A couple years ago, I worked on a project to make Loomio more accessible for people who are blind. I learned that there’s a big difference between saying “people who are blind” and “blind people”. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference to you, but for some folks, “people who are blind” emphasises the person and names one of their attributes, whereas “blind people” sounds like you’re reducing a whole group of complex people down to one attribute. There are many examples like this, whether it’s about people’s abilities, gender, ethnicity, whatever: I try to say “women” instead of “ladies”, “y’all” instead of “guys”, the list goes on.

Unfortunately, being careful with your language can backfire in many different ways. From a political strategy perspective, it’s an easy quirk to exploit.

When we take care with the words that we use, I would call that “being considerate”, but people have gotten a lot of mileage by relabelling “being considerate” as “political correctness” (here’s a browser extension to switch it back). These days, “special snowflake” is an even more effective political insult, exploiting the same dynamic. Essentially, the claim is that we’re “overly sensitive” (whatever that means), and we pay too much attention to words when there are much more important things to focus on. Rationally, it’s a dumb argument, but it’s very effective, partly due to this thing called “shame”. (I can feel ashamed when someone asks me to be more considerate with my language, so it’s a lot easier for me to dismiss them with a veiled insult rather than confront how my behaviour might be causing harm.)

When you’re in a community that puts a high value on using the “right” words for everything, a kind of local dialect can emerge. This can make your group unwelcoming to newcomers, who will feel embarrassed about saying the wrong thing. Again, from a political strategy perspective, that’s counter-productive if you’re trying to recruit people who don’t already know the lingo. The dialect can create internal problems too, as people inside your group gain status simply by using the right words for things (virtue signalling).

So all of this is just a disclaimer: while I take care of the language I use, I don’t spend a lot of time policing other people. Peter Block says “all transformation is linguistic”, which is a phrase worth meditating on. I think word choice is incredibly important, and also I think it’s usually not useful for me to tell people what words they should or shouldn’t use. So with all that introduction, I’m going to tell you about a word that really bugs me: America.

Wherever I go, I meet people who say “America” when they mean “the United States of America”. How many articles have you read about “North America” where the author clearly forgot about Mexico? I do it too: here’s a story I wrote a couple months ago where I’m talking about “US Americans”, but the word I used was “Americans”. Now I’m reading The Open Veins of Latin America, it’s got me paying more attention, due to passages like this:

“Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.”

Eduardo Galeano in The Open Veins of Latin America

It might take a little effort to train myself to stop saying “Americans” when I mean “US Americans”, but the lexical effort is symbolic of my intention to grow a different perspective.

The word choice is a little a reminder, a note to self: there’s no such place as America. I’m in the Americas. Plural.

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The post Make America Plural Again: The Paradox of Choosing Your Words Carefully appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“At the end of the day, we are what we do to change who we are.”

–Eduardo Galeano

As the idea of patterns of commoning suggests, commons are not objects, but actions. In Part II, we would like to illustrate the many forms that commoning takes by examining more than fifty noteworthy commons throughout the world.

The actions that breathe life into commons require at least three insights of everyone involved. First, a recognition that commons do not belong to one person alone. They belong to a community of shared interest that spans past, present and future generations. In this sense, the conventional idea of “ownership” is a category error – an inappropriate frame of reference for understanding commons.

This leads to a second insight, the idea that a commons is all about the relationships among everyone involved. Those relationships cannot be linear, hierarchical or merely bureaucratic because in a commons the terms of human relationship require authentic social connection and care. They must be based on a basic equality of responsibility, entitlement and mutual respect while also recognizing the diversity and uniqueness of the community. This is not just a matter of moral or ethical preferences; it is a necessity for the operation of a stable, robust commons.

Third, a commons needs to affirmatively develop the systems – social, legal, technological – to protect the integrity of its commoning from entropy and hostile outside forces, especially corporate enclosure. This is a perennial struggle of any commons. However, self-protective measures have become extraordinarily important in a time when global capitalism is relentlessly exploiting “free” and unpriced resources as feedstock for its voracious market machine.

These are just a few of the preconditions from which a logic of the commons can emerge – a logic that stands in notable contrast to the logic of the market and its emphasis on absolute individual rights, impersonal exchange, short-term profit and constant economic growth.  And yet commons, drawing upon different human capacities and working through different institutional forms, actually produce a great deal of value. We can see this in the forest commons of India and Romania, the Potato Park of Peru, the Helsinki Timebank and Cooperativa Integral Catalana. As these examples also show, commons do not only produce what we need, they shape who we become: our values, practices, relationships, commitments and very identity.

