SH: ‘That is actually a good segue to make a related point: problematizing the source of social security is so important, because it is obvious that social security cannot just mean monetary security. We would all agree on that. And still usually we think of social security as monetary security. That means that any redistribution of wealth will necessarily depend by design on the vagaries of markets. That’s pretty insecure as an approach (especially when the wealthy politically dictate unequal terms of redistribution).

‘It also forces us to keep the megamachine going (see Fabian Scheidler’s book ‘The End of the Megamachine’) to conceive and provide social security in the first place. This is a design flaw! And it brings us directly to another pillar of the capitalist economy, and therefore of the welfare state: property – the prerequisite for generating monetary value through the market. Therefore, we are not allowed to touch the familiar ownership models.

‘In other words, there is a tacit consensus that we can talk about redistribution, but we cannot talk about predistribution, because real predistribution would mean making sure everybody has legally secure access to land, housing and other basic elements of shared wealth needed to live a dignified life. Decommodifying land – the land for agriculture and the land our houses and flats are built upon – would be the biggest contribution to a more commons-friendly version of social security. But that would require re-claiming some of the accumulated wealth of the ‘1%’.

‘The reality is different though: part of the reason why governments are having to spend all these billions now, during this pandemic, is that many people cannot even afford their rent. It’s an untenable situation. The right to decommodified housing should be part of social security. It should count as the bare minimum, part of what you are entitled to as a citizen. But for such a shift to occur, we would first need to re-think property.’

DB: ‘The ownership model in our societies is always either private and corporate, or state-run. Which then leads to this simplified debate between capitalism vs. socialism. And commons-based ideas are never even considered. They seem to be marginalized, ignored, and out of reach, always.’

SH: ‘This is because state authorities are trained to consider the market economy and its extractive business models as the only source for achieving redistribution. But whenever a crisis hits, this approach is exposed as a really bad design choice. Because we all know that there will not be enough money to redistribute whenever the next crisis hits.’

DB: ‘It is a matter of power. The state is run by people whose class, prestige, and careers are based on that extractive economy. Their jobs are about facilitating or managing that extraction and the growth it produces. They have no incentives whatsoever to imagine a wholesale shift away from this paradigm. I even think most people understand the problems we face, but they are not willing or occupationally capable of entertaining fundamental solutions.’

‘It is a matter of power. The state is run by people whose class, prestige, and careers are based on the extractive economy. Their jobs are about facilitating or managing that extraction and the growth it produces.’

SH: ‘So when talking about the future of social security, and analysing what is wrong with the current system, this is the right starting point: there is a flaw in the design of our modern nation-states. They are actually market-states, which makes any act of redistribution fully dependent on the market – i.e., investors. So any serious scenario for future social security will have to originate from outside of this framework.’

DB: ‘The market has always evaded the reality that it cannot in fact provide social security for everyone. Inequality is built into the system and accepted as “normal” by those who defend it. Now we’ve reached a crunch-point where that fact has become evident. So in the search for solutions, people are forced to choose between the market and social solidarity. This puts well-intentioned, socially minded politicians in a real bind because they are not “allowed” to entertain degrowth or post-capitalist options.’

SH:  Exactly. In Europe, as in the States, there is a tradition of – supposedly progressive – labour unions that comes to mind – a thinking about organised solidarity. But even that tradition is inadequate for what we are up to because it means that job creation on the labour market is a precondition for any social policy conceived by the welfare state.

‘To put it even more strongly, most of the time, social security policies have the explicit goal of trying to create jobs for everyone, no matter if they make sense or not. What matters is, above all, to keep the economy going, because, as we have just established, that is our only source of means for redistribution. Thus creating a perfect circle, or tautology: We need money to incentivize market participants (businesses, investors) in order to create jobs, which will let people earn money to maintain their social security, which in turn will keep the economy going and – as many hope – create still more jobs. We can not only conclude that social security has become completely monetized. We need to get rid of that entire mindset. It’s a flawed system.

‘I have researched the federation of cooperatives called Cecosesola, in Venezuela. This makes for an interesting case study about commons-based social security. There is very little left in the Venezuelan economy these days. Not enough supply on the market, not enough energy provided, no capital, nothing. But still people manage to meet their needs somehow, with provisions from Cecosesola, for example.

When you ask people who participate in that network, ‘What does Cecosesola mean to you?’, they say: ‘Security, the feeling that nothing can happen to me’. And that’s the point. It’s derived from the stability of social bonds, from living social relationships. It’s the de facto ownership they have, of their community-stewarded markets, their self-organisation, their price-sovereign trading, their ritualized activities and mutual support. They control their decision-making processes. Their peer-organized social security – they even run a fully equipped hospital without a boss – creates a sense of belonging for their members at the margin of the state of the larger economy. And I feel that this basic element, having a sense of belonging, is not even part of the discussion about social security here in Europe.’

DB: ‘One of the reasons something like Cecosesola could never work in the US is because there is no space in the political culture, discursively speaking.’

SH: ‘This brings us to the next flaw in our systems. The boundaries of our discourse around social security and economy are so narrow that there is no space to introduce new insights and experiment with them.’

