Towards a first stateless commons transition plan: a partnership of P2P-F with the Catalan Integral Cooperative

The General Assembly of the Catalan Integral Cooperative has confirmed a proposed partnership with the P2P Foundation.

This is an important development for several reasons.

First, the Catalan Integral Cooperative is the first new type of cooperative that is entirely in line with the idea for a new type of coops engaged in the co-production of the commons, and, after themselves already embodying these ideas before we formulated them in our recent appeal, they are committed to continue and pioneer the path of open cooperativism.

Second, the CIC fully endorses the Commons Transition Plan that was formulated in connection with the floksociety.org project in Ecuador. The FLOK experience was important in that it was a historical first for such ideas to be endorsed at a nation-state level, but also because that cooperation with a government brings its own type of challenges. How to transition towards partner state practices with a state that is not a partner state itself ?

The experience in Catalonia promises to be very different. While the CIC endorses the Commons Transition Plan as its own development plan and roadmap, of course to be adapted and concretized to their own needs, it wants to apply the proposals for the commonification of public services and the partner state, not at the state level, but at the civic level. So the aim here is to directly create civic institutions which can, within or outside of the CIC, carry out the same support functions and enable the further expansion of the commons economy, in particular to stimulate p2p-based production and manufacturing, which the CIC itself is already pioneering. If successful, we may well have a adaptable/changeable but also largely replicable model that could be used in other regions of the world as well, because it will have been the experience where different pieces of successful DNA have come together in a working model.

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