David Bollier

As market economies become more expensive and predatory, Stephanie Rearick is showing that it’s entirely possible to meet people’s needs effectively through care and cooperation, through a kind of alternative social economy. 

For more than twenty years, Rearick has championed mutual aid and cooperative economics through such projects as the Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative and the Dane County TimeBank, both of which she founded. Rearick also works internationally through Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks, a global network of networks dedicated to building mutual aid economy. 

Rearick is keenly aware of the pressures that the formal economy exerts on people. Government budget cutbacks, corporate price gouging, engineered dependencies, trade tariffs, and inflation all contribute to our precarity.  

This state of affairs has quickened interest in mutual aid as a practical strategy. Rearick reports that a recent online webinar on mutual aid hosted by the resistance group Indivisible attracted some 5,000 attendees. 

It’s almost as if thinking big about different social logics has become fashionable – or alternatively, as a serious survival strategy. “I often say that the best part of my job is helping people see we can afford to dream better,” Rearick told Shareable.net. 

To learn more, I recently interviewed Stephanie Rearick on my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #69). It was a brisk immersion in the fiercely resourceful, committed world of mutual aid and cooperative economics that works at local, regional, and international levels.

Mutual aid prioritizes social cooperation and then dreams about how to develop better organized systems to encourage it. To illustrate its priorities, Rearick’s website features a “pyramid of abundance” -- an inverted pyramid that lists several tiers of activities for meeting needs. 

I always find it invigorating to have interviewers ask me about the commons. Their questions force me to see the commons from other perspectives and raise still other questions. So if you enjoy the back-and-forth of a conversation, here are five recent interviews that I've had with podcasters and the editor of a British magazine. Our discussions focused on the governance of online collaboration, the future of education design, and how commons can speak to environmental challenges. 

Revolution.Social, with Rabble Evan Henshaw-Plath. Episode #13, posted October 8. “The commons and why open platforms aren’t enough.” Rabble is a leading activist programmer and expert on social media focused on the governance design of digital platforms to maximize commoning. He previewed this episode saying: “When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that's a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons.” 

Future Learning Design podcast, with Tim Logan.  A social change / institutional design podcast. Posted November 3; 46 minutes. Tim Logan writes: “For the last 250 years we've gotten used to compulsory standardised schooling being provided at scale by either the state, as public government schools, or by the market, as private fee-paying schools. I'm fascinated by the question of what alternatives there might be to this binary choice. Home-schooling networks, 

What might the world look like if climate change is not stopped? What if societies refuse to, or cannot rein in capitalism and its relentless growth and exploitation of nature? Chris Smaje, a writer and farmer in southwest England, offers some intelligent speculation in his recently published book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft.  

Smaje is not a doomer or survivalist, nor given to lurid prophesy. His book is a serious analysis of current macro-political and social trends and how they might play out in everyday life. He extrapolates from existing trends -- the rising costs of fossil fuels, food, and transport, the proliferation of droughts, floods, and wildfires, etc. – to sketch a vision of a post-capitalist, climate-disrupted world that is already arriving. 

“What the mainstream refuses to acknowledge,” Smaje writes, “is that the dance between energy supply and overshoot (or climate change) poses an unprecedented challenge to the very existence of contemporary urban society, particularly large and mega-cities.” 

He sees the “pipelines” of commerce from the peripheries (rural and Global South regions) to the centers of capitalism (the West and its cities) breaking down or at least becoming much more expensive. All this will disrupt the global economy and centralized national governance.

Since ecological collapse is often seen as more imaginable than the end of capitalism, I was curious about Smaje’s scenarios for the future. So I interviewed him on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #67),  and heard a fascinating account of how current trends may play out.

A book tour is a dizzying, whirl-a-gig experience. It catapults an author into a blur of very different podcasts and webinars, classroom talks and conference panels, media interviews and in-person events. 

In my case, I also personally visited a number of cities with passionate commoners, including London, Amsterdam, Brussels, New York City, and hooray, Brattleboro, Vermont. By the end of my tour, mention of the word “commons” made me as talkative as a drunken magpie.

My visits and events were actually a kind of field research for me. I learned a lot about what people know and think about the commons, what initiatives they are already involved with, and what topics need more attention. I also made some new friends and acquaintances along the way.

Despite all this positive energy, I’m happy to report that my book tour has officially ended. It was a five-month sprint that began in mid-March, with the release of the significantly revised, second edition of my 2014 book, Think Like a Commoner. 

A big thanks to New Society Publishers for their confidence in releasing a second edition of the book after eleven years! My apologies if I didn’t make it to your town, but I’m still open to (a few) invitations.