Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain Samantha—Cole

Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin generated and saved every possible melody to a hard drive, then turned it back around to the commons.

Vice
Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain

Samantha Cole

Craig Murray — Nationalisation Without Compensation

What the Labour Party should be going for?

What Craig Murray is addressing, without being explicit about it, is the theory of natural property rights based on John Locke's just-so story about mixing labor with land to acquire a natural right through use. This is based on a narrative that is unhistorical, on one hand, and on the other, it doesn't justify transfer, especially through inheritance.

Marx gave the correct historical account based on "primitive accumulation," which amounts to "enclosure" — seizure really — by those powerful enough to do so. This resulted in the bifurcation of society into property owners and workers as separate classes with opposing interests.

Ayn Rand provides perhaps the most outspoken but honest statement of this mindset:

"[The Native Americans] didn't have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.... What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent." — "Q and A session following her Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974"

Murray proposes that it is high time to address this. What he doesn't address is the importance of the concept of the commons, which Ayn Rand denies. As nomadic tribes, the Native Americans were obviously using the land collectively as do other such groups worldwide to the present day, although in decreasing numbers as "civilization" and enclosure encroach on the commons.

In Locke's account there was no commons, just unused land waiting to be made useful — given utility — through work that confers property rights as natural instead of institutional. Institutional confirmation was subsequently added to that which was gained naturally in his view.

Again, this is unhistorical. The truth is that until enclosure the vast majority of people were collectively self-sufficient based on the commons, Enclosure ended that self-sufficiency, forcing them to labor for others — the property owners — on terms dictated by the others‚ the ownership class. Initially, this was "the palace" (warrior class) and "the temple" (priesthood). This developed into feudal aristocracies in the Agricultural Age.

What Murray is proposing is real socialism rather than pseudo-socialism that is a weak reform of monopoly capital based on the spurious history and logic of the bourgeois ideology that came to dominate as bourgeois liberalism replaced the divine right, capitalism replaced feudalism as the dominant socio-economic system in the Industrial Age. Property owners became the new aristocracy through inheritance laws — inheritance of estates contradicting personal initiative and meritocracy as the basis of capitalist accumulation and political rule. 

While Murray's proposal may seem utopian in the current environment, such proposals are needed in order to shift the narrative and engage in consciousness-raising by addressing what Marx and Engels called "false consciousness," in which workers are persuaded by owners' control of the narrative to accept an ideology that disadvantages them. This narrative "proves" how this is just — all receive their "just deserts." Moreover, the narrative runes, this the only alternative.

Based on this starting point — Thatcherism in the UK, Murray's proposal is a beginning but not enough. Based on the lessons of history, sudden change doesn't not always produce the optimal result and may even worsen the situation. Diagnosis must be complemented by etiology (identification of causes) and treatment by addressing causes in order to not only remove the systems but also to return the system to health. Murrays' post remains on the level of symptom. Deeper analysis is needed.

Reflection is required on how to meet the challenge of getting from here (monopoly capital) to there (socialism). The most promising path seems to be through social democracy as pioneered in the Nordic countries but which some of them are moving away from under the pressure of neoliberalism, the current flavor capitalism that has become dominant through globalization. 

What is "capitalism"? Favoring capital as a factor of production based on growth and assuming trickle down. What is "socialism"? Favoring people as a whole and land as the environment ("the nest") over growth for its own sake. This requires an integrated ecological approach that prioritizes the factors differently in terms of human purpose consistent with human values, including human rights, e.g., as set forth in the UN General Assembly's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Social democracy can be developed as a transition to socialism and the regaining of the priority of the commons as humanity's home and life-support system. The "correct" approach to economics would therefore be something more like ecological economics and green economics instead of conventional (neoliberal) economics.

The problem with much "heterodox" economics is that it is a reaction to conventional economics and is concerned with reforming a system that has outlived its usefulness and is now becoming a threat not only to the human species but all species as the Earth hurtles toward the next extinction event.

Craig Murray's post is just a beginning of the debate that is needed where change can happen, the ballot box. Bold action is required.

