From a debate in the Commoning mailing list, and how commoners should deal with political and philosophical differences.
“As a starting point I’d claim that all of us think that the current way to organise our societies produces serious problems and something has to be changed. But, nevertheless, we have different motivations for our activities and different assumptions of how society works, how man „is“ or how society should look like. Some are concerned about climate change and environmental damages and focus on the use of natural resources, some have spiritual or religious arguments relying on the connectedness of all living beings, some are concerned about the loss of social cohesion and the growing social inequality, some are striving for individual freedom to realise ones potential, some for more social justice or food sovereignty, some have aesthetic notions of a life in harmony, some want to overcome capitalism. This is the place where the discussion about ideology is located. But as soon as it comes to concrete action, very similar modes of social practice might occur even from very different ideological background. This is why all of us ended up in the commons movement and on this mailing list. Producing commons seems to be a good solution from many different points of view.
So, if some people start to run, let’s say, an open source network or a community garden they may do it from all the motivations mentioned above, or from mere existential needs (which holds more for the community garden) of simply for fun (which holds more for the open source network). What they are doing, however, shows effects – on them and on their social and natural environment. And these effects might be rather independent from their motivation and their intentions. These activities can empower those who participate, they might turn out to be beneficial to the environment, they in any case will change social relations and challenge property relations, they might make some people more independent from the market system by satisfying their existential needs, they might contribute to the development of strong social networks, but some commons may be only accessible for elites and thus excluding others, some might be harmful to other commons and some might also turn out as just supporting the market system by reproducing labour power for free, or by providing resources for free. Hence it seems important, to have a theoretical framework, categories and instruments to evaluate the implications of our commons.
And these we may find without referring to the attitudes or ideologies that motivated us to produce commons.
So we do not need a common denominator in WHY we are producing commons (that means, we are not open only for anti-capitalists), we do not need to argue about world views and assumptions of what or how men, society or nature „is“, or whether all of these things „are“ not, but are permanently (re)produced by social interaction. One could discuss this for years without finding consensus. Instead we should try to find out what we want to achieve by the commons and to agree on criteria and instruments to assess the effects of the commons we make.
What we had to agree on are principles like the following (these of course are only tentative, just take them as examples):
As all of us are, I suppose, convinced that for some things commons are more adequate to fulfil people’s needs or to sustainable use of resources than markets are, we could agree on
* that a space for commons to develop and to persist should be provided and guaranteed
* that there have to be enough resources to create and maintain commons
* that all people should have access to commons, maybe even a right to commons
* that one commons must not exploit other commons
* that the commons must not be exploited by capital
If we agree on principles like that, we also need to find a theoretical concept, instruments and criteria for the evaluation of our commons, to see whether they confirm to these principles and how to develop mechanisms, rules, social practices or laws to achieve this. To this purpose theoretical concepts for evaluation have to be taken seriously and not to be refused as standing against the commons or as offending the people producing commons. We must allow that these instruments are applied to our commons, we must allow critique and, finally, argumentation must refer to the evaluation process and draw on the experiences of commoners and not on our intentions.
There are some of us who highlight the potential of the commons to spread and survive from their own, while there are some who stress the threat of enclosures and questions of power. Thus there will be a lot of discussions about the desirable outcomes and how to evaluate them and how to achieve and secure them. One can of course question the theoretical framework for the evaluation and propose another one in addition or instead, one can question the criteria and whether the instruments were applied properly.
But this is a discussion different from that about assumptions, motivations and intentions WHY we want to make commons. Instead it’s about HOW to make commons and to WHICH END. And I think it might be possible to agree on many – though not on all – principles on that level, where questions of ideology simply aren’t relevant. As Michel already mentioned, the property-issue is broadly agreed on, for example. Or, people who don’t find the question of power as crucial as others do, could still agree on that to be a criterion for evaluation and the same holds for other criteria not all of us are convinced of. If we managed to do so, there would be a large space for common practice, for sharing experience, for developing viable commons, without referring to ideological differences on the motivation side. “