What the Commons Is Missing

Text by Joel Dietz

Text

"What the commons is missing

After the "Economics and the Commons" conference here in Berlin, I spent a long time digesting the proceedings here in Berlin. Despite near consensus among interested parties on the importance of the "commons" and "commoning," I had an eerie sensation that something was missing. Despite so much vision casting, I suspect that tangible outcomes would be limited, that something more was needed to bring people together.

As I mulled, I came up with this set of suggestions and, along the way, a few strategies for stimulating the commons:

(1) The study of natural ecosystems is, pace Andreas Weber, a fantastic way of understanding what life in common together can be. Numerous recent scientific trends, including epigenetics, have illustrated how intertwined human life is with its surroundings. But at times it seems we lack models for what an optimal ecosystem is and looks like. What does it mean to have an ecosystem that is growing and facilitating optimal outcomes for those within that ecosystem? Do we have an answer for this question?

(2) The effort to agree is often the lack of ability to debate, to propose alternative models and to expose them to critical feedback. If we simply mesh together a bunch of different models and theories, one does not allow for models to emerge that have gone through the much harder process of consensus building after legitimate critical comments have been raised.

Consensus without commitment is useless. A consensus that arises from a common commitment to build an ecosystem that can accommodate real people is valuable. If you abandon critical thinking and feedback mechanisms, you get agreement that does not include tangible outcomes. If you abandon progress, you often get merely stasis. Even ideas get old, as do the people promoting them.

(3) One very real issue is the economic one, sustainable solutions must also include a way for the people who live in the ecosystem to have all the necessary resources needed to live. For most of this includes currency of some kind. Here there seems to be a lack of viable hybrid models. Either you have a profit driven companies (AirBnB) or people that are in some way living off of state funding (i.e. salaried university professors). If a commons is to truly be built, we need more institutions that produce value, but are not driven by profit, and that ideally do not fuel themselves primarily via resources extracted via taxes from the populace.

(4) In the reaction against market fundamentalism, it seems that we are often afraid to leave behind the boundaries of materialistic modern philosophies all together. Too much is tied implicitly or explicitly to Marx, and there are far too few references to spirituality, aesthetics, positive health, and the great philosophical traditions of the non-Western world. This often seems to make the movement at times more reactionary, in the sense of simply throwing off existing incompetent overlords, rather than casting a positive vision for the future. We need instead to integrate the things we have learned from the past century about a more integral experience into our political philosophy.

(5) Dare I suggest that in a time when the global financial infrastructure has more or less imploded, rainforests are burned to the ground overnight by teams of well-organized profit seekers, and soldiers of once proud republics are butchered in public in broad daylight, that people dedicated to global democracy and the commons need to a bit more radical? Who is actually organizing to prevent these atrocities from continuing? Can you prevent whole forests from being cut to the ground with mere words? I have the sense that many people are content to merely comment on these trends that are ripping apart the world. The world needs more do-ers.

Joel Dietz is co-editor of Ouishare.net and a teacher of mediation and yoga. He also runs a startup which provides an ecological digital currency."