Economists and politicians are accustomed to referring to space, the oceans, the atmosphere, genetic knowledge and other planetary systems as “global commons.” The ostensible point is to suggest that these things belong to everyone and should be managed for collective benefit. And in fact, nations have crafted a handful of treaties that purport to create cooperative governance to preserve and protect various natural systems.

Believing that Antarctica should remain unowned and nonmilitarized, seven countries with plausible territorial claims to the continent ratified a treaty in 1959 to establish a scientific research commons there. Similarly, as space became a new frontier, more than 100 nations, including the US, ratified the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, to ensure that space exploration would be for the benefit of humanity. A 1979 Moon Agreement (which the US has not signed but is regarded as international law) declared that the surface, subsurface, and resources of the moon shall not be treated as private property. In other words: no ownership, no resource extraction, no militarization, no colonization.          

Imperialistic habits die hard, however. As Trump’s executive order shows, in defiance of treaties, nation-states in practice rarely treat “global commons” as commons – that is, as participatory social systems for stewarding shared wealth in fair, inclusive, long-term ways. More often, at the behest of industry, national governments see “global commons” as free-for-alls for grabbing everything that they can. The needs of ecosystems, other people, and future generations are secondary if not trivial concerns.     

A series of treaties to protect the oceans as the “common heritage of mankind” started out in the 1970s with the ambition of preventing over-exploitation of deepsea minerals, fisheries, and other marine resources. But over time the mindset of nation-states has shifted to “let’s just make sure that our nation can do what it wants and gets its ‘fair share’ of profits.”

In short, the language of “global commons” has been corrupted. Nation-states and industry have no serious aspirations to act as conscientious stewards of our common wealth. Their priorities are return on investment and national aggrandizement.

This habit has taken a dark turn during the Covid-19 pandemic as private pharmaceutical research firms race to produce a vaccine and other treatments. Even though their work is built on our shared inheritance of medical knowledge, often funded by taxpayers – and even though solutions come faster through collaboration and knowledge-sharing – humanity is now held hostage by proprietary, competitive models that pit nation against nation and rich against poor.

Treating medical R&D and treatment discoveries as a genuine commons could produce affordable, widely accessible treatments much more rapidly, as partnerships like the World Health Organization and Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative have shown. We should remember the history of eradicating polio. In the 1950s, when a reporter asked medical researcher Jonas Salk who owned the patent on the new polio vaccine, he replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Times have changed, and now everything from seeds to groundwater, colors and smells, common words and two-second samples of music, are locked up as private property. The Trump Administration’s goal of mining on the moon is simply the logical extension of this ethic. It stems from neoliberal capitalist beliefs about “value” – that which can be encased in private property rights and exchanged for money in the marketplace has value. Anything used for collective, nonmarket, or conservationist purposes, with no cash changing hands, is by definition worthless. Price = value. Open source sharing may be generative, but it doesn’t contribute to GDP.

The point of talking about the commons is precisely to name those types of value that have no price tag. Things that are essential to our planetary survival, that are sacred and core to our identities, and that are critical to the flourishing of everyone and future generations – these must be regarded inalienable. They are not for sale. We may have drifted a long way from this ethic, but it’s not too late to insist that the Moon – and so many other gifts of the universe – belong to all of us.

The demonstrations are welcome in these respects, but, ominously, they are also evidence of a profound crisis of legitimacy in American life to which the market/state system is not likely to be able to respond effectively. In a sobering piece in The Atlantic, “Shouting Into the Institutional Void,” journalist George Packer notes:

The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report [the official Kerner Report that studied the origins of the 1968 race riots] with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.

After half a century of social dissolution, of polarization by class and race and region and politics, there are no functioning institutions or leaders to fail us with their inadequate response to the moment’s urgency. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

Packer’s insight suggests some troubling dangers ahead. We’ve already seen the rise of violent proto-fascist and white supremacist networks and the weakness of state institutions and law. On the other hand, we also have some rich, positive opportunities to transform our political economy and culture – if we can assert a coherent vision for a paradigm shift, if we can get beyond a reversion to a tepid (capitalist-oriented) liberalism.

The state is not impotent in the coming drama, but it is surely distrusted, for good reasons. It has been far more committed to a utopian neoliberalism than to a vision that provides dignity for all citizens, healthcare during a pandemic, basic food and shelter during an unprecedented economic recession/depression, and existential protection as the earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems collapse from too much market growth.

Since the state is so entangled in its deep alliance with capital, the real energy and thought for structural change will not likely be coming from within those circle or traditional politics. It can only come from us – commoners and care workers, families and communities, water protectors and Indigenous peoples, and all others whose fates have not been captured or co-opted by the established, dysfunctional system. 

Despite the many traumas, the past two weeks give me great hope. Deep human truths can still be expressed, heard and acted upon. They have a raw power of their own, if we dare to honor them. But how to deal with the institutional void that George Packer notes? How to build new social attitudes and institutions that can meet our urgent needs, that can build a "more perfect union"? Aye, that is the unmet challenge ahead.

The Great Lakes Commons larger mission is to show people that the lakes are “a revered source of life and a shared and equitable commons” and not a mere “object of management, a measurable resource or a commodity.” To help make this idea more real and public, people are invited to sign the Great Lakes Commons Charter Declaration inspired by the rich traditions within commons and the Indigenous governance of the Anishinabek and Haudenosaunee nations. 

