A core intention in Open2020 is to establish initiatives that collaborate on commons building projects. Production in-and-of commons is a vision that I share. **"The commons is the glue."** Commons/commoning is at the heart of this proposal.
It’s not that every aspect of production or exchange must be in a commons - some kinds of markets, and some scales of commodity production and trade, are not intrinsically harmful; and some infrastructural activities and protocol activities on a ‘state’ or trans-regional scale are involved in maintaining subsistence and wellbeing on an equitable basis, across the globe.
But at the centre of the economy there need to be practices that are historically ‘new’, moving decisively beyond the market and the state, in the forms we know them: post-Fordist global capitalist trade and speculation, and liberal-democratic buttressing of these.
And at the centre of ‘the new’, the making and mobilising of ‘new commons’ seems to me to be pivotal. See Commoning as dual power
Commoning is a way of organising which is long-practised and widespread and ‘obvious’ and humane and sensitive, but very new in the radical extensions now proposed, across all landscapes of material and cultural life - from **wild commons** of air and forest and ocean, to **commons of digital media and means**, through commons of everyday material **means of subsistence and wellbeing**.
Commoning flat-out challenges and displaces extractive, enclosing **regimes of capital accumulation and oligarchy**, and bureaucratised, ‘we’ll do what’s best for you’, **regimes of representative democracy and public administration**.
It has zero tolerance too for ‘free choice’, acquisitive, individualist consumerism. Collectives, **mutualism**, stewardship, mutual obligation and association for common weal are at the heart of commoning - and indeed, were at the heart of coops too, when they were invented.
See . . - Pattern languages as commons for the way in which commoning is at the heart of the practice of the college - Curating, stewarding and enjoying commons as practices skilful, aware practice of active, direct, in-context **valuing** that run all the way through the college federation. - Commoning as dual power
# See also - Pattern language(ing) - a disciplined and skilful mode of generating and holding understandings of practice - A college - organised on the basis of pattern language and language-ing, as a practice of commoning, in a federation of social ventures.
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