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About Double Edge Theatre

Double Edge Theatre, an artist-run organization, was founded in Boston in 1982 by Stacy Klein as a feminist ensemble and laboratory of actors’ creative process. The Double Edge Ensemble, led by Artistic Director Klein, along with Co-Artistic Directors Carlos Uriona, Matthew Glassman, Jennifer Johnson, and Producing Executive Director Adam Bright, creates original theatrical performances that are imaginative, imagistic, and visceral. These include indoor performances and site-specific indoor/outdoor traveling spectacles both of which are developed with collaborating visual and music artists through a long-term process and presented on the Farm and on national and international tours. In 1994, Double Edge moved from Boston to a 105-acre former dairy farm in rural Ashfield, MA, to create a sustainable artistic home. Today, the Farm is an International Center of Living Culture and Art Justice, a base for the Ensemble’s extensive international touring and community spectacles, with year-round theatre training, performance exchange, conversations and convenings, greening and sustainable farming initiatives. DE facilities include two performance and training spaces, production facilities, offices, archives, music room, and 5 outdoor performance areas, as well as an animal barn, vegetable gardens, and two additional properties: housing in the center of town for resident artists and DE’s Artist Studio, giving primacy to African American and Latinx artists; and a design house, with design offices, studios, costume shop, and storage for sets, costumes, and props.

The post Double Edge Theatre: Art & Commoning appeared first on P2P Foundation.

While politicians clearly hope that massive government bailouts will restore the economy, it’s important to recognize that this is not just a financial crisis; it’s a social and political crisis as well. Many legacy market systems – generously subsidized and propped up by state power – are not really trusted or loved by people. Do Americans really want to give $17 billion to scandal-ridden Boeing while letting the post office go bankrupt? It is too early to declare that the old forms will never return, and we do need to remember that the authoritarian option is dangerously close. But it is clear that the future will have a very different pattern.

To me, one thing is obvious: searching for the rudiments of a New Order should be our top priority once emergency needs are taken care of. We need to identify and cultivate new patterns of peer provisioning and place-based governance, especially at the local and regional levels. We need new types of infrastructures and new narratives that understand the practical need for open-source civic and economic engagement.

This is not only necessary to help us deal with climate change and inequality; it is a preemptive necessity for fortifying democracy itself. Reactionary forces are already poised to try to restore a pre-pandemic “normal.” “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting,” writes filmmaker Julio Vincent Gambuto in a wonderful essay on Medium.

Gambuto astutely predicts that corporate America, the White House, and the rest of capitalist establishment will soon mount a massive marketing campaign to minimize the realities we’re now experiencing and rebrand the American Dream as back:

Get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all this feels.

And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war one; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America…. But you did. You are not crazy, my friends. And so we are about to be gaslit in a truly unprecedented way.

Put another way, economists Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin foresee what they call “the coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative.” In a paper by that title on Vox CEPR Policy Portal, Bowles and Carlin declare the coronavirus to be “a blow to self-interest as a value orientation and laissez-faire as a policy paradigm, both already reeling amid mounting public concerns about climate change.”

They predict that a struggle will soon be underway to lock in the political and economic lessons of the pandemic. There will be a big push for a state-friendly, capitalist-affirming narrative, of course. But that frame will narrow the debate to familiar binary choice of “liberal” vs. “conservative” policy, subtly foreclosing consideration of larger structural reforms or a paradigm shift. We will need only ask ourselves, Do we want a bigger, more active government or free markets (sic)?

Fortunately, the pandemic supplies plentiful evidence to support a more ambitious, breakthrough agenda. The Commons Sector and all sorts of alt-economy approaches, long hovering on the progressive fringe, are now bursting out into mainstream view. Makerspaces have stepped up to make personal protective equipment using 3D printers. The City of Amsterdam has embraced Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” framework. All sorts of localized commons – for food, social support, emergency responses, etc. – are flourishing through people-powered ingenuity and goodwill. Thanks to the pandemic, once-fringe ideas (universal basic income, wealth taxes, relocalizing supply chains) are seen as practical if not essential options.

Bowles and Carlin argue that the pandemic calls into question the very language of economics and public policy. It is now clear that neither market contracts nor government edicts are capable of solving this and future pandemics. In addition, they argue, a “market vs. state” framing of future possibilities fails to acknowledge what the pandemic is showing — “the contribution of social norms and of institutions that are neither government nor markets – like families, relationships within firms, and community organisations.”

