I’m talking with Dil Green of Mutual Credit Services, who design models for building the commons in all sectors of the economy. Today we’re talking about building a textile commons around the flax / linen industry.
Dave: Hello Dil. You know that I interviewed Rosie and Nick of Fantasy Fibre Mill about their work. They’re trying to revive the flax / linen textile industry – and they’d like to do it as a commons. I asked them questions about the practicalities of growing flax and producing linen. I now want to ask you some questions about how it might be developed as a commons. I’m thinking of questions that would be useful for them. Then we can bring you together to chat about a potential basic roadmap for building a commons for the textile industry. If it works well, we can try to do it for other industries.
Dave: There are lots of parts of a potential textile commons – growing, harvesting and processing, spinning, weaving, distribution, retail. What would be commoned – ie the common-pool resource? The land for growing? The knowledge? The machinery and workshops, the shops? The finished products? All of the above?
Dil: We’ve got to think hard about these things – we need to get it right. I often think about a fishery (because it’s documented by Elinor Ostrom). The fishing grounds is the common pool resource. But the fishing ground is also a potential route for cargo ships, and for recreational use, like swimming and yachting, and marine farming – not related to the fishing grounds. So there are actually overlapping commons around complex resources. If you attempt to define a common pool resource too broadly, you’ll end up with far too many stakeholders and too diffuse a conversation, with lots of cross-cutting incentives that don’t relate. That’s likely to make it too difficult to get going. If on the other hand you define the common pool resource too narrowly, you can end up missing enough of the system. So if you just had fishing boats, what about the processing, packing, freezing, distribution etc. You might think you can separate the catching and processing, but if you do that, you might miss some important feedback loops. So there’s no simple answer. But with textiles, land could also be used for growing food, and many other things. Land isn’t necessarily part of the textile world – it could be owned by a land commons. So a flax grower might be a tenant of the local land commons – a commoner.
Dave: Would there be Future-use vouchers for bundles of yarn? square metres of linen? Or even for finished clothing / sheets etc?
Dil: If you think about the finished product in terms of the fishing example, does that mean the fish soup in your local restaurant can be bought in local fish vouchers? You can see that the variety (a cybernetics term) of end uses of linen / flax is going to be very large. Flax has been used not just for clothing and sheets, but for industrial products, rope etc. There are far too many uses of flax to mix them up with growing, probably. You’ve got to define what your system in focus is (another cybernetics term). My feeling is that yarn is possibly quite a good one. Some distance along the processing chain – we’ve united growers, initial processors and some secondary processors. Then there’s an issue with yarn because there might be many different standards of yarn – but as we do in the housing commons, there could be some sort of weighting, based on physical quantity of yarn times some sort of quality multiplier.
Dave: with houses it’s things like parking spaces, garden, view, neighbourhood, how well the house has been maintained etc. So you’d apply that kind of thinking to flax yarn as well, in terms of quality.
Dil: that’s my guess, because then you’ve got a clear unit – a kilogram times a quality multiplier – of something with a tight enough set of workers / processors, so that they’ve all got something to talk with each other about. The processors will have something to say to the growers – maybe about varieties of flax, how much watering, when it’s harvested etc. The growers might ask if the processors can use lower-grade flax, as they’re still improving the land, or they can’t get the right quality seeds etc. That seems like a place where there will be useful conversation to be had – whereas people who design and specify clothing are probably more interested in talking with the weavers, who will figure out what type of yarn they need to achieve a certain quality of cloth. Then you might have weavers, designers and fabricators in a commons around cloth, which might include more than just linen cloth. Garments might contain linen, but parts of it might be silk, cotton etc. Plus it might need buttons, zips etc. that are nothing to do with flax manufacturing. So my feeling is that yarn might be a good place to start – to build a commons around. But the processes of that thinking is the important thing.
Dave: textiles are a higher risk than, say, energy, isn’t it? You can have a good idea how much electricity a wind turbine or solar panels will produce, but not their flax processing machinery yet – how to deal with that risk?
