Vivero Pol has done pioneering work in bringing the very idea of food as a commons to the fore, especially among academics, but also among many action-oriented activists engaged with agriculture, hunger, and bioregional ecological issues. His basic goal is to make the many varieties of food commons visible as a practical, functioning alternative to Big Ag. A landmark effort in this regard is The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, a major anthology published in 2020 with 39 chapters and 29 authors addressing this theme. The volume was co-edited by Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, and Ugo Mattei.

At a recent webinar co-organized by Vivero Pol, Professor Sam Bliss of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont pointed out that, while "nonmarket practices" for provisioning food are widely ignored, they are pervasive. According to surveys, gardening, fishing, foraging, hunting, bartering, sharing, gifting, scavenging from dumpsters are widely practiced in his state.

Bliss notes that nonmarket sources of food provide a way to escape the extractivist commodity system. Through food commons, people can not only reduce their dependence on (often-expensive) markets, they can respect the limits of nature -- because harvests from foraging or hunting, for example, are limited to household use; market sale is prohibited.

By contrast, the concentrated system of Big Agriculture that dominates most nations is based on massive public subsidies to the largest corporations. The United States, most European nations, Russia, China, and India, among others, all treat food as a commodity on the theory that "free markets" are the most efficient and productive ways to grow and distribute food.

This narrative, however, is a social mythology. Agriculture in the countries named above is based on lavish subsidies that don't take into account the gifting of public wealth to the already-wealthy, the ecological harm to soil, habitat, and water, and the hunger that results for those with little money.

Big Ag companies "are not playing on a level playing field," notes Vivero Pol. "They're not competing on a free market. The food market is the second most heavily subsidized market after fossil fuels. Basically, these companies are earning profits because they are heavily subsidized through public funds."  He notes that while politicians "are always talking the market, the market, the market, under the table agricultural markets must be subsidized. Otherwise, they would be a complete disaster."

Vivero Pol suggests that public funds could be more fruitfully spent to help smallholder farmers, agricultural commons, food banks, school lunch programs, and bioregional projects.

"Once we change the narrative about food," said Vivero Pol, "state policies and legal frameworks will align to enact food in a different way." There will still be markets to distribute food, of course, but there will also be new forms of market regulation and new spaces of public intervention and commoning to assure that food is healthy, affordable, and accessible to everyone.

You can check out my conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol at this link.

Vivero Pol has done pioneering work in bringing the very idea of food as a commons to the fore, especially among academics, but also among many action-oriented activists engaged with agriculture, hunger, and bioregional ecological issues. His basic goal is to make the many varieties of food commons visible as a practical, functioning alternative to Big Ag. A landmark effort in this regard is The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, a major anthology published in 2020 with 39 chapters and 29 authors addressing this theme. The volume was co-edited by Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, and Ugo Mattei.

At a recent webinar co-organized by Vivero Pol, Professor Sam Bliss of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont pointed out that, while "nonmarket practices" for provisioning food are widely ignored, they are pervasive. According to surveys, gardening, fishing, foraging, hunting, bartering, sharing, gifting, scavenging from dumpsters are widely practiced in his state.

Bliss notes that nonmarket sources of food provide a way to escape the extractivist commodity system. Through food commons, people can not only reduce their dependence on (often-expensive) markets, they can respect the limits of nature -- because harvests from foraging or hunting, for example, are limited to household use; market sale is prohibited.

By contrast, the concentrated system of Big Agriculture that dominates most nations is based on massive public subsidies to the largest corporations. The United States, most European nations, Russia, China, and India, among others, all treat food as a commodity on the theory that "free markets" are the most efficient and productive ways to grow and distribute food.

This narrative, however, is a social mythology. Agriculture in the countries named above is based on lavish subsidies that don't take into account the gifting of public wealth to the already-wealthy, the ecological harm to soil, habitat, and water, and the hunger that results for those with little money.

Big Ag companies "are not playing on a level playing field," notes Vivero Pol. "They're not competing on a free market. The food market is the second most heavily subsidized market after fossil fuels. Basically, these companies are earning profits because they are heavily subsidized through public funds."  He notes that while politicians "are always talking the market, the market, the market, under the table agricultural markets must be subsidized. Otherwise, they would be a complete disaster."

Vivero Pol suggests that public funds could be more fruitfully spent to help smallholder farmers, agricultural commons, food banks, school lunch programs, and bioregional projects.

"Once we change the narrative about food," said Vivero Pol, "state policies and legal frameworks will align to enact food in a different way." There will still be markets to distribute food, of course, but there will also be new forms of market regulation and new spaces of public intervention and commoning to assure that food is healthy, affordable, and accessible to everyone.

You can check out my conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol at this link.

In a series of books, Illich argued that formal education, healthcare, transportation, law, and other systems have come to dispossess us, creating more harm than benefit. In his book Medical Nemesis, Illich showed how the medical profession overmedicates people and pathologizes normal life. Deschooling Society showed how formal education is more focused on credentialing people for the capitalist order than in stimulating genuine curiosity and learning. Tools for Conviviality called for a culture that empowers humans with creative, open-ended tools for sociability.

A common thread in Illich’s thinking was Who gets to define our sense of reality?  He cast his lot with the “vernacular domains” in which we self-organize ourselves – the informal spaces where we perform the “shadow work” of commoning and caring – activities the mainstream economy ignores. Illich also ventured into all sorts of unusual historical excavations, such as a history of the senses in reporting medical problems, silence as a commons, and the role of hair (as a vector for lice) in the history of urban life. (See some of my previous blog posts on Illich here and here, and a 2013 talk that I gave on Illich's contemporary influence.)

By approaching the world from the bottom up, via actual social practices and spiritual needs, Illich’s books and talks were prophetic in laying the intellectual foundations for the world of commoning that has emerged over the past twenty years. By exploring social and spiritual life that exists outside of the market/state imperium — a space beyond the secular, materialistic, economic realm of modern consciousness — Illich affirmed and articulated a rich space for imagining modern-day commons. Cayley has called Illich “a Marx for the age after development.”

Illich was a thinker, like E.F. Schumacher, who insisted “the scale issue is not some frill,” said Cayley. “It is absolutely central, an absolutely crucial issue. When things get too big, they become unmanageable, absolutely and without qualification. There are tools that by definition, by their very nature, cannot be controlled.  They will control us, inevitably.”  

Illich therefore proposed the concept of “convivial tools” that honor human agency and creativity. Convivial tools are not closed and proprietary, in the style of Microsoft Windows, but open-ended, flexible instruments that serve the needs and interests of ordinary individuals and communities.

Illich was among the early critics of standard economics and modern capitalist notions of “development.” He challenged the premise of “scarcity” built into this framework of thought and highlighted the dangers of unlimited growth. Standard economics, he noted, has no sense of “enoughness”; this is not only the source of our ecological problems, but our emotional and spiritual turmoil. This can be traced to capitalist markets, as supported by the state, that steer us toward dependencies on commodities and market transactions, marginalizing our basic human needs and disrupting our relationships with each other.  

In this sense, he argued, modern life represents a 500-year war against subsistence – the idea that we should produce for exchange value and money, rather than for use value and needs. “The economy is not going to save most of the people who are alive in the world today,” wrote Illich. “But it can make their pursuit of livelihood obscure and undignified.” The root error of “development,” said Illich is “an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control of nature.”

While David Cayley’s book is long — more than 450 pages — it vividly synthesizes Illich’s life and work in a text that combines personal memoir, biography, intellectual history, and cultural commentary. The book helps contemporary readers appreciate Illich as a powerful original thinker, a creative and dogged scholar, and a magnetic personality. Though classically educated, Illich wrote and spoke for a popular audience. He was a teacher as well as a theologian of sorts who tried to teach people through his actions and provocations. He was so compelling because he brought his fullest, most vulnerable self to the challenge. Cayley once compared him to an alert bird cocking his head,  trying to take everything in.  

You can listen to my interview with David Cayley here. 

In a series of books, Illich argued that formal education, healthcare, transportation, law, and other systems have come to dispossess us, creating more harm than benefit. In his book Medical Nemesis, Illich showed how the medical profession overmedicates people and pathologizes normal life. Deschooling Society showed how formal education is more focused on credentialing people for the capitalist order than in stimulating genuine curiosity and learning. Tools for Conviviality called for a culture that empowers humans with creative, open-ended tools for sociability.

A common thread in Illich’s thinking was Who gets to define our sense of reality?  He cast his lot with the “vernacular domains” in which we self-organize ourselves – the informal spaces where we perform the “shadow work” of commoning and caring – activities the mainstream economy ignores. Illich also ventured into all sorts of unusual historical excavations, such as a history of the senses in reporting medical problems, silence as a commons, and the role of hair (as a vector for lice) in the history of urban life. (See some of my previous blog posts on Illich here and here, and a 2013 talk that I gave on Illich's contemporary influence.)