DB: ‘A lot of this has to do with the bureaucracy that is such an essential part of state power, which tends to rely on one-size-fits-all models. Bureaucracy helps politicians justify their centrally administered policies as ‘meritocratic’ and fair. But by clinging to universality and bureaucracy, the system does not take into account local particularities and how bottom-up creativity can generate value, open source style. The commons approach explicitly takes these factors into account because the commons tend to be place-based and accessible. But this is also one of our challenges: how do we, as commoners, engage with the state’s bureaucracy to make it more supportive of commoning and localism?

‘One example is the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, for instance, and more broadly, the whole “Co-Cities” movement that people like Christian Iaione and Sheila Foster are part of. This approach is trying to develop a working rapprochement between city bureaucracies and commoners, working as neighborhood groups, citizen associations, or whatever. But this good-faith experiment is vulnerable to all the power-plays of electoral politics, political parties, and legislative representatives. In addition, there is a philosophically unresolved collision of world views between state power and commoning.

‘Silke and I have struggled with this challenge: How do we formulate a commons-public partnership in a fruitful way? How can we make bureaucracy and electoral politics shift and open up, to allow for the pluriverse of commoning to occur? It’s not clear what the answers are.’

SH: ‘Exactly. It is too simple to blame “the state,” and it is, in this context, understandable that people propose a state-run basic income that is the same for everyone. However, if our governance system is set up hierarchically, as it is today, we get used to asking the same for everyone even though no one’s circumstances and needs are the same. State power creates monocultures of administration that obviously prefer monetary security. And this is a big problem, because if there is one thing we learned from Elinor Ostrom, it is that there is no such thing as a panacea. People have non-monetary security needs that have to be addressed as well.’

TdG: ‘In our research, we explore a couple of transition paths. One of them is about ‘care income’ and alternative currencies. A care income is a concept that we learned from feminist thinkers in the degrowth movement. It could serve as a way to value social reproductive labour in a way that the market simply does not. We added to that the idea to organise this with neighbourhood currencies.’

SH: ‘We always talk about the undervalued part of the economy, the part where we as people engage in provisioning. The current system only looks at the part of the economy where the money flows. But as you point out, that excludes a lot of work. The answer that many feminist economists give is that we simply have to pay more to the people who care, who account for all that reproductive labour. But paying more doesn’t get us out of the monetization trap we talked about earlier. I do understand the impulse to connect care income to alternative currencies. It’s a good idea, because you take part of the solidarity economy and shield it from the market economy. Commoning and commerce should be kept apart.

‘But there is another way. Let’s go back a bit. Any nation state depends on a bureaucracy that makes rules for everyone. Let’s call it ‘abstract equality,’ panaceas, one-size-fits-all. States will always have to govern from above and thereby ignore a lot of different situations. Otherwise these governments would continually be challenged because the law has to be the same for everybody, right?

‘So when talking about various forms of Universal Basic Income, or care income, or any such scheme, we need to ask another question. And that question is: Who governs it? Let’s think about community-based basic incomes, governed by federated communities. In this scenario, it would not be the state determining who gets how much for how long and what for.

‘There are successful models of local communities managing basic income programs that help leverage a sense of belonging, responsibility, and commitment – as opposed to a pot of state money suddenly dropping from the sky with only formal, legalistic strings attached to it. And we have to keep in mind that there is no such thing as social security without a living social fabric, without that sense of belonging.’

‘When talking about various forms of Universal Basic Income, or care income, we need to ask another question: Who governs it? Let’s think about community-based basic incomes.’

DB: ‘To add to that, I am working on a report about commons-based financing. It asks how to keep money and community inalienable – i.e., not commoditized by market forces? In other words, how can we design a system where money (and value) does not leak away from the community, and where communities and people are not treated by capital as neocolonial sites of extraction (think fracking, water, minerals, data-mining, etc.)?

‘I have come to realise that alternative currencies are part of the solution. Those schemes are by definition place-based, and so the neighbourhood currency cannot be sucked into the circuits of global finance. The challenge is to create a buffer to prevent the value generated within commons from being subjected to simple monetary trading and speculation in the larger economy. You need a buffer to prevent the users of an alternative currency from sliding back into capitalist relationships. So determining how the alternative currency is designed and used is critical. And ultimately, local communities themselves are the only ones who can settle this issue, really.’

SH: ‘The bottom line is: We need to come up with ways to decommodify our social security. So let’s start by decommodifying information, and land and even the money itself by creating a myriad of alternative currencies that might serve as means of exchange but not as commodity. This way you start to get little pockets of transition, and people can see what works for them, and start connecting them all.

‘So you set up the conditions for a needs-based and peer governed conceptualization of social security. It is key to always start from people’s needs: take shelter as an example. The most important thing a state can do is to create ownership of shelter for everyone, and set up other property models like Community Land Trusts, for example, and help communities to decommodify not only the houses but the land underneath the houses. This will help create structural independence from the market. If you look at this current crisis, we can safely say that self-organised, community-supported initiatives have proven to be more resilient when disaster strikes. They are not as dependent on international flows of capital and goods.’

DB: ‘Fannie Lou Hamer, a famous voting rights activist from the civil rights movement, is mostly known for her political activism. But she is also celebrated as a pioneer in the co-operative movement. To escape the dependency on white supremacists who controlled the local economy, she started the Freedom Farm Co-operative, to build economic independence for the Black community.