For example, 750,000 ordinary Brits volunteered to help the National Health Service in dealing with the pandemic (only 250,000 could be practically put to work). Among South Koreans, there was a huge outpouring of social cooperation to get tested for the virus. One might also add to these examples the remarkable mutual aid projects that have spontaneously arisen worldwide, as chronicled by George Monbiot in The Guardian.

The pandemic has demonstrated that old systems are broken (and were always broken). But many people, including progressives and political parties, are still not willing to recognize this reality. They can’t quite admit that new institutional forms and social behaviors are entirely possible on a systemic, ongoing basis.

Rather than backslide into the old, familiar ideological mindsets, it’s vital that we stride into the new spaces that have opened up! If you look carefully to the outskirts of mainstream politics and policy – to the many “new economy” experiments underway – you can see the lineaments of a new order. There is a huge constellation of promising experiments and proven archetypes. What they share in common beyond non-capitalist organizational forms is their invisibility on MSNBC, CNN, and among many progressive NGOs.

It’s hard to acknowledge that bottom-up social energies can and do work, that there are developed alternatives awaiting expansion and refinement. These models don’t resemble markets or bureaucracies, however, which is surely one reason they have been marginalized. They are emergent, situation-based social phenomena. They can’t be strictly controlled from the top-down, which may be why traditional power centers are so wary of them. They have a quasi-sovereignty of their own that stems from being grounded in a geography, with real grassroots players, who work together as a living, peer-organized, evolving force. This is precisely why they can accomplish so much serious work so quickly and flexibly, as pandemic mutual-aid initiatives have shown.

As renegade economists, Bowles and Carlin appreciate the limits of markets and the state:

Neither government officials nor private owners and managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable contracts or government fiats to implement optimal social distancing, surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including to vaccine development….

[N]on-governmental and nonmarket solutions may actually contribute to mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat. The behavioral economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics – are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical values and other regarded preferences.

Bowles and Carlin don’t really explore HOW to foster new forms of collective social action, however, or what specific ones ought to be embraced. Perhaps they are not so familiar with the world of commoning and the impressive variety of “new economy” projects.

It is precisely this cohort of players who hold answers for the future. I’m talking about people who are pioneering the relocalization of food and place-based markets, new types of cooperatives, platform cooperatives in digital spaces, non-capitalist forms of finance, degrowth strategies, digital peer production, globally shared design (open source style) used to manufacture locally, agroecology and permaculture, urban commons, and countless other projects that point beyond capitalism and state bureaucracy.

A rare historical moment has opened up new possibilities. We can’t let it be wasted. We need to support an aggressive surge of institutional innovation, relationship-building and meme-spreading along with the development of new grand narratives and collaborative strategies. In a future post, I will look at some of the intriguing new institutional forms that are emerging in specific sectors.

Lead image: by Prachatai.

The post Let the Institutional Innovation Begin! (Part I) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

However, pandemics are hard to ignore. Many ideas once ignored or dismissed by Serious People – commoning, green transition policies, climate action, relocalization, food sovereignty, degrowth, post-capitalist finance, universal basic income, and much else – now don’t seem so crazy. In fact, they are positively common-sensical and compelling.

The pandemic has been horrific, but let’s be candid: It has been one of the most effective political agents to disrupt politics-as-usual and validate new, imaginative possibilities.

Many things are now less contestable: Of course our drug-development system should be revamped so that parasitic corporate monopolies cannot prey upon us with high prices, marketable drugs rather than innovation, and disdain for public health needs. Of course our healthcare system should be accessible to everyone because, as the pandemic is showing, individual well-being is deeply entwined with collective health. Of course we must limit our destruction of ecosystems lest we unleash even greater planetary destabilization through viruses, biodiversity loss, ecosystem decline, and more.

In this sense, covid-19 is reacquainting us moderns with some basic human realities that we have denied for too long:

• We human beings actually depend on living, biological systems despite our pretentions to have triumphed over nature and its material limits.
• We human beings are profoundly interdependent on each other despite our presumptions – at the core of modern economics and liberal democracy — that we are self-sovereign individuals without collective needs. (Margaret Thatcher: “This IS no society, only individuals.”)

Notwithstanding these general assumptions of modern life, we humans are discovering that we are in fact programmed to help each other when confronted with disasters. As Rebecca Solnit chronicled in her memorable book A Paradise Built in Hell, earthquakes, hurricanes, and gas explosions spur human beings to self-organize themselves to help each other, often in utterly sublime, beautiful ways. It’s a deeply human instinct.

