As a more recent Enspiral member based in Europe, they asked me to write about the larger landscape I saw a network such as Enspiral being part of. I had gotten to know this space quite well and from a different perspective, by being in the midst of the global Ouishare community since 2012. I liked the prompt, and said yes.

A global movement with no name

My essay in Better Work Together, Welcome to the age of participation, puts forward a question: are organizations like Enspiral and Ouishare isolated phenomena, or are they part of a larger, emerging movement? If this is a movement, what are its characteristics? What are the key themes and commonalities? Who is part of it? What could be its’ impact on the world?

In reflecting on my experiences over the past 8 years in various countries, communities and (many) gatherings, the conclusion I reach is no — these are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a growing movement. This left me with a challenge: how do I describe a movement that my intuition tells me exists, but that has no name or quantitative measure? In my essay, I put words to my experiences to draw out the common patterns and themes I can see.

There is a movement on the rise that it is leveraging the power of community, networks, and participation to work on systemic challenges.

Here is how I describe this global movement: a movement that it is leveraging technology and the power of community to connect local and global action and form networks to work on systemic challenges. This not only exists conceptually, but is a tangible reality with a growing number of projects scattered across the globe. The organizations that are part of it come from a broad range of sectors — from environment, to agriculture, to education, to health, to business, to politics. This diversity makes it harder for them to recognize each other. Yet, while their areas of work may differ, their modes of operating are similar. They are aware that their work is a contribution — not a complete solution — to the challenge they aim to solve, and that it is a piece in a much larger puzzle (of global wicked problems).

To understand the facets of this movement more clearly, I identified five main fields (not the only ones) it spans across:

1. The Sharing & Collaborative Economy
2. Circular Economy & Ecological Activism
3. Social Entrepreneurship & Impact
4. Open Source & Decentralization
5. Digital Nomadism & Freelancer collectives

As broad and different as these fields may seem, many of the people and organizations working in them share an ethos, a culture, and many common values. In my essay I paint a colorful picture of this culture and those who are championing it.

Its’ stars are not famous figureheads, but the communities as a whole.

Here is a snapshot of some of the organizations I alone have encountered throughout my work, whom I see as part of this culture (and which are mentioned as examples in the book):

Amanitas Collective, B-Corp, Civic Wise, Commons Network, Edmund Hillary Fellowship, Fab City, Holochain, Impact Hub Network, MakeSense, Malt, Open Collective, Open Food Network, Ouishare, Platform Coop, P2P Foundation, Remotive, Scuttlebut, Shareable, Transition Towns Network, Wemind, Zero Waste Network.

And there are so many more.

Moving from connecting to collective action

This movement has matured a lot since I entered it in 2011, from a fuzzy niche to gradually becoming more defined. The level of connections between the people and organizations within this ecosystem has been increasing, but that is just the first step.

We can all be different and united in action.

Cross-community initiatives like Neotribes, Human Networks, and Dgov Foundation are demonstrating the value of working beyond your own community and networking the networks. Now it’s time we use the fabric we have been weaving between us to move from connecting to collective action. If this movement is to achieve the impact the world needs right now, we need to recognize: we can all be different while united in action.

Read the full essay in Enspiral’s first book, Better Work Together!

Better Work Together reflects on 7+ years of learnings from the Enspiral community through short essays, practical guides, toolkits and personal reflections. It covers different facets of the future of work, including self management, collective structures, cultural processes and tools to deliver a global perspective on how embracing new ways of working together can transform how we do businesses — with practical examples from real world learning.

If you liked this article, I appreciate your claps, following me on Medium and twitter.

Follow the organizations mentioned above on Medium: OpenCollectiveHolochain Design OpenFoodFrance B Corporation B Lab UK BCorpSpainRemotive Malt Shareable TransitionTown Media Fab City Global InitiativeImpact Hub makesense

Thank you Kate Beecroft for the edits and Joshua Vial for the title inspiration!Some rights reserved

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A session in progress at the CrowdLaw conference at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy

In this session on ‘Transparency and Participation’ at the Bellagio conference on Crowdlaw: People-Led Innovation in Urban Lawmaking (March 13–17, 2018), we discussed whether participation depended on more transparency and whether transparency could be counter-productive to more engagement. I had the pleasure of speaking and moderating a conversation with:

• Mukhelani Dimba, Open Government Partnership
• Julia Keutgen,Westminster Foundation for Democracy
• Hélène Landemore, Yale University
• Veronica Seguel, Chamber of Deputies Chile

Transparency is instrumental for participation and for accountability. But in order to delve into the linkages between transparency and participation with discernment, it is necessary to clarify the concept of ‘transparency’. Transparency is the immediate visibility for citizens of all policy related aspects. It is the contrary of opacity but is can be compatible with a certain closure. It is more demanding that publicity. It can help citizens to engage in policy, be instrumental to accountability and be educational and transformative for citizens. Transparency helps citizens to know and understand whether their government is protecting their rights and delivering on public services. It can range from total transparency to partial transparency. In some cases, partial transparency has been used by governments and parliaments to justify certain decisions. But when transparency is only partial, it cannot be expected to deliver good outcomes as citizens voice their opinion without having the full picture.

Transparency and participation should be regulated by law, including through Freedom of Information laws and the rules of procedure of parliament. In Brazil, for instance, the rules of procedure of parliament state the obligation for citizens to participate in committee hearings. That being said, there is not a single legal provision of transparency that could grant access to full access to information. Even when regulated by law, the utopian possibilities of transparency as a means to inclusiveness, universality and transformation, are simply not borne out in reality. For instance, today there is no evidence that Freedom of Information laws on their own have dramatically improved government transparency, responsiveness and accountability.

Transparency mostly operates in circumstances of high inequality. In these circumstances, having more transparency does not mean that there are better dialogues between government/parliaments and citizens. In this sense, transparency can lead to more inequality and elite capture because only those who have access to resources and the information are able to participate. Ultimately, participation rests on access to information. Where there are information asymmetries, only voices and interests of the resource rich are audible.

Transparency should be accompanied by civic education and procedural language of government and parliament should be translated meaningfully to citizen to enable meaningful their participation. Participation channels should be linked to citizen’s interest on a single issue rather than party politics. In Chile, for instance, the parliament has developed an online tool “Ley fácil” (easy law) to make the law understandable for ordinary citizens (https://www.bcn.cl/leyfacil).

Transparency is not always the most efficient way to improve a legitimate participatory process and can be very time consuming. Some scholars have even gone further and argued that it has a counterproductive effect on democracy. Even if relative transparency is achieved, there are questions regarding the quality of participation (who participates and how, with what degree of sincerity) and the quantity of participation (how many people participate). This is for instance the case in Chile, where public hearings organized by the parliament are mostly attended by men with a legal background and living in the capital and the voices of other stakeholders are not being heard.

Transparency makes compromises between representatives more difficult. When discussions are transparent and public, it can harden negotiating positions and make it difficult for elected officials to compromise. Citizens are mostly in favour or against a single issue, while legislation requires compromises and trade-offs between single issues. The more trade-offs are involved, the more trade-offs are required the more difficult it is to have full transparency of the negotiation that led to the compromise. Finally, too much transparency coupled with a lack of understanding of parliamentary/governmental processes, for instance disclosure of donations, can have a dampening effect on participation and lead to increased lack of trust in the institutions and its systems.

In the end, participants agreed that transparency is the ideal default principle, with instrumental value, but should be compatible with exceptions. It should not in itself represent a judgement of democracy.

Julia Keutgen is ‎a Technical Advisor at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD)

Cross-posted from Govlab.org

Photo by sniggitysnags

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“What is, then, a philosophy of relation?

Something impossible, as long as it is not conceived of as poetics.”

 – Edouard Glissant

The World as Consciousness

Near Sant’Andrea, Italy, the sea laps onto the slabs of rock that form the edge of the island of Elba. The waves, smooth as fish bellies, slate gray, white, and aquamarine, shatter into liquid fragments on the rock. In the distance lies Corsica, barely visible in the haze, under a fan of fingers of light. The water that strokes the stones, the boulder rounded and worn away, the wind tousling one’s hair, the birds blown by and lost again, come together in a dance. We are commoners of a commons of perception from which our own experiences, our own identities and those of the world emerge.

