In DisCOs, production is explicitly guided by need, including social and environmental priorities. This orientation towards positive outcomes is the heart of a DisCO’s values. The needs-based priorities defined by the cooperative are embedded in each DisCOs legal statutes, as well as the technologies and cultural practices that let DisCOs assess and reflect on the outcomes of their effort. The disco elements

In DisCOs, production is communal and value measurement aims to be transparent. Three types of value are highlighted and rewarded: - Livelihood Work: productive market value (the DisCO’s goods and services are paid for); - Love Work: productive pro-bono value (the commons created through self-selected volunteer work); and - Care Work: reproductive work value (towards the collective and among its members, see above). All are tracked through complementary value metrics that apply to all DisCO members. Recognizing different types of value influences functions including payments, work priorities and certain key decisions. This recognition gives visibility and empowerment to other The DisCO Elements

We may experience social change driven by the intangible and immaterial (like P2P networks), but until social change has reached the realm of the tangible, we haven’t had any radical change, or any change has not been translated into a change in the material conditions of existence. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, p.69

My first concern about all the P2P stuff ... is ... the fact that it depends on both other modes of labour and extraction (like digging coltan in the Eastern Congo) and other modes of enforced and very material (guns, fences, guards, borders etc.) social division within and between societies. (Pithouse 2010; private correspondence) in De Angelis, Omnia Sumn Communia, p.73

Bollier, Benkler and Bauwens thus converge on a techno-legal and economic fix when they anticipate transitions in the direction of the commons. Despite allusions to ‘commonist’ movements, we are left completely in the dark as to how these will gather a critical mass, how they will overhaul the ‘neoliberal dominance’ and how they will reform the state and the market (Bauwens 2005; see also Bauwens 2014: 28). Instead, we are served a list of techno-economic conditions that will pro- mote peer-to-peer production (Bauwens 2005). The ‘vital condition’ for a historical transition towards a commons-based society is not political but the existence of commons-based peer production, as proto-practices for a full mode of production. . . . These proto-practices have to evolve within the older system, first as emergent practices, then on a parity level, before they can become dominant themselves. (Bauwens 2011; emphasis added) In the technocratic outlook that has prevailed from the beginning of the millennium in the digital commons literature, technology, economic practices, the law and vague references to ‘social movements’ are the main entries. Change society by designing a new model that makes the existing model obsolete, not by fighting ‘the system’. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Policies, p.59

The commons is…. - A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity. - A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State. - The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children. Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge. - A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State. Bollier, https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/commons-short-sweet/2017/09/25

Starting from the position that we should not confuse the commons with resources held in common, I approach commons as social systems in which resources are pooled by a community of subjects who also govern these resources to guarantee the sustainability of the resources (if they are natural resources) and the reproduction of the community, and who engage in commoning, that is, doing in commons that has a direct relation to the needs, desires and aspirations of the commoners. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, p.90

It is obvious that, stated in these terms, class struggle is pervasive in society. It is in the workers demanding higher wages, and in ‘consumers’ boycotting a brand. It is in environmentalists stopping the construction of a new airport terminal, and in women questioning the traditional division of labour and its corresponding relations. It is in refugees crossing borders, in landless peasants reclaiming land and in indigenous people reclaiming dignity. But it is also in the universe of micro-conflictuality happening at any scale of social cooperation. All these and many others are instances of non-monetary value practices and the corresponding social forces that in given contexts and circumstances posit a limit to capital and its own specific value practices. Unless the different value practices posited by these movements are able to weave themselves into self-sustaining social feedback processes that are alternative to the parametric centre of capital’s value mechanism and its corresponding mode of relations, these struggles risk being either repressed or assimilated into capitalism’s evolving forms. We need to work through a politics of value that problematises strategically how we sustain new social relations of production, new value practices through which we reproduce our individual livelihoods and their articulation, vis-à-vis the value practices of capital that, through enclosures and a pointless competitive rat race, reproduce scarcity while we could be celebrating abundance. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 13: Measuring and Struggles

Indeed, in order to be subsumable, struggles must to some extent be dispersed across the social field, because their dispersion and relative isolation facilitates their integration into capitalist markets. If struggles circulate and coagulate, there emerges a political recomposition that is able to articulate all these values opposing capital’s value, to sustain them, to give force to their constitutive action as a new mode of relations, an absolute limit to capital in that it is a limit to the production of its value. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 13: Measuring and Struggles

A political critique of the more technocratic imaginary of the commons should not catapult us into a diametrically opposite error. Indeed, material social practices can help to educate people in alternative values. They can also stage an appealing prefigurative example that serves to win over larger swathes of the population. Moreover, they could manufacture an infrastructure that reduces dependence on the power of dominant structures and elites, yielding the base for an effective counter-hegemonic bloc. Yet ‘the political’ needs to be alive and kicking throughout, even within the techno-economic advances. If, for instance, ‘open communities of peer producers are largely oriented towards the start-up model and are subsumed to profit maximization’ (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014b: 358), how are they going to rally around the cause of an autonomous peer production of the commons without a political articulation of a commons vision and a deliberate collective agency around it? A political perspective should not simply turn this scheme upside down by positing a voluntarist primacy of the political as the paramount factor of historical change. More plausibly, it should reassert the required activation of the political and the need to combine progress in the modes of production with concerted cultural and political activity in order to push forward a systemic reform (see Rigi 2014: 403). Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Policies, p.61-62

Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that makes life worth living. In the end, then, politics is about the meaning of life. Any such project of constructing meanings necessarily involves imagining totalities (since this is the stuff of meaning), even if no such project can ever be completely translated into reality—reality being, by definition, that which is always more complicated than any construction we can put on it. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological theory of value, p.88