As any nuanced thinker will tell you, there are no easy answers in this world. However given the massive upheavals we are experiencing, it is incumbent on us to push forward through sense-making and connecting with our values and our visions. In this book chapter we offer three scenarios for the futures of the commons movement and social change. We argue that we need to build a meta language for commoning – a “protocol commons”. This will allow us to weave a broader movement across many different actors that are working for commons in their own way (even when they are not calling it commons or commoning). We call this an “ecology of the commons”. 

The book chapter is part of an ambitious anthology by Anne Grear and David Bollier titled ​”The Great Awakening: New Modes of Life amidst Capitalist Ruins​”  (​Punctum Books, Santa Barbara) ​​

​I​t is an ambitious ​anthology that brings together contributions from​ ​Sam Adelman, David Bollier, Primavera De Filippi, Vito De Lucia, Richard Falk, Anna Grear, Paul B. Hartzog, Andreas Karitzis, Xavier Labayssiere, ​and ​Maywa Montenegro de Wit​, as well as including our work.​ In their own words: 

“It is clear that the multiple, entangled crises produced by neoliberal capitalism cannot be resolved by existing political and legal institutions, which are imploding under the weight of their own contradictions. Present and future needs can be met by systems that go beyond the market and state. With experiments and struggle, a growing pluriverse of commoners from Europe and the US to the Global South and cyberspace are demonstrating some fundamentally new ways of thinking, being and acting…. We learn about seed-sharing in agriculture, blockchain technologies for networked collaboration, cosmo-local​ ​peer production of houses and vehicles, creative hacks on law, and new ways of thinking and enacting a rich, collaborative future. This surge of creativity is propelled by the social practices of commoning new modes of life for creating and sharing wealth in fair-minded, ecologically respectful ways.​” ​

The ​anthology will be available in September​ 2020 through Punctum Books here. A preprint of the book chapter can be seen here.

Lead image:  CityTree עץבעיר 

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“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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Click here to download the German edition. The forthcoming English edition will be available in September 2019.

Video reposted from YouTube, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

The post Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

The post The German Edition of Our Book, “Frei, Fair und Lebendig”, is Launched appeared first on P2P Foundation.

David Bollier and Silke Helfrich: If there is one recurring theme described in this book, it is the importance of exploring the inner dimensions of commoning as a social form, moving beyond economistic notions of the commons as a mere resource to be managed. Commoning is an attitude, an ethic, an impulse, a need and a satisfaction – a way of being that is deeply inscribed within the human species. But it is up to us to make it thrive. We must choose to practice commoning and reflect on its impact on our lives and the Earth, the more consciously, the better.

The great appeal of commoning is simultaneously a reason for its invisibility: it calls on us to see the world from a fundamentally different perspective, acknowledging that the self emerges from relationships with others and can exist only through these relationships and as a result of them. Failing to perceive the diverse types of “we’s” that exist and their complex dynamics and logics is tantamount to trying to live on Earth without an atmosphere. Our lives are enframed and defined by “we’s.” These collectives are not merely the sum of individuals, but distinct systems of organization that emerge from our encounters with each other and committed joint action.

More: a commons is dynamic and evolving, and therefore proposes a more realistic idea of human life. It does not propose a static economic perspective that assumes what we supposedly are; it recognizes that we are always becoming. Commoning draws upon our distinct, situated identities, cultures and roots as essential elements of governance, production, law and culture. This perspective helps us grasp that we not only create the world; the world in turn shapes and creates us. So we must attend to the larger, holistic consequences of our own world-creating capacities, to make sure that the selves that we each cultivate through our relationships and world-making are the selves that we truly wish to be and worlds we wish to live in. Or as Lau Tzu put it with such wisdom, “Be a pattern for the world.”

The commons quivers with aliveness precisely because it is a reflexive, open system that resists attempts to make it schematic, regularized and tightly controlled. The commons is alive because it offers space for people to apply their own imaginations and energy to solve problems – and human ingenuity and cooperation tend to produce many surprising results. In their self-created zones of freedom, commoners have the latitude to build their own worlds without the tyranny of the Market/State, bureaucratic procedures or confining social roles (consumer, seller, employee, expert).

Needless to say, an economy and society that truly respects commons requires a re-imagination of politics itself. They require social processes that invite collective participation and express collective sentiments, not “leaders” who may be only crudely accountable to people and captive to capital and its imperatives. Commons require a primary focus on meeting everyone’s needs, not on catering to the ever-proliferating wants of the few. Expanding the scope and scale of commons so that they can become a powerful alternative to capital driven markets, and spur mutual coordination and federation, introduces a whole new set of challenges, of course. It requires that we work for new configurations of state authority and clear limits on market power. Yet there are many promising scenarios of policy, law, governance and politics that seek to advance this vision: the focus of our next anthology.

Photo by bruskme

The post Patterns of Commoning: A Finale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Fortunately, there exist many experiments with non-capitalist modes of assessing and exchanging value, sharing goods and services, and making decisions that can help us transition to a more sustainable political economy based on principles of degrowth. One of the best ways to generate non-capitalist subjects, objects, and spaces comes from systems designed to manage common pool resources like the atmosphere, ocean, and forests. Commons-based systems depend upon self-governance and reciprocity. People rely on and take responsibility for each other, finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill their needs. This also allows communities to define the guidelines and incentives for guiding their own economic behavior, affording people more autonomy and greater opportunity for protecting and cultivating shared values. Commons-based systems cut across the private/public, market/state dichotomy and present alternative economic arrangements defined by communities.

According to David Bollier, “As the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”³ Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet.

