Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse
* Article: Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons. David Bollier. International Journal of the Commons, V. 18, N. 1, pp. 288–301, 2024.
URL = https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389
"Over the past two decades, hundreds of different commons around the world have arisen and developed working ties with peers, creating what might be called the Commonsverse. To elected officials, legislatures, bureaucracies, courts, and business people, the commons continues to be seen as a failed management regime, one that implicitly needs state or market intervention and control. As the essays of this special issue suggest, however, many projects and activists are seeing commons as a powerful, versatile force for change. The piecemeal efforts to build a Commonsverse amounts to a quest to build a parallel polis. Commoning honors wholesome values and different ways of being, knowing, and acting while allowing ordinary people to assert some measure of self-determination in the face of capitalist markets and state power.This essay explores a broad range of contemporary commons activities, the “ontological politics” they are engendering, and the challenges they face in expanding and institutionalizing commoning. Future development should focus on the potential of commons/public partnerships, new infrastructures to make commoning easier, legal hacks to open up zones of commoning, the potential of relationalized finance, and new institutional structures of care."
Contents
David Bollier:
"While mainstream players sometimes acknowledge a growing literature treating commons as social systems, such claims often amount to a cultural posture – a virtue-signaling speech act that lays claim to democratic, egalitarian ideals, much as the word “sustainable” is used by people as a performative proxy for ecologically committed behavior.2
As the essays of this special issue suggest, however, the commons in modern times is a far more powerful, versatile, and seminal idea. It refers to a shadow culture with diverse manifestations that is barely recognized publicly, perhaps because commons, taken seriously, reject many norms of capital-driven markets and state power. Commoners tend to see climate change and myriad ecological crises, social inequality, precarity, and racialist divides as inescapable symptoms of economic growth, “development” and “progress.” While the commons discourse helps make this critique of capitalism, many commoners also see the discourse as a useful scaffolding for building a transformative, alternative vision for society. Wary of the limitations of liberal meliorism, commoners tend to focus on bottom-up forms of social association that can, with the right structures and implementation, empower ordinary people to meet their own needs directly. The discourse affirms the need for personal responsibilities and benefits achieved through collective action, and to the importance of open spaces for creative, democratic, and local participation.
The essays of this special issue of the International Journal of the Commons explore how these dynamics are being played out in some very different contexts. We see how ordinary people are developing innovative forms of commoning in major cities like Barcelona (childcare commons, knowledge commons) (Zechner, 2024)), Bologna and Naples (commons/public partnerships) (Vesco & Busso, 2024), and in various ecovillages around the world. We encounter new types of online governance commons, such as DAOs (digital autonomous organizations), platform co-operatives, and alternative local currencies. A burgeoning academic and popular literature is assessing the immense variety of contemporary commons as vehicles for re-imagining the future. (Bollier, 2021; Dardot & Lavel, 2019; Standing, 2022; Broumas, 2020; Varvarousis, 2022; Gerhardt, 2023).
What type of future is implied by the commons manifesting today (or whose members come to recognize them as commons)? Contributors to this issue point to some ways in which political economy and culture are being reinvented, often by adapting conventional frameworks of law, policy, and governance. We see how commons projects are challenging received notions of democratic liberalism and bureaucracy, as Roy L. Heidelberg observes in his piece (Heidelberg, 2024), and how state bureaucracies and politicians are using unexpected twists in municipal government to support commoning in numerous contexts (Zechner, 2024).
While these vanguard developments point to important paradigm shifts in public administration, policymaking and politics, it’s important to note that these changes are driven by changes at a subjective, experiential level of everyday life. People want to change the terms of their livelihoods and social practices. In her essay in this volume, Zechner emphasizes the importance of “micro-politics” – the social and personal “spheres of meaning and signification” that affect how people relate to each other – and how they feel and behave differently as a result (Zechner, 2024). By her reckoning, changes in the micropolitics of life provide “the most solid basis for engaging lasting and sustainable social and systemic change.” This idea is a core theme of my book with Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, which explores the inner subjective dimensions (behavioral, social, emotional, ethical, spiritual, etc.) that make commoning possible.
An immersion in the commons literature quickly reveals that many truisms of capitalist economics are problematic or simply incorrect. Multiple commons, for example, call into question the presumption of standard economics that private property law, contracts, and free markets are the most reliable, fair, and efficient vehicles for meeting people’s needs. The fable of the Invisible Hand as an engine of progress and social equity is revealed as a just-so story, exposed by the egregiously Visible Hand of state power in creating a rentier capitalism whose markets are anything but free (Standing, 2021). The Covid pandemic, the climate emergency, and the rise of authoritarian nationalism have exposed the profound limitations of the nation-state as it has become a captive or at least deep ally of business interests. Beyond such political concerns, however, it has become clear that representative democracy and centralized bureaucracies have only narrow affordances, in any case, for addressing complex, systemic issues in Earth-friendly, participatory ways.
