The State of the Commons in 2025 : What is to be done ?

What should be the strategy of the commoners, in the context of the ‘long durée’ ? Part One: Historical Contextualization.

This will again be a kind of longish article, in which we first place the commons, as an institution and as perennial human practice, in a longer historical arc, before looking at its present status, and why we should give it a prominent place in the next (post?)civilizational phase that is announcing itself.

Defining the Commons in a ‘digital’ ‘peer to peer’ context:

But perhaps we should first define what we talk about. Following Elinor Ostrom, we would define the commons around three criteria:

1. It is a common resource, which can be material or immaterial. This means that indeed, we should stress that the commons is definitely a ‘social object’, not some nebulous principle of togetherness, sometimes called the ‘common’ without an ‘s’ at the end. The commons are definitely a graspable ‘thing’.

2. But paradoxically, it is a thing that is established relationally, through human choice. So the commons are not just something that only applies to non-rival and non-excludable goods, as some neo-classical economists might contend, but rather one of the choices that are nearly always available. Commons are not ‘natural’, but a specifically human institution, which does not exclude cooperation and partnerships with other living entities. But the air, the ocean, language, etc.., though we share them in common, are not ‘commons’ as we understand it, unless they are created, sustained, defended and managed by a human community. And this brings us to the third element of the definition:

3. Commons must be governed through the rules established by its community of producers or users. State-governed public properties, like parks, are NOT commons, unless they are self-governed. Private properties managed by owners are of course not commons either, think of the social media platforms.

In my own practice and thinking, and for the P2P Foundation network, the commons should be associated with peer to peer dynamics, an element that adds a strong element of ‘historicity’ to our understanding of the commons.

Peer to peer relations, i.e. freely set relations amongst relative peers or equals, were originally bound by locality, i.e. geography, and so historically, the commons were local resources managed by local communities; but today, peer to peer relations have become trans-local, through the intervention of digital networks. So P2P, as we understand it, is the capacity to organize trans-locally, through digital networks, and to create shared resources in this new way. This has created a new wave of commons, which are no longer just local, but are global: the digital commons. Of course, humans have bodies that are located in space, and the digital cannot change that fundamental condition, but it is equally true that we can now work together, organize together, to create common value and distribute it, relatively independent of the place where we are located. We are in the realm of the physicalization of what Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin called the Noosphere. And this new form of noospheric cooperation can be done in real time, trans-locally.

To add some detail to this: in 1993, humanity created the web, and the browser, democratizing access to this universal medium, where the digital incorporates all the previous media, and allows for many to many communication and production. In 2008, when the first socially sovereign, globally scalable currency was invented (Bitcoin), it came with the invention of the universal peer to peer accounting system, the blockchain. The capacity to organize the coordination of labor (mostly for the production of shared knowledge, coding and design at first), and to finance that labor, as is now done through Web3, is a worldwide pivot for the capacity of universal cooperation outside the full control of nation-state and corporate systems.

Historicizing the Commons

We will attempt here to historicize the commons in three different ways:

• The evolution in linear time of the commons and their institutions, in the context of increasing societal complexity

• In the context of historical, societal, and civilizational cycles: the Pulsation of the Commons throughout human history

• The spiral bifurcation of the commons to a new expanded presence, in the next civilizational phase

Before this exercise we should stress that the commons is a universal social form that has existed at nearly all times in human history, and in all cultures and civilizations, but of course expressing itself in different ways according to time and place.

The relational grammar of Alan Page Fiske, recognizes four forms of relational value exchange:

• Communal Shareholding: exchanging with a whole, i.e. general, not directly reciprocal exchange. Examples, when the Amish collectively build the new house of a young couple, that young couple owes the return favour to all new coming couples in the future, not to the particular people who helped them; Same for the developer of Linux code. The logic is one of ‘give a brick, get a house’.

