What would it take for a commons-centred, collaborative form of production to supplant capitalism? That is the central question of this book. In approaching this query, it is necessary to first establish a basic understanding of what capitalism is, how it currently works, and the inherent challenges involved in overcoming it. In doing so we can also get a better sense of the proposed compeerist framework, and how it is reflected in, yet also partially distinct from, a number of existing theoretical offerings.

It makes sense to start by viewing the economy as a mode of production, since this is how capitalism is often framed by those espousing its replacement with a new mode centred on commons-based, collaborative forms of socio-economic organization. A mode of production is here understood as a fully-fledged, values-laden arrangement of a society's productive forces (labour and machines) and productive relations (the organization of property, law, and social interactions) in the pursuit of economic output (Marx and Engels, 1965). It is this arrangement that fundamentally determines the accumulation and distribution of material wealth within a society. The starting point of this mode is the privatization of the means of production, enabling individuals who gain access to these means the ability to use them in the pursuit of personal wealth. Importantly, for Marx, this foundational basis of the capitalist mode of production is also directly linked to the emergence of a host of injustices and conflicts.

To begin, Marx (1992) pointed to how capitalism's origins are rooted in a type of thievery, expressed in the enclosing and privatization of communal lands and assets, leading to the entrenched haves and have-nots on which capitalism depends to establish a working class reliant on wage labour. It is the exploitation of this labour (surplus labour) that then established what Marx (1992; 1993) identified as the foundation of industrial profit (surplus value) and the concomitant amassing of wealth in the hands of the relatively few. Furthermore, as this process of privatization and the establishment of waged labour unfolded, money, which is used to mediate property and labour exchange in an open market, begins to function as a stand-in for all value. In doing so an underlying mindset is created that reduces the social and environmental relations involved in production to the commodities themselves, a phenomenon Marx termed ‘commodity fetishism’ (1992).