5. Many Galaxies of Commons

Seeing commons as generative social systems—and not simply as “resources”—can be a difficult challenge. We often hear politicians refer to the atmosphere, oceans, outer space, or the internet as commons, as if a given type of resource is ordained to be a commons. But these “resources” don’t come with predestined governance, rules, a defined community, or usage limits. They are in fact open-access regimes or free-for-alls—what Garrett Hardin mistook to be commons.

These systems are not managed at all. They are too vast, autonomous, and distributed in scale for any nation-state or international body to truly manage, let alone govern as commons. (And by the way, who would be the commoners in this scheme?) The idea of managing planetary systems as commons is an absurd anthropocentric conceit. Which is not to say that commons can’t have enormous, positive impacts on a global scale. It’s just that they will function as federated systems of commons, not as a single, unified central control.

It’s far more productive to think about commons as social processes for collaboratively maintaining shared wealth at appropriate scales. A commons arises when people come together to cooperate, coordinate, and steward shared wealth in specific contexts. If no two snowflakes are the same, so with commons: each has its own distinctive identity and appropriate scale. Each bears the imprint of its geography, history, culture, values, and the people who have developed it. The Commonsverse is a kind of extended family. Its members have shared, distinctive characteristics, but in each instance they manifest in idiosyncratic ways, much as fractals are both similar and different.

In the chapters on enclosure, we glimpsed a wide range of commons under siege. Now we begin to look at the many types of successful commons. We’ll see commons revolving around land, forests, pastures, water, and fisheries. We will encounter a menagerie of digital commons, including free and open source software, wikis, shared digital infrastructures, platform cooperatives, peer production, and cosmolocal production. Mutual aid networks and care commons take care of elders, children, and disabled people. Local commons are plentiful in the form of alternative currencies, community gardens, community land trusts, town festivals, amateur sports leagues, and cohousing.

Some people seem to think there is a natural, logical classification scheme for commons. I seriously doubt this—or at least, I believe that any classification system will necessarily reflect the analyst’s cultural biases. An African would have a very different mental map of the commons than a European, and both would have different perspectives than an American. So be warned: Classification schemes tend to impose an overly tidy, regularized, and intellectual understanding of commoning, which I believe is ultimately experiential, historically situated, and based on relational dynamics.

A commons arises whenever a group of people decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, use, and long-term stewardship. Since commons require collective social imagination, initiative, and historical opportunity, they can and do emerge nearly everywhere!

Subsistence Commons

Traditional commons—the familiar commons of history and the ones most studied by contemporary academics—usually revolve around natural wealth such as water, forests, fisheries, arable land, and wild game. These gifts of the earth must be actively and responsibly stewarded if they are to provide for human societies yet not be overused.

The recurring question is, How should access and use of shared resources be managed? How can free riding and abuse of a commons be prevented? What governance systems work best? Specific communities and bioregions have explored such questions through trial and error and active stewardship over long periods of time. That is an organic, evolutionary process. Developing a socioecological system that blends social customs and practices with the natural dynamics of a river, forest, or farmland takes time! But this process, over the course of decades or generations, has yielded certain general patterns of commoning. My late colleague Silke Helfrich and I identified more than twenty-five of these patterns of commoning in our book Free, Fair and Alive, a topic that will be treated further in Chapter 7. For now, just observe that successful commons tend to manifest certain recurrent behaviors and ethical norms. There may be different ways of dealing with the different “resources” at hand—land, software code, crops—but the social dynamics are similar. Commoning is best understood as a peer-organized social phenomenon, a collective behavior that manifests in natural settings, on the internet, in cities, in local contexts.

It may be easier to grasp the dynamics of commoning by observing it in settings only loosely influenced by the modern market/state.