Indigenous peoples who live around the lakes have in fact been close collaborators in the Great Lakes Commons. They have brought their ancient rituals and wisdom about the water and building a more diversified community to defend it against misuse. 

Baines in 2017 launched a “currency of care” project that invited people to imagine the value of money as tied to the quality and availability of water to serve life in the Great Lakes basin. The project co-created its own paper bills for people to give to others who have shown a commitment to the lakes. The idea was to create tangible new circuits of gratitude, reciprocity, mutualism, trust, reverence, and friendship related to the lakes. 

For more on the Great Lakes Commons, listen to Paul’s spirited explanations of its work!

In a 2008 essay on “Bioculturalism, shamanism and unlearning the creed of growth,” Sullivan suggests that modern economics suffers from a perpetual hunger that can never be sated. This affliction resembles one that the Greek god Demeter gave to a greedy king who refused to respect a scared grove of trees. Sullivan writes:

Permanent dissatisfaction and unfulfilled desire similarly are a zeitgeist of the freedom to produce and consume that is the hallmark of the creed of growth of state-corporate capitalism. And with indicators everywhere of decline and collapse in both global economy and ecology – from housing and finance markets, to disruptions in the dance of the seasons, the wake-up call of imminent ‘peak oil’ productivity, monstrous inequalities in the distribution of material wealth and resources, and reductions of cultural and biological diversity – perhaps we now are experiencing the inevitable inability of contemporary structures to sustain that hunger.

It's not just that we, or the king, try to consume too much. It is that we have conceptually divorced ourselves from nature. The problem is that we see nature as "some thing to be measured, mapped, modeled, commodified, conserved, used. It is not felt, celebrated, danced, or given gifts.” We moderns don’t have a “bioculturalism” that links biological diversity with a diversity of cultural knowledge, languages, and practices.

Sullivan has many other essays that speak to the ways in which our language, technologies, and desires have separated us from the more-than-human world, while paradoxically promising to emancipate and enrich us.

Check out her piece on the ontological assumptions of environmental knowledge and policy, for example, or an account of new accounting protocols that attempt to measure and monetize “natural capital” and associated flows of “ecosystem services.” Another interesting essay looks at the misguided potential of blockchain technologies to host a cryptocurrency exchange for “natural capital assets.”

While the financialization of nature may seem like a niche topic, it is really part of a larger cultural phenomenon. A few weeks ago, senior White House advisor Kevin Hassett told CNN that America’s “human capital stock” is ready to get back to work as the pandemic (supposedly) recedes. Er, yeah...but most of us regard ourselves as human beings, not machines for driving ROI.

Other Administration officials have famously opined that old people should be willing to risk death by Covid-19 for the sake of reopening the US economy. As President Trump himself tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE [shelter-at-home restrictions] BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” 

Of course, this money-obsessed sensibility is not confined to our ethically challenged president. For several decades, with the ardent backing of corporate America, the US Government has used a calculation known as Value of a Statistical Life, or VSL, to assign a value to a person’s life. The current value is $10 million. Under cost-benefit analysis protocols, a new regulation is considered too expensive if it requires an industry to spend more than $10 million per estimated life saved. 

How did we get to this amoral immersion into the financial worldview? How did we forget the primary sensuous experience of life itself and appreciation for its intrinsic, priceless value?

Read poets like Wendell Berry to rediscover the embodied joys of living. But for a more clinical, archeological dissection of what’s gone wrong with modernity and economics, check out Sian Sullivan’s outstanding oeuvre. Her writings are a refreshing forensic account of  how we have financialized our understanding of nature, warping our souls in the process -- and how we need to rehumanize ourselves with a new vocabulary of value.

In a recent piece in The Guardian, Bregman recounts his research odyssey to confirm the incident and learn more details. (See, also, a profile of Bregman here.)

It turns out that the Australian boys had been stranded alone on the island of Ata for fifteen months before being rescued on September 11, 1966. Fifty years later, Bregman flew to Australia to try to track down any survivors of the incident. He located sea captain Peter Warner, then 90 years old, who told Bregman how he came to rescue the lost boys given up for dead.

The island on which the boys were marooned had been inhabited until 1863, when a slave ship captured all the natives and sailed away. While steering his ship past Ata, Captain Warner noticed a fire. Looking through his binoculars, he saw naked boys screaming for help. The six boys were all Catholic schoolboys, ranging in age from 13 to 16, who had drifted for six days without food or water following a big storm. Eventually they washed up on the shores of Ata.

The fifteen months stranded on the island did not resemble the story of Lord of the Flies, however. As Captain Warner recalled in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” The boys survived on fish, coconuts and tame birds, and seabird eggs, wild taro, bananas and wild chickens.

In Lord of the Flies, the boys got into fights about who would maintain a fire to alert would-be rescuers. But the boys on Ata assiduously kept their fire going for more than a year. The boys had a roster for tasks, which they did in pairs. If arguments erupted, they agreed to a time-out. Bregman writes that “their days began and ended with song and prayer.”

The real-life drama of the stranded boys of Ata helps us to see that we invent the stories we want to believe. Who knows what motivated William Golding to tell this story, but Bregman notes that Golding as a person was apparently unhappy, alcoholic, and prone to depression. Golding himself even acknowledged Nazi-like tendencies in himself.

