Introduction

When my seatmate on the airplane turned to me and abruptly asked, “So what do you do?” I replied that I study the commons and work as an activist to try to protect it.

Polite bewilderment. “Say what?” It was not the first time. So I cited the familiar references—the Boston Common and medieval pastures—and moved on to the so-called tragedy of the commons, the meme that brainwashed a generation of undergraduates.

Sensing a quiver of interest, I ventured further, mentioning open-source software, Wikipedia, countless collaborative websites, and billions of books, articles, images, and music made shareable via Creative Commons licenses. At the risk of overwhelming my captive seatmate, I ticked off a list of commons that are rarely seen as commons: community supported agriculture and community land trusts. The “gift economies” of blood donation systems, mutual aid networks, and Indigenous commitment-pooling traditions.

There are fisheries managed by coastal fishers, water protectors defending precious rivers and groundwater, and alternative local currencies. There are makerspaces, mesh network WiFi systems, and platform cooperatives. Language itself is a commons, free to anyone to use, but whose letters and words are fast becoming proprietary trademarks.

I half expected my new friend to turn back to her book or gaze out the window at the fleecy clouds over the Great Plains. Instead she brightened. “Oh, I get it! The commons are things that no one owns and are shared by everyone.”

Well put.

She mused that the park where she walks her dog and mingles with strangers is a commons—and so is the online listserv about parenting that she belongs to. She cited a community festival and parade with homemade floats and local luminaries.

In the modern industrialized countries of the world, the commons tends to be a baffling, alien idea. The word may be invoked to make faux-genteel allusions to Merrie Olde England (“Coxswain Commons Apartments”), but otherwise it has scant currency. We don’t really have a language for naming commons—real commons—and so they tend to be invisible and taken for granted. The commons is not a familiar cultural category. (Confusingly, “commons” is both the singular and plural of the term, and some people make things even more confusing by using the word “common” instead of “commons.”)

Anything of value is usually associated with the “free market” or government. The idea that people could actually self-organize durable arrangements for managing their own resources and that this paradigm of social governance could generate immense value, well, it seems either utopian or communistic, or at the very least, impractical. The idea that the commons could be a vehicle for social and political emancipation and societal transformation, as some commons advocates argue, seems just plain ridiculous.

The point of this book is to gently dispel such prejudices and provide a short introduction to the commons. After encountering so much confusion about the commons over the years—and seeing how rich bodies of commons-oriented scholarship are inaccessible to the lay person, and commons-based activism projects are scattered, ignored, or misunderstood—I decided it was time to write a short, accessible synthesis of the topic.

I want you, my reader, to imagine that you are my quizzical seatmate as we begin a short flight. You have intuitions about the commons and the need for social cooperation. You surely know about the dismal performance of corporate capitalism and government. You may be outraged by the alarming privatization of public lands, schools, and research; Big Tech’s relentless surveillance of our personal lives via social media and websites; and investors’ destructive addiction to carbon fuels and economic growth. The pervasive commodification and privatization of our shared wealth is what spurred me to write my first book on the commons, Silent Theft, in 2002. It helped me realize how our ignorance of the commons is actually part of the problem. It allows grand narratives about economic growth and progress to deflect attention from what’s really going on: the private plunder of our common wealth, our dispossession, our social disintegration.

That’s why I want to explain the history of the commons and the political vision it sets forth as reasons for optimism. I want to describe how the commons can ameliorate our economic troubles by offering us fairer, more eco-minded ways to meet our needs. Commons help us enact a richer theory of value than conventional economics allows us to imagine. This is not just an idle academic exercise but an urgent practical one because too much of the world’s economic and political life revolves around voracious markets and the warped human relationships and ecological damage they inflict.

In the following pages, we will see the power of commons to address such problems in innovative, socially minded ways. Simply talking about commons is a valuable first step. For starters, it gives us a rich vocabulary to name the pathologies of markets and the feasible commons-based alternatives. I like to think that by naming the commons, we can learn how to reclaim it. We can begin to understand the limits of markets and learn how to participate in commoning with others. We can reap many benefits—economic, social, political, civic, physical, aesthetic, even spiritual—that can’t be bought at a store.

The 2008 financial meltdown and decades of market/state inaction on climate change make clear that the dogmas of market individualism, private property rights, and unfettered markets cannot, and will not, deliver the kind of change we need. And yet the traditional advocates of reform, liberals and social democrats, while generally concerned with market abuses and government malfeasance, are themselves too timid or exhausted to imagine new paths forward. They are too indentured to the market/state mindset and cultural outlook. (I use the term “market” in this context to refer to large capital-driven markets conjoined to our neoliberal polity: a realm of predatory monopoly, concentrated political power, and exploitation—rentier capitalism—and not Adam Smith’s idea of free exchange among equals in transparent, open markets.) By accepting the power of finance capital and corporations, many professed liberals are not really willing to fight for new forms of governance and political transformation. They are content to muddle through with political marketing and buzzwords while clinging to sinecures of privilege.