From the perspective of researchers, there are several different ways to define the commons. In most cases, the commons are understood to be material objects. For example, the atmosphere and ocean are global commons, because they are resources we must all learn to regulate and share collectively. This notion of the commons as material resource goes hand-in-hand with another notion that the commons can be both material and immaterial, a product of either nature or culture. Using this second definition enhances our appreciation for what is often undervalued by traditional economic measures such as care work, shared knowledge production, and cultural preservation. Together, both these perspectives are helpful in devising political and economic strategies for managing the commons, which remains the dominant interest of most commons researchers and policymakers.

Nevertheless, whether material or immaterial, the commons are viewed as a given concept or thing, ignoring that more fundamentally they are generated by social practices. In other words, there are no commons without commoners to enact them. From an enactive perspective, commons are not objects, but actions generated by many different actors in relationship. Whereas the prior notions assume that individuals need to be regulated and punished to prevent overconsumption (an assumption known as the tragedy of the commons), an enactive perspective on commons conceives the individual in relation to everyone (and everything) involved in co-managing the more-than-human commons. It therefore diverges from the prior two notions in assuming a relational epistemology rather than being premised on a liberal epistemology based on the individual. From a Buddhist perspective, one could say that the commons emerges co-dependently with a field of objects, forces, and passions entangling the human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and machinic.

The more-than-human commons thus does not dualistically separate the material and immaterial commons, the commons (as object) from the commoners (as subjects), nor does it separate humans from nonhumans. Instead, the commons are always understood as a more-than-human achievement, neither wholly produced by nature or culture. Commoning becomes, as Bayo Akomolafe points out, a material-discursive doing shaped by practices and values that engage humans with their environments.⁴ In Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that all commons exceed conceptual distinctions, because they are not things; rather, they are another way of being, thinking about, and shaping the world.⁵ Commoning is about sharing the responsibility for stewardship with the intent to construct a fair, free, and sustainable world—a goal that is all the more important given the unequal distribution of risks posed by intensifying climate change.

Read the entire essay/issue at The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.

Zack Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Process Studies graduate program at Claremont School of Theology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring process-relational, contemplative, and engaged Buddhist approaches to political economy, sustainability, and China. His most recent writings provide critical and constructive reflection on mindfulness trends, while developing contemplative pedagogies and practices for addressing social and ecological issues. He is a research specialist at Toward Ecological Civilization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. He has also received lay precepts from Fo Guang Shan, an engaged Buddhist organization based in Taiwan, and attended numerous meditation and monastic retreats in Thailand, China, and Taiwan. For further information and publications, please connect: https://cst.academia.edu/ZackWalsh, https://www.facebook.com/walsh.zack, and https://www.snclab.ca/category/blog/contemplative-ecologies/.

Illustration by Alicia Brown

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The British web magazine Beshara just published an interview of me, “The Revival of the Commons,” by Editor Jane Clark. It’s a beautifully presented webpage. Here’s one excerpt:

Jane:  …When there is this deep encounter with other beings, it triggers a natural desire to reciprocate, to share and communicate. So perhaps the commons brings out that aspect of our humanity which naturally desires to work toward the flourishing of our fellow creatures?

David: Yes, and I think this is why there is a kind of invisible tropism towards the commons. People sense precisely this potential of the commons and, without fully understanding or even if they have certain resistances or skepticism, they are nevertheless drawn to it. Through the many talks I have given and the conversations I have had over the years, I have come to see that the commons appeals to something very deep in people. It is about making human connections, about speaking to larger circumstances in life – and to deep time, both historical and present day. And it does so without all the encrustations of theological dogma.

These days there are very few discourses available to us where we can explore these matters outside of a theological one. Some kind of broad, cross-cultural exploration of our common humanity is long overdue. So I think that this aspect of the commons will grow as more and more people become involved with it.

Here’s another general introduction to the commons: an interview that I did with Adam Simpson of the Next System Project. The podcast — Episode 17, “Social Transformation Through The Commons” — is a 35-minute conversation that covers the basics about the commons. Adam was quite skilled in asking the right questions and eliciting things that might not have otherwise occurred to me!

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of visiting Kingston Radio, WKNY, in Kingston, New York, where Jimmy Buff is showing what a community radio station ought to sound like! Amazing diversity of music, news, cultural perspectives, and community-building. Jimmy interviewed me about the commons, and Peter Buffett, Co-President of the NoVo Foundation, about the state of the world.

Finally, I’m pleased to have played a role in a newly released theatrical film called 24 Davids, a documentary by Canadian filmmaker Celine Baril.

The film is an idiosyncratic, oddly compelling film about a lot of cosmic issues and societal challenges as seen through the eyes of 24 people named David on three continents. Including me, filmed circa 2014. I look a bit younger.

Baril used portions of my interview as the voiceover for the film’s trailer, which should give you a sense of the film’s ambitions and tone. Also, here’s a short clip from my interview.

24 Davids (Clip #1 – David Bollier) from NFB/marketing on Vimeo.

I loved encountering the other Davids. Each of us offered our own grand speculations about the future of global civilization. Baril slyly provides a subtle emotional undertone to the film, linking a lot of different people and gritty everyday realities together. Unfortunately, I can’t find a listing of where the film is showing, but it appears that that AMC, a US theater chain, has scheduled some showings. Perhaps the film will make it to Netflix sometime.

*             *              *

Let me end by re-posting a lovely poem that Beshara magazine included at the end of my interview. David Attwooll’s “The Binding of the Moor,” is about an attempt in the nineteenth century to enclose the ancient wetland Otmoor in Oxfordshire, which led to the Otmoor Riots of 1829-1830.

We took a fine oat-sheaf, tight bound at the waist And set it on fire; and while it was burning Our Lady of Otmoor rode all round the moor-edge Until the great sheaf was just ash on the ground.

Her shining cloak circled the land that was Common And granted forever to us local people For kypeing of fish, for eel scuttles of osier And fowling and keeping allotments of geese.

Many hundred’s year later, the gentry’s men came And bound her with fences, and drained her with ditches. They built mighty banks and stopped up the Ray. They enclosed all our birthright and forced us all out.