Craig Murray Blog
Nationalisation Without Compensation
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

David Sloan Wilson — How to Construct a New Invisible Hand: A Conversation with Peter Barnes

In a previous essay, I announced a new concept of the invisible hand to replace the old and erroneous idea that the pursuit of self-interest robustly benefits the common good. The new version is based on examples of the invisible hand that exist in nature, such as cells that benefit multi-cellular organisms and social insects that benefit their colonies. These lower-level units don’t have the welfare of the higher-level units in mind. They don’t even have minds in the human sense of the word. Instead, they exhibit behaviors that have been winnowed by higher-level selection to benefit the common good. Higher-level selection is the invisible hand.

Absorbing this fact leads to a robust conclusion about the design of our own societies. We must learn to function in two capacities: 1) As designers of social and economic systems; and 2) as participants in the systems that we design. As participants, we need not have the welfare of the whole system in mind, in classic invisible hand fashion. But as design­ers, we must. The invisible hand must be constructed, which would be a contra­diction of terms according to the old concept.

Yet, this does not mean that the invisible hand must be constructed by centralized plan­ning, the main alternative to laissez faire economic policies that is typically imagined. Instead, the design process needs to be evolutionary, iterative, and collaborative, resulting in mechanisms that work like the invisible hand, even though they never could have arisen on their own. This constitutes a middle path between laissez faire and centralized planning that could be a breakthrough in solving the problems of our age....

Evonomics
How to Construct a New Invisible Hand: A Conversation with Peter Barnes
David Sloan Wilson | SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo

Oleg Komlik — The Goose and the Common — The Privatization of Public Space

An anonymous 18th century poem on enclosure of the commons. The result was the real tragedy of the commons for most people.

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
The Goose and the Common — The Privatization of Public Space
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies

David F. Ruccio — The goose and the commons

Enclosure of the commons, aka "primary accumulation" and "privatization of state property," that is, public goods.

Occasional Links & Commentary
The goose and the commons
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

P2P Foundation — Patterns of Commoning: The Ten Principles of Burning Man

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

P2P Foundation
Patterns of Commoning: The Ten Principles of Burning Man

George Monbiot — How Reviving Common Ownership is One Possible Route to Social Transformation

With one breath, the friends of power told us that global capitalism was a dynamic, disruptive force, the source of constant innovation and change. With the next, they told us it had brought about the end of history: permanent stability and peace. There was no attempt to resolve this contradiction. Or any other.

We were promised unending growth on a finite planet. We were told that a vastly unequal system would remove all differences. Social peace would be delivered by a system based on competition and envy. Democracy would be secured by the power of money. The contradictions were crashingly obvious. The whole package relied on magic.

Because none of it works, there is no normal to which to return. The Keynesian measures espoused by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – in a world crashing into environmental limits and the mass destruction of jobs – are as irrelevant in the 21st Century as the neoliberal prescriptions that caused the financial crisis....

So this column is the first in an occasional series whose purpose is to champion new approaches to politics, economics and social change. There is no going back, no comfort in old certainties. We must rethink the world from first principles.

There are many points at which I could begin, but it seems to me that an obvious one is this. The market alone cannot meet our needs, nor can the state. Both, by rooting out attachment, help fuel the alienation, rage and anomie that breeds extremism. Over the past 200 years, one element has been conspicuously absent from the dominant ideologies, something that is neither market nor state: the commons.

Evonomics
How Reviving Common Ownership is One Possible Route to Social Transformation

George Monbiot

Matt Bruenig — Tired of capitalism? There could be a better way.

Capitalism is a coercive economic system that creates persistent patterns of economic deprivation.

Governments have typically dealt with capitalism’s more misery-inducing tendencies by creating institutions of labor protection — such as the right to organize unions — and by building out modern welfare states. Although these policy programs have been fairly successful, especially in the countries that have pushed them the furthest, they have not fully eliminated coercion and deprivation. To secure freedom and prosperity for all, it may ultimately be necessary to supplement the welfare state with a universal basic income — a program that would provide all citizens with a basic level of financial support, regardless of whether they’re employed.

