"Movements arise only from the immediate and practical necessities of social life, and are never the result of purely abstract ideas. But they acquire their irresistible force and their inner certainty of victory only when they are vitalized by a great idea, which gives them life and intellectual content."
- Rudolf Rocker, 1938
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
- David Graeber
Welcome
Perth Commons is a community association in Perth, Western Australia, dedicated to building alternative ways of living right here and now that thrive and rely on self-governance, community ownership, and self-responsibility. A third space called the commons.
We envision a resilient, circular economy — a parallel system built on localised control and broad mutual association — that serves what we see as a necessary defence against climate change and the dangerous and destructive institutions that have driven it.
These are not distant ideals; they are specific and realised laws and amendments built around our participatory and democratic constitution, associations formed with like-minded groups and worker-co-ops, and specific proposed and active projects in our project space. These institutions and implementations are themselves our contribution to the commons.
We are a small part in an already rich and quickly growing alternate economy and democracy in Perth and around the globe.
About Us
We are an association that aims to support and build what we think are better ways of living that do not rely solely on getting a job (employment) or welfare. A third space often called the commons, that, for a momentary lack of a better term, is focused instead on self employment. It is a space that relies on community and self responsibility and control and ownership over the positive and negative fruits of your actions and thoughts. A space which has been abused, fenced off and minimised for too long and is making a big comeback.
Contents:
Why are we doing this?
We are quite concerned about climate change and the increasingly powerful corporate monopolies, peakbody associations and captured political institutions largely driving it. We see Perth Commons as an effective and necessary tool to try and protect ourselves from these increasingly disastrous realities, as well as a tool to propose and build alternatives that support better ways of living and a more hopeful future.
How are we doing this?
- 1.
Project Space: here, members actively propose, document and build out whatever projects they want in a shared collaborative space. Perth Commons offers open and resilient documentation tools and collaborative spaces that you can use, or not. We also facilitate funding of projects through two approaches: incorporated, and distributed. Incorporated funding utilises association funds to support projects that are already well established proto-types or seek more official association with Perth Commons public pages and presence. Distributed funding is members choosing to freely associate to pool resources on some project they are interested in for whatever reason. Distributed funding is more suited to early stage projects or projects that are not seeking access to Perth Commons public pages and presence. Both of these funding models are currently work in progress. One of the primary projects we're focused on right now is community owned and controlled communications infrastructure; the true digital public square.
- 2.
Association: we aim to actively seek out and associate with like minded groups. This can range from simply publicly acknowledging and advertising this association, to actively pooling resources for projects, to engaging in circular economic style exchanges, like preferring to buy products or services from like minded institutions.
- 3.
Self-governance: our constitution represents more than just a rules document for Perth Commons. It is an experimental blueprint in democratic self governance of the commons that is offered freely to anyone who wants to participate as a member of Perth Commons itself, or to copy to use for their own association; one which ideally we would then associate with.
What methods do we utilise?
- 1.
Resilience through decentralised democratic systems: by creating more decentralised and democratic systems, we are increasing resilience to the unstable and unpredictable nature of the 2 degrees climate warming we appear to already be locked into. This not only improves human well-being going into the future but also gives us a better foundation to take action against reducing the impacts of climate change. Further, by shifting some degree of economic control to democratic institutions we shift the economy away from a focus on reducing investor risks to induce high growth, to a focus on individual and community responsibility better suited to dealing with an age were human impact has such a huge and complex affect on our biosphere.
- 2.
Aligning means and ends: our goals are not distant achievements that are disconnected or independent of the institutions we inhabit and use to achieve them. Instead, the institutions and projects we pursue and associate with today are done with the clear minded intention that they themselves are the possible seeds of a more hopeful future. This makes us somewhat distinct from other organisations who might instead treat their goals as a threshold that is reached one day through acts of lobbying or legislative pressure. Furthermore, by building up more local community based institutions, we are also giving people more space to choose to opt out of the more destructive aspects of our modern economics, as well as giving them more financial security to pursue strike actions to leverage their continued positions in the labour market.
- 3.