In New Mexico, native Hispanic-Americans have managed community-based waterways known as acequias since the 1600s. This “biocultural” institution has shown how, even in a very dry region such as the American Southwest, a commons can align community usage of water with ecological limits. Remarkably, acequias have the sanction of New Mexico state law. But it is the community itself that manages and protects the water supply. All acequia members are expected to participate in maintenance responsibilities such as the annual cleaning of the water ditches. While nearby towns in New Mexico are plagued by unchecked suburban development and voracious demands for water, the acequias have succeeded in allocating their water allotments to meet people’s needs fairly while conserving soil and water, recharging aquifers, and preserving wildlife and plant habitat.

The range of subsistence commons around the world is vast. They consist of pastures used for cattle-grazing by farmers and nomads; African rangelands used for hunting; agroforestry tracts in Asia and Africa to harvest timber, resins, fuel, and medicines; water-user associations in India to protect and govern water supplies; fisheries in the coastal areas of the Philippines and Chile; tropical rainforests in Guatemala maintained by local villagers; and mutual aid networks that help households afflicted by droughts, deaths (and burial costs), and the need for credit. Anthropologists and scholars associated with the International Association of the Commons have generated an impressive literature studying these systems.

Subsistence commons strike the modern mind as backward and premodern. But in many respects, that is the very point—to reach back to premarket social norms that once placed necessary limits on market activity. To commoners, maximizing market value is not the supreme purpose; community needs, fairness, and ecological stability take precedence. Subsistence commoners take only what they need while protecting the shared asset. This is a singular achievement in modern times: to develop an ethic of sufficiency.

Most economists have little interest in subsistence commons, perhaps because they see them as small, isolated, and disconnected from markets. How boring! And because the value of subsistence commons cannot be expressed in numbers, they don’t show up in GDP statistics. The conventional economic framework has no way of comprehending the importance of community self-determination, ecological resilience, social equity, or cultural connection to a place. Yet subsistence commons, operating outside of the market system without private property rights or money, are vitally important to an estimated two billion people worldwide, according to the International Association for the Study of the Commons.

It’s worth emphasizing that subsistence commons are not without their problems. Many need better management practices. Others reflect the patriarchy of their cultures or struggle with hostile political environments and attempted enclosures. Notwithstanding such issues, subsistence commons help people meet their everyday needs with dignity and generally respect ecological limits. Those are impressive accomplishments that modern markets and states have trouble emulating.

Indigenous Peoples’ Commons

A decade ago, Peruvians created the Potato Park as a “landscape conservation commons” so that Indigenous tribes of the Andes could have full stewardship rights over a tremendous diversity of native potato species and varieties. This was a major achievement because transnational ag-biotech firms were eager to acquire patents on some of the nine hundred genetically valuable potato varieties that Andean tribes had developed over thousands of years.

Officially known as an Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Area, the Potato Park authorizes seven thousand villagers from six Indigenous communities (Amaru, Chawaytire, Cuyo Grande, Pampallaqta, Paru-Paru and Sacaca) to jointly manage their communal land for their collective benefit. The point is to let these peoples legally protect their livelihoods and ways of life from capitalist “development” (especially international patents and trade) while conserving the agro-ecological landscape. On the one hand, the Potato Park is quite unusual because its alignment of community values and practices with the regional ecosystem has been formally and legally recognized. On the other hand, such commons-based stewardship is typical in Indigenous cultures.

Indigenous Peoples’ commons vary a great deal, of course. The Aboriginal Australians have long fought to protect their sacred places, cultural knowledge, and striking artistic designs from outside appropriation, especially by commercial interests. India and Southeast Asia are home to many “traditional knowledge commons” (or “TK commons”) that protect and use highly specialized types of knowledge about local plants and medicinal treatments. Some transnational companies are attempting to appropriate this knowledge in order to patent it for genetically engineered crops and drugs—a type of enclosure often known as “biopiracy.” In India, there have been several notorious cases in which transnational companies tried to patent neem seeds and turmeric. Madagascar’s rich biodiversity has also been a prime target of companies in search of patentable genetic knowledge. Such commercialization poses a serious threat to TK commons because people may be reluctant to contribute to a commons if they fear that their knowledge could be taken private and sold for money. “One man’s gift must not be another man’s capital,” as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss warned. Corporate enclosures of TK commons have prompted some innovative responses. In India, for example, commoners have compiled a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a database of public-domain medical knowledge, to help challenge patent applications that would privatize the community knowledge.