Our identities arise through that which we are not: through impressions and touch, through sensory exchanges with that which is stone and water, molecule and light quantum, all of which somehow transform themselves into the energy of the body. All life, from the very beginning, derives from solar energy that is given to all. Our existence in an ecosphere suffused with life is part of a vast commons even before individuality can be perceived. Each individual belongs to the world and is at the same time its owner, owner of the rough stone speckled by the waves, ruffled by the wind, stroked by rays. All perception is commons, which is to say, the result of a dance of interdependency with the world. The world belongs to us completely, and at the same time, we are fully entrusted to it. It is only through this exchange that we become conscious of it and of ourselves.

Beyond Humanism

A new self-understanding that aspires to supplant modernity is currently developing. It is still in a state of flux, unformed in many ways. But often, it can be discerned as a struggle by humanism to overcome the limits of Enlightenment rationality. It questions the separation of the world into a sphere of humans and a sphere of things that consists of natural resources, animals, objects and ideas. Humans are no longer to be at the center – but the idea of nature as an independent order is also rejected.

Proponents of this type of thinking have given it various names – “Anthropocene,” “Posthumanism” and “Metahumanism,” among others. What they all share is an attempt to reconceive the relationship between humanity and nature, thus articulating the human in a different way. The proponents of this project – for example, the Italian philosopher and writer Francesca Ferrando – see “an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human” (Ferrando 2013:26).

This quest will shift completely our understanding of ourselves and of the world we are part of. As a consequence it will also imply a reordering of the realms of politics and economics. If we do not see the world any longer under a duality of “human actors” and “natural resources,” then the boundaries between that which is being distributed and those who are using it become blurred. In such a world, socioeconomics can no longer pursue only the goals of just and fair distribution because “producers” and “consumers” are often the same people. We can already witness this in the many commons now arising, and in those that have always been there and are now being rediscovered.

In other words, in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the posthumanist thinking it entails, a new metaphysics of “householding” is emerging, revealing how exchanges of matter and metabolites – and human meaning – are deeply intertwined. This is an astonishing opportunity to escape the dilemmas of modernity and to reimagine our ontological condition. It might be compared to the great transformation occurring at the beginning of the Enlightenment period.

Seeking a new concept of what is human, numerous thinkers are doing away with the separations between humans and “nature,” “nature” and “culture,” and body and mind, which have dominated our self-understanding since the Enlightenment. New propositions are challenging these dualisms and, in turn, undermining the worldview that has given rise to the neoliberal “free market” economy and the biological ideology that all organisms strive to be “efficient.” The old conceptual barriers that thwarted a more benevolent relationship between humanity and the rest of the living world can now be overcome, or at least the terms of the relationships can be shifted.

Today, we are not only in a time of economic or social upheaval, but also in a crisis of self-awareness; the very metaphors we use to describe our role in the world are inadequate. This crisis of normative perception and thought offers the rare opportunity to achieve a more balanced relationship between humans and the earth than was possible with thinking that presumes a human/nature separation. But our crisis today could also result in the opposite, namely, a more commanding, coercive vision of human dominance. Will a new form of anthropocentrism, a new toxic utopia, emerge from the current competition between perspectives? Will this worldview ultimately dominate natural history by comprehending the biological solely as an object of technical creativity? Will it treat the human as a derivative version of the cyborg – a perspective that some representatives of Anthropocene thought seem to believe? Or can we instead develop a comprehensive ontology of creative aliveness?

It is imperative to go beyond Enlightenment categories of thought to recover those currents of humanism that earlier, rationalizing streams of the Western world banished. It is equally important to evaluate some important new perspectives that contemporary thought are able to add, drawing upon co-creative perspectives in biology, anthropology and poetics. To date, theories of the Anthropocene and Posthumanism do not sufficiently include the perspective of creative aliveness; this is the diagnosis of this essay. These theories still follow mainly the notion that the world can be accurately understood as a body of inert physical matter, or, that it needs human stewardship as a controlling agent or a “gardener” (Marris 2013) to fully reach its creative potential.

This essay challenges this belief by recovering the dimension that has been forgotten since the Enlightenment and has not yet been rediscovered in the Anthropocene – the radical philosophical practice and perspective of the commons, without which the relationship of humans to reality cannot be understood. I argue that reality, from which we are descended and through which we experience and engender ourselves, is itself a commons that must be understood and connected to as such.

The commons of reality is a matrix of relationships through which aliveness is unfolding in ecosystems and history. It conveys the aliveness of biological and human communities from a perspective of metabolic dependency, exchanges of gifts, and the entanglement of actors within their vectors of activity. Living participants bring each other into being by establishing relationships (metabolism, predator/prey relationships, social ties), thus producing not only their environments but their very identities (Weber 2014).

Thus, the commons describes an ontology of relations that is at the same time existential, economic and ecological. It emphasizes a process of transformation and identity formation that arises out of a mutuality that is not only material, but also experienced. For humans, then, this ontology produces meaning and emotional reality. This process also encompasses what has recently been described as “conviviality” – “an art of living together (con-vivere) that allows humans to take care of each other and of Nature, without denying the legitimacy of conflict, yet by using it as a dynamizing and creativity-sparking force” (Alphandéry et al 2014).

In the following pages, I will attempt to describe a perspective of reality based on connecting all humans and all other creatures. I seek to shatter the familiar categories of “culture” and “nature,” which are invariably seen by moderns as separate and distinct. The two realms are in fact one, if we can recognize that reality is founded upon aliveness as the critical, connecting element. Aliveness is not limited to “nature” or “culture.” It is intrinsic to all social and biological systems. It has an objective, empirical substance and a subjective, tangible dimension, and it is always interweaving dimensions of matter with perception and experience (Weber 2013).

It is therefore essential that we elucidate a self-understanding of the Anthropocene from this perspective – an ontology of the commons. After all, without this perspective to complete the picture, the Anthropocene – the new epoch characterized by the dominance of human beings – would disregard a core attribute of reality. To distinguish the necessary new perspective from the technical rationality of the Enlightenment, I refer to this emerging perspective as Enlivenment – a theme that I explored in a previous essay (Weber 2013). Enlivenment is an ontology of aliveness, of coming to life, that is at once physical and intangible, and scientific and spiritual. It calls people to live in an unfolding natural history of freedom and self-realization.

The Anthropocene Hypothesis as a Commodification of the Creative

How, exactly, do the many, burgeoning posthumanist interpretations of our time fail to grasp the cosmos as a creative reality? Let us begin with the Anthropocene. Today, climate researchers assume that humans have become the defining biogeochemical force on Earth since the year 1800, more or less, and that the Holocene era, the phase that started with the last Ice Age, has ended (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000:17-18). Today, we are living in the “epoch of mankind,” the Anthropocene. This hypothesis, of course, is not only a scientific finding about the history of the climate: it is simultaneously a cosmological statement about the status of human beings, one that eliminates the familiar division of reality into a sphere of human activity and a sphere of nature.

It is this variant of the Anthropocene hypothesis that is increasingly affecting our deliberations on how to achieve sustainability. Its focus is frankly solipsistic – how should we humans deal with other animals and plants, and what changes should we make to our economic system? But this view lacks a critical element – an account of the more-than-human world as a living reality. The Anthropocene hypothesis may help us overcome thinking that pits humans against nature, but it fails precisely in that endeavor as long as it celebrates humans as the masters of nature. Anthropocene thinkers often enthusiastically annex the planet into the sphere of culture in what appears like a philosophical equivalent of globalization; reality is re-cast to ratify the triumph of human beings over the natural world.

To be sure, our earlier concepts of “nature” are obsolete, but not in the sense that they would have to find their place in the human world. Rather, the Anthropocene is misguided because it projects human methods for solving problems onto a cosmos that is still not understood. It speaks from within the mindset of human power. Sustainability pioneer Wolfgang Sachs observes, “At first, the term ‘Anthropocene’ expressed the diagnosis of anxiety. Ten years on, it meant power of authority” – a methodology of domination (personal communication, July 21, 2014).

If we consider “nature” to be formed predominantly by culture and technology, the Anthropocene consummates the colonialization of elemental nonhuman creative forces that Western culture has dreamed of for centuries. In other words, Anthropocene thinking is proving to be a new, more extensive iteration of enclosure. To advance narrow human purposes, it not only seizes control of self-organizing creative forces in nature (e.g., genetic engineering, nanotechnologies); it also seizes the self-organizing wild creativity within us.