However, there is no such thing as a “pure” commons – for the simple reason that commons cannot be understood as abstract idealizations. They can only be understood in their actual, embedded social circumstances. It is no wonder that any search for a single definition of “the commons” will come up empty-handed! One must understand a commons in its particularity.

This is inescapable because the identity of a commons does not reside solely (or even primarily!) in the resource that is shared. Its character is defined by how we experience it subjectively and emotionally – and that will vary by the people, culture, geography and other conditions and circumstances. A commons resembles a morphological form that shapes both physical matter and social organization and culture. New things will emerge in this world as they are generated anew time and again. Slowly, commoners develop a self-awareness of their acts of commoning, stabilizing them through rules, rituals, traditions, language and ethics. Through the practice and experience of commoning, some very different forms of knowing arise or are preserved. They slowly take root and eventually change our patterns of thinking and our frames of reference. In this fashion, a commons can transport us into a different way of being.

That, truly, is why commons have such emancipatory potential. They can help incubate new ways of seeing, being and knowing. Such emergent sensibilities can help us escape ossified categories of dominant paradigms of thought, politics and economics. They can also help us nourish new foundations for thinking that can free us from the misleading dichotomies of contemporary life – subjective and objective, individual and collective, private and public, rational and irrational.

Despite the diversity of commons that we survey in Part II, one thing stands out: they all slip the mental shackles that contemporary capitalism seeks to impose. The dominant categories of private property, capital, money, profit and wage labor do not play a central role in any of them. These commons are animated by a different logic, a different repertoire of human motivations and emotions than the logic of maximizing individual gain at the expense of nature or other human beings. We are aware of the fact that the old, familiar categories of understanding will continue to be applied to these notable commons (they even emerge in some self-descriptions of commons), if only because we still live in societies forged by archaic categories and must act in a commons-unfriendly political and economic environment. But if you look closely, it is clear that each of the commons profiled in Part II ushers us into a transitional zone of possibilities; they point to a new framework of analysis and set of experiences. However, it will take time, research and dialogue for the contours of such a framework to become more evident and widely understood.

In working with the authors on their essays, we found it fascinating that so many of them thought that things we were interested in were not worth mentioning. To them, certain realities of their commons were self-evident; they simply took them for granted. For example: how decisions are made, how conflicts are dealt with or how the project relates to the state. On many occasions, we learned about these important features of daily commoning only through a process of discussing the authors’ drafts with them. It was not always possible to finish discussing our questions, let alone find adequate answers and present them in the space available. Still, we believe these essays provide a rich foundation for further inquiry and for commoners to “live the questions” as a fruitful way to find answers.

Some of the remarkable commons we present here do not even consciously consider themselves as such. Indigenous Ethiopians have been managing the Menz-Guassa grasslands for centuries – well before social scientists or activists applied the term to their relationship to the earth. Contributors to the Public Library of Science journals do not necessarily self-identify as commoners; nor do the participants of the Burning Man festival.

For this reason, one might agree with the authors of the recent Corner House Report: “The term ‘commons’ tends to be a term of political art and not of self-description.” (Lohmann/Hildyard, 2014:16) Tech-savvy initiatives in particular tend to focus on their experimental or technological components, or on their openness. See, for example, the profiles of the Public Library of Science journals, Arduino, Open Design, OpenCourseWare and Fab Lab St. Pauli. They do not necessarily recognize that their very processes of commoning point to a very different type of economic activity and way of living. That is one of the points of the profiles of commons in Part II: to help showcase some similarities of radically different commons and to foster a greater self-awareness of these social patterns.

Even though a common may be a small player in a cultural backwater (the idea of open mapping to help with humanitarian crises, for example), we can begin to see in Part II how virtually any commons begins to connect to a larger pattern. We see collaborative ways of creating pools of knowledge; the networking of like-minded commons with each other; the drive to take into one’s own hands the infrastructure needed to meet daily needs; and precautionary tactics to prevent enclosure of shared wealth and commoning. All commons also have a potent but latent political significance that should not be understated. Whether and how they will manifest remain an open question.

Yet commons flourish without regard to the political viewpoints or worldviews of participating commoners. That not only makes commons strong, it makes them far more than a political or ideological phenomenon. They are pockets of a highly distributed cultural future that is struggling to crystallize a new worldview and sensibility. Commons may appear to be islands, yet if we connect the dots among the dozens of commons profiled here, making invisible patterns more visible, we cannot help but agree with Norbert Rost’s insight, “Islands grow to form continents if we connect them intelligently.”¹

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 website for more resources.

Reference

Lohmann, Larry and Hildyard, Nicholas. 2014. “Energy, Work and Finance,” Corner House Report, March 31, 2014, available at http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/energy-work-and-finance

Citations

1 http://www.spiekerooger-klimagespraeche.de/node/171

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