Dave Darby

After the financial crash of 2008-9, I started to discover tools and ideas that I thought were promising, but discrete and disconnected. But they’re not: they can be (and are being) used together to form networks that have the potential to grow exponentially to challenge the status quo – to build a commons economy, a commons society, a commons world.

We can start with the concept of sharing, of commoning, and then try to work out together how we can common the land and potentially, what’s produced on it. It’s anarchic in the sense that it’s massively decentralised, with lots of tiny nodes that together can provide the clothing and textiles that we need to live.

All civilisations fall in the end. The Roman Empire is long gone, along with the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians. Will the global civilisation of corporate capitalism buck the trend? Of course not, but how long does it have left?

There’s a strong sense of wanting social justice in this part of the world. There’s a legacy of extraction of Wales’s natural resources, along with the highest levels of poverty in the UK. Plus the rising social, financial and ecological costs of fossil fuels.

In the end, building a commons economy is the only way to deliver systems change. The way it turns into an economy is when people have bought rent vouchers, flax vouchers, kWh vouchers etc, that they begin to be able to exchange for other things, and not need pounds. If people need fewer pounds, they don’t have to work so much.

Dave Darby of Lowimpact.org and Stroud Commons in conversation with Sonia Bussu, Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Birmingham and project lead for INSPIRE (looking at democratic innovations and their limitations – particularly around marginalised people), about participatory democracy and its role in helping build the commons economy.