So men blackened their faces and wore women’s cloaks And ventured at night with hatchets and billhooks And tore down the bindings. On the sixth of September All in broad daylight, a thousand folk walked

Seven miles round the moorland, past all seven towns Pulling down fences in spite of the Riot Act. Sixty-six of us they arrested that day And carted us off to the City for trial.

When we reached Oxford it was St Giles Fair Where the holiday mob freed all of us prisoners. We won the day, but the moor stayed a patchwork: A hundred years passed ’til the bindings were loosed.

When the waters came home and the chessboard dissolved They planned the M40 to drive through her middle: Over three thousand people bought one-foot square parcels Of Alice’s Meadow to stop them at last.

The only road now is a path full of puddles, The Roman road’s agger is a scatter of stones. The moor’s safe – for now – and free to the people And the bright cloak of water is home to the birds.

The post Some Recent Interviews about the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’re talking about a different mental register of paradigm for understanding the world. For so long, we’ve had this presumption of fiction that the homo economicus, the utility maximizing individual, is the chief agent in the way to see the world. The commons says there is a different way to see humanity—not simply as a notional ideal, but as a practical operational system and there’s countless examples out there.

This audio interview (and transcript) with our colleague David Bollier was conducted by Adam Simpson and originally published by The Next System Project.

David Bollier joins us this week to discuss “the commons” and what such a concept means for social transformation. You can read more about David’s ideas in his paper for the NewSystems: Possibilities and Proposals series, and also read more of his work at www.Bollier.org.

Interview transcript

Adam Simpson: Welcome back to The Next System Podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson, joined today by self-described commons activist and director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, David Bollier. David is the author of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. He’s also the editor of From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond with John Clippinger, as well as Patterns of Commoning, and The Wealth of the Commons with Silke Helfrich.

Wouldn’t you know it, David is here to talk to me today about the concept of the commons. David, welcome to The Next System Podcast.

David Bollier: It’s great to be here.

Adam Simpson: Great. Well, before we get into the concept of the commons, David, I wanted to ask you: How did you first come to learn about this concept, what made you embrace it, what really drew you to this kind of work that you do?

David Bollier: Well, in the 1970s and 80s when I was working for Ralph Nader, all of my friends were fighting what I would now call enclosures of the commons, meaning privatization and commodification of things like federally funded research, public lands and the air waves, which are used by broadcasters for free and so forth. All these were being taken private, but we really didn’t have a language for talking about this. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s when I encountered the work of Elinor Ostrom, a great scholar of the commons and I realized that the commons was a great way to describe how things get done outside of the market and the state, meaning through self-organized activities and self-governance to manage projects that create things of value. I realized this at a time when neoliberal capitalism and its policies were getting worse and worse.

It was essentially colonizing and taking over all of these commons in our life. Not only the resources that belong to us, but our ability to self-manage them for our benefit. They were basically appropriated by the corporate world for global trade and turned into private property.

I realized that the commons had great potential as an alternative political vision that is not some unified movement or ideology, like in the past, but something that is locally distributed and grounded in things that people love and want to protect. So, the commons is about sharing those things that belong to all of us that we want to protect in our ability to manage them for our purposes.

Adam Simpson: Right. It seems like you started with intellectual property as a way of thinking about the commons, and not, say, the management of environmental resources?

David Bollier: Well, that was actually, you might say the proximate cause, because in the late 90s you may recall the world wide web had just gone live in 1991, and here was a system that encouraged automatic sharing, yet copyright was being asserted to prevent us from sharing…

Adam Simpson: This was the time of Napster…

David Bollier: Yes, it was the time of Napster; it was the time of the emergence of open source software, and then a few years later, of the blogosphere and many other innovations. All innovations in which value and creativity was based on sharing and collaboration, something that conventional economics and markets don’t understand because they want to create things that are artificially scarce and individually ownable, as opposed to something that’s shared.

Copyright was a very important force for me in bringing into focus that we needed to protect our commons, and in fact, I helped co-create the group called Public Knowledge. It’s a Washington advocacy group to protect the knowledge commons: on Internet and telecommunications policy, it’s trying to protect shareable information.

Adam Simpson: Yeah. It reminds me that one of my first interactions with this space would have been the late Aaron Schwartz and his work on public knowledge.

David Bollier: A real pioneer. I mean, there was a whole movement that has ebbed and flowed, but Larry Lessig, when he established Creative Commons licenses to allow legal sharing of content, that was a huge innovation. It provided a legal infrastructure for people to share. You have to remember, copyright was based on any little scribble or a guitar riff being born as private property. There was no way for stuff to be legally shared, so everything was implicitly piracy if you simply imitated or used somebody else’s work. Creative Commons licenses were an enormous innovation that did what Congress or federal authorities would not do, which is to legalize sharing.

Adam Simpson:  I heard you imply a critical take on Elinor Ostrom’s work when you said that she focused on the commons in terms of resources, could you elucidate what you meant?

David Bollier: Let’s first introduce Elinor Ostrom. I mean she was a Indiana University political scientist who, over the course of 30 or 40 years, from the 1970s until her death in 2012, studied lots of natural resource-based commons: forests, fisheries, farm land, irrigation water, etc. She showed that contrary to the whole “tragedy of the commons” fable that Garret Hardin proposed in a famous 1968 essay, people can and do self-organize to sustainably manage resources. Her life’s work was, first of all, studying that on the ground level and then creatively theorizing to explain how and why that occurs. Well, she, as a woman working in the male-dominated economics professions, saw that social relationships mattered in creating things of economic value. That was a lot of what her work was about. But, at the end the day, she’s working within a rational economic framework as opposed to a cultural or social framework.