It may have been that Golding wanted to channel the spirit of Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher whose fable about social contracts has long been used to justify state power. A Hobbsean story like Lord of the Flies helps justify our supposed need for the modern, coercive state. Who else, after all, is going to keep order when we individually can’t constrain our own savagery? Lord of the Flies in effect dismisses the idea that we might self-organize a stable, humane order that can satisfy our needs. 

Bregman’s discovery of the stranded boys of Ata is therefore a revelation. It helps debunk the fictionalized projections about humanity that often pass for political wisdom.

I’d argue that the story of the shipwrecked boys validates a different story about humanity.  It affirms the reality and potential of commoning. As Bregman puts it, “It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.” 

Why this conversation now?

There are several reasons why this conversation is needed now.  First, it’s clear that the pandemic has opened up our minds. Now that the failures of existing institutions are so obvious, people are more willing to entertain alternatives that were dismissed only a few months ago. Amazingly, the Financial Times of London has actually endorsed the idea of a Universal Basic Income and wealth redistribution. Congressional Republicans have shown themselves willing to create trillions of dollars for unemployment insurance and social services, without considering it public debt. It’s been the equivalent of “quantitative easing” for people instead of banks.

All of this confirms the saying that there are no neoliberals or libertarians in a pandemic. This is not entirely true, as we’ve seen with armed militia defying state authorities so barber shops can open.  But the general point remains: such ignorant defiance of scientific realities is properly seen as anti-social and wacky.

At a deeper level, the pandemic is reacquainting us moderns with something we have denied:  that we human beings actually depend on living, biological systems. We human beings are profoundly interdependent on each other despite our presumptions to be autonomous, self-made individuals. A recent essay by ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, “Nourishing Community in Pandemic Times,” puts it nicely:

The corona pandemic makes us understand that the earth is a commons, and that our lives are shared. This insight is not a rational concept, but springs from an emotional need. Individuals accept hardships by restricting their contacts in order to protect community. The understanding that we need to protect others has been able to override economic certainties within days.  Humans choose to put reciprocity first. Reciprocity – mutual care – is neither an abstract concept nor an economic policy, but the experience of a sharing relationship and ultimately of keeping the community of life intact. 

The reality of mutual aid as a deep human impulse has been showcased recently in a column by George Monbiot in The Guardian and an excellent piece by Gia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

There are two other, more hard-bitten reasons that we need to talk about institutional innovation right now. The pandemic is causing a decline in the market valuation of many types of businesses and assets, and even bankruptcies. This means that it may be easier to acquire land, buildings, and equipment to convert them into commons infrastructure. For this, we will need to develop a whole class of “convert to commons” strategies, which I’ll discuss in a moment.

And finally, this is a time when lots of top-flight talent is eager to innovate and contribute to the common good. During major economic recessions, especially those affecting the technology industries, we have seen remarkable surges of innovation. Talented coders and engineers who otherwise would be designing systems to serve business models and maximize profit-making, can instead design what they really want to design. That’s one reason that we saw such an effusion of tech innovations following the 2002 recession, with blogs, wikis, social media, and other great leaps forward in software design. Similarly, the New Deal under FDR was a time of grave necessity driving breakthrough innovations in government and economics. 

In a crisis, it is necessary to innovate, or at least we have “permission” to deviate from standard business models and to reinvent the state. I worry about mutual aid systems withering away as old commercial systems struggle to get back on their feet. I don’t want mutual aid to be merely a transient rescue system for the weaknesses of capitalism and state power. I want it to become a distinct institutional and power sector of its own! To do that we need to self-consciously develop institutional innovations to sustain commoning.

The Commons

I come to this talk as a long-time scholar/activist of the commons. I’ve studied the theory, practice, and social life of the commons for the past 20 years, currently as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. I’ve encountered hundreds of commons in my travels and studied them closely. I’ve concluded that they have great promise in addressing the challenges of this moment.

Eight months ago, I published a book called Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons with my German colleague Silke Helfrich. The book distills and synthesizes our twenty years of study of commoning as a social and economic alternative.

I’ve come to conclude that the commons discourse is not only a fantastic way to critique capitalism. It helps us talk about creative, constructive alternatives as well. It points to functional alternatives that meet needs in non-capitalist ways with the active participation and creativity of commoners.

The truth is, we can and must leapfrog over tired debates about socialism versus capitalism. Both of these options rely on centralized, hierarchical, state-based systems, after all. The point of the commons is to open up new vistas for distributed, peer-organized initiative. It’s to honor the countless Internet-friendly options that empower us to take charge of our own governance and provisioning as much as possible.

If we truly want a world of democratic sovereignty and freedom, this option is arguably imperative.  After all, electoral politics in modern politics, especially in the US, has been captured and corrupted by capitalism. The nation-state has become so closely allied with capital that it’s virtually impossible to effect transformational change. Political ideology and power have triumphed over serious ideas and debate. Even though economic growth is biophysically impossible over the mid-term, as climate change makes clear, the state continues to prop it up with huge subsidies and legal entitlements.

So unless we confront these tendencies of state power – which the commons helps us do -- we will remain entangled in the web of neoliberal capitalism and its structural constraints.