It is difficult to overgeneralize about Indigenous Peoples’ commons because they embody so many different types of landscapes, tribal cosmologies, and cultural practices. Still, legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie has noted striking similarities among Indigenous systems of knowing and interacting with the natural world. Indigenous commons tend to reflect “a perception of the earth as an animate being; a belief that humans are in a kinship system with other living things; a perception of the land as essential to the identity of the people; and a concept of reciprocity and balance that extends to relationships among humans, including future generations, and between humans and the natural world.”

Botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer has brilliantly popularized many of these ideas through her bestselling book, Braiding Sweetgrass. The book blends modern scientific knowledge about plants with the ancient wisdom of the Potawatomi tribal culture in which Kimmerer was raised. With poetically beautiful prose, she persuasively argues that opening ourselves up to intersubjective relationships with nature is the only way we can heal the planet and ourselves. “In some Native languages,” Kimmerer writes, “the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’ ” Unlike scientists who tend to objectify nature, Kimmerer advises: “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” Kimmerer’s book was one of the first to introduce the idea of animism to mainstream readers—a profound shift away from the modern, Western worldview, a topic I’ll explore further in Chapter 7.

The socioecological commons that Indigenous Peoples have codeveloped with the earth are remarkably fertile precisely because they focus on long-term social relationships, not one-off market transactions. Indigenous commoners realize that everything is alive, pulsating with its own creative agency and proclivities. Westerners often dismiss Indigenous commons out of hand because they reject a hyperindividualism, private property rights, and market notions of “value” (i.e., a price for everything). As N. Bruce Duthu, a leading scholar of Native American law, has written, “The idea of ‘property’ in the Western tradition… implies an orientation toward the market use of resources without special regard for the long-term ecological consequences or the social meanings of nature to people; the price system presumes a basic equivalence among like-priced elements of nature. Societies that have a more direct, subsistence relationship to nature may therefore find property- and market-based sensibilities alien and even offensive.”

In a bold attempt to protect Indigenous ways of commoning, Indigenous advocates in many countries have developed the legal doctrine known as the “rights of nature.” This idea arose as communities pressured courts and legislatures to confer “legal personhood” on rivers, mountains, and other natural systems. The goal has been to equip nature to defend its needs in court, via legal surrogates. Much of the industrialized world regards the rights of nature as ridiculous, impractical nonsense, and indeed, Western jurisprudence as constituted has had some troubles operationalizing this legal innovation. And yet the doctrine has spread rapidly since its introduction about fifteen years ago. In the US alone, there are more than three dozen communities (Pittsburgh; Toledo; Orange County, Florida) that have enacted such laws, often with overwhelming public support. Ecuador now has a constitutional provision recognizing the rights of nature. The idea has even given rise to another legal innovation, “self-owned land,” by which private landowners can authorize appointed custodians to protect the rights of nature for designated plots of land.

These gambits to reestablish serious working relationships between humans and the earth are still moving ahead fitfully and irregularly, often without formal legislative recognition. Yet the cultural tailwinds driving this vision of commoning forward are gaining momentum.

Mutual Aid and Gift Economies

In the face of modern economies that attempt to commodify everything, there are many efforts to support relationships of care. Loving care—of children, elderly parents, or friends in need, and the caring stewardship of a landscape—cannot be bought. It requires an open, vulnerable exchange among living beings and real affection and devotion. Supporting care in a world dominated by the formal capitalist economy whose driving ethic is contractual self-interest and monetary exchange, however, immediately creates complications and conflict.

