Greek edition of “Think Like a Commoner”

After the governing coalition Syriza capitulated to creditors’ draconian demands in 2016, its credibility as a force for political change declined. Despite its best intentions, it could not deliver. The Greek people might understandably ask:  Have we reached the limits of what the conventional Left can achieve within “representative democracies” whose sovereignty is so compromised by global capital?  Beyond such political questions, citizens might also wonder whether centralized bureaucratic programs in this age of digital networks can ever act swiftly and responsively.  Self-organized, bottom-up federations of commoning often produce much better results.

Pummeled by some harsh realities and sobered by the limits of Left politics, many Greeks are now giving the commons a serious look as a political option. This was my impression after a recent visit to Athens where I tried to give some visibility to the recently published Greek translation of my book Think Like a Commoner.  In Greek, the book is entitled Κοινά: Μία σύντομη εισαγωγή).  Besides a public talk at a bookstore (video here), I spoke at the respected left Nicos Poulantzas Institute (video with Greek translation & English version), which was eager to host a discussion about commons and commoning.

Re-inventing law for the Commons, David Bollier from Institouto Nicos Poulantzas on Vimeo.

In my talk, I suggested that the Greek state might wish to re-imagine “the economy,” politics and law by considering what commons could accomplish (and are accomplishing), and how state policies might support commoning. Since the left cannot necessarily advance its larger agenda of social justice, fairness and human rights through the state – subservient as it is to neoliberal circuits of global power – it should entertain how the commons might open up some new solution-sets.

To that end, I discussed the promise of relocalized food and agriculture systems; the potential of re-imagining city policies and programs as a commons; the advantages of academic commons to more efficiently generate and share scholarship and scientific knowledge; the power of open source software and open design and manufacturing; the ecological wisdom of traditional agricultural, forestry and fishery commons; and the ways in which law could decriminalize and support commoning, moving beyond many pathologies of bureaucracy.

At the macro-scale, a commons-based economy could also help a country escape the massive inefficiencies, ecological costs, predatory behaviors and corruption associated with the conventional economy — while generating new forms nonmarket provisioning and socially legitimate political power.

I was told about medical care commons that have sprung up in Athens in recent years.  Staffed by volunteers and donated/low-cost supplies, the system is a desperate social improvisation to help people meet basic medical needs at a time when public hospitals turn people away.  The system has become a respected alternative system for medical care, engaging people as real human beings and not as mere “clients” or numbers. When patients don’t use all the pills they are given, for example, they return them, so someone else can use them. A kind of social solidarity has emerged. Supplies and personnel are obviously limited, but some aspects of healthcare have been reinvented as flexible modes of human caring, escaping the economic and social logic of conventional healthcare.

Of necessity, Greeks have established other commons as well – for food, housing and fuel.  There are active efforts to make Greek academic research and data more available as a commons, going beyond the logic of open platforms.  A Greek hacker community, the Libre Space Foundation, has even built the first open source satellite and ground station network – UPSat and SatNOGS — from readily available and affordable tools.

These are the sorts of initiatives that the traditional left may regard as interesting, but not politically significant. I think that is a huge mistake. In that gap of understanding lies the potential for inventing a new type of climate-friendly, socially just economy and political culture.

At this moment of transition, therefore, when the commons seems to be acquiring new traction and visibility in Greece, I am thrilled that my book Think Like a Commoner is now available there.

I wish to thank George Papanikolaou and Andreas Karitzis for their role in organizing the translation of my book, and Efstathiou Anastasio of Angelus Novus Editions for publishing and promoting the Greek edition.  My thanks also to two commons scholars, Antonis Broumas and Stavros Stravrides, for graciously sharing their thoughts on the commons at the bookstore event.  A salute, too, to the Nicos Poulantzas Institute for hosting my talk.

For any readers of Greek, here are a few press interviews with me and reviews of my book – in Epohi; in Avgi, a collective blog (and here); in efsyn; and in Left.

Even though it was cold and blustery — Athens in February! — I had a great time, including a visit to the Acropolis and Agora. Next time: longer discussions, a day at the National Museum, and a visit to Greek islands.

Cross-posted from Bollier.org

Photo by stevegarfield

The post The Greek Left Takes Stock of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A big salute to Thom for hosting this kind of material on his show. He is a rare creature on American TV and radio — an intelligent progressive willing to give airtime to ideas from outside the Washington, D.C. echo chamber. Since the retirement of Bill Moyers, there are very few American TV personalities who actually read history, understand how it informs contemporary politics, and give sympathetic exposure to movement struggles seeking social and economic transformation.

Since I’m sharing links, let me also share the link to my 20-minute presentation yesterday at Ralph Nader’s conference, “Breaking Through Power.org” conference, which is being held this week in Washington, D.C.  My talk, “Controlling What We Own — Defending the Commons,” can be seen here at the timemark 5:35:15.

Check out the other presentations on this eight-hour video from Real News Network — some amazing segments by folks like John Bogle, William Lerach, Ellen Brown and others focused on corporate governance, power and financial abuses.

The post The Commons gets its foot in the door on US TV appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Karl Marx memorably described the commoditizing logic of capitalism, saying, “All that is solid melts into air.” Enclosures eclipse the history and memory of the commons, rendering them invisible. The impersonal, individualistic, transaction-based ethic of the market economy becomes the new normal.

If we are to understand the commons, then, it is useful to learn more about its rich, neglected history. Capitalist culture likes to think that all of history leads inexorably to greater progress, if not perfection, as society climbs towards the present moment, the best of all possible worlds. The complex, overlooked history of the commons tells a different story. It is an account of how human beings have learned new and ingenious ways to cooperate. It is a story of building new types of social institutions for shared purposes despite systems of power (feudalism, authoritarianism, capitalism) with very different priorities.

Commons tend to be nested within other systems of power and institutional relationships, and therefore are not wholly independent. There is often a deep “creative tension” between the logic of the commons and the imperatives of its host environment (whether feudal lords, technology markets or national laws). This is why many commons thrive in the interstices of power, in “protected zones” tolerated or overlooked by Power, or accidentally remote from it.