Dil: I’m not sure the machinery is the risk. They seem very smart, and using tech to enable small machines to be productive enough. It’s more the problem with all agriculture – the weather, rainfall etc. That’s the risk element.
Dave: yes – they don’t know how good the yarn is going to be because of all sorts of factors.
Dil: I think that’s another reason for having a commons around the yarn as a unit of account – because that enables farmers to communicate early to processors that maybe this is a wet year, and they had to plant late, and the quality of the yarn might change. Can we get ready for that, and communicate to customers that this year, we might produce lower-grade yarn (but I don’t know enough about flax to know details). Maybe processors can then adapt their machinery accordingly. Or maybe they’ll know that they have to get material from elsewhere to augment the local produce. In the commons – maybe one year the processors have a bumper year (maybe linen got v fashionable), and the next year there’s a drought – but the processors will have good reason to support the farmers to get through any problem times. So the risk is offset by bringing a few more stakeholders in. If farmers, spinners, processors etc. are entirely separate, farmers could see bad weather coming, and decide to grow something else instead, which will destroy the processors’ livelihoods. Having them in conversation immediately reduces the risk.
Dave: You’ve mentioned before in other sectors, that there could be agreements to buy vouchers for finished goods (in this case yarn), further down the line, when they’ve had some success, so there’s less risk, and the earlier investors get in, the bigger the discount they get. Can you say more about that?
Dil: if we try to build the commons without money, it will take forever – because there’s a lot of novel work to do, which makes things more expensive than they would otherwise be. This is a problem co-ops have – they have to do a lot of extra things that ordinary businesses don’t (and they try to pay better wages) – so they’re at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the market. So we can’t build the commons with no money, and if we’re going to get money, there’s borrowing, selling shares, or philanthropic giving – those are the options people generally have. None of those is easy to fold into the commons mix – although we’re trying to build as many routes in for money as possible. But we don’t want debt, because we’d be feeding the system of property rights, where if you can’t pay the debt, your commons is deleted, because they repossess everything. And if you have shareholders, that’s an extraction forever scenario. They’re taking a share of profits out, so that they don’t go back into the common resource. The point of the commons is to continually steward your common pool resource so that it becomes more productive for everybody. And the problem with philanthropic money is where it comes from – it often comes from someone who got the money in ways that damage the biosphere and the commons. Private businesses usually do – whether they intend to or not. Then they take a small amount of the money they made and use it to salve their consciences. Having said that, philanthropic money is useful as a kickstarter, but the commons needs to take the assets of the old economy in pounds and dollars, but we repay returns to investors in the value that we produce, not in pounds or dollars – this is what a future-use voucher is. So if you want to ramp up production of the new machines that the flax group are building, they’ll need money for R&D and for building copies of those machines and distributing them. If investors were willing to buy future yarn kilogram vouchers at a discount now (maybe they can buy £100 worth of yarn for £80 now) and then later, when the yarn is produced, they can redeem their vouchers for yarn, and sell it for the £100 that it’s worth. That would be a 25% return on their capital, which sounds like a lot, but it depends on how many years it takes. If it takes 5 years, that’s a 5% annual rate, which is roughly what pensions like to provide. So if you want to help the flax/linen commons, and you want to invest, but can’t afford to donate, you can get flax vouchers that can be turned into pounds later, but if the commons economy develops, you might be able to swap those vouchers for other services, without needing pounds at all. Every pound we don’t need is interest that we’re not paying into the banking system.
Dave: Any other ideas about getting investment for a budding textile commons?
Dil: the key thing to think about is that investors are generally pretty risk-averse. So you need a solid story about the future continuity of what they’re investing in – the growers, spinner, processors, buyers etc. – which is what you have to do for any investor prospectus – i.e. that they’ll get the returns they expect. Because the commons is relatively novel, people possibly need extra confidence – so the commons governance has to be very clearly robust and resilient to shocks. In essence, the best way to prove that is to have more commons that we can point at. At the moment, just starting out, we have to be able to tell very good stories to relatively willing investors, who want it to be true. People who love the commons, but need reassurance that their money is not going to disappear. Generally, a small group of people who believe in something get together and do it, and if it works, people get excited about it. What encourages me is that there’s enormous latent desire for the kind of good-news stories that the commons would bring. Some quite small projects with very little impact are very well-known. People like to hear about Co-operation Jackson, or the Preston Model, or Mondragon or regenerative agriculture projects, even though if you compare them to the systems they’re an alternative to, they almost don’t exist. They’re great things, but very small. But people really love these stories, and they get shared a lot among people looking for hope. If we can put forward some good stories, and make the model easier to replicate because it has a return-on-investment story that co-ops don’t have, then it will take off.