The grim reality is:  Covid-19 is the most powerful political actor of our time. It is disrupting countless premises of modern life and forcing us to acknowledge a fork in the road: Shall we try to restore brittle, tightly integrated global markets based on neoliberal fantasies of unlimited economic growth and technological progress? Shall we re-commit to this vision even though this system requires horrific extractivism from nature, racism, inequality, and neocolonialism – and even though small local perturbances like a virus can bring the system down?

Or shall we build a more distributed, resilient, eco-mindful, place-based system that places limits on the use of nature?  Shall we build a system that invites widespread and inclusive participation, and nurtures place-making cultures that assure a rough social fairness for everyone? 

This is the race we commoners are in – to articulate a positive, progressive vision of the future before reactionaries and investors restore a shabby version of the Old Normal, an unsustainable capitalism that may easily degenerate into authoritarianism or fascism. This direction is already being staked out by Trumpism and its attacks on the rule of law, the rise of the capitalist surveillance state, and armed protests against shelter-at-home policies.

The Old Paradigm is indeed falling apart – but new ones are not yet ready.  Since politicians and economists are not going to develop any new paradigms, the burden falls to us to step up and sketch a new societal vision. Beyond expressing a new worldview and set of social practices and norms, we will need to build new types of infrastructures and institutions revolving around the commons. While state power and capital-driven markets will not disappear, it won’t be enough to hoist up a Green New Deal or cling to a timid Democratic Party centrism. 

In this essay, I leave aside the complicated macro-policy discussion that we might have. Here, I want to focus on the institutional innovations that could move us in the right directions. In any case, it’s very hard to implement macro-policies without underlying support at the micro-level – the realm of everyday experience and culture. So I’d like to focus on institutions that we can build ourselves, right now, without having to persuade politicians or courts. That, in fact, is the beauty of the commons. We generally don’t need permission to move forward.

Commons-based Institutions

Pre-pandemic, it was very hard to get any traction for expanding the commons, or even talk about it, because the neoliberal vision of “development” was so pervasive and powerful. It was seen as the only credible template for policy, politics and economics. Of course, the moment has changed. The veil has been ripped off of the neoliberal capitalist narrative and it is now quite obvious that we are actually biological creatures whose well-being depends upon a living Earth. We are social creatures who depend on each other.

Fortunately, there are, in fact, many functional models for change that recognize these realities. It’s only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that the problem is more one of our internal consciousness than external institutions. But the effect of the pandemic is to push the “microbial destruction of the Western Cognitive Empire,” as Andreas Weber puts it, referencing a great book, The End of Cognitive Empire, by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Weber’s point is that the Hobbesean vision of society as governed by a social contract and a world composed of dead things misreads the human condition. The conceit that we are ahistorical, decontextualized, isolated individuals – that we are rational, utility-maximizing materialists -- is a modernist, libertarian, capitalist fantasy. 

The Enlightenment conceit that we can separate humanity from nature, that the individual is utterly separate from the collective, and that the mind and body can be separated, is empirically wrong. It is, frankly, ridiculous. So it’s a bit misleading to say that the coronavirus is destroying the capitalist global economy. It’s more accurate to say that it’s destroying the epistemological edifice upon which the economy stands.

We’re beginning to realize that the world is a pulsating super-organism of living agents. That’s why there is so much talk these days about the “new animism.” People are beginning to realize that the world is actually alive. Gaia really exists!

So rebuilding the world won’t just require new economic policies.  It will require an entirely new mindset about a living world and our own aliveness. We need to see that life is really about achieving organic wholeness and integration. It’s about relationality and reciprocity. We need new systems that are take this into account. They must be bottom-up and place-based  and embedded in local ecosystems. There must be opportunities for peer governance and local cultures to flourish. 

As for “scaling” the commons, hope lies in federating diverse commons so that they can coordinate with each other and work at larger scales without becoming captured by the state or political elites. This requires that we demonstrate the feasibility of new forms of commoning, infrastructure, finance, and commons/public partnerships.

So let me share some of the institutional innovations that I think we need to develop.

Relocalization is vital to a resilient economy. Prime vehicles for relocalization include community supported agriculture, community land trusts, local import-replacement of goods, and local currencies.  The basic goal is to decommodify assets and recirculate value.

CSAs are a time-proven finance technique for upfront sharing of the risk between users and producers.  We know this as an agricultural finance tool, but in fact it can be used in many other contexts. In my region, many jazz fans subscribe to a series of jazz performances by paying upfront fees, CSA-style. This relieves the financial risks on concert producers and lets performers follow their creativity and not just hype their most well-known, marketable songs.   

Community land trusts are also a great way to decommodify land, take land off speculative markets permanently, and mutualize control and benefits of real estate. CLTs help keep land under local control and allow it to be used for socially necessary purposes (e.g., organic local food) rather than for marketable purposes favored by outside investors and markets.

One adaptation of the CLT model developed by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics is “Community Supported Industry,” which applies the CLT model of collective ownership of assets – not just land, but buildings, manufacturing, and retail space – as a way to foster “import replacement.”  The idea is to substitute local production for the importing of products through global or national markets.

Another way to foster relocalization is through what I call “Convert-to-Commons Strategies.”  This refers to financial or policy mechanisms for converting private, profit-making assets into ones for collective use (preferably nonmarket uses rather than market exchange). Converting business assets into commons helps anchor them in a particular ecological place rather than making them mere commodities subject to the whims of external investors or markets.  

