Hi Michel

Some feedback for consideration.....

This is a really good summary and illustration. So much makes complete sense to me. Thanks so much for this articulation. I think it is rich and very helpful indeed. When will the report be coming out and who are the authors?

I have a sense of deja vu however? So my comments are about the practical articulation and the dynamics as other forces are in play.  For the past two hundred plus years, the tension and indeed struggle between authority at the political level and the striving for democratic authority from the grassroots has been continuous and constant. Polanyi's Double movement therefore has many dynamic aspects to consider. How is it best to do this to be clear about the dialectical complexity?

Stephen Yeo, a very close colleague of Robin Murray's over decades, is writing a book on the Three Socialisms. These are Statism (from social democracy to communism), Collectivism and Associationism. The last form is the most forms that are participatively democratic and includes working class self-help associations for mutual aid and including of course trade unions that we should try to include in your illustration of the layers.

The ideas you are advancing are a rekindling of the debates and thinking from say 1900 right up to 1947 when the Cold War kicked off and when Statism thereafter effectively crushed and suppressed associative democracy thinking and ideas. Statists East and West told co-ops and unions thank, but no thanks. We are taking over to make your bits and pieces integrated and comprehensive. 

But to guide this earlier struggle by commoners, In 1919 GDH Cole produced his book Guild Socialism Restated when he set out a very clear blueprint with a remarkable coincidence with what you, David B, Janelle Orsi and others are working up here. 

What is very creative about the Cole proposals that Bertrand Russell fully supported in his book Roads to Freedom a century ago was to recognise clearly that political socialism (social democracy shall we say) and associative socialism need to be established at the territorial level and at the national level in a system of checks and balances with a clear and agreed division of labour between the politicos and the economic democrats.

Essentially the proposal of Cole set out a blue print for how economic democracy though a Guild Congress at local, regional and national levels would relate and complement Parliamentary democracy. But what was wonderful about the Cole proposals is that it considered co-operative commonwealth building in all industries, services, arts and sciences and worked out sector solutions for them. Plus Cole also proposed that cities should be based on land held in commons to capture economic rent and to stop speculation. Thus he argued for co-operative garden cities.

20 years earlier in Fields Factories and Workshops had attempted a very creative blueprint as well for economic democracy and what in practice this would look like.

Okay Polanyi did not arrive in the UK until about 1933 and his way to escape fascism was paid for by crowd funding by Guild Socialist, but given that in Vienna in the 1920s Polanyi was at the forefront of associative democracy solutions and thinking, you can see the resonance.

Given that democratic socialism is being rekindled in parts of Europe (Spain, Portugal, the UK and elsewhere), I think it would helpful to connect the sound thinking from the 1920s before the lights began being turned out with what you are proposing.

I would suggest we are rediscovering co-operative commonwealth thinking and practice which you are doing such a brilliant job of updating to the digital age.

I hope this helps.  Drawing on the best practices from the past will enable us to contextualise the arguments and link these to this vernacular part of the Double Movement we should not overlook.

All the best

Pat

On 04 October 2017 at 06:35 Michel Bauwens <michel@p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

this is the very last section of our report which will come out soon with the Boll foundation:

3.6. Towards a global infrastructure for commons-based provisioning

We have argued in this overview that we are in a conjuncture in which commons-based mutualizing is one of the keys for sustainability, fairness and global-local well-being. In this conclusion, we suggest a global infrastructure, in which cities can play a crucial role.

See the graphic below for the stacked layer that we propose, which is described as follows:

• The first layer is the cosmo-local institutional layer. Imagine global for-benefit associations which support the provisioning of infrastructures for urban and territorial commoning. These are structured as global public-commons partnerships, sustained by leagues of cities which are co-dependent and co-motivated to support these new infrastructures and overcome the fragmentation of effort that benefits the most extractive and centralized ‘netarchical’ firms. Instead, these infrastructural commons organizations co-support MuniRide, MuniBnB, and other applications necessary to commonify urban provisioning systems. These are the global “protocol cooperative” governance organizations.

• The second layer consists of the actual global depositories of the commons applications themselves, a global technical infrastructure for open sourcing provisioning systems. They consists of what is globally common, but allow contextualized local adaptations, which in turn can serve as innovations and examples for other locales. These are the actual ‘protocol cooperatives’, in their concrete manifestation as usable infrastructure.

• The third layer are the actual local (urban, territorial, bioregional) platform cooperatives, i.e. the local commons-based mechanisms that deliver access to services and exchange platforms, for the mutualized used of these provisioning systems. This is the layer where the Amsterdam FairBnb and the MuniRide application of the city of Ghent, organize the services for the local population and their visitors. It is where houses and cars are effectively shared.

• The potential fourth layer is the actual production-based open cooperatives, where distributed manufacturing of goods and services produces the actual material services that can be shared and mutualized on the platform cooperatives.

...

Figure 8: City-supported cosmo-local production infrastructure

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Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org  

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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