ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at three types of ownership which fit the SEWP model: cooperatives, social enterprises and commons-based organizations. Cooperatives, or worker-owned enterprises, are a long-established way of creating shared company ownership. The crucial third leg of the model is the Mondragon bank, which specifically exists to provide patient, long-term capital for existing cooperatives and financial backing for start ups. As Peter Barnes notes, cultural commons resources even extend as far as language, religion, music and medicine, while the physical commons includes vital, commercially valuable areas such as the broadcast spectrum. Commons organizations are even more capable of bursting out of the nationalist constraints of the growthist economy. The Potato Park commons relies on a powerful Andean cultural tradition of allyu, a holistic moral and spiritual political economy, which is based on a positive reciprocal relationship between humans and their natural environment.