By approaching the world from the bottom up, via actual social practices and spiritual needs, Illich’s books and talks were prophetic in laying the intellectual foundations for the world of commoning that has emerged over the past twenty years. By exploring social and spiritual life that exists outside of the market/state imperium — a space beyond the secular, materialistic, economic realm of modern consciousness — Illich affirmed and articulated a rich space for imagining modern-day commons. Cayley has called Illich “a Marx for the age after development.”

Illich was a thinker, like E.F. Schumacher, who insisted “the scale issue is not some frill,” said Cayley. “It is absolutely central, an absolutely crucial issue. When things get too big, they become unmanageable, absolutely and without qualification. There are tools that by definition, by their very nature, cannot be controlled.  They will control us, inevitably.”  

Illich therefore proposed the concept of “convivial tools” that honor human agency and creativity. Convivial tools are not closed and proprietary, in the style of Microsoft Windows, but open-ended, flexible instruments that serve the needs and interests of ordinary individuals and communities.

Illich was among the early critics of standard economics and modern capitalist notions of “development.” He challenged the premise of “scarcity” built into this framework of thought and highlighted the dangers of unlimited growth. Standard economics, he noted, has no sense of “enoughness”; this is not only the source of our ecological problems, but our emotional and spiritual turmoil. This can be traced to capitalist markets, as supported by the state, that steer us toward dependencies on commodities and market transactions, marginalizing our basic human needs and disrupting our relationships with each other.  

In this sense, he argued, modern life represents a 500-year war against subsistence – the idea that we should produce for exchange value and money, rather than for use value and needs. “The economy is not going to save most of the people who are alive in the world today,” wrote Illich. “But it can make their pursuit of livelihood obscure and undignified.” The root error of “development,” said Illich is “an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control of nature.”

While David Cayley’s book is long — more than 450 pages — it vividly synthesizes Illich’s life and work in a text that combines personal memoir, biography, intellectual history, and cultural commentary. The book helps contemporary readers appreciate Illich as a powerful original thinker, a creative and dogged scholar, and a magnetic personality. Though classically educated, Illich wrote and spoke for a popular audience. He was a teacher as well as a theologian of sorts who tried to teach people through his actions and provocations. He was so compelling because he brought his fullest, most vulnerable self to the challenge. Cayley once compared him to an alert bird cocking his head,  trying to take everything in.  

You can listen to my interview with David Cayley here. 

We didn't know that quotation at the time, but that was essentially how we worked. It was liberating. It opened open up new fields of action. I frankly wonder how my life might have evolved had I not encountered Silke as my working partner and foil, my co-investigator and reality-check. We somehow co-created each other in significant ways, or at least gave each other courage.

Raised on a farm in the German Democratic Republic (the former East Germany) and educated in the social sciences and Romance languages in Leipzig, Silke’s perspectives were quite a distance from my own upbringing as a middle-class, suburban American in the 1960s. She had lived through the the GDR, the reunification of Germany, and the cruel ascent of neoliberal capitalism in Europe.

However, I had acquired a first-rate political education by working with consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Hollywood producer/activist Norman Lear, and immersing myself in Washington politics and public-interest activism. Culturally, intellectually, and politically, we came from very different worlds, but we shared an elemental passion for the commons and a preternatural sense of its potential. Our differences paradoxically contributed to what I experienced as explosive creativity. 

To my absolute shock, our long, strange journey came to a disturbing end last week when I received heartbreaking news from Jacques, Silke’s partner. While attending a conference in Liechtenstein, Silke had left for a day hike in the Alps on the morning of November 10, and never returned. A search team later stated that she had had a fatal accident in “impassible terrain.”

The news has left me reeling. Speechless and numb. How could this dear friend of mine – a brilliant intellect, savvy activist, and lively, generous woman with relentless energy – no longer be a Zoom call away? How could I possibly make sense of the unfolding Commonsverse without her astute judgment and experience?  Silke’s abrupt departure has made only too clear what a towering presence she was in the world of contemporary commoning – and indeed, in the quest to envision a credible post-capitalist world.

In tribute to my dear colleague, I wish to offer some reflections on her unique personality and mix of talents. Her friendship, counsel and support over the course of fifteen years profoundly shaped how I’ve grown. Let me extend my heartfelt condolences to Clara, Paul, Jacques, Gina, Nick, Kai and family for their, and our, deep loss.

*                      *                      *

The most improbable thing may be that Silke and I lived 4,000 miles apart. She lived in Jena, Germany (and more recently in the village of Neudenau), and I lived (and still live) in Amherst, Massachusetts, a rural college town. For years, neither of us had a normal job or secure institutional support. (Since 2017, I’ve been with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics; Silke remained unaffiliated – “self-employed” – after leaving the Boell Foundation.)

Following our 2008 adventure in Graz, we knew that we had to investigate and advance the commons. Working with Massimo De Angelis and Stefan Meretz, we decided to try to convene our dream team of commons scholars and activists for a three-day retreat. We wanted to learn from Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Michel Bauwens, Wolfgang Sachs, and many others.

But how to make this happen? Once we committed, providence began to smile and nudge things in our direction. We somehow found sustainable forester and German count Hermann Hatzfeldt, who graciously offered to let us use his country residence, Crottorf Castle, built in 1550, to host our motley conclave of international commoners. I loved the conceit: commoners convening in the castle's great hall to deliberate about a different kind of future.

And so began our experiment in improvisational, low-overhead activism and culture-change. We relied on the "invisible means of support" that materializes when, as Joseph Campbell put it, you follow your bliss. At the same time, as independent actors, we were determined to steer clear of untoward ideological and institutional entanglements.

Along the way, Michael Bauwens – the founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and a Belgian activist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand – joined Silke and me in forming the Commons Strategies Group (CSG). (Michel left CSG in 2018.) CSG was more of a name and brave aspirational statement than a real organization because, in truth, we were just a loose association of three individuals. We had no secure funding or legal standing. 

But each of us, coming from different perspectives, keenly appreciated the potential of the commons paradigm and discourse. We began to co-educate each other, trading insights and intuitions and writings. We tracked the progress of various commons projects around the world. We would meet up in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, or wherever our speaking schedules overlapped so that we could steal time to exchange news and make sense of unfolding developments.

I sketch our unusual collaboration because it highlights Silke’s signal strength: her probing, synthesizing mind, her talent in making friends, her zeal for practical action. She got countless invitations to speak and advise, and spent many months on the road at conferences, workshops, and public talks. Through a vast personal network of commoner-friends and acquaintances, Silke learned firsthand about breaking developments in the Commonsverse before most anyone else, enriching her, and our, big-picture understanding of this seemingly marginal, offbeat world.

She was usually familiar with the hotspots of possibility out there – among Francophone commoners in Paris, Montreal, and Africa; among Syriza-affiliated commoners in Greece; and among activists in Latin American countries. She knew key commoners in Europe and spent time with activists and academics in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the World Social Forum. 

A lot of our later outreach was made possible through two seminal international conferences on the commons that we organized, in 2010 and 2013, both in cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin and especially with the support of Heike Loeschmann, Head of the International Politics Department, and President Barbara Unmüßig.

These two conferences brought together several hundred self-identified and would-be commoners around the world, unleashing enormous energies. People were empowered to have their intuitions about the commons validated. New relationships proliferated. The commons as a discourse began to grow and circulate.

In the meantime, separately, CSG hosted more than a dozen small “Deep Dives” gatherings between 2012 and 2021. These events were designed to probe timely, vexing strategic questions for which we had no ready answers. We invited key experts who could address, for example, how commoning might work constructively with state power (2016); how digital platforms might be used to spur cooperativism (2014); how various social movements might coordinate and converge (2014); and how ontological beliefs act as a hidden driver of contemporary politics (2019).

With anthropologist David Graeber, we convened a 2016 Deep Dive to explore what alternative theories of value might challenge standard economic theory, which equates price with value. Just a few months ago, in September 2021, we convened a virtual gathering of European commoner-politicians and political players to explore how mainstream policy can support commoning.

By far, Silke’s and my most challenging collaborations were our three books – the anthologies The Wealth of the Commons (2012) and Patterns of Commoning (2015), and our ambitious reconceptualization of the commons as a social system, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (2019). The Boell Foundation and Heike Loeschmann provided critical support for all three books.