Some of the most powerful treatises about care come from a rich feminist literature in economics, history, philosophy, and cultural studies. Researchers such as Diane Elson, Julie Nelson, Alicia Girón González, and others show how capitalist economic valuations of care miss the point. Inducements of money, schedules, and productivity measurements can’t mobilize and sustain genuine care. And care cannot be mechanized through robots. It requires healthy, functional families and communities, and extended networks of care. Giving relationships are at the heart of care. The question is how to encourage and support stable, constructive relationships that can provide care despite the priorities of capitalist structures and norms.

There are, in fact, many examples. The Covid pandemic reminded us anew that mutual aid arises spontaneously when disasters hit. As a 2020 “anarchist guide” put it, mutual aid is “the decentralized practice of reciprocal care by which participants in a network make sure that everyone gets what they need, so that everyone has reason to be invested in everyone else’s well-being. This is not a matter of tit-for-tat exchange, but rather an interchange of care and resources that creates the sort of redundancy and resilience that can sustain a community through difficult times.” Both the state and corporate markets were colossally ill-equipped to deal with the public health emergencies and disruptions caused by Covid. However, peer-organized local mobilizations of mutual aid groups proved tremendously rapid, flexible, and effective in providing care.

A more institutionalized version of such mutual aid can be seen in blood and organ donation systems. While body parts and plasma are sometimes treated as commodities, voluntary community systems persist because we find markets for intimate, living substances (tissue, organs, blood, body parts) repellent and dehumanizing. Humans prefer to treat transfers of previous living things as social gifts. Blood banks have often been likened to a “gift economy” in which people give with no expectation of direct personal benefit, but out of a sense of social duty or as a tribute to loved ones. Some famous studies show that gift economies for blood and organs are more likely to avoid the ethical conflicts that can plague markets and, moreover, attract higher quality blood and organs than those that are sold. That’s partly because the people most likely to sell their blood or organs are alcoholics, drug users, and those in poor health.

As discussed in Chapter 4, academic disciplines are significant, highly productive commons. Researchers do not generally use cash or legal contracts to exchange knowledge; instead, their universities and disciplines serve as hosting infrastructures for gift economies. Scholarship and instruction are considered “contributions” to the field, not “products.” A discipline advances through a community ethic of sharing, open debate, and peer review, not cash purchases among individuals.

Because it nurtures inner commitments and peer support, commons help avoid the ethical problems that tend to be associated with markets. Markets usually have trouble nourishing ethical values because they are typically focused on self-serving transactions, not committed mutual relationships. The focus is on the “cash nexus” between people which tends to foster relationships that are impersonal, episodic in nature (not ongoing), and based on a strict “even-steven” exchange of value. The boundaries separating individuals and their interests are kept quite clear.

In gift economies, however, as Lewis Hyde notes in his classic book, The Gift, social boundaries are blurred or even eradicated through gift exchange. There is no rational calculation of whether the value given and received is strictly equal; the point is to establish ongoing social relationships and sympathies. The subtitle of Hyde’s book, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, captures this idea nicely: Gifts bring people closer together, especially when the exchange is indirect and staggered over time. So long as gifts continue to circulate among people without a clear reckoning of what one is “owed,” the commons of nonmarket exchanges thrives.

Before Big Tech revved up its takeover of internet spaces, mutual aid was a robust way of meeting needs online. Gift economies to exchange care are attractive because they can radically lower the transaction costs that markets otherwise require, such as the costs of advertising, administrators, legal contracts, buildings, and so forth. The overhead to engage in market exchange can be expensive, so it is often cheaper, easier, and more reliable to coordinate activities through communities of trust.

CouchSurfing was a prime example in the early 2000s. This informal, volunteer-run Web service enabled travelers to find overnight hospitality in more than 97,000 cities and towns around the world. Cash exchange between hosts and guests was explicitly prohibited, and a pay-it-forward ethic flourished. CouchSurfing was enabling more than five million strangers a year to exchange hospitality and forge new friendships in the process. Investors soon recognized that there was big money to be had by converting this gift economy into a capitalist enterprise. And so, with infusions of more than $20 million, Couch-Surfing became a for-profit business that aggressively marketed itself and morphed into a travel service with subscription fees and other paid features. Venture capitalists dubbed their new business models the “sharing economy” even though nothing is being “shared” and a very different spirit and ethic prevails. A microrental market with players like CouchSurfing, Airbnb, and Uber is not about care, generosity, and commoning.