In some ways, she was providing an interesting counterpoint to the conventional economic theories. In other ways, she was still working within, what you might call, the ontological framework: the premises of our human relationships, rationality, and behavior. The very dominant theme then was the prisoner’s dilemma in which people supposedly are always trying to calculatedly maximize their personal gain, which of course happens but it’s not the full story of what humanity is about.

I think that there are other dimensions of our propensity to give, to collaborate, to share, to be part of something larger than ourselves, which is arguably non-rational and haven’t had been adequately conceptualized within economics. The commons helps to deal with that.

Adam Simpson: Part of the intervention of the commons, it seems to me, is a cultural shift as well because in the prevailing context of capitalism and neoliberalism, it makes sense for people to try to maximize their outcomes, but in the framework of the commons, it doesn’t make sense to put this kind of personal gain at the forefront.

David Bollier: Well, let’s just say nobody wants to be a sucker in being taken advantage of. So if the prevailing system is ‘get all that you can for yourself,’ you are a sucker if you just give it away. However, if you can develop a sufficient critical mass with protectable boundaries around your shared resources and generative capacity the way open source software does, the way a lot of local systems do, the way countless different commons do, you can create a different paradigm that is—I think—more humanly satisfying, that benefits more people without the gross inequality and exploitation that occurs now, and that is more ecologically benign because it doesn’t have the growth imperative that capitalism has. So you can start to reintegrate people with each other and with natural systems.

We’re talking about a different mental register of paradigm for understanding the world. For so long, we’ve had this presumption of fiction that the homo economicus, the utility maximizing individual, is the chief agent in the way to see the world. The commons says there is a different way to see humanity—not simply as a notional ideal, but as a practical operational system and there’s countless examples out there.

Adam Simpson: On the notion of rational economic man, it seems to me that with a fairly rudimentary knowledge of anthropology one would see numerous examples of commons. I don’t know, this seems fundamentally a question about human nature: homo economicus and “rational economic man” versus a kind of collaborative creature that I think most social scientists understand humans to be.

David Bollier: Well, first of all, I’m dubious about saying there is some essentialist human nature. Having said that, evolutionary scientists are showing that our propensity to cooperate seems to be in-born even though, of course, we’re quite capable of competitive and quite awful things as well. But part of it, it comes down to what the culture validates and nourishes or what it allows to become the cultural norm. We, of course, within capitalism know what those norms are. But in some ways, we do have more capacity to create these alternatives worlds in making them sustainably not just as some fantasy or a cult or isolated community. We can see this in many different domains from natural resources to urban spaces to digital spaces.

I think it’s important to understand that this is a cross-sectoral/cross-cultural paradigm that can give us a way out of some of our very profound problems today.

Adam Simpson: A key concept in this conversation within this framework of the commons is the notion of property and ownership. I wanted to ask how does our current system of property and ownership fail us and how is the paradigm of the commons different?

David Bollier: Well, property law tends to privilege the whole idea of individual exclusive control, and it presumes that that is the only way to go, even though individual property ownership tends to deny the realities of our social connection to each other and our embeddedness in ecosystems. In other words, it denies relationality as the basis of human life because it focuses mostly on simply market exchange of objectified things that have been put inside an envelope of property.  So for instance, you have snippets of music sampling defined as appropriations of private property. It’s been taken to such extremes that all sorts of knowledge, like the breast cancer susceptibility gene, can be privately owned, nano-matter is being patented, and it goes on and on.

Basically, there is, of course, an important role for private property, but so much private property is, in fact, corporate property.  This is consequential for the natural ecosystem, because it’s gotten out of control. This dominion of private property is reaching extremes, with various cascading environmental problems and climate change happening as capitalism tries to propertize everything in the world.

The commons is an attempt to assert, “No, there need to be limits to private property and some things need to be collectively managed for the collective good and not simply leveraged as much as possible for market gain.”

Adam Simpson: I mean, this is exactly my next question: the question of commodification and enclosure. I heard, earlier today, that the human genome is 20% patented. What would you say are the consequences and the implications of this kind of continuous enclosure, this commodification of everything? What does it mean for our society?

David Bollier: Well, we’re living through it right now: it means grotesque inequality, with many shared common needs not being met. This is, in the large part, driven by the private propertization and marketization of everything. I mean, even social problems themselves are marketized. We have to create new kinds of property rights, for example, pollution rights, in order to tackle pollution. Or we need to financialize incentives to deal with nature, like let’s monetize how much pollination bees do for crops. Let’s put a market value on that and create a market security that can be traded as a way to solve the problems of bees disappearing.

In other words, it’s grotesquely out of control. We are trying to use property and market incentives to deal with precisely the problems these structures and incentives have created in the first place. Can we start to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature instead? There are things that are outside of the market that should remain inalienable and not be propertized. I think this is one of the pre-eminent concerns of our time, but paradoxically even progressives and liberals who are tied to the market growth grand narrative can’t go there, because they see the only way to solve problems is further growth, further growth, further growth, and that’s something that we have to step up to and deal with.

Adam Simpson: Related to the question of growth—you suggest that continuous growth is one the maxims of our system. We can’t even have a stable or a steady-state economy, as it’s called. We have to always keep growing. How might an advocate of the commons understand the concept of economic growth or the steady state or de-growth, as some people call it?

David Bollier: Well, capital is driving this because capital wants more and more return and things that are un-owned—not yet propertized—are ripe resources for the market machine. A commoner would say, “How can we create things that are simply not for sale?”

I think we need to cultivate this ethic that many things are not for sale and devise either the legal or technological or social norms to prevent that from happening. We have to realize that the growth paradigm is no longer the tool for improved civilization in human betterment. It’s becoming destructive of those very things, yet capital insists that that’s the only way forward.

We have to have a reckoning on that, and it’s not simply going to happen at the macro level first, we have to cultivate that at the micro level where we live: in our own medium of productive needs.

