The commons lies at the heart of a major cultural and social shift now underway.
Photo Credit: AllanGregg; Screenshot / YouTube.com
April 14, 2014
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Jeremy Rifkin's new book, “The Zero Marginal Cost Society,” brings
welcome new attention to the commons just as it begins to explode in
countless new directions. His book focuses on one of the most
significant vectors of commons-based innovation — the Internet and
digital technologies — and documents how the incremental costs of nearly
everything is rapidly diminishing, often to zero. Rifkin explored the
sweeping implications of this trend in an
excerpt from his book and points to the "eclipse of capitalism" in the decades ahead.
But
it's worth noting that the commons is not just an Internet phenomenon
or a matter of economics. The commons lies at the heart of a major
cultural and social shift now underway. People's attitudes about
corporate property rights and neoliberal capitalism are changing as
cooperative endeavors — on digital networks and elsewhere — become more
feasible and attractive. This can be seen in the proliferation of
hackerspaces and Fablabs, in the growth of alternative currencies, in
many land trusts and cooperatives and in seed-sharing collectives and
countless natural resource commons.
Beneath the radar screen of
mainstream politics, which remains largely clueless about such cultural
trends on the edge, a new breed of commoners is building the vision of a
very different kind of society, project by project. This new universe
of social activity is being built on the foundation of a very different
ethics and social logic than that of homo economicus — the economist's
fiction that we are all selfish, utility-maximizing, rational
materialists.
Durable projects based on social cooperation are
producing enormous amounts of wealth; it's just that this wealth is not
generally not monetized or traded. It's socially or ecologically
embedded wealth that is managed by self-styled commoners themselves.
Typically, such commoners act more as stewards of their common wealth
than as owners who treat it as private capital. Commoners realize that a
life defined by impersonal transactions is not as rich or satisfying as
one defined by abiding relationships. The larger trends toward
zero-marginal-cost production make it perfectly logical for people to
seek out commons-based alternatives.
You can find these
alternatives popping up all over: in the 10,000-plus open access
scientific journals whose research is freely shareable to anyone and in
community gardens that produce both fresh vegetables and neighborliness.
In hundreds of "timebanks" that let people meet basic needs through
time-barters, and in highly productive, ecologically minded
commons-based agriculture.
Economists tend to ignore such wealth
because it generally doesn't involve market activity. No cash is
exchanged, no legal contracts signed and no measureable Gross Domestic
Product is generated. But the wealth of the commons is not accumulated
like capital; its vitality comes from being circulated. As I describe in
my new book, "Think Like a Commoner," the story of our time is the rise
of the commons as a new way to emancipate oneself from predatory
markets and to collaborate with peers to protect and expand one's shared
wealth. This is a story that is being played out in countless digital
arenas, as Rifkin documents, but also in such diverse contexts as
cities, farming, museums, theaters and indigenous communities.
One
reason that so many commons arise and flourish is because they help
their participants meet important basic needs in fair, responsive and
socially satisfying ways. That's quite attractive to those who are
otherwise held captive by conventional, predatory markets. Big
agriculture is more concerned with efficiency and profit than ecological
stewardship. Large transnationals are more interested in rip-and-run
resource extraction (mining, fracking, timber) than in the protection of
sacred lands and time-honored ways of life. "Copyright industries" like
Hollywood and record labels want to treat all of culture as tightly
controlled "product," not as something that is freely shared and built
upon.
Nowadays the commons has a special appeal for people of the
global South who are often victimized by the "enclosures" inflicted by
neoliberal investment and trade policies. Enclosures are the act of
privatizing and commodifying previously shared resources. For example,
millions of acres of land in Africa, Asia and Latin America are
currently being seized by investors in a massive international land
grab. Hedge funds and even the government of South Korea, Saudi Arabia
and China are enacting an eerie replay of the English enclosure
movement. Commoners who have worked the land for generations as a
customary right are being forced to migrate to cities in search of work,
where they often end up as paupers and sweatshop employees: a
modern-day replay of Charles Dickens' novels.
By the lights of
modern economic theory, it's all for the best because it promotes
"development" (i.e., consumerism and other market dependencies). But
many commoners are now fighting the dispossession and dependencies that
enclosures entail by struggling to retain some measure of dignity and
self-determination through their commons. The International Land
Alliance estimates that 2 billion people around the world depend upon
subsistence commons of forests, fisheries, arable land, water and wild
game to meet their everyday needs.
Strangely, the leading
introductory economics textbooks in the U.S. virtually ignore the
commons except for the obligatory warning about the "tragedy of the
commons." They prefer not to recognize that the commons represents an
entirely viable but different paradigm of "development" - one that can
transcend the unsustainable consumerism, cultural disintegration and
economic growth of our time. As the late Nobel Prize winner Elinor
Ostrom showed, commons are an entirely sustainable, ecologically
friendly model of resource management, contrary to the "tragedy"
parable.
Commoners are not all alike. They have many profound
differences in their governance systems, management practices and
cultural values. And commons are not without their conflicts, struggles
and failures. That said, most commoners tend to share fundamental
commitments to participation, openness, inclusiveness, social equity,
ecological respect and human rights.
The politics of the commons
movement can be confounding to conventional observers because political
goals are not the paramount priority; protection of the commons is.
Commoners tend to be more focused on "prepolitical" social activity and
relationships, which is why commons are embraced by such a wide variety
of people. As German commons advocate Silke Helfrich notes in
The Wealth of the Commons,
"Commons draw from the best of all political ideologies." Conservatives
like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility. Liberals are
pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement.
Libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative. And leftists
like the idea of limiting the scope of the Market.
It is important
to realize that the commons is not a discussion about objects, but a
discussion about who we are and how we treat each other. What decisions
are being made about our resources? Does economic activity satisfy basic
human needs and honor human rights and dignity? These kind of
discussions are not often heard in in conventional business and policy
circles, alas.
To conventional minds, the idea of the commons as a
paradigm of social governance appears either utopian or communistic, or
at the very least, impractical. But a diverse, eclectic universe of
commons around the world demonstrates otherwise. It is the neoliberal
project of ever-expanding consumption on a global scale that is the
utopian, totalistic dream. It manifestly cannot fulfill its mythological
vision of human progress through ubiquitous market activity and greater
heaps of private consumption, if only because it demands more from
Nature than it can possibly deliver - while inflicting too much social
inequity and disruption as well.
Fortunately, the Internet and
indigenous peoples, the re-localization movement and hackers, community
foresters and fishing cooperatives and many, many others, are showing
that the commons can be an effective vehicle for social and political
emancipation. Jeremy Rifkin's astute analysis of this powerful trend
will help open up a much-needed discussion in the stodgy precincts of
conventional economics.
David A. Bollier is an
author, activist, blogger and independent scholar with a primary focus
on “the commons” as a new paradigm for economics, politics, and culture.
He is the founding editor of Onthecommons.org (2002-2010), co-founder
and principal of the international consulting project Commons Strategy
Group, and co-director of the Commons Law Project. Bollier is the author
of numerous books, including "Think Like a Commoner: A Short
Introduction to the Life of the Commons."
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