The exhaustion of liberal reformism – or at least its waning credibility in the public mind and its manifest political deficiencies – suggests that structural changes in the market/state system as constituted must be considered. Broadly speaking, prevailing governance systems cannot deliver results that are fair, effective, rational, and humane over the long term. Some sort of re-imagining – some artful reconfiguration of state power and political life – is urgently needed. But the path forward remains murky. It’s not clear “the way out of no way,” as the US civil rights movement once described its challenges."
(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)
ToC
EDITORIALS
Introduction: Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of The Commons Hendrik Wagenaar, Koen Bartels
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse David Bollier
What is “Political” in Commons-Public Partnership? The Italian Cases of Bologna and Naples Antonio Vesco, Sandro Busso
Relational Ecosystems: Sustaining Prefigurative Change by Creating Conditions for Mutual Learning and Change Koen P. R. Bartels
Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now? Liz Richardson, Catherine Durose, Matt Ryan, Jess Steele
The Incompatibility of the Commons and the Public Roy L. Heidelberg
Towards Democratisation of Public Administration: Public-Commons Partnerships in Barcelona Marina Pera, Sonia Bussu
No Commons Without Micropolitics. Learning with Feminist and Municipalist Movements in Spain Manuela Zechner
Excerpts
Commons-Based Identity Shift
David Bollier:
"The practice and the discourse of commoning has an elemental character: it reflects a desire by people to provision their needs directly, as self-governing communities working outside of the usual circuits of capitalist markets and state power.
Such realizations can entail a shift of identity and culture. Participants come to see that they are not “citizens” petitioning a remote, powerful state. They are not “consumers” seeking satisfaction through the market or “volunteers” donating their time to good causes. People realize they are commoners whose peer-governed activities are helping to constitute a different social and political mise en scene. They realize that their commoning enacts a different social logic, set of provisioning practices, and cultural ethos than the dominant ones of capitalist modernity and liberal, representative democracy."
(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)
Onto-Politics
Davis Bollier:
" “onto-politics,”: there are core (but usually tacit) conflicts revolving around different ways of being, knowing, and acting in the world."
For example:
"Commoners enact a world of deep, dynamic and intricate relationality. They frankly recognize interdependencies among people, and between humanity and more-than-human systems. This understanding of the world is at odds with that of capitalist modernity, in which market/state institutions generally declare the supremacy of individual sovereignty, market freedom, and material progress over the claims of community, future generations, and ecological needs. It is not surprising that market/state institutions often attempt to suppress, co-opt, or criminalize commoning."
(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)
Ecocene
David Bollier:
"the instability of the planet’s climate and severity of other ecological crises confirm what Mihnea Tănăsescu writes in Ecocene Politics: “[M]odernity tends towards the annulment of the striations and textures of the world” (Tănăsescu, 2022a, 13–14). It is this fundamental ontological reality of modern life – “all that is solid melts into air” – that must be reversed. The coming epoch is not so much the Anthropocene, in which humankind will hold sway, but the Ecocene, in which more-than-human natural systems will profoundly intrude upon and reshape civilization.
Tănăsescu argues that the Ecocene,
- "by foregrounding the central role of ecology in the new era….implies that we have to make political sense of our times via concepts that are synchronous with ecological science. And if we accept that chance, change, and locality are what ecology injects into political thought, then the Ecocene becomes that era when human social and political arrangements start from the necessity of living with uncertainty…. Our imbrication with the world is not something to be escaped so as to find human meaning and purpose; it is itself the condition for meaningfulness" (Tănăsescu, 2022a, 13–14).
Much more deserves to be said on this topic, but for the purposes of this essay, it is enough to say that any path forward must deal with “the irruption of ecological processes within the polis” – a theme that Bruno Latour also addressed in his later books (Latour 2017; Latour 2021; Schultz & Latour, 2023). Climate change is destroying the global capitalist fantasy of infinite possibilities and material extraction without consequences. It is also shattering the idea that the Local, as a counterpoint to the Global, is a haven of sequestered safety, morality and order. Neither the Global nor Local is truly connected to the biophysical realities of the Earth, Latour points out. Both are modernist constructions and projections. It is this worldview that the Ecocene is disrupting, forcing humans to radically reshape the polis of modern civilization."
(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)
Relationalized Finance in Support of the Commons
David Bollier:
" some commoners have developed noncapitalist forms for finance that pool money among supporters, decommodify shared assets such as land, and minimize the need for market growth to repay investors and lenders. Salient examples include community land trusts for agriculture and affordable housing, community supported agriculture farms (CSAs) for local, healthy food, place-based development finance, complementary local currencies, crowdfunding, platform cooperatives, and novel digital organizational forms that use peer governance and mutualize benefits (Bollier, 2023a).
For commoners, the point of relationalized finance is to minimize transactional debt and equity held by outside investors, thereby enhancing self-determination and reducing pressures for profit-maximization, growth, and hierarchical cultures. Noncapitalistic forms of finance take many different forms, but seen through the lens of the commons, they constitute a distinct, overlooked class of finance. Much more study is needed to normalize the legal, financial and organizational dimensions of relationalized finance."