That’s what the commons can do: meet needs in decommodified ways, where you don’t need to have market exchange. Your needs and what the market wants are different things entirely.

Adam Simpson: Related to the question of growth is the question of value; our market centered system depends on the enormous amount of ‘externalities’ that go unaccounted for. How does the concepts of the commons inform your understanding of value?

David Bollier: Well, market economics regards anything that can be exchanged and it has a price as being valuable. The commons regards all sorts of things that don’t have a price as also being valuable, but that doesn’t have any standing within the conventional political or economic discourse. For example, the value of rivers, lakes, oceans as natural systems of wildlife, species and genes as natural systems; the value of care work that work women and family, and unfortunately very few men are involved in. All of these are non-market phenomena unless they’re turned into something for sale. The whole notion of the economy which focuses on exchange value needs to start to focus on use value, meaning what’s valuable for us to use whether or not it has a price, whether or not money is exchange to make it happen.

The commons is about encouraging use value not as mediated by price or supply and demand, but by social need in negotiation, in coordination, and that’s a different proposition than the market.

Adam Simpson: You mentioned care work; I want to follow-up on that because that appeared in quite a few different passages of different works of yours I’ve read. As you mentioned, the market interpretation of care work would be that it is a service that is either bought or sold or traded, etcetera. As you stated, I’d like to reemphasize that whether we’re talking about child care or elder care, this is mostly done by women. It’s mostly unpaid and when it is unpaid, it’s mostly done by women. I want to know how the idea of care work fits into the framework of the commons.

David Bollier: Well, it is a major sector of non-market life that is regarded as external to the economy, and because it’s external to the economy and it’s therefore not productive, it’s not valuable in any price sense or a return on investment sense. Some ingenious people have been able to turn care work—elder care, child care or household activities—into a market. Suddenly, it’s valuable. The problem is that’s inconsistent with the very notion of care which cannot be regimented. You can’t put a price on what real care is about because care involves sacrificing of yourself. You’re not maximizing your utility; you’re giving of yourself to someone else. You’re spending a lot of time with them in ways that are not productive or creating value in a market sense.

There is an inherent contradiction involved in marketizing care work. Care work creates a problem for economics in the sense that we obviously know that care is essential to a human civilization. In a society, somebody needs to raise and enculturate the children, somebody needs to educate them, old people need to be taken care of. But the problem is that it doesn’t fit within market categories and economics doesn’t quite know how to deal with it—but of course it has to be done.

That’s a theoretical limitation of conventional economics. It doesn’t want to go there because there’s no exchange value going on, so I think the ambition should be to integrate the commons into our notion of the economy so that the reproduction of life, families, households has stand-in in economic analysis as opposed to, “Oh, if not being paid for, it’s not worth anything.”

Adam Simpson: I want to move on to the possibilities that the commons unlocks. I’ve read about the commons being used to support programs ranging from a basic income, to environmental protectionism or even, I think, Peter Barnes’ combination of the two with a cap and dividend program around carbon emissions. Are there examples you would highlight that you come your mind immediately as the kind of political, economic and, or social programs that are unlocked through a more detailed understanding of the common?

David Bollier: Well, this is a frontier right now because the conventional state is so allied with markets and capital as the only way to get things done that it doesn’t consider the commons as something worth pursuing. It doesn’t generate tax revenue, or at least not as much tax revenue as market growth does, so the state is either indifferent or uncomprehending of the commons.

That said, there are a handful of interesting experiments that are trying to use state power to support the commons. You mentioned Peter Barnes, things like the Alaska Permanent Fund in which the state legislature created a trust to take revenues from state oil sales, put it in a trust fund owned by every resident in Alaska and every year, residents of Alaska get between $1,000 and $2,000 from that fund. Even people like Sarah Palin support it.

Well, the state could create trust funds for natural resources that we all own: groundwater, forests, minerals. This would be one way to protect them from simply being exploited by rip-and-run companies, so that the public could get some benefit from them and steward them so they’re not simply leaving ecological destruction in their wake.

That’s one interesting model. There’s others. In Europe, there’s a lot of cities that are developing so-called “public-commons partnerships,” where the city government is collaborating with self-organized neighborhood groups or other initiatives to facilitate them doing work that bureaucracies would otherwise do. It’s a great advance because the citizens care about their neighborhood, they want it to work, they can devise their own systems that are not legalistic or bureaucratic or come with lots of high overhead. It’s really a way to get people re-engaged with the city, and for governments to support genuine citizen participation. Another example might be participatory budgeting where people can have a direct say in how budgets are allocated.

There are some of these things but, frankly, this is more of a frontier that is now being explored as commons grow and start to bump up against conventional systems, market systems, bureaucratic systems.

Adam Simpson: I wanted to ask specifically about the notion of finance and money. In a lot of ways, money is a public utility that we use to lubricate exchanges, but money is something that’s really not controlled publicly as a utility in the current system, although there are experiments like with alternative currencies and things like that. How does the monetary system fit into the framework of the commons?

David Bollier: Well, people don’t realize that 95% of the money in the United States is created privately through banks. They give out loans and that creates new money. They don’t necessarily have a significant amount of money in the bank. Their loan creates the money, and they then reap the gains of that through interest payments all the time. Essentially, the US government has surrendered its prerogative as a sovereign state. It has surrendered the power to create money to private banks—and all the profits from that are privately capitalized and controlled.

This means that we, the people of the United States, don’t reap the benefits of that power to create money. This is called the power of ‘seigniorage.’ Well, could we capture some of that value ourselves by having the government or its designated trustees create money rather than banks? We saw, for example, how the government used that power to bail out the banks in 2008: it essentially created money to bail them out without it being considered public debt that needed to be repaid. That’s only because the government has that power: the state has that power.