The stark reality is that commons tend not to be dominant institutional forms in their own right. This subordinate role can be seen in the flourishing of medieval land commons under feudalism; in mutual associations under socialism and communism; and, in our time, in gift economies such as academia and civic associations under capitalism. Such commons were (and still are) nested within larger systems of power and rarely functioned as sovereign forces.

Still, human reciprocity and cooperation go back millennia. With the dawn of civilization, legal traditions were invented that sought to protect the shared interests of the many and of future generations. The human impulse to cooperate is rarely expressed in purely altruistic forms; it tends to work in creative tension with individualism and power. Even though we like to contrast “individualism” and “collectivism” as opposites, in the commons they tend to blur and intermingle in complicated ways. The two are not mutually exclusive, but rather dynamic yin-and-yang complements.

Historical, small-scale commons belie the claims made by contemporary economists that humans are essentially materialist individuals of unlimited appetites, and that these traits are universal. Quite the opposite. The real aberration in human history is the idea of Homo economicus and our globally integrated market society. Never before in history have markets organized so many major and granular elements of human society. Never before has the world seen so many societies organized around the principles of market competition and capital accumulation, which systematically produce extremes of selfish individualism, inequalities of wealth and crippling assaults on natural ecosystems.

This is worrisome on its own terms, but also because of the instability and fragility of large-scale, market-based systems. Six years after the 2008 financial crisis, the greater powers are still scrambling to re-establish trust, credibility and social stability to many global and national markets. Whether through crisis or choice, it is virtually inevitable that the human race (or at least the industrialized West) will need to rediscover and reinvent institutions of human cooperation.

What Evolutionary Sciences Tell Us About Cooperation

Given their premises about individual self-interest, it is not surprising that economists consider the world a nasty, competitive place that will degenerate into anarchy unless the State steps in to restrain bad actors and mete out punishment. A formidable set of political philosophers — John Locke, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes — set forth this worldview in the eighteenth century; in the words of Hobbes, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Upon its principles of universal selfishness and individual “rationality” entire systems of law and public policy have been built.

But what if this is mostly a “just so” story — a partially accurate fable that does not really describe the full, empirical realities of human nature? What if it could be shown that human cooperation, reciprocity and non-rational behavior are just as significant a force as “competitive rationality” and “utility maximization”?

This is the startling conclusion of much contemporary research in the evolutionary sciences, especially brain neurology, genetics, developmental and evolutionary psychology, biology, organizational sociology and comparative anthropology. These sciences are confirming that social reciprocity and trust are deeply engrained principles of our humanity. They may even be biologically encoded.

One of the first scientists to explore this possibility was the Russian zoologist Petr Kropotkin in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Kropotkin surveyed the animal kingdom and concluded that it “was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human.” Animals live in association with each other and mutually aid each other as a way to improve their group fitness.

Mainstream science in the twentieth century took a very different direction, however. It has generally embraced models of rational self-interest to explain how organisms behave and evolve. In the evolutionary sciences, natural selection has traditionally been seen as something that happens to individuals, not to groups, because individuals have been considered a privileged unit in the biological hierarchy of nature. Thus evolutionary adaptations have been thought to happen to individuals, not to collectivities or entire species. Scientists have generally dismissed the idea that biological traits that are “good for the group” can be transmitted and evolve at the group level.

Over the past decade, however, there has been an explosion of new research by respected scientists such as Martin Nowak, E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson, who argue that group-level selection is a significant force in human and animal evolution. Empirical evidence suggests that evolutionary adaptations can and do occur at all levels of the biological hierarchy, including groups. The basic idea is that while cooperation and altruism can be “locally disadvantageous” for individuals, they can be highly adaptive traits for groups. As E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson put it, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” In short, reciprocal social exchange lies at the heart of human identity, community and culture. It is a vital brain function that helps the human species survive and evolve.

Controversy still rages, of course, but it would appear that human beings are neurologically hardwired to be empathic and cooperative, and to connect emotionally with their fellow human beings. As author and essayist Rebecca Solnit showed in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, members of communities beset by catastrophes such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1907, the German Blitz of London during World War II and the 9/11 terrorist attacks generally show incredible self-sacrifice, joy, resolve and aching love toward each other. The communities such disasters create are truly “paradises built in hell.” Her book is an answer to the economists and political leaders who believe that the world is made up of isolated, selfish individuals who must be governed through authoritarianism and fear.

“Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution,” writes Harvard theoretical biologist Martin A. Nowak, “is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world,” adding, “Thus, we might add ‘natural cooperation’ as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection.” It bears noting that the popularity of “individual selection theory” during the latter half of the twentieth century coincided uncannily with the heyday of market culture and its ethic of competitive individualism. A case of culture affecting scientific observation?

What is notable about the more recent findings of evolutionary science is the recognition that individual organisms function within a complex system of interdependence. This means that individual self-interest and group survival tend to converge, making the supposed dualism of “self-interest” and “altruism” somewhat artificial. Anyone who participates in useful online communities will recognize this feeling; individual and group interests become more or less aligned and self-reinforcing, if occasionally disrupted by disagreements and external jolts.

As a social scientist, Professor Elinor Ostrom studied hundreds of cases around the world in which communities were able to self-organize their own systems of commons-based governance and develop a cooperative ethic. Her research unearthed an ethnographic reality: that commons can persuade individuals to limit their narrow self-interests and support a larger collective agenda. The gratifying news is that evolutionary scientists are confirming these claims at the more elemental level of genetics, biology, neurology and evolutionary psychology.

The Forgotten Legal History of the Commons

The subterranean life of the commons in evolutionary science — which is only now being recognized — parallels its legal history. The law of the commons has also been largely ignored, and yet it actually goes back to ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, and is stitched like a golden thread throughout medieval history in Europe. Landmarks of commons-based law — such as Roman legal categories for property and the Magna Carta and its companion Charter of the Forest — are deeply embedded in Western law.