By now, it is well established that capitalism is fundamentally built upon threats of force. As libertarian philosophers Robert Nozick and Matt Zwolinski have explained, the only way to turn unowned natural resources (such as land, minerals and other goods) into privately owned property is by violently preventing all others from using them. This one-sided exclusion destroys freedom of movement and cuts many people off from the things that they need to survive.

When the physical resources necessary for production are privately held in the hands of very few, as in the United States, the majority of the population is forced to submit itself to well-financed employers in order to live. The precarious position of most workers in this position — desperate for employment but aware that they could lose their jobs at any time — is coercive on its face and susceptible to exploitation and abuse.…

Pretty good analysis of enclosure of the commons and its maintain through "force of law"with emphasis on "force." But more weak suggestions for limiting excesses instead of addressing the issue of capitalism.

The only way to address capitalism effectively is through liberal democracy as government of the people, by the people and for the people based on universal human and civil rights that knock property rights off their pedestal.

Nothing short of the will do it because the choice is between first US Chief Justice JohnJay's, "Those who own the country should govern it," and President Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

The Washington Post
Tired of capitalism? There could be a better way.

Matt Bruenig

Translation For J&J Sixpack: "No, Really. You're Better Off If You Let Us Rich Control Frauds Own Everything. Trust Us. YOU Don't Know How To Manage Your Country Anyway."

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I just received this brazen propaganda by email. It's so breathtakingly revealing that it's worth sharing, with in-line commentary. It's also nearly too cruel and mean to observe, without coming to tears. These people don't seem to think that J&J Sixpack are very intelligent. Where do we find obsessive, compulsive "advisors" like this? Under a crock?

Michael Likosky via cmail2.com
to rge 

I want to pass along a quick update and a piece that I just published in the NY Times (see below). 

A China-led Infrastructure Bank is being created to promote private investment by Europeans and others into the Asia region.
The type of thing that we've been doing globally for a couple decades.
Those private investments have produced pretty good results, lots of quality infrastructure and many countries now giving us a run for our money as a result. Investors have gotten good returns as a result of the successes of these competitors.

While a lot of exciting stuff is happening right now at home - I will send a note on that soon - we are still having trouble figuring out whether to let private investors get some of our infrastructure built. Is American infrastructure a good investment for our pension funds, or is the future of Asia a better bet.
I include here a piece that I just published in the New York Times, related.
(clipped in below my signature)
More soon on progress happening.
- Michael

[RGE: Smooth, sweet, soothing ... just like strychnine-laced saccharine. :(  Since we trusted them on tax policy, why not trust them on ownership of The Commons too? ps: Michael somehow forgot to include this old image.]  

 So of course:

Taxpayers Benefit If Investors Absorb Risks of Infrastructure Projects

[RGE: Come again? Wow! If anyone believes this, I've got some Medieval Futility in the Dark Ages to sell to them. What's that old quote about the bigger the lie, the easier it is to get the naive to swallow? This is a double-blind test, America. Just how naive ARE you? And please note that an invisible government doesn't require an outright conspiracy. An expanding lobby of avaricious fools can easily lead a trusting aggregate astray, purely by blind drift alone. Speaking of which .... ]

Michael Likosky is the co-head of infrastructure at 32 Advisors. 

Few would dispute that America faces an infrastructure crisis as cities, states and the nation remain cash-strapped. Just look at the pending transportation bill, which would vastly underfund our needs, to see how low a priority infrastructure is in Washington. 

[RGE: Ooh, he's good! Note the classic propaganda technique. Baldly mingle an obvious truth linked directly to the biggest lie, and all IN THE OPENING SENTENCE! Then the reader is half accomplice, and playing his own devils advocate, as the price for reading the rest of the bullshit. Once they continue past the 1st line, the rest is downhill for the reader. Who knew that "32 Advisors" was a euphemism for "30 pieces of silver?"]

But investors see opportunities to finance the difference between what we need and what we can afford to pay by, say, upgrading a port and being repaid by fees from shippers. 