‘Her fight for food independence meant that Black people in that region no longer had to answer to white supremacists. This also made them politically independent, because they no longer had to fear being thrown off their land. The Freedom Farm Co-Operative was theirs, it was a place of security for them, a place from where they could build, and not be politically and socially dependent on others. Not just for their basic needs, but for their dignity. And that is something the state should be able to help us with. That would be a great place to start.

‘It’s basically the ‘Transition Towns Ethic’ which strives for communal goals in people’s everyday life. It doesn’t start with ideologies, which are usually politically driven and focused on state-related issues. Instead it’s about real, practical things – food, shelter, public life — that mean something for ordinary people. George Monbiot calls this the “politics of belonging” — a nourished identity based on mutual support and practical needs.’

TdG: ‘Do you think that the future of social security is decentralised, and that the municipalities will play a bigger role in organising localised schemes of social security?’

SH: ‘You know how political centrists always tell you everything is ok? Like, with the US presidential election, people tell me, ‘Biden will be elected, and that will prove that the system works, liberal democracy is the best system and our insitutions are strong’. Well, no, they are not strong. And no, this democracy does not work well. Otherwise you wouldn’t have two parties that are both part of the problem.

‘To put it differently, as long as our cities, regions and countries are ruled according to the competitive logic of political parties whose mandate is based on 50,01%  real change won’t happen.’

DB: ‘Exactly. Many people think that decentralisation is a solution, but major cities are governed by the same people that govern the country. The political culture is the same. For real alternative power structures to arise, you need to get rid of or supplant these parties first. Only then will you be able to construct a new political culture, built around place-based politics.’

‘For real alternative power structures to arise, you need to get rid of these political parties first. Only then will you be able to construct a new political culture, built around place-based politics.’

SH: ‘Absolutely. Rethinking the idea of social security, requires that we begin with predistribution, of land and shelter, and alternative political cultures will follow.’

DB: ‘But it’s not a linear sequence. We have to do both, simultaneously. We need to find ways to extricate ourselves from the market, and we also need to have an affirmative social vision of participation, belonging, contribution, and commoning.’

Schneider has made it his business to try to bring this geography to the foreground. There is so much talk these days about putting people over profits, rejuvenating local business, and strengthening community control, he said. Cooperatives are a natural response.

Nathan sees two primary strategies for moving coops into the American mainstream. One is a frankly political approach in the manner of Populists of the 1880s and 1890s, who used coops to shake the foundations of the political establishment. Another strategy is a less adversarial, consensus-driven approach that builds on shared national mythologies such as ownership.  He cited Louis Kelso’s invention of the employee stock ownership plan as an example. ESOPs were a legal and organizational innovation that has enabled employees to build personal equity in their workplace while improving the general work culture. 

Schneider recognizes that ultimately coops can be a powerful movement force only if they can threaten the power of capital. The classic examples are credit unions that have posed competitive challenges to banks, and rural electrical coops that took business away from utilities. It is this rich history of cooperatives overcoming staunch opposition that gives Nathan optimism about the future power of platform coops, among other cooperative initiatives.

To help push that goal along, Schneider has been developing a number of nitty-gritty, operational initiatives, some of them through the Media Enterprise Design Lab, a practice-oriented research center for community ownership and governance in media organizations.  The Lab collaborates with entrepreneurs, startup projects, and activists to explore new financial schemes, software tools, and educational gambits. 

Schneider has a great personal interest in finding new ways to expand democratic ownership and governance in online projects. One such effort is a cooperative “accelerator,” Start.Coop, led by a number of cooperative leaders, including Greg and Howard Brodsky. The project helps startups find investors and project development assistance, and learn more about cooperative practices and culture.

Nathan has played a big role in developing a new financial strategy known as “Exit to Community.” Normally, the founders of traditional startups who become successful see little choice but to sell out to Wall Street or a big technology company. Exit to Community aims to provide a practical alternative. it lets entrepreneurs who want to move on, or raise more money, to sell their enterprises to community members. This can help keep a business more purpose-driven, socially minded, and community-based. 

Schneider has been dismayed at the state of governance within open source software communities, which he describes as a regime of “implicit feudalism” with little participatory governance, at least formally. To help remedy this, he developed the CommunityRule website to provide a rudimentary “governance toolkit” for digital communities. The idea is to help groups choose fairer, more enlightened arrangements for governing themselves while avoiding the pitfalls of concentrated control and founders behaving like "dictators for life."

The full podcast interview with Nathan Schneider can be downloaded here.

“Our way of making sense of the world – our paradigm – shapes our ability to respond to crisis,” the report begins. “Once a paradigm is established, it is extremely hard to think and behave outside its limits.” The report continues: 

Reading political and economic texts through ontological perspectives allows us to uncover the underlying hidden assumptions informing them. Different frameworks of governance presuppose different assumptions about reality. Today’s mainstream political and economic discourses are increasingly sterile and unfit in large part because they are based on incorrect assumptions about the nature of being. The whole explanatory apparatus informing mainstream politics and economics is fundamentally Eurocentric and outdated, informed by centuries’ old science and philosophy. In this moment of crisis, rethinking governance requires more than re-thinking organizations, structures, and positions—it requires re-thinking the underlying belief systems, value systems, and ethics that inform them.

