There is much more that can be said about the commons—in greater depth, with greater precision, from different cultural perspectives, and with the wisdom of historians, poets, and artists. My account here is only one of many, from the perspective of a white, privileged (and dissenting) Westerner. But if I’ve whetted your appetite to explore further, I am satisfied. This book is only a short introduction, after all.
A question I am asked a lot is, “What can I do to help the commons?” Or as one woman put it after a talk I had given, “How can I become more “commonable?” A wonderful coinage! I always reply that it must start with your passion and where you live—and then you must find others to help push the idea forward, however small the effort may seem at first. The famous line by Margaret Mead comes to mind: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
If you prowl the world of commoning as covered by my blog and podcast, the International Journal of the Commons, various sites on peer production, Shareable magazine, Stir magazine in the UK (and many others—see the list of websites engaged in commons on page 228), you will encounter dozens of stories of ordinary people doing some amazing work. It is tempting to patronize some commons initiatives as “too small” to be significant; conventional policy experts like to imagine bold, sweeping plans that can be decisively implemented to solve problems. But the truth is that commons work best when they emerge organically over time in coordination with local conditions and particular needs.
Climate activists sometimes complain that “we don’t have enough time” for such efforts, but clearly the past forty years of “working within the system” and its protocols and norms have not yielded the change we need. A different logic is needed. Commoning has the advantages of converting capitalist resource-extraction into inalienable care-wealth and placing enforceable limits on the use of natural systems. It grounds provisioning in bioregional settings and builds grassroots practices and norms to enact a postgrowth vision.
It is surely true that the government, public policy, and international law at the “higher” levels must also provide legal and financial support to commons initiatives. There is a need for infrastructures and platforms to help commons flourish and unleash enormously important local energies. There is a need for commons-based innovations at national and regional levels, but also at local levels, which are often patronized as “too small” to be consequential, but which can collectively, over time, remake a society. In this regard, I think of Mark Lakeman and City Repair, an enterprising civic project dedicated to reviving neighborhood spaces in Portland, Oregon; Rajendra Singh and his Young India Association, which has reclaimed the nearly dry Arvari River by applying commons principles; and the dozens of hackerspaces and Fab Labs that commoners have created to co-produce software, customized fabrication, and open hardware design and manufacturing.
The point in any of these instances is not so much to “scale” the commons in a linear, hierarchical sense—that’s so twentieth century!—but rather to intensify and diversify its workings everywhere at once, honoring distributed autonomy. The process is more akin to crystallization, as my friend Silke Helfrich once put it. New “atoms” join the crystal as they resonate with its basic structures and ideas, and soon the crystal begins to take shape and grow in all directions without any traces of hierarchy or points of centralization. In this way, small changes—commons by commons—can have big cumulative effects on the whole system. (The internet—a network or World Wide Web—has grown in much this way.) This process is well underway, as we’ve seen throughout this book.
Most commoners I know are not interested in developing a “unified field theory” of the commons as a political philosophy. To be sure, they want to develop a larger, more coherent set of ideas about what the commons means and how it may apply to diverse circumstances. But they tend to be wary of overemphasizing ideology and abstractions. The first priority of commoners, when it comes right down to it, is to tend and protect their particular commons. They understand that they need to focus their energies on the beloved commons that are near and dear to them. To cultivate the art of commoning: this is the base for all else.
It is precisely the decentralized, self-organized, and practice-based approach of the commons that makes it so hardy as a political strategy. It’s harder to co-opt a movement when there is no single cadre of leadership. To put it more positively, a diversified movement rooted in on-the-ground, self-directed leadership can elicit much more energy and imagination than centrally directed initiatives can (which, in turn, are more vulnerable to cooptation). Because commons are usually based in practice, not theory, they can also skirt many of the enervating battles over ideological purity that often plague movements. For many commoners, the point is less about getting the right intellectual formulation than about getting real work done. Ideas matter, to be sure, and strategic debates are important. But as the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has pointedly noted, “Action causes more trouble than thought.”
In the early pages of this book, I asked how we could confront the aging dogmas of neoliberal ideology. How might we unseat a “free market” theology that cannot deliver on its promises and yet will not allow serious consideration of alternatives? The basic answer is now fairly clear, I hope. It’s important to form and expand a wider circle of actual, functioning commons that can serve as staging areas for building a new vision for the future, a new cultural ethic, a new political constituency. This vision cannot simply be announced. A brilliant leader cannot simply declare what should be. The vision has to be “coenacted” by commoners themselves, over time. Appropriate strategies and solutions can only emerge from active experimentation, debate, and innovation.
