Not so long ago, the commons was widely seen as a quaint historical curiosity—interesting perhaps, but essentially irrelevant to modern life. Then, about twenty years ago, a rediscovery of the commons started to gain some momentum. The surge was partly fueled by the rise of the World Wide Web and its networking progeny (open source software, wikis, blogs, etc.) but also by people’s fierce desire to reclaim some modicum of control over their lives. Then, after the 2008 financial meltdown, people began to realize that neoliberal capitalism and its promises of progress through growth and technology are not going to deliver a better life. Yes, there are significant human benefits from advanced capitalism, but they often entail radical destruction and dispossession: the privatization and plunder of our shared wealth and the displacement of massive costs and risks onto households, communities, ecosystems, and future generations. In the service of private profitmaking, the market machine appropriates our land, forests, and water, genes, seeds, and lifeforms. It claims private ownership of knowledge, creativity, and even data about our personal lives. It’s all part of a global project of extraction, now supercharged by financialization, authoritarian politics, and artificial intelligence.
To help reclaim the commons and name the forces of enclosure, I wrote Think Like a Commoner in 2012 and 2013 to tell the historical backstory of the commons and showcase noteworthy contemporary projects. I also wanted to explain how commoning could help reinvent modern life in institutional and everyday ways. At the time, this challenge felt ambitious but necessary. After all, the first association triggered by the word “commons” was invariably “tragedy,” as in tragedy of the commons. People who self-identified as commoners were seen as oddballs lurking outside the perimeter of respectable politics. Commons projects were generally brave, small experiments that rarely attracted attention. As a self-appointed chronicler of the fledgling Commonsverse, I found it fairly easy to keep track of notable commons developments, at least in the Global North.
No longer. The Commonsverse has exploded in size and variety—or perhaps more precisely, the discourse of the commons has spread, allowing countless commons to become more conspicuous. The scope of scholarship, experimentation, and activism has also soared. The commons has acquired enough cachet, in fact, that some trend-conscious corporations perceive a competitive advantage in commons-washing—wrapping themselves in the word “commons” to try to signal authenticity and street cred.
In short, the character of the Commonsverse and its political and cultural context have changed dramatically over the past fifteen years. Hence the need for this new, revised edition of Think Like a Commoner. Many developments deserve mention, and many new sorts of commons—in cities, agriculture and food systems, local communities, and on the internet—have arisen. Practitioners are building new types of infrastructures to make commoning easier. Many older commons—now larger and more robust—are confronting novel challenges from state power, law, and finance, while scholars tracking these changes are offering new insights and ideas.
Beyond the Commonsverse proper, movements for degrowth, climate action, peer production, platform cooperatives, and racial and ethnic justice are increasingly seeing how commons can help address the intertwined crises of our time. These include the planet’s climate emergency, corporate enclosures, social precarity, wealth inequality, social alienation, and a waning commitment to democracy. While the original text of this book remains a solid introduction to the commons, this new edition takes account of current circumstances for commoning, drawing on ground-level commoning projects, strategic initiatives, and commentary.
This edition also brings some important shifts of perspective. For example, instead of seeing the commons primarily as a resource, as conventional economists do, this edition pays far more attention to commons as a social system. The point is to move beyond the narrow scope of economic thinking that sees the commons as a thing, and reveal it as a deeply relational, living social organism that itself generates value.
Another perspectival shift in the pages that follow: instead of focusing on the scourge of market enclosures—which remain an urgent, destructive problem—this edition emphasizes the commons as a social space for creative experimentation and social reconstruction. Commoners have come to realize that they must do much more than fight enclosures, important as that is. After all, stopping enclosures is exceedingly difficult when state power is so deeply allied with capitalism and its fixation on capital accumulation, growth, and “progress.” In the face of this totalizing power, many commoners see the appeal of building a parallel polis—functional “islands of coherence” outside of the market/state system.
A warning: Think Like a Commoner is an introduction, not a comprehensive treatise. While this book describes many successful projects and movements, it can’t explore all noteworthy fields of commoning or fully probe their complicated challenges. Nor can it delve into the experimentation that is needed or myriad undertheorized frontiers. But ambiguities and fuzzy edges are precisely why the Commonsverse is such a promising sociopolitical space: It is still being imagined and built. Promising spaces, tools, and strategies are still being identified. At this stage, the most relevant question may be whether we have the imagination and tenacity to “live the questions” posed by the commons. That’s the only way we’ll be able to bring into being the world we need.
— David Bollier Amherst, Massachusetts
June 1, 2024
David Bollier at david /at/ bollier.org | New Society Publishers