Consider King John. In thirteenth-century England, a series of monarchs began to claim larger and larger plots of forest lands for their personal recreation and use, at the expense of barons and commoners. By threatening the basic livelihoods of commoners who depended on the forest for their food, firewood and building materials, these royal encroachments on the commons provoked prolonged and bitter civil strife. Livestock could not roam the forests; pigs could not eat acorns; commoners could not gather timber to fix their homes; boats could not navigate rivers upon which dams or private causeways had been built.

After years of brutal armed conflict, King John in 1215 formally consented to a series of legal limitations on his absolute power and stipulated that other members of society, including commoners, were entitled to due process, human rights and subsistence, among other rights. This was the great Magna Carta, one of the foundations of Western civilization. The rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, the prohibition of torture and the rule of law all derive from the Magna Carta. All these legal principles have since found expression in modern constitutions around the world as the fundamental rights of citizens. They are also affirmed by a number of leading human rights conventions.

A near-forgotten document, the Charter of the Forest, also bears mention here. Signed two years after the Magna Carta and later incorporated into it, this charter recognized the traditional rights of commoners to use royal lands and forests. Thus commoners formally enjoyed the rights of pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing) and turbary (cutting of turf for fuel) on royal properties. As a practical matter, the Charter of the Forest gave commoners basic rights to subsistence. It also protected them against state terror as waged by the king’s sheriffs in their defense of the king’s enclosures.

As this brief history suggests, the law of the commons points to a different type of law — one that originates from the lived experience of commoners; one that tends to be informal, situational and evolving rather than fixed and written; and one that encourages social mutualism and equality over commercial goals or state authority. Peter Linebaugh is instructive on this point: “Commoning is embedded in a labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of field, upland, forest, marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor. They belong to experience, not schooling.… Commoning, being independent of the state, is independent also of the temporality of the law and state. It’s much older. But this doesn’t mean that it’s dead, or premodern, or backward.”

Commoning remains vitally important as a bulwark against the abuses of formal law because it represents one of the few ways that formal law can be made accountable to the people. Formal law can be more easily corrupted and betrayed because it has identifiable access points — legislatures, courts, heads of state — where bad actors can traduce it, whereas vernacular law is deeply rooted in the daily lives of people and their culture and is therefore harder to manipulate or corrupt.

As welcome as the Magna Carta was to commoners, its guarantees could only be assured through constant vigilance. Commoners were skeptical, and understood the necessity of fighting back. This is one reason why kings repeatedly republished the Magna Carta over the years, ritualistically affirming that the basic human rights of commoners were indeed being upheld. Of course, a piece of paper has proved to be of only limited value in stopping the abuses of state power. As we’ve seen in our own times, the US government has, in the name of fighting terrorism, ignored with impunity the rights of habeas corpus, due process, the prohibitions on torture and other principles of the Magna Carta.

So, too, in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the Magna Carta did little to impede enormous new enclosures of land. In 1536, King Henry III eliminated Catholic monasteries, unleashing a fierce round of enclosures by lords and nobles — a “massive act of state-sponsored privatization,” as Linebaugh calls it. Authorized by four thousand acts of Parliament over several centuries, a rising class of gentry seized roughly 15 percent of all English common lands for their own private use. These enclosures destroyed many commoners’ social connection to the soil and trampled their social identities and traditions, paving the way for their proletarianization.

As enclosures intensified, women who tried to maintain their old ways of commoning — who asserted their rights to common, if only because they had no other way to subsist — often found themselves accused of being witches. Silvia Federici explores these themes in her feminist history of the medieval transition to capitalism, Caliban and the Witch. She writes: “The social function of the commons was especially important for women, who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on them for their subsistence, autonomy and sociality.”

The Eclipse of the Law of the Commons

“Enclosure meant a shift away from lives guided by customs preserved in local memory toward those guided by national law preserved in writing,” observed commons scholar Lewis Hyde. “It meant a shift in the value of change itself, once suspect and associated with decay, now praised and linked to growth. It meant a change in the measurement and perception of time” (as factories began to rationalize and measure time and direct people’s activities based on it).

As people’s access and rights to land were separated from social custom, a new type of person arose — the individual, someone who was not visibly a member of a collective and whose worldview became oriented around personal wages, technological progress, social progress and material gain. The new market order, writes Karl Polanyi, created people who were “migratory nomadic, lacking in self-respect and discipline — crude, callous beings.” All of this followed when the “bundle” that constituted the commons — resources, commoners and social practices — was disassembled and commoditized to serve the needs of the new industrial market order.

Of course, enclosure had some positive effects, such as doing away with the master/commoner relationship, transforming vassals into freeholders. But this new “freedom” cut both ways: while it liberated people to pursue new identities and social freedoms, it also destroyed the social cohesion of the commons, a person’s assured subsistence, ecological sustainability and the stabilizing linkages between identity and resource use.

The history of socialism and political liberalism can be seen as attempts to ameliorate some of the worst structural problems created by the dissolution of the commons. European socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries introduced new sorts of social mutualism and bureaucratic systems to try to meet the needs of former commoners in the new circumstances of industrialized society. Bottom-up innovations such as consumer cooperatives, social security systems and municipal water supplies were invented. The idea was to meet the basic needs of commoners in a very different historical context, that of the Market/State.

These innovations were certainly an improvement over the laissez-faire order, and indeed, many of the early socialistic or utopian projects more or less functioned as commons, perhaps because they still had a lively memory of traditional commons. But as workers’ collectives adapted to the requirements of state law, bureaucracy, corporations and market forces, the practice of commoning — and the vitality of commons — slowly disappeared.

State regulation has been another means to compensate for the problems introduced by “free markets,” namely the displacement of costs and risks onto the environment, communities and the human body. The regulation of environmental practices and the safety of food, drugs, medical devices, chemicals, autos and consumer products can be seen as attempts to use the cumbersome apparatus of formal law, science and bureaucracy to enforce the social and ethical norms of commoners. Given the scale of commercial dealings and the power of multinational corporations, state regulation is absolutely necessary; conventional commons are too small, unorganized and lacking in resources to assure socially responsible outcomes.

