Occupy P2P Alternatives

Currently, we witness two parallel phenomena: Global development policies cause the loss of use rights to the natural commons as the livelihood support system for an estimated two billion people. At the same time, an ecology of collaborative production is (re)emerging beyond markets, money and organizational hierarchies as we know them. The lines between production and consumption are becoming blurred by social practices, which are based on sharing and (indirect) reciprocity. These practices are providing innovative answers to the fundamental question of how to (re)produce our livelihoods. Yet, most of the time, they do neither recognize “the whole of work”, which means to overcome the structural divisions between productive work and care work (education, health, eldercare, household level, etc.) nor do they reduce embedded gender imbalances in the performance of these activities. And yet, the emerging new patterns bear the potential for a historical transformation toward a model that we could term “(re)prosumption”.

We are organizing our second Making Worlds Forum, “BUILDING THE COMMONS”, to be held in March 29-30, 2013. We envision 2 days of workshops and conversations on how to build spaces and projects for a politics, technology, culture, and an economy of, by and for the 99%.

This year, we would like to open up space for a horizontal conversation with a strong focus on the concrete processes of commoning that are taking place or could take place in New York City now. Instead of the usual format of speaker presentations followed by discussion, we would like to see if an open conversation can take place in which knowledge and experience are shared horizontally. We acknowledge and value all the projects, processes, investigations and networks people are building in their daily lives and in their collaborations with others.

This is David Bollier‘s report on the European preparatory workshop for the Commons Economics Conference that will be held in Berlin on May 22-24.

David Bollier:

“”At a small workshop outside of Paris, France, twenty-two of us – mostly Europeans except for two of us – got together to discuss the economics of the commons from an on-the-ground perspective. We wanted to identify promising avenues for future research, writing and political action. This was the third of a series of “Deep Dive” workshops that the Commons Strategies Group, working in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, held in the fall of 2012. The two other ones were held in Bangkok for Asian commoners, and in Mexico City for Latin American commoners.

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is...

by Johan Söderberg  One of the many attractions at the New York Maker Faire in 2011 was the ”Print-village”. It gathered twenty-something stands displaying the famous Rep-rap 3D printer and its man...

Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society Volume 22, Issue 3, 2010 Special Issue: THE COMMON AND THE FORMS OF THE COMMUNE

Seventy activists from feminist groups, Occupy, UK Uncut, Solidarity Federation and Disabled People Against Cuts have today occupied London’s historic Women’s Library in a daring bid to save it from closure.

By: Bernardo Gutiérrez 
An indigenous collective of Chiapas, tangled with a co-working space of Quito. A crowd funding platform of Barcelona, ??working with open data movement of Montevideo. A Greek cooperative, inspiring artistic groups of Caracas (and vice versa). A hacktivist group of Madrid, feeding of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas permaculture. A community of free software developers in Buenos Aires, collaborating with Lima based city planners. Cultural groups with hackers. Foundations, together with activists. Copyleft artists + cultural agents. Networked Politics. Open Source Ecology. Open data. Southern Europe, its bottom-up and grassroot movements, united with the buzzling Latin American. Both sides of the Atlantic ocean, twinned by Peer-to-peer (P2P), an open  network topology in which each node is connected to the other without passing through any center. The P2P – with its openness, decentralization and collective empowerment – is not longer something marginal. P2P is philosophy, working trend and a solid reality. P2P is the nervous system of the new world.

EVERY SATURDAY AT CENTRAL SQUARES OF ALL CITIES BEGINNING JANUARY 12, 2013 @ 3:00PM IN UTC+01 Freedom for political prisoners! Down with state terrorism! Down with fascist junta! All power to the C...

A massive number of jobs are being replaced by free contributions from people. If we consider alternatives such as basic income, this could be a great step for us.

What is the connection between the historical tradition of socialism/communism and the contemporary emergence of ideas and practices centered around p2p dynamics and the commons? In the article for...

AFTERMATH, life beyond the crisis

by Christian Siefkes Building Blocks for Physical Peer Production [Originally published in Journal of Peer Production, Issue #1: Productive Negation, July 2012.] Summary Commons-based peer producti...