Cosmolocalism: this is the ideal of localised control of resources coupled with standardised, cosmopolitan, protocols and communication. It allows for relatively easy interlocking of resources on large scales for when and where it's needed, while maintaining localised autonomy for rapid response to local issues. This is a very important dynamic considering how localised and disproportionate the effects of climate change can be in time and space, while also being highly non-localised in how it must be approached and solved.
- 4.
Validation through organic opt in growth: we are focused on an opt in and responsibility based approach to social change. This has major benefits. Firstly, it acts as a validation procedure: institutions and systems are allowed to grow organically. At a certain point, any institution or system that becomes significant enough applies its own coercive forces. But given that these systems will have already been well tested through organic opt in growth, they are inherently democratically validated in ways that other approaches are not. Instead of voting for some person who you hope will act in your interest, or buying from some corporation that espouses "your values", responsibility is placed on you and your community. You take the steps to opt in in a very practical sense. This can be an extremely freeing realisation for many. A direct dismissal of the notion of the end of the world being easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.
Perth Commons is simultaneously a political organisation, a hobbyist organisation and a community organisation. Not goals realised by separate thoughts and actions, but goals that are realised in-situ by being intertwined into the same thoughts and actions.
Governance in the Future
In 2025, the Australian government, via the newly created Australian Climate Service, released the first ever national risk assessment on climate change. One of the components of this report was a technical report on governance. This report highlights the fact that, the way Australia currently governs itself is itself a significant risk factor going forward into a climate destablised future. The report notes that
"Engagement and participation in decision-making are critical for effective governance, especially when addressing complex issues like climate change. Sustained and comprehensive community involvement is essential, extending beyond limited consultation periods. Challenges in engagement efforts are evident, as aggregate engagement data can obscure diverse perspectives and experiences among different social groups. Factors such
as gender and other intersectional characteristics can significantly influence individuals' decision-making power... Climate change has been described as a ‘wicked’ problem (Jones et al 2014) and even as a super wicked problem’, due to its pervasiveness, context-specificity, complexity, interconnectedness, the numerous stakeholders involved, as well as its nonlinear, uncertain and rapidly escalating impacts (Weaver et al., 2023; Levin et al., 2012). Wicked problems cannot be managed within organisational boundaries and instead demand multi-level, multi-
actor, and multi-sectoral responses (Bianchi et al., 2021; Alford & Head, 2017; Lægreid & Rykkja, 2015). The governance of wicked problems is a recognised challenge because most existing systems are not set up to deal with the complexity (Bianchi et al., 2021; Ansell & Gash, 2008)."
A copy of the report can be found in our repo, linked at the bottom.
We see Perth Commons as a part of that "essential" "multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-sectoral" response which goes beyond "existing systems" as a necessary form of governance for addressing the complex problem that is climate change.
"aggregate data" obscuring diverse perspectives is a problem, as we see it, largely created by a politics of electoral based representative democracy. Instead, Perth Commons allows for the diverse perspectives inherent in the polity to govern themselves in a far more direct capacity, where direct democracy is coupled with sortition. Sortition here being used as a method to select statistically representative samples of the polity to be placed on committees. Because governance is not performed on behalf of a diverse polity by a statistically unrepresentative group of "representatives", the same reliance on aggregate data to coordinate the wants and needs of the polity with the independent governance structures is not present. Because of this, true diversity is empowered and used as a tool and mechanism of governance itself, instead of being a disconnected notion that government appeals to.
Sustained community involvement is facilitated by our approach focused on means and ends, whereby responsibility is placed on the stakeholders themselves to build and affect change, and political governance is distributed out to more localised circumstances where appropriate.
The complexity of the problem that is climate change is the `!simultaneous "context-specificity" of the problem and the "pervasivness" of the problem``. "Context-specificity" is addressed by allowing localised and autonomous control of resources; where local communities are empowered to address and resolve issues that specifically affect them without need to appeal to distant or disconnected government for resources. "Pervasiveness" is addressed by facilitating standardised and universal procedures, protocols and communication between and within existing and newly formed systems of governance.
#Can include some brief card definitions (intensional and extensional) of key terms at the bottom.