Admittedly, it is hard to determine who is to blame for this habit of thinking, which is so deeply anchored in the self-understanding of the West as to be utterly invisible. We are not talking about a particular discourse, but the very foundation of our concept of reality. Forms of thinking and feeling that deviate from this sense of reality are hardly possible. Or they are considered “unscientific” and thus unserious. This subtle cognitive form of enclosure occurs with the best of intentions. Since the early modern period, the “Bacon project” has sought to achieve the separation of humans and resources. This is the quest for total self-empowerment of mankind that began with the British Renaissance scholar Francis Bacon’s “novum organon” (Schäfer 1993). This project was intended to improve human life and keep death in check. The logic and appeal of this worldview remain very much in force today. In the realm of ecology, for example, humans often regard “nature” as an inert physical Other – or they may consider themselves stewards of natural systems and their functions, which are essential for our survival.

Yet this arrangement paradoxically deepens the gulf between what is human and the rest of the world. In the end, such a stance tempts people to conceive of everything nonhuman as a soulless physical resource. From here, it is only a small step to its actual transformation into a commodity, a saleable good that can be used however we wish. Once we adopt this orientation toward the world, all further enclosures seem as necessary and desirable steps. Every physical enclosure of wild and emotionally unbridled reality can be traced back to this separation of living entities from the living context of which they are a part – a separation that neutralizes the generative power of life itself.

This dynamic can be seen in the enclosures of commons in sixteenth century England, the patenting of the human genome and in the sterile, proprietary seeds produced by gene patenting. Such outcomes are the inevitable physical expressions of a conceptual dualism, as it were, that elevates a narrow human instrumentality over the essential wildness of reality.

Dualism as an Invisible Colonialization of the Soul

This dualism is not a mere abstraction; it has been the driving force separating humans from the experience of creative vitality. It also lies at the heart of the historical Enlightenment idea that the world can become a habitable place only by means of reason, which itself is the basis for the logic of the market that also differentiates between actors and things. All of these phenomena have the same roots and are the consequence of an enclosure that is initially imaginary. The liberal market system, which makes a distinction between resources (which are traded) and subjects (who trade or who want to be supplied with things), is the product of this dualism. Dualism has appeal because it is a method for asserting control by dividing the world in two: an inanimate sphere (“nature”) that is to be dominated and a sphere of human subjects ordained to assert control.

From this perspective, there is no difference between enclosure, commodification, and colonialization. All three not only attack living systems that have no single owner, they at the same time trample on the psychological and emotional identities connected to these resources. They are all attacks on “aliveness” itself – a capacity of life that is unavailable and incomprehensible to the dualistic mind. Therefore, they are also attacks on reality. In this vein, political scientist David Johns (2014:42) observes, “Colonialism is nowhere more apparent and thriving than in the relationship between humanity and the rest of the earth.”

Actual action thus is always preceded by a tacit enclosure sanctioned by the deep assumptions of the mind. Enclosure usurps the categories of existence and disparages the concept of aliveness as well as the dimensions of experience linked to it. The practices of conceptual enclosure preemptively deny the existence of an unavailable Other, making it impossible to conceptualize and honor real, subjective experience. This Other is not only “nature” or a person from a foreign culture; it is the experience of a dimension of reality that can only be lived and not captured by rational conceptualization. This Other is the domain of physically experienced reality that precedes all conceptualization and colonialization: it is the bliss when we watch the sun rise or see a beloved partner or a young dog, or the dimension of meaning in a piece of work that benefits everyone and not just ourselves. It is the domain of what Manfred Max-Neef catalogues as “human needs” – the existential dimensions of healthy relationships to self and others (Smith & Max-Neef 2010).

Enclosure occurs through a type of thinking that ignores creative processes and the meanings of emotions, both of which originate in the body. Enclosure instead subordinates these feelings to “rationality,” “stewardship,” empiricism, discursivity and control. Such thinking culminates in the idea that “nature” and the body themselves do not exist, but are solely artifacts of culture. In modern culture, it is considered naïve to believe that “nature” can be experienced as a domain of creative unfolding, or that there is a perceptible kinship of being alive that is shared by all living things and which can be experienced. This reality is denied by our cognitive frameworks and language, resulting in what amounts to mental and spiritual enclosure. This colonialization of our innermost essence inescapably results in an “empty self,” as biophilosopher David Kidner (2014:10) predicts. This de facto “empty self” is indeed diagnosed by many as a current psychopathological “civilizational narcissism” that marks our times.

In humanity’s resurgent obsession with treating Earth as a raw, inert resource (e.g., geoengineering to forestall climate change, synthetic biology to “improve upon” nature, etc. ), the Enlightenment is pushing one last time for sovereignty over the cosmos. Here the Anthropocene is completely identical with Anthropocentrism. The old notions of human superiority, control and technical mastery are concealed by equating humans and “nature,” putting them on an equal footing. Even a sophisticated theorist such as Bruno Latour falls for this category error when he reassures his readers, “The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment” (quoted in Shellenberger & Nordhaus 2011). Since people are in fact connected in relationships (with the Earth, with each other), the fallacy lies in attempting to dominate what embraces them in ways they do not understand; they are blind to reality and prone to act destructively.

Italian philosopher Ugo Mattei believes that even the act of dividing the world into subject and object results in commodifying both (quoted in Bollier 2014). The commodification of the spirit inevitably finds a warped expression at the real and political level. “Nature” is banished to the periphery of the human world even though it still nourishes and sustains us, produces everything we eat, and remains the wellspring of creative energy. Every separation into subject and object divides the world into two realms, resources and profiteers. This boundary is not necessarily between things and people (or between matter and creatures), but between that which is used up, and those who benefit from that consumption.

Thus, we are suffering not only because of the commodification of the natural and social world. We are suffering because our conceptualization of the world itself allows commodification as the sole way to relate to it. It is no longer possible to speak about the world in the categories of subjective aliveness. We are suffering because of the enclosure of the spiritual through myriad cultural fictions of separation and domination that falsely parse the world into an outside (resource) and inside (actor). Concepts such as strict cause-and-effect relationships, causal mechanisms, the separation of body and soul – all of them fundamental premises of Enlightenment thinking – result in our taking reality hostage. We colonize it by believing in the concept of a treatable, repairable, controllable world. Any experience that contradicts this enclosure of reality must be discounted or denied.

Yet hardly anyone is aware of the profoundly misleading taxonomic screens of our language and worldview. We can barely imagine the extent to which our view of reality is distorted by spiritual enclosure. We do not realize that the self-organizing nature of our everyday lives has disappeared from view – a dispossession far more radical than the one experienced by commoners locked out of their forests a few hundred years ago. We do not appreciate how conceiving of our own selves as biomachines has impoverished us as humans, and how treating our emotional feelings chiefly as “chemical imbalances” (to be corrected through pharmaceuticals) denies an elemental dimension of our humanity.

Cutting living subjects off from participating in the commons of reality and its mixture of practices and emotions, objects and aspects of meaning, is destructive in another serious respect: It blinds us to the nature of enclosure itself. As psychologists Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit (2007:101f) observe, the overarching ideology of enclosure is an ideology of control and dominance, and a denial of enduring relationships. This systemic worldview is not simply unjust and dangerous, it brazenly defies reality. It is cruel because it violates the web of relational exchange which reality is.

Every metaphysics that separates humans from the world furtively transforms itself into an inhumane ideology. The ideology of enclosure is inhumane because it generates a hierarchy in reality, ostensibly for human benefit, by installing humanity as custodian of the rational, the protector of the ordered, the knight battling chaos. Yet reality is not chaotic. On the contrary, it simply embodies an order that we are not always able to discern. Reality is structured as a creative expression of living agents, both human and more-than-human. Its structure, however, is sometimes invisible because its systems cannot be universalized, regimented or monetized without destroying life itself.

Posthumanism as an Extension of Our Machine Dreams

A flurry of new critiques are ostensibly seeking to break away from the dualisms of the Enlightenment by using “post” in their names – for example, postenvironmentalism or posthumanism. Regrettably, they do not really come to terms with creative reality. Instead they put forward hybrid versions of human nature that exist between “object” and “subject.” But ultimately they are not rooted in the processes of the creative wild, but in technological artifacts made by humans.