A still-emerging Convert-to-Commons approach is finding ways to convert private businesses into collectively owned and managed projects. Activist/scholar Nathan Schneider called these “Exit-to-Community” strategies.  These are ways for entrepreneurs to allow communities to acquire their enterprises, avoiding the only two other options generally available to them -- selling out to large companies or “going public” (i.e., selling to private investors) through Initial Public Offerings.   

In Great Britain, there is a wonderful Assets of Community Value Law, which gives local communities a legal entitlement to be the first to bid on private business that is being sold or in danger of liquidation. This has been a way to convert privately owned pubs, buildings, and civic spaces into community assets.

Relocalization of food production and distribution systems. An important subset of the relocalization question is regionally based agriculture and food distribution systems. The pandemic has shown the precariousness of global and national supply chains, not to mention the atmosphere-destroying carbon emissions that such chains require. We need to develop food supply chains that are more place-based, cheaper in their holistic operations, respectful of ecosystems, and resilient when disruptions do occur. 

The activist/academic Jose Luis Vivero Pol has done a great deal of thinking about treating food as a commons and what this would entail. By this, he means that food should not be regarded just as a market commodity that should fetch the highest price, but something that is affordable to everyone, nutritious and not just profitable, and rooted in local economies. This will require that we re-imagine food systems that favor local agriculture, agroecological practices, and more equitable value-chains than we currently have. 

An example is the Fresno Commons in California, a community-owned food system in the San Joaquin Valley. Among other mechanisms, the Fresno Commons uses a stakeholder trust to assure that locally grown produce is accessible and affordable. What would otherwise be siphoned away as “profit” is instead mutualized among farmers and field workers, consumers, community businesses, restaurants, and other participants in the food value-chain.

The relocalization of food should also look to innovative data analytics so that farmers themselves can start to build new sorts of cooperative supply systems.  If they don’t, the big players who can own and manipulate agricultural data – Monsanto, etc., -- will come to control local agriculture. Along the same lines, farmers need to look to open-source designs for agricultural equipment to assure that they can modify and update the software on their tractors, prevent price-gouging and copyright control of data and software, and take charge of their own futures.

This brings me to the idea of cosmo-local production. This is a system in which global design communities freely share and expand “light” knowledge, open-source style, while encouraging people to build the “heavy” stuff -- physical manufacturing – locally.

There are already a number of exciting examples of cosmo-local production arising for motor vehicles, furniture, houses, agricultural equipment, electronics, and much else. In agriculture, there are the Farm Hack and Open Source Ecology projects. For housing, there is the WikiHouse model. For furniture, Open Desk. For electronics, Arduino.  To help deal with environmental problems, by providing monitoring kits, for example, Public Lab is a citizen-science project that provides open source hardware and software tools.

Like local food chains, the point here is the importance of developing more resilient local production that can be customized to meet local needs. Innovation need not be constrained by the business models that Google and Amazon or other tech giants depend on; the small players can actually make a go of it! Production costs can be cheaper using nonproprietary, non-patented design that rely on open-source communities of innovators.  And transport and carbon costs can be minimized. 

Imagine what could happen if this approach were applied to the development of a Covid-19 vaccine! Once a new vaccine is presented to the world, we are poised to see a major fight among proprietary drug developers, rich and poor nations, and various international bodies. Some people won’t be able to afford to vaccine, and others will make a fortune off of the pandemic – without actually vaccinating everyone, as needed.  That’s why we need to look to organizations like the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative, which organizes international partnerships to develop high-quality, low-cost medicines for everyone.

There are two serious problems that will need to be addressed if cosmo-local production, however: finance and law. If there is no intellectual property for cosmo-locally produced products – and thus no property to serve as collateral -- lenders will be less inclined to finance new drugs or cosmo-local products. So these problems will need to be solved to help cosmo-local production scale.

Platform cooperatives are another institutional model of commoning. They use Internet platforms as vehicles for cooperative benefit – to empower workers and consumers, to spur creativity, to reduce prices, to assure quality of life. The point of a platform coop is to empower the people who own and run them – workers, consumer, municipalities – rather than investors who extract money from a community in the style of Uber and Airbnb. Platform coops mutualize market surpluses for the benefit of participant-owners.

There are now platform coops for taxi drivers in Austin, Texas (ATX Coop Taxi), for food delivery workers in Berlin (Kolymar-2), for delivery and messaging workers in Barcelona (Mensakas), and for freelance workers in Brussels (SMart), among many others. Recently a new platform for independent bookstores in the US -- Bookshop.org – has made some headway against Amazon.  While not a coop but rather a B-Corporation, it shares 75% of its profits with bookstores.

One variant of platform cooperatives is known as DIsCO, the Distributed Cooperative Organization, which is a digital platform, sometimes using distributed ledger/blockchain technologies, to build working communities that prioritize mutual support, cooperativism, and care work, while avoiding the exclusionary, techno-determinism of typical networked platforms.  DIsCOs and other network platforms need not be market-driven.  They can be mutual aid platforms of the sort we’ve seen in response to the pandemic…..or timebanking platforms that enable people to share services through a credit-barter system…or freecycle platforms for giving away and sharing things.

