Many reading this book will have heard some approximation of the quip, ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Fisher, 2009, p 2). The origin of this line can be traced back to Fredric Jameson's (1996) Seeds of Time, but it is probably most closely associated with Slavoj Žižek, who has been fond of making the claim in various ways. In a 2005 documentary, for instance, Žižek proclaims, “Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay” (in Taylor, 2005, np). Mark Fisher has even coined a term to capture this sentiment of inevitability, ‘capitalist realism’, describing it as the ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009, p 2).

Awareness of a mass resignation of society to the inevitability of capitalism is not new. It was already captured in Friedrich Engels’ (2000) comments on ‘false consciousness’, later honed by the likes of Antonio Gramsci (2011) and Theodor Adorno (2015) to explain the working class's complacency towards their own exploitation. Yet what seems to have changed is that the political left has now also fallen prey to capitalist realism as evidenced, for instance, by the almost complete incapacity to envision and pursue societal wellbeing in a way that does not depend on ever-expanding business revenue and a rising stock market (Jackson, 2017). Hence, while some socialist and green-minded movements can point to isolated political victories, in the end, they have been unable to tap into or develop any inspirational ideas to effectively challenge the deep sense that our current organization of the world, despite its many intractable problems, is more or less as good as we can ever hope for. Clearly, for those who truly believe ‘another world is possible’, something new is needed to wake us from our dogmatic resignation.

In this book we delve into one proposition seeking to do just that.

Today, humanity possesses wealth, knowledge, and productive capabilities that are truly immense, the thing of fantasies just one hundred years ago. And yet, we live in a world characterized by massive inequality, widespread poverty, environmental collapse, and political instability and conflict. Given what humanity has to work with, it is hard to imagine that a better outcome is not possible. Consider, for instance, that contemporary global per-capita GDP is roughly on par with that of Costa Rica, Thailand, or Serbia (or the US of the 1950s). Human development indices show that countries that have achieved this range of economic production can manage very high human development, with health, education, and environmental/social sustainability scores that are comparable to those of rich countries (Jackson, 2017). In fact, if we home in only on happiness and life satisfaction, the correlation between wellbeing and GDP begins to fall apart after the world's average economic output is achieved. Costa Rica, for instance, has repeatedly ranked as one of the fifteen happiest countries in the world (Garrigues, 2019).

Next, consider that the averaged global wealth per adult, that is, overall net worth, currently stands at around US$80,000 (Hechler-Fayd’herbe, 2021). If this wealth were equitably distributed and added to the global average per capita GDP, we would reach affluence levels significantly higher than mid-range countries like Costa Rica. If we then further assume a significant reduction in prices that could be achieved in many critical goods and services by shifting from a profit-seeking form of production that fosters artificial scarcity to one centred on expanding the abundance of use-value, then these affluence levels would rise even higher. In other words, taking all of these considerations into account, it is fair to conclude that humanity easily has the means to establish a Minority World, middle class life for essentially everyone on the planet, with perhaps somewhat less quantity in the material things consumed but with a greater access to product quality and the ubiquitous availability of top-notch, basic and supplementary services.

The fact that such an achievement appears as distant as ever, however, should give pause regarding the current organization of our productive capabilities and its political defence. Indeed, we started the book by challenging the resigned conviction that there can be no alternative to capitalism.

The most fundamental distinction between compeerism and capitalism is the focus on the production of democratically determined use-value instead of the private pursuit of exchange-value. In other words, it is not simply supply and demand, deeply configured by the distribution of money and privately held property, which will decide what gets produced. Instead, when the means of production are truly commanded by a compeerist society, their use will primarily be employed to expand humanity's capacity to thrive. In preceding chapters we focused on the promise and challenges facing the broad adoption of such a political economy. The context in this exploration, however, was always one in which capital and the capital-state nexus was still firmly in control. In this final chapter, then, we consider what a compeerist mode of production could look like if it actually were to become dominant.