Posthumanism is in fact fixated on machines. It is mostly about cyborgs and hybrid humans, and has little interest in grasshoppers, geckos or the integration of the natural and the social as we see, say, in indigenous communities’ systems of thought. With the notable exception of the influential Donna Haraway, a feminist scholar who writes extensively about human-machine and human-animal relations, posthumanism wants little to do with other species. Posthumanism is oriented toward machines because they are our species-specific creations. They are artifacts that bear witness to this special feature of ours, namely being not only biological creatures of the cosmos, but also sovereign creators, controllers and engineers. Technical hybrids – i.e., humans whose cognitive abilities are enhanced by means of electronic tools or combinations of humans and machines – represent a type of the wild that fascinates many posthumanist thinkers. But a genuine posthumanism would recognize that we must imagine the deconstruction of the machines as functional essence of what is human. The “function” of our hands, after all, is not just to pick up things, but to be able to sensitively caress a stone, a loved one’s neck, or a black poodle’s fur in the warm sun.

Posthumanism as now conceived still erects walls around a colony of abstraction. It strictly guards an enclave of rationality and shies away from the practice of living connectedness. And so except for sporadic lapses when the metaphysical fabric accidentally rips, posthumanism continues to overlook the enclosure of the living body as a place of experience, feeling and self. It fails to see itself as a vehicle for any sort of exchange with the Other. Every self-styled philosophy of emancipation is on shaky ground if it is not clear about the self-concealed enclosures of the wild that it commits against our selves, our thinking and our identities.

Recognizing the Commons of Existence: The Key to the Anthropocene

The hypothesis of the Anthropocene, namely that “man and nature are one today,” can be considered in a meaningful way only if it acknowledges a theory of reality as a commons. A concept of the Anthropocene can be fruitful only if we do not grasp it as yet another “epoch of humankind,” but as an epoch in which the living co-creative reality of ecosystems becomes the foundation for how humans perceive and experience reality.

To this end, we must recognize reality itself as a commons that is pressing forward to unfold in a natural history of freedom. This history must embrace the role of the bodies and subjective experiences of all living subjects. The point is that commons are not only entities designed by humans. They are an existential, self-created necessity of all living exchange – i.e., of life itself. As theologian Martin Buber (1937) puts it, “all actual life is encounter.” All reality, every act of perception which accesses and produces the world, is a negotiation, a creative transformation between two poles, each of which is at the same time object and actor.

Even in our absence, reality is a commons. We can approach it by shaping it according to a pattern of mutual giving and giving in return, and then witness the transformational ripples following from each act of giving. Human culture has the opportunity to shape the world as a commons as it participates in the web of interdependent living things, thus making the world more real. In the Anthropocene, this new perspective on natural history as the unfolding of freedom and depth of experience and expression should be put at center stage. This idea, not a narrow vision of human instrumentality, should explicitly guide our self-understanding and our economic and political agenda. Without such an orientation, we will continue to act destructively toward other living things and our planet.

As a philosophy and practice, commoning considers the coexistence of living things on this planet as a joint, creative process, one that increases the aliveness of the biosphere and the cultural sphere. Thinking in the categories of the commons actualizes an ontology that, while not fundamentally new in Western thinking, has been underestimated and suppressed for a long time. This ontology alone makes it possible for us to grasp the conditions of evolutionary reality in which we exist and then to play a constructive part in shaping the unfolding reality. The existential realities of the world have brought us forth as participants in the natural history of the cosmos and its social, metabolical, and existential dimensions; we in turn are continually extending and recreating this natural history.

A commons is a way of entering into relationships with the world, both materially and conceptually. It does so without the usual dualistic concepts of the Enlightenment (culture/nature, animate/inanimate, etc.) and it fuses theory and practice as one. Principles of acting are embedded in concrete, situational processes of conflict, negotiation and cooperation, which in turn alter reality and generate new situations.

All principles that animate this process are intrinsic to it and cannot come from “outside” of it. The principles do not fall into our laps, and no god, state or moral-philosophical process of any kind can posit them. At the same time, however, the process of commoning – and this is true of the commons of reality, too – is anything but devoid of rules. It follows the principles for how creative relationships arise among various counterparties and thereby create their identities, shape their bodies and determine their interests. Commoning is an ecological and evolutionary reality based on concrete interactions, which always have to mediate between the flourishing of individuals and the prosperity of the encompassing whole. In this sense, existential success always is a negotiation between autonomy and fusion. Its shape can never be codified because it is a living, dynamic process; existential success can only be lived.

In this reading, all commons are “posthuman.” Our undeniable human agency is inscribed within a living system of other animate forces, each of which is both sovereign and interdependent at the same time. In commons, humankind does not hold arbitrary sway as a ruler, but as an attentive subject in a network of relationships. The effects of (inter)actions reflect back on those acting and all other nodes, animated or metaphorical – human subjects, bats, fungi, bacteria, aesthetic obsessions, infections, or guiding concepts – are active as well. Every commons is a rhizome – a material and informal network of living connections which constantly changes as it mutates and evolves.

The innermost core of aliveness cannot be classified and negotiated rationally. It is only possible to be involved in experiences and creative expression. That is why the idea of the commons, which is fundamentally about real subjects seeking nourishment and meaning through physical, pragmatic, material and symbolical means, is the best way to describe a “posthuman” connection to the rest of the biosphere. For a commons is always an embodied, material, perceptible, existential and symbolic negotiation of individual existence through the Other and the whole. It is an attempt to echo the forms of order implied in the self-creating wild through acts of creative transformation, in response to the existential imperatives of the wild.

Each of these acts involves both self-awareness and material interactions. Each is real and metabolic in that the participants of the ecosystem are linked together through the exchange of eating and being devoured, of taking and giving, and of subtly influencing the order of the whole and being influenced by it. This process is imaginative because it is triggered by the experiences of joy, fear and other feelings – which in turn are the basis for consequential actions and material changes.

The concept of the commons helps bridge – and transcend – the dualities that otherwise structure our self-awareness. It bridges the connection between the “natural” – the world of beings and species – and the “social” or “cultural” – the sphere of human-made symbolic systems, discourses and practices – by generating an interdependent, organic whole. For this reason, conceiving of “nature” as a commons of living entities is also a way of understanding ourselves anew. It helps us see and name our biological and our social aliveness as an indivisible whole conjoined to the rest of the world.

An ontology that describes reality through the lens of the commons, in other words, makes it possible to focus on aliveness as both a conceptual idea and experience. Therein slumbers the opportunity to arrive at a new, relational understanding of ourselves and the world. Going beyond “objective” structures, algorithms, and cause-and-effect scenarios that look at observable external behaviors, we can also take account of the internal feelings of the actors (which are motive-forces in their own right), and thereby escape the sterile dualism that has crippled the Western mind for so long.

The Anthropocene can reconcile and integrate humans and “nature” only if we comprehend that we exist as agents who are continuously transformed in a process that is both material and filled with meaning – a process that experiences itself emotionally and reproduces itself creatively, and in so doing generates and expresses ever more complex degrees of freedom (in a larger context of dependency on other living systems).

In this sense, “nature” and “human” are aligned and quite literally identical. Both rely on “imagination” to produce a world and self-reproduce themselves. Our identities are rooted in the uncontrollable wild and in creative self-organization, neither of which can be entirely subject to control or “stewardship.” Such control (even when asserted through enclosure) cannot prevail ultimately because the instruments of control that we devise are themselves built on “uncontrollable forms” – wildness – which remain beyond strict control and understanding. So while humans may “dominate” “nature” in ways that posthumanism celebrates, conversely, we humans are grounded by forces of wildness that ultimately cannot be subdued and mastered through cultural control because culture relies on them as the basic principles of creation, self-organization and co-creative relations.

In regarding reality as commons, we do not resolve the contradictions of existence by reducing them to one aspect – only mind, only matter, only discourse, only market. Nor do we seek anything such as a higher synthesis – the classic, devastating response to the paradoxes of existence ever since Hegel and then his student Marx, who promised a contradiction-free, higher state of being that drove utopians mad in violent anticipation.

The mundane reality is that true being is “higher” and “lower” at the same moment. And for a simple reason: What is alive resists any and all synthesis. Inner, immaterial and experiential identity, coiled within a material body, is itself the greatest paradox. This identity, which becomes real only through a body, has no separate physical mass and occupies no space. And yet still it profoundly alters the physical world and space through a continual and self-referential process.