It’s important to build commons-based infrastructure so that any individual commoner doesn’t have to be heroically creative and persistent. Infrastructure – physical, legal, administrative – provides a structure that makes it easier for individual commoners to cooperate and share more readily. It’s a standing, shared resource.

Some examples: Guifi.net, a WiFi system in Catalonia, Spain, has more than 30,000 nodes that functions as a commons.  It provides high-quality, affordable service that avoids the loathsome prices and business practices of corporate broadband and WiFi systems. Another interesting infrastructure project is the Omni Commons in Oakland, a collective property for artisans, hackers, social entrepreneurs, and activists. The project consists of nine member collectives who make decisions together, and provides meeting spaces, programming, community-outreach, and more. 

Creative Commons licenses are a form of legal infrastructure that enables legal sharing and copying of information and cultural works. Again, this would be far too difficult for any individual to do, but as a collective enterprise, these free public licenses have opened up countless new, cheap and free opportunities to share information, creativity and culture.

Land is an important infrastructure – for regenerative agriculture, affordable housing, and community-based businesses. There is a whole frontier in making land a form of community-owned infrastructure, rather than a mere market or speculative commodity.

Stakeholder trusts like the Alaska Permanent Fund are another rich vehicle for treating public assets as infrastructures for sharing benefits. In his book Capitalism 3.0, Peter Barnes sets forth many examples for using stakeholder trusts to monetize and share the benefits of publicly owned land, forests, water, minerals, and more. The basic idea is to use trusts to manage these assets, which in turn can generate annual dividends for the ordinary citizen. 

Finally, we need to explore new types of commons-based finance in the years ahead. There are already many hardy examples to build upon, such as mutual aid societies and insurance, crowd-gifting and crowd-equity pools of money, and – as mentioned earlier – community land trusts, CSA finance models, platform cooperatives, and Convert-to-Commons strategies. 

The idea is to avoid the traps of conventional debt and equity, which generally colonize our future behaviors and options, and require enterprises to become growth-driven despite the ecological and community consequences.  We need to imagine finance as a diverse array of community-supported and -accountable pools of money that actively facilitate commoning. 

The state may be able to play to creative role here, especially city governments, so long as they can get used to the idea of use-rights being as important as market exchange. One way of pursuing this goal is through commons/public partnerships, as Silke Helfrich and I discuss in our book Free, Fair and Alive. This is another, much larger topic – how the state -- long allied with capital investors interested in economic growth -- can become a constructive, non-intrusive partner with commoners in developing different types of infrastructures, legal regimes, and financing for commons.

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At the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once thundered in defense of her economic plans, “There IS no alternative!”  We now see that this idea is a ridiculous, bullying claim. The pandemic has revealed that neoliberalism is a fragile monoculture.  It is no match for the harsh biological realities of global viruses, the living dynamics of Gaia and climate change, and the governance and inequality problems of the market/state order.

The opportunities ahead are better defined by the acronym TAPAS: “There are PLENTY of alternatives.” But we need to find ways to work together to develop these institutional models and give them some public visibility as real options.  We need to communicate these ideas to other commoners and to the general public.

My bet is that the dysfunctionality of current systems and urgent social need will propel great interest in many commons-based models. Still, we have a lot of work to do in consolidating these ideas into a new vision of the future and in building them out. It is very early in the day!

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I’m planning to post a new episode at the beginning of every month. I consider Episode #1 as the April podcast even though it was released in March, because the pandemic and my recovery from some surgery delayed the posting of the second episode.

Episode #2, to be posted on May 1, will feature an interview with Rachel Moriarty of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Rachel, a colleague of mine who oversees management of the BerkShares regional currency, will talk about its history and role in building a stronger economy in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. BerkShares are one of the most successful regional currencies in the world today. Future episodes will feature Paul Baines, the director of the Great Lakes Commons and that project’s innovative efforts to save those great bodies of water. I’ll also speak with Marco Garcia, the director of Medialab-Prado, whose influential initiatives in Madrid, Spain, are demonstrating new forms of civic action. Medialab-Prado has created new technology platforms for civic deliberation, hosted fascinating conferences, and invited artists and cultural workers to help invent new social practices.

Also lined up: Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, the co-directors of Sociocracy for All, will talk about how Sociocracy helps groups draw upon the collective wisdom of its members to make better, fairer, wiser decisions. We’ll also hear from Dave Jacke, a leading figure in the permaculture world who will talk about how ecosystem behaviors can help guide our own models of cooperation.

I'm hoping that we can open up many other new conversations with some of the most thoughtful people on the frontiers of commoning.

Put another way, economists Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin foresee what they call “the coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative.” In a paper by that title on Vox CEPR Policy Portal, Bowles and Carlin declare the coronavirus to be “a blow to self-interest as a value orientation and laissez-faire as a policy paradigm, both already reeling amid mounting public concerns about climate change.”

They predict that a struggle will soon be underway to lock in the political and economic lessons of the pandemic. There will be a big push for a state-friendly, capitalist-affirming narrative, of course. But that frame will narrow the debate to familiar binary choice of “liberal” vs. “conservative” policy, subtly foreclosing consideration of larger structural reforms or a paradigm shift. We will need only ask ourselves, Do we want a bigger, more active government or free markets (sic)?

