The next day, about 130 people showed up for a full day of breakout sessions to dream up provocative new ideas and make plans for a different future. While a post-capitalist future is not going to arrive tomorrow, countless minds were expanded and many seeds of change planted.

Among the self-organized “unconference” sessions was one on “bringing ecological intelligence to culture” and another on “co-operative development.” One session asked people to imagine “a city/world without police,” and yet another gave guidance on “transitioning what and how we eat” (preparing simpler but tasty food). 

I was enthralled to learn about The Center for Post-Carbon Logistics, which is exploring how to move “goods and people from place to place in a climate constrained future.” I met Jesse Brown, co-founder of Hudsy.tv, a “digital storytelling platform for the Hudson Valley, NY…[that provides] an integrity-based video content distribution option” for filmmakers. The idea is to create a platform cooperative that does not act as a giant money-machine sucking personal data and money from independent filmmakers and viewers who care about the Hudson Valley.

One gentleman invited the audience to join a small team in identifying the antisocial incentives of Kingston’s zoning code. An entire breakout group contemplated solutions to the city’s rampant gentrification and other housing issues. Clearly this is a town whose citizens have the courage and imagination to think big.

By coincidence, the day before the conference, The Guardian had published a first-person account by a former Kingston resident marveling at the city’s progressive ambitions. With some hyperbole, the headline read: “The US City Preparing Itself for the Collapse of Capitalism.” The article focused on the inspiring healthcare project known as O+ (“O positive”), which has worked with artists to secure medical, dental and wellness services for them, while enlisting their energies in street art and an annual public festival.  

O+ is just one of many Kingston initiatives that are developing functional alternatives to the standard “economic development” vision. We all know how Chambers of Commerce like to attract large outside investors to build big facilities and spur local employment – not appreciating that such ventures often siphon away the life and money of a town while making them more dependent on outsiders.   

Folks in Kingston have very different ideas.There is Radio Kingston, which gives voice to a full panoply of community members on the air every day. Hudson Valley Farm Hub is a huge tract of farmland whose managers are exploring how to grow more food for local distribution, in more ecologically and socially mindful ways. Its Native American Seed Sanctuary is working with the Akwesasne Mohawk Tribe to grow Native American varieties of corn, beans, squash and sunflowers, while helping to preserve the tribe's culture. 

One pillar of the emerging activist network is the Good Work Institute, which offers space for events and meetings. The Hudson Valley Current is an alternative currency that is starting to make greater headway in reinvigorating local exchange. There is even a fledgling Kingston Maker Project that seeks to nurture the local talent and enterprises for a more resilient future.

Other conveners of the Kingston event bear mention: Transition Kingston; Commonwealth Hudson Valley, which aims to energize the cooperative economy regionally; Rise Up Kingston, a grassroots group focused on “dismantling the structures of racism and oppression”; and the NoVo Foundation.

As the author of the Guardian piece, Alexandra Marvar, put it, “Kingston is piecing together the infrastructure for a self-sufficient community.” That will clearly take some time, but surely a great threshold has been reached when people have the resolve to imagine a new and better future, and the confidence to rely on their own collective agency. Wow.

I left Kingston with a new spring in my step and fantasies about trans-local dialogues among vanguard cities like Kingston. But of course, first things first.

After several months of irregular screenings here and there, Gift has just opened a national theatrical run, starting in New York and Los Angeles and continuing for weeks with screenings in dozens of theaters around the US. You can check the schedule of screenings here. You can watch the trailer here. McKenna introduces us to the joys and satisfactions of gift culture by interweaving several storylines at once. We visit with a young Indigenous artist, a wood sculptor in the Pacific Northwest, whose work will be part of an elaborate potlatch ceremony. He is committed to passing on the learning and passions that his mentors gave to him, and to communing with his community through his artistic gifts.

We also visit a massive squat of an abandoned factory in Rome, which migrant families have adorned with murals and other breathtaking artworks.  By making their collective and individual living spaces a kind of “living museum,” the squat has paradoxically thwarted businesspeople who would love to gentrify the space. Their art and its connection with their everyday live indirectly indicts the "deadness" of conventional artworks as commodities.   

Another story follows a participant in Burning Man, the popup festival in the Nevada desert. The San Franciscan amateur artist spends weeks devising a crazy vehicle resembling a bumblebee for the week-long Burning Man encampment. She scoots around the playa, joyously distributing honey in her whimical vehicle. 