This dimension of living reality should follow a “dialogic” rather than a binary logic, as French philosopher Edgar Morin claims. Morin’s dialogic does not try to eliminate contradictions but explicitly seizes them to illuminate the point. Living reality is a logic of dialogue and polyphony, of encounters, conversations, mutual transformations and interpretations, in the logic of negotiation and striking compromises (Morin 2001:272). It is this stance of negotiating, adapting and enduring that has determined the way in which humans have dealt with the commons since time immemorial. It is what is called commoning.

Poetic Materialism

The Anthropocene lacks the understanding that any exchange – of things (in the economy), of meanings (in communication), of identities (in the bond between subjects) – always has two sides: an external, material side and also an internal, existential side in which meaning is expressed and experienced. Reality is creative and expressive precisely because it never lets itself be reduced to one of these sides. Since all processes are founded upon relationships that convey meanings (which all subjects experience as emotions), the most appropriate way to formulate such a reality is through the idea of poetics.

The poetic dimension is the world of our feelings, our social bonds, and everything that we experience as significant and meaningful. Poetics is at the same time symbolic and material and therefore it is inextricably linked to social communication, exchange and interactions with others and the environment. Poetics describes the world that we experience in the perspective of the first person – the world in which we are at home in an intimate way and the world that we seek to protect through political arrangements. Economic exchange, which is always a meaningful householding among living beings, also takes place in this world described by a poetic reality.

In our time, the great discourses – empirical rationality, human freedom as a rational actor, instrumental reason in economics – are being exposed as deficient, provoking a mad scramble to salvage them as coherent perspectives. The real issue of our time, then, is to activate a new language. After 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, the challenge is to redefine aliveness and humanity within it by complementing techné with the concept of poiesis. Techné means explainability, analysis and successful replication. Poiesis, by contrast, means creative self-realization – an element that brings forth reality, that cannot be suppressed, and that can never be sufficiently understood to be successfully controlled.

In the end, everything is techné in one sense – but in another, everything is also poiesis. Techné is cause and effect, control, management, understanding, exchange. Poiesis is inner goal-directedness, bringing forth oneself, giving oneself over, self-expression, feeling, and accepting. Techné is planning and sustainability. Poiesis is the “wasteful” promiscuity of creation. Life needs both. Reality is both. Creative transformation grows out of the tension of this contradiction without ever resolving it.

Perhaps one could call such a perspective poetic materialism. Any thinking in relationships can take place only in the form of poetic acts. Living relationships, however, organize themselves only among bodies which constantly transform themselves, which grow and decay. In systems in which change occurs dynamically as participants seek to negotiate and transform each other, experience cannot be expressed as a fixed identity, but only as the transient expression of one through the other – in other words, poetically.

The poetic dimension is simultaneously a modification of the individual and a modification of the whole. It becomes distinct and visible in an individual only through forms of experience and symbolic expression. In this sense, as a poetics of relationships defines the individual reality, and a poetics of relationships can be understood as a commons, reality appears to the individual as a commons. Systematic thinking joined with the lived practice of commons – commoning – are based on a poetics of relations. Their idea of exchange considers both embodied things and the existential (inner) reality of meaning and feeling. All are aspects of a “creative householding” – the ability to express and experience things, which constitute the freedom that is constantly being enacted in natural history.

The idea of understanding reality through the lens of a “poetics of relation” was first formulated by the French-Carribean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant. Glissant calls his poetics a “creolization of thinking”: a mutual transformation and fertilization of self and other without clear hierarchies. Everyone involved has equal standing. They are actors and objects. They belong to themselves. And they can be means – even food – to everyone else (see Glissant 1997).

A creolization of thinking requires “peership” between empirical reality and feeling. All processes take place inside and outside an organism simultaneously; they are always conceptual and spiritual, but they are also always real in space and time. Taking the step across the abyss between the two cultures means understanding and reevaluating creative aliveness as the center of reality. Creative action is the experience of what is alive, as experienced from the inside, subjectively. One might call it “affective objectivity” – a universal and real phenomenon, but one that is also evanescent and resistant to measurement.

Indian geographer Neera Singh has shown the extent to which this emotive power encourages commoners to act and provides subjective rewards for their action. She demonstrates that villagers in rural India not only make resources more productive through their commoning with forests. They also satisfy emotional needs and “transform their individual and collective subjectivities” (Singh 2013). They are engaging in an active poetics of relating, in which the human affect and the “material world” commune with each other and alter one another.

It bears emphasizing that “collective subjectivity” extends beyond the human community to include the subjectivities of the living environment – the trees, the supportive vegetation, the birds, the flows of water, the “real” ecosystem elements that human subjectivities actually alter. Commoners, one could say, follow a poetic reason that has emotive substance, but also material manifestations in people’s bodies, community life and local ecosystems. The poetic moment of their action manifests itself when the living forest and social community flourish together, in entangled synergy. This is something that can be perceived by the senses and experienced emotionally through the forest’s opulent biodiversity (and yes, also measured, but the measurements will invariably fail to grasp the animating power of the human affect).

It is telling that cultures for whom participation in natural processes amounts to emotional engagement in a poetic reality, do not make the distinctions between “animate” and “inanimate” or “nature” and “culture” – dualities that are taken for granted in Western thinking. The basic affective experience of being in a lively exchange with the world, taking from it and contributing to it, is denied by the West’s worldview and language: a perniciously subliminal type of enclosure.

Singh calls the psychological-emotional engagement arising from caring for a commons “emotional work.” In the absence of this affective dimension, both subject and object lose their paired identities: those working on the land, say, as well as the object of such work, the animate whole. Geographers and philosophers are increasingly beginning to comprehend land and people as a lived reality – a factor of real interactions and an existential, poetic enactment.

If such a commons is colonialized – which today would mean to be reduced to a mere resource by industrial agriculture – the emotional needs of the people involved – belonging, meaning, identity – can no longer be fulfilled. This is precisely what has happened to our purportedly modern minds – a colonization of emotions that are denounced as backward, superstitious, unenlightened or unscientific. The emotional work of caring for a commons, however, is both an ecological necessity and a material reality, as well as it is a psychological need. Therefore the collapse of affect (belonging, meaning, identity) has material consequences. As human relationships to an ecosystem erode, so does respect for the ecosystem, and the ecosystem’s stability. A kind of ecological death occurs, in turn, one that has both spiritual and biodiversity-related dimensions. The two depend on one another and balance one another.

In other words, a healthy culture is a co-creative interpretation of nature in all its irrepressible aliveness. That is why subjectivity, cooperation, negotiation and irreconcilable otherness must not be seen as patterns that only we lay upon the world, as is currently done by most economy and culture approaches. Rather it is the other way round: Subjectivity, meaning-creation, “weak” non-causal interaction, code and interpretation are deep features of living nature. Its most basic principle comes down to the paradoxical self-realization of an individual through the whole, which at the same time is “the other” that needs to be fenced off.

Need, distance and momentary balance in beauty: Aliveness as such is a commoning process. Perception thus becomes a co-creative commons integrating a subject concerned with care for its self and its environment – which both mutually imagine, nourish and bring forth one another. In this perspective our deeper feelings are themselves a distinguishing feature of patterns of creative aliveness. They affect the perceptions of subjects and impel them to participate in a co-creative commons with their environment; subjects and environment actively imagine, nourish and engender each other.

Culture therefore is not structurally different from nature in the sense that it is only human – a feature putting man apart as incommensurate with the remainder of the world. Nature, on the other hand, is not underlying human culture in a reductionist sense. Nor can all cultural structures can be explained (socio-)biologically. The causal-mechanic, efficiency-centered approach as a whole is mistaken. Nature is based on meaning, open to creative change and constantly bringing forth agents with subjective experiences. It is always creative in order to mediate the realization of the individual through the whole. Any exchange-relationship in Nature always involves both metabolism and meaning, and in this way generates feeling. Nature is a process of unfolding freedom, tapping inexhaustible creativity and intensifying experiential and expressive depth (Weber 2015).

In this sense (although not in any superficial, reductionistic pattern), culture has to be like nature. This is an idea somewhat parallel to what philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (2013) is claiming when he argues that any art worthy of its name does not copy nature’s objects but rather follows its deep process of creative unfolding, freedom and “non-identity” – the impossibility of reducing an agent to just one substance, be that a causal mechanism or language-games. Culture is structurally not different from ecological exchange processes, but echoes them in the human species-specific creative forms. It expresses our own poetic interpretation of the ever-recurring theme of coping with the irresolvable paradox of autonomy and wholeness. That is why human culture cannot control and engineer nature as a passive, non-living object. Because we humans are implicated in the creative aliveness of nature, our culture must also honor our own aliveness as the best way to foster our own freedom and long-term survival. We must shape our selfhood according to the needs of a larger whole that is necessary to all life. Autonomy is always inscribed within a larger whole and only possible through it. Paradoxically, autonomy is possible only through relation.