The two anthologies were intended to showcase the rich diversity of contemporary commons. We wanted to show that commons are not a relic of medieval life or a backward form that strangely persists in the Global South; commons are an utterly contemporary, robust set of alternatives to the market/state system. Here again, Silke’s keen judgment, excellent education, and global web of personal friendships helped us pull the threads together.

By 2016, Silke and I realized that we had witnessed far more commoning than we could fully explain to ourselves or the public. So, with some trepidation, we set about trying to write a third book as co-authors, building on the insights of the two co-edited anthologies. We wanted to develop a grand theoretical synthesis to more accurately describe the empirical diversity of commons we had witnessed. We wanted to show that commons are not simply unowned resources, as standard economics regards them, but a dynamic, generative social form. (No 'tragedy of the commons' at all!)

Drawing inspiration from Christopher Alexander and his pattern language methodology, we sought to explain commons as a timeless social form that cannot be understood through the ontology of modern market individualism and economics. They can only be apprehended through an “OntoShift” that sees the dense relationality of commoning and dispenses with misleading binaries like individual/collective, rational/irrational, and selfish/altruistic.

This was a major breakthrough in our thinking about commons. Here again, Silke was a relentless force pushing us into unknown territory. The book that resulted, Free, Fair and Alive, was a crazy, exhilarating, and exhausting three-year sprint.

We once spent a week huddled in a friend’s house in the Berlin suburbs, talking, debating, and writing for fifteen hours each day. What are the recurrent “patterns of commoning”? What should they be called? How does this square with what we’ve seen and what Elinor Ostrom wrote? Our deliberations would yield what we eventually called the “Triad of Commoning” framework.

On another occasion, I squeezed in a few extra days following a conference in Arnhem, Netherlands, so that we could think through our fledgling idea of “relationalized property,” which we see as a hallmark of many commons. We came to realize that the realities of commoning could not be expressed through the epistemology of property rights or by the premises of market “rationality” and individualism. We needed to develop a new vocabulary that could express a different logic and ethos than economistic terms allow.

Silke’s sheer grit and determination – and faith in creative improvisation – helped us power through many obstacles, intellectually and practically. When we couldn’t raise enough money to hold a deep dive at a retreat center, she decided to host the gathering at her home. We slept in spare rooms, cooked together, and washed the dishes together.

Once, to allow Michel, me and her to reconnect as Commons Strategies Group after a long time without seeing each other, she prevailed on her friends at Oya magazine to host us in their remote German village on the North Sea. On another occasion, she cajoled a friend in Florence, Italy, to help us find a place in the Tuscan countryside where we could meet and catch up after our criss-crossing travels. As always, this led to serendipitous encounters with commoners – in this case, the Nidiaci Garden in central Florence.

And so our adventures kept unfurling. Unexpected developments and new friends somehow always materialized to push our work along.

Silke and I also spent time at each other’s homes to craft our books. At one such visit to her place, a film crew filmed us deep in discussion, which was later turned into a short promotional video for our book. It gives a nice sense of how Silke and I “thought together.”

Or check out this short video from 2010, produced by Remix the Commons, filmed right after the Berlin commons conference, in which Silke explains her feelings at that moment:  

“You get the idea that the commons are touching the hearts of people. Once that happens, it will develop like a virus. Suddenly people discover that they have a lot in common. Once someone in the water movement can sit down and talk with somebody from the free hardware movement – and realize that the commons is about something really intimate that we all share – the idea is planted like a seed and people’s ability to build relationships is only a matter of time. You start to talk about how to take our life into our own hands.”

While we often collaborated, we each steered by our own stars and pursued our own projects. I would report from my circuits of travel and reading, struggling to keep track of her crazy travel schedule and offbeat meetings. I would receive emails from her saying that she had just met with socially minded bankers in Switzerland, or was conferring with a graduate school interested in developing a commons curriculum, or had just met the most interesting Ph.D student, or was working with a team of commoner-translators (Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese) to translate Free, Fair and Alive.

That’s another thing -- her fluency in multiple languages gave her a passport to communicate with a very broad, eclectic group of commoners worldwide.

With so much passion, talent, idealism, and energy, it is no wonder that Silke was chronically over-committed and often exhausted. She was so generous with her time and so eager to help a promising project. She would fret about her jam-packed schedule, but she never really took steps to deal with it. She couldn’t help herself. She often worked late into the night, calling me when it was midnight her time in Germany (and 6 pm on the east coast of the US). 

I realize that hiking the Alps is a different proposition than exploring modern commons, but let it be said that Silke was rarely fazed by the problem of navigating “impassible terrain.” She always plowed ahead. She would route around a problem, or jump over it, or burrow under it, or work to transform it. The depth of her commitment was amazing. Her audacious, lively mind was utterly thrilling. Her open-hearted friendship was a gift. I can hardly believe she is gone, and I will miss her terribly.

We didn't know that quotation at the time, but that was essentially how we worked. It was liberating. It opened open up new fields of action. I frankly wonder how my life might have evolved had I not encountered Silke as my working partner and foil, my co-investigator and reality-check. We somehow co-created each other in significant ways, or at least gave each other courage.

Raised on a farm in the German Democratic Republic (the former East Germany) and educated in the social sciences and Romance languages in Leipzig, Silke’s perspectives were quite a distance from my own upbringing as a middle-class, suburban American in the 1960s. She had lived through the the GDR, the reunification of Germany, and the cruel ascent of neoliberal capitalism in Europe.

However, I had acquired a first-rate political education by working with consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Hollywood producer/activist Norman Lear, and immersing myself in Washington politics and public-interest activism. Culturally, intellectually, and politically, we came from very different worlds, but we shared an elemental passion for the commons and a preternatural sense of its potential. Our differences paradoxically contributed to what I experienced as explosive creativity. 

To my absolute shock, our long, strange journey came to a disturbing end last week when I received heartbreaking news from Jacques, Silke’s partner. While attending a conference in Liechtenstein, Silke had left for a day hike in the Alps on the morning of November 10, and never returned. A search team later stated that she had had a fatal accident in “impassible terrain.”

The news has left me reeling. Speechless and numb. How could this dear friend of mine – a brilliant intellect, savvy activist, and lively, generous woman with relentless energy – no longer be a Zoom call away? How could I possibly make sense of the unfolding Commonsverse without her astute judgment and experience?  Silke’s abrupt departure has made only too clear what a towering presence she was in the world of contemporary commoning – and indeed, in the quest to envision a credible post-capitalist world.

In tribute to my dear colleague, I wish to offer some reflections on her unique personality and mix of talents. Her friendship, counsel and support over the course of fifteen years profoundly shaped how I’ve grown. Let me extend my heartfelt condolences to Clara, Paul, Jacques, Gina, Nick, Kai and family for their, and our, deep loss.

*                      *                      *

The most improbable thing may be that Silke and I lived 4,000 miles apart. She lived in Jena, Germany (and more recently in the village of Neudenau), and I lived (and still live) in Amherst, Massachusetts, a rural college town. For years, neither of us had a normal job or secure institutional support. (Since 2017, I’ve been with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics; Silke remained unaffiliated – “self-employed” – after leaving the Boell Foundation.)

Following our 2008 adventure in Graz, we knew that we had to investigate and advance the commons. Working with Massimo De Angelis and Stefan Meretz, we decided to try to convene our dream team of commons scholars and activists for a three-day retreat. We wanted to learn from Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Michel Bauwens, Wolfgang Sachs, and many others.

But how to make this happen? Once we committed, providence began to smile and nudge things in our direction. We somehow found sustainable forester and German count Hermann Hatzfeldt, who graciously offered to let us use his country residence, Crottorf Castle, built in 1550, to host our motley conclave of international commoners. I loved the conceit: commoners convening in the castle's great hall to deliberate about a different kind of future.

And so began our experiment in improvisational, low-overhead activism and culture-change. We relied on the "invisible means of support" that materializes when, as Joseph Campbell put it, you follow your bliss. At the same time, as independent actors, we were determined to steer clear of untoward ideological and institutional entanglements.

Along the way, Michael Bauwens – the founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and a Belgian activist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand – joined Silke and me in forming the Commons Strategies Group (CSG). (Michel left CSG in 2018.) CSG was more of a name and brave aspirational statement than a real organization because, in truth, we were just a loose association of three individuals. We had no secure funding or legal standing. 

But each of us, coming from different perspectives, keenly appreciated the potential of the commons paradigm and discourse. We began to co-educate each other, trading insights and intuitions and writings. We tracked the progress of various commons projects around the world. We would meet up in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, or wherever our speaking schedules overlapped so that we could steal time to exchange news and make sense of unfolding developments.

