The commons in Europe and Latin America

The first contribution is excerpted from a discussion on the commoning mailing list, by Brigitte Kratzwald. In the second one, Massimo de Angelis of the Commoner blog, reflects back a second time on what he wrote about the “minga” water commons in Ecuador. This is also taken from the Commoning mailing list, which was set up after the Crottorf Commons meeting in 2009.

Brigitte Kratzwald:

“There still are “real” commons and commoning. For example mountain pastures and community forests in the alps in Austria and Germany, where still shared work is undertaken by the community, but I admit, they have been reduced to a marginal position.

A second mode of commoning, with money involved in different contexts, can be found frequently:

In Austria water supply in rural regions often is run by water cooperatives, that are the owners of the springs and the users of the water. Of course, the users pay for water, but the control is still neither by the state nor by some for-profit company but with the community. The same holds for many projects on renewable energy.

There are lots of examples of direct marketing of agricultural products either directly at the farms or in so called “Dorfläden” (small shops in the villages) run by groups of farmers and consumers, where direct social interaction between producers and consumers takes place and guarantees the existence of the farmers as well as the supply with healthy and usually organic food for the consumers.

We find an increasing number of self-managed co-housing projects for elderly or disabled people, drawing partly on public subsidies, but nevertheless acting self-determined. The same holds for private schools or kindergardens, “privat” not meaning run by companies but by the parents of the children themselves, who want some alternative education for their kids. Of course the teachers are paid, but the education concept and teaching methods are determined by the parents, mostly they also are involved in many activities necessary for operating the projects.

And as the last example: the rising interest in community gardens, where often migrant women are engaged, maybe a kind of closing the circle to the original form of commoning.

In all these examples money is involved, but it is not the main source or aim of social interaction nor is it about “equivalent exchange” or “profit”. More important then the exchange process are the social relations developing from self-management, self-organisation and active contribution to something these people have “in common”. Prices are not oriented on profit but on the needs of all people involved, in this way the arrangement of prices is part of commoning. All these examples show many characteristics of commons and commoning, we should not ignore that, or abandon them because the use of money, but rather consider what can grow out of the social relations and interactions happening there.

Possibly this is what Massimo sometimes calls “distorted commons”? But – and more dangerous – from the opposite point of view they can be seen as “distorted markets”, where the invisible hand cannot fully deploy its beneficial effects and therefore every effort is taken to integrate them into the market system. At this very moment these projects are facing big threats from EU legislation on behalf of consumer protection and safety. Two examples from my personal social environment:

Farmers doing butchery themselves and producing sausages and ham for direct marketing are subject to the same hygiene standards as food industries. Small farmers cannot afford the necessary adjustments, but anyway, most of the people buying food from those farmers like exactly this hand-made quality that differs from industrial standards. If this direct marketing process is inhibited it is not only about healthy food, but at the same time the remaining commoning-features, the special form of social interaction between producers and consumers, comes to an end. And if you don’t eat meat – the same is happening in relation to the production of cheese or even of medical herbs.

The other example is about Kindergardens: The area for cooking and eating has to be totally separated from the area where children are playing and learning, there are strict prescriptions for the kitchen-equipment. Not only, that for small private Kindergardens it is hard to afford the necessary adjustments, but at the same time the educational concept of the Kindergardens is challanged: many parents want the process of cooking, eating together and cleaning to be part of the daily life experience of their children and want them to be involved in this process – of course accordingly to their age and abilities. Children in this way would be educated as commoners. This is inhibited by these regulations, children are reduced to comsumers of food produced by some anonymous producers – at the same time once more making female reproduction work invisible.

We should really be aware, that EU legislation on consumer protection often at the same time prevents or even criminalizes commoning and thus can be seen as part of the struggle on commons in our advanced industrial and affluent societies!”

Massimo de Angelis on what he learned from the Minga story:

“1. we learn that what we conventionally mean by commons in the political discourse in the West is actually short of commoning, which include not only the question of “public” ownership of a resource but also and crucially the question of power, of control over what use to make of a resource, of autonomy and self-determination. Hence in our battles for commons here (such as for health care, education or water), we need to go behind the simple principled position against privatisation and recover a sense of power in our political interventions. In our context, this may not imply that we start directly managing water provisions, but it certainly imply the people gain more power in defining what the current state, municipal or even private managers can or cannot do. The example made by Brigitte about EU legislation of “health and safety” being against commoning, i.e. favouring the education of children as consumers, is a case in point .. .

2. we learn to measure our background to that of a people that in spite of 500 years of murders and genocides, in the last few decades is recovering his dignity and history and is giving value to what the colonisers have despised and de-valorised. In other words, the “Minga’s backgorund” as Rainer calls it, exists in this tradition because of its defence and re-valorisation — also by the younger generations of indigenous intellectuals who, like Carlos Perez who I have interviewed, manages pretty well to defend the old while at the same time embracing the new. And when we measure our background in this fashion, we discover that we also had “Mingas” in our not so distant history, although we did not call it this way. Why did we let them go in our political discourses, when they are still there in many of our practices? We need to recover this history, because otherwise we loose our selves. Thus, we learn that our relation to history is damn important, not because we want to go back to the past, but because we want to move forward with a sense that our roots are grounded on commoning. Recovering our history also implies that we make visible and valorise, what is generally invisible and irrelevant because we see it with the eyes of the coloniser in us (i.e. homo economicus).