This is distinct from traditionally financed projects in that the investor can only recoup costs, and profit, as long as the port performs well. And the investor would only pay contractors when the job is done to spec. The contractor would have to cover any cost overruns themselves, rather than going back to the government for pay to complete a project. Ultimately, the private investor, not taxpayers, would bear the risk of poor performance or unexpected delays.
America's infrastructure needs vary greatly from project to project. Different investors have grown up to finance distinct needs. Private investment can present a genuine opportunity for governments and communities as long as both sides are attuned to the needs and requirements of the other and the right match is made. 

Some want only mature infrastructure assets that they can fix up and sell. Some pursue high risk/high return projects in which they will get paid only if their projections are realized and, if not, the government gets a cost-free project. A pension fund, for instance, might be willing to build a project from scratch even if they don't realize their return for a number of years. Other investors may agree to invest in infrastructure unable to be supported from user fees such as structurally deficient bridges, in exchange for regular payments from government over a period of time. 

Solving our infrastructure crisis can be as much about politics as about money, though. Labor groups might be wary of privately financed projects that pay lower wages than the ones several generations of workers have fought to gain. Rural communities might want water, but not if investors demand a high rate of return. 

But is being locked in a fight with no winner worth being passed over for investment that supports our economic competitiveness, growth and basic health? We do not simply need more money in the system, but more targeted investment opportunities where the key stakeholders, including financiers, are also willing to think innovatively and work through challenges that often derail projects.



BIO
Michael Likosky is the co-Head of Infrastructure at 32 Advisors. He has over fifteen years of experience providing advice to many of our nation's leaders and acting as an expert in infrastructure and public and private partnerships. 

Likosky holds a JD and DPhil (Oxford Law). He is an expert on infrastructure, oil and gas, mining, free zones, human rights, foreign investment, and high technology growth strategies. He has published five books in these areas including three with Cambridge University Press. His most recent book, Obama's Bank: Financing a Durable New Deal, looks at the Obama Administration's approach to public-private partnerships. His other books are: Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights; Privatizing Development; Transnational Legal Processes; and The Silicon Empire. 

Likosky is an Expert to the Clinton Global Initiative, the OECD, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He co-chaired California Governor Edmund Brown Jr's Task Force to Modernize the CA Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, the country's oldest infrastructure bank with over thirty-two billion dollars lent out to-date. Likosky is a regular contributor to the World Investment Reports, Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and Trade and Development Report. 

Likosky's work has been supported by Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Board, Surdna Foundation, Markle Foundation, Chatham House, and others. 

He advises public officials, private investors, pension plans, and inter-governmental organizations. Likosky has advised US Treasury; US Senators John Kerry (then), Charles Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Bill Nelson; US Representative Rosa De Lauro; California Governor Edmund Brown Jr.; New York State Empire State Development Corporation; CA Business Transportation and Housing Agency; CA State Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank; the cities of Chicago and Newark; D. E. Shaw; Deutsche Bank; Credit Suisse, McKinsey; Goldman Sachs; Standard and Poor's; broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN), International Development Law Organization; the capital stewardship programs of SEIU, AFT, UFCW, and LiUNA, and others. 

He has published opinion pieces and appeared in outlets such as New York Times, New York Times Deal Book, Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, Bloomberg, Associated Press, Reuters, Bond Buyer, American Banker, Institutional Investing in Infrastructure, Infrastructure Journal, PPP Bulletin, Engineering News-Record, Africa Investor, and elsewhere. 

Likosky has delivered keynote and featured talks to Project Finance International (Master Class), Bond Buyer's Annual Transportation P3 event, American Society of Civil Engineers, the US Chamber of Commerce; State Chief Financial Officers Roundtable, Oxford Law, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Max Planck-Halle, and elsewhere. 

He founded and directed NYU's Center on Law and Public Finance and was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge, was Professor of International Economic Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and has held fellowships and visiting posts at Oxford Law, NYU Law, Fordham Law, Wisconsin Law, and the University of Bonn. 