Dave: yes, in Stroud, everyone we talk to about commons loves the idea, and there’s a smaller group of people building it – but if we can get things rolling, I think it will be a lot less difficult to inspire investors, customers etc.
Dil: yes, the first tenants are moving into the first house in the housing commons soon, and even just one house that has been bought without debt and has tenants able to pay 5% less than market rent, that will make people take notice.
Dave: yes – then we can double the number of houses in the commons every year.
Dil: that would be a good target, wouldn’t it?
Dave: can you say more about secondary institutions. I know you think they’re important for developing a sector – like secondary housing co-ops.
Dil: yes. Everywhere, people are building incredible projects, and most of them are going against the grain. The finance system doesn’t want community. Not because of ideology, but because it’s a machine, that doesn’t like community because it gets in the way of the flow of capital – stops woodlands being cut down for profit etc. Community resistance is what stopped a third runway at Heathrow, and will maybe do so again. The finance system likes a lot of insecure, atomised individuals who put most energy into looking after themselves. But there are still great projects getting set up, everywhere – usually by a small group of over-committers. Those people, because they’re going against the grain, are usually totally consumed by the local effort. So the knowledge, expertise, the culture built up inside those projects are kept in those projects – they don’t have time for anything else. So without some way of funding places where people who gain expertise and capacity etc. from running projects can earn a living by helping other projects, all this incredible social value is gone when the projects end. The over-committers usually burn out – if the project doesn’t survive (it collapses, gets bought or turns into something without the same values), they retreat into something safer, and who can blame them? And if it survives, they still end up siloed because they’re then trying to make it into a bigger organisation. The secondary movement will be the way that learnings from projects can be shared, and it becomes much easier to set up new projects.
Dave: in stroud we’re looking to build a Commons Lab – like a centre of excellence, to research commons models and test what works. Do you think a textile commons will need this? (and in fact all industries/sectors)?
Dil: yes – these kinds of things exist. For example each county has a tourist board, who try to understand how to get tourist pounds into their county. They’re not unusual. There are lots of industry bodies. Fostering something for the commons movement isn’t weird. It just needs to be constituted as a commons itself.
Dave: also, any commons has to make enough money to survive in the modern world. Could the growth of the commons in other sectors help with that? (eg if housing commons grows, it can provide affordable rents and no worries about eviction could this help them survive? Same with other sectors?). Plus commons will bring local jobs, and therefore more local customers and opportunities to make an income?
Dil: 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: that’s a good strapline – ‘you won’t have to work so much’.
Dil: yes, and they’ll have more agency, and choice in their lives. So they’d have time to build commons and work for change etc. And most crucially, it will reduce the amount of interest paid into the banking system. The banking system seems utterly huge and indomitable. But interest is only ever a fraction of the money in play. So a small reduction in the amount of interest paid is quite a big reduction in the extractive profits of the finance sector. If you’re paying 1% less in interest, they might be getting 10% less profit. If you borrow £100 and they charge 5% interest, their profit is £5. If you only need to borrow £80 and pay £4 interest, their profit is 4% – a 20% drop in profit. A 20% drop in profits for a capitalist organisation will make shareholders very jumpy. It doesn’t require all interest in an economy to be deleted before the commons economy can start to have a impact.
Dave: yes, and more money stays in communities, so there are more opportunities for local people to earn it and make an income.
