“In a way we need to stop looking for definitions of the commons as a notion, as a concept. Because in fact it’s not about a thing. It’s not about a concept. It’s not about something separated from us. It’s another way of being in the world. It’s another way of thinking about the world, and thus another way of constantly reshaping and reconstructing the world.”

Silke Helfrich of Commons Institute and the Commons Strategies Group was interviewed by members of Zemos98 during last November’s European Commons Assembly in Brussels.

Video Transcript

My name is Silke Helfrich. I’m from Germany, and I am with the Commons Institute in Germany, which is a network of people who think about the commons, and think about how the idea of the commons transforms our way of being — of living together and working together. And I’m also with the Commons Strategies Group, which is a small group of three independent international activists, scholars and authors on the commons.

In a way we need to stop looking for definitions of the commons as a notion, as a concept. Because in fact it’s not about a thing. It’s not about a concept. It’s not about something separated from us. It’s another way of being in the world. It’s another way of thinking about the world, and thus another way of constantly reshaping and reconstructing the world.

We should better talk about “commoning” instead of commons. And having said this, commoning means being aware that plenty of the resources we need to make a living, don’t belong to individuals, need to be shared with other people. And that need to share resources requires skills: of sharing; of knowing how to do it; of managing shared resources. So commoning is about taking responsibility for common stewardship of resources, processes, spaces and the time we have available together.

It’s a practice: talking about the commons is talking about social practices that enable us to build (I would say) a free, fair and sustainable future. Because if we have one political challenge ahead, it is basically coming up with proposals, and concrete social practices, that help us merging three core ideas of political traditions. Which is: Freedom: the enhancement of ourselves, so to say, but freedom in relatedness to others, because we are not isolated human beings in this world; it is Equity — so we all need fair share in this world which at the same time a fair share is building a safer world; and is the notion of Sustainability, because, as the Greens used to say, we only borrowed this world from our grandchildren, right? So I think that the political project of the commons is to bring these three notions of (usually) different political traditions together: Fairness, which is kind of a very socialist idea; Freedom, which is a very liberal idea; and Sustainability, which is a very green idea.

The thing I enjoyed the most, in this starting process of Commons Assembly in Europe, is that all of us involved in this, got aware of how many we actually are. Because one tends to feel isolated as a commoner, right? Because obviously the way we think, the way we do, the way we work; the proposals we make; are not really on top of the political agenda. And if they are on top of the political agenda then as enclosures of the commons — that it separating people from the resources they need to make a living, or enclosing, privatizing what has been held in common etc. etc. So it has been empowering for us to see so many people all over Europe working, perhaps with different words, and in different realms of action, and certainly in different countries and locations, on a kind of common agenda. So it’s a moment of power, through, simply, coming together and sharing our experiences.

If you really want to challenge the political agenda, which today is an agenda of enclosing the commons, denying access to common resources to people, of market fundamentalism with a consequence of rising nationalism — right wing nationalism — I think that the dimension of the challenge we have had is that we need to flip the whole narrative. So it is not about doing an amendment of concrete laws here and there. It’s not about making another policy proposal which will have tough times to get channelled through the political institutions. It is about commonizing the way we do politics. It is about rethinking politics and rethinking democracy. Because if it is representative democracy, tied to, locked into, extremely structured, and so to say un-free, political processes (as we’ve heard yesterday as well, when we have been introduced to the processes in the European Parliament) then it is pretty clear that what the commons system needs the most which is: conversation; deliberation; time for people, and space for people to figure out how they can resolve their own problems in their very concrete contexts. So perhaps the most important thing decision-makers and policymakers can do for us, is provide support: recognize our right for self-organization; provide support, space, and financing for opening spaces, for a kind of deliberative democracy where people resolve their own problems, because they are the ones who know their situation best; and provide them with the tools to do so, and support them with finding their own solutions. And so it’s flipping the whole narrative, rethinking the very fundaments and the very categories policymaking is based upon today; and rethinking and challenging the dominant notion of democracy — of representative democracy.

I would like to make a call, because I think that in essence the whole idea of the commons is raising awareness that common people usually do uncommon things. And having said that, it’s also pretty clear that a sound message around the commons will be a simple message around the commons, in plain language that really speaks to people’s hearts. And sometimes it seems to me that we, as commoners, who try to theorize, conceptualize and make sense of the complexity out there, are not able to speak that plain and simple language. So I want to make a call to all those creative people out there, who know how to speak to people’s hearts — because it’s about all of us. Each of us out there has a stake in the commons. It’s about raising awareness about what we are already doing, already creating, to create a free, fair and sustainable society. So let’s build a huge coalition between all the commoners in Europe, and communication designers, and people who can help us getting the message across.

Transcript by Simon Grant. Thanks Simon!