Since 2008, Likosky has convened the Reinvesting in America Series often in partnership with OECD, Partnership for NYC, Clinton Global Initiative, Citizens Budget Commission, Debevoise & Plimpton, Shearman Sterling, British Telecom, and Hogan Lovells. It features members of Congress; public officials from US Treasury, Defense, Transportation and Commerce; as well as state officials. The series includes small off-the-record discussions and large public events. It alternates between New York and Washington DC.

Damn! That's a very long-winded way of saying he's sold out to the best of the best of the worst ... if you follow my semantics. How many keynotes did Judas (or Quisling) make, before, during & after getting their 30 pieces of silver?

ps: He's also saying that China's Asian Development Bank is not competing with the remnants of England's East India Corp, or the G7's World Bank and IMF. No, he's saying that the 1% everywhere have teamed up, to own & hoard The Commons worldwide.

What's not to like?

What we've got here is failure to communicate .... honestly. (Blam!) You do have to admit that they have a relentless, killer-drone instinct.

For anyone who's ever taken biology-101, this is a mundane and boring replication of an age-old pattern, since the dawn of life on planet Earth. It goes like this. In any and all growing aggregates - even gas clouds pre biology - observers will notice that those components that CAN scavenge & hoard new surplus resources ... will. It's the straightforward statistics of of any recombination process, in any aggregate. Biology is just organized to find shortcuts, faster than thermodynamics alone. Either way, you eventually get some of every possible permutation of characteristics which support further recombination, in succeeding populations of components. That's what recombination produces ... whether molecular, sexual, behavioral or cultural recombination.

Yet hoarders never know what to do with said resources, any more than any other components. None of us is ever as smart as all of us working together, with all components adequately PROVISIONED! So the inevitable next step - among survivors, that is - after the inevitable blind hoarding reflex, is to re-distribute provisions in a way that enables the aggregate to invade new niches beyond the imagination of any of it's components. Hoarding is just a useless bit of noise in the ongoing recombination statistics. Discerning signal from noise always shows the path to progress. If we don't need hoarding, and can dispense with it, or repurpose it, then all the better.

It's called evolution. Get over it. It's happened. Countless times. And rest assured that it will happen again. One tombstone at a time. It's only a question of whether the next arrays of tombstones have to mark the graves of countless wasted human lives, or just mark the timely, graceful passing of their naive ideas about obsolete hoarding. As Wallace & Darwin implied, it's far more valuable to hoard and lust for Aggregate Adaptive Rate, rather than to be a dumb, King Midas member of the 1% - and be  merely statistical noise slowing down evolution.

In the history of planet Earth, subsequent aggregates always appear, slightly more able to hoard coordination methods on a new level, not just crude resources. That's how army ants evolved past snails, and how homo fiaticus will evolve past homo neoconinsis. It'll happen again, when we quit conning ourselves in neo ways.

Do we HAVE to subject another 7 generations of humans to yet another cycle of producing/hoarding/dying/evolving? Or can we just do it all virtually, right now, and just SAY we did it the hard way? Are we really fascinated with Grand Theft Culture, or can we just make an app for the 1%, and let them pretend to uselessly hoard real resources?

ps: Let's not hate Michael Likosky too much. Like Smedley Butler, he may yet realize that he's been a "high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers," and then seek more meaning in his life. If he's intelligent enough. It takes a culture to train a citizen. Likely, he's just had too little feedback to fully grasp the implications of what he's doing.

Rajesh Makwana — From Basic Income to Social Dividends

It’s time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons.

Some interesting points but bogs down over affordability. Doesn't get that the issue is distribution of real resources and that affordability is not the issue.

Counterpunch
From Basic Income to Social Dividends
Rajesh Makwana

Kimball Corson — The Internet is the Virtual Commons of 21st Century

The commons was once just that. Huge unfenced areas open to the use of any and all. Then, by legal slight of hand, they became privatized, fenced and own by wealthy private individuals who used law and government to acquire them. They then charged others for their rental use. The internet is the 21st century analogue of the commons. That is what the fuss regarding net neutrality is largely all about. 