I sketch our unusual collaboration because it highlights Silke’s signal strength: her probing, synthesizing mind, her talent in making friends, her zeal for practical action. She got countless invitations to speak and advise, and spent many months on the road at conferences, workshops, and public talks. Through a vast personal network of commoner-friends and acquaintances, Silke learned firsthand about breaking developments in the Commonsverse before most anyone else, enriching her, and our, big-picture understanding of this seemingly marginal, offbeat world.

She was usually familiar with the hotspots of possibility out there – among Francophone commoners in Paris, Montreal, and Africa; among Syriza-affiliated commoners in Greece; and among activists in Latin American countries. She knew key commoners in Europe and spent time with activists and academics in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the World Social Forum. 

A lot of our later outreach was made possible through two seminal international conferences on the commons that we organized, in 2010 and 2013, both in cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin and especially with the support of Heike Loeschmann, Head of the International Politics Department, and President Barbara Unmüßig.

These two conferences brought together several hundred self-identified and would-be commoners around the world, unleashing enormous energies. People were empowered to have their intuitions about the commons validated. New relationships proliferated. The commons as a discourse began to grow and circulate.

In the meantime, separately, CSG hosted more than a dozen small “Deep Dives” gatherings between 2012 and 2021. These events were designed to probe timely, vexing strategic questions for which we had no ready answers. We invited key experts who could address, for example, how commoning might work constructively with state power (2016); how digital platforms might be used to spur cooperativism (2014); how various social movements might coordinate and converge (2014); and how ontological beliefs act as a hidden driver of contemporary politics (2019).

With anthropologist David Graeber, we convened a 2016 Deep Dive to explore what alternative theories of value might challenge standard economic theory, which equates price with value. Just a few months ago, in September 2021, we convened a virtual gathering of European commoner-politicians and political players to explore how mainstream policy can support commoning.

By far, Silke’s and my most challenging collaborations were our three books – the anthologies The Wealth of the Commons (2012) and Patterns of Commoning (2015), and our ambitious reconceptualization of the commons as a social system, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (2019). The Boell Foundation and Heike Loeschmann provided critical support for all three books.

The two anthologies were intended to showcase the rich diversity of contemporary commons. We wanted to show that commons are not a relic of medieval life or a backward form that strangely persists in the Global South; commons are an utterly contemporary, robust set of alternatives to the market/state system. Here again, Silke’s keen judgment, excellent education, and global web of personal friendships helped us pull the threads together.

By 2016, Silke and I realized that we had witnessed far more commoning than we could fully explain to ourselves or the public. So, with some trepidation, we set about trying to write a third book as co-authors, building on the insights of the two co-edited anthologies. We wanted to develop a grand theoretical synthesis to more accurately describe the empirical diversity of commons we had witnessed. We wanted to show that commons are not simply unowned resources, as standard economics regards them, but a dynamic, generative social form. (No 'tragedy of the commons' at all!)

Drawing inspiration from Christopher Alexander and his pattern language methodology, we sought to explain commons as a timeless social form that cannot be understood through the ontology of modern market individualism and economics. They can only be apprehended through an “OntoShift” that sees the dense relationality of commoning and dispenses with misleading binaries like individual/collective, rational/irrational, and selfish/altruistic.

This was a major breakthrough in our thinking about commons. Here again, Silke was a relentless force pushing us into unknown territory. The book that resulted, Free, Fair and Alive, was a crazy, exhilarating, and exhausting three-year sprint.

We once spent a week huddled in a friend’s house in the Berlin suburbs, talking, debating, and writing for fifteen hours each day. What are the recurrent “patterns of commoning”? What should they be called? How does this square with what we’ve seen and what Elinor Ostrom wrote? Our deliberations would yield what we eventually called the “Triad of Commoning” framework.

On another occasion, I squeezed in a few extra days following a conference in Arnhem, Netherlands, so that we could think through our fledgling idea of “relationalized property,” which we see as a hallmark of many commons. We came to realize that the realities of commoning could not be expressed through the epistemology of property rights or by the premises of market “rationality” and individualism. We needed to develop a new vocabulary that could express a different logic and ethos than economistic terms allow.

Silke’s sheer grit and determination – and faith in creative improvisation – helped us power through many obstacles, intellectually and practically. When we couldn’t raise enough money to hold a deep dive at a retreat center, she decided to host the gathering at her home. We slept in spare rooms, cooked together, and washed the dishes together.

Once, to allow Michel, me and her to reconnect as Commons Strategies Group after a long time without seeing each other, she prevailed on her friends at Oya magazine to host us in their remote German village on the North Sea. On another occasion, she cajoled a friend in Florence, Italy, to help us find a place in the Tuscan countryside where we could meet and catch up after our criss-crossing travels. As always, this led to serendipitous encounters with commoners – in this case, the Nidiaci Garden in central Florence.

And so our adventures kept unfurling. Unexpected developments and new friends somehow always materialized to push our work along.

Silke and I also spent time at each other’s homes to craft our books. At one such visit to her place, a film crew filmed us deep in discussion, which was later turned into a short promotional video for our book. It gives a nice sense of how Silke and I “thought together.”

Or check out this short video from 2010, produced by Remix the Commons, filmed right after the Berlin commons conference, in which Silke explains her feelings at that moment:  

“You get the idea that the commons are touching the hearts of people. Once that happens, it will develop like a virus. Suddenly people discover that they have a lot in common. Once someone in the water movement can sit down and talk with somebody from the free hardware movement – and realize that the commons is about something really intimate that we all share – the idea is planted like a seed and people’s ability to build relationships is only a matter of time. You start to talk about how to take our life into our own hands.”

While we often collaborated, we each steered by our own stars and pursued our own projects. I would report from my circuits of travel and reading, struggling to keep track of her crazy travel schedule and offbeat meetings. I would receive emails from her saying that she had just met with socially minded bankers in Switzerland, or was conferring with a graduate school interested in developing a commons curriculum, or had just met the most interesting Ph.D student, or was working with a team of commoner-translators (Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese) to translate Free, Fair and Alive.

That’s another thing -- her fluency in multiple languages gave her a passport to communicate with a very broad, eclectic group of commoners worldwide.

With so much passion, talent, idealism, and energy, it is no wonder that Silke was chronically over-committed and often exhausted. She was so generous with her time and so eager to help a promising project. She would fret about her jam-packed schedule, but she never really took steps to deal with it. She couldn’t help herself. She often worked late into the night, calling me when it was midnight her time in Germany (and 6 pm on the east coast of the US). 

I realize that hiking the Alps is a different proposition than exploring modern commons, but let it be said that Silke was rarely fazed by the problem of navigating “impassible terrain.” She always plowed ahead. She would route around a problem, or jump over it, or burrow under it, or work to transform it. The depth of her commitment was amazing. Her audacious, lively mind was utterly thrilling. Her open-hearted friendship was a gift. I can hardly believe she is gone, and I will miss her terribly.

Some entries are several pages; others are just a paragraph or two. Readers can pore through the entries in any sequence they find interesting, but in whatever order they are read, taken together they offer a brilliant perspective on the problems of contemporary capitalism, the vulnerabilities facing human civilization, and how a post-capitalist world will likely evolve. Especially intriguing are Fleming’s speculations into how cooperative culture will surge as modern capitalist structures and markets fall apart.

The publication of Lean Logic spurred a wide public interest in Fleming’s ideas, perhaps because he addresses topics that are very much on people’s minds, but not often approached with frank realism and subtlety.

The book’s success was helped along by a shorter companion volume that Chamberlin prepared, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. This book is a more conventionally structured book of essays that distills the best of Lean Logic but edits the text into a “linear read,” meant to be read straight through, from front-to-back.

The entry on “Death” gives a sense of how Fleming’s method and depth.

“Death. The means by which an ‘ecosystem keeps itself alive, selects its fittest, controls its scale, gives peace to the tormented, enables young life, and accumulates a grammar of inherited meaning as generations change places….The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win.”

An entry on “Carnival” explains how “the making and sustaining of community requires deep presence and empowerment, with three key properties” – a “radical break” from the everyday; the elevation of the “animal spirit at the heart of the tamed, domesticated citizen”; and a “sacrifice-and-succession” process to affirm the ability of a community to survive and even be immortal, despite the death of community members.

In other words, Lean Logic offers a lot to reflect on. If you'd like to dip into David Fleming's world and check out his sensibilities, visit the Lean Logic website at https://leanlogic.online.online.

Over the past decade, Shaun Chamberlin, while promoting Fleming’s writings, has pursued his own set of system-change initiatives. He leads a course, “Surviving the Future,” through Sterling College in Vermont. And with a friend, Mark Boyle, he recently launched “The Happy Pig,” a “free pub, bunkhouse and community space” where people can connect and enjoy each other’s company.  Chamberlin shares his research and writing at his website Dark Optimism.