To be sure, the Web, as we’ll see in Chapter 9, still hosts a lot of mutual sharing. But a key lesson of the past twenty-five years is that digital gift economies and mutual aid networks must preemptively protect their social practices and ethical culture from attempted enclosures.

Alternative Local Currencies

Designers of alternative local currencies have come to learn the delicate interplay of structure and culture. Commoners must constantly enact their generosity and care, but they also need legal and organizational structures to protect that culture and extend it outward. This insight has been key to local currencies. The financial industry is not terribly accountable to local communities and ordinary people, as we saw in the aftermath of the 2008 finance crisis. This is not surprising. Mega-banks and financial institutions are in the business of extracting value from nature, communities, and the “real economy,” and they have skillfully used their profits to capture and compromise the political and regulatory system.

Mindful of this history, development economist Will Ruddick realized that many poorer communities in Africa could invent a new framework, outside of capitalist finance, to improve their lot. They may not have as much money to meet their needs, but they do have goods and services to offer each other—cooking, tutoring, bike repair, taxi rides, and so forth. What’s missing is a currency for exchange.

So in the Kenyan community of Mombasa, Ruddick and his group, Grassroots Economics, created the Bangla-Pesa currency, a system of mutual credit vouchers. Anyone can issue a Bangla-Pesa credit voucher for goods and services that they can provide, and the voucher can then circulate among neighborhood participants as a kind of community-based money. For the homegrown exchange system to work, however, there must be a critical mass of participants offering a diverse range of goods and services, rules to prevent hoarding, and a brisk circulation of the vouchers.

By 2024, the system had 218 participating businesses and eighty-seven thousand vouchers in circulation, helping thousands of people meet many everyday needs. Ruddick and his organization have gone on to create community currencies in over eighty communities throughout Kenya as well as in Cameroon and South Africa. Over sixty thousand households are spending and receiving the equivalent of US $4 million in exchange.

A key lesson is that a community can control its means of exchange to advance its own interests without relying on banks, the capitalist economy, or the national currency. After working with dozens of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities, Ruddick came to realize that modern societies need to pay more attention to the art of social cooperation and peer governance as practiced by premodern societies. In Africa, when people need help in harvesting annual crops, building houses, or teaching their children, they help each other and then informally keep track of everyone’s contributions and obligations. Ruddick encountered more than forty-two different tribal names for these traditions of reciprocity, which suggests that this form of money-free mutual aid is a spontaneous and even universal social phenomenon.

“Surprisingly, if you look through anthropology research,” said Ruddick, “this social practice is almost undocumented, even though it seems to have been nearly everywhere.” It petered out around the time of colonialism, when colonizing nations introduced their own currencies. A local saying held that “those who would lose their traditions become slaves,” an apt description of what happens when colonial currencies and market wages supplanted traditions of mutual aid.

Ruddick calls traditional mutual aid practices commitment pooling. He explained, “The pooling of commitments is a mechanism for curating and fairly exchanging resources within communities. This approach hinges on the idea that commitments can be effectively pooled to create a more equitable and collaborative economic system.  ” Ruddick’s innovation is to integrate the power and reach of commitment pooling with digital ledger technology. While the blockchain version of this software is famously associated with Bitcoin, a speculative, capitalist currency, it and other ledger technologies can be adapted for other, more socially minded purposes.

Ruddick points out that the very idea of community ledgers is quite old. It’s just that the “ledgers” that people once used to keep track of how much who owes what to whom, were previously the twenty brains of individuals who kept track of debts and credits within a community. This collective algorithm, so to speak, was improved with the invention of tally sticks and then through a progression of accounting systems. Now, thanks to the internet and software platforms, said Ruddick, “we have new ways to make it really easy to enable people to authenticate themselves across large networks, using memory systems, transparency, provability, and interoperability. But it’s essentially a social infrastructure.” In his contemporary forms of commitment pooling and community currency, Ruddick says six key organizing principles must be honored: care for people, care for the environment, fairness, reciprocity, nondominance over others, and resilience.