Monied interests want exclusive and superior access to most of the better aggregate bandwidth. They are trying to use law and government to get it, just as with the commons. The issue becomes will the rest of us become relegated to the lesser piece of the internet and otherwise be cut off.…

And intellectual property is the enclosure of mental space.

Wandering the Oceans
The Internet is the Virtual Commons of 21st Century
Kimball Corson

Claire Moser — Election Divides GOP On Whether To Seize And Sell America’s Public Lands

In the run-up to Tuesday’s elections, each week seemed to bring a new Republican candidate for federal and state office advocating for America’s national forests, wildlife areas and other public lands to be seized by the states or auctioned off to the highest bidder. Even the Republican National Committee (RNC) passed aresolution endorsing these extreme proposals earlier this year. 

Not all western state Republicans stood by their party’s platform in this election cycle, however. High-profile candidates who won competitive races in the West deliberately distanced themselves from their party’s platform, or avoided taking a stance on the issue altogether during their campaigns. At the same time, a number of western Republicans in competitive races who chose to embrace their party’s extreme stance came up short on Election Night.

Land grabs are also deeply unpopular among voters. Recent public opinion research, conducted by a bipartisan polling team, found that the majority of Western voters firmly oppose proposals to transfer America’s national forests and public lands to state ownership.

One winning candidate who backed away from his initial stance on seizing and selling off public lands was Montana Congressional candidate Ryan Zinke (R). Zinke, who had been an outspoken supporter of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, which would have required the sale of public lands to reduce the deficit, was forced to revise his position after his Democratic opponent ran a popular ad criticizing his stance. 

The ad, set to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s famous “This Land is Your Land,” elevated the issue to a centraldebate on the campaign. Zinke then clarified that “he supports the ‘framework of the Ryan Budget,’ but opposes selling off public land,” as the Great Falls Tribune reported.…

Privatization of the commons, primitive accumulation, enclosure, the whole neoliberal catastrophe.

For the Republican Party, the growing internal debate over whether America’s public lands should be seized and sold represents a choice between the conservation values of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and the power of a special interest-driven agenda.

Think Progress
Election Divides GOP On Whether To Seize And Sell America’s Public Lands
Claire Moser

Derek Wall — What Elinor Ostrum taught: democratic control is not only possible, it's normal

The market fundamentalism of Hayek seems to dominate political discourse. Hayek, the liberal free market Austrian economists, argued that state planning would end in failure and only the market could promote economic efficiency. This agenda seems, since Thatcher and Reagan, to have swept the world but it is, of course false. Neo-liberals far from reducing state intervention use the state to support corporations. Privatization is about helping powerful firms and market competition is no longer an issue. A good example is the current transformation of the NHS into a cash cow for Virgin and US health corporations. Neo-liberals promote corporate welfare and monopoly. Elinor Ostrom is powerful ally for all those of us who want to challenge that neo-liberal dogma and create people centred cooperative economics. 

Elinor Ostrom, who sadly died in 2012, was the first and so far only women to win a Nobel Prize, strictly speaking the Swedish bank prize, for economics. She was awarded it for her work on commons, collective resources and collective communal property. If we want a practical alternative (s) to privatisation she helps in a number of ways.…

Open Democracy
What Elinor Ostrum taught: democratic control is not only possible, it's normal
Derek Wall | International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is a political economist, whose last book was ‘The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom’ Routledge 2014. He is married to the community musician Emily Blyth and is a founder of Green Left, the anti-capitalist network in the Green Party. He is also a columnist with the Morning Star and is completing his new book for Pluto ‘The Economics of anti-capitalism’ which will be published in 2015.

David Bollier — Faircoin as the First Global Commons Currency?

It’s hard to find many co-operatives with the kind of practical sophistication and visionary ambitions as CIC – the Catalan Integral Cooperative -- in Spain. CIC describes itself as a “transitional initiative for social transformation from below, through self-management, self-organization, and networking.” It considers the state unable to advance the public good because of its deep entanglements with market capitalism -- so it has set about building its own working alternatives to the banking system and state.