Anarchist and Marxist depictions of a final end-goal economy generally espouse an aim in which, in the words of Kropotkin (1995, p 78), the ‘associations of men and women who … work on the land, in the factories, in the mines, and so on, [are] themselves the managers of production’. Yet there is significant variation as to how such an economy would function on a larger scale. In capitalism, money, representing all the tangible value of the world, gives the invisible hand of the market its movement. Using money determines demand while pursuing money motivates supply. What possible and preferable alternatives exist to this arrangement?

In anarcho-communist approaches the answer is to get rid of money, markets, and property altogether. Means of production are owned in common and supply and demand is determined from within the community, with each working according to their ability and everyone receiving according to their needs. In collectivist approaches, in turn, there is again an embrace of mutually-owned production capabilities, yet the role of money is generally revived, at least in the short term, as a labour token. This token, which can be redeemed for communally produced goods, ensures a motivation to work and a means with which to organize distribution, hence addressing two key uncertainties within the anarcho-communist approach.

Alternatively, mutualist outlooks accept money and markets as long as property ownership is conditional, meaning it should not lead to artificial scarcity or be used to exploit labour.

Every economy, no matter how sophisticated or diversified, is ultimately tied to the limitations and boundaries of the material world on which it depends for food, energy, raw materials, and stable ecological systems. Thus, while commonifying infrastructure and the industrial means of production is necessary for a compeerist transition, it is not sufficient. In this chapter, therefore, we consider efforts and ideas for fundamentally reshaping, along compeerist lines, the management and use of our natural resources and systems (the primary sector of the economy). More particularly this means pursuing more fair, democratic, collaborative, and ecologically sound governance arrangements when it comes to our earth-given endowments.

The importance of the ecological dimension, rooted in the ultimate limitations imposed by the physical laws of our natural world, cannot be overstated. Over and beyond its goal of commonifying the economy, compeerism is thus confronted with an imperative that is as straightforward as it is challenging, namely, to divert us from our current path towards planetary ecocide and guide us, instead, on an arc that ensures the establishment of long-term, environmentally (and socially) resilient communities and societies. It is a recognition that points to the necessary overlap between compeerism as an alternative organization of our social relations and, at the same time, a materially embodied alternative to our current relationship with the planet.

The ecological concept of resilience is useful here as it describes the ability of a system to achieve the long-term conditions needed to maintain wellbeing by effectively contending with various stresses; it is an outlook and understanding of the world that maintains significant synergies with compeerism. To achieve social and environmental resilience, for instance, non-market-based assets, such as social capital, diversity, and ecosystem services are seen as integral (Lewis and Conaty, 2012). For compeerists, in turn, creating an economy primed for equitable and democratic use-value production is intended precisely to create the conditions in which such non-market factors can fully develop and be harnessed; furthermore, this economy is itself dependent on processes like cooperation and solidarity that also lie outside exchange-valuation measures.

Fostering and applying knowledge/data to maximize positive outcomes is also a critical component of both resilience and compeerist frameworks, the latter of which pursues this aim by supporting the creation and collaborative use of an expansive data commons.

In basic terms, compeerism aims to harness the digital revolution to unleash the general intellect, hence triggering a gradual shift from a mode of production aimed at engineering scarcity to one committed to serving the most pressing needs and wants of humanity. Yet, capital's continuing efforts to privatize knowledge/information via intellectual property protections and the pilfering and coopting of the digital commons has thus far stymied any designs on blowing the foundations of capitalism ‘sky high’, as per the early Marx. This chapter, therefore, explores the proposition that a compeerist-aligned movement can still succeed in creating a digital commons that could serve as a repository and incubator of a capital-challenging, liberated general intellect. Before delving into such potential, and the various barriers that need to be overcome to realize it, we must review in more detail the current state of commons-based digital value production and its relation to capital.