Seen from this perspective, it becomes essential to adopt a first-person viewpoint as a counterpoint to the purportedly scientific perspective of “objective reality,” which is typically expressed in the third person. In the ontological reality that we are describing here, the first-person perspective is both poetic (rich with meaning, feeling and implications for identity) while genuinely objective (material, scientifically measurable). The first-person viewpoint mediates our perception with our material reality, which is only possible from the perspective of a meaning-making self (see Weber & Varela 2002 for more details). Internal, first-person insights that were ruled out by a worldview that accepts only the empirical/objective point of view – because they are not “real” in the material, physical sense – become valid. Once natural ecosystems are seen as creatively alive, it becomes necessary to complement rational thinking and empirical observation with the “empirical subjectivity” of living things, and its complement, the “poetic objectivity” of meaningful experiences. This new standpoint cannot be dismissed as a soft, vague emotion, but must be heeded as a critical genre of evolutionary intelligence.

As living organisms, we must learn to experience and describe the world “from the inside” (emotionally, subjectively, socially) while at the same time treating it as a physical reality outside of us. Poetic objectivity is a solution to the destructive dualities that since the Enlightenment have separated the human species as above and apart from “nature.” Poetic objectivity represents the missing first-person-centered perspective in human culture that must act as a complement to the dominant but partial objectivist approach.

Commoning as Partaking in Reality

This essay has so far focused on the philosophical dimensions of the challenge facing humankind, but of course, the practical test is how to bring this ontological sensibility into the world and make it real. Fortunately, the social practices of creating and maintaining a commons – commoning – offer excellent opportunities for blending the subjective and objective, humanity and “nature,” and for overcoming the many other dualisms that deny our creative aliveness.

The process of commoning challenges the dualisms upon which “the economy” as conventionally understood is based. It does this by enacting different roles than those ordained by neoliberal economics and policy (such as “producer” and “consumer,” and “investor” and “natural resource”) and by building provisioning systems that are oriented toward meeting basic needs in situated contexts, and in ways that generate a sense of life and personal integration. The point of commoning projects and policies is to restore enlivenment to the center of any economy activity, which means it must strive to reflect the shared interests of all, subjective human needs and the integrity of natural ecosystems.

This can be seen in Anne Salmond’s essay in this volume (pp. 309-329), which describes how the culture of the Māori people in New Zealand expresses “the fundamental kinship between people and other life forms….They are linked together in an open-ended, dynamic set of complex networks and exchanges.” The same idea is expressed by the notion of Buen Vivir, the idea of “good living” that people in Ecuador and Bolivia use to speak about living in mindful ways with Pachamama (“Mother Earth”), the community and one’s ancestors. Needless to say, this poses serious challenges to the “modernist cosmo-logic” of the nation-state and capitalist markets. Traditional and contemporary examples add to an endless number of human ways to relate to the Other, social and natural, and defy the artificial borders of animate and inanimate. In so doing, these forms of commoning represent identity systems “beyond nature and culture,” as Collège-de-France anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013) has it.

Such patterns of commoning are not confined to people with premodern cultural roots. Even people raised in that modernist cosmo-logic of globalized industry and commerce are building commons that nourish an ontology of creative aliveness. The permaculture network is deliberately designing and engineering forms of agriculture in alignment with ecological forces. A key principle of permaculture is “integrate rather than separate,” so that farming practices build relationships among those things that work together and support each other.¹ For its part, the Burning Man community celebrates the principles of “radical inclusion” and “communal effort” in conjunction with “radical self-reliance,” “participation” and “immediacy.”² The point is to honor the wildness within every human being while insisting upon a civil social order and sustainable relationship to the land.

The idea of working with the forces of nature and the social dynamics of living communities – rather than trying to deny them, bureaucratize them or forcibly overpower them – is a key principle of commons-based governance. It is why social critics like Ivan Illich embraced the commons as a path for the spiritual reintegration of people in the face of a dehumanizing modernity. The commons helps move in this direction because it honors “affective labor” as a critical force binding people to each other, to natural systems and to earlier and future generations. The commons cultivates identity, meaning, ritual and culture among people as they work with resources to meet their everyday needs. In the process “resources” are retransformed into things that are inflected with personal and community meaning. The artful blending of the social, moral and physical into an integrated commons is what gives the commons paradigm such durability and power. It taps into wellsprings of creative aliveness in people and in so doing engenders deep satisfaction, identity, commitment, flexibility and vitality.

It is admittedly a difficult challenge for the nation-state born of ultra-rational Enlightenment principles to engineer new types of law and public policy to recognize and support commoning. The cosmo-logic of a liberal, modernist polity has trouble understanding the efficacy or desirability of governance based on subjective feelings, locally rooted knowledge and singular historical relationships; the bureaucratic state prefers to govern with universalized abstractions and atomized individuals shorn of their histories and contexts. Paradoxically, this is arguably why the nation-state and bureaucratic organizations are increasingly losing the loyalty, respect and commitment of people – their remote, impersonal modes of governance have become indifferent to the creative aliveness that human beings need and invariably seek.

The idea of citizen/consumers interacting with the market/state duopoly to advance their self-interests corresponds to the individual seeking to act smartly and efficiently to be a sovereign agent using all available resources to build up an identity and resilient self. When personal identity is regarded from this standpoint, it naturally follows that other subjects, human or otherwise, to whom the self becomes attached, are legitimately seen as mere resources for advancing one’s interests. Relationships in this picture become solely a means to a selfish end, a way of functionalizing the Other, rather than open-ended, imperfect processes of transformative exchange.

This may also be why so many commoners working on open networks – e.g., open source software, open design and production, open source agriculture, and much else – are outflanking markets that prize predictable financial gains over all else. Businesses may recognize the abundance that can be produced through common-based peer production, which necessarily draws upon people’s creative aliveness – but they are structurally designed to enclose the commons because of their ontological commitment to the subject/object division which is perfectly executed by money. Money is a means to objectify and separate. Putting a price on something reduces self-contained purpose to mere function. Therefore cash-based relationships generally disdain the value of “affective labor” and long-term commitments. Through its deep alliance with markets, the state generally colludes in denying the ontological reality of living systems despite the existential catastrophes that are now raining down on the entire planet, notably in the form of climate change.

The guardians of the state and “free market” would do well to admit their own structural limitations and legally recognize commons as a salutary form of governance. But as products of modernity and its cosmo-logic, the Market/State is mostly unable to participate as a respectful peer in the natural history of the planet; it is unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.

It is telling that many proponents of the Anthropocene who interpret it as an epoch of world-gardening and technological stewardship over the biosphere – such as Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2013) and Marris (2013) – celebrate ultra-neoliberal free-market approaches as the best way to organize human interactions with the rest of the biosphere, and to distribute and allocate goods, and make sense of the world. They hail market creativity as the key force for inventing planet-healing technologies. This alone confirms that the postdualism of the Anthropocene is in fact still entirely anthropocentric; we are still enacting Enlightenment principles, but this time it hides behind a different mask.

This is why the tendency of certain sustainablity thinkers to hail “green economy” ecological economics and “green accounting” is questionable. To “factor in” natural services may be a quick, expedient amendment and it may in fact help otherwise-endangered ecosystems. Still, it deeply misunderstands the nature of our relationship with reality. As explained above, it fails to recognize that any exchange process is always and inevitably happening on many entangled, mutually dependent levels that reciprocally co-create one another, from the physiological to the spiritual. In a reality that consists of a dynamic and mutual unfolding of transformative relations, or existential commoning, that inescapably transforms both sides of an exchange, an economics and policy regime based on anthropocentric dualisms, including “posthumanism,” can never truly heal.