The post Silke Helfrich on the Commons as a way of working and living together appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The ontology of Copylove. Map collectively produced after the first Copylove Residencies. Translated by Rubén Díaz.

The story-behind: Commons, Love and Remix

About four years ago, Copylove put into orbit the ZEMOS98 festival, bringing an apparently simple premise: investigating how affection and care can cultivate relationships within a community of agents who are trying to generate common goods. Taking this hypothesis as a starting point, the coordination group called some residencies in February, March and April 2012; and there, people belonging to several groups with previous community experience could have a brainstormed ways of thinking related to the management of affections, commons and communities.

We believe in commons. Commons, as Elionor Ostrom said, are sometimes apart from the market or the government. Commons are about the contents we are sharing all the time in our digital networks. But commons are not new. When we talk about commons, we are talking about really old questions. For example, the recipe of our typical andalusian tomato soup is a common recipe. It is not private. It is not exactly public (in the sense of “institutional or governed by official rules). It constructs a common code. A common language. You can choose one single recipe and create your own version. But, if you share your own version, anyone could do it the same, remixing your version. Because, culture is an infinite palimpsest. So, of course, we have to expand the utility of the commons. We have to spread how the commons could help us to build our communities.

On other hand, when we talk about the market and the government, we talk about words like “inside” or “outside” the communities, and about our official economic system. And we divide it in two levels: the productive level and the reproductive. Some feminist studies consider that we are just talking about the official and productive level. When you ask someone, “What do you do?”, people answer with the professional profile. They don’t say: “I’m a mother” or “I usually cook rice with vegetables”. But, how important are these kind of tasks in our communities? Why can’t we talk about it? We consider this a reproductive sphere. And you can imagine how important it is for our culture.

“Our mothers taught us that life is a battlefield. The battlefield of making possible what we consider life”. Poster of the 14 ZEMOS98 Festival, dedicated to our mothers.

Commons, love and remix were the three initial concepts, they related to each other, they opened the field of play to start building collectively the meaning of “copylove”. We saw soon that they were three interwoven fields nourishing each other: Affections nourish commons and vice versa. We must place affection in the spotlight, understand commons as already a part of a community, see that communities have constituent links and values; but also, in order for them to be sustainable, require a caring component, a subjective built by affections.

The Invisible Commons

No doubt that the objective of the first edition of Copylove was to make all those ways of doing things visible, and create a community where citizens are the core of it. Trying to become more specific about it, we wanted to recall those everyday practices so tightly attached to our everyday life that go unnoticed, because they are essential to hold our lives together. We defined the invisible commons, as non-monetary resources, ways of doing things to which we have become assimilated (for good or for bad), and processes we have been taught or acquired in our community life and that make community sustainable. These commons are occasionally invisible because we have assumed they are something “natural” in our practice, but other times (most of the times and especially those related to women’s labour work) they become invisible by the developmentalist regime we are living in, specialized in ignoring that what makes life livable.

“Citizens-Godzilla”, poster of the 15 ZEMOS98 Festival.

Based on this legacy, we reached a new turning point in the investigation. We had to organise what we had learned and pose new questions. Following this track, we thought that “invisible commons” was a good label for the things we had learned up to that moment, and gave us the opportunity to keep uncovering those practices exceeding what is considered productive. In order to have a better understanding of all the resources and community processes we had to value and activate simultaneously, we started interviewing groups and associations from Bilbao and Barcelona, so we could obtain new questions for our Copylove residency.

We were searching for a better understanding of these invisible commons, starting from three topics that were present in the early stages of the investigation, they would help us to go deeper towards the following stage. Three major concepts would be helpful and would make new questions about “copylove” arise: Community, Memory and Life explained by the participants in this video (english subtitles):

After that, we did another Festival dedicated to Copylove in April 2013 and a crowdfunding campaign (gathering 7.865€, at the end of that year añlso) to try to gather all the essential lessons-learned in the process and of course, we had internalized most of them also in our daily practices and as part of our way of living and working.

In summary: without care, life is impossible. Life cannot be “productive” without a care centered economy. If we have been “productive” in the fiction called capitalism, it is thanks to the fact that we care for others, what some have labelled as an “unproductive” action: domestic work, the reproduction of labor. Without care, working life could not exist in a market economy, although these practices are not visible. This invisible work has been done by women (and here «women» can be also understood as minorities). Neither state nor market have managed to cover a fundamental need: the right to be cared for/of.

The post The Importance of Care and Affections in our Communities: Copylove and the Invisible Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Copylove started in 2011 as a local informal network for investigations into commons and feminist practices. Later, it turned into a public and open investigation via www.copylove.cc (only in Spanish) led by Sofía Coca (ZEMOS98, Sevilla), Txelu Balboa (COLABORABORA, Euskadi) and Rubén Martínez (Fundación de los Comunes, Barcelona) in which we tried to extract, from the experiences we had, what kind of ties and relations are established within a community of agents, whose practices and ways of doing generate commons for the whole community. Copylove was a way of getting deeper into all that we consider that reproduces desirable conditions of existence: affection, processes of interdependence, mutual aid, community love, care, etc. When we say Copylove, we mean everything we produce and reproduce that can take us closer to “good living”, to a sustainable living, and not simply in monetary terms.