Although ontology may be seen like arcane philosophical stuff – an arid topic for graduate students, and not so relevant for commoners and activists – that is emphatically not the case if we want to transform politics and culture. Silke and I made this argument in Chapter 2 of our book Free, Fair and Alive, in which we noted how dominant paradigms can blind us to realities right in front of our eyes. For example, many scientists in the 1840s simply could not make sense of newly discovered dinosaur fossils because, living within a worldview of Biblical creationism, they could not imagine the idea of deep time and biological evolution. Today, similarly, market capitalism is arguably the archaic paradigm. Living within its worldview makes it difficult to see the actual dynamics and power of our humanity and earthly systems.  

Our deep dive was a continuation of this line of inquiry -- in effect, that ontology matters. As the deep dive report explains:

The logic of the commons is so different from liberal democracy and market capitalism that it is necessary to rethink the ontological premises informing it. Elinor Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework, for example, is the dominant approach to understanding the commons, yet it takes for granted many of the same foundational assumptions of standard political and economic thought [e.g., a focus on the individual as the primary agent; “nature” as separate from humanity; life as relational, not transactional, etc.]. Shifting the paradigm within which we understand governance offers immense transformative potential.

Some of us have come to the conclusion that commons governance should be informed by an ontology that is fundamentally oriented to processes and relations, called “process-relational ontology.” Such a framework could help us build more appropriate, commons-based institutions that leverage and honor our relationships. 

A few nuggets of wisdom harvested from the deep dive:

• Ontological concepts are really supra-verbal.
• Very little is possible when people become reactive due to misalignments of core beliefs and epistemologies.
• Political thought still views agents as rational subjects and interprets relations primarily in terms of cause and effect.

A shift in ontological perspective, or OntoShift as we call it, helps us see human beings as deeply relational creatures who, in turn require different types of political and economic institutions than than one we have now. In markets, the central relationships are transient cash transactions among isolated individuals pursuing their “rational self-interest.” With state power, we are treated as individual citizens whose chief duties are to pay taxes, vote, and be acquiescent. There are very few institutions or legal regimes that affirmatively support the trust-building, sense of shared purpose, and creative innovation that commoning entails. 

Having these sorts of discussions is difficult, pointed out Peter Doran, a law professor at Queen’s University Belfast, because “The modern frame is in active denial of some form of relationality. Western ontology is based on fear and security." He said our bids for ontological security are complex responses to our deep vulnerability as a species. The paradox is that the privileged Western response valorizes control, self-sufficiency, heroic individualism, and a disembodied disposition that are built on a denial of our vulnerability and mortality, resulting in individuals feeling deep disconnection.

Nicole Dewandre, an advisor to the European Commission, admitted that although we may experience thinking as disembodied, without feeling, we also need to be careful not to believe that the other extreme—prioritizing the body over the mind—is the solution. Feeling without thinking can be just as problematic, she noted, leading, for example, to antisocial crowd dynamics and hooliganism. We need to communicate using language in ways that acknowledge our bodies and feelings.

Lieselotte Viaene, an anthropologist at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, recommended that we adopt Arturo Escobar’s concept of “thinking-feeling with the Earth” (sentipiensan con la Tierra). If we hosted our discussion by the river in the company of other beings, for example, we could deepen our connections between thinking and feeling. Thinking-feeling describes the ways indigenous peoples think, without the Western habit of separating the mind and body, and reason and emotion.

There is much else of interest in the report about Ontopolitics. You can download a PDF version of it here.

Progressives and other would-be political change agents are at a singular disadvantage in their advocacy efforts, said David, because they don’t have a serious, shared theory of value that can challenge the prevailing price theory of value used by economists. I regret to say that our workshop didn’t solve this problem, but we did clarify many theoretical issues and generate some promising lines of inquiry. It remains a topic that new economy movements should take pains to address.

This was my sole personal encounter with Graeber, and it confirmed what I had heard from many sources – that he was a quirky polymath and absolutely authentic person. But he never let his daring ideas get clotted up with academic posturing or decorous euphemisms. David spoke earnestly from the heart, with intellectual sophistication, personal courage, and an off-kilter sense of the absurd.

He was the moving epicenter of a global network of brilliant friends and co-conspirators, each of whom fed his capacious imagination even as he generously returned the favor, throwing off bright sparks and providing intellectual and personal support. Many observers have noted that Graeber originated the Occupy movement phrase, “We are the 99%.” But he demurred, saying that he only came up with the idea of “the 99%.”  Others on the Occupy organizing team came up with “We” and “are,” proving that committees can often do great work, he crowed.

As Graeber’s fame grew, he objected to being pigeonholed as the “anarchist anthropologist,” as if that were a standing identity. He regarded anarchism as something you do, not as an identity. This was of a piece with his rejection of formal roles and the tyranny of reputation. What could be more satisfying and generative than being a fully alive, curious, questing, adventurous human being?

I think this was ultimately what enabled him to come up with such astute judgments and astringent commentary in his books. I still remember his point about debt: “For me, this is what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money.” 

Or: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it‘s something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Or: "Whenever someone starts talking about the 'free market,' it's a good idea to look around for the many with the gun. He's never far away."

It feels gratuitous to repeat much of what has appeared on Twitter and other venues of appreciations for Graeber. For those unfamiliar with him, here is a link to the New York Times obit for him, and here is Rebecca Solnit’s appreciation in The Guardian.

