There is a good chance that readers of the first part of this book, in line with the closing thoughts of the last chapter, became increasingly aware of an unaddressed elephant in the room, namely the unspoken fact that any compeerist potential in the digital realm is impossible without an underlying, supportive foundation rooted in the material world (Vadén and Suoranta, 2009). Importantly, compared to digital value, the economic dynamics of material resources and assets are different, as these come with built in limits and breaking points. Within this context, the compeerist issue of interest is not as much about freeing artificially constrained abundance, as in the digital realm, as it is about finding a collaborative, commons-oriented approach to the optimal use of the scarce and constrained material means of production, including infrastructure, manufacturing capabilities, and natural resources. Critically, the pursuit of the ‘optimal’ here must again be viewed as driven by compeerism's commitment to use-value, that is, of first and foremost servicing the most fundamental needs and wants of humanity.

To achieve this use-value oriented aim, compeerism's commons-based focus centres on the need for greater economic democratization to ensure that the relevant stakeholders within the material economy, from workers to end-users, all have a seat at the table when it comes to determining how resource use and production are to be organized (Alperovitz, 2005; Schweickart, 2011). As with most digital value, however, the current control over infrastructure, factories, and land remains firmly in the grips of corporate capital. This control is further extended to the governance regimes overseeing the natural and increasingly fragile environmental systems within which these assets and their use are embedded. In addressing this challenge, mostly by seeking to expand commons-based forms of economic activity in an effort to supplant capital-based ones, we are confronted by an underlying tension.

On the one hand, compeerism is drawn to decentralized and localized forms of production as a way to enable greater stakeholder empowerment and, hence, better conditions for pursuing commons-centred, democratized forms of production. Yet, on the other hand, in an effort to be economically effective and viable in the face of market pressures, we are now forced much more into calculations of ‘efficiency’ in a world of de facto scarcity, which often calls for more macro-level approaches to organizing and governing production.