The digital commons and copyleft

In conceptualizing the digital commons, it is important to distinguish between labour-derived, curated content, on the one hand, and raw, collected data, on the other. Digitized data, which is still unprocessed, is a different form of information that we will deal with in the next chapter. For now, we can stay focused on labour-derived, intentionally assembled digital value, which is entangled in a number of other pivotal issues that require our attention, including property and remuneration for work. We begin by considering code and other creative/cognitive media, which gave rise to the first commons-oriented property protections, before turning to the challenges and promise entailed in commons-based research and applied knowledge (design).

Code and software offered the first glimpse of an organized demand for the creation and protection of a digital commons. Richard Stallman, a pioneer of the hacker movement, developed the idea of the ‘four freedoms’ of code, namely that code should be open and free to use, study, manipulate, and distribute (GNU, 2021). These freedoms then became the rallying call for the free open-source software (FOSS) movement. Since its inception, there have been many widely cited cases of successful FOSS projects in which a community of ‘geeks’ comes together to collaboratively develop a particular code which not only is free and open-source but is of equal or superior quality to any proprietary options (Benkler, 2006).

Compeerism recognizes that the dominance of exchange-value driven thinking expounded at the outset of the last chapter is ultimately rooted in the three-headed apparatus of capture, which combines the governance of property, labour, and money in the service of capital. Each of these reinforces the other, making it difficult, at least from within the limited commons realm, to overcome just one on its own. Most of this book has thus far been focused primarily on the potential for exit and replacement within the two ‘heads’ of property and labour governance, yet it is clear that the third component, money, must also be addressed.

It is money, after all, that enables exchange-value monopolization and the subsequent commodification of everything (property and labour), hence degrading the perceived worth attributed to the non-commodifiable commons and commoning. This underlying function of money as the third ‘head’ is honed and guided via its current iteration: the monetary-banking apparatus. This apparatus governs money's creation and distribution in the form of debt issuance, which, being focused solely on making more money, is a purely exchange-value driven process. Thus, if compeerists could succeed in shifting how money is organized and managed, essentially removing it from capital's control, then the commons-oriented modes of organizing property and labour could be allowed to function within a much more conducive environment. More to the point, however, if all three components of the apparatus of capture could be replaced with synergized, commons-based alternatives, then capitalism as we know it would cease to exist.

Following from this, then, a fundamental, long-term aim on the part of compeerists must be the reinvention of money as a technology and tool that is designed to bolster the commons and commoning. Yet, achieving such a breakthrough means overcoming the currently dominant monetary-banking apparatus introduced in the previous chapter. There are essentially two options to meeting this challenge. One is a bottom-up effort from within the commons subeconomy itself aimed at a wholesale exit from the state-based monetary system. The other is a top-down approach that seeks to compel a monetary restructuring through a commons-friendly state. We can start with the latter.

In continuing our exploration of how the compeerist vision of a commons-based transition out of capitalism translates to the material economy, this chapter considers the possible commonification of manufacturing, which, as with infrastructure, is instrumental in providing the actual material hardware on which the digital revolution depends. Critically, however, manufacturing has also become increasingly dependent on the digital. Indeed, the application of digital technologies to manufacturing has brought us significantly closer to Marx's vision in Grundrisse, where information, rather than labour, becomes the key determinant of value creation. Yet the ability of digitized knowledge/code/data to bring about a liberated workforce while delivering greater material prosperity for all, as is compeerism's aim, will greatly depend on both who controls this digital value, a key issue in Part I, as well as how the industry that can make use of this value is organized, which is the overarching focus of this chapter.

The increasing interdependence between digital capabilities and manufacturing is worth emphasizing. To begin, product development goes through various, exhaustive stages of design, prototyping, and testing using sophisticated modelling software and computer power. The entire production process, from the logistics involved in acquiring the needed components to the actual assembly on the factory floor, is largely organized and kept on track using algorithmically driven, and increasingly blockchain-enabled, monitoring systems. Products themselves, such as cars and appliances, are becoming digital goods in their own right, outfitted with processing power, software, and internet connectivity that can significantly enhance performance. Yet, clearly, the innovation within manufacturing that entails the most far-reaching implications for human societies has been the application of industrial robots to perform manufacturing processes based on computer instructions, allowing for a large degree of automation.