The film is at once a meditation on timeless themes, a series of stories, and a moving work of art for reflecting on the power of gifts in making us whole human beings. Find out where Gift is playing near you – and then read Lewis Hyde’s book. Or if you’ve read the book, see the film and experience the sublime satisfactions of living within a web of gifting. 

The author goes on to reference Ostrom’s research showing that commons are often stable and durable, such as the Swiss commons of Törbel, which have managed shared irrigation systems for 500 years. “An exclusive focus on states and markets as ways to control the use of commons neglects a varied menagerie of institutions throughout history,” the author concludes. 

In a final note, the author invites us to consider how commons could change society: “A world rich in healthy commons would of necessity be one full of distributed, overlapping institutions of community governance. Cultivating these would be less politically rewarding than privatization, which allows governments to trade responsibility for cash. But empowering commoners could mend rents in the civic fabric and alleviate frustration with out-of-touch elites.”

The author even cites Ostrom’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she called on policymakers to “‘facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans’.  This prompted the author to offer a benediction: “That sounds like common sense.”

I remain amazed that this piece was able to survive a gauntlet of business-minded editors at The Economist. While I appreciate the good press for the commons (instead of the umpteenth retelling of the "tragedy" story), I frankly would have welcomed a deeper analysis of the larger cultural and political ramifications of commons.

But relax, I tell myself, this is a moment to be gracious. Thank you, Economist, for opening the door a little on the realities of commoning. May you find the courage to entertain a richer treatment of the non-capitalist possibilities already unfolding all around us.

These assumptions struck us as fundamentally misleading, especially if you understand humanity in a biological sense. We humans are all inscribed within larger collectives that make us who we are. We are shaped by intergenerational cultures, geographic communities, extended families, affinity groups and a living, pulsing more-than-human ecology (aka "nature"). Why can't we begin to acknowledge that life is far more relational than transactional?

People engaged in commoning are not caught up in “prisoner’s dilemma” scenarios or rationally calculating how they can get more for themselves. They are trying to meet their needs, or simply survive, by working together in social solidarity. From co-housing and agroecology to alternative currencies, and from community land trusts to open-source everything, people around the world are turning to commoning to emancipate themselves from predatory market/state institutions This is one reason the cachet of the commons has soared in recent years: it offers a discourse and real projects for challenging capitalism and building socially constructive alternatives.

A theme that resonates throughout our book is the idea of relationality. Commoning is about building relationships of trust in the course of meeting collective needs. In this fashion, the commons help us develop a new “politics of belonging” that works quite differently than the ideological polarization of "representative" democracy. Commoning also helps us develop a new economics of sufficiency that can deal with runaway economic growth and ecosystem collapse.

To try to express the realities of commons that we have witnessed, Silke and I had to develop a new theoretical and practical framework for understanding the commons. 

We found a way forward in pattern languages, an idea developed by the renegade architect and urban planner Christopher Alexander who saw that certain design patterns in buildings recur again and again across cultures and history. He realized that there is no universal set of principles for identifying these patterns – but if we study the patterns that exist despite very different contexts, we can identify some striking regularities. We found that his approach that fits very well with commons, which have many regularities despite varying immensely another around the world.

To showcase these patterns, our book synthesizes dozens of patterns of social practice, ethical values, and group behaviors that we observed in countless commons. We integrated this vision through what we call the "Triad of Commoning" framework. It combines three essential aspects of any commons – provisioning, peer governance, and social life – each of which is entangled with the others. This framework acknowledges that commons are alive, alive! They are not simply inventories of unowned “resources.

In the course of rethinking the commons, Silke and I realized that if we are going to escape the dead-end of neoliberal capitalism, we need to invent and learn a new vocabulary. So we coined a lot of new terms. Instead of seeing nature mostly as a set of “resources,” commoners tend to see water and land and forests as “care-wealth” -- living things that they care about and that shape their identities and cultures.

Instead of seeing everyone as isolated individuals striving to maximize their material gain, we coined the term “Ubuntu Rationality” to describe a logic of human interaction that deeply aligns a person’s interests with the well-being of others.

Instead of seeing “property” as something that is owned absolutely and used to dominate and control others, we explore the idea of “relationalized property.” There are, in fact, “other ways of having” – ways to access and use things -- that go beyond the extraction, exclusion or marketization associated with conventional property ownership. Examples include open source seeds, the federated wiki platform, and the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, which depends upon members working for free several hours a month. 