My podcast interview with Shaun can be found here. 

Some entries are several pages; others are just a paragraph or two. Readers can pore through the entries in any sequence they find interesting, but in whatever order they are read, taken together they offer a brilliant perspective on the problems of contemporary capitalism, the vulnerabilities facing human civilization, and how a post-capitalist world will likely evolve. Especially intriguing are Fleming’s speculations into how cooperative culture will surge as modern capitalist structures and markets fall apart.

The publication of Lean Logic spurred a wide public interest in Fleming’s ideas, perhaps because he addresses topics that are very much on people’s minds, but not often approached with frank realism and subtlety.

The book’s success was helped along by a shorter companion volume that Chamberlin prepared, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. This book is a more conventionally structured book of essays that distills the best of Lean Logic but edits the text into a “linear read,” meant to be read straight through, from front-to-back.

The entry on “Death” gives a sense of how Fleming’s method and depth.

“Death. The means by which an ‘ecosystem keeps itself alive, selects its fittest, controls its scale, gives peace to the tormented, enables young life, and accumulates a grammar of inherited meaning as generations change places….The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win.”

An entry on “Carnival” explains how “the making and sustaining of community requires deep presence and empowerment, with three key properties” – a “radical break” from the everyday; the elevation of the “animal spirit at the heart of the tamed, domesticated citizen”; and a “sacrifice-and-succession” process to affirm the ability of a community to survive and even be immortal, despite the death of community members.

In other words, Lean Logic offers a lot to reflect on. If you'd like to dip into David Fleming's world and check out his sensibilities, visit the Lean Logic website at https://leanlogic.online.online.

Over the past decade, Shaun Chamberlin, while promoting Fleming’s writings, has pursued his own set of system-change initiatives. He leads a course, “Surviving the Future,” through Sterling College in Vermont. And with a friend, Mark Boyle, he recently launched “The Happy Pig,” a “free pub, bunkhouse and community space” where people can connect and enjoy each other’s company.  Chamberlin shares his research and writing at his website Dark Optimism.

My podcast interview with Shaun can be found here. 

Allow me to also make a blunt philosophical judgment: The market/state’s foundational commitments to private property, individualism, capital accumulation, and technology represent a kind of political and cultural lock-down. Certain departures from these ideas are simply taboo. Add to this the unexamined modern belief that humanity stands apart from natural systems, and that individualism trumps collective action, and it becomes clear that our current system offers very little space to imagine creative paths forward.

Which may help explain why young people are so despairing about the future. It also explains why so many ordinary people are turning to commons in these difficult times. Commoning is a means of survival. Informal cooperation, and mutual aid can meet needs that the market and state can’t or aren’t providing during the pandemic.

Yet strangely, commoning is often not seen as a “real system.” It is patronized as nice and well-meaning, but waved aside as too informal, improvised, and disorganized to be taken seriously as an institutional form. After all, governance and provisioning in commons do not rely on the formal rules or hierarchical structures. Power is decentralized and leadership diffused.

The polite dismissal of commons is a serious misjudgment, I believe, because the market/state system – if it is to navigate the civilizational turbulence ahead -- will need to forge some explicit, practical understandings with commoners. Their goodwill, creativity, and power to generate social legitimacy for state action will be indispensable. The market/state system itself already relies on social cooperation, trust, and commoning more than it realizes. Why not leverage this reality in more explicit ways?

In any case, this much is true: If commoning is to develop, mature, and succeed as a flourishing form of governance, it will have to work out a new modus vivendi with the market/state system.  So we stand at the threshold of a fascinating new conversation between commoners and the market/state system.

As my contribution to this dialogue, I’d like to explore three primary points:

First -- that commons are not resources, as conventional economics and politics seem to think. They are self-organized social systems. Commons are highly generative precisely because they are living social organisms entangled within the larger web of life.

My second point is that the dynamics of commoning remain poorly understood because there are so many erroneous ideas ascribed to it. So today I’d like to try to clarify some realities about commoning as a durable, proven social system.

And finally, my third point: The fate of the commons as a vehicle for social emancipation will depend upon negotiating and creating new configurations of state power.  We will need innovations in law, bureaucracy, and politics to safeguard and support commoning – and state power will need to align more closely with commoners if it hopes to neutralize the fierce, nihilistic pathologies of contemporary capitalism and the reactionary nationalism associated with nation-states. We absolutely need to understand commons governance on its own terms – but we must situate this discussion in a larger, more complicated context.

#1. Commons as a Social System, Not a Resource

Let’s first deal with Point #1, the persistent habit of treating the commons as unowned resources open to all. Economists and politicians habitually do this when they refer to land, the oceans, outer space, and the Internet as commons. But these resources are not commons. They are potentially shareable resources that currently lack a functional governance regime. There is no community stewardship on behalf of everyone. Right now, such resources are mostly free for the taking.

In his famous tragedy of the commons essay, Garrett Hardin called this scenario the “tragedy of the commons” because finite resources are vulnerable to overuse and ruination. But in reality, Hardin was not describing a commons. In his parable of an imaginary pasture, there is no community of shared purpose, no body of rules, and no penalties for free-riders. It’s more accurate to call this scenario a tragedy of the market because the free market invites individuals to plunder the common wealth for their private gain with impunity. 

Let me add, this is the near-inevitable outcome when you talk about commons as resources. The framing of “commons as resources” indirectly accepts the premises of standard economics, which holds that the market and state are the only serious, responsible regimes of governance. Western property law is invoked, the state defers to capitalist markets, and we know how this story ends. Shared wealth can only be protected successful through private property rights or state regulation, according to Hardin and his legion of followers, and state regulation is usually seen as ineffectual and intrusive.

But in fact, institutions of social cooperation offer another path, as we can see throughout world history; in Elinor Ostrom’s scholarship; and in countless examples in contemporary life.

Evolutionary scientists confirm that cooperation is a key way that organisms improve their evolutionary fitness. Natural selection doesn’t work just at individual levels. Group selection or “multi-level selection” are powerful forces in evolution, as E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, Martin Nowak, and others argue persuasively. 

This analysis helps us see that relationality is a deep, animating force of commons and of life itself. We are not just atomistic individuals bouncing around in a vacuum called “society,” whose very existence Margaret Thatcher denied in her famous remark that “there is no such thing as society.” Symbiotic cooperation among organisms occurs even at the cellular level, often in subtle, nonobvious ways.

Complexity sciences, too, show that life arises through entangled relationships of interdependence. Biologist Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock of ‘Gaia hypothesis’ fame, showed that life arises through a process or ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘dependent origination.’ Read Merlin Sheldrake’s recent book Entangled Life for some amazing scientific accounts of how mushrooms and lichen and insects and trees and other plant life are all intimately interconnected as creative agents!

The point that I wish to stress is nicely stated by cultural historian Thomas Berry: “The universe is the communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” This applies to the commons as well.

Scientific rationalism and economic thinking have trouble understanding this fact, however. They are too intent on objectifying life and seeing it in machine-like terms. In the words of ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, science and economics are “unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.” Weber, a biologist, shows how life itself functions as a vast, complex commons. However, modern, Western categories of thought – which separate humanity from nature, and our minds from our bodies – can’t make sense of this reality.

I make this brief detour into evolutionary science and ontology because it’s important to understand why commons are so highly generative. It’s because they are alive. It’s because all living things are relational, symbiotic, and therefore generative. Life consists of networks of entangled interdependencies that produce what we need. 

Ah, but can modern human societies actually honor this fact – or is the market/state machine fated to control, extract, and monetize the gifts of life?

It is true that commons usually do not have the infrastructure or financing that markets and states enjoy. But commons do meet people’s needs in highly flexible, place-based, and humanly satisfying ways in cooperation with nature, and without the pathologies of extractive growth.

Now that the Internet is empowering small, disaggregated players in dramatic new ways, we can see the structural deficiencies of centralized systems. Large-scale industrial systems tend to have enormous fixed overhead costs, rigid designs for efficient mass production, and a commitment to efficiency over resilience. They are not respectful of place, pluralism, or human agency. 

Commons, by contrast, unconstrained by business models and market powers, are free to be flexible, creative, and open to new approaches from the street. In this regard, Dutch artist Thomas Lommée has offered a bit of prophecy that resonates with me: “The next big thing will be a lot of small things.”

Unfortunately, change that occurs in smaller, self-organized, and distributed contexts tend to be dismissed as too trivial, local, and inconsequential to matter. In climate debates, even progressives tend to say, But we don’t have time to develop these small-scale alternatives! Which always prompts me to wonder, So what have the top-down market/state institutions been doing to deal with climate change these past thirty years? Could it be that there are problems with the fundamental structures and belief-systems of the market/state?