I now realize how much comfort I took just from knowing Graeber was out there. I could count on him applying his deep and subtle scholarship to the problems of our time – and suggesting ingenious pathways forward, starting with ourselves. He was always scheming up new activist strategies, blending his antic imagination with serious purpose. And what could be more valuable, in the end, than responding to the human predicament with authenticity, serious thought, personal generosity, and humor?

Medialab Prado also hosts a citizen-science lab to “help make scientific research more democratic and transversal, ensuring it encompasses a range of perspectives.” Its DITOs project – “Doing It Together” -- is a pan-European network aimed at fostering citizen participation in environmental sustainability and biodesign.

The accent of so much of Medialab Prado’s work is open participation and exploration. How can we develop innovative ways of meeting civic needs? A participatory budgeting project, for example, focuses on empowering citizens to make their own choices in allocating local government budgets. 

A recent “Taxi Experiment” brought together cab drivers with their families, users, and community members to explore how the experience of riding in a taxi could be improved. Drivers learned more about the needs of riders with disabilities, for example, and an app was designed to improve the service that cabs could offer.

Now Medialab Prado is trying to go global with its civic incubation model. In September and October, it will be hosting a MOOC course (in Spanish) on “how to grow your own citizen laboratory and build networks of cooperation.” The idea is to foster very localized citizen innovation labs, even in rural areas, by helping people learn how to host prototyping workshops, use helpful digital tools, issue open calls to identify projects and collaborators, and run communication plans, mediation, documentation, evaluation, etc.

The lab hopes that this effort will result in an international collective of distributed citizen laboratories. An English version of the course may be offered in 2021. More about it here.

A recurrent theme of Medialab Prado projects is to serve as “a listening tool to see what people want,” as García puts it. “We provide a neutral, comfortable space for people that is useful at the municipal level,” said García. When people are invited to participate, share what’s on their minds, and are given tools to self-organize in a welcoming, supportive environment, some remarkable new ideas emerge. The process amounts to applying the open source ethic to civic contexts.

Medialab Prado is helping citizens and society evolve together in more thoughtful ways. “A big question we should always be asking ourselves,” said García, “is how we want to be living together. In a way, the prototypes that people are making [at the Medialab] have to do with that question.”

Whatever the source, the authors write, urban commons have (re)emerged as an alternative to state and market, and to the problems caused by enclosures. In our times, the neoliberal policies instigated by the US and other industrialized countries in the 1970s and 80s have been the driving force of enclosure, prompting a resurgence of interest in commons as a way for people to reclaim their lives. 

The authors note that the global financial crisis in 2008 and today's coronavirus pandemic have demonstrated how essential commons remain. The “solidarity, empathy, and collectivity” that they typically mobilize “are precisely what is needed to prevent social isolation and maintain a vital sense of community despite social distancing.”

Moreover, commons engender resilience. “Porch food drops and homemade PPE, 3D-printed ventilator parts and crowdsourced solidarity funds…represent a buffer against shocks. Urban commons are at the front line of community needs, once again acting to lessen immediate damage and helping preserve the communities that we have come to rely on so that we are even more resilient next time.”

As Dellenbaugh-Losse et al. see it, urban commons projects share four key characteristics:

• Resources are managed by the users through a prosocial and participatory process called “commoning.”
• Projects also focus on a resource’s use-value — the practical, everyday value of the resource for its users — instead of treating it as a commodity from which profit can be derived.
• Residents address their own perceived desires and co-produce solutions to urban issues that are important to them, from housing to wireless internet.
• They rely on intangible resources such as social capital and also actively build these within their communities.

Unlike so many academic works of theory, The Urban Commons Handbook is not afraid to get down-and-dirty with practical advice that ordinary people can use. The book assesses specific methods of participation and peer governance, and of social cooperation and community outreach. It also includes a useful bibliography of literature on urban commons and resources. Check it out! 

Singh’s early encounters with forests in India led her to study community forests more intensively.  In 2012, she published an article that summarized some of her key findings in Geoforum journal under the title, “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India.”  

After comparing industrial-style monoculture forests managed for productivity and predictable outputs, with the social practices of community forests, Singh concluded that the subjective identities that people develop in the course of caring for their forests -- their “affective labor” -- makes a big difference. 

Unlike wage-labor or state-mandated behavior, affective labor develops people’s inner selves and fuels higher, nonmarket aspirations. People become eager to bring emotional connections and spiritual commitments to their "work." They are stewarding “care-wealth." They are taking care of the things that matter to them, with dramatic results.

What made Neera’s 2012 article so compelling to me was its willingness to abandon the standard idiom of “resource management” used by economists, social scientists, and even some commons scholar.  Instead she focused on the subjectivity of commoners as a serious topic for empiricalinvestigation.

Instead of presuming that every villager was an isolated individual making rational calculations about how to extract as much value for herself (as Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” fable does), Neera wanted to explore “the role of affect and environmental care practices in the production of new subjectivities.” There is a collective culture and commitment into which individuals are integrated as "Nested-I's." Given that there are about 10,000 villages actively protecting state-owned forests in Odisha, it makes sense to explore how elaborate community-based arrangements actually work.  

Singh’s paper documented how “villagers’ daily practices of caring for and regenerating degraded forests in Odisha can be seen as affective labor in which mind and body, reason and passion, intellect and feeling are employed together. Through the environmental care practices involved in ‘growing forests,’ villagers not only transform natural landscapes; they also transform their individual and collective subjectivities.”