Why can’t we have quantitative easing for the environment or social needs without it being considered public debt that needs to be repaid? We could do that responsibly so long as the money is sapped up through taxes so that we don’t create inflation. Mary Miller, a British monetary specialist has written about this in a book called Debt or Democracy? The point is, these alternative ways of creating money are entirely feasible and responsible as opposed to simply surrendering that power to private entities to reap all the gains.

Adam Simpson: Of course, sovereign fiat currency issuers have the power to create money in such a way and right now, we let private banks do it. Are you compelled by the notion of publicly owned banks or other institutions that might have another way of generating this for the people?

David Bollier: Well, public banks would be a huge improvement as well—because instead of a city or state governments having to borrow money from private banks at their exorbitant interest rates, they could radically lower their interest cost. For example, in creating major infrastructure, they could save a quarter, a third or more of the cost by having their own bank. A city, if it were to open its own public bank, deposit city funds in it, and then make loans, could save lots in infrastructure.

Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute is the leading expert on this. A lot of states and localities are now exploring public banks as a way to throw off the yoke of dependency on private banking. It’s entirely feasible.

Adam Simpson: Right. Now, I want to talk about the theory of change here. In your model’s paper, I believe it’s called Commoning as a Socially Transformative Paradigm, you mentioned that some parts of the left that rely on top down notions of theories of change like “if we get this elected office or enough people in this legislative body, we can affect change.” What do you think that these pathways that rely on the notion of taking political power, what do you think they get wrong about the theory of change?

David Bollier: Well, I think that as those top down approaches become autonomous onto themselves, they lose connection with the people they’re trying to serve—the way the Democratic Party has, for example, and they become a self-replicating political elite. Moreover, they lose sight of the fact that simply taking power is a dead letter if you can’t prevail on a transformative agenda or have the will power and imagination to do so. We saw how the left took over power in Greece in how it was pointless because they were trumped by international capital.

Even as a sovereign nation, they could not deal with their debt crisis because the international banks were saying, “Too bad, we hold all the trump cards.” I saw the same thing in Bolivia where Ivan Morales took power from the left as an indigenous person. He essentially had to retain the extractivist economy that had existed before because of their dependence on international capital and markets.

If we’re talking about being transformative, simply taking power through the state is maybe necessarily but is quite insufficient. It’s not going to be transformative unless it’s really organically connected to local change and local change has a different political and cultural logic. In other words, it doesn’t want to simply placate or accommodate or even support international capital.

I think that the seeds of change have to come from the bottom and that when they do, they will express a different political culture through people’s personal and social practices. That has to be origins at this point because the rest of the system is too indentured: too tied up with the existing logic of the system, and so we need some external forces to intervene because within the logic of the existing system it is just is not going to happen.

Adam Simpson: You talk about not just the commons, but the verb commoning. I was hoping to get you to elaborate on how commoning represent an effective theory of change and if there are some examples of commoning that you might refer people to.

David Bollier: I’m very suspicious of novel words being our salvation, and we’ve seen the lifecycle of the word sustainability, for example, where it’s now meaningless because everybody is sustainable. The point is what’s happening that’s achieving the goal of that word? The truth of the matter is there is no such thing as a common as such, there is commoning: the social practices of talking, negotiating, working it out for shared goals, bringing diverse perspectives into alignment. This is the processing of commoning, and this is a form of democratic empowerment and governance that can happen right now without permission from the government or the corporations. We can do it ourselves in lots of arenas.

Commoning, you might say, is the seedbed of a new democratic practice. Well, Peter Linebaugh, great historian of the commons says there is no commons without commoning, and I think that’s a way to keep the vitality and aliveness of the commons. In fact, it’s the only to keep it alive because if you’re simply mouthing the word as a buzzword or marketing or messaging strategy, it’s dead right then. You have to have a community of people who have the commitment, the activity and it has to be constantly recreated.

To put it in high flown words this is the relational theory of value. The value is created through people enacting their relationships together through commons, so that’s where I think really transformative change is going to come from. It needs that grounding in people’s lives, in local practice.

Adam Simpson: Thank you, so that was actually my last question. I think it’s a great place to end actually, but is there anything you’d want to add for our listeners about the subject of the commons or about your work?

David Bollier: Well, we didn’t discuss so much the broad range of things going on but I would just say, first of all, there’s lot of people that are, you might say, commoning and don’t even know it. The value of the commons language and vocabulary is it helps validate something that they might consider trivial, marginal, not consequential. But it is, and I think that’s part of the importance of the language of the commons, especially as a counterpoint to the market narratives that are seen as the only legitimate, the only productive way of producing things.

Second, I would point out that there are lots of projects in different domains. I mentioned the city as commons, lots of digital projects from open source software to Wikipedia and dozens of Wikis to open access scholarly publishing and it goes on and on, which are forms of commoning that are incredibly productive, creative arguably more so than the proprietary versions.

I just wanted to say that there is a broad variety of social activities that are commoning right now, so this is not some utopian abstract thing, it’s happening; it’s practical whether it’s recognized culturally as commons: as a different form of value generation. That’s precisely what a lot of the commons movement is all about: validating this as an important activity that needs to be protected and extended.

I would just leave it at that and what people know that there is a lot of resources out there. I can direct them to my website blog which Bollier.org, but there’s other important ones like the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, which has a lot of stuff on peer production, open design, and manufacturing. You can go to the Commons Transition website, and then in Europe there’s quite a few different sites, if you have more specialized interest, for instance in Barcelona, which is in the vanguard of a lot of activities around the commons.

I just wanted to end with the notion that this happening, even if it’s not being culturally recognized—at least in America.

Adam Simpson: Well, to our listeners, thank you for listening this week and, David, thanks so much for joining us.

David Bollier: Thank you.