While state power often expresses a nominal interest in the idea of commons, it often amounts to lip service, or a way to freshen up and re-brand the battered reputation of liberal democracy. (I might add that this tendency afflicts some progressive advocacy groups as well.)

Because the commoners that I know want real shifts of economic power. They want formal legal rights to steward their shared wealth, and affirmative rights to common. They want the kinds of state support – in legal regimes, finance, infrastructure, and official celebration – that investors and corporations have long take for granted.

Alas, when push comes to shove, when commoners make demands, it becomes clear that the state’s deeper allegiance is to growth and capitalism. The state may be sincere about protecting the commonweal, but its deep commitment to the market economy overrides action to support commoning and the ecological, social, intergenerational, and ethical value that flows from it.

#2. What Does Commoning Look Like?

This leads me to my second point, about commoning as a social system. It’s important to see the commons as a social system – as a set of relational dynamics that is generative – because this lets us move beyond market price as the default theory of value in modern life.

My coauthor Silke Helfrich and I -- when writing our book Free, Fair and Alive -- eventually realized that the very language and thought-categories of economics and politics are themselves a big problem. We came to see that the language of “resource management” and individual “rational choice” cannot express the types of value that we saw firsthand in countless real-life commons. Econo-speak does not convey the emotional richness, subtlety, or situational character of commons governance.

So we set out to describe the commons as a social system and how it creates (non-monetary) value. We took our cue less from economists than from anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural theorists. Instead of accepting the normative lens of modern, Western culture and the ontological commitments of economics – the half-truths about individualism, the fictions about “rationality” – we wanted to show that the commoning is about the deep relationality of everything.

We took pains to escape the language of methodological individualism and its ideas about direct cause-and-effect and objects having fixed, essential attributes. So Newtonian, so mechanical, so divorced from the ontology of life! 

Instead, we have tried to show how commoning is about fluid, always-evolving webs of social relations, like life itself. We want to show how commoning is the enactment of an open-ended process of emergence. We want to show how the subjectivity and the inner lives of people are part of what animates successful commons.

I delve into these metaphysical aspects of commoning because truly understanding commons governance requires this shift in worldview. Or more precisely, as Silke and I put it, understanding commons requires an OntoShift – a shift of ontological perspective. We need to understand the inner dynamics and relational logic of commons – which is to say, commons as a verb – commoning – rather than as a noun.  Commons as a social process, not a resource.

To theorize the commons in this new way, Silke and I identified the many recurrent patterns of commoning and divided them up into three spheres – Social Life, Provisioning, and Peer Governance. While we treat them separately, they are all tightly interconnected. We call the whole framework the Triad of Commoning.

We were inspired by the work of philosopher/architect Christopher Alexander, who devised a methodology for developing “pattern languages” based on actual social behaviors that occur historically and cross-culturally. Using an inductive method based on studying actual examples, Silke and I identified more than two dozen patterns of commoning. Not idealizations or abstractions, but careful generalizations based on successful commons we had witnessed

In liberal political theory, it is customary to separate production (or “the economy”) from governance (the state) – and to treat social life, otherwise known as “civil society,” as a cameo player off to the side. This is where commons governance really strikes off in new directions because commons blend production, governance, and social life into one integrated system.

I don’t have time to go through the many patterns that we identified, but let me give you a quick idea. Here are some of the patterns of commoning for the sphere of Peer Governance.

We had trouble with the connotations of “governance” as something that a group of people vested with power does to and for another group of people, perhaps with their participantion and consent, perhaps not.  But Peer Governance not governance that is done for people or to people. It is governance through people themselves.

Commoners see each other as peers with equal rights and duties to participate in the collective process of making decisions. They set boundaries for the commons and make and enforce rules. They have an aversion to centralized systems of power. They try to contribute in nonhierarchical ways.

One pattern of peer governance is Honor transparency in a sphere of trust.  Transparency cannot just be mandated; it can flourish only if people trust each other. Thus to honor real transparency in a commons, people must come to trust each other deeply, so that difficult, uncomfortable information can be shared.

Another pattern is Create semi-permeable membranes for commons. This allows commoners to interact with the larger world in careful, selective ways. They can absorb the energy and life and creative ideas of the larger world – but still protect their shared wealth and peer governance from appropriation and co-optation by outsiders, especially markets.

I don’t have time to go through all of the patterns here in detail, so I’ll just mention a few other patterns of Peer Governance. They include: Share knowledge generously.  Assure consent in decision making.  Rely on heterarchy. Relationalize property.

The patterns in Peer Governance and the two other spheres – Social Life and Provisioning -- reveal that commoning is a cross-sectoral social phenomena. It may be shaped by specific resources, but it is not defined and driven by them.

What unites commons across resource-categories their similar social dynamics. Commons governance helps to advance:

….a richer collective wisdom and a sense of consensual fairness. 

….distributed power, so that teams can work independently in modular ways.

….dense social relationships of trust that create stability and yet flexibility.

….rapid feedback loops that create better, fresher knowledge.

….overlapping systems and resilience, so that disruptions are not catastrophic and adaptation can occur more easily.

….and stewardship of value that is not priced and traded, thereby avoiding the habit of market economics to treat nature, care work, gift economies, and social cooperation as limitless and free.

Unlike economic theory, which sees human beings as rational materialists who want to maximize their material wealth, commons governance allows for a more spacious field of human development. In a commons, people have greater opportunities to develop a richer amplitude of human talents, ethical commitments, and relationships than economic theory allows. Seemingly improbable organizational forms such as open source communities, Wikipedia, local land stewardship, committed care work, and other cooperative possibilities are revealed entirely practical.

The “social theory of commoning” that I’ve sketched here has one wild card, however:  What role will state power play? So let me turn now to the third issue of commons governance.

#3. State Power and Commoning

As commons grow in size and influence, they often begin to become vehicles of political power and moral authority in their own right. This often makes politicians and state power nervous. Because commons might begin to erode consumer demand and siphon away “market share,” just as Linux undercut Microsoft twenty years ago, leading to complaints that open source software is communistic.

Successful commons also begin to attract more loyalty and trust than the state, and indirectly become a political force. So the state often frowns upon the work of commons. At the behest of certain industrial sectors, the state may even criminalize commoning, as we have seen for digital sharing and seed-sharing. (Recall that women in the Middle Ages who insisted upon using their former common lands after they were enclosed, were often branded witches and burned!)

Suffice it to say, from the perspective of state officials, there is so much more upside in working closely with well-heeled capitalists and the familiar interfaces that the state and capitalists have negotiated over generations.  

The problem here is not just about money and power. Modern bureaucracy has formal, rigid, legalistic way of doing things. Its mindsets and methods do not easily accommodate the vernacular practices and norms of commoning. States want to regularize and control things in top-down, centralized ways. As political scientist James C. Scott has written, “The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality behind it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observation.”

The state as a bureaucratic apparatus has historically not really wanted to support commons, and even if it did, it does not have readily available ways to do so. Certainly it has not gone out of its way to provide legal, financial, or technical support.

A key question for our times, then, is Why should state power support commons? And How can it do this in constructive ways?

I believe the state must eventually come to terms with the surging interest and social reality of commoning. The Commonsverse today is a burgeoning space. Think open source software communities, platform cooperatives, open access publishing, citizen-science, and myriad forms of digital collaboration. Think agroecology, community land trusts, community-supported agriculture, and relocalization movements.

Think of the many innovative urban commons from regional mesh networks like Guifi.net in Catalonia, to co-cities projects in many European cities, to timebanks, to the expanding number of cities that are pursuing Doughnut Economics. Think local currencies, crowdfunding, crowdequity, and other forms of relationalized finance. 

These countless commons are doing significant work outside of the market/state system – a point illustrated by the famous iceberg image used by feminist economists and the community economies research network. The formal economy is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg of nonmarket provisioning. For states that are hard-pressed to meet their citizens’ needs – governments that don’t have the budgets, the political support to expand services, the bureaucratic capabilities – the Commonsverse is a potentially significant ally.

Partnerships with commoners can not only meet a lot of urgent human needs, they can help reconstruct social connections and community.  State support for commoning can help nourish a sense of belonging and responsibility linked to real entitlements. It can strengthen a sense of social agency and identity at a time of great social anxiety and disempowerment. And let’s not forget, commons can help us step away from the extractivist practices, competition, and consumerism of the capitalist economy. 