Key Terms and Definitions
Freedom of association means we're not trying to approach the broader goals of our association by ourselves under a single banner. We associate with other independent groups and organisations or do things in house. Deciding which is more appropriate on a case by case basis. This supports the goal of creating a parallel circular economy. Again, as with everything, this is not some distant goal or slogan. Our means and ends are aligned: the project space and the associated organisations are themselves the parallel economy.
The modern definition of the Commons is any commonly accessible economic resource not privately controlled and enclosed. A frequent example is the atmosphere. This definition loses a lot of its historical and political grounding though. More traditionally, the Commons was an economic resource and institution that relied on and facilitated community and self responsibility. A practical economic institution that implemented the ideal of ownership over the positive and negative fruits of your actions. This is quite distinct from other modern economic institutions, like getting a job (employment). This more traditional concept is what we build from. We go a step further and realise that any interaction with the Commons by an individual or group necessarily implies a possible impact beyond the confines of that individual or group. And that therefore, the appropriate institution to manage the commons is a democratic one. Given most of the commons is currently managed and governed by private, authoritarian institutions called corporations, a democratic approach to managing the commons must mean economic democracy. Democracy built into the day to day business, work and communities that people live and breath in.
In practice, a commons can be something as simple as a media server you share with friends and family; where instead of each individual being an atomised buyer of media, the media is only bought once by some member, and then shared and made accessible to everyone in your family. You can see how this meaning of the commons is synonymous with abundance. Instead of 5 people all having to buy an item, and the scarcity that this implies, the item is made abundantly accessible to all of them. `!Enclosure`` of the commons is therefore an act of destroying the abundance of the commons in favour of creating artificial scarcity. In the case of a digital item, this is quite clear; the inherent nature of a digital item is that it can be copied and be made accessible infinitely; enclosure is the act of destroying this abundance through overzealous copyright, DRM, subscriptions. While this act of destruction of abundance in favour of artificial scarcity is a clear and obvious institution in the case of digital items, the same logic applies to enclosure of physical items and resources as well.
Democracy in this instance is distinct from the form most people know today where the only real interaction is to be blasted by propaganda and vote once every few years. Instead, it is a general notion that means that decisions and choices should be made by those most affected by those decisions and choices. Applying this to the notion of the commons developed above begins to outline a specific implementation that closely resembles what is commonly called economic democracy.
Authoritarian is not used here to mean bad. It's a descriptive term which means an institution where orders, decisions and power flow from the top, down to the bottom. Authoritarian accurately describes any traditional corporate structure.
Sortition is an institution where governing bodies are selected not be election, but by random chance from the polity. Jury duty is a common example of sortition today, but sortition used to be far more integrated into democracy in general. Democracy by election is the historical anomaly. Election, for example, was considered to be an oligarchic institution by the Greek Philosopher, Aristotle. Similarly, practiced democracy in ancient south America all throughout the continent relied on sortition, not election. Democracy by election only really appeared as an institution 400 years ago. Democracy by sortition has a continuing legacy that dates back thousands of years.
The economic institution of getting a job is quite a novel and unique institution in history. It really only become common place for most people to be employed in the 19th century. Before this, most people worked under alternative institutions. With a job, you have 0 ownership over the fruits of your own labour; whether they are the liabilities or positive outputs you create. Instead, you are renting your actions out to another real or fictitious person (corporation), and that person becomes the legal owner of 100 percent of your rented actions. Then, on that basis, you negotiate a wage with this person, where the agreement is, for every hour that this person owns and controls the outputs of your actions, you get paid a certain amount. Legally, speaking, it is an institution that treats a person as an interchangeable tool or component, rather than treating a person as being inalienably responsible for their own thoughts and actions.
As alluded to, in order to manage the commons, we instead focus on institutions more similar to democratic self-employement. An example of an economic institution that better aligns these defacto realities with a legally binding implementation is the `!worker owned co-op``. A worker owned co-op is, in essence, a firm based on the organising principle that every member is self employed, and decisions are made in a democratic way, either through elected or sortitioned management, or more direct participation.