The post Social Transformation Through ‘The Commons’ with David Bollier appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Open Access Scholarly Publishing

For generations, scientists and scholars have used scholarly journals to share their latest research discoveries and theories. These journals – usually run by commercial publishers selling subscriptions to university libraries and research institutes – provide the easiest, most efficient way for academic disciplines to advance their collective knowledge.

But the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies has called into question the expense and information restrictions of this commercially driven system. Thanks to digital publishing, it has become far cheaper and easier for a field of researchers to share their specialized research with anyone on the planet. To be sure, there are still costs associated with editing a journal and the peer review of articles, but Web-based publishing has radically reduced (and sometimes eliminated) the expenses of print production, distribution and marketing.

Most commercial journal publishers, not surprisingly, have seen these developments as a troubling threat to their business models. They have continued to assert strict copyright control over articles, putting them behind Web paywalls and charging high subscription fees. In short, they have limited access to research that could otherwise be made freely available – research that taxpayer money has often financed.

In the early 2000s, a variety of academic researchers in the US and Europe began to address this significant problem by starting the open access, or OA, movement in scholarly publishing. Its goal has been to make academic research freely and openly available to anyone in perpetuity. Open access advocates have had to pioneer new revenue models for academic journal publishing, overcome the limitations of copyright law by using Creative Commons licenses,¹ and fight fierce opposition from commercial publishers, uninformed politicians and slow-moving university administrators.

Happily, these strong, sustained efforts to reclaim research from profit-driven publishers and reclaim it for the academic commons have had many great successes. The open access journals started by the Public Library of Science in 2003² have been followed by thousands of other publications that honor open access in one fashion or another. One example is the International Journal of the Commons,³ an open access journal published by the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Major funders of scientific research, including governments, have started to require that research be published under OA principles, and commercial journals have allowed academics to self-archive their work in open access repositories. Some of the largest journal publishers have themselves started OA journals, joining a small group of niche publishers that have pioneered OA publishing as a profitable enterprise.

As of July 2015, the Directory of Open Access Journals had indexed 10,354 open access, peer-reviewed journals that had published more than 1.8 million articles. A flood of major research universities, including Harvard University, now require their faculty to publish works under open access principles. While there remain many challenges in making scientific and scholarly research more accessible, open access journals have become one of the most significant success stories in reclaiming and reinventing knowledge commons.

 – David Bollier

Book Publishing as a Commons for Regional Culture

Dissatisfied with the costs and slowness of conventional book publishing, some newcomers are trying to re-introduce the craft, care and social relationships that once prevailed in the field. One of the most innovative examples is Levellers Press, a worker-owned and -managed co-operative in Amherst, Massachusetts (USA), the offshoot of a regional photocopying business, Collective Copies.

Levellers Press – inspired by the seventeenth-century commoners who denounced the privatization of common lands and called for greater equality – wants to give authors new opportunities to reach readers, and first-time authors new opportunities to publish. This means changing the relationships among publishers, authors and readers. As one local observer put it, “It’s something of a throwback to a different era, when publishers were also printers and worked more closely with writers on their books – and when books were produced not just for the sales potential but for their literary and informative value.”⁴

The authors who publish their books through Levellers Press usually live in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Many Levellers books cover regional topics that might not otherwise find a book publisher. Levellers’ first book, for example, was Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, by a retired Amherst College professor, Robert Romer. Since its inception in 2009, Levellers has published more than fifty books on a wide range of topics – fiction, poetry memoirs, social issues, health. Books are sold in local markets as well as via the Levellers and Amazon websites.

Two factors have been critical to Levellers’ success – its skillful use of new technologies to develop a new publishing model, and its founder, Steve Strimer, a worker-owner of Collective Copies since 1997. Strimer realized that the publishing marketplace was changing radically, and that a niche printer such as Collective Copies could prosper by pioneering a new form of regional publishing. New types of software, printers, scanners and bindery machines now make it possible for a small enterprise like Levellers to do print runs of 100 to 200 books for less than $10 a copy.

Such small-batch “print on demand” publishing helps avoid costly, unsold inventory while also giving unproven authors an opportunity to find their voice and reach readers. This publishing model also allows great flexibility in meeting unpredictable consumer demand. If a spurt of interest arises for Vital Aging, a guide for older people, or Girls Got Kicks, a popular photo-documentary book about “badass females,” Levellers can quickly print a few dozen copies within a few days for a very low cost. Most Levellers’ authors sell between 200 and 300 copies. After The Wealth of the Commons was rejected by a dozen conventional publishers, Levellers agreed to publish the book in 2012 and welcomed the editors’ use of a Creative Commons license. The book went on to sell well and earn a profit for the worker cooperative.

Authors like the Levellers publishing model because it is simple and fair: Levellers absorbs the startup costs of layout, design and printing for any book it chooses to publish, and the author gets no advance payment and must do most of the marketing. But once production costs have been recouped – usually after sales of 100 to 150 books – the author and publisher split all revenues 50-50. This is a far better deal for authors than the usual royalty rates of 7 to 12 percent. Levellers also has a self-publishing arm called Off the Common Books, which assists authors in printing and marketing books themselves. This was a perfect arrangement for Patterns of Commoning because of the greater author autonomy, low pricing, open licensing and production control that Off the Common Books makes possible.

Levellers has enriched the western Massachusetts area by carving out a viable new market for books of local interest – memoirs by community personalities, biographies, histories, recipe books, and many other books of quirky authenticity. Strimer concedes that he does not need to be as market-focused as conventional publishers to be profitable, and that is mostly the point: the Levellers publishing model blends financial practicality with localism, and makes book publishing a feasible creative outlet for a diverse roster of people who might not otherwise become authors.