Epilogue: The Affirmation of Belonging

Modernity has sought human emancipation from nature by dominating it. The thinkers of the Anthropocene and posthumanism strive to put an end to this stance – but they continue (tacitly) to separate humans from the rest of reality. In contrast, the poetic materialism of Enlivenment outlined here, which expresses itself in successful processes of commoning, sees humans and “nature” as inextricably entangled in an exchange of mutual responsibilities, materially and culturally. The sharing of creative principles is both material and symbolic. It accepts that aliveness is a defining principle of nature just as for all species, one of which is Homo sapiens. The principles of exchange include physical embodiment, co-creativity with other living creatures, birth through death, mutual transformation through commoning, and the paradox that every connection is also a separation – because to connect, a separation is needed in the first place. It is a oneness achieved through the conjunction of two distinct unities. Identity is not wholeness, but “interpenetration,” as the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye would have put it.

The Anthropocene as a reconciliation of humans and nature will function only if we grasp that we are “nature” because we share aliveness with every being, and that creative aliveness is the underlying character according to which reality unfolds. We are transient transformations in a larger process defined by of material/semiotic referentialities. Viewed in this light, reality is revealed as a commons of those perceiving and those perceived, and their ongoing interactions. Its objectivity is not simply an academic discourse. Nor is it invented or constructed by human culture. Instead, reality is both a way of describing the world as it is and as a set of experiential practices. Like Aristotle’s ethical ideal of a mediation between the “wise and the many” (Nussbaum 2001), the ontology of the world is never fixed and unequivocal; it is always process, always birth, always becoming. The goal lies in participating in the enterprise of creative aliveness in order to make the world more real.

*       *       *

After the sun has set in Sant’Andrea off Elba, the thunderstorm, gray and , has moved on toward Corsica. The sea simultaneously mirrors the colors of the atmosphere and shakes them off, while its choppy suit of armor takes on every hue: turquoise, sky blue, gray, orange, violet, ultramarine. The ocean has no colors, it has nothing but energy. The ocean is the “wine-dark sea” that Homer celebrated in song, the power that enables the actualization of living things. It is a power that makes things more real and that lends itself to everyone who carries it further and transforms it.

We can overcome the misunderstanding of the Anthropocene that celebrates itself as the “era of humans.” To do so, however, we need an attitude of inclusivity, of mutual acceptance between attitudes, bodies, identities and sensations. We need the affirmation of belonging and a willingness to engage in an ongoing negotiation within a reality that we recognize as a commons. We can adapt our behaviors to its ongoing transformations and amalgamation. Since this is the inescapable existential reality of life itself, we must acknowledge that the fertile wild ultimately cannot be denied, suppressed or enclosed without a profound constriction on our own freedom.

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Bilgrami, Akeel et al. 2013. “The Anthropocene Project: An Introduction.” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Bollier, David. 2014. Think like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, B.C. New Society Publishers.

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Frye, Nortrop. 1991. Double Vision. Identity and Meaning in Religion. Toronto, Ontario. Toronto University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

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Johns, David. 2014. “With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies.” In: George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist and Tom Butler, editors. Keeping the Wild. Against the Domestication of the Earth. Washington, D.C. Island Press.

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Weber, Andreas. 2012. “The Economy of Wastefulness. The Biology of the Commons.” In David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

———. 2013. Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

———. 2014. Lebendigkeit. Eine erotische Ökologie. München: Kösel.

———. 2015. Healing Ecology. Finding the Human in Nature. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers.

Weber, Andreas & Varela, Francisco J. 2002. “Life After Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1:97 – 125.

Andreas Weber (Germany) is a biologist, philosopher and book and magazine writer based in Berlin. His longstanding interest is how human feeling, subjectivity and social identity are related to biological worldmaking and cognition. He recently published Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Heinrich Böll Foundation 2013), and Healing Ecology: Finding the Human in Nature (New Society Publishers, 2015).

Special thanks to David Bollier for inspiration, corrections and support, particularly for the section on commoning.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Reality as Commons, A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sol Trumbo & Nick Buxton: In an age of Trump and trolls, it may be strange to talk about utopia. Not only has a divisive reactionary right-wing privileged minority surged to the fore, but social inequality, militarism and the climate crisis have worsened too. There does seem, however, to be one arena for hope for progressive solutions and that is in the city. Worldwide, mayors are increasingly a progressive and fearless voice advancing bold agendas on climate change, welcoming refugees and trialling new forms of democratic participation.

The question remains: can these cities offer solutions that address multiple systemic crises instead of pursuing, as Greg Sharzer suggests, a “way to avoid, rather than confront capitalism” by focusing on “piecemeal reforms around the edges”? Can a group of cities really offer any fundamental solutions to a crisis created by the immense power of corporate capital?

To try and answer this question, the Transnational Institute in 2017 launched Transformative Cities, asking communities to share their stories of radical transformation, in particular in the areas of water, energy and housing. Our research, particularly in the areas of water and energy had revealed a significant global counter-trend to privatisation, showing that 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries had brought their public services under public control since 2000.

We wanted to explore this more deeply to see whether and how cities could be part of building systemic solutions. American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in his assessment of strategies for confronting capitalism, says that we need to escape from delusions that we can either overthrow capitalism or tame capitalism – arguing that the answer is to erode capitalism. He argues for the building of “real utopias” which are constructs that have “the potential to contribute to eroding the dominance of capitalism when they expand the economic space within which anti-capitalist emancipatory ideals can operate”. As we argued in a previous piece, cities offer many advantages for pushing forward these kinds of radical emancipatory ideals, that in the language of this initiative we call ‘transformative’.

At the same time, it is clear that what ‘transformative’ looks like will vary radically according to the context, the culture, and the process. Cities may make transformative changes in one area and still be regressive in others. As the Zapatistas have cogently argued and shown in practice, the revolution depends on stepping out and asking questions as we move forwards (Caminando preguntamos). We have a clear analysis that the key crises we face are due to a capitalist system of production that has concentrated economic and political power in the hands of transnational corporations and a small elite while bringing our ecological systems to a dangerous point of collapse. However, we have an open mind regarding what the truly transformative city and politics looks like.

 The Atlas of Utopias. Credit: TNI 2018.

As a result of the call, TNI is today presenting its Atlas of Utopias, telling the stories of 32 communities from 19 countries, ranging from small peri-urban indigenous communities in Bolivia to major urban metropolises such as Paris. Their contexts are starkly different, and their initiatives vary widely in terms of time, scale and impacts. Thirty-two cases are also just a tiny snapshot of the range of exciting transformative initiatives taking place around the world.

Nevertheless, the stories showcased in this Atlas of Utopias are deeply inspiring. Despite the diversity, there are also common threads to radical transformative practice. We would like to share four of them here:

1. Organising locally can take on corporate power and national governments. It would seem that the balance of power between local governments and the national government and multinational corporations would make victories difficult but, in many cases, determined campaigners have defeated both. They have done this by taking advantage of people’s loyalty to their city, their greater control over local policy and by naming and shaming corporations and their failures to run city services effectively. In Berlin, for example, residents took on the federal government as well as the multinationals RWE and Veolia that did everything they could politically and legally to block remunicipalisation of the city’s water. Eventually political pressure – including a referendum in which 98% demanded that the government publish secretive contracts – led to water remunicipalisation in 2014.
2. Organising around access to basic rights such as water, energy, housing can engage many people and be part of a bigger transformation including tackling climate change. The advantage of organising around tangible issues such as energy or housing is that these are essential to everyone’s daily life, which is why these struggles have been so emblematic to the rise of municipalist movements everywhere. They also can be an opening to building a bigger progressive radical agenda. In Richmond, California, initial protests against air pollution by the Chevron refinery has led to a surge of support for the Richmond Progressive Alliance, their election to the council and a sea of change in local policy. This oil company town has subsequently raised its local minimum wage, brought in rent control measures that protect 40% of Richmond tenants, and rolled out successful community policing led by a visionary gay police chief. In Nicaragua, an association of rural development workers not only organised to build a community hydro to provide electricity to a rural population for the first time, it used the income from its surplus electricity to create an additional US $300,000 of revenue for investment in further development projects for the region.
3. Worker engagement is usually critical to transformation. As Hilary Wainwright has argued, workers are not just important for their bargaining power against capital, they are also uniquely positioned because of their knowledge and experience in running services and their pivotal role within community relations. Remunicipalisation and transformative practices work best when they can draw on this knowledge and creativity. In Jamundi, Colombia, the local trade union has not only stopped the privatisation of water, but has also become a fierce defender of the human right to water, developing four community water systems.  In Mumbai, India, former mill workers have succeeded in staying mobilised even after the mills closed and have won the construction of 26,000 homes for workers. They have successfully challenged and defeated real estate developers who sought to build malls and luxury housing.
4. Changes in one city can inspire many others. Many cities report that their actions have led to interest by many others and therefore sparked changes way beyond the community. Grenoble’s bold water remunicipalisation in 2001 – that included high levels of citizen accountability, social tariffs and ecological measures – inspired Paris to do the same. In Mexico, a special school has been set up to encourage lawyers, engineers, accountants, geographers and teachers in 16 states to defend public water for all, helping ensure that good practice becomes viral. The victory of the citizen-movement platform Barcelona en Comú has similarly sparked a new wave of municipalist movements worldwide. This perhaps answers one of Olin Wright’s challenges for establishing real utopias – the need for these networks to expand so that they can be in a position to challenge ‘the dominance of capitalism’.