Within this continuously evolving realm of digitally programmed production, the emerging technology with the most potential to disrupt the manufacturing sector is, arguably, that of 3D printing (or additive manufacturing). With the right digital design inputs, which can be changed at will, the 3D printer can produce a wide array of things within one confined location. Here, it is clearly the design code, as opposed to any actual human work on the factory floor, that becomes the main source of added value within any produced good.

What would it take for a commons-centred, collaborative form of production to supplant capitalism? That is the central question of this book. In approaching this query, it is necessary to first establish a basic understanding of what capitalism is, how it currently works, and the inherent challenges involved in overcoming it. In doing so we can also get a better sense of the proposed compeerist framework, and how it is reflected in, yet also partially distinct from, a number of existing theoretical offerings.

It makes sense to start by viewing the economy as a mode of production, since this is how capitalism is often framed by those espousing its replacement with a new mode centred on commons-based, collaborative forms of socio-economic organization. A mode of production is here understood as a fully-fledged, values-laden arrangement of a society's productive forces (labour and machines) and productive relations (the organization of property, law, and social interactions) in the pursuit of economic output (Marx and Engels, 1965). It is this arrangement that fundamentally determines the accumulation and distribution of material wealth within a society. The starting point of this mode is the privatization of the means of production, enabling individuals who gain access to these means the ability to use them in the pursuit of personal wealth. Importantly, for Marx, this foundational basis of the capitalist mode of production is also directly linked to the emergence of a host of injustices and conflicts.

To begin, Marx (1992) pointed to how capitalism's origins are rooted in a type of thievery, expressed in the enclosing and privatization of communal lands and assets, leading to the entrenched haves and have-nots on which capitalism depends to establish a working class reliant on wage labour. It is the exploitation of this labour (surplus labour) that then established what Marx (1992; 1993) identified as the foundation of industrial profit (surplus value) and the concomitant amassing of wealth in the hands of the relatively few. Furthermore, as this process of privatization and the establishment of waged labour unfolded, money, which is used to mediate property and labour exchange in an open market, begins to function as a stand-in for all value. In doing so an underlying mindset is created that reduces the social and environmental relations involved in production to the commodities themselves, a phenomenon Marx termed ‘commodity fetishism’ (1992).

Proponents of the view that commons-based peer production represents an alternative paradigm for organizing the economy like to point to how the steam engine ushered in the final death knell of feudalism. Why should it not be possible, then, to harness the digital revolution in a similar way to bring about another fundamental shift, this time out of capitalism? The internet's power to capture and disperse the digitized general intellect could here be the impetus for a transition to a commons-based, collaborative economy characterized by the abundance of digital information/content and massive leaps in the quality and efficiency of material production (Arvidsson, 2020; Mason, 2016).

As the previous chapter revealed, however, there are many obstacles that still stand in the way of achieving a liberated general intellect for which the internet could serve as a facilitator and conduit. Apart from these constraints, which centre on capital's ability to enclose and commoditize digital value, it is, however, important to acknowledge that the internet itself has become a controlled, cyber infrastructure in the service of capital. With the establishment of the more interactive Web 2.0, and Web3 on the horizon (based on blockchain-enabled smart-contracts), the capitalization of people's use of cyberspace has taken centre stage. This reality poses novel and difficult challenges, but also some openings, for a compeerist-aligned evolution to a new, post-capitalist mode of production.

We can begin by reiterating that compeerism views the liberatory potential of the digital revolution with a great deal of caution. While technological upheavals can challenge capital, capitalism has been historically adept at bringing any lines of flight back into the fold of wealth-extracting commodification. More to the point, as Dmytri Kleiner, a long-term (h)activist and disabused believer in the revolutionary potential of the internet put it: ‘so long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production, it will produce platforms that reproduce it’ (Wilson and Kleiner, 2013, np). Kleiner refers specifically here to the ‘client-server-capitalist state’, an arrangement engineered to control and centralize what would otherwise be a decentralized and free network of information and exchange. In this way the internet has been reconfigured into a set of interlinked assemblages/apparatuses composed of technologies, ‘providers’, and ‘consumers’ that make up the basis of capitalism's latest wave of renewed profit and growth.