Our publisher, New Society Publishers, is touting our book as "a cultural critique, table-pounding political treatise, and practical playbook for commoning." We’re honored to have some heroes of ours give endorsements to the book. Bill McKibben, author of Falter and founder of ‘350.org’ wrote:

“If you want a truly exciting glimpse into what the world after this one might look like, this book is for you. When we move past “markets solve all problems” into a more mature approach, it will incorporate precisely the insights in this lively and engaging volume!”

Raj Patel, author, The Value of Nothing and Stuffed and Starved, said:

“David Bollier and Silke Helfrich don’t just establish that commoning can work, and work well. They’ve analysed the contours of successful experiments in how humans have come together to make their worlds freer, fairer and more alive”.

The activist and author Vandana Shiva wrote that the book

“shows the path to respond to the ecological emergency and the polarization of society, economically, socially, culturally. The recovery and co-creation of the commons offers hope for the planet and people.” 

We are proud that Free, Fair and Alive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which should enhance its availability. The German version of the book was published by transcript Verlag in April, and Spanish and French translations are planned.

A common denominator of many of these local activities, says Tokar, is a growing frustration with national politics and international institutions, and with the stranglehold of corporate influence at these levels on everything from climate policy and financial sector reform to trade and fair elections.

One recurring question is how local efforts can have a more significant impact beyond themselves, especially at national or international levels. Can local action “tackle the fundamental question of where and with whom political power resides?” asks Tokar. “We need to strengthen forms of coordination that emerge from the municipal context to support a growing network for change in synchrony with a global resurgence of solidarity, democracy, and justice.”

Much of the response by commenters focused on this very question – how can various local efforts coordinate with each other and develop a larger vision and network for change?

Rather than attempt to summarize the many different perspectives, I recommend a brisk read through the many lively responses. They raise some provocative questions about where the energies for social transformation will come from, how they might self-organize themselves to have real impact, and how they could change the very character of politics as we know it today.

In recent weeks, the Sharing Society has set about launching a new network to continue the cross-disciplinary international dialogues. It’s too early to know how that venture will unfold, but it promises to be a good space for cross-sectoral discussion, alerts about upcoming conferences and publications, and a repository of literature. 

You can find more about the Sharing Society at its website, and a wealth of literature generated by its prior events here. If you want to sample some of the great papers submitted to the event, a 688-page volume of conference proceedings containing dozens of papers can be accessed here. It was edited by Professors Tejerina, Cristina Miranda de Almedia and Ignacia Perugorría.

I was pleased to encounter this fledgling forum and network because I think academics and activists generally don’t mix it up enough. So it was refreshing to move into this welcoming space for open minds and methodologies to study cooperation in its many varieties. We all need serious academic studies that burrow into the hidden experiences of practitioners while avoiding the perils of ivory-tower theories. And commoners, for their part, often need to take a broader, more rigorous perspective on their own work. History, political economy, and social theory can be very helpful.

A series of eight keynote speakers gave some wonderful presentations.  You can watch each of the talks in streaming video here.

Greek scholar Manuela Zechner spoke about “caring, sharing and commoning,” offering a fascinating taxonomy of different types of care. There is “caring about” and “taking care of,” which are typically gender-biased toward men – and there is “care-giving and “care-receiving,” which are typically left to the less powerful. She also noted that we can distinguish care as a disposition and care as a practice. 

The problem with care, said Zechner, is that we find it difficult to acknowledge that we need care and that we are dependent. That is why setting up circuits of care that can mature into a commons can be so difficult. After all, the default norm in market culture is simply to outsource care via paid labor. A key challenge in contemporary society, therefore, is “how to instantiate and sustain relations of care,” Zechner said.

Italian design expert Ezio Manzini echoed some of these ideas in his talk, which focused on building urban spaces and a regenerative circular economy on the basis of care. These topics are elaborated in Manzini’s latest book The Politics of the Everyday, which discusses how city-making, social innovation, and design are all interconnected.

Internet scholar Mayo Fuster Morrell, Director of Dimmons Research Group in Catalonia, described the policy void that exists in thinking about the collaborative economy in holistic terms, and the failure of government to adequate assess the sustainability of existing models (such as Airbnb and Uber) and the alternatives that deserve greater attention.  

