We will get an english version of our site up shortly at http://www.createcommons.org in order to facilitate international cooperation. Perhaps there will be an opportunity to do something together in the future!

»Skapa Allmanningar« means »create commons« and the subtitle »The seeds of a new way of organizing society« — which sounds very like the stuff we are doing here at keimform.de (which means »seedform« or »germform«).

Please check-out more of keimform.de if you are familiar with german, or read our english texts which cover to some extend the same content: http://www.keimform.de/category/english/

Let’s keep in touch!

(www.skapaallmanningar.se is a swedish initiativ to boost and create commons. english version to come – we’re really interested in international cooperation!)

An economic and political system characterized by a free market for goods and services and private control of production and consumption.

Is that okay?

If the quote above was true then we would find that the societies that is most in accordance with capitalist principles would be the societies where people are starving.

I don’t understand, what you mean. What I described, is capitalism.

I don’t understand why you call commodities and money “dead stuff”, it seems to me like a poetic trick. We all rely on “dead stuff”, like cars, food and anti-biotics.

It’s true, there is some poetry in it, I remembered John Holloway when I wrote the text. But there is a real background.

I try to avoid the term »dead labour«, which would be more correct. The point is, that we indeed rely on different things, which are not »living«, but being commodities they are »dead labour«, which is perfectly exchangeable against another incarnation of »dead labour«: money.

If the things we want are the outcome of a commonist production, they are means to satisfy our needs. They are embedded in the daily live of the people, which control the things and not the other way around as in capitalism. Thus »labour« is the disembedded social form of production in capitalism. In commonism there is no longer such thing.

What I fear is a new generation of young people who read Naomi Klein, and actually believe that free trade is evil, that the voluntary exchange of goods is evil and therefore will move to stop it.

Free trade is evil, it’s the backbone of capitalism. But why should people should stop from helping each other and giving things back and forth? Exchange in the sense of equivalent exchange is the problem we should face.

“I don’t argue that everything in a capitalist society is covered by property rights, things that exist in infinite amounts ( or can be copied to exist in infinite amounts ) like air and linux-distros are clearly not covered.”

I think, that it is not only about things that exist in infinite amounts (not even clean air exists in infinite amounts), it’s about water, soil and genetic resources inscribed into biological resources too (genes can be copied but not necessarily the plants or forests which harbour those genes). So, it is more tricky.

” However if somebody has mixed his labour in with a vacant strip of land, and produced e.g. wheat, you would be hard pressed to argue that the wheat doesn’t belong to that person. He owns his body, so it would be fair to assume that he owns the actions of his body, the wealth it produces.”

The commons idea is precisely not about “vacant resources”, it is not about no men’s land, but about common possession of resources we all need to live, to produce and to be creative.
What you are talking about is exactly the John Lockean idea of property, which ended up in all teaching books all over the world, thus, I would challenge those ideas:
Let’s take petrol for instance: Someone mixes petrol with his labor, research, investment and so on, and – ok- by doing so he is entitled to appropriate the value of the product (a barrel) as far as his labor, research and investment is concerned. But IMHO, this doesn’t authorize him to appropriate the mere value of petrol itself. These are two very different things. (in a certain way recognized by John Locke when he formulated his two basic conditions)

Obviouly the problem is more complicated than described, since those who explore, use or approriate a certain common resource not only appropriate the sheer resource but normally they destroy others (in the case of petrol f.i. whole landscapes, aquifers, climate stability), and they never pay back to society for the destroyed values,
hope you get my point.
So, in some cases this can be resolved by taxes, but only a very few countries (if any) manage to do so. Normally the gains of commons resource appropriation gets privatized and the loss of commons resource value gets socialized.

I did not get your “commonist car example” well; but for me, the decisive point in that discussion is not WHO owns? (even though, it’s a very important question). For me the very point is: what is the owner doing with the thing he owns with respect to others and with respect to our common resources? For example what do we gain, all together, if every proprietary owner of his car or even tens of millions of owners of “commonist cars” (I guess that’s what you mean) continue driving at 8 liters/100 km? Nothing. We will still destroy the planet.

So, it’s not again all kind of individual rights. It’s about how to use what and what for and how to democratize usage rights, based on the very idea of the morally same possession rights of every citizen on the resources provided by the earth or by former generations.

corporatism:
yes, there is a lot of corporatism in Mexico, less in El Salvador… but, there is no governmental control in huge parts of social life at all and still a kind of “informal expropriation”. I refer to the “normal enclosure of the commons” process driven by capitalist accumulation logic – everywhere.(f.i. They turn half of the salvadoranian territory upside down just because gold prices raised, so they will destroy livelyhoods for this and future generations. And never pay back.)