In the next month, we plan to explore nine cases in more depth, sharing their process of change. Then in mid-April, the public will be invited to vote on their favourites. In addition, we have been working with a number of evaluators to draw out the learning which will be turned into publications in a variety of media formats to inspire and assist other communities involved in the same struggles.

There is a lot to learn about both the individual cases, their durability in terms of transformation, and whether they contain the elements for eventually “challenging the dominance of capitalism”. The latter still seems very far off, and it remains an open question and debate over whether an ever-expanding municipalist movement will ever reach the position of challenging the hegemony of transnational corporations and client neoliberal states.

What is clear already is that the first step for transformation begins when a group of people in a community decide to say no to the corporate takeover of public resources, and when they start to imagine an alternative.

Throughout the atlas, we witness individuals and organisations who have dared to dream and who have trusted that people can make decisions more justly than corporations driven by profit. In the process, they are building the social relationships that can take on corporate capital and most of all creating the imaginary that another world is not only possible but is on the way.

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance. – Eduardo Galeano

Featured image: Affordable housing for women workers in Solapur, India. Credit: Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).

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379 mayors representing more than 68 million Americans said they would implement the Accord regardless of the head-in-the-sand attitude of the country’s president. More significantly, given the weakness of the Paris agreement, more than 40 cities have gone further and committed to 100% renewable energy no later than 2050.

This practical defiance highlights how the city in our globalised world is emerging as a place of resistance, alternatives and solutions to our world’s multiple crises.

Cities are privileged places

Cities have a long history as cradles of social transformation, whether it was the urban revolts in Budapest, Stockholm and other European cities in 1848, the municipal victories and participatory budgeting experiments of the Workers Party in Brazil in the late 1980s or the emerging municipalist movement in Spain and other regions more recently. Cities constitute a privileged place to organise collectively and to imagine new ways of living and working together, spaces where bodies and minds interact and where ideas spread quickly and have unparalleled impact.

This is not to over-romanticise them. Cities, as other human constructions, have their own structures of concentrated power, inequality and exclusion. Greek city-states framed ideas of democracy that we still use today, but their societies were based on slavery and patriarchy. Medieval city-states were laboratories of modern liberal democracies and welfare systems based on taxation, but they were also the places where capitalism, colonialism, international finance and unfair trade relations emerged. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries.

Nevertheless, cities have noticeably emerged as a critical arena for many recent social struggles from the Arab Spring in Tahrir square, Cairo or the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. It has happened at time when cities for the first time in history now house more than 54% of the world’s population (expected to reach 67% by 2050).

For social movements, the cities are a strategic place to organise, not only practically but also politically. More than two decades of neoliberalism have succeeded in entrenching corporate power within national and international institutions and international legal frameworks – making it ever more difficult terrain for people’s movements, who have to defeat powerful interests and appeal to a deliberately disempowered electorate. Cities by contrast offer a more level playing field where people power can still take on and defeat corporate power and thereby prove that political mobilisation can deliver results.

Participation and power

The political theorist, the late Benjamin Barber, argued that cities are capable of reconnecting “participation, which is local, with power, which is central”. While nation states used to play that role, he argued they have become too large (and we would add also too captured by corporate capital) to sustain the kind of “bottom-up citizenship, civil society and voluntary community” that is essential to democracy.

Across the world, social movements are actively seizing this potential power,advancing important social demands, whether for dignified work, sustainable food systems, green energy or racial justice. Much of this transformation takes place under the radar, as mainstream largely corporate media continues to focus all its attention on the happenings in the national corridors of power.

Even we were surprised in 2015 when our organisation, the Transnational Institute, decided to look at the number of municipalities who had brought water services back under public control and discovered 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water. Given the power of transnational water companies like Suez and Veolia – and the grip that the ideology of privatisation has on national and international water policy – this was nothing short of a silent revolution. 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water… – nothing short of a silent revolution.

A follow-up report earlier this year that broadened its focus to include energy and housing unveiled 835 examples of (re)municipalisation of public services involving more than 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries. TNI researcher, Satoko Kishimoto, says “What is most important about these cases is that they kill once and for all the myth that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism. They show that not only is there a clear alternative to privatisation, but that it also has the potential to both improve services and transform society and environment for the better.”

An alternative to neoliberalism

In many cases, the experience of resisting corporate capital and defending rights, such as those of access to water or housing, has itself been transformational. It has helped activists reconnect with those alienated by neoliberalism, and also opened up peoples’ imaginations to think of new ways of organising work, services and social needs. The energy and dynamism that is released is palpable, captured in documentary films such as Demain (Tomorrow)

The experiences of trying to set up green businesses in Totnes in the UK, for example, eventually led to an international project, Reconomy, that seeks to build local economies that are sustainable, equitable and anchored in wellbeing, rather than tied to economic growth at any cost. An initiative by the New Delhi government to set up hundreds of small free health clinics to do diagnostics and simple treatments has inspired health activists across the world. In Barcelona, the experience of resisting house repossession inspired some activists to fight and win municipal elections based on a participatory platform of policies that include fining banks that speculate on empty homes, creating a new municipal energy company and providing sanctuary to refugees.

Barcelona’s new city council is now helping to foster a movement of ‘fearless cities’ committed to the same principles of participation, openness and social and environmental justice. Their first gathering in Barcelona in June 2017 attracted more than 600 participants representing more than 100 municipalist platforms from around the world.

The feminization of politics

Municipal activism is also an opportunity to put feminism and the feminization of politics at the forefront. As Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird have argued “the feminization of politics, beyond its concern for increasing presence of women in decision-making spaces and implementing public policies to promote gender equality, is about changing the way politics is done.” In practice, this means leaving aside patterns of our patriarchal society such as competition, dominant leaderships, vertical organizations, egoism and structures that have typically excluded women from politics. It is noticeable how many of the new leaders in the municipalist movement are women.

Perhaps the proximity, scope and nature of the political conflicts at the city level, such as struggles for access to water and housing, rather than monetary policy or military alliances, also provide an arena where non-patriarchal modes of political action are better suited.

Vandana Shiva, philosopher and activist, at Fearless Cities, June 9 – 11, 2017. Flickr/Barcelona En Comú. Some rights reserved.

Transformative Cities Initiative: a unique participatory award

These successful experiences around the remunicipalisation of public services and the rising municipalist movement have inspired TNI to launch the Transformative Cities Initiative. Our goal is to build an atlas of real utopias, make these experiences viral, and to share the learning that comes from implementing these experiments. This month, we are launching a unique participatory award to recognise transformative experiences. In the first year, the focus will be on water, energy and housing. In future years, the initiative will expand its focus to other areas such as migration and solidarity, territorial food governance and drugs harm reduction.

We are encouraging both social movements and cities to use this opportunity to share your story. We plan to bring participants together, to learn from and systematise these experiences, in order to inspire and accelerate the process of transformation in other regions and places. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates.

At a time when our current political framework offers most people a choice between neoliberal globalisation and authoritarian nationalism, between the global mall and the border wall, it is critical that the real alternatives coming from social movements are fertilized and strengthened.

A strategy that only seeks to resist increasingly authoritarian national governments, defending an ever-shrinking civic space, is demoralising and self-defeating. Similarly a strategy that articulates national and international alternatives that have no chance of realisation is equally disempowering.

Cities offer the chance to break with the dichotomy of despair – they give us a chance to trial out transformative change at a local level, and in so doing providing the building blocks for the global transformation that is so desperately needed. As the Fearless Cities gathering put it, “The local was where democracy was born; it is now where we will recover it.”

About the authors

Originally published in Open Democracy

Lead image:  Some rights reserved by Overpass Light Brigade

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