The early journalism about covid-19 confirms this human impulse. Just as the Occupy movement mobilized to provide essential relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, mutual aid networks are now popping up in neighborhoods around the world, as the New York Times has noted.

The Times cited the great work of Invisible Hands, a network of 1,300 NYC young people who spontaneously peer-organized in three days to deliver groceries to at-risk people who can’t venture out of their homes. The piece also cited this radio segment on mutual aid on Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now! 

Check out a number of useful links in the article to other mutual-aid efforts, including a massive Google Doc listing scores of efforts in cities around the US, and a pod mapping toolkit. And check out the Washington Post’s piece on how a website for neighborhood cooperation, Nextdoor, has become a powerful tool for people to help each other through the pandemic.

The mainstream world likes to refer to such peer-assistance as “volunteering” and “altruism.” It is more accurately called commoning because it is more deeply committed and collective in character than individual “do-gooding,” itself a patronizing term. And surprise: it sometimes comes with disagreements that must be resolved – but which can end up strengthening the commons.

A thoughtful piece on the role of anarchism in surviving the pandemic notes that mutual aid “is the decentralized practice of reciprocal care via which participants in a network make sure that everyone gets what they need, so that everyone has reason to be invested in everyone else’s well-being. This is not a matter of tit-for-tat exchange, but rather an interchange of care and resources that creates the sort of redundancy and resilience that can sustain a community through difficult times.”

The vexing question for the moment is whether state power will support mutual aid over the long term (it may be seen as a threat to state authority and markets) — or whether Trump-style politicians will use this moment of fear to consolidate state control, increase surveillance, and override distributed peer governance.

Another important question for the near-term is:  Can we develop sufficient institutional support for commoning so that it won’t fade away as the red-alert consciousness of the moment dissipates. To that end, I recommend Silke Helfrich’s and my book Free, Fair and Alive You may also want to browse the governance toolkit on CommunityRule.info or look into Sociocracy for All.

*                *               *

Throughout history commoning has always been an essential survival strategy, and so it is in this crisis. When the state, market, or monarchy fail to provide for basic needs, commoners themselves usually step up to devise their own mutual-aid systems.

In so doing, they are illuminating the structural deficiencies of conventional markets and state power. As we gave seen political agendas and profiteering have often been higher priorities than public health or equal treatment, as the $2.2 trillion bailout bill passed by the US Congress suggests. President Trump has been more obsessed with reviving the market and winning re-election than in saving people’s lives. Consider how many corporations are more intent on reaping private economic efficiencies (offshoring medical facemask manufacturing; closing down access to cheap generic drugs) than in allowing collective needs to be met effectively through government or commoning.

Numerous commentators are pointing out how the pandemic is but a preview of coming crises. It’s not been mentioned much that covid-19 is partly the result of humans encroaching excessively on natural ecosystems. The UN environment chief Inger Anderson has said that biodiversity and habitat loss are making it easier for pathogens to jump from “the wild” to humans.

And ecologist Stephan Harding has a wonderful piece on how Gaia seems to be trying to teach us to see the dangers of unlimited global commerce: “We are seeing right now how in an over-connected web a localised disturbance such as the appearance of a fatal virus can spread and amplify very quickly throughout the system, reducing its resilience and making it more likely to collapse.”

At this juncture, many massive, pivotal choices await us. We must decide to rebuild our provisioning systems on green, eco-resilient terms, not on neoliberal fantasies of unlimited growth and tightly integrated global markets. New/old types of place-based agriculture, commerce, and community must be developed.

This will entail a frank reckoning with how we re-imagine and enact state power, writes Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, in the Financial Times: “The first [choice] is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.” Harari warns:

Humanity needs to make a choice. Will we travel down the route of disunity, or will we adopt the path of global solidarity? If we choose disunity, this will not only prolong the crisis, but will probably result in even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and crises that might assail humankind in the 21st century.

Obviously, I think the commons has a lot to contribute to citizen empowerment and global solidarity. Hope lies in building new systems of bottom-up, place-based provisioning and care that are peer-governed, fair-minded, inclusive, and participatory. Hope lies in federating diverse commons so that they can coordinate and reach more people – accountably, flexibly, effectively, with resilience.

State institutions may be able to play positive roles, mostly in providing general rules, coordination, certain types of expertise, and infrastructure. Beyond that, they should focus on empowering people and smaller-scale governance and thereby engender trust in collective action.