Of course, entering into commons/public partnerships at the national level -- where ideological considerations tend to drive politics – may be too ambitious for now. But at municipal levels, there is greater room for open experimentation driven by practical needs and working personal relationships among people. I find it immensely gratifying to see all sorts of commons-oriented innovation in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Ghent, Lille, Naples and Milan and other Italian cities; and Seoul, Korea; among others. There is an explosion of experimentation going on in such cities….urban land ytrusts…citizen crowdsourcing…municipal data commons….

Projects like U!REKA do a great deal to help cross-fertilize our knowledge and deepen our understanding about the possibilities for state/commons partnerships. There are arguably some durable new patterns of urban commoning being born right now.

But I do not think that there are any magic templates to be found. What is really needed are open minds and social commitments to explore fresh approaches. Which is why the subtitle of this talk is “Find Answers by Living the Questions.” This is a frontier. The answers have to be imagined and developed. They will be built on relationships of trust and a spirit of experimentation.

The good news is that there is a rich constellation of commons to work with. The sobering news is that developing stable and resilient forms of commons governance will take time, hard work, imagination, negotiation, conflict, and persistence. Despite that, I believe commoning remains one of the more promising avenues that we have for addressing the profound structural challenges of contemporary politics, economics, and culture.  Thank you.

Allow me to also make a blunt philosophical judgment: The market/state’s foundational commitments to private property, individualism, capital accumulation, and technology represent a kind of political and cultural lock-down. Certain departures from these ideas are simply taboo. Add to this the unexamined modern belief that humanity stands apart from natural systems, and that individualism trumps collective action, and it becomes clear that our current system offers very little space to imagine creative paths forward.

Which may help explain why young people are so despairing about the future. It also explains why so many ordinary people are turning to commons in these difficult times. Commoning is a means of survival. Informal cooperation, and mutual aid can meet needs that the market and state can’t or aren’t providing during the pandemic.

Yet strangely, commoning is often not seen as a “real system.” It is patronized as nice and well-meaning, but waved aside as too informal, improvised, and disorganized to be taken seriously as an institutional form. After all, governance and provisioning in commons do not rely on the formal rules or hierarchical structures. Power is decentralized and leadership diffused.

The polite dismissal of commons is a serious misjudgment, I believe, because the market/state system – if it is to navigate the civilizational turbulence ahead -- will need to forge some explicit, practical understandings with commoners. Their goodwill, creativity, and power to generate social legitimacy for state action will be indispensable. The market/state system itself already relies on social cooperation, trust, and commoning more than it realizes. Why not leverage this reality in more explicit ways?

In any case, this much is true: If commoning is to develop, mature, and succeed as a flourishing form of governance, it will have to work out a new modus vivendi with the market/state system.  So we stand at the threshold of a fascinating new conversation between commoners and the market/state system.

As my contribution to this dialogue, I’d like to explore three primary points:

First -- that commons are not resources, as conventional economics and politics seem to think. They are self-organized social systems. Commons are highly generative precisely because they are living social organisms entangled within the larger web of life.

My second point is that the dynamics of commoning remain poorly understood because there are so many erroneous ideas ascribed to it. So today I’d like to try to clarify some realities about commoning as a durable, proven social system.

And finally, my third point: The fate of the commons as a vehicle for social emancipation will depend upon negotiating and creating new configurations of state power.  We will need innovations in law, bureaucracy, and politics to safeguard and support commoning – and state power will need to align more closely with commoners if it hopes to neutralize the fierce, nihilistic pathologies of contemporary capitalism and the reactionary nationalism associated with nation-states. We absolutely need to understand commons governance on its own terms – but we must situate this discussion in a larger, more complicated context.

#1. Commons as a Social System, Not a Resource

Let’s first deal with Point #1, the persistent habit of treating the commons as unowned resources open to all. Economists and politicians habitually do this when they refer to land, the oceans, outer space, and the Internet as commons. But these resources are not commons. They are potentially shareable resources that currently lack a functional governance regime. There is no community stewardship on behalf of everyone. Right now, such resources are mostly free for the taking.

In his famous tragedy of the commons essay, Garrett Hardin called this scenario the “tragedy of the commons” because finite resources are vulnerable to overuse and ruination. But in reality, Hardin was not describing a commons. In his parable of an imaginary pasture, there is no community of shared purpose, no body of rules, and no penalties for free-riders. It’s more accurate to call this scenario a tragedy of the market because the free market invites individuals to plunder the common wealth for their private gain with impunity. 

Let me add, this is the near-inevitable outcome when you talk about commons as resources. The framing of “commons as resources” indirectly accepts the premises of standard economics, which holds that the market and state are the only serious, responsible regimes of governance. Western property law is invoked, the state defers to capitalist markets, and we know how this story ends. Shared wealth can only be protected successful through private property rights or state regulation, according to Hardin and his legion of followers, and state regulation is usually seen as ineffectual and intrusive.

But in fact, institutions of social cooperation offer another path, as we can see throughout world history; in Elinor Ostrom’s scholarship; and in countless examples in contemporary life.

Evolutionary scientists confirm that cooperation is a key way that organisms improve their evolutionary fitness. Natural selection doesn’t work just at individual levels. Group selection or “multi-level selection” are powerful forces in evolution, as E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, Martin Nowak, and others argue persuasively. 

This analysis helps us see that relationality is a deep, animating force of commons and of life itself. We are not just atomistic individuals bouncing around in a vacuum called “society,” whose very existence Margaret Thatcher denied in her famous remark that “there is no such thing as society.” Symbiotic cooperation among organisms occurs even at the cellular level, often in subtle, nonobvious ways.

Complexity sciences, too, show that life arises through entangled relationships of interdependence. Biologist Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock of ‘Gaia hypothesis’ fame, showed that life arises through a process or ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘dependent origination.’ Read Merlin Sheldrake’s recent book Entangled Life for some amazing scientific accounts of how mushrooms and lichen and insects and trees and other plant life are all intimately interconnected as creative agents!

The point that I wish to stress is nicely stated by cultural historian Thomas Berry: “The universe is the communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” This applies to the commons as well.

Scientific rationalism and economic thinking have trouble understanding this fact, however. They are too intent on objectifying life and seeing it in machine-like terms. In the words of ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, science and economics are “unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.” Weber, a biologist, shows how life itself functions as a vast, complex commons. However, modern, Western categories of thought – which separate humanity from nature, and our minds from our bodies – can’t make sense of this reality.

I make this brief detour into evolutionary science and ontology because it’s important to understand why commons are so highly generative. It’s because they are alive. It’s because all living things are relational, symbiotic, and therefore generative. Life consists of networks of entangled interdependencies that produce what we need. 

Ah, but can modern human societies actually honor this fact – or is the market/state machine fated to control, extract, and monetize the gifts of life?

It is true that commons usually do not have the infrastructure or financing that markets and states enjoy. But commons do meet people’s needs in highly flexible, place-based, and humanly satisfying ways in cooperation with nature, and without the pathologies of extractive growth.

Now that the Internet is empowering small, disaggregated players in dramatic new ways, we can see the structural deficiencies of centralized systems. Large-scale industrial systems tend to have enormous fixed overhead costs, rigid designs for efficient mass production, and a commitment to efficiency over resilience. They are not respectful of place, pluralism, or human agency. 

Commons, by contrast, unconstrained by business models and market powers, are free to be flexible, creative, and open to new approaches from the street. In this regard, Dutch artist Thomas Lommée has offered a bit of prophecy that resonates with me: “The next big thing will be a lot of small things.”

Unfortunately, change that occurs in smaller, self-organized, and distributed contexts tend to be dismissed as too trivial, local, and inconsequential to matter. In climate debates, even progressives tend to say, But we don’t have time to develop these small-scale alternatives! Which always prompts me to wonder, So what have the top-down market/state institutions been doing to deal with climate change these past thirty years? Could it be that there are problems with the fundamental structures and belief-systems of the market/state?

While state power often expresses a nominal interest in the idea of commons, it often amounts to lip service, or a way to freshen up and re-brand the battered reputation of liberal democracy. (I might add that this tendency afflicts some progressive advocacy groups as well.)

Because the commoners that I know want real shifts of economic power. They want formal legal rights to steward their shared wealth, and affirmative rights to common. They want the kinds of state support – in legal regimes, finance, infrastructure, and official celebration – that investors and corporations have long take for granted.

Alas, when push comes to shove, when commoners make demands, it becomes clear that the state’s deeper allegiance is to growth and capitalism. The state may be sincere about protecting the commonweal, but its deep commitment to the market economy overrides action to support commoning and the ecological, social, intergenerational, and ethical value that flows from it.

#2. What Does Commoning Look Like?

This leads me to my second point, about commoning as a social system. It’s important to see the commons as a social system – as a set of relational dynamics that is generative – because this lets us move beyond market price as the default theory of value in modern life.

