A lecture on the commons and p2p.

1. Commons as an
Alternative
Jukka Peltokoski
KSL Civic Association for Adult Learning
jukka.peltokoski@ksl.fi
http://slideshare.net/jukpelto

2. What kind of Alternative?
● Commons = shared resources
● Commoners = producing and sharing res.
● Cooperation, co-creation
● Community vs. private and public
● Close to social economy
● Power of networks, wisdom of crowds
● Open source, Wikipedia, Linux,
crowdsourcing, time banking, couchsurfing,
cooperatives, urban space, everyman's
right, biodiversity...

3. Themes of the lecture
● Precariat as a new subjectivity
● Commons
■ Concept
■ Types
■ P2P
■ Solidarity economy
■ Peer to peer state
■ Theoreticians
● Vision: Coalition of constructive powers
● Commons.fi

4. What is precariat?
● Latin "precarius"
● Italian (precario), French (précaire),
Spanish (precario)
● Uncertainty, being at the mercy of
● Compare "pray"
● Crisis of welfare state
● Flexibility of labor markets

5. What is precariat?
● Studied from the 1970's
● Politicized in the 2000's
● EuroMayDay process 2003-2010
● Temp workers, part time workers, self
employed, entrepreneurs, unemployed,
immigrants, students, media and social
movement activists, radical unionists,
greens, leftists, etc.
● Demand for social Europe and basic income

6. From Precarity to Commons
● Common resources reduce uncertainty
● Creative work is based on commoning
● New possibilities to create alternative
■ Subjective
■ Technological
■ Permanent state of crisis
● New necessities really to do it!
■ Ecological catastrophe
■ Neo-fascist comeback
■ Debt economy

7. What are the Commons?
"General term for shared resources in which
each stakeholder has an equal interest. Goods
which are jointly developed and maintained
by a community and shared according to
community-defined rules."
- P2P Foundation

8. What are Commons?
http://youtu.be/k0ZWFPVBTws

9. What are the Commons?
"The salient characteristic of commons, as opposed to
property, is that no single person has exclusive control
over the use and disposition of any particular resource in
the commons. Instead, resources governed by commons
may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more
or less well-defined) number of persons, under rules that
may range from 'anything goes' to quite crisply articulated
formal rules that are effectively enforced."
- Yohai Benkler

10. What are the Commons?
The commons “refers to that vast range of
resources that people collectively own, but
which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized,
traded in the market, and abused.”
- David Bollier
See: https://vimeo.com/album/245612/video/17781175

11. What are the Commons?
"Every commons has four characteristics: a
resource; the people who share it; the value
created through its production or
preservation; and the rules that govern it."
- Silke Helfrich

12. What are the Commons?
"The word 'common' is the best starting point for the
analysis. The common thing within a commons are the
resources, which are used and cared for, are the goods
resulting from joint activities, and are the social
relationships emerging from acting together. These three
aspects are so different for all commons, that no one
could describe them in a reasonably complete manner."
- Stefan Meretz

13. Distinctions
● Private / public / common
● Commons / common pool res. / public goods
● Natural / social / informational commons
● Scarce / abundant
● Conservation / creation
● Can commons be made by private or public
actors?

14. Etymology
● Latin 'communis' = shared, public, common
● 'Co' = together
● 'Munus' = gift, duty
● 'Immunis' = free from duties
● 'Communitas' = political association
● 'Res Communes' = third property form
● 'Common land' = land system in Medieval
England and Wales
■ Large enclosures in the end of the 18th century

15. Tragedy of the Commons
● Garrett Hardin 1968
■ Overconsumption of the common land
■ Individual rationality causes social damage
■ Claims for social restrictions and privatisation
● Elinor Ostrom (Nobel 2009)
■ Tragedy of the unrestricted commons
■ Human history proves about sustainable
commons
■ Commons vs. common pool resources
● Michael Heller: Tragedy of the
anticommons, 1998

16. Other Commoners
Yohai Benkler, Chris Andersson, David Bollier,
Michel Bauwens, Peter Linebaugh, Lawrence
Lessig, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Rick
Falkvinge, Michael Heller, Elinor Ostrom, Silke
Helfrich, Christian Siefkes, Antonio Negri,
Michael Hardt, Nick Dyer-Witheford, George
Caffentzis, John Holloway, David Harvey

17. Stephan Meretz's Taxonomy of Goods
http://www.slideshare.net/StefanMz/understanding-commons-and-peer-production

18. Commons Based Peer Production
● Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Network, 2006
● Network model of production
● Mass participation without trad. hierarchy
● Emphasis on intrinsic motivation, open
participation and shared information
● Microtask, crowdsourcing, open innovation...

19. P2P as Hyper-productivity (Bauwens)
● Internet enabling the self-organizing of the
value production on global scale
● Open innovation communities, ethical
entrepreneurship
● Challenge to apply the experience of free
and open software to 'hardware'
● Struggle between 'netarchy' and cognitariat
● Partner state needed to enable commoning
and fair trade

20. Becoming of the Commons Coalition
http://youtu.be/-tj72CWhK-k

21. Commons.fi | What is to be Co-done?
● New publication and research project
● Commons, solidarity economy, social
movements
● Open network of interested people
● Common pool resource
http://commons.fi
Commons.fi Group in FB:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/303831303047659

22. Commons
● https://vimeo.com/album/245612/video/17781175 (Bollier on commons)
● http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwaNZgY9PCQ (Tragedy of the
commons)
● http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ZWFPVBTws (What are commons)
● http://www.slideshare.net/StefanMz/understanding-commons-and-
peer-production (Meretz’s presentation)
● http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
● http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
P2P
● http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tj72CWhK-k (Bauwens: Grand
Coalition)
● http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123111423139193.
html (Bauwens: Partner State)
● http://www.tni.org/article/unleashing-creativity-labour (Stuttgart model)
● http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/summary-theses-on-the-emergence-of-the-
peer-to-peer-civilization-and-a-new-political-economy/2010/02/28
(Bauwens: Thesis Summary)
Solidarity economy
● http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_economy
● http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/solidarity-economics/
Commons.fi
● http://commons.fi

23. Thank you!
Jukka Peltokoski
KSL ry | http://www.ksl.fi
jukka.peltokoski@ksl.fi
http://slideshare.net/jukpelto