David Bollier

The following is an adaptation of my notes for my talk at the Occupy Wall Street “Making Worlds” conference on February 16-18, 2012. 

I am so pleased that the Occupy and Commons movements are finding each other and starting a new conversation.  Occupy is an incredible force for change.  It has a bracing vision, a deeply principled philosophy, and an independent, risk-taking spirit that is unusual in American political life.  There are many challenges for Occupy, however, as it tries to imagine new ways to move forward and grow.  I’d like to suggest how the commons framing and language may be strategically important by surveying the international scene of commons activism, which is remarkably robust.  There is a lot is going on -- but I won’t presume to be comprehensive; my apologies for any significant omissions.  

Let me start by giving a brief speculation about why people from so many backgrounds are embracing the commons.  First of all, it is a way for people to assert the integrity of their existing communities, or to try to reclaim that integrity.  The commons also provides a way to assert a moral relationship to certain resources and people that are endangered by market forces.  It’s a way of saying, “That _________  (water, air, software code, cultural tradition) belongs to me.  It is part of my life and identity.”

Many people are embracing the commons, too, because it provides a powerful critique of neoliberal capitalism.  But it is much more than that.  It is a pro-active set of alternatives that work.  And therefore it provides a positive, constructive scaffolding for practical alternatives to the prevailing market economy and corrupt political process.  But the commons is still more than this.  It is not just a policy critique or political philosophy, but equally a distinctive worldview, language and social ethic.

All of this means that the commons can give us a vision of a new world.  And in this respect, the commons is really about building a new vocabulary.  For example, what neoliberal capitalism generally calls “progress,” we would call “enclosure.”  People are starting to understand that market forces do not necessarily represent progress, but rather dispossession and destruction.   So-called economic development is more about environmental destruction than “progress.”

Here’s something that any student or academic can do to promote the free flow of scientific and scholarly inquiry:  pressure your college or university to sign the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.  It’s a statement of solidarity among institutions of higher learning to promote open-access publishing. 

In the more specific language of the Compact, universities commit to “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”

This imperative is growing stronger every day now that publishers are trying to roll back the existing open-access rules for federally funded research.  Under the Research Works Act, introduced in December, the federal government could not require open access rules for the research it funds.  In other words, highly lucrative commercial journal publishers would have a protected market for taxpayer-subsidized research for which it would hold the copyrights.  A sweet deal!

Open access is getting a lot more attention these days now that more than 5,700 researchers are calling for a boycott of Elsevier, one of the leading publishers of scientific journals.  It started when mathematician Timothy Gowers of Cambridge University announced that he would no longer have anything to do with Elsevier-publisher journals; he would neither submit articles or act as a referee or editor for them.  Soon the boycott had spread. 

The Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro this June will be a major event in the world’s ecological history.  The event, officially the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, will provide an opportunity for the world’s nation’s to take stock of what has happened to the environment since an earlier, landmark conference in Rio in 1992 – climate change, loss of biodiversity, species extinctions, desertification, etc., etc. – and to plot ambitious strategies to save the planet in the coming decades. 

But don’t hold your breath.  The world’s governments are not likely to come up with anything significant.  The G-20 nations, which have been described as the “executive board of the world,” have little interest in bold political and institutional reform.  That would only disrupt the desperate search for economic growth.  An open, candid inquiry into the growth economy, consumerism and the finite carrying capacity of Earth’s biophysical systems would be far too politically explosive.  It is far easier to talk about a “green economy,” as if greater efficiencies alone will save the planet. 

The real goal of governments at Rio+20 will be to make it look as if they are doing something significant for the environment.  No one expects that Rio+20 will result in serious, practical government commitments to “sustainable development” (whatever that means), let alone new forms of multilateral governance that could arrest the planet’s ecological decline. 

I am fascinated to watch the constructive ferment about the commons in Italy.  The most stunning sign of this trend (as mentioned in a previous blog post) was the voter referendum on water in June 2011 when Italians overwhelmingly rejected the privatization of their municipal water systems.  The vote was a stinging defeat for political elites and the media, and a surprising confirmation that the commons can be a template for shuffling the ideological deck.  Some 94% of voters, including the center/right, said that water should be controlled by the people, not profit-maximizing corporations.

This signal was apparently heard in Italian political culture.  Luigi de Magistris, a former prosecutor and member of the European Parliament,was elected mayor of Naples in May 2011 on a law and order platform.  He has now become a big-time champion of the commons.  As Anthony Quattrone of the Naples Politics blog puts it, Naples is now a hothouse of “participatory democracy, bottom-up initiatives, and social innovation.” 

De Magistris was an outsider to Neapolitan politics when he won the support of two minor parties for his quest for the mayoralty.  With support from both the far left and conservatives, he improbably defeated the businessman supported Prime Minister Berlusconi.  “Many citizens in Naples feel that the election of Luigi de Magistris is a last-ditch bid to save whatever is left of the glorious capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,” Quattrone wrote.  “Neapolitan disenchantment with politics and total distrust of politicians started with the unification of Italy and has basically persisted to this day.”

The commons as a path forward?  De Magistris thinks so.  He has appointed an “Assessor of Commons” to reclaim public management of the city’s water services.  The Assessor is also charged with identifying new commons-based ways of providing services.  The Mayor has national political ambitions, and talks frankly of the commons as a framework for managing the people’s wealth.