On the other hand, regulation has not worked so well. The centralization and formalization of law made it easier for regulated industries to capture and corrupt the process — no surprise given the power of the Market/State and the depth of its overlapping interests. It remains something of an open question how governance might be restructured to rein in the chronic social and environmental abuses generated by markets.

Just as state regulation has a very uneven record, so the state’s role as a trustee of common assets is uneven and often dismal. We easily forget that many resources managed by the state belong to the people. The state does not “own” the air, water, public lands, coastal areas or wildlife, and cannot do what it pleases with them. It is authorized to act only as an administrative and fiduciary agent of the people. Under the public trust doctrine it cannot give away or allow the destruction of these resources. To emphasize the state’s stewardship obligations, I like to call large-scale, state-mediated commons state trustee commons.

Unfortunately, the state often neglects its responsibilities to “intervene” in markets because it fears that it might inhibit economic growth and violate widely believed fictions about “free market” principles. Safety regulations and public-service requirements, for example, tend to stabilize society, prevent serious harm and assure a rough social equity. But in our neoliberal times, even these goals are seen by most governments as an unacceptable burden on capital and corporations, and as a drag on economic growth.

To be sure, many grassroots movements have developed a modest independent sector of cooperatives and mutual association. Unfortunately, these alternative provisioning systems have generally failed to reach a meaningful scale. Similarly, while many important regulatory protections have been won over the years, they have failed to keep pace with the relentless stream of new problems generated by markets. In addition, regulation is generally dominated by legal proceduralism and scientific expertise, so that the views of local residents or individual consumers do not carry as much weight in decision-making as those of lawyers, credentialed technical experts and corporate officials. Commoners often find themselves delegitimized as participants in the governance process, or simply unable to afford the costs of participating.

In practice, the very institutionalization of the process, ostensibly intended to assure fair, equal and universal participation, also tends to disenfranchise commoners. This can be seen when social democratic states have taken over the administration of projects (social security) and when state communism has marginalized collective initiatives (co-ops). It is no surprise that the success of commoners in developing adequate protections for themselves and their resources through the legal systems of the nation-state has been highly irregular and limited.

Some of the most astute commentators on these problems are autonomous Marxists such as Massimo De Angelis, editor of The Commoner website; George Caffentzis, founder of the Midnight Notes Collective; Silvia Federici, an historian who concentrates on the feminist implications of the commons; Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto and other histories of English commons; and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the political theorists and authors of Multitude, Empire and Commonwealth. Each in different ways has noted that the core problem of unfettered capitalist markets is their tendency to erode the authentic social connections among people (cooperation, custom, tradition) and to liquidate the organic coherence of society and individual commons. Capital breaks commons into their constituent parts — labor, land, capital, money — and treats them as commodities whose value is identical with their price.

This has caused a persistent moral and political crisis because market capitalism cannot answer the questions, What can bind people together beyond the minimal social and civic ties needed to participate in market exchanges? Can a market-based society survive without the commons?

2016 May 18

The following is an excerpt from Think Like A Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Copyright © 2014 by David Bollier. Reprinted with permission of New Society Publishers.

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We’re launching a new kind of publishing network, with a team of P2P/commons publishers in Europe and Latin America. The idea here is to “think global” – create a book translation and release a free e-book – and “print local” – support small, local printers and publishers, and avoid environmentally destructive long-distance shipping. This project is being crowdfunded with our friends at Goteo. An extract of the crowdfund text is reproduced below but please click here to read the full text, see the rewards and contribute to this project.

Think Global, Print Local: Taking action towards a new model of publishing and distribution

Think global – print local. We’re a consortium of commoners in Latin America and Spain taking action towards a new model of publishing and distribution. Our group includes P2P-minded translators and copyleft publishers starting a new process for translating, publishing and distributing books in a decentralized way that also reduces or eliminates expensive, wasteful long-distance shipping.

Our team’s plan, with the help of this crowdfund, is to translate a specially selected book into Spanish. Its content will be made freely available online and its message will be materialized locally through small scale printing and distribution in several locations: Spain, Peru, Argentina and Mexico, with more nodes to come.

The book we have chosen to translate and follow our model is David Bollier’s popular Think Like a Commoner. This book explores the rich history and promising future of the commons — a self organizing social system for the stewardship and enrichment of our collective wealth. By thinking as commoners, we open ourselves to the process of commoning, crystallizing actions and reimagining systems in order to empower collaboration and community benefit.

Main Features

Using David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons as a first prototype, we want to pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. This model makes the best use of the digital knowledge commons by freely offering the translated text online while printing and distributing hard-copy books at the local level through nodes in various locations. In this way we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping.

Production and labor costs for translation, design, formatting and manufacturing will be covered by the crowdfund. Work will be performed globally and locally, as appropriate, by the consortium of: Guerrilla Translation (Spain, Portugal and Argentina); Traficantes de Sueños (Spain), Tinta Limón (Argentina), La Libre (Perú), SurSiendo (México).

Why this is important

This is a very important campaign for commoners worldwide, and not only in the Spanish-speaking world. It will help build bridges across languages and cultures, and enable concrete, material commoning practices. For this reason, we urge our English-speaking and indeed all multi-lingual friends to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort. In the cultural aspect it will amplify and enrich the conversation on the commons in Spanish-speaking countries through the translation of David Bollier’s book. There are more than 400 million native speakers of Spanish worldwide; with this project, Spanish speakers can read and share what is possibly the best introduction to the Commons in book form. Notably, many of the traditions and innovations of the Commons are taking place in Spanish-speaking communities, where Latin American cultures have a rich history of commoning.