• Equality Matching: what we know as a gift economy. If I give you something, you feel beholden to return a gift of similar value eventually, to restore the equality in our relationship

• Authority Ranking: goods are distributed in a hierarchy of rank, such as in feudal societies

• Market Pricing: things are exchanged through a common token of value

Kojin Karatani, in the ‘Structure of World History’, has historicized the evolution of their relative hegemony over time:

• The commons are the primary social logic in tribal, kinship based societies, especially in their nomadic phase

• The gift economy kicks in when humanity settles and can no longer escape conflict through movement: social relationships are created through mutual gifting

• Once conquest and domination set in, authority ranking, i.e. the state, becomes dominant

• Once commercial cities expand, the market becomes ever more dominant with the capitalist order enshrining its hegemony, starting in Western Europe but becoming a global norm (we can discuss whether China and others are still exceptional in that regard).

For Karatani, Mode A is the confluence of commoning and gifting in tribal, kinship-based cultures; Mode B is the state, emerging with class-based civilization, Mode C is the market, becoming dominant under capitalism.

But crucially, humanity continuously strives to reinstate Mode A, because humans have a cultural, and probably generic, preference for convivial living in small trusted groups. But human groups attempt to do this at a higher level of complexity, in a permanent attempt to moderate the extractive logic of civilization. We discussed this in the article drawing on Hanzi Freinacht’s distinction between ‘coordination engines’ and ‘purification generators’. A coordination engine is how a society organizes its own social reproduction, through productive systems like hunter-gathering, agriculture, industry, and the digital-cognitive; purification engines are the periodic attempts to humanize and ethicize these extraction regimes.

This attempt, and the reforms that go with it, is what Karatani calls Mode D. Mode D was first attempted by the world religions, starting in the Axial Age, then became the goal for mass social and political movements in modernity (socialism, anarchism, …), but today, this would also be my argument, mode D is today exemplified by constructive networks. Karatani called this the ‘New Associationism’.

If you read the linear aspects of the development of the commons that I describe below, it has to be understood as the attempt of the practices and institutions associated with commoning, to adapt to the different developmental stages (stages of complexity) of human society. There are commons in hunter-gathering contexts, as well as in agricultural, industrial and digital-cognitive contexts.

Linearity in Commons development: adapting to stages in societal complexity.

With this in mind, let’s recall the important historical stages of the commons, as they adapt to societal complexity:

• The original, pre-historical (mode A) as well historical modalities of the commons are primarily in the form of local communities managing natural resources for their long-term preservation. Commons are hegemonic in tribal societies, but are still a large part in pre-capitalist civilizational models. So at this stage of adaptation to complexity, commons are primarily concerned with collectively managing physical resources, although they are of course associated with spiritual and cultural practices, and form a unity with them. Indigenous commons are seen to be ruled by spiritual forces for example.

• Capitalism and modernity, as they first emerge in the West, are the first historical societal forms that are actively opposed to the commons and strive to minimize or eliminate them, gradually even losing the awareness of their very existence. When the Enclosures are enacted, i.e. the farmers-commoners massively lose access to their common(s) lands, especially after the 16th century, they become poor and unprotected proletarians in the industrial cities.

• This creates a second wave of commons, that are primarily ‘social’ in nature: what is mutualized and managed collectively are no longer the physical resources, now under the near complete control and ownership of the capitalist class, but the management of life risks. In response to the dire life conditions of early capitalism in the West, the working class of the 19th century massively created social commons. However, while the physical commons had been privatized, the social commons will eventually be statified as the welfare state. This may have been a good thing in terms of securing livelihoods for working class families, but from the point of view of self-managed commons, this combined assault, fatally weakened the commons in Western countries, and they nearly disappeared in the ‘advanced’ industrial countries, while also being under permanent assault in the Global South. Under the Soviet system, and its derivatives, commons were nationalized by the state, resulting in very similar realities.

• However, under the latest stage of cognitive, networked capitalism, the peer to peer dynamics of digital networks create also a new phase in the development of the commons, that of the digital commons, i.e. the capacity to not only create shared knowledge resources that are produced and managed collectively, but also ecosystems of digital production, that create active digital resources such as software, designs, protocols and the like. It is my contention, and we believe we can support this through our research in the P2P Foundation, that these digital commons are only an intermediary stage, as they are now meshing themselves into the very structures of physical production.