Fortunately, the pandemic supplies plentiful evidence to support a more ambitious, breakthrough agenda. The Commons Sector and all sorts of alt-economy approaches, long hovering on the progressive fringe, are now bursting out into mainstream view. Makerspaces have stepped up to make personal protective equipment using 3D printers. The City of Amsterdam has embraced Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” framework. All sorts of localized commons – for food, social support, emergency responses, etc. – are flourishing through people-powered ingenuity and goodwill. Thanks to the pandemic, once-fringe ideas (universal basic income, wealth taxes, relocalizing supply chains) are seen as practical if not essential options.

Bowles and Carlin argue that the pandemic calls into question the very language of economics and public policy. It is now clear that neither market contracts nor government edicts are capable of solving this and future pandemics. In addition, they argue, a “market vs. state” framing of future possibilities fails to acknowledge what the pandemic is showing -- “the contribution of social norms and of institutions that are neither government nor markets – like families, relationships within firms, and community organisations.”

For example, 750,000 ordinary Brits volunteered to help the National Health Service in dealing with the pandemic (only 250,000 could be practically put to work). Among South Koreans, there was a huge outpouring of social cooperation to get tested for the virus. One might also add to these examples the remarkable mutual aid projects that have spontaneously arisen worldwide, as chronicled by George Monbiot in The Guardian.

The pandemic has demonstrated that old systems are broken (and were always broken). But many people, including progressives and political parties, are still not willing to recognize this reality. They can’t quite admit that new institutional forms and social behaviors are entirely possible on a systemic, ongoing basis.

Rather than backslide into the old, familiar ideological mindsets, it's vital that we stride into the new spaces that have opened up! If you look carefully to the outskirts of mainstream politics and policy – to the many “new economy” experiments underway – you can see the lineaments of a new order. There is a huge constellation of promising experiments and proven archetypes. What they share in common beyond non-capitalist organizational forms is their invisibility on MSNBC, CNN, and among many progressive NGOs.

It's hard to acknowledge that bottom-up social energies can and do work, that there are developed alternatives awaiting expansion and refinement. These models don’t resemble markets or bureaucracies, however, which is surely one reason they have been marginalized. They are emergent, situation-based social phenomena. They can’t be strictly controlled from the top-down, which may be why traditional power centers are so wary of them. They have a quasi-sovereignty of their own that stems from being grounded in a geography, with real grassroots players, who work together as a living, peer-organized, evolving force. This is precisely why they can accomplish so much serious work so quickly and flexibly, as pandemic mutual-aid initiatives have shown.

As renegade economists, Bowles and Carlin appreciate the limits of markets and the state:

Neither government officials nor private owners and managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable contracts or government fiats to implement optimal social distancing, surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including to vaccine development….

[N]on-governmental and nonmarket solutions may actually contribute to mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat. The behavioral economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics – are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical values and other regarded preferences.

Bowles and Carlin don’t really explore HOW to foster new forms of collective social action, however, or what specific ones ought to be embraced. Perhaps they are not so familiar with the world of commoning and the impressive variety of “new economy” projects.

It is precisely this cohort of players who hold answers for the future. I’m talking about people who are pioneering the relocalization of food and place-based markets, new types of cooperatives, platform cooperatives in digital spaces, non-capitalist forms of finance, degrowth strategies, digital peer production, globally shared design (open source style) used to manufacture locally, agroecology and permaculture, urban commons, and countless other projects that point beyond capitalism and state bureaucracy.

A rare historical moment has opened up new possibilities. We can’t let it be wasted. We need to support an aggressive surge of institutional innovation, relationship-building and meme-spreading along with the development of new grand narratives and collaborative strategies. In a future post, I will look at some of the intriguing new institutional forms that are emerging in specific sectors.

Notwithstanding these general assumptions of modern life, we humans are discovering that we are in fact programmed to help each other when confronted with disasters. As Rebecca Solnit chronicled in her memorable book A Paradise Built in Hell, earthquakes, hurricanes, and gas explosions spur human beings to self-organize themselves to help each other, often in utterly sublime, beautiful ways. It’s a deeply human instinct.

The early journalism about covid-19 confirms this human impulse. Just as the Occupy movement mobilized to provide essential relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, mutual aid networks are now popping up in neighborhoods around the world, as the New York Times has noted.

The Times cited the great work of Invisible Hands, a network of 1,300 NYC young people who spontaneously peer-organized in three days to deliver groceries to at-risk people who can’t venture out of their homes. The piece also cited this radio segment on mutual aid on Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now! 

Check out a number of useful links in the article to other mutual-aid efforts, including a massive Google Doc listing scores of efforts in cities around the US, and a pod mapping toolkit. And check out the Washington Post’s piece on how a website for neighborhood cooperation, Nextdoor, has become a powerful tool for people to help each other through the pandemic.

The mainstream world likes to refer to such peer-assistance as “volunteering” and “altruism.” It is more accurately called commoning because it is more deeply committed and collective in character than individual “do-gooding,” itself a patronizing term. And surprise: it sometimes comes with disagreements that must be resolved – but which can end up strengthening the commons.

A thoughtful piece on the role of anarchism in surviving the pandemic notes that mutual aid “is the decentralized practice of reciprocal care via 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.”

The vexing question for the moment is whether state power will support mutual aid over the long term (it may be seen as a threat to state authority and markets) -- or whether Trump-style politicians will use this moment of fear to consolidate state control, increase surveillance, and override distributed peer governance.