In order to bolster commoning as challenge to the standard narrative of market economics and defend our shared wealth from enclosure, we must create new relations and structures of production. We are proposing this nascent distributed physical production network, and are initiating it through this project. A successful campaign will allow us to ‘learn by doing’, and repeat the experience with new books and texts in the future. We also want to find other partners, and to help create similar localized networks for book publishing in other languages.

Goals of the crowdfunding campaign

The first goal is to enable the translation Think Like a Commoner into Spanish, with the time and dedication of a group of translators who are familiar with the commons and the linguistic idiosyncrasies of its terminologies in both English and Spanish. The campaign will also support the simultaneous publication of the book in four distinct manufacturing and distribution locations, through the work of commons-oriented small publishers and a globally-available e-book. These communities will host events focused both on the commons in general as well as the book itself, grounding and developing the book’s theme. This campaign is a pilot project for an expanded, transnational publishing network which is commons-oriented in content, as well as practice.

Team and experience

The consortium presently includes a P2P translation collective and four commons-oriented publishers/book shops.

1. Guerrilla Translation (Translation, editing and project coordination/Transnational) is a P2P translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain, whose members love to translate and share knowledge about the commons, P2P, and the socio-environmental issues affecting us today.
2. Traficantes de Sueños (Formatting and editing, publishing, distribution/Madrid, Spain) is critical and committed publishing project mapping the lines that constitute other orders of life and creating theoretical and practical tool kits for the coming decades. Committed to free access to knowledge, Traficantes publish all their texts with open licenses that allow anyone to copy, download and distribute them.
3. Sursiendo (Book design, publishing, distribution/Chiapas, México) is a research collective dedicated to the collective building of knowledge for a more a more tolerant, inclusive world and its embodiment through shared actions. Focused on activism, communication, design, education, art and cultural management, they operate from a gender based and commons-oriented perspective.
4. La Libre de Barranco (Campaign Video, Publishing, Distribution/Lima, Peru) is an independent bookshop and library featuring independent Peruvian literature, the classics, poetry and photography. Dedicated to alternative means of sharing culture, La Libre educates on and shares knowledge under open licenses.
5. Tinta Limón (Publishing, Distribution/Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a self-managed editorial collective. Tinta Limón translates as “Lemon ink”, a steganography technique used in clandestine writings. Their collective recaptures this clandestine spirit by avoiding the obvious and steering their thoughts towards the everyday practice of coalescing constructive experiences.

Please click here to contribute to the Crowdfund campaign

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“Picture a pasture open to all.”

For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline.

“The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” wrote Hardin, proposing to his readers that they envision an open pasture:

It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible in the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”

The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd with- out limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The tragedy of the commons is one of those basic concepts that is drilled into the minds of every undergraduate, at least in economics courses. The idea is considered a basic principle of economics—a cautionary lesson about the impossibility of collective action. Once the class has been escorted through a ritual shudder, the professor whisks them along to the main attraction, the virtues of private property and free markets. Here, finally, economists reveal, we may surmount the dismal tragedy of a commons. The catechism is hammered home: individual freedom to own and trade private property in open markets is the only way to produce enduring personal satisfaction and social prosperity.

Hardin explains the logic this way: we can overcome the tragedy of the commons through a system of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.” For him, the best approach is “the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance.” He concedes that this is not a perfectly just alternative, but he asserts that Darwinian natural selection is ultimately the best available option, saying, “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” We put up with this imperfect legal order, he adds, “because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”

Such musings by a libertarian-minded scientist have been catnip to conservative ideologues and economists (who are so often one and the same). They see Hardin’s essay as a gospel parable that affirms some core principles of neoliberal economic ideology. It affirms the importance of “free markets” and justifies the property rights of the wealthy. It bolsters a commitment to individual rights and private property as the cornerstone of economic thought and policy. People will supposedly have the motivation to take responsibility for resources if they are guaranteed private ownership and access to free markets. Tragic outcomes—“total ruin”—can thereby be avoided. The failure of the commons, in this telling, is conflated with government itself, if only to suggest that one of the few recognized vehicles for advancing collective interests, government, will also succumb to the “tragedy” paradigm. (That is the gist of Public Choice theory, which applies standard economic logic to problems in political science.)

Over the past several decades, the tragedy of the commons has taken root as an economic truism. The Hardin essay has become a staple of undergraduate education in the US, taught not just in economics courses but in political science, sociology and other fields. It is no wonder that so many people consider the commons with such glib condescension. The commons = chaos, ruin and failure.

There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy parable. It does not accurately describe a commons. Hardin’s fictional scenario sets forth a system that has no boundaries around the pasture, no rules for managing it, no punishments for over-use and no distinct community of users. But that is not a commons. It is an open-access regime, or a free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource. Hardin was confusing a commons with “no-man’s-land”—and in the process, he smeared the commons as a failed paradigm for managing resources.

To be fair, Hardin was following a long line of polemicists who projected their unexamined commitments to market individualism onto the world. As we will see later, the theories of philosopher John Locke have been widely used to justify treating the New World as terra nullius—open, unowned land—even though it was populated by millions of Native Americans who managed their natural resources as beloved commons with unwritten but highly sophisticated rules.

Hardin’s essay was inspired by his reading of an 1832 talk by William Forster Lloyd, an English lecturer who, like Hardin, was worried about overpopulation in a period of intense enclosures of land. Lloyd’s talk is notable because it rehearses the same line of argument and makes the same fanciful error—that people are incapable of negotiating a solution to the “tragedy.” Instead of a shared pasture, Lloyd’s metaphor was a joint pool of money that could be accessed by every contributor. Lloyd asserted that each individual would quickly deplete more than his share of the pool while a private purse of money would be frugally managed.

I mention Lloyd’s essay to illustrate how ridiculous yet persistent the misconceptions about the “tragedy” dynamic truly are. Commons scholar Lewis Hyde dryly notes, “Just as Hardin proposes a herdsman whose reason is unable to encompass the common good, so Lloyd supposes persons who have no way to speak with each other or make joint decisions. Both writers inject laissez-faire individualism into an old agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead. From the point of view of such a village, Lloyd’s assumptions are as crazy as asking us to ‘suppose a man to have a purse to which his left and right hand may freely resort, each unaware of the other’.”