In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.

Of course, traditional communities and indigenous peoples have known this for generations. It is western science and business that have not really understood this. It has taken novels like Richard Powers’ The Overstory – a series of stories about people’s intimate, intergenerational relationships with trees – to give a sense of how animism is alive and well and uplifting, even in western societies that consciously deny “superstition.” 

Far from being gratuitous, human care lies at the core of everything. (Ah, but how do you measure it, the scientist and business executive responds!) Georges Braque, the French painter, once said “I do not believe in things. I believe only in their relationships.” The German physician Hans Peter Dürr agrees with this conclusion: "Basically, there is no such thing as matter. At least not in the common sense. There is only a fabric of relationships, constant change, vitality. We have trouble imagining this. What is primary is only the interrelationships that exist – that which connects. We could also call it spirit. Something we can only experience spontaneously and cannot grasp.” 

The stewardship of forests in Odisha brings many of these ideas into focus.People’s affective labor makes something vital and alive. It's how we co-create the world with other living organisms. That is what creates value and meaning – far more than the “utility” or price that economists regard as value. Give a listen to my podcast interview with Neera Singh to get a richer sense of her research.

To read more of Neera Singh's scholarship in this area, here are a few thoughtful articles:

Ephemera 17(4): 751-776:  "Becoming a commoner: The commons as sites for affective socio-nature encounters and co-becomings" 

Ecological Economics 163 (2019) 138-142: "Environmental justice, degrowth, and post-capitalist futures."

Book (2018) PDF): Ecologies of Hope & Transformation: Post-Development Alternatives from India, coedited by Neera Singh, Seema Kulkarni, and Neema Pathak Broome.

Given the realities of the pandemic and an array of ecological crises, including climate change, Andreas Weber writes, the imperatives of living systems will have to become foremost concerns: 

“Only if we understand that the metabolic process through which we participate in life is an act of nourishing a community shared with other beings, can we move away from treating others – human and non-human beings – as objects, which need to be dealt with efficiently. Sustainability politics, therefore, should include the experience of creating fertile life within a community, considering human and non-human beings as kin, and putting the other’s wellbeing first. For millennia, and until today, this position has been taken by societies labelled as 'animistic.' From the perspective of a community of life, these lessons of animism need to be revalidated, as being able to inform our actions with etiquette of reciprocity in the great society of being.”

Another wonderful essay that helps us take stock of the structural problems of the moment is Silke Helfrich’s piece, “How the coronavirus is forcing us to think beyond market and state.” Silke clarifies how market/state thinking is part of the problem that must be identified and overcome:

“….our economic system is so dependent on the production of goods and relentless consumption that, despite ample inventories, public debate is all about the imminent catastrophe and collapse that would occur if we were to take just two or three months to turn the energy levels down, relax, take a rest, catch our breath, do nothing, live off of reserves, share and scale down. Yet in one of the richest industrial nations of the world, where the needs of most people are met, or can quickly be met, through redistribution, this option is seen as a trauma.

“On the other hand, not only the production of goods, but also our political system is designed to require that nobody ever relaxes, takes a break, catches their breath and does nothing for a while, even though controlling the pandemic and healing the environment dictates it. The state’s singular job is to either stimulate consumption to re-jumpstart the economy or to stimulate the economy to jumpstart consumption. If the wheel ceases to turn, the system is in danger of collapse. Anything more than a short-term “shutdown” seems unthinkable. Therein lies the design flaw of our economy.”

Helfrich notes that an obvious response is commons-based thinking, which focuses on what people are able to do with each other in a self-determined, self-organized, needs-oriented manner, without market exchange. For example, in the early days of the pandemic, the protest movement in Hong Kong took infection control into their own hands, as she writes: 

“On the very same day that the city had its first reported infection, a team of citizens who had been engaged in political protests set up a website to track cases of Covid-19 infection, identify transmission hotspots, and cross-check news stories across multiple sources.  In a remarkably short amount of time, without government assistance, nearly everyone in Hong Kong equipped themselves with masks despite the government’s ban on covering one’s face in public (a rule imposed in the wake of the protests). The use of masks was entirely voluntary, not mandatory.”

More broadly, Helfrich argues that the commons address the design flaws of our economy. They "create resilience, reduce dependence and lessen power imbalances… Everything is not already over-leveraged to provide returns to capital. It becomes possible to operate at a relaxed pace, in ‘power saving mode,’ as long as we have enough to live on. There is no need to produce gratuitous things just so that people can keep their jobs and ensure their survival. With commons, it becomes possible to engage in many meaningful activities that have nothing to do with profit-driven business models.”

Finally (for now), consider another brilliant essay by systems thinker Nora Bateson and Mamphela Ramphele, Co-President of the Club of Rome. They suggest that we are at an inflection point in how our society approaches environmental and social change. “It turns out that it is not traction that is needed, but relationship,” they write in an essay, “Finding a Way.” 

Fifty years ago, the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who gave us his (in)famous “tragedy of the commons” fable, also promoted what he called the “lifeboat ethic.” This parable suggested that the human species, as endangered by environmental threats, resembles a group of 50 people in a lifeboat that can hold only ten additional people, even though there are 100-plus people in the water.

Therefore the questions are:  Whom shall “we” save, and using what criteria for making those choices? This is the cold logic of experts who apply believe that their rigorous, imperative reasoning is the only way to approach a problem and solve it. 