Since its founding in May 2010, CIC has developed some 300 cooperative projects with 30 local nodes, involving some 4,000 to 5,000 participants. You can get an idea of the impressive scope of CIC’s work through this interview with Enric Duran by Shareable magazine in March 2014. It’s fairly clear that CIC is serious about building a new global economic system – and not just as a rhetorical statement. CIC builds real, working alternatives, showing great sophistication about politics, law, economics and digital platforms.
CIC has now started Fair.Coop to help build a set of free economic tools that will “promote cooperation, ethics, solidarity and justice in our economic relations.” A key element of the Fair-Coop vision is a cryptocurrency, Faircoin, which has been designed to adapt the block-chain technology of Bitcoin with a more socially constructive design. (Faircoin relies less on "mining" new coins than on "minting" them in a more ecologically responsible, equitable ways.)

Many skeptics might scoff at the brash, utopian feel of this initiative. But in many respects, Faircoin is the ultimate realism. CIC correctly recognizes that the existing monetary system and private banks pose insuperable barriers to reducing inequality and ensuring productive work and wealth for all. The only "realistic" alternative to existing fiat currencies and foreign exchange is to invent a new monetary system! Fortunately, thanks to the pioneering examples of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and the evolving powers of software, that idea is actually within reach these days.…

David Bollier — news and perspectives on the commons
Faircoin as the First Global Commons Currency?
David Bollier

Michel Bauwens — 10 Open Source Policies for a Commons-Based Society

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation and former advisor to the goverment of Ecuador for a project to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge.” With a team of researchers and through a partipatory process involving local civic actors and global commoners, the FLOK project produced a generic transition plan to a commons society with more than 15 specific policy and legislative plans.

Mira Luna culled from Bauwens his top recommendations of government policies to encourage open source development and the commons. While government policy usually sides with proprietary knowledge in the public sector, there is a huge opportunity to use goverments as a ally, supporter and guardian of the commons. To learn more and get involved, check out the P2P Foundation, OpenSource.com, Open Mind and the Open Source Initiative.…

Shareable
10 Open Source Policies for a Commons-Based SocietyMichel Bauwens

Matt Bruenig — John Locke Says Everything Belongs to Everyone

As I’ve pointed out before, people misread Locke as if he is some kind of hardcore absolute propertarian, but he simply isn’t.

In the very first sentence of his treatment of property, Locke cites to Psalm 115:16 and remarks that “it is very clear, that God … has given the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common.” Locke reaffirms that the earth belongs to everyone in common over and over again in the ensuing paragraphs: “God, who hath given the world to men in common”, “the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common”, “the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men,” etc.

That Locke says everything belongs to everyone is not surprising, as it would have been a massive break with Christian tradition to say otherwise.

From the starting point that the entire world is owned in common, Locke then argues for creating and respecting property institutions as being instrumentally valuable for administrating the use of the collectively-owned earth. He notes that, although the world belongs to everyone, it is intended that people “make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience” and “for the support and comfort” of human beings. Accordingly, “there must of necessity be a means to appropriate” the earth to mobilize its resources towards these ends.

So, on the abstract normative framework level, Locke’s view is that the world belongs to human beings in common, that we need some mechanism to allow for the utilization of its resources, and that a propertarian system “might” serve that instrumental end. If this seems familiar to you, it’s because that’s the Thomist view, which, again, was fairly prevalent at the time.

Demos Policy Shop
John Locke Says Everything Belongs to Everyone
Matt Bruenig

Locke’s other writings on resource rights make this all very clear. In addition to the famous Lockean Proviso (which requires that property cannot be appropriated unless there is enough left in common for others), Locke straightforwardly claims that the poor have a right to the “property” of the rich:

God, the lord and father of all has given no one of his children such a property in his peculiar portion of the things of this world, but that he has given his needy brother a right to the surplusage of his goods, so that it cannot justly be denied him when his pressing wants call for it, and therefore, no man could ever have a just power over the life of another by right of property in land or possessions, since it would always be a sin in any man of estate to let his brother perish for want of affording him relief out of his plenty.