This absurdity, unfortunately, is the basis for a large literature of “prisoner’s dilemma” experiments that purport to show how “rational individuals” behave when confronted with “social dilemmas,” such as how to allocate a limited resource. Should the “prisoner” cooperate with other potential claimants and share the limited rewards? Or should he or she defect by grabbing as much for himself as possible?

Needless to say, the complications are endless. But the basic premise of such social science experiments is rigged at the outset. Certain assumptions about the selfishness, rational calculation of individuals and lack of context (test subjects have no shared social history or culture) are embedded into the very design of the “game.” Test subjects are not allowed to communicate with each other, or develop bonds of trust and shared knowledge. They are given only limited time and opportunity to learn to cooperate. They are isolated in a lab setting for a single experiment, and have no shared history or future together. Aghast at the pretzel logic of economic researchers, Lewis Hyde suggested that the “tragedy” thesis be called, instead, “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Common-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Noncommunicating, Self-Interested Individuals.”

The dirty little secret of many prisoner’s dilemma experiments is that they subtly presuppose a market culture of “rational” individuals. Most give little consideration to the real-life ways in which people come to cooperate and share in managing resources. That is changing now that more game theory experiments are incorporating the ideas of behavioral economics, complexity theory and evolutionary sciences into their design.

Yet the fact remains that a great deal of economic theory and policy presume a rather crude, archaic model of human being. Despite its obvious unreality, Homo economicus, the fictional abstract individual who actively maximizes his personal “utility function” through rational calculation, continues to hold sway as the idealized model of human agency in the cultural entity we call the “economy.” Two introductory economics textbooks widely used in the US, by Samuelson and Nordhaus (2004) and Stiglitz and Walsh (2006), consider cooperative behaviors to be so inconsequential that they do not even mention the commons. If economists show any inclination to discuss the commons, you can be sure that the word “tragedy” will be lurking very nearby.

Paradoxically enough, the heedless quest for selfish gain— “rationally” pursued, of course, yet indifferent toward the collective good—is a better description of the conventional market economy than a commons. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, such a mindset propelled the wizards of Wall Street to maximize private gains without regard for the systemic risks or local impacts. The real tragedy precipitated by “rational” individualism is not the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the market.

Happily, contemporary scholarship has done much to rescue the commons from the memory hole to which it has been consigned by mainstream economics. The late American political scientist Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University deserves special credit for her role in expanding the frame of analysis of economic activity. In the 1970s, the economics profession plunged into a kind of religious fundamentalism. It celebrated highly abstract, quantitative models of the economy based on rational individualism, private property rights and free markets. A child of the Depression, Ostrom had always been interested in cooperative institutions working outside of markets. As a young political scientist in the 1960s, she began to question some of the core assumptions of economics, especially the idea that people are unable to cooperate in stable, sustainable ways. Sometimes working with political scientist Vincent Ostrom, her husband, she initiated a new kind of cross-disciplinary study of institutional systems that manage “common-pool resources,” or CPRs.

CPRs are collective resources over which no one has private property rights or exclusive control, such as fisheries, grazing lands and groundwater. All of these resources are highly vulnerable to over-exploitation because it is difficult to stop people from using them. We might call it the “tragedy of open access.”

What distinguished Ostrom’s scholarship from that of so many academic economists was her painstaking empirical fieldwork. She visited communal landholders in Ethiopia, rubber tappers in the Amazon and fishers in the Philippines. She investigated how they negotiated cooperative schemes, and how they blended their social systems with local ecosystems. As economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explained, “She would go and actually talk to Indonesian fishermen or Maine lobstermen, and ask, ‘How did you come to establish this limit on the fish catch? How did you deal with the fact that people might try to get around it?’”

From such empirical findings, Ostrom tried to figure out what makes for a successful commons. How does a community overcome its collective-action problem? The recurring challenge facing a group of principals in an interdependent situation, she wrote, is figuring out how to “organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically. Parallel questions have to do with the combinations of variables that will (1) increase the initial likelihood of self-organization; (2) enhance the capabilities of individuals to continue self-organized efforts over time; or (3) exceed the capacity of self-organization to solve CPR [common-pool resource] problems without eternal assistance of some form.”

Ostrom’s answer was Governing the Commons, a landmark 1990 book that set forth some of the basic “design principles” of effective, durable commons. These principles have been adapted and elaborated by later scholars, but her analysis remains the default framework for evaluating natural resource commons. The focus of Ostrom’s work, and of the legions of academics who now study commons, has been how communities of resource users develop social norms—and sometimes formal legal rules—that enable them to use finite resources sustainably over the long term. Standard economics, after all, declares that we are selfish individuals whose wants are unlimited. The idea that we can depend on people’s altruism and cooperation, economists object, is naive and unrealistic. The idea that commons can set and enforce limits on usage also seems improbable because it rejects the idea of humans having unbounded appetites.

Ostrom nonetheless showed how, in hundreds of instances, commoners do in fact meet their needs and interests in collective, cooperative ways. The villagers of Törbel, Switzerland, have managed their high alpine forests, meadows and irrigation waters since 1224. Spaniards have shared irrigation waters through huerta social institutions for centuries while, more recently, diverse water authorities in Los Angeles learned how to coordinate their management of scarce groundwater supplies. Many commons have flourished for hundreds of years, even in periods of drought or crisis. Their success can be traced to a community’s ability to develop its own flexible, evolving rules for stewardship, oversight of access and usage, and effective punishments for rule-breakers.

Ostrom found that commons must have clearly defined boundaries so that commoners can know who has authorized rights to use a resource. Outsiders who do not contribute to the commons obviously have no rights to access or use the common-pool resource. She discovered that the rules for appropriating a resource must take account of local conditions and must include limits on what can be taken and how. For example, wild berries can only be harvested during a given period of time, or wood from the forest can only be taken from the ground and must be used for household use only, not sold at markets.

