In the meantime, I have been getting out and about a bit. On September 29, I delivered a keynote talk at the Prairie Festival in Salina, Kansas, hosted by The Land Institute. The annual festival, now 40 years old, brings together several hundred progressives from around the country concerned about agriculture, food, land, and social change.

The Land Institute, founded by a hero of mine, Wes Jackson, is a leading independent agricultural research center. Its plant breeders and ecologists have an ambitious mission: to develop “an agriculture system that mimics natural systems in order to produce ample food and reduce or eliminate the negative impacts of industrial agriculture.”

One of the most impressive achievements of the Land Institute is its development of a perennial wheat called Kernza, which could radically reduce the ecological impact of conventional agriculture. The Institute is also developing a range of other crops using the principles of “perennial polyculture,” which relies on complementary, mutually supportive crops in the same field.

The event’s main events were held in a large, open barn that felt unusual warm and intimate despite the chilly weather that day. A print version of my remarks are below; a video can be seen here. (My talk starts at the timemark 41:00 and goes through 1:22.)

Thank you, Fred Iutzi and the Land Institute for inviting me to this wonderful festival!   It’s a great honor to be speaking at an event at which so many illustrious thinkers, innovators, and activists have attended in the past. I want to thank the Land Institute for its pathbreaking research and leadership over the years – and give a special thanks to Wes Jackson for his vision, courage, and sheer persistence over so many years.

I’m not a farmer or seed-sharer, and I don’t have a specific role in the farm-to-table world except as a grateful eater. However, I do live in a small, somewhat rural town, Amherst, Massachusetts, a place of maple trees and CSA farms, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, and… a town common.

It is in that capacity that I come before you today, as a commoner. Much more about that shortly, but suffice it to say that the commons, to me, is a vehicle for social and political emancipation. My new book, written with my German colleague Silke Helfrich and due out next year, captures three touchstones of commoning in its title — Free, Fair & Alive. It’s all about lived experience, not ideology, and more about living systems that emerge from the bottom up than about policies imposed from above.

I want to start with a blunt and perhaps jarring statement, that we are embroiled in a deep and serious war – a war against the imagination. This phrase comes from Beat poet Diane di Prima, who wrote:

The war that matters is the war against the imagination

all other wars are subsumed in it….

the war is the war for the human imagination

and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise

it is not only fierce, it is practical

men die everyday for the lack of it,

it is vast & elegant.

“The ultimate famine,” di Prima warns, “is the starvation of the imagination.”

When an artist-friend shared these lines with me, I realized how profoundly they speak to our times. In today’s world, there seems to be very little room in respectable circles for wide-open dreaming and experimentation, or for stepping off in new directions to explore the unknown. But the realm of the unknown is precisely where we really start to see and live.

In today’s world there are certain presumptions that serious people aren’t supposed to question, such as the necessity of economic growth and capital accumulation, and the importance of strong consumer demand and expansive private property rights. The more of these we have, the better, we are told.

These dogmas have sucked all the air out of our public life and politics.  Which is one reason that I have come to see the commons as a precious patch of ground — an important staging area for thinking and living our way past the prevailing orthodoxies. The commons is a space from which an insurgency might be launched – indeed, it IS being launched, if you train your eyes to see it.

In the next few minutes, I’d like to suggest how the commons paradigm can help us develop a new social and cultural vision, and new strategies for practical change. Paradoxically enough, redirecting our attention away from conventional politics and policy may offer the most promising possibilities for developing a transformational vision.

We’re surely reaching a point of diminishing returns within the existing system. Real change and regeneration are going to require that we jump the tracks somehow. We need to start imagining different ways of being, doing, and knowing – and we need to invent new institutional structures to support such a paradigm shift.

Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons

Let me first clarify what I mean by the commons – a term that is greatly misunderstood and misused. For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when you mention the word “commons” is tragedy – as in the “tragedy of the commons.”

That idea was put into circulation by biologist Garrett Hardin in a now-famous essay published by the journal Science in 1968. Hardin said, Imagine a pasture on which farmers can put as many sheep as they want. The result, he said, would inevitably be the over-exploitation of the pasture. No individual farmer would have a “rational” incentive to hold back, and so the sheep would over-graze and ruin the pasture, resulting in the tragedy of the commons.