It is still too early to know how the pandemic will unfold and resolve. There are too many complex variables play to predict the many ramifications. However, it is clear enough that this pandemic calls into question MANY elements of today’s neoliberal market/state order, whose institutions and political leadership are either dysfunctional or uncommitted to meeting public needs. It’s not just individual politicians; it’s a systemic problem. Yet the rudiments of a coherent new system with richer affordances have not yet crystallized.

So that may be our ambitious task going forward. Commoners and allied movements, disillusioned liberals and social democrats, people of goodwill must thwart the many retrograde dangers that threaten to surge forward under the cover of fear. But we must also, simultaneously, demonstrate the feasibility of new forms of commoning, infrastructure, finance, and commons/public partnerships. Rarely have needs and opportunities been so aligned!

• Republished from Bollier.org
• Featured art photographed by Antonio Marín Segovia

The post Commoning as a Pandemic Survival Strategy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Dig deep enough into many of the problems this country faces, and you will soon hit land,” writes Monbiot. “Soaring inequality and exclusion; the massive cost of renting or buying a decent home; repeated financial crises, sparked by housing asset bubbles; the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems; the lack of public amenities – the way land is owned and controlled underlies them all. Yet it scarcely features in political discussions.” (The six report coauthors are Robin Grey, Tom Kenny, Laurie Macfarlane, Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole and Beth Stratford.).

The report contains recommendations to the British Labour Party as it develops a policy agenda in preparation for the next general election. Given that much of the world suffers from treating land as a speculative asset, the report could be considered a template for pursuing similar reforms around the world. (Monbiot’s column summarizing the report can be found here.)  

For me, the report is quite remarkable:  a rigorous, comprehensive set of proposals for how land could be developed, used, and protected as a commons.

There are succinct, powerful sections on making land ownership data more open and available; ways to foster community-led development and ownership of land (such as a “community right to buy”); and codifying a citizen’s “right to roam” on land for civic and cultural purposes. One effective way to curb speculative development and revive farming and forestry is by creating community land trusts and curbing tax privileges and subsidies.

The bald financial realities about land are quite troubling. The report notes that in the UK, “land values have risen 544% since 1995, far outpacing any growth in real incomes.” Housing is simply unaffordable for many people. “Two decades ago, the average working family needed to save for three years to afford a deposit [downpayment] on a home,” the report notes. “Today, it must save for 19 years.”

Much of the blame can go to tax laws and other policies that encourage people to treat homes as financial assets. This fuels fierce speculation in housing that raises prices, greatly benefiting the rich (landowners) and impoverishing renters. Similarly, thanks to speculation and tax subsidies, wealthy landowners consolidate more land while small farmers are forced to give up farming.  Fully one-fifth of English farms have folded over the past ten years. 

Politicians are generally far too wary to propose solutions to these problems. It would only enrage a key chief constituency, the wealthy, and alienate some in the middle class who aspire to flip homes as a path to wealth. But there are in fact many ways to neutralize the speculative frenzy associated with land and mutualize the acquisition and control of land to make something that can benefit everyone.  

Land for the Many recommends a shift in “macroprudential tools” – financial assessments of systemic risk – to prod banks to make fewer loans for real estate and more loans that help productive sectors of the economy. The report also urges restrictions on lending to buyers intending to rent their properties.Other healthy ways to make land more accessible and affordable for all:  a progressive property tax on land; a reduction of tax exemptions for landowners; and a cap on permissible rent increases at no more than the rate of wage inflation or the consumer price index, whichever is lower.

Since profit-driven development can have catastrophic long-term effects on ecosystems, wildlife, and future generations, the report calls for the creation of Public Development Corporations. These entities would have the power to purchase and develop land in the public interest.

I especially like the idea of creating a Common Ground Trust, a nonprofit institution to help prospective homebuyers buy homes. As the request of a buyer, the Trust would buy the land underneath a house and hold it in trust for the commons. Since land on average represents 70% of the cost of a house, the Trust’s acquisition of land under housing would greatly reduce the upfront downpayments that buyers must make. “In return,” write Monbiot et al., “the buyers [would] pay a land rent to the Trust.”  Home buyers could reap any appreciation in value of their house, but land would effectively be taken off the market and its value would be held in the commons.

“By bringing land into common ownership, land rents can be socialized rather than flowing to private landlords and banks,” the report notes. “Debt-fueled and speculative demand can be reined in without the risk of an uncontrolled or destabilizing fall in values.”

Land for the Many is major achievement. It consolidates the progressive case for land reform and explains in straight-forward language how law and policy must change. Of course, the politics of securing this agenda would be a formidable challenge. But given the grotesque inequalities, ecological harms, declines in farming, and unaffordable housing associated with the current regime of land ownership, this conversation is long-overdue.