Italian scholar Derrick de Kerckhove spoke about “the rise of collaborative investigative journalism” as seen in the collaboration of 370 journalists and their respective news organizations in making sense of the so-called Panama Papers, a huge cache of documents detailing transnational tax avoidance and corruption. 

My colleague Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation described a new type of “distributed cooperative,” or DisCO, that is a “locally grounded, transnationally networked cooperative focused on social and environmental work.” DisCOs are a counterpoint to the anarcho-capitalist structures known as DAOs, or “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” that attempt to use blockchain software (of Bitcoin fame) to create "trustless" online groups based on algorithms and "smart contracts." DisCos also use the blockchain, but are instead designed as “commons-oriented open cooperative governance” models. One example is Guerrilla Translation, the Spain-based translation cooperative that Troncoso works with.

In my talk on “the commons as a living social system,” I described the new framework for understanding the commons that I developed with Silke Helfrich in our forthcoming book, Free, Fair and Alive. You can watch the video here, but otherwise, more on that topic in a future post.

Stuart McMillen explores these questions in his magnificent 56-page cartoon, “Who Owns the Million Dollar Baseball?” It wasn’t the player Mientkiewicz who somehow made an ordinary baseball worth a million dollars or more. He was just the lucky guy who made the last ‘out’ of a seven-game World Series following a baseball season of 176 games, producing the first World Series victory after 85 luckless seasons.  

McMillen’s strip notes how the entire team won the three other games in the seven-game series, and how the fans had loyally supported the team for generations. The cartoon notes that the City of Boston and State of Massachusetts, played an indirect role by providing streets, electricity, sewer and other infrastructure for the Fenway Park stadium in which the Red Sox play. 

In our blog, Jon Rowe and I wrote:

The value of a business, resource, historic baseball or whatever does not reside solely in the thing. Nor does it arise from the efforts of an entrepreneur alone. Value is, rather, a co-production between an individual, society and nature; and the latter two often play the larger part. Land values, for example, are almost entirely a social product. That’s why two acres near an urban freeway exchange or subway stop can fetch more than does an equal amount of land in the middle of a desert.

The question is less what the owner did, than what others did around him, individually and through government. So, too, with music, inventions – just about everything. These accomplishments draw on what was done before, and depend on the sustaining presence of society as a whole. Even stocks would have little value without stock markets through which to sell them, and without governments to police – to some degree – those markets. These are social creations all.

Once we acknowledge the social component of economic value, then discussion of financial return and social policy take a new turn. Taxation, for example, no longer is a matter of “redistributing” someone else’s income, or wealth, but rather of restoring a portion of it to the rightful owners. The acknowledgment of social co-production also dissolves the myth of the heroic individual businessman or woman as “self-made.” Individuals may do great things, but as Warren Buffett – who knows something about making money – has pointed out, none do it alone.

Stuart McMillen’s strip makes these points wonderfully vivid. In an accompanying blog post, he elaborates on the public factors that contribute to individual success. His "self-made" executive bears a striking and deliberate resemblance to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world's richest man.  

McMillen's principal interests are environmentalism, post-growth economics, and human psychology, but he also deals with such diverse topics as Buckminster Fuller, religion, energy, and drugs. He supports himself through a crowdfunding page at which 169 individuals have so far pledged a cumulative US$1,223 per month. He aspires to be the first crowdfunded Australian cartoonist to earn a median income for his country. You can contribute to his work at the crowdfunding site Patreon.

By the way, a shamed first baseman Mientkiewicz eventually agreed to return the ball so it could be put on display. It was an implicit acknowledgment that the Red Sox's success in the World Series stemmed from many sources generously working together.

For me, the report is quite remarkable:  a rigorous, comprehensive set of proposals for how land could be developed, used, and protected as a commons.

There are succinct, powerful sections on making land ownership data more open and available; ways to foster community-led development and ownership of land (such as a “community right to buy”); and codifying a citizen’s “right to roam” on land for civic and cultural purposes. One effective way to curb speculative development and revive farming and forestry is by creating community land trusts and curbing tax privileges and subsidies.

The bald financial realities about land are quite troubling. The report notes that in the UK, “land values have risen 544% since 1995, far outpacing any growth in real incomes.” Housing is simply unaffordable for many people. “Two decades ago, the average working family needed to save for three years to afford a deposit [downpayment] on a home,” the report notes. “Today, it must save for 19 years.”