My coauthor Silke Helfrich and I -- when writing our book Free, Fair and Alive -- eventually realized that the very language and thought-categories of economics and politics are themselves a big problem. We came to see that the language of “resource management” and individual “rational choice” cannot express the types of value that we saw firsthand in countless real-life commons. Econo-speak does not convey the emotional richness, subtlety, or situational character of commons governance.

So we set out to describe the commons as a social system and how it creates (non-monetary) value. We took our cue less from economists than from anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural theorists. Instead of accepting the normative lens of modern, Western culture and the ontological commitments of economics – the half-truths about individualism, the fictions about “rationality” – we wanted to show that the commoning is about the deep relationality of everything.

We took pains to escape the language of methodological individualism and its ideas about direct cause-and-effect and objects having fixed, essential attributes. So Newtonian, so mechanical, so divorced from the ontology of life! 

Instead, we have tried to show how commoning is about fluid, always-evolving webs of social relations, like life itself. We want to show how commoning is the enactment of an open-ended process of emergence. We want to show how the subjectivity and the inner lives of people are part of what animates successful commons.

I delve into these metaphysical aspects of commoning because truly understanding commons governance requires this shift in worldview. Or more precisely, as Silke and I put it, understanding commons requires an OntoShift – a shift of ontological perspective. We need to understand the inner dynamics and relational logic of commons – which is to say, commons as a verb – commoning – rather than as a noun.  Commons as a social process, not a resource.

To theorize the commons in this new way, Silke and I identified the many recurrent patterns of commoning and divided them up into three spheres – Social Life, Provisioning, and Peer Governance. While we treat them separately, they are all tightly interconnected. We call the whole framework the Triad of Commoning.

We were inspired by the work of philosopher/architect Christopher Alexander, who devised a methodology for developing “pattern languages” based on actual social behaviors that occur historically and cross-culturally. Using an inductive method based on studying actual examples, Silke and I identified more than two dozen patterns of commoning. Not idealizations or abstractions, but careful generalizations based on successful commons we had witnessed

In liberal political theory, it is customary to separate production (or “the economy”) from governance (the state) – and to treat social life, otherwise known as “civil society,” as a cameo player off to the side. This is where commons governance really strikes off in new directions because commons blend production, governance, and social life into one integrated system.

I don’t have time to go through the many patterns that we identified, but let me give you a quick idea. Here are some of the patterns of commoning for the sphere of Peer Governance.

We had trouble with the connotations of “governance” as something that a group of people vested with power does to and for another group of people, perhaps with their participantion and consent, perhaps not.  But Peer Governance not governance that is done for people or to people. It is governance through people themselves.

Commoners see each other as peers with equal rights and duties to participate in the collective process of making decisions. They set boundaries for the commons and make and enforce rules. They have an aversion to centralized systems of power. They try to contribute in nonhierarchical ways.

One pattern of peer governance is Honor transparency in a sphere of trust.  Transparency cannot just be mandated; it can flourish only if people trust each other. Thus to honor real transparency in a commons, people must come to trust each other deeply, so that difficult, uncomfortable information can be shared.

Another pattern is Create semi-permeable membranes for commons. This allows commoners to interact with the larger world in careful, selective ways. They can absorb the energy and life and creative ideas of the larger world – but still protect their shared wealth and peer governance from appropriation and co-optation by outsiders, especially markets.

I don’t have time to go through all of the patterns here in detail, so I’ll just mention a few other patterns of Peer Governance. They include: Share knowledge generously.  Assure consent in decision making.  Rely on heterarchy. Relationalize property.

The patterns in Peer Governance and the two other spheres – Social Life and Provisioning -- reveal that commoning is a cross-sectoral social phenomena. It may be shaped by specific resources, but it is not defined and driven by them.

What unites commons across resource-categories their similar social dynamics. Commons governance helps to advance:

….a richer collective wisdom and a sense of consensual fairness. 

….distributed power, so that teams can work independently in modular ways.

….dense social relationships of trust that create stability and yet flexibility.

….rapid feedback loops that create better, fresher knowledge.

….overlapping systems and resilience, so that disruptions are not catastrophic and adaptation can occur more easily.

….and stewardship of value that is not priced and traded, thereby avoiding the habit of market economics to treat nature, care work, gift economies, and social cooperation as limitless and free.

Unlike economic theory, which sees human beings as rational materialists who want to maximize their material wealth, commons governance allows for a more spacious field of human development. In a commons, people have greater opportunities to develop a richer amplitude of human talents, ethical commitments, and relationships than economic theory allows. Seemingly improbable organizational forms such as open source communities, Wikipedia, local land stewardship, committed care work, and other cooperative possibilities are revealed entirely practical.

The “social theory of commoning” that I’ve sketched here has one wild card, however:  What role will state power play? So let me turn now to the third issue of commons governance.

#3. State Power and Commoning

As commons grow in size and influence, they often begin to become vehicles of political power and moral authority in their own right. This often makes politicians and state power nervous. Because commons might begin to erode consumer demand and siphon away “market share,” just as Linux undercut Microsoft twenty years ago, leading to complaints that open source software is communistic.

Successful commons also begin to attract more loyalty and trust than the state, and indirectly become a political force. So the state often frowns upon the work of commons. At the behest of certain industrial sectors, the state may even criminalize commoning, as we have seen for digital sharing and seed-sharing. (Recall that women in the Middle Ages who insisted upon using their former common lands after they were enclosed, were often branded witches and burned!)

Suffice it to say, from the perspective of state officials, there is so much more upside in working closely with well-heeled capitalists and the familiar interfaces that the state and capitalists have negotiated over generations.  

The problem here is not just about money and power. Modern bureaucracy has formal, rigid, legalistic way of doing things. Its mindsets and methods do not easily accommodate the vernacular practices and norms of commoning. States want to regularize and control things in top-down, centralized ways. As political scientist James C. Scott has written, “The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality behind it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observation.”

The state as a bureaucratic apparatus has historically not really wanted to support commons, and even if it did, it does not have readily available ways to do so. Certainly it has not gone out of its way to provide legal, financial, or technical support.

A key question for our times, then, is Why should state power support commons? And How can it do this in constructive ways?

I believe the state must eventually come to terms with the surging interest and social reality of commoning. The Commonsverse today is a burgeoning space. Think open source software communities, platform cooperatives, open access publishing, citizen-science, and myriad forms of digital collaboration. Think agroecology, community land trusts, community-supported agriculture, and relocalization movements.

Think of the many innovative urban commons from regional mesh networks like Guifi.net in Catalonia, to co-cities projects in many European cities, to timebanks, to the expanding number of cities that are pursuing Doughnut Economics. Think local currencies, crowdfunding, crowdequity, and other forms of relationalized finance. 

These countless commons are doing significant work outside of the market/state system – a point illustrated by the famous iceberg image used by feminist economists and the community economies research network. The formal economy is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg of nonmarket provisioning. For states that are hard-pressed to meet their citizens’ needs – governments that don’t have the budgets, the political support to expand services, the bureaucratic capabilities – the Commonsverse is a potentially significant ally.

Partnerships with commoners can not only meet a lot of urgent human needs, they can help reconstruct social connections and community.  State support for commoning can help nourish a sense of belonging and responsibility linked to real entitlements. It can strengthen a sense of social agency and identity at a time of great social anxiety and disempowerment. And let’s not forget, commons can help us step away from the extractivist practices, competition, and consumerism of the capitalist economy. 

Of course, entering into commons/public partnerships at the national level -- where ideological considerations tend to drive politics – may be too ambitious for now. But at municipal levels, there is greater room for open experimentation driven by practical needs and working personal relationships among people. I find it immensely gratifying to see all sorts of commons-oriented innovation in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Ghent, Lille, Naples and Milan and other Italian cities; and Seoul, Korea; among others. There is an explosion of experimentation going on in such cities….urban land ytrusts…citizen crowdsourcing…municipal data commons….

Projects like U!REKA do a great deal to help cross-fertilize our knowledge and deepen our understanding about the possibilities for state/commons partnerships. There are arguably some durable new patterns of urban commoning being born right now.

But I do not think that there are any magic templates to be found. What is really needed are open minds and social commitments to explore fresh approaches. Which is why the subtitle of this talk is “Find Answers by Living the Questions.” This is a frontier. The answers have to be imagined and developed. They will be built on relationships of trust and a spirit of experimentation.

The good news is that there is a rich constellation of commons to work with. The sobering news is that developing stable and resilient forms of commons governance will take time, hard work, imagination, negotiation, conflict, and persistence. Despite that, I believe commoning remains one of the more promising avenues that we have for addressing the profound structural challenges of contemporary politics, economics, and culture.  Thank you.