Three personal examples, much rooted in my personal experience:

a) My grandfather was a farmer, and up to 60 years ago, i.e. before he migrated to the city, he routinely participated in harvests and construction work together with others farmers in his community. Last June, it was enough to recover this latent memory in the community where I live in the Italian Appenines, to organise a “reclaim the park” day where few hundreds from children to elderly came down in a spirit much similar to the one evoked by Carlos in his description of Mingas, and in one day poolled all sort of skills together, fixed the toys of the park, restructured the fountain and humiliated the local council who proclaimed itself to be powerless to do anything about our run down park (only to offer help and $$ after our action . .. this is indeed the thing, local and not local authority are generally quite scared of grassroots action that substitute for public services. Not because they would not like to save money. They obviously would. But because saving money in this way — i.e. through grassroots commoning — comes with a political price tag, i.e the loss of control and of political legitimacy. I have a similar experience about our local school . .but this is for another time. Anyway, pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/108207399781503580405/RiprendiamociIlParcoDiMonchio#

b) In my experience, other examples of Mingas occurs in social centers, in political organising, in associations, in community work, etc. etc. Hence it is not only a question of past-history of commons/commoning but also of the present of commons/commoning. What we learn from the indigenous movement is the necessity to link the two. For them, the history of enclosures and struggles for commons is connected to the practices in the present that survived as they were or in a modified form. And the important thing is that they survived in spite of the tremendous murderous and genocidal pressures of enclosures during 500 years. . .hence what we learn from the indigenous struggles is precisely their inventive ability to connect the past to the present, to the point that the latter gain value, political legitimacy and dignity. We in the West have a lot of work to do to make this connection. We often see and judge the political validity of our political organising and associating in terms of the proclaimed ends, but not in terms of the organisational means, when in fact the organisational means are often forms of commoning, i.e. ultimately the only processes that create alternatives . . .

c) another name for Minga — actually I sense it has a slightly different meaning, but I must investigate — is Aijn. Ajin is a network of reciprocity traditionally applying to the Ayllu, which is the basic commons unit of both Andean and Amazonian indigenous life. I have seen Ayllu translated into Spanish as “family” — although clearly a far more extensive unit that traditional nuclear families. But I have also seen Ayllu translated as “community”, which include blood family members, but also acquired members — we would say “friends”, or perhaps “really good friends”. Indeed, there are rituals embedded in both Andes and Amazonia’s cultures that allow the acquisition of “hermano” or “hermana” inside a Ayllu (brothers and sisters) without having to go through marriage. I am pointing this out because this again resonates in my personal experience. I can reasonably conceive some of my friends as part of a Aijn network, of networks of mutual aid. Where I now live, I turned a storage room into a kitchen, with the help of a good friend of mine, who also taught me some basic building work besides doing the work as well. When I travel in Europe or the US, I often stay with friends that I made through the years, or simply staying as a guest of someone I never met before but is friend of friend within an “affinity” network. Perhaps the way we enter these networks is different than the Andes or Amazonian indigenous way, and perhaps the way we interact within these network is different. These are culturally specific aspects, to the extent that it is through actual commoning that we weave the values and meanings of our action. But as a general form, I do not have difficulty to see Ajin (or Minga) as relevant to the West as well. The question is how to valorise these forms politically (as they are doing) and give them political expression (as they are doing). And this is a political question.

3. Thus in this translation of the meanings of Minga and Aijn for us, we also learn that the commons provide a context of social interaction, not a model to be applied. In this context, justice is also something one fights for, as for example the women inside the indigenous zapatistas communities have taught us. So, we should not be carried away in our study of commons and think we are discovering “the” model of the perfect society that meets all our ideals of justice. No, commons provide a context within which negotiations and struggle for justice are nevertheless carried out, although in a different way than the context represented by capitalist markets. This because if we truly believe that commoning is the generative principle of alternatives, justice or injustice are not ideals, but are waived into social relations and actualised in struggles and forms of cooperation. . .

4. from the water minga story we also learn that “efficiency”, when used as *the* bottom line measure of common action, is a dirty word, because it excludes everything else, i.e. life, justice, solidarity, reciprocity and hearth. It is up to us then to draw the implications for this in the many contexts of our lives when we participate in common action with others and we encounter “efficiency” (and the correspondent profit maximisation or cost minimisation) as *the* dominant measure making our social co-operation (nothing escape some form of social cooperation) a sort of distorted commoning.

5. we also learn that “victories” in defence of commons are never the end of the menace to commons (in the case of the story, after the water commons victory there is now the mining menace), at least until capital as a social force is present.

6. and finally, we learn that if water is a “rival good”, it is not for the commoners who administrate it through commoning (for whom it is instead a common good, and the “rivalry” about who get what is solved in the very moment common action is collectively defined and undertaken), but for those who wants to take away this administration from them. . .we should rather talk about rival powers and rival value practices instead of rival goods.”

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