The commons is ultimately a cultural practice and outlook that seeks to understand the world in different terms. It is driven by a shift in perception about how human beings can actually influence the making of a better world. It is animated by personal ethics and social engagement finding new fulcrum points to leverage change. Representative democracy and law remain important vehicles for progress, but commoners tend to be realistic. Passing new laws or electing the right candidates will not yield the change we need, especially when old systems of governance are so corrupt, ineffective, and anchored to archaic structural paradigms. The most urgent task is to devise durable new institutions of commoning—a parallel polis that can flourish within the husk of the etiolated market/state system.
If uncertainty is a keynote of the Ecocene era that we are entering, we will need to be open to improvisation, dynamic change, and a radical rescaling of functions that are now mostly centralized, regimented, and corporatized. Hierarchies of control are becoming more problematic, or at least more expensive and complicated to administer as disrupted ecosystem processes assert their own living logics. New organizational forms like commons are needed to propel exploratory and participatory processes, in the manner of open-source innovation. Crisp blueprints and rigid, linear systems of command-and-control won’t be effective. Far better to nurture relationships of trust and solidarity among people and in collaboration with natural systems, facilitated by infrastructures of reciprocity.
Drawing on themes discussed earlier, a number of sweeping initiatives strike me as vital:
The imaginative space of the commons provides the opportunity to start anew, with a different conceptual foundation, a new framework of analysis, and a more robust moral and political vocabulary. In its broad sweep, the commons offers a powerful way to reconceptualize governance, economics, and policy at a time when the existing order is incapable of reforming itself, let alone pioneering new social and economic logics. The commons can revitalize democratic practice at a time when conventional political institutions are dysfunctional, corrupt, resistant to reform—or all three.
The commons paradigm and discourse could harness much of this energy because it has four distinct advantages. First, it is a worldview and sensibility that is ecumenical in spirit and analysis. It isn’t a rigid totalizing ideology but rather a template for change that is open-ended, flexible, and accessible to diverse cultures and societies. It respects on-the-ground realities and practical working models.
Second, the commons has a venerable legal history that stretches back to the Roman Empire and the Magna Carta and its companion Charter of the Forest. This history is a great source of instruction, credibility, and models for political and legal innovation today.
Third, the commons is a serious intellectual framework and discourse that lets us critique market capitalism while validating constructive alternatives based on cooperation and community. Political liberalism has been too closely aligned with capitalist ideology to understand its own structural flaws and limitations. The commons offers a template for political and social emancipation that moves well beyond the possibilities allowed by Homo economicus, market exchange, and liberal universalism.
Finally, the commons consists of a rich array of successful working models for provisioning and empowerment that in many instances are out-competing the market and state. It is an emerging parallel polis that can step up to the challenges ahead as the climate emergency, capitalist dysfunction, and elemental needs intensify.
Alain Lipietz, a French political figure and student of the commons, traces the word “commons” to William the Conqueror and the Normans—not the English, interestingly. The term “commons” supposedly comes from the Norman word commun, which comes from the word munus, which means both “gift” and “counter-gift,” which is to say, a duty.
I think this etymology gets to the nub of the commons. We need to recover a world in which we all receive gifts and we all have duties. This is a very important way of being human. The expansion of centralized political and market structures has tragically eclipsed our need for gifts and duties. We rely on the institutions of the market and the state for everything, leaving little room for personal agency or moral commitment. And so we have largely lost confidence in what Ivan Illich called the vernacular domain, the spaces in our everyday life in which we can create and shape and negotiate our lives. I think we need to fortify vernacular law—the law of the commons.
What I find reassuring is the deep resonance that this idea has among so many different people around the world—Indigenous protectors of groundwater, Brazilian remix artists, Amsterdam hackers, German cohousing members, American free culture users, Italian municipalities. The explosion of commons-based initiatives popping up around the world is creating powerful synergies and opening up rich possibilities for change.
This is exciting because when theory needs to catch up with practice, you know that something powerful is going on. At a time when the old structures and narratives simply are not working, the commons gives us many reasons to be hopeful.
David Bollier at david /at/ bollier.org | New Society Publishers