David Bollier

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view.

Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships. As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons. In their artistry, musicians and performers must learn to see their creative talents as gifts, something they must share without expectation or guarantee of return, but invariably important benefits materialize – inspiration, creative mastery, a sense of belonