From Capital to Commons: A Review

Environmental news, paradoxically, approaches banality as every day a new horror finds resonance in the media we consume and which consumes us. These daily reports enervate us and lead to resignation. Is our passivity the intention? If we refuse to be immobilized, how do we find a route out of our misery?

We don’t suffer from a lack of proffered paths for our “engagement.” A multiplicity of them pursue our attention, many illusory, and often provided as a service for a “slight fee.” In frustration, and as a kind of therapy, the most committed rush to clean a beach, while mostly we sign online petitions, or make donations to allay the futility we feel.

The complexity of our ecological predicament, when we are methodically informed, clarifies matters. But where are we treated as adults? Certainly not by the mass media. Sometimes by an author who provides a wholistic, systemic presentation like Hannes Gerhardt in his From Capital to Commons. He introduces us, as his subtitle states, to an exploration of a world beyond capitalism.

This is not a book of dire predictions, but one of documented approaches meant to free ourselves of the constraints of powerlessness we encounter whenever we are confronted with daily catastrophes. Gerhardt offers meaningful reportage and not quick fixes.

He begins by detailing how capitalism subverted the early egalitarian promise of the internet, with its open-source projects, into a shoddy marketplace and, in doing so, continued in due course to mass surveillance and accelerated control posing as technological advance: AI.

An excellent example of the pioneering explorations of public access computer technology was Berkeley’s Community Memory project. Community Memory was the first public computer-based bulletin board, originally set up in 1973 at Leopold’s Records in Berkeley, California. This experimental service and tool was enthusiastically received and provided groups of people who had never used computers with new levels of access to technology and information-sharing.

At the core of Gerhardt’s exposition is compeerism – a neologism based on the commons as the platform, so to speak, for peer-to-peer (P2P) association and production. P2P itself was first formulated by several theoreticians as an outgrowth of early internet collaboration. The initial open-source movement gave shape to the concept of peer-to-peer production of software. Gerhardt’s neologism is intended, with the concluding addition of an “ism,” to be a radical version of peer-to-peer endeavors that seeks to replace capitalism.

Compeerism, for me, resembles the practice of worker cooperatives whose members are conscious of their anti-capitalist vision. The early promoters of manufacturing cooperatives at the beginning of the 19th century, like the Irish philosopher William Thompson and the practical utopian Robert Owen, interpreted cooperatives as mircro-commons. For them, the workers in the workshop cooperatives were members managing their productivity, just as the members of a traditional land commons managed their bounty.

Recently David Ellerman traced the historical legacy of this view regarding control of enterprises by the members who actually worked in them and not simply benefited from the work of others like the retail food co-ops, where the members are the shoppers.
 

In the US cooperative economy, worker cooperatives are the smallest sector; within capitalism it is miniscule. While Gerhardt is aware of what he calls “commons-based worker cooperatives” it is understandable that he gravitated towards the P2P movement, which had, until recently, a more contemporary alignment with digital technology implying greater potential as a system changer.

The recent development of digital worker cooperatives marks a trend that is beginning to influence the entire cooperative economy. Platform cooperatives, for example, rely on democratic control by members in opposition to the hierarchical practice of capitalist platforms.

Gerhardt advocates economies that are designed globally with input from sources worldwide, but manufactured locally (DG-ML).

DG-ML relates to the universal communication that the internet makes possible. The transmission of information to localities can inform and support grassroots endeavors. The most recent news of the exploitation of this system of DG-ML, unfortunately, makes possible the manufacture of drones used to subvert traditional warfare with cheaply assembled models drawn from the internet.

The threads of productive examples throughout the book encompass the internet to be sure, but also incorporate various aspects of technology like the systems of energy creation: wind, solar, tidal, and maybe others to be further developed. Though Gerhardt doesn’t mention nuclear power since it doesn’t easily conform to commonization; smaller and safer thorium reactors being developed in China, may conform to a decentralized imperative.

From Capital to Commons moves from digital decentralization to localized energy production where, fortunately, many rural areas of America are served by cooperative utilities. The management in these cooperatives have usurped the role of the members, those who purchase the electricity. Sandeep Vaheesan’s new book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States, outlines the original intent that the utilities would be controlled by those it served. Potentially, this legal structure could be revived if communities sought to return control of their energy to themselves.

The subtitle of Sandeep’s book: Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry. He writes:

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control.

The main topic of Gerhardt’s book, which is explored extensively, is the commons as a refutation of private property. Gerhardt is fully aware of the difficulties of maintaining the promise of peer-to-peer relationships, as in commoning—the practice of the commoners—in an age of Silicon Valley monopolies and their economic aggressiveness. To contend with this divisive force, he develops a comprehensive and holistic approach to restructuring anti-capitalist alternatives. His in-depth discussion covers many topics with an abundance of references to projects here and abroad.

The worldwide cooperative movement, and especially worker cooperative members, would benefit from an exploration of Gerhardt’s book. It is especially relevant in the presence of the multifaceted crises we are beginning to endure.

If there is anything lacking in Gerhardt’s exposition, it is the sense of urgency. Those daily news reports of worldwide catastrophes too often occur in remote locations in foreign lands. And when they occur in the US as severe storms, wildfires, or drought they are still happening someplace else, unless you lived recently in certain sections of Los Angeles or North Carolina.

Without a program to contend with these dire circumstances, how can we do anything other than attempt to repress the reality that tomorrow we will be the victims of climate change or resource depletion? The lack of urgency also applies to the cooperative movement for the most part.

Gerhardt’s exposition provides us with projects that could form resilience to the quotidian ecological horrors we do our best to avoid thinking about. We need not seek refuge in solarpunk fantasies or permacultural utopianism, when all about us in communities all over the country practical projects are underway that could create a strategic response to the material vertigo of capitalism. But the point is to develop a conscious strategy.

The commons is not, as Joe Hill said, “pie-in-the-sky bye and bye,” but present in a neighborhood near you, or in a town down the road, or at a local farm. These commons are elements of the cooperative economy: credit unions, food stores, housing complexes, and most importantly, worker cooperatives.

Gerhardt moves on to agriculture. Here again, retail cooperatives have a presence in many communities where they limit the predatory monopolization of our food supply. These retail co-op ventures are not simply stores, they function as a support system for local farmers, who in turn are often members of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups. And, further in community networking, if there is a credit union in the town it can function as an economic cornerstone.

These are tangible realities that exist and need support and need to spread rapidly. The cooperative ethos essentially aims to democratically control the economy and thereby begin the mitigation of devastation already upon us. To take but one historic, but still relevant, example: for three decades from the 60s through to the 80s a band of tree planters called The Hoedads formed worker cooperatives to restore the northwestern forests corporate entities clearcut for profit.

Gerhardt’s book opens possibilities for us to contemplate how to contend with what some are calling the polycrisis, consisting of ecological mayhem, political turmoil, and resource depletion. The existing ventures outlined in From Capital to Commons embody in their potential the solutions we need to implement immediately.

We need the wisdom, outlined in From Capital to Commons, to implement a strategy* that realizes the potential nascent in the worldwide cooperative economic sector. Not tomorrow, but today (I offer a possible strategy in my book— Jobs, Jive, & Joy).