Dil: yes, and more of people’s productive time stays in communities. If people will work for rent vouchers, water vouchers, care vouchers, kWh vouchers etc, and they’re able to work less, then it frees up time for them to do things that improve the quality of life where they are, without damaging their quality of life – which is what a lot of people want. Over time, people might be able to accept a material reduction in their standard of living, because the socially-delivered quality of life will be so much more rewarding. A reduced standard of living materially is where we’re going to end up, one way or another, as the biosphere degrades anyway, so commons are needed, because places with more social solidarity and less material wealth, are actually happier. Every year, research shows that people in relatively poor countries are happier.
Dave: community is essential for human well-being, isn’t it?
Dil: absolutely. In this country we have possibly the most degraded community conditions of anywhere on the planet, due to being capitalist longer than anywhere else.
Dave: you know about the Open Food Network, which provides a platform for smallholders to sell their food. Maybe there could be an Open Textiles Network to do the same thing? To help with sales and marketing for small textile producers.
Dil: there absolutely could be. It would require enough textile commons-like initiatives to make it worth it. There’s a real problem with food production, and we’ve talked with the OFN about introducing something like a food box voucher, but the problem is that a kilo of flax yarn is well understood, and with the quality multipliers we discussed, you could probably have a kilo of rough flax for making string and a kilo of super-fine flax for making shirts – but it’s still flax, and the relationship to growing and the whole supply chain is roughly the same. With food, prices of a weekly organic veg box seem to have standardised, so that could become a unit. But how do you price a sack of potatoes against that unit? The level of variety with food makes that hard to imagine. Food is a tough nut to crack. CSA schemes are often built around a small number of local farms, so if local weather conditions etc. result in a bad harvest, local members can’t get much food from it, whereas supermarket shoppers aren’t affected. There’s quite a long route to working out how a food commons will work I think. Commoning the land, machinery, purchasing of seeds, processing of food all seem to be doable independently, but food overall is a difficult one. Textiles are much simpler, like housing.
Dave: And of course, if things start to fall over, if we have networks of local commons businesses with people who can grow things, process things, fix machinery etc. – it’s going to be a lot more secure for people in those kinds of communities.
Dil: whenever we wonder whether we’re doing the right thing, with the accelerating pace of the omnicrisis, we realise that transforming the finance system isn’t going to happen in time. But if we’re building community resilience through a cultural model of how to collaborate around our needs, without becoming a collective / communist club, we might well have something that people can adopt when things get dicey – in the same way that during covid a few people knew how to set up mutual aid networks, because they’d been running themselves in many areas. Because the models and ideas were available, within a couple of months of lockdowns beginning, there were tens of thousands of those networks in the UK, and many more worldwide. Something that was a niche idea became very well known. So just having a story as to how people can come together and manage a local water or transport or any kind of system might be incredibly valuable if local governments go bust (although they’re not allowed to disappear yet, the UK’s second biggest city has gone bust, and is being run by the government, which is withdrawing everything except statutory services, so the quality of civil life in Birmingham is degrading). When things like that happen, if the commons model is well understood, and there are secondary organisations to help set new ones up and bring best practice and wisdom for how to adapt models and solve problems, we could get rapid uptake. It’s about providing exemplars, sharing knowledge and connecting people together. All of that is valuable, even if the finance stuff doesn’t have time to change the world.
Dave: OK, I’ll get this interview written up, get it on youtube, and send it to Rosie and Nick. Then we’ll get you together for another interview, and you can ask each other relevant questions, and we’ll see if we can take it a step further.
Dil: that would be amazing.
Highlights
- Land isn’t necessarily part of the textile world – it could be owned by a land commons. So a flax grower might be a tenant of the local land commons.
- Yarn could be the ‘common pool resource’, with some sort of weighting, based on physical quantity of yarn times some sort of quality multiplier.
- Then you might have weavers, designers and fabricators in a commons around cloth, which might include more than just linen cloth.
- The commons needs to take the assets of the old economy in pounds and dollars, but repay returns to investors in the value that we produce, not in pounds or dollars.
- In the end, building a commons economy is the only way to deliver system 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.
- If the commons model is well understood, and there are secondary organisations to help set new ones up and bring best practice and wisdom for how to adapt models and solve problems, we could get rapid uptake.