Inspired by ancient practices, commitment-pooling protocols make it possible to rein in the relentless abuses and externalization of costs that modern economies routinely generate and allow. Rather than allowing individuals to overwhelm and destroy commons through markets and money, commitment pooling inverts this dynamic. Community currencies and commitment pooling are used, instead, to reinvent markets as (economic) commons.

Commitment pooling takes another form among women of the African diaspora in the Global North. Instead of pooling their labor and talents, millions of Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America have created their own trusted alternative to formal banking systems that exclude them. There are many names for these traditional systems—susu, partner, meeting-turn, box-hand, sol—depending upon the culture in which they arise. But they are generically known to scholars as ROSCAs, an acronym for “rotating savings and credit associations.” ROSCAs are a vital way for people of color and modest means to take care of their financial needs when banking systems are unfriendly or unaffordable, often for racialized reasons. Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein, a scholar of the Black social economy, cooperatives, and informal economies, has studied ROSCAs as practical, peer-based commons for savings and credit.

Black people have been “so traumatized by formal finance,” said Hossein, “that there are people who are unbanked or they choose to be under-banked. Anti-black racism in commercial banking is not a secret anymore,” she said. This explains why many African American women choose to “avoid those kind of stresses and engage with people who actually value their humanity”—their friends and neighbors. For generations, Black women in the African diaspora have relied on “do it together” ROSCAs to pay for major expenses while avoiding racialized abuses by mainstream banking and state regulators. “Black banker ladies” have instead created their own groups of ten, twenty, or sometimes dozens of friends, as a trusted, convivial form of finance. Besides helping Black households regularly save money and access credit, ROSCAs have served as vehicles of political empowerment, too. In some cases, ROSCAs have provided seed money to the campaigns of political candidates who wish to be champions for struggling working people.

For Hossein, ROSCAs demonstrate the generative value of informal systems: “Our primary focus in the West with marginalized groups has been to formalize everyone, and to demonize the concept of the informal. I like to think that Covid has really pushed us to a place where we now understand the value of mutual aid and getting things informally. It’s actually a good thing. Not everything in the informal is dark and dirty. It is a way for people who have been under persecution to thrive.”

The beauty of informal systems is that they can adapt to many different circumstances. Consider another type of community currency, time banking. This is a localized time-barter system widely used in dozens of cities and towns worldwide. Time banking lets people earn “time credits” (known in the US as “time dollars”) for providing services to others in their communities. Examples include mowing lawns, babysitting, providing household help, or running errands. People can then spend their time credits for other services provided by members of the community. Often administered by churches and nonprofits, time banking has proven to be a boon to many elderly and poor people who have far more time than money.

Perhaps the largest, most developed alternative local currency in the US is the BerkShares, a complementary currency (supplementing the national currency) that circulates in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. Recognized by The New York Times as a “great economic experiment,” the circulation of BerkShares is overseen by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in cooperation with local businesses and banks. Anyone can buy $100 worth of BerkShares for US$95 at local banks, in effect giving users a 5 percent discount on purchases at participating businesses. Some 350 regional enterprises accept BerkShares for everything from buying a pastry to booking an hour of a local lawyer’s time. Businesses that accept the currency then use it to patronize other local stores and service providers. At any given moment, roughly $150,000 worth of BerkShares is in circulation.

BerkShares are a powerful way for local communities to bolster their economies, preventing an outflow of money to banks and financial institutions elsewhere. Every Berkshare spent in the region has a multiplier effect economically. The currency also builds regional identity and pride. BerkShares bills depict historical local heroes such as W. E. B. DuBois, Norman Rockwell, and a Native American Mahican from a tribe that originally inhabited the area. In the currency’s nineteen years of existence, more than $10 million worth of BerkShares has circulated and the model has inspired the creation of other local currencies abroad.