But Bateson and Ramphele note in their essay that people are not simply numbers and roles; life cannot be reduced to a set of simple narratives and formulas.  People are living, creative organisms who are embedded in a dynamic, contingent context.  Their sentiments of care and imagination – and their relationships to each other – are themselves generative and can open up new paths forward.

“Finding a way” is therefore about the unique possibilities that arise through relationships among particular people, in a particular body of water, on a particular day. There is no formula, no method… 

The point of the essay is that people improvise and discover new approaches through their living relationships and actual circumstanceds. Instead of an inexorable lifeboat scenario, it’s possible that people would decide to take turns swimming, or tie clothing to hold people together, or find some other novel means to survive together. As Bateson and Ramphele note, we soon discover that “capacity cannot be front-loaded; it is emergent.” 

Given his "lifeboat ethic," it is not entirely surprising that Harden expressed a lot of eugenicist, nationalist and white supremacist ideas: simple, formulaic approaches that trade on fear.

Whereas commoners are co-inventors and co-discoverers of new answers. Bateson and Ramphele: “The eagerness to define community and to define set formulas for responding to the needs of community are creating a blindness to the necessary complexity, perpetuating the elimination of contexts and failing to perceive the uniqueness of the ways in which communities are alive and entangled.” You can read the entire essay here. 

It turns out that the social system for generating, curating and maintain knowledge is critical to how that knowledge can circulate. As more scholars are discovering, open and closed are both compatible with predatory forms of corporate control – high subscription fees, limited user access, copyright and contract restrictions, encrypted formats, and even outright censorship in response to nations like China.

Commoning, by contrast, puts the responsibilities and entitlements of commoners as the primary goal. This helps to ensure that peer-generated knowledge is accessible and shared in ways that are free, fair, and respectful.   

With that preamble, I’d like to share some excerpts from the “Labour of Love” manifesto and invite you to read the full piece at at The Commonplace, a project of the Knowledge Futures Group. The Commonplace is “a space where people discuss the digital infrastructure and policies needed to distribute, constellate, and amplify knowledge for the public good.” 

The manifesto declares at one point: “With this manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon.”

You had me at “re-policiticise.”

The manifesto makes clear the “paradox of knowledge commons” in academia, noting that “academics are effectively required to hand over their research, which is often supported by public funding, to publishers whose primary goal is to earn profit rather than to make the material freely and uncompromisingly accessible.” This is “the real threat to academic freedom,” the group declares.

The problems that flow from this paradox are myriad, as the manifesto explains. (All links and boldface below are in the original text.)

In recent decades, academic publishing has been transformed into a highly profitable business. In the past, scholarly journals were primarily published through professional associations or academic institutions; today, many are owned or distributed by commercial publishers with large profit margins. These profits are achieved through a system of academic exploitation: not only is the writing and reviewing provided free to the publisher, but authors are increasingly required to pay an article processing charge (APC) to avoid having their work being placed behind expensive paywalls. Libraries face a rapid increase in costs, at an aggregate rate of 11% per annum, to maintain access to journals and their contents.

Meanwhile, insofar as publication in “high-ranking” journals and name-brand presses is required for jobs, tenure, funding, and research assessment exercises of all kinds, academics feel under increasing pressure to “play the game.” This has serious implications for scholars with interdisciplinary or otherwise unconventional research agendas, and it places enormous pressure on early-career and precarious academics. It is particularly punishing for women, who are still disproportionately charged with various forms of care work.

While this dismal state of affairs is fast approaching what property rights theorists call “a tragedy of the anti-commons,” the irony of seeing the same communities that make qualitative social scientific research possible excluded from full participation in the production of knowledge (in the form of expensive journal subscriptions and APC charges) is too often lost on researchers consumed with the forward progress of their own careers.

Over the past few years, a number of high-profile incidents have further exposed the corrosive influence of commercial considerations, including the willingness to censor content in order to maintain access to profitable markets. In August 2017, it was revealed that Cambridge University Press had complied with the demands of Chinese government censors to block access within China to over three hundred “politically sensitive” articles published in the prestigious journal, China Quarterly. Prompted by public outcry, the press ultimately reversed its stance, restoring access to the censored contents for Chinese readers and making them available free of charge for all.

Unfortunately the Cambridge University Press incident was just the tip of the iceberg, and there have been numerous other examples of major publishers censoring content on behalf of the Chinese government. In October 2018, it was revealed that Springer Nature had been removing chapters dealing with “sensitive subjects” from its Transcultural Research book series, unbeknownst to the authors or editors. Despite public outrage from the academic community, Springer Nature remained defiant. The company refused to reverse its actions and justified them as being necessary for the advancement of research.

All of this is alarming in its own right, especially since the consolidation of OA publishing under corporate publishers is becoming a new normal. The manifesto states: 

Over the next decade, Open Access (OA) is likely to become the default in scholarly publishing. Yet, as commercial publishers develop new models for capturing revenue (and as policy initiatives like Plan S remain reluctant to challenge their centrality), researchers, librarians, and other concerned observers are beginning to articulate a set of values that critically engages the industry-driven project of broadening access to specialist scholarship. [Plan S is the proposal of a coalition of national research funding organizations that seeks to ensure that research is routinely published in open access journals, repositories, and platforms.]

