URL: https://www.bollier.org/blog/will-ruddick-commitment-pooling-build-economic-commons
After working with Indigenous tribes and traditional communities, he has come to appreciate that the social dynamics of a community are at least as important as the technical issues for how one designs a money system. Premodern societies have a lot to teach us. The lessons mostly have to do with the dynamics of social cooperation and relationships. One can call it commoning, but the more formal academic name for it in this context is "rotational labor associations," or ROLAs.
ROLAs are ancient mutual service practices by which households in a community provide help to each other through reciprocal exchange without any currency involved. So when people need help in harvesting annual crops, building houses, or teaching their children, they help each other and then informally keep track of who owes some reciprocal help to whom.
To be sure, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously called indirect reciprocity, or pooled commitments, "gift economies." But Ruddick thinks that that term gives an overly idealistic gloss to premodern exchange by implying that the system was animated by personal generosity and altruism. The situation appears to be more complicated and structured than that, Ruddick says. "There was a whole set of social protocols and governance around these practices, and principles guiding a huge amount of reciprocity going on."
Ruddick has identified six organizing principles that he sees as essential to economic commons. They are:
- Care for People – collaboration and vision driven care for oneself and others’ well-being and happiness
- Care for the Environment – support environmental protection and regeneration, minimize use of finite resources for economic activity, ecosystem management approach to farming and business development.
- Fairness – fair and secure access to instruments, land, resources, knowledge & care for members from different backgrounds, age, gender and religion.
- Reciprocity – mutual sharing of risk, cost and surplus.
- Non-Dominance – no person or association to have dominant rights over another person or association’s resources e.g., data, finances, intellect, materials and freedom.
- Resilience – capacity to prepare for, address and adapt to economic, political, climate and other events in order to ensure sustainable community based systems/commons.