 – David Bollier

A Community of Commoners in the Guise of a Magazine

The first time the printing presses were fired up for Oya, the word “crisis” followed “print media” like a mantra. Since March 2010, thirty issues of this young magazine from Germany have been published every two months. Oya emboldens readers to forge new paths in living a “good life.” Yet the editors do not themselves decide what a “good life” is supposed to be, but instead set out on an expedition with their readers. The journey winds a varied trail from open workshops and urban gardens to art in public spaces and communal residential projects. The magazine has gone to ecovillages, farms practicing eco-responsible agriculture, and schools in the wild.

Commons principles lie at the core of the projects. They all depend upon voluntary contributions, communal action, self-organization, self-determination and a diversity of participants. As the motto of Oya’s online edition (www.oya-online.de) puts it, “Much more interesting than a bunch of like-minded people is a community of differently minded people.” While Oya tends to focus on practical applications, it is also a thoughtful and reflective magazine. Its essays question the foundations of contemporary thinking and squarely face up to failures and disillusionment.

The magazine has been published every two months since March 2010 with a lively layout and strong photos, and of course, on eco-friendly paper. Roughly 90 percent of the print edition is available online under a copyleft license, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA). The project is run by Oya Medien eG, a cooperative whose preamble states that its goal is not to enrich its members, but to publish a meaningful magazine. Oya has a large and loyal following that warrants print runs of 10,000 copies – a cost financed mostly by subscriptions, advertising and sales at select railway news stands. One tenth of the magazine’s 4,000 subscribers are members of the cooperative and support it with shares of 200 Euros each: an impressive show of support, but not quite enough to make the magazine financially stable. That will require 5,000 subscriptions. In the meantime, the editorial staff, administrators, and authors made substantial gifts to the magazine in the early years in the form of their work.

Oya is not a glossy lifestyle magazine designed to promote a bit of sustainable consumption. It is a magazine by and for activist-minded people who are deeply concerned with the state of the world and want to make a real difference. In this sense, Oya is far more than a magazine. It is a community of commoners trying to develop and share commons-based ways of living and forms of economic activity that can thrive in a world framed by climate change and Peak Oil.

 – Lara Mallien

A Growing Network of Commons-Oriented Magazines

A number of magazines are starting to provide regular coverage of the commons and companion-movements. In the United Kingdom, STIR magazine, for “stir to action,” has introduced a fresh, vigorous voice to the coverage of politics, culture and social transformation. In addition to its coverage of co-operatives, open source projects and alternative economics, STIR has focused a great deal on the commons movement and its initiatives. Like Oya, STIR has re-imagined the idea of a magazine as a focal point for bringing together an active community of reader/activists/thinkers. Many small, local projects with great potential are woven together to suggest hopeful new visions for the future.

Another notable British publication on the commons is The Commoner, edited by Massimo De Angelis. The website is a rich body of Web commentary and analyses from an autonomous Marxist political lens. Since May 2001, The Commoner has published fifteen substantive collections of essays exploring how the commons is relevant to care work, domestic labor, free software, energy, money, the body and value, among other topics. The Commoner explains that it is “about living in a world in which the doing is separated from the deed, in which this separation is extended in an increasing numbers of spheres of life, in which the revolt about this separation is ubiquitous.”

In the US, several web and print magazines are providing valuable coverage of the commons. Shareable, based in the Bay Area, is a Web magazine with plentiful, cutting-edge coverage of developments in the “sharing and collaborative economy.” Shareable has pioneered the idea of “shareable cities” with a set of detailed policies, and organized dozens of projects to promote alternative local projects and activism. Yes! Magazine – the magazine for alternative futures – features an ongoing series of articles on “commonomics,” the development of local alternatives, from local co-ops to public banks to community-owned solar projects. On the Commons magazine, published from Minneapolis, generally focuses on the great variety of North American commons, giving special attention to placemaking initiatives, water commons and organizing efforts.

Kosmos, a beautifully designed quarterly magazine with an international readership, has frequently focused on the commons as part of a larger agenda of building a “planetary civilization and world community.” Published out of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, Kosmos also explores transformational leadership and spiritual dimensions of making change.

The Case for the Commons is a bimonthly e-publication that explores the implications of dozens of judgments and orders about the commons passed by the Indian Supreme Court, High Court and state governments. Produced by the Foundation for Ecological Security in India, the e-publication interprets and popularizes the legal rulings, with an eye toward improving commons governance.

In Latin America, Pillku – “lovers of freedom” – is an online magazine about free technology and culture, commons, good living, collaboration and commun­ity property. It is published quarterly by Código Sur, a nonprofit organization whose purpose, among others, is to assist the development and socialization of these concerns by providing basic funding and technical infrastructure. The Pillku website provides a collaborative space for debate on free culture and commons in Latin America and seeks to build a society based on the freedom to share. Although it meets the standards of scientific and scholarly journals, Pillku as an organization and magazine is dedicated to collective creation, even in its editing processes. Most of the work needed to produce Pillku is voluntary. Contributions to the website come from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, generating a vast commons of information and building relationships among various projects. The extended Pillku community and editorial board are comprised of committed social organizations in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico.

In India, Pratham Books is a not-for-profit publisher that has the avowed mission of “putting a book in every child’s hand.” It is an outgrowth of the “Read India Movement,” which seeks to cultivate a joy of reading among children and encourage education. Identifying a lack of affordable, quality books for children in India, Pratham Books has set out to publish inexpensive books in English and ten other Indian languages. It works with a range of partners – a foundation, a conservation group, social media enterprises and other publishers – to reach children. To date, it has published over 280 titles and over 12 million books.

Of course, there are also a wide number of blogs and websites devoted to the commons. The leading academic website on the commons include those run by the International Association for the Study of the Commons, founded by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom, and the Digital Library on the Commons, which hosts an extensive collection of documents. Another much-used resource is the P2P Foundation’s blog and wiki, a vast archive of materials about digital peer production, the commons and related fields.

 – David Bollier and Santiago Hoerth Moura

 Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by brewbooks

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