What a tenacious little smear this has been! Over the past two generations, economists and conservative ideologues have embraced the “tragedy parable” as a powerful way to denigrate the collective management of resources, especially by government. Hardin’s just-so story has also proved useful for celebrating private property rights and, by implication, free markets and government deregulation.

The problem is, Hardin was spinning out a fantasy. It has no empirical basis. He was not describing any actual commons. He was describing an open-access regime – a free-for-all — in which there is no community, no rules for managing resources, no boundaries around them, no penalties for overuse or free-riding, etc. That’s not a commons. A commons consists of a community plus a shared resource and a set of social agreements, practices, traditions, etc., for governing it.

The scenario Hardin was describing more accurately describes market economics in which everyone is a disconnected individual defined by their “utility-maximizing rationality” and competitiveness, which makes you a sucker to restrain yourself. You might say that Hardin was really describing the tragedy of the market – “Grab what you want and forget about the mess you leave behind.”

The late Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University powerfully rebutted the whole “tragedy of the commons” fable in her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work in 2009 – the first woman to win the award. Ostrom and hundreds of scholars explained how countless communities around the world have self-organized themselves to manage natural resources without over-exploiting them – all of this outside of the market and state power.

Why, then, are these systems generally ignored by economists?  Because when you’re studying market transactions as the main event of life, anything that doesn’t involve cash and market exchange isn’t all that interesting.

And yet commons are everywhere. They are the ancient heritage of the human species. The International Land Coalition has estimated that there are over 2.5 billion people in the world whose daily lives today depend upon forests, fisheries, farmland, irrigation water, and wild game managed as commons. It’s the default mode of provisioning through nature! Yet to we moderns, commons remain mostly invisible – or misrepresented as ineffective and marginal.  Doomed to failure.

The huge achievement of Ostrom and her academic colleagues was to provide scholarly validation for the commons as a system of governance and provisioning. Ostrom showed that cooperation is actually economically consequential, something that her colleagues, most of them males, scoffed at.

A Movement of Commoners Arises

Meanwhile, outside of academia, a related story was developing on a parallel track over the past twenty years. A self-replicating movement of commoners was arising to build an empire of their own – an insurgent, diversified network based on the ideas of commoning. Yes, the commons is not so much a noun as a verb.

Commoning is the social process by which people come together, figure out the terms of their peer governance, learn how to devise fair systems, how to deal with rule-breakers, how build a cohesive culture, and so forth. Who are these commoners? They include:

• farmers, villagers, pastoralists, and fishers who use community systems to manage crops, pastures, irrigation water, trees, wild game, fish….

• “Localists” who want to restore the self-determination of their communities through community land trusts, CSA farms, alternative currencies and time-banking systems, among other commons.

• There are Croatians fighting enclosures of their public spaces and coastal lands, and Greeksdeveloping mutual aid systems to fight the neoliberal economic policies that have decimated that nation.

• There is a rich Francophone network of commoners, and others in Spain, Italy, the UK, and India.

• A new “municipalism” of urban commons is arising in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Bologna to establish commons-based Wi-Fi systems, public spaces, social projects, limits on development, and more.

• Indigenous peoples are arguably the oldest commoners, fighting to defend their ethnobotanical knowledge and biocultural practices.

• A vast network of digital commoners are creating free and open source software….building open-access publishing systems….“platform cooperatives” as alternatives to Uber and Airbnb….wikis and makerspaces and Fab Labs.

Through some form of spontaneous convergence – or rising of a collective unconscious – these various groups are discovering the commons and using it as a lingua franca. While they all traffic in very different resources and in very different circumstances, most of them have a least one thing in common — a victimization by global markets and capital.

Enclosure and the War Against Imagination

This brings us to the word “enclosure.” It is a word that helps commoners fight the war against the imagination. Enclosure names the great harms that occur when the market/state system privatizes and encloses our common wealth. Enclosure happens when something managed by a social cohort or rooted in an ecosystem is redefined as a market commodity. It is ripped from its context, converted into private property, and sold. Its price becomes its value.

This is an act of radical dispossession – the kind that defined the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which millions of commoners were evicted from their forests and pastures, and forced to migrate to cities and England’s dark satanic mills.