If ever there was a clearer call for the right of redistribution, I haven't seen it. And, of course, this too was the prevailing Christian thought on this matter at the time. Locke's musings on property have acquired a radical character more so from anachronistic misreads and half-reads than what Locke actually wrote.

Seem that John Locke was more of a socialist than Pope Francis. Who knew?

Glynn Moody — The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman's GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption -- things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That's what Ecuador's FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. "FLOK" is derived from "free", "libre" and "open knowledge"; here's how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project…

TechDirt

The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

Glynn Moody

David Bollier — Ecuador’s Pathbreaking Plan for Commons-Based Peer Production: An Update

The nine-month effort in Ecuador to develop a new vision and policy architecture for commons-based peer production is coming into much sharper focus. To refresh your memory on this project, the Government of Ecuador last year commissioned the FLOK Society (FLOK = “Free, libre, open knowledge”) to come up with a thoughtful plan for enabling every sector of Ecuador to be organized into open knowledge commons, to the maximum degree possible. The project has now released a transition plan accompanied by more than a dozen policy frameworks for specific social and economic domains.

The main document can be read here – and here is a version that anyone can comment upon. Here is series of specific sectoral policy proposals.

What makes the FLOK Society report so significant is its informed analysis of global trends in the production of knowledge and culture -- and its bold attempt to reformulate state policies to assure maximum social benefits flow from them. The “advanced” industrial economies continue to cling to archaic intellectual property regimes that ignore network dynamics and prey upon the value created by nonmarket communities. But Ecuador’s path-breaking project seeks to go beyond neoliberal economics and policy. Many of us are excited because the FLOK Society report is a comprehensive, sophisticated and integrated synthesis for moving to the next stage of commoning and peer production on open networks....

David Bollier | news and perspectives on the commons
Ecuador’s Pathbreaking Plan for Commons-Based Peer Production: An Update

Cutting edge?

David Bollier — The New Economic Events Giving Lie to the Fiction That We Are All Selfish, Rational Materialists

On the development of the politics and economics of the commons going on under the radar of mainstream focus. David Bollier riffs off Jeremy Rifkin's new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society.

"Commoning" has been increasing in scale since the Sixties, and it is well developed now. Yet most people are unaware of it unless they or friend and acquaintances participate in it. Nor is it required to drop out to participate. All that is needed is to tune in. There are plenty of defectors in place already participating in commoning in some way or other. Those committed to self-sufficiency know the value of community and that the commons is indispensable unless one inherits great wealth.

AlterNet
The New Economic Events Giving Lie to the Fiction That We Are All Selfish, Rational Materialists
David Bollier

Robert Neuwirth — Against Economics

 “The idea of individual, exclusive ownership, not just of what can be carried and occupied, but of the immovable, near-eternal earth, has proved to be the most destructive and creative cultural force in written history. It has eliminated ancient civilizations wherever it has encountered them, and displaced entire peoples from their homelands, but it has also spread an undreamed-of degrees of personal freedom and protected it with democratic institutions wherever it has taken hold.”— Andro Linklater

Stealth of Nations
Against Economics
Robert Neuwirth reviews Andro Linklater's Owning the Earth

[08] As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part. 

[09] The real value of all the different component parts of price, it must be observed, is measured by the quantity of labour which they can, each of them, purchase or command. Labour measures the value not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labour, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit.

[10] In every society the price of every commodity finally resolves itself into some one or other, or all of those three parts; and in every improved society, all the three enter more or less, as component parts, into the price of the far greater part of commodities.

— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 6

Sec. 32. But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest; I think it is plain, that property in that too is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common. Nor will it invalidate his right, to say every body else has an equal title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners, all mankind. God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.

Sec. 33. Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself: for he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst: and the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

Sec. 34. God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another's labour: if he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another's pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him in common with others to labour on, and whereof there was as good left, as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to.

— John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Chapter V