You might wonder why I’ve focused on local currencies. Why not the more famous digital currencies like, say, Ethereum or Bitcoin? Those experiments may have their value, but some digital currencies like Bitcoin are not really used for market exchange, but as a speculative asset. In terms of social impact, it’s more important to relocalize money than to facilitate electronic exchange on a global scale. Global digital currencies are notorious for fluctuating in value. They also supercharge global markets and accelerate the homogenization of everything local. It’s far better to empower local communities to grow on their own terms.

Cooperatives

Cooperatives are a time-tested organizational form for meeting needs that corporate markets serve poorly or ignore. Co-ops enable people to interact with markets for the benefit of their members while accenting socially minded, ecological priorities as desired. People can band together to discuss their needs, participate in running the enterprise, and share in the benefits. Members own and govern the business as a collective, and in so doing, have greater capacity to advance many of their values and aspirations.

For these reasons, cooperatives have a long history as vehicles for collective emancipation, especially among farmers, rural communities, consumers, workers, small businesses, and marginalized peoples. In the United States, rural cooperatives for electricity, credit, and crops have greatly improved people’s lives. African Americans have used co-ops to survive and build social solidarity in the face of white supremacist abuses and discrimination. “African Americans pooled resources to solve personal, family, social, political, and economic challenges,” writes Jessica Nembhard Gordon in Collective Courage, her history of Black cooperatives. “They often addressed freedom, health, childhood development, education, burial, employment, and investment in cooperative ventures in ways that leveraged and maximized returns and reduced risks.”

It’s impossible to do justice to the history and varieties of cooperatives in a few paragraphs, but let’s start by noting that co-ops take many forms to serve countless needs. Enterprises owned by consumers or community members tend to focus on food, housing, or transportation. Farms and businesses frequently participate in producer co-ops to make bulk purchases and share marketing costs. Credit unions are a type of financial co-op that can reduce credit costs. Cohousing and intentional communities often organize themselves as cooperatives. In digital spaces, platform cooperatives bypass predatory business models by giving workers a shared app and business structure for mutualizing revenues from taxi rides, cleaning services, stock photography, and other services.

In recent years, a new generation has looked to reinvigorate the transformational potential of co-ops, focusing on better forms of co-op organization, credit, member education, community-building, and ecological concern. In some cases, city governments are taking a more active role in encouraging the development of cooperatives, often through government purchasing. Unions have sometimes teamed up with cooperatives in places like Jackson (Mississippi), Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Denver, to build a shared empowerment agenda for their members. The Synergia Institute offers a rigorous eight-module course online that deals with land, food systems, energy, precarious livelihoods, money and finance, and earth care, among other topics.

So are cooperatives commons? They certainly can be, and many are. But co-ops don’t necessarily prioritize a culture of commoning, let alone social engagement. Many co-ops don’t actively educate their members into cooperative principles, for example, or invite meaningful participation in decision-making. Some co-ops are in effect controlled by a management team and may even resemble corporations: hierarchical, controlled from the top down, and focused on competition and profits. The largest three hundred cooperatives in the world have sales of $2.2 trillion, yet even this scale of cooperation in commerce has not shaken the foundations of capitalism.

The lesson for commoners is this: The legal form of organization doesn’t guarantee certain behaviors or outcomes. Legal structures can guide and enable commoning, and eliminate legal and financial complications. But legal status is not destiny. Some commons organized as limited-liability partnerships are highly democratic and participatory. The point is that the practices and culture of commoning are primary; forms of legal organization are secondary.

This brief survey of prominent classes of commons only begins to capture the astonishing variety of commons in the world. But I hope it suggests the complexity and hardiness of commons, as well as the deep similarities coexisting amidst great differences. This truly is one of the enduring hallmarks of commons—their capacity to arise, and surprise, in myriad unexpected contexts.