We are now in the midst of a second major enclosure movement. This time, it is using less violent but even more effective weapons of dispossession. These include intellectual property law, digital technologies, Big Data and algorithms, and, as needed, raw state coercion and market power. As in the past, the mission is to seize the common wealth for private profitmaking.

Enclosure happens when the Hunt brothers buy up vast tracts of groundwater in the Midwest, turning priceless repositories of life into speculative commodities to be sold to the highest bidders.

Enclosure happens when biotech and pharmaceutical companies patent genetic information about plants and seeds, and medicines and diseases. One fifth of the human genome is now owned by companies as patents. The German company BASF owns more than 6,000 patents derived from genetic sequences in 862 marine organisms.

Enclosure happens when industrial agriculture converts a living landscape into a vast, quasi-dead vessel of soil to grow monoculture crops. It occurs when the traditional sharing and cultivating of seeds are criminalized – which is happening today.

Enclosure is happening today in Africa and Asia, as sovereign investment funds and hedge funds collude with governments to buy land that have been used for generations by subsistence communities and indigenous tribes. It’s a huge land grab that is displacing millions of people and triggering new migrations to urban shantytowns and future famines: the English enclosure movement revisited.

Amazingly, American politics and economics don’t have a name for the idea of enclosure.  Instead it’s usually called “innovation,” “wealth creation,” and “progress.” The language of the commons helps us debunk these modern-day fairy tales.

The Commons and Place-Based Stewardship

What does all of this talk of the commons have to do with rural America and farming, ecosystems and human well-being?

I’d like to propose that the commons discourse can help us break out of the claustrophobic mindset of contemporary politics and economics, especially as they apply to rural America. The concepts and language of the commons – and scores of real-life projects – can open up new ways of thinking that go beyond the traditional “progress narratives” of growth and “development.”

As the era of climate change descends upon us – as we begin to recognize the fragility and costs of global supply chains for food, energy, and water; as we learn how giant corporations work with government to consolidate market power and squeeze out small players; as we discover how markets tend to flatten the distinctiveness of place and identity, and propagate inequality and division – we are learning what pre-moderns have known for millennia: Place-based stewardship and community self-reliance can offer more ecologically rooted, humane, and satisfying ways to live.

But how can we possibly work for such a vision? One thing is for sure, it won’t come via Washington, D.C., or new trade policies or farm bills, at least not primarily. It will first require some deeper cultural and personal shifts from us – and the development of new sorts of commons-based institutions.

It will require that we wean ourselves away from a mindset that is transactional – which is the essence of capitalist markets and culture, a mindset deeply embedded within each of us – and learn to embrace a mindset that at its core is relational, where we see ourselves as interconnected and interdependent, and can show our vulnerabilities as humans without being taken advantage of.

That’s where I see the commons helping to catalyze a transformation. The language and framing of the commons helps name this different order of life. Evolutionary sciences are showing that the hyper-individualistic story told by conventional economics is an utter fantasy. As E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and Martin Nowak (among others) have shown, we are a species that has evolved through cooperation.

We are not free-floating individuals without histories or social ties, untouched by geography or community. In reality, we are all nested-I’s – individuals nested within larger biological webs and within social collectives that profoundly shape us. Land and natural systems are not mere resources as the price-system implies. They are what I call care-wealth.

It’s this relationality that needs to be brought to the foreground. As Thomas Berry put it memorably: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” This is the ontological shift – the OntoShift – that we need to make as a culture and find ways to enact through projects and express through language.

In a sense, that’s the purpose of the commons. It’s a rediscovered term that is being used to describe some ancient realities. It expresses the spiritual connections of indigenous peoples to the land and the cosmos. The commons is about the land ethic that Aldo Leopold wrote about. It echoes what Rachel Carson said about the subtle interconnectedness of all living things, and what Wendell Berry has so beautifully written about the human satisfactions of working with a landscape.

 A commons is about having responsibilities and entitlements that flow from them; stepping up to long-term stewardship; making up the rules of governance from the bottom up, with an accent on fairness, participation, and inclusiveness; and the inalienability of certain things. Some things just aren’t for sale.

In short, it’s all about relationality!  It is here where a new vision for rural America needs to begin.