Originally posted on bollier.org

Header image: mini malist/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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I just learned that the comic is based on a blog post that I produced with my friend, the late Jonathan Rowe, in 2010 — “The Missing Sector: Enlarging Our Sense of ‘the Economy’” – in which we reflected on a controversy that arose after the 2004 World Series. After making the final ‘out’ in the last game of the series, a player for the Boston Red Sox quietly kept the baseball, knowing that he could sell it for millions of dollars and profit personally. The team’s victory was historic and sweet because it was the Red Sox’s first World Series victory in 85 years. But that sense of elation curdled when it was learned that first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz had pocketed the game-winning ball and refused to surrender it.

This story prompted Jon and I to reflect on the basic question, Who creates wealth? Who exactly created the monetary value of that ordinary ball, and why should the person who just happened to be holding it at the end of the game be entitled to all its value?

Stuart McMillen explores these questions in his magnificent 56-page cartoon, “Who Owns the Million Dollar Baseball?” It wasn’t the player Mientkiewicz who somehow made an ordinary baseball worth a million dollars or more. He was just the lucky guy who made the last ‘out’ of a seven-game World Series following a baseball season of 176 games, producing the first World Series victory after 85 luckless seasons.  

McMillen’s strip notes how the entire team won the three other games in the seven-game series, and how the fans had loyally supported the team for generations. The cartoon notes that the City of Boston and State of Massachusetts, played an indirect role by providing streets, electricity, sewer and other infrastructure for the Fenway Park stadium in which the Red Sox play. 

In our blog, Jon Rowe and I wrote:

The value of a business, resource, historic baseball or whatever does not reside solely in the thing. Nor does it arise from the efforts of an entrepreneur alone. Value is, rather, a co-production between an individual, society and nature; and the latter two often play the larger part. Land values, for example, are almost entirely a social product. That’s why two acres near an urban freeway exchange or subway stop can fetch more than does an equal amount of land in the middle of a desert.

The question is less what the owner did, than what others did around him, individually and through government. So, too, with music, inventions – just about everything. These accomplishments draw on what was done before, and depend on the sustaining presence of society as a whole. Even stocks would have little value without stock markets through which to sell them, and without governments to police – to some degree – those markets. These are social creations all.

Once we acknowledge the social component of economic value, then discussion of financial return and social policy take a new turn. Taxation, for example, no longer is a matter of “redistributing” someone else’s income, or wealth, but rather of restoring a portion of it to the rightful owners. The acknowledgment of social co-production also dissolves the myth of the heroic individual businessman or woman as “self-made.” Individuals may do great things, but as Warren Buffett – who knows something about making money – has pointed out, none do it alone.

Stuart McMillen’s strip makes these points wonderfully vivid. In an accompanying blog post, he elaborates on the public factors that contribute to individual success. His “self-made” executive bears a striking and deliberate resemblance to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world’s richest man.  

McMillen’s principal interests are environmentalism, post-growth economics, and human psychology, but he also deals with such diverse topics as Buckminster Fuller, religion, energy, and drugs. He supports himself through a crowdfunding page at which 169 individuals have so far pledged a cumulative US$1,223 per month. He aspires to be the first crowdfunded Australian cartoonist to earn a median income for his country. You can contribute to his work at the crowdfunding site Patreon.

By the way, a shamed first baseman Mientkiewicz eventually agreed to return the ball so it could be put on display. It was an implicit acknowledgment that the Red Sox’s success in the World Series stemmed from many sources generously working together.

Originally published on Bollier.org

Lead image from the website of Stuart McMillan

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Let’s just consider concert production as a commons. 

In western Massachuetts, where I live, Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares represents a creative mashup of the CSA farm model (community-supported agriculture) with concert production. Instead of paying upfront for a season’s supply of vegetables, people pay for a September-June season of ten jazz concerts. It’s like a subscription model but it’s more of a community investment in supporting a jazz ecosystem. Talented musicians get to perform, fans get to experience some cutting-edge jazz, the prices are entirely reasonable for everyone, and a community spirit flourishes.

As the group explains:

Our members purchase jazz shares to provide the capital needed to produce concerts with minimal institutional support. A grassroots, all-volunteer organization, we are a community of music lovers in Western Massachusetts dedicated to the continued vitality of jazz music. By pooling resources, energy and know-how, members create an infrastructure that is able to bring world-class improvisers to our region.