• Indeed the capacity of digital commons to directly interfere with the organizing of ‘physical’ production, has evolved through the creation of socially sovereign digital cryptocurrencies, the ‘stigmergic’ capacity of peer production communities to coordinate labor by signaling to each other through open ecosystems of production, and the resulting capacity of Web3/crypto capacity to coordinate flows of labor and capital on a global scale, while funding their own commons, all this creates the condition of an emerging ‘Cosmo-Local’ stage of physical-digital commons. In this phase of adaptation of commons practices and institutions, the priority is to use the newfound commons capacity, for the benefit of the commoners themselves, by focusing on integrating digital commons in productive communities.

This is where we are at today: at the early stages of ‘phygital’ commoning.

In a separate article, A global history of regulation, I have offered a similar developmental history of regulation through the commons:

• Indigenous communities have no separate regulatory institutions but internalize boundaries for human action through forms of spiritual ownership of resources

• Pre-capitalist imperial systems recognize and tolerate local commons as a means to create social reserves for the common people, in times of hardship.

• Capitalist regimes suppress the regulatory function of the commons by enlisting state power to regulate market forces

• Nation-states lose the capacity to regulate market forces through the globalization of financial capital.

There is also a cyclic aspect regulating the ebb and flow of the influence of commons-based institutions, which we will now address.

Cyclical Aspects of Commons Development: The Pulsation of the Commons

This cyclicality is something I discovered through my readings of the macrohistorians but especially through the historical examples found in that marvelous book by Mark Whitaker, entitled “Ecological Revolution(s)”.

The Pulsation of the Commons thesis is the following:

• The strength of the extractive civilizational institutions that are markets and states ebb and flow in cycles; these forms emerge, grow, mature, and decline, eventually collapsing. When a civilization completely collapses, we may properly talk of ‘Dark Ages’, such as the Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BC, or what happened in the Western part of Europe after the fall of Rome. China is similarly marked by several ebbs and flows of civilizational institutions and integrative capacity.

• During periods of growth of civilization, when the centri-petal forces (center-reinforcing pressures) dominate, the commons tend to weaken. Generally speaking both Empires and the current form of Nation-States, tend to be hostile to local self-organization and both markets, and state-based welfare institutions, tend to weaken local solidarities.

• But the situation changes when societies and civilizational forms are declining: this creates a centri-fugal force, reinforces local solidarities and the return of commons-based solidarities. Think how world religions, as a motive force for the Mode A attempts, create large-scale conditions for their re-emergence. As Toynbee noted, when Empires fall, it is those religions that maintain collective culture in the former imperial area. The very reason that universal religions exist in the first place, is because the imperial Peace and security allowed their spread in the first place. If St. Paul could travel throughout the Roman lands, or Buddhist monks could travel from India to China, and spread their ideas, it is because of the unification of culture that had been created by universal empires.

• Then notice what happens in proper ‘Dark Ages’: these are periods of religious reformation, in which commons-based religious formations, i.e. monasteries and the like, provide a spiritual, and inevitable also a ‘material’ reset, for the failing civilizational models of the previous stage. In such dark ages, they become the near hegemonic institutions of common culture, and institutions for renewed production. Following Carroll Quigley, I believe these were in fact ‘commons-based instruments of expansion’, since they actively create surplus for societal reconstruction, and even expansion. In other words, the very surplus-creating capacity of these commons-based institutions create the conditions for a new societal upsurge, not excluding a renewed imperial reconstruction.

• And so the circle is round.

In contrast to the linearity of the commons that we explained in the previous section, this is the ‘circularity’ of the commons, the ‘Pulsation of the Commons’.

The Spiral Bifurcations: towards the Cosmo-Local Commons-Based Post-Civilization ?

One of the important macro-historians is Pitirim Sorokin, who wrote a four-volume study, Cultural and Social Dynamics, stressing how civilizational change is marked by ‘bifurcations’, in his particular view, between Sensate-oriented forms, focusing on material welfare, and Ideate forms, focusing on spiritual welfare. Civilizational history is marked by serious swings between such civilizational orders.