Another important question for the near-term is:  Can we develop sufficient institutional support for commoning so that it won’t fade away as the red-alert consciousness of the moment dissipates. To that end, I recommend Silke Helfrich’s and my book Free, Fair and Alive You may also want to browse the governance toolkit on CommunityRule.info or look into Sociocracy for All.

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Throughout history commoning has always been an essential survival strategy, and so it is in this crisis. When the state, market, or monarchy fail to provide for basic needs, commoners themselves usually step up to devise their own mutual-aid systems.

In so doing, they are illuminating the structural deficiencies of conventional markets and state power. As we have seen, political agendas and profiteering have often been higher priorities than public health or equal treatment, as the $2.2 trillion bailout bill passed by the US Congress suggests. President Trump has been more obsessed with reviving the market and winning re-election than in saving people’s lives. Consider how many corporations are more intent on reaping private economic efficiencies (offshoring medical facemask manufacturing; closing down access to cheap generic drugs) than in allowing collective needs to be met effectively through government or commoning.

Numerous commentators are pointing out how the pandemic is but a preview of coming crises. It's not been mentioned much that covid-19 is partly the result of humans encroaching excessively on natural ecosystems. The UN environment chief Inger Anderson has said that biodiversity and habitat loss are making it easier for pathogens to jump from “the wild” to humans.

And ecologist Stephan Harding has a wonderful piece on how Gaia seems to be trying to teach us to see the dangers of unlimited global commerce: “We are seeing right now how in an over-connected web a localised disturbance such as the appearance of a fatal virus can spread and amplify very quickly throughout the system, reducing its resilience and making it more likely to collapse.” 

At this juncture, many massive, pivotal choices await us. We must decide to rebuild our provisioning systems on green, eco-resilient terms, not on neoliberal fantasies of unlimited growth and tightly integrated global markets. New/old types of place-based agriculture, commerce, and community must be developed.

This will entail a frank reckoning with how we re-imagine and enact state power, writes Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, in the Financial Times: “The first [choice] is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.” Harari warns:

Humanity needs to make a choice. Will we travel down the route of disunity, or will we adopt the path of global solidarity? If we choose disunity, this will not only prolong the crisis, but will probably result in even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and crises that might assail humankind in the 21st century.

Obviously, I think the commons has a lot to contribute to citizen empowerment and global solidarity. Hope lies in building new systems of bottom-up, place-based provisioning and care that are peer-governed, fair-minded, inclusive, and participatory. Hope lies in federating diverse commons so that they can coordinate and reach more people – accountably, flexibly, effectively, with resilience.

State institutions may be able to play positive roles, mostly in providing general rules, coordination, certain types of expertise, and infrastructure. Beyond that, they should focus on empowering people and smaller-scale governance and thereby engender trust in collective action.

It is still too early to know how the pandemic will unfold and resolve. There are too many complex variables play to predict the many ramifications. However, it is clear enough that this pandemic calls into question MANY elements of today’s neoliberal market/state order, whose institutions and political leadership are either dysfunctional or uncommitted to meeting public needs. It's not just individual politicians; it's a systemic problem. Yet the rudiments of a coherent new system with richer affordances have not yet crystallized. 

So that may be our ambitious task going forward. Commoners and allied movements, disillusioned liberals and social democrats, and people of goodwill must thwart the many retrograde dangers that threaten to surge forward under the cover of fear. But we must also, simultaneously, demonstrate the feasibility of new forms of commoning, infrastructure, finance, and commons/public partnerships. Rarely have needs and opportunities been so aligned!

Through personal stories, interviews and vignettes, the viewer catches a glimpse into how each is trying to improve the world in his own way, or trying to make sense of what’s going on. There is David Vargas, for example, who installs rainwater harvest systems in Mexico City to help people deal with persistent shortages of water. Working with residents, he has installed some 1,800 systems that let 10,000 people live off of rainwater for half the year.  

David Lida, a professor in Mexico concerned with inequality and the precariat, talks with a vegetable vendor in a city market who works 15-hour days and considers himself lucky, relative to the factory job he might otherwise have.

To give some larger cosmic perspective, we hear from David Marsh, a British scientist whose principal interest is theoretical cosmology. Interspliced with the other interviews, Marsh  talks about the mysteries of dark matter, which holds the universe together, and about the vast sweep of time and the evolution of the universe. We also hear from a David who is a slam dancer, and one who is a recycler, and another who is a champion for a basic income. 

This film is not just a series of boring talking heads, however. It’s an immersion into the gritty, colorful realities that all these Davids live and work within. We see the dusty, impoverished rural lanes with barking dogs where David Vargas is installing a water system. A woman says, “We have nothing. The government doesn’t provide anything. They’re just taking care of themselves.” We visit the empty early morning streets of the city, where a blind person with a white can shuffles along and the street sweeper cleans up trash. 

In other words, the film conveys the gritty desolation and beauty of everyday life as curated by Céline Baril. She artfully blends the eclectic voices and feelings in a way that is strangely moving and entirely coherent. As the film’s promotional blurb describes it, 24 Davids is “a melting pot of heady thoughts and politics in a refreshingly freewheeling cinematic format, probing the mysteries of the universe and the challenges of living together.”