….. The undersigned are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are questioning the fairness and scientific tenability of a system of scholarly communication dominated by large commercial publishers. With this manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon.

In this manifesto we mobilise an extended notion of research output, which encompasses the work of building and maintaining the systems, processes, and relations of production that make scholarship possible. We believe that the humanities and social sciences are too often disengaged from the public and material afterlives of their scholarship. We worry that our fields are sleepwalking into a new phase of control and capitalisation, to include continued corporate extraction of value and transparency requirements designed by managers, entrepreneurs, and politicians.

We fervently believe that OA can be a powerful tool to advance the ends of civil society and social movements. But opening up the products of our scholarship without questioning how this is done, who stands to profit from it, what model of scholarship is being normalised, and who stands to be silenced by this process may come at a particularly high cost for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

….. What is clear to us is that the future of a more accessible, ethical, transparent, and creative form of scholarly communication largely relies on a labour of love—unremunerated, off-work time that is freely given as a result of political, emotional and otherwise idealistic investment in projects that transcend the quest for academic prestige and seek to transform the publishing system from within. However, scholar-led OA publishing can also benefit from the expertise and institutional solidity of other actors. While scholars can provide the carefully-argued analysis, the peer review, and the editorial work, we also need the support of our universities, libraries, and other like-minded organisations to ensure that our collective effort can be sustained, archived, and scaled up to meet the challenge of the digital information era.

The manifesto concludes by calling for the commonification of Open Access – “scholarship that is collaboratively and responsibly built and shared.” Check out the specific recommendations for authors, senior scholars, deans and provosts, librarians, and journal editors. It's a good outline for how pressure should be applied to universities from the bottom up. 

This piece is a gust of fresh air – a much-needed, long-overdue challenge to the corporate and university powers that control academic publishing. Through inertia, ignorance, and sometimes complicity, universities are not challenging the distinct limits of corporate-controlled “openness" and defending the ideals of academic scholarship. Nor are they adequately investigating the countervailing appeal of the commons, which offer a better framework for reinvigorating the life of the academy.

Professors Julian Agyeman of Tufts University and Kofi Boone of North Carolina State University recently noted that “land loss has plagued black America since emancipation.” They suggested that it is time to look again at ‘black commons’ and collective ownership as a solution. 

In a piece on The Conversation website, they cite a study showing “a 98% decline in black farmers between 1920 and 1997,” which contrasts sharply with “an increase in acres owned by white farmers over the same period. In a 1998 report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ascribed this decline to a long and ‘well-documented’ history of discrimination against black farmers, ranging from New Deal and USDA discriminatory practices dating from the 1930s to 1950s-era exclusion from legal, title and loan resources.”

What might be done to reverse this injustice that has caused a cascade of harm to African Americans for generations? 

Agyeman and Boone call attention to collective ownership of land as a historic vehicle for Black emancipation and progress. For example, they note the cooperatively run “Freedom Farms” that civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer established on 40 acres of prime Mississippi Delta land in the mid-1960s. Her idea was to enable former sharecroppers and poor Black farmers to become independent of local white landowners and their political power.

The current issue of Harper’s magazine has a wonderful piece, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” by Audrea Lim, which describes another civil rights experiment – community land trusts – that has helped Black farmers take charge of their lives.

In 1969, Shirley and Charles Sherrod other civil rights activists – including Bob Swann, founder of the Schumacher Center – came together to create one of the first community land trusts, New Communities Farm, near Albany Georgia.  While the project eventually went under – a victim of a severe drought and discriminatory USDA finance practices – the venture was the beginning of a much larger CLT movement that has grown and flourished since then, thanks in part to the fierce advocacy of Bob Swann.

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics has seen CLTs as a powerful tool for addressing inequities in wealth in general and for African Americans in particular.  In a 2018 proposal, the Schumacher Center suggested that a Black-led CLT could be used as “a national vehicle to amass purchased and gifted lands in a Black Commons with the specific purpose of facilitating low cost access for Black Americans hitherto without such access.  In short, creating one piece of a Black Reparations Movement.”  (Read the full proposal here.)

As the proposal explains:

The community land trust is a tested and known entity for holding working lands in a commons while at the same time facilitating leaseholders ability to build equity in homes and other improvements on the land. Donors would be assured that their one-time donation of land would not again enter the market but would remain a permanent part of a Black Commons. Individual leaseholders could change, and buildings sold, but the land would continue to be held in the nonprofit structure dedicated to serving those disenfranchised by a history of discriminatory practices.

The concept of Black Commons has great appeal on a number of levels. It would serve as a fitting, effective vehicle of reparations. It would ratify a rich history of African American collective emancipation while embracing new forms of collective action and peer governance. One can, in fact, trace a direct line from Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms and Black CLT farms to the traditions of Black credit unions and mutual aid funds, as described by Jessica Gordon Nembhard in her book Collective Courage. 

The digital world of peer governance and provisioning is another space for such peer-support to flourish.  Check out such Black commons as Urban Patch, a nonprofit that uses crowdfunding to build community spaces in the inner city of Indianapolis and foster economic development; and the Movement for Black Lives, as cited by Professors Agyeman and Boone.

The time is ripe to explore and develop these new sorts of commons, which can open the door for new types of social collaboration and solidarity in fighting racism and building flexible yet strong post-capitalist institutions.