The ontology of Copylove. Map collectively produced after the first Copylove Residencies. Translated by Rubén Díaz.

The story-behind: Commons, Love and Remix

About four years ago, Copylove put into orbit the ZEMOS98 festival, bringing an apparently simple premise: investigating how affection and care can cultivate relationships within a community of agents who are trying to generate common goods. Taking this hypothesis as a starting point, the coordination group called some residencies in February, March and April 2012; and there, people belonging to several groups with previous community experience could have a brainstormed ways of thinking related to the management of affections, commons and communities.

We believe in commons. Commons, as Elionor Ostrom said, are sometimes apart from the market or the government. Commons are about the contents we are sharing all the time in our digital networks. But commons are not new. When we talk about commons, we are talking about really old questions. For example, the recipe of our typical andalusian tomato soup is a common recipe. It is not private. It is not exactly public (in the sense of “institutional or governed by official rules). It constructs a common code. A common language. You can choose one single recipe and create your own version. But, if you share your own version, anyone could do it the same, remixing your version. Because, culture is an infinite palimpsest. So, of course, we have to expand the utility of the commons. We have to spread how the commons could help us to build our communities.

On other hand, when we talk about the market and the government, we talk about words like “inside” or “outside” the communities, and about our official economic system. And we divide it in two levels: the productive level and the reproductive. Some feminist studies consider that we are just talking about the official and productive level. When you ask someone, “What do you do?”, people answer with the professional profile. They don’t say: “I’m a mother” or “I usually cook rice with vegetables”. But, how important are these kind of tasks in our communities? Why can’t we talk about it? We consider this a reproductive sphere. And you can imagine how important it is for our culture.

“Our mothers taught us that life is a battlefield. The battlefield of making possible what we consider life”. Poster of the 14 ZEMOS98 Festival, dedicated to our mothers.

Commons, love and remix were the three initial concepts, they related to each other, they opened the field of play to start building collectively the meaning of “copylove”. We saw soon that they were three interwoven fields nourishing each other: Affections nourish commons and vice versa. We must place affection in the spotlight, understand commons as already a part of a community, see that communities have constituent links and values; but also, in order for them to be sustainable, require a caring component, a subjective built by affections.

The Invisible Commons

No doubt that the objective of the first edition of Copylove was to make all those ways of doing things visible, and create a community where citizens are the core of it. Trying to become more specific about it, we wanted to recall those everyday practices so tightly attached to our everyday life that go unnoticed, because they are essential to hold our lives together. We defined the invisible commons, as non-monetary resources, ways of doing things to which we have become assimilated (for good or for bad), and processes we have been taught or acquired in our community life and that make community sustainable. These commons are occasionally invisible because we have assumed they are something “natural” in our practice, but other times (most of the times and especially those related to women’s labour work) they become invisible by the developmentalist regime we are living in, specialized in ignoring that what makes life livable.

“Citizens-Godzilla”, poster of the 15 ZEMOS98 Festival.

Based on this legacy, we reached a new turning point in the investigation. We had to organise what we had learned and pose new questions. Following this track, we thought that “invisible commons” was a good label for the things we had learned up to that moment, and gave us the opportunity to keep uncovering those practices exceeding what is considered productive. In order to have a better understanding of all the resources and community processes we had to value and activate simultaneously, we started interviewing groups and associations from Bilbao and Barcelona, so we could obtain new questions for our Copylove residency.

We were searching for a better understanding of these invisible commons, starting from three topics that were present in the early stages of the investigation, they would help us to go deeper towards the following stage. Three major concepts would be helpful and would make new questions about “copylove” arise: Community, Memory and Life explained by the participants in this video (english subtitles):

After that, we did another Festival dedicated to Copylove in April 2013 and a crowdfunding campaign (gathering 7.865€, at the end of that year añlso) to try to gather all the essential lessons-learned in the process and of course, we had internalized most of them also in our daily practices and as part of our way of living and working.

In summary: without care, life is impossible. Life cannot be “productive” without a care centered economy. If we have been “productive” in the fiction called capitalism, it is thanks to the fact that we care for others, what some have labelled as an “unproductive” action: domestic work, the reproduction of labor. Without care, working life could not exist in a market economy, although these practices are not visible. This invisible work has been done by women (and here «women» can be also understood as minorities). Neither state nor market have managed to cover a fundamental need: the right to be cared for/of.

The post The Importance of Care and Affections in our Communities: Copylove and the Invisible Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.