Commoners must be able to create or influence the rules that govern a commons, Ostrom noted. “If external governmental officials presume that only they have the authority to set the rules,” she discovered, “then it will be very difficult for local appropriators to sustain a rule-governed CPR over the long run.” Commoners must be willing to monitor how their resources are used (or abused) and must devise a system of sanctions to punish anyone who violates the rules, preferably through a gradation of increasingly serious sanctions. When disputes arise, commoners must have easy access to conflict-resolution mechanisms.

Finally, Ostrom declared that commons that are part of a larger system of governance must be “organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.” She called this “polycentric governance,” meaning that the authority to appropriate a resource, monitor and enforce its use, resolve conflicts and perform other governance activities must be shared across different levels— from local to regional to national to international.

Excerpted from Think Like A Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons.

28 July 2015

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Let me tell my own story about two experiments in commons-based book publishing.  The first involves Patterns of Commoning, the new anthology that Silke Helfrich and I co-edited and published two months ago, with the crucial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The second experiment involves the Spanish translation for my 2014 book Think Like a Commoner. 

Whereas the German version of Patterns of Commoning was published with transcript-Verlag, a publisher we consider a strong partner in spreading the word on the commons, for the English version, we decided to bypass commercial publishers.  We realized that none of them would be interested – or that they would want to assert too much control at too high of a price.

We learned these lessons when we tried to find a publisher for our 2013 anthology, The Wealth of the Commons.  About a dozen publishers rejected our pitches.  They said things like:  “It’s an anthology, and anthologies don’t sell.”  “It doesn’t have any name-brand authors.”  “It’s too international in focus.”  “What’s the commons?  No one knows about that.” 

It became clear that the business models of publishers – even the niche political presses that share our values – were not prepared to support a well-edited, path-breaking volume on the commons.

In general, conventional book publishing has trouble taking risks with new ideas, authors and subject matter because it has very small economic margins to play with.  One reason is that commercial book distributors in the US – the companies that warehouse books and send them to various retailers – take 60% of the cover price, with little of the risk. They are the expensive middlemen who control the distribution infrastructure. Their cut leaves about 40% of the cover price or less for the publisher, author and retailer to split.

This arrangement means that book prices have to be artificially higher, relative to actual production costs, to cover all the costs of so many players:  editors, marketers, publicists, distributors, retailers.

So how did we bypass this costly apparatus and assert control of the publishing process?  How did we produce an affordable, highly shareable 400-page book? By looking to our international community of commoners.

We did a private crowdfunding outreach to solicit orders for advance bulk orders — $10/copy in increments of ten.  This raised enough money to finance about half of the cost of the print run of 2,000 copies. Silke and I personally paid for the rest of the print run, which we expect to recoup after selling a few hundred copies. We were able to reclaim control over what happens with our book and avoid the strict limitations imposed by conventional publishing business models.

We built on the logic of commoning:  First, build community (which took years of work), then support each other.  This is both more efficient and socially satisfying than relying on highly consolidated corporate markets that require ever-escalating prices, control and sales.

We had had a great experience in publishing The Wealth of the Commons in 2012 via Levellers Press, a regional press that took a chance on our book. Levellers was started a few years ago by its parent company, Collective Copies, a worker-owned, movement-friendly photocopy business in Amherst, Massachusetts, US.

So when it came time to publish Patterns of Commoning, we could have published with Levellers, but decided this time to go with Levellers’ self-publishing arm, Off the Common Books.  The big difference was that we, as authors/editors, put up the money ourselves to print and distribute the books.  Off the Common Books then sells and ships the books for a modest per-book fee.

Publishing Patterns of Commoning ourselves has been a wonderful liberation from the costly, unresponsive machinery of traditional publishing.  Even though our book is not available through most bricks-and-mortar bookstores, that’s okay; very few books are.  Patterns of Commoning can be bought directly through the Off the Common Books website  – our preferred source – or through Amazon (not preferred, but it’s hard to reach general book buyers otherwise).

Because our overhead costs are so low, we were able to keep the price of our book at $15 – much lower than a conventional publisher would charge – while pocketing higher revenues than typical publishing deals (a scant 7-10% of the cover price).  We can break even sooner, and enjoy fewer risks and costs because we have a smaller press run.

The Power of Commoning Over Marketing

Then there is marketing.  The authors of books usually end up doing most of the marketing because they know their reader-community better than most publishers.  Authors are motivated to reach out to readers, but US publishers entering a publishing season often have “more important” titles to promote than one’s own book.  “Lesser titles” are often left to fend for themselves.

When I published a book (with coauthor Burns Weston) with the esteemed Cambridge University Press, several people cycled through the job of marketing my book in the course of only two years.  The Press initially charged $85 for the hardback copy (now $55) because it apparently sees university libraries as its primary market for hardcover sales. When it was time to publish a cheaper ($35) paperback, the Press refused to correct the typos (“too expensive”) or even include an errata sheet.

Self-publishing in collaboration with our commons network let us avoid all of these problems.  We have been able to rely on our own network of commoners, Web visibility and word-of-mouth recommendations – avoiding the expensive and mediocre outreach and promotion that many publishers do.  We have also been able to use a Creative Commons license (in our case, a CC BY-SA 4.0 license), which authorizes foreign translations for free and lets us post the entire book online. (Chapters will be posted in the next month or two.)   We value impact and connection over profit.

Of course, as non-academics, Silke and I don’t need to worry about the perceived prestige of a publisher.  Our careers are not dependent upon getting published with the most respected academic presses, which may also be expensive, averse to Creative Commons licenses, and focused on traditional marketing approaches.

