Silke Helfrich: Connecting Commoners Across Continents
I work with Silke within the Commons Strategies Group and have learned to admire her work and dedication to the Commons. Here is a nice profile from On The Commons, reproduced from Jay Walljasper’s book, All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons.
“If there is one thing that Silke Helfrich has learned in her world travels, it is the cross-cul¬tural appeal of the commons. As the director of the German-based Heinrich Böll Foundation’s for Mexico, Central America and Cuba from 1999 to 2007, based in Mexico City, Helfrich and her team hosted one of the first major international conferences on the commons, in 2006, bringing together commoners from throughout Latin America, North America, and Europe.
The event was a rare gathering in which rural farmers, free-culture advocates, water activists, and opponents of genetically modified crops could begin to forge a shared language of the commons. Many of them had suffered personally from destructive free market trade policies, the privatization of public services, and deregulation of government protections. Their communities had suffered from enclosures of land and crops that decimated people’s livelihoods and local ecosystems. In such circumstances, a language of the commons—or bienes comunes in Spanish—makes a lot of sense.
“Forty-nine per cent of the seed market is concentrated in the hands of only four companies, five companies control 90 percent of the copyrights in the music industry,” notes Helfrich. “Whatever area we look at, we are confronted with concentration—of control, money, and power. These processes of concentration have an immediate impact on the rights of use of everyone and on the vitality and diversity of the commons.”
Now living in her native Germany, Helfrich engages with activists, academics, businesspeople, and politicians to explain the strategic value of talking about the commons. She travels throughout Europe meeting with leading theorists of the commons and frontline activists. She publishes the latest news about commons developments on her German-language blog, and she edited the 2008 book Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons. A new report The Commons: Prosperity by Sharing, co-authored with Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs, and Christian Siefkes, can be downloaded here in English.
Helfrich recently co-founded the Commons Strategies Group —along with former OnTheCommons.org editor David Bollier and Michel Bauwens of the Thailand-based P2P Foundation and Argentinian free culture activist Beatriz Busaniche— to promote the commons internationally. In November, the new group hosted the International Commons Conference in Berlin, drawing activists from 34 countries.
The commons makes sense to Helfrich because it gets beyond the classic division of haves and have-nots, of owners and non-owners, and of public and private. “The com¬mons,” according to Helfrich, “is about the missing third element—people as active participants, co-owners, and citizens in their communities, people with rela¬tionships of responsibility toward each other and the resources that we all share together.”
Excerpted from the book: All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons by Jay Walljasper and On The Commons (The New Press).
April 24th, 2011 at 11:35 am
keep up the good work, silke. i am also spreading the word. hope our paths will cross one of these days, best, zeki