Much of the blame can go to tax laws and other policies that encourage people to treat homes as financial assets. This fuels fierce speculation in housing that raises prices, greatly benefiting the rich (landowners) and impoverishing renters. Similarly, thanks to speculation and tax subsidies, wealthy landowners consolidate more land while small farmers are forced to give up farming.  Fully one-fifth of English farms have folded over the past ten years. 

Politicians are generally far too wary to propose solutions to these problems. It would only enrage a key chief constituency, the wealthy, and alienate some in the middle class who aspire to flip homes as a path to wealth. But there are in fact many ways to neutralize the speculative frenzy associated with land and mutualize the acquisition and control of land to make something that can benefit everyone.  

Land for the Many recommends a shift in “macroprudential tools” – financial assessments of systemic risk – to prod banks to make fewer loans for real estate and more loans that help productive sectors of the economy. The report also urges restrictions on lending to buyers intending to rent their properties.Other healthy ways to make land more accessible and affordable for all:  a progressive property tax on land; a reduction of tax exemptions for landowners; and a cap on permissible rent increases at no more than the rate of wage inflation or the consumer price index, whichever is lower.

Since profit-driven development can have catastrophic long-term effects on ecosystems, wildlife, and future generations, the report calls for the creation of Public Development Corporations. These entities would have the power to purchase and develop land in the public interest.

I especially like the idea of creating a Common Ground Trust, a nonprofit institution to help prospective homebuyers buy homes. As the request of a buyer, the Trust would buy the land underneath a house and hold it in trust for the commons. Since land on average represents 70% of the cost of a house, the Trust’s acquisition of land under housing would greatly reduce the upfront downpayments that buyers must make. “In return,” write Monbiot et al., “the buyers [would] pay a land rent to the Trust.”  Home buyers could reap any appreciation in value of their house, but land would effectively be taken off the market and its value would be held in the commons.

“By bringing land into common ownership, land rents can be socialized rather than flowing to private landlords and banks,” the report notes. “Debt-fueled and speculative demand can be reined in without the risk of an uncontrolled or destabilizing fall in values.”

Land for the Many is major achievement. It consolidates the progressive case for land reform and explains in straight-forward language how law and policy must change. Of course, the politics of securing this agenda would be a formidable challenge. But given the grotesque inequalities, ecological harms, declines in farming, and unaffordable housing associated with the current regime of land ownership, this conversation is long-overdue.

Approximately 95 fans pay $125 to underwrite ten local jazz concerts a year in a variety of regional venues – colleges, clubs, performance spaces. Business sponsors and single-ticket sales augment these revenues. But it’s not just about the money. It’s about building a community through mutual aid and money-lite commoning. As reported by New England Public Radio, Siegel and Page have been known to cook for visiting performers. Sometimes Jazz Share members pick up musicians at the train station and make food for the artist receptions following each performance. 

The share-model is arguably the secret to presenting sometimes-challenging music. The shares enable performers to be artistically authentic and venturesome. They can improvise in bolder ways than would be possible in conventional commercial venues, and fans can enjoy the results. For example, one quartet included a bassoonist, which is not usually heard in jazz performances. Other artists report that they feel free to explore their artistic frontiers.

The whole setup also changes the audience. As Siegel explains, “Although many of our shareholders do not know who Karl Berger is, most have an open mind and an adventurous attitude. Because our audience expects to be surprised, we can expose them to new experiences. Although we attempt to have balance in our programming, the dilemma facing most presenters of not wanting to offend or get too far ahead of audience tastes does not affect us.”

Now in its seventh season, Jazz Shares has built a sociable community of jazz fans who might otherwise remain isolated at home. Local saxophonist and composer Jason Robinson credits Jazz Shares for creating a very special musical culture in the region: “Jazz Shares does special things for our local community that [don’t] exist in Boston. It barely exists in New York. It’s something that’s quite unique across the country.”

Glenn Siegel explained how Jazz Shares has engendered a very special cultural ecosystem: “Just as plants are dependent on the sun, clean water and healthy soil to thrive, the music needs paying gigs and an appreciative audience to reach full flower. Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares is helping to build that rich inch of topsoil that stands between us and a barren cultural landscape.”

Sounds a lot like commoning to me!