Think of how for the Classical World, work was deemed worthy only for slaves and dependent workers, but how the Christian civilization stressed the combination of ‘ora et labora’. Indeed, in the new post-Roman order of the world, work had become a salvific enterprise, and the resurrection of the body indicated that both matter and spirit were to be placed on the same level of potential sacrality. But work served prayer, indicating the birth of a new Ideate form of civilization in the West. Similar processes happened in every area. Think of the ‘Ideate’ Buddhist revolution critiquing the more Sensate Confucianism, as you can read in one of the chapters of William Dalrymple’s, ‘The Golden Road’.

When a civilization order falls, many of its values are rejected, and the value polarity of the newly emergent civilization may be entirely different, at every level of social life.

What does that mean for the future form of the commons ?

Until today, as we indicated in our history, the polarity of the commons was originally on physical resources, needed for the reproduction of life; more recently, the commons are now also digital, and they even already be the primary driver of our economy. As argued above, my suggestion is that the new commons will be ‘phygital’: a synthesis of the material and the digital.

The original commons were local, with the social commons of the working class adapting to nation-state realities, they became ‘national’. My suggestion is that the new commons will not just be ‘planetary’, but more properly called cosmo-local. Cosmo-local commons have to bridge the differentialism, i.e. the geographic, bioregional and national differences and the call for local distributed sovereignty, including the domain-specific cultures of universally organized specialisms, i.e. the calls for virtual sovereignty, which we find in the emerging ‘network nations movement(s) , while at the same time, rekindle an updated form of universalism, which is not equivalent to western hegemony, but to ‘planetarity’. The resource, biodiversity and climate crises that the world is facing, needs both a local aspect, regeneration needs to start locally, but at the same time, it also needs to be planetary, i.e. cosmic forms of coordination. We need to solve problems at the same scale in which they occur, and the ‘meta-crisis’ has both local and planetary aspects.

We have suggested that the civilizational model itself, is essentially a geographic entity, though with universal aspirations. It is essentially a relation between the land, producing a surplus to fund the specialized classes in the cities; and later, industry producing a surplus to produce the noospheric digital layer. In the next stage of civilization, i.e. the noospheric layer itself, which needs to produce a surplus to allow for regeneration. That by the way, is the proper role for AI in the future world order, i.e. to help humanity resolve the meta-crisis. Since the meta-crisis is a crisis of complex systems, we need technologies that are themselves able to process complexity. What the digital moment has introduced is a massive capacity for trans-local self organization. I believe this is a first post-civilizational element.

Similarly, civilization was the consequence of an earlier climate disruption, in which human groups felt the necessity to master natural processes (originally mastering irrigation around the river basins), first as stewards, later, under the western separative paradigm, as masters with full dominion. This is no longer a viable option, and in that sense, we need a qualitative step change towards new forms of partnership with the natural world. This is the second post-civilizational element.

But states and markets are geographic-based, competitive, and extractive institutions, especially under the current paradigm. The commons has historically been the protective, long-term, regenerative institutions. The third shift towards post-civilizationality is the return, at a higher level of complexity, to a commons-centric reality, in which the protective institution of the commons, at a cosmo-local level, can regulate the destructive and hyper-extractive effects of the current market-state centric systems. Commons-centric does not mean ‘commons only’, but it means the capacity, through cosmo-local commons-based institutions, to keep extractivity in check, and redirect resources towards regeneration.

One useful framing is this: ‘Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process’.

Life was born in an immature biosphere, which constantly endangered the emerging life forms, but the Great Oxygenation event created the conditions for the birth of Gaia, a mature earth system and biosphere, which created the conditions for the emergence of humanity, its culture, and its technology. This at first creates an immature Technosphere, which now endangers the very biosphere, i.e. the conditions for life itself. Our task, through the revival of commons-based regulatory and production institutions, including the production of appropriate human cultures, is to create a mature Technosphere, which no longer endangers the Biosphere, as Adam Franks has suggested.

Note that this is an important way, a ‘spiral’ return, at a higher level of complexity, as is for example well explained in Second Sapiens, by Said Dawlabani. We are going back to mode A, but adding a new kind of kinship to the mix, that of self-assembling phygital communities, based on the common production of value.

This is the end of our historical contextualization. In a next installment, we will discuss the specifics of the current situation, and look into possible strategies and tactics for the current commons’ movement(s).

So look out for :

The State of the Commons in 2025 , Part Two: What Now ?