Much has been made about the linkages between rural America and Trump voters – a linkage that I think has been vastly overblown. Trump brilliantly exploits genuine needs, and preys upon fears and desperation. But if we think more deeply about what’s important to us and what makes for quality of life over the long term, the answers won’t be ideological. They must be human, and they must grow their own new legal, economic, and institutional vessels.

The standard wisdom is that farmers, agricultural suppliers, and rural businesses should double-down and try to compete more effectively in integrated global markets. They should get leaner and meaner and smarter, goes the pep talk. They should demand greater government subsidies and new forms of support. This is fair enough, so far as it goes.

But we’ve seen how this approach is fraught with problematic risks. Are we really prepared to accept permanent subordination to the corporate seed, biotech, and chemical giants? Do we really want to build a future based on volatile energy and food prices in an era of Peak Oil and climate change? Can we depend on dwindling supplies of water from elsewhere and owned by someone else, and on the shifting sands of international trade policies and tariffs?

The Commons and Rural Futures

I’d like to suggest that the a more constructive and secure long-term vision is for communities to become more locally autonomous and self-directed….. to become less dependent on the global and national markets, many of which treat rural America as sites for neocolonial extraction in any case.

The more promising answers lie in greater relocalization and community self-reliance….in decommodifying our daily needs as possible; in working with the land and not abusing it; in sharing infrastructure and collaborations with other commoners; and in mutualizing the benefits that are generated.

This was roughly the strategy that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer used fifty years ago when she and others purchased 680 acres of Mississippi Delta land and named them “Freedom Farms.” The goal was to provide access to land so that African-Americans could grow their own food cooperatively. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around and tell you what to say or do,” she said.

That is the beauty of commoning. It’s practical. You could say that it draws from the best of all political ideologies: Conservatives like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility. Liberals are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement. Libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative. And leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the market. It’s all about cultivating a mindset of mutual support and building durable systems of relationality.

In the few minutes that remain, I’d like to quickly review some of these cooperative, benefit-sharing, relational approaches.

It seems appropriate to start with the Land Institute’s Kernza wheat and other perennial crops. Could one imagine an agricultural innovation more in sync with natural systems? It absorbs more water than conventional wheat, prevents runoff and erosion, captures more carbon, and provides year-round habitat for wildlife – while of course providing a tasty food for we humans. Kernza has enormous potential for bringing humans into a deeper, more regenerative relationship with the land itself – which will surely enhance the stability of agricultural towns.

I am thrilled by another commons-in-the-making, the Open Source Seed Initiative. Its basic purpose is to decommodify seeds to make them freely breedable and shareable, under terms set by commoners themselves. Currently, more than 400 varieties of seeds and fifty-one species have become what I would call “relationalized property” – legally shareable seeds that can participate in the gift-economy of nature and yet cannot be privatized.

Of course, land is another precious resource that has already been enclosed by capital or faces constant threats of enclosure. How can land be made more affordable and accessible, especially for young farmers, and be deployed as an object of stewardship, not simply ruthless market exploitation?

We know that community land trusts are a powerful vehicle for land reform. They are a way for communities to take land off the speculative market and use them for long-term community purposes, such as workforce housing, town improvements, sustainable agriculture, and recreation.

Again: the strategy of decommodify and share. A CLT is a kind of commons because it socializes and collectivizes economic rent, and then invests it back into the community that helps create it. It’s a social organism for regenerating value, through democratic governance and open membership in its classic form.

More recently, the Schumacher Center has been developing an offshoot of community-supported agriculture – community-supported industry. The idea is to use community land trust structures in novel ways to help decommodify land and buildings in a town. They can then be used for all sorts of “import-replacement” enterprises – production, retail, food – that recirculates dollars within the region.

In terms of re-purposing land, I recently learned about the FaithLands movement. It’s a small but growing movement of churches, monasteries, and other religious bodies offering up their land for community-minded agriculture, ecological restoration, and social justice projects. It turns out that religious organizations own a lot of tax-free land, and so they can potentially act like conservation organizations or land trusts.

A farmer working on church land said: “Our scripture starts with Genesis in the garden and ends with Revelation in a garden in the city—with Jesus in the middle inviting us to a meal. If we’re seeking to transform our food system in a way that’s going to be beneficial not only for ourselves, but for our great grandchildren, how can the church put [its] land into service?”