The previous chapters have pointed to concrete, compeerist-oriented efforts centred on values that are fundamentally at odds with those of capital, offering contours of what a compeerist transition out of capitalism could look like within various sectors of the economy. In all of these explorations the need for an expansion, deepening, and synergizing of such actions on the prefigurative, institutional and, ultimately, government-based level, was emphasized. In other words, an economic trajectory out of capitalism can only succeed if all of the various initiatives noted in the prior chapters are not just intensified but pursued simultaneously, with each pulling more or less in the same direction. Yet this, for many, is seen as the hardest part.

As Peter Kropotkin (1975) astutely observed nearly 150 years ago, ‘New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order’. In this chapter we thus turn to the political mobilization needed to overcome this inertia by enabling the prefigurative lines of flights explored in the past chapters to intentionally consolidate and break free from the existing ‘old order’. However, it is important to note that compeerism does not offer a dogmatic answer as to what the exact outcome of such a mobilization would entail. Indeed, there are multiple forms that a compeerist-aligned organization of the political economy can take. In Chapter 10, therefore, we move on to consider just one possibility of what a fully evolved compeerist mode of production could look like, emphasizing, in particular, the organization and governance of production, consumption, investment, and environmental stewardship. But first we must address the question of getting there.

Building a compeerist movement

As explained at the outset of this book, the compeerist outlook is best understood as an amalgamation and sharpening of existing thought. Hence, while it embraces the P2P position that commons-centred, collaborative production has the potential to outcompete and ultimately replace our current mode of production, such a process is also seen, in line with most autonomous Marxists, as far from easy or straightforward given that capital currently infiltrates almost every aspect of our socio-economic reality.

There is a good chance that readers of the first part of this book, in line with the closing thoughts of the last chapter, became increasingly aware of an unaddressed elephant in the room, namely the unspoken fact that any compeerist potential in the digital realm is impossible without an underlying, supportive foundation rooted in the material world (Vadén and Suoranta, 2009). Importantly, compared to digital value, the economic dynamics of material resources and assets are different, as these come with built in limits and breaking points. Within this context, the compeerist issue of interest is not as much about freeing artificially constrained abundance, as in the digital realm, as it is about finding a collaborative, commons-oriented approach to the optimal use of the scarce and constrained material means of production, including infrastructure, manufacturing capabilities, and natural resources. Critically, the pursuit of the ‘optimal’ here must again be viewed as driven by compeerism's commitment to use-value, that is, of first and foremost servicing the most fundamental needs and wants of humanity.

To achieve this use-value oriented aim, compeerism's commons-based focus centres on the need for greater economic democratization to ensure that the relevant stakeholders within the material economy, from workers to end-users, all have a seat at the table when it comes to determining how resource use and production are to be organized (Alperovitz, 2005; Schweickart, 2011). As with most digital value, however, the current control over infrastructure, factories, and land remains firmly in the grips of corporate capital. This control is further extended to the governance regimes overseeing the natural and increasingly fragile environmental systems within which these assets and their use are embedded. In addressing this challenge, mostly by seeking to expand commons-based forms of economic activity in an effort to supplant capital-based ones, we are confronted by an underlying tension.

On the one hand, compeerism is drawn to decentralized and localized forms of production as a way to enable greater stakeholder empowerment and, hence, better conditions for pursuing commons-centred, democratized forms of production. Yet, on the other hand, in an effort to be economically effective and viable in the face of market pressures, we are now forced much more into calculations of ‘efficiency’ in a world of de facto scarcity, which often calls for more macro-level approaches to organizing and governing production.