Cofounders Glenn Siegel and Priscilla Page decided to launch Jazz Shares after realizing that there were many more jazz musicians in the region than there were commercial venues to support them. As a longtime concert producer at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Siegal lamented, “Each season I would receive many more worthy gig requests than I could honor. With a limit on how many University concerts I could produce each year (six), and without the personal resources to just write checks, I got tired of saying ‘Sorry, no’ to some of my musical heroes. I knew there must be another way to bring these great musicians to town.”

As an economist might put it, there was a market failure (demand did not induce an adequate supply). So commoning came to the rescue! 

Approximately 95 fans pay $125 to underwrite ten local jazz concerts a year in a variety of regional venues – colleges, clubs, performance spaces. Business sponsors and single-ticket sales augment these revenues. But it’s not just about the money. It’s about building a community through mutual aid and money-lite commoning. As reported by New England Public Radio, Siegal and Page have been known to cook for visiting performers. Sometimes Jazz Share members pick up musicians at the train station and make food for the artist receptions following each performance. 

The share-model is arguably the secret to presenting sometimes-challenging music. The shares enable performers to be artistically authentic and venturesome. They can improvise in bolder ways than would be possible in conventional commercial venues, and fans can enjoy the results. For example, one quartet included a bassoonist, which is not usually heard in jazz performances. Other artists report that they feel free to explore their artistic frontiers.

The whole setup also changes the audience. As Siegel explains, “Although many of our shareholders do not know who Karl Berger is, most have an open mind and an adventurous attitude. Because our audience expects to be surprised, we can expose them to new experiences. Although we attempt to have balance in our programming, the dilemma facing most presenters of not wanting to offend or get too far ahead of audience tastes does not affect us.”

Now in its seventh season, Jazz Shares has built a sociable community of jazz fans who might otherwise remain isolated at home. Local saxophonist and composer Jason Robinson credits Jazz Shares for creating a very special musical culture in the region: “Jazz Shares does special things for our local community that [don’t] exist in Boston. It barely exists in New York. It’s something that’s quite unique across the country.”

Glenn Siegal explained how Jazz Shares has engendered a very special cultural ecosystem: “Just as plants are dependent on the sun, clean water and healthy soil to thrive, the music needs paying gigs and an appreciative audience to reach full flower. Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares is helping to build that rich inch of topsoil that stands between us and a barren cultural landscape.”

Sounds a lot like commoning to me!

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Mattei is the noted international law scholar, lawyer and activist who has been at the center of some of the most significant commons initiatives in Italy. His chapter is a welcome synthesis of how the commons discourse in Italy arose from the misty-eyed imagination of a few far-sighted legal commoners, to become a rally cry in critical fights against the privatization of water, the Teatro Valley theater in Rome, and other cherished shared wealth. The concept of the commons has since gone mainstream in Italian political culture, animating new initiatives and providing an indispensable vocabulary for fighting neoliberal capitalist policies.

Ugo’s piece is called “Institutionalizing the Commons: An Italian Primer.” (PDF file) In it, he describes the history of the commons in Italy as “a unique experiment in transforming indignation into new institutions of the commons,” adding, “perhaps this praxis ‘Italian style’ could become an example for a global strategy.”

The story starts in 2005 with a scholarly project at the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, which examined the many ways in which public authorities were routinely privatizing public resources, often with no compensation or benefit to the public. This project later led to a national commission headed by Stefano Rodotà, a noted law scholar and politician. In April 2008, the Rodotà Commission delivered a bill to the Italian minister of justice containing, as Mattei puts it, “the first legal definitions of the commons to appear in an official document” in Italy.

The Rodotà Commission defined the commons (in Italian beni comuni) by dividing assets into three categories – commons, public properties, and private properties. Resources in commons were defined as

such goods whose utility is functional to the pursuit of fundamental rights and free development of the person. Commons must be upheld and safeguarded by law also for the benefit of future generations. The legal title to the commons can be held by private individuals, legal persons or by public entities. No matter their title, their collective fruition must be safeguarded, within the limits of and according to the process of law.

Specific common assets mentioned included “rivers, torrents and their springs; lakes and other waterways; the air; parks defined as such by law; forests and woodlands; high altitude mountain ranges, glaciers and snowlines beaches and stretches of coastline declared natural reserves; the protected flora and fauna; protected archaeological, cultural and environmental properties; and other protected landscapes.

This early (modern) legal definition of the commons is rooted more in state law and its recognition of certain biophysical resources as public, than in the sanctity of self-organized, customary social practices and norms. The definition nonetheless has provided a valuable language for challenging privatization, most notably, the alarming proposal by the Italian Senate in 2010 to sell Italy’s entire Italian water management system.