Simply asking, “What does the land want?” and “How can we feed the hungry?” lets us consider the radical idea of food itself as a commons. Why shouldn’t food be recognized as a basic human need available to all, and not merely as a private, transnational commodity? A famous essay published in 1988 called for returning a vast portion of the Great Plains to native prairie as a “Buffalo Commons.” That never happened, of course, but it did provoke valuable debates that have sparked some actual projects that move in this direction. A dialogue about food commons could have similar effects.

If a larger Commons Sector is going to arise and flourish, however, we will need more than small-scale, one-off projects. We need larger shared infrastructure to take things to the next level. This can open up new opportunities for commoning while thwarting the possibility of business monopolies and proprietary lock-ins, as we see in seed patents, exclusive supply chains, and the like.

I am thrilled to learn of the supply infrastructure created by farmers in the area north of Boston, along the seacoast of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Three River Farmers Alliance has brought together a variety of local producers to aggregate and distribute their foods. The shared distribution system helps them escape a dependency on powerful middlemen and build new bonds of trust among themselves. An open source farm-management software platform lets each farm function independently while also letting each opt-in to share knowledge and cooperate with others. This works only because there are shared data protocols managed as a commons.

Or consider the Fresno Commons in Fresno, California, which is reinventing the whole farm-to-table supply chain under the control of a series of community trusts. This is helping farmers, distributors, retailers, and others to mutualize risks and benefits throughout the value-chain. The “profit” doesn’t get siphoned off to investors, but is used to improve wages and working conditions, grow food without pesticides, make food more affordable to low-income people, etc.

These stories point to the critical role that digital network technologies can play in bringing gig-economy efficiencies down to the local level. But this is not just about market efficiencies and automated administration; it’s about building tech-based affordances for new forms of cooperation in today’s world.

Another such platform is called cosmo-local production. This is an emerging production process in which knowledge and design – the light-weight stuff – are co-developed and shared with collaborators around the world via the Internet. Then the heavy, physical tasks of production are done locally, in open source ways — which is to say, in ways that are inexpensive, modular, locally sourceable, and protected from enclosure. This is the idea behind Farm Hack, a global community of open source designers of all sorts of farm equipment.

Cosmo-local production is also being used to design electronics (Arduino), video animations (Blender Institute), cars (Wikispeed), houses (Wikihouse), and furniture (Open Desk). The same general logic of global collaboration can be seen in the System for Rice Intensification, a global collaboration in which thousands of farmers around the world share their own agronomy innovations with each other, open-source style. It has improved rice yields four- and five-times over without chemicals or GMOs.

I haven’t touched on innovations in local government. Let me just quickly mention the ingenious uses of government procurement to help strengthen the local economy such as the pioneering work led by the Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland and more recently, in Preston, England. In Italy, dozens of cities are developing “public/commons partnerships,” also known as “co-city protocols.” These are systems through which city bureaucracies collaborate with neighborhoods and citizen groups, empowering people to meet their own needs more directly and on their own terms.

Lest I leave the impression that the commons amounts to a bunch of white papers and policy ideas, let me underscore that the commons is about providing convivial spaces for us as whole human beings. A commons can only work by drawing upon our inner lives, sense of purpose, and cultural and spiritual values. It is therefore imperative that artists and cultural organizations play a conspicuous role. They can express insights and feelings that our hyper-cognitive minds cannot. They can express embodied ways of knowing.

I think you can begin to connect the many dots. No single one of them is the answer, but together, they help us to begin to think like a commoner. That’s liberating. That opens up new vistas of possibility. It helps us fight the war against the imagination and give us hope.

In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Thatcher defended the harsh neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, and fiscal austerity, with a line that was often shortened to its acronym, TINA: “There Is No Alternative!” she would thunder. In truth, as I hope I’ve shown, the more accurate acronym is TAPAS: “There Are Plenty of Alternatives!”

But these alternatives are only available to us if we can learn how to develop a new mindset, cultivate a new language to express our shared vision, and embark upon the hard work of building it out through commoning, project by project. That’s our challenge, which I am grateful to be able to share with this remarkable Prairie Festival!

Thank you.

The post The Insurgent Power of the Commons in the War Against the Imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

Interview transcript

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

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

David Bollier: It’s great to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Simpson: This was the time of Napster…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Bollier: Thank you.

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