Countless real-life commons provide a vital counterpoint. By stewarding the gifts of nature and hosting online collaborations and various forms of mutual aid, they enact new configurations of power, governance, and aspiration. They integrate economic production, social cooperation, personal participation, and ethical idealism into a powerful single package of self-help and collective benefit. The commons is essentially a parallel economy and social order that quietly affirms that another world is possible. And more: we can build it ourselves, now.

As we will see in the pages that follow, the commons holds great promise for reinventing dysfunctional governments and reforming predatory markets. It can help us rein in our overly commercialized consumer culture. It can usher in new forms of green governance to protect the environment. At a time when our representative democracy has become a gaudy charade driven by big money and remote bureaucracies, the commons offers new forms of on-the-ground participation and responsibility that can make a real difference in people’s lives.

I should stress that the commons is neither a messaging strategy of the sort favored by campaign publicists, nor an ideology or dogma. It is not just a new name for the “public interest.” It amounts to a kind of political philosophy and practical way of being that engages us as complex, embodied, feeling creatures. Commoning invites us to escape the suffocating norms of capitalist culture and explore and develop our authentic inner selves in communities of social trust. This self-transformation is a necessary step for engaging with the more-than-human world and transforming the external world. Indeed, it opens up a new type of politics by identifying the market/state duopoly as a central issue and naming a world that lies beyond it.

The market and state, once very separate realms of morality and politics, are now joined at the hip: a tight alliance with a shared vision of technological progress, corporate dominance, and ever-expanding economic growth and consumption. Commoners realize that this is not just a morally deficient, spiritually unsatisfying vision for humanity; it is a mad utopian fantasy. It is also ecologically unsustainable, a crumbling idol that can no longer command respect.

In response, the commons sets forth a very different vision of human fulfillment and ethics, and invites people to achieve their own bottom-up, do-it-yourself styles of emancipation. It has little interest in hidebound party politics, performative rhetoric, rigid ideologies, or elite, centralized institutions. It seeks to build anew, or, as R. Buckminster Fuller memorably put it, “to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That’s what a robust commons movement around the world is doing. The Commonsverse is pioneering new forms of production, more open and accountable forms of governance, innovative technologies and cultures, and healthy, appealing ways to live. It is a quiet revolution—self-organized, diversified, and socially minded. It is pragmatic yet idealistic and, for now, only occasionally engaged in mainstream politics or public policy. Yet it has been steadily growing, in most instances outside the gaze of the mainstream media and political establishment. It seems poised to “go wide,” as they say in the movie business, because various tribes of transnational commoners are increasingly making common cause with each other.

I hope that in the coming flight I can explain the refreshingly different logic and social dynamics of commons as they are now unfolding in numerous contexts. I promise to keep things short, accessible, and interesting—while pointing as much as possible to the complexities and unresolved questions that demand further attention. Our journey through the world of the commons will pass through three stages: (1) a survey of enclosures of the commons as a significant problem of our time; (2) a look at commons as generative living systems building a new type of worldview, culture, and political economy; and (3) the challenges facing the Commonsverse in the years ahead.

I hope our flight together goes briskly. I promise you will see a landscape that is not often seen, at least in one sweeping, clear view. Before we conclude, I want to contemplate the future of the commons paradigm as it confronts the aging dogmas of neoliberal ideology. How can we unseat a “free market” creed that cannot deliver on its promises and yet will not allow serious consideration of alternatives? How can commoning advance when our archaic systems of nation-states, law, bureaucracy, and finance are so entrenched and resistant to change?

The good news is that commoners and kindred system-change advocates are already making impressive progress. These movements—for degrowth, the social solidarity economy, cooperatives, transition towns, agroecology, relocalization, peer production, alternative currencies, racial justice, decolonization, Indigenous cultures, the Wellbeing Economy movement, and many others—are in effect creating a new type of “parallel polis,” one that will eventually force a reckoning with the market/state leviathan. This is no ideological pipe dream. It is a piecemeal revolution of real, functional alternatives being built by savvy, pragmatic innovators working largely beyond the gaze of main-stream institutions.

There will surely be some turbulence ahead but also many beautiful, soaring vistas. For now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. Let’s talk about the commons.