I’ve published more than ten books with ten publishers in my career, and I’ve never had a happier publishing experience than with Levellers/Off the Common Books.  Steve Strimer, the publisher, is a wonderful guy who understands the commons and is creative and flexible in trying out new ideas.  The press can do print-on-demand, small-scale print runs for books, which means that its overhead costs are small, allowing it to turn a profit after selling only 200 to 300 copies of a book.  Steve takes pride in saying that he is one of the only for-profit US publishers of poetry, one of the most notoriously unprofitable genres of writing there is.  (Levellers’ poetry imprint is Hedgerow Books.) http://hedgerowbooks.net

I do think this commons-based model represents a superior commercial model for movement-oriented books so long as you have sufficient inhouse editorial and production know-how.  You can make your own choices about editorial content, control your own marketing, reap more of the revenues from sales, and use a Creative Commons license.  You don’t have to forfeit so much to a publisher and the commercial distribution apparatus.  In our case, it was crucial to have a partner like Off the Common Books, an author-friendly, movement-oriented cooperative.

I think the next step for commons-oriented publishing is to invent new sorts of cooperative book distribution systems so that small presses can avoid the crippling fees charged by the conventional book distributors.  A modest editorial and production infrastructure for a press could accomplish a great deal for very little money. (For those who read German: my colleague Silke Helfrich elaborated a bit on that idea and calls for a Commons Publishing or a Publishing Commons.)

Another Cooperative Publishing Experiment, in Spain

Let me quickly mention a second commons-based book publishing experiment now underway.  This project revolves around the Spanish translation for my 2014 book, Think Like a Commoner.  The book is licensed under a CC BY-SA license, which means that translators can do a translation for free.  So far, there are translations in French, Italian, Polish and Korean – with a Chinese one in progress.

Last year, a consortium of commons-oriented groups in Madrid organized by Guerrilla Translation – Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel – decided that they wanted to translate Think Like a Commoner as a collaborative project.  The consortium includes the Medialab-Prado, free software publisher Traficantes de Sueños, the commons crowdfunding website Goteo and the translation team of Georgina Reparado, Susa Oñate and Lara San Mamés.

This group, coordinated by Guerrilla Translation’s Xana Libânio, is mounting a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the translation, campaign management, and book editing and design.  Contributors can choose from among numerous rewards, including copies of the book.

What’s especially imaginative is how the Spanish translation project is engaging with publishers in Latin America to print, distribute, promote and sell the book in their various countries – Tinta Limón in Argentina, La Libre in Perú, SurSiendo in México.  Publishers will print a set number of copies for the initial crowdfund distribution, but will then be free to print and sell additional copies for their respective countries.

I am grateful to the Madrid team that has undertaken this project, and impressed by the creative structures and cooperation that they have devised.  It makes me wonder if the time is right to start a standing press on commons and movement concerns.  That would surely require more resources and reliable revenue streams, but it is certainly worth exploring.  The economics of conventional publishing is delivering less and less value to authors and readers even as book prices go higher.  Meanwhile, important new books never get published in the first place because they are deemed unmarketable.

We have a chapter in Patterns of Commoning that describes some of the more notable commons-based publishing innovations out there.  Besides open access scholarly publishing, there is Oya magazine in Germany, Shareable in the US, Pillku in Latin America, among others.  Maybe it’s time for a commons-based publishing summit.

Originally published in bollier.org

Lead image: “Peoples Library Occupy Wall Street 2011 Shankbone” by David Shankbone, David Shankbone – Flickr: Peoples Library Occupy Wall Street 2011 Shankbone. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons –

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My thanks to Bernardo for his initiative and tenacity in doing the translation and in finding a suitable publisher, Stampa Alternativa. And my thanks also to the pioneering Italian commons thinker and activist Ugo Mattei for writing the preface.

Italy is at the vanguard of many commons innovations these days.  One sign of this is the first International Festival of the Commons (organized by Mattei), which will be held in Chieri, Italy, from July 9 to 12. I plan to attend, so perhaps I will see you there.

For the record, the Italian edition of Think Like a Commoner is the third translation, following the Polish and French translations. Translations into Spanish, Korean and Chinese are now pending.

Originally published in bollier.org

The post Just Published: The Italian Edition of “Think Like a Commoner” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There is already a French translation, La Renaissance des Communs:  Pour une société de coopération et de partage, published by Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer, of Paris, which commissioned me to write the book in the first place.

There is also a Polish translation, The Commons:  Dobro Wspólne dla ka?dego, (downloadable for free from the Internet Archives. The Polish edition was initiated and translated by Petros & Natasha of the Freelab collectiveand published by the Social Cooperative “Faktoria,” in Poland.

Now, translations are underway in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Chinese and Korean, all with the generous permission of the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation (which is directly supporting the Chinese translation).

The Spanish translation is being made by Guerrilla Translation of Madrid in cooperation with a number of commons-based groups in Spain. A special thanks to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for their tenacity and leadership in making this happen.

Italian translator Bernardo Parrella has done a lot of work exploring publishing arrangements for Think Like a Commoner in Italy.  The good news is that Stampa Alternativa will publish the Italian edition in the spring, probably in April.

The Korean version will be published by Galmuri Press.  Details of the Greek and Chinese publishing arrangements are still being worked out, but in the meantime translations are proceeding.

I was frankly surprised at the number of translations that have materialized for Think Like a Commoner in only one year. The cross-cultural interest suggests that the commons is fast becoming part of the Zeitgeist, recognized as a powerful way to begin to confront the dead-end economics and values of neoliberalism and to imagine a new and better world.

My thanks to everyone who is helping make these translations of my book happen!

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From the shownotes to the episode:

KMO welcomes independent research and writer, David Bollier, to the C-Realm to discus the themes in his new book, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. First, they dispense with Garret Hardin’s so-called “Tragedy of the Commons,” which purports to demonstrate why it is impossible for people to self-manage a shared resource but which actually demonstrates just how focused academic economics is on validating its own core principles and projecting them onto the world. Later, David talks about the human genome as a commons which is currently being enclosed by corporations who are claiming sections of human DNA as their intellectual property. At the end of the program, KMO reads and responds to listener feedback.

Music by The Shiz.

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