This outrage led to the collecting of over 1.5 million signatures to secure a ballot referendum to let the public decide whether the state should be allowed to privatize the water commons. In June 2011, Italian proto-commoners prevailed by huge margins and helped make the commons – beni comuni – a keyword in Italian politics. As Mattei puts it, the commons provided “a unifying political grammar for different actions.”

Over the past eight years, the commons has continued to gain currency in Italian politics as the economic crises of capitalism have worsened. The language of enclosure showcased how government corruption, neoliberal trade and investment policies, and state subsidies and giveaways were destroying the common wealth.This was underscored by parallel protests by the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy movement, and the Arab Spring protests, which also focused on inequality and enclosures of the commons. Mattei’s short book Beni comuni: Un Manifesto helped bring these themes to further prominence and connecting many single-issue struggles that had long been seen as separate, but which in fact share common goals, adversaries, and values.

I like to think that most towns, cities and regions of the world could and should begin to write their own modern-day histories of their distinctive commons. It’s imperative that we recover and learn these histories if we are going to learn from the terrible disruptions and struggles of the past, and invent new forms of social practice, culture and politics.

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The book, published in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and its office in Sarajevo, is a rigorous yet accessible 170-page introduction to the commons, with an accent on developments in the region of South East Europe (SEE). Its main editor and author is Tomislav Tomašević, with  additional editing by Vedran Horvat and Jelena Milos, augmented by contributions from a number of individual authors and a larger team. 

The Institute’s primary goal in preparing the book is to “put this part of Europe….on the landscape of international academic and political debate on the commons.” By synthesizing knowledge about the commons in the region, the book aims to “provide an interpretive and theoretical framework” for understanding “numerous political actions and mobilizations that have emerged across the region of South East Europe, mainly with the ambition of creating the commons or defending and resisting further enclosure of the commons. Since practice has preceded in-depth theoretical understanding in many cases, we felt a responsibility to start bridging this gap.” 

I highly recommend the book. It’s a tight, well-written, and carefully documented overview of a region whose commons have not received enough attention. 

The book starts with a “compact history of the commons” featuring the classical theory of the commons and newer “critical theory.” From these chapters, the book introduces the history of the commons in the region, cases of commons governance there, and significant political struggles against enclosure.

Like most places around the world, there is a rich history of commoning here that is not widely known:

Ethnologist Jadran Kale writes that the common pastures in Croatia and Slovenia were called gmajna, which obviously comes from the German word Gemeine meaning “common.” In the see countries under the Ottoman rule, there was an interesting concept of vakuf, which comes from the Arabic word waqf and was an inalienable endowment in land, building or other asset under Islamic law that could be freely used by all members of the community but in sustainable way. Despite some of the differences between the SEE countries, historian, and philosopher Maria Todorova writes about the regionally specific social form of extended family cooperative, which became well known in international anthropological literature as zadruga. This was an agricultural socio-economic communal organisation based mostly on kinship, with rather democratic governance and common property institutions.

This chapter of the book traces the history of commons following World War II to the present, noting the distinctive history of Yugoslavia as part of the Non-Aligned Movement (neither market-capitalist West nor state-socialist East). The country hosted a variety of self-governance experiments such as workers self-management and “social ownership” of all means of production. Of course, despite the nominal ownership by workers and citizens, decisionmaking remained in the hands of an elite.  

This historical context is important because, as the book notes, “such a legacy is a major obstacle for advocating any forms of commons in the region today….Even words like ‘cooperative (zadruga), which are not controversial in Western Europe, are considered insulting and hostile by many people in the region” because of the previously mandated agricultural coops in socialist Yugoslavia.

With the past either vilified or bathed in nostalgia for a more stable time, it can be hard for contemporary minds to grasp the realities of peer governance. Would-be commoners in the SEE region must navigate the gap between the repressive totalitarian past, the bloody civil strife of the 1990s, and the fierce neocapitalist capitalist exploitation that has occurred under the auspices of representative democracy.

As the authors explain, the latter resulted in “de-industrialization, high unemployment and increasing poverty” while also disabling the instruments of direct and participatory democracy” that might have allowed citizens to control their elected governments.

So in grappling with the problems today, people in South East Europe confront problems of language, memories, and mindsets. “The neoliberal transition made many people in newly independent countries of South East Europe nostalgic about socialist Yugoslavia, while nationalist political elites still make some critical but honest evaluation of the self-governance practices impossible.” 

However, over the past twenty years, there have been important theoretical elaborations of self-governance advanced by Elinor Ostrom and Yugoslav economist Branko Horvat. The book also notes the landmark work by the working group within Balkan Forum of the 2013 Subversive Festival. (See The Balkan Forum, a 2014 book by edited by Danijela Dolenec and others.)

Most commons in the South East Europe region tend to take two forms — communities of userswho have organized themselves in various sectors (health, education, culture, housing) and people struggling against enclosure — “the commodification, privatization and statification of resources that should be accessible to all.”

Significantly, activist commoners have often embraced the governance practices of commoning in their struggles. In fighting to protect Varšavska Street against the construction of a shopping mall in downtown Zagreb, for example, and in student fights against the commodification of the education system, activist occupations self-governed themselves as commons. 

There is much more in this book worth checking out – the case studies of pasturing commons, the Rojc Community Centre in the City of Pula, and the Luke water supply system in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The book also chronicles the struggles against enclosure in the region, such as the effort to protect Srđ Hill above the City of Dubrovnik from construction of a massive, upscale golf course, villas and hotels.

While there is clearly a commons movement in South East Europe, the authors of this book are candid in admitting that “commons theory, discourse and practice occur within a well-connected but still rather small community of scholars, activists and practitioners, which makes its impact limited. Expanding the commons movement in South East Europe and increasing the amount of research on commons, struggles over commons and governance of commons remains a challenge for the future.”

The report can be downloaded as a pdf file here. 

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On April 12, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, which sponsored the writing of our book, will be hosting a public event to launch the book. Silke will be there, of course, and after speaking she will have a conversation with the prominent German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa; Robert Habeck, the Federal Chairman of Alliance ’90/The Greens; and Elisabeth von Thadden, editor of DIE ZEIT.

There will be a livestream of the event at 19:30 CET. A 96-second trailer about the German edition of the book can be found here.

We have been working on this book for much of the past three years, so I am thrilled by its completion (from which I am still recovering). Let me hoist a transatlantic toast to my dear friend for her brilliant ideas, warm collegiality, and sheer persistence throughout this odyssey.

I will offer a longer introduction to the book as the release of the English edition draws closer. For now, let me just say that our book is an ambitious attempt to build on Elinor Ostrom’s work by providing a deeper understanding of the commons as a living social organism. Our new framework – the Triad of Commoning — focuses on the commons in three interrelated aspects – the social, the political (peer governance), and the economic (provisioning). We also look at how one’s view of elemental reality shapes one’s sense of political possibility, and how language plays a critical role in making commoning visible.

This approach emerged after months of working on our book. Silke and I concluded that we just couldn’t convey the realities of commoning if we remained captive to the rational-actor, resource-focused framework used by so many economists. Much of that language points us in the wrong direction by downplaying or ignoring the social, personal, and ecological relationships that live at the heart of a commons.

For example, the word “resource” implies something external and inert that can be bought and sold, or used however one wishes. But to a commoner, shared wealth such as a forest or river is alive. It has emotional and cultural meaning. The word “resource” ignores this whole affective dimension and implies a norm of human dominance. Similarly, to focus on the individual as the primary agent of action – the lone genius or leader – overlooks the collaboration and contextual factors that are essential in a functioning commons.  

To deal with such issues, Silke and I set out to develop a “relational theory” of the commons, complete with some new concepts and vocabulary. If we are going to stop destructive acts of enclosure, if we are going to get beyond the misleading conceits of standard economics, we need to get beyond the unexamined premises of market individualism and private property. We need to get beyond the theory of value that market economics relies on and rethink concepts such as “development,” “rationality,” and “scarcity.” We must develop new and richer vocabularies that point to the aspects of commoning that are typically ignored. We invented the terms “care-wealth,” the “Nested-I,” and “OntoShift” to name some neglected shifts of consciousness that commoning entails.

Language is important in building new cultural understandings for how the world might be structured differently, so we realized that we need to rethink some of our received notions of “property.” Instead of seeing property in the traditional way as private dominion over a “resource” and the exclusion of others, the idea of “relationalized property” offers an alternative way of having and using, via a commons. While our book has plenty of new theoretical concepts, we also worked hard to keep our analysis grounded in actual examples. One appendix itemizes more than 70 specific commons that are mentioned in the book.

Silke will soon venture out on a book tour through June with some forty events planned. For those of you in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland (and readers of German), here is Silke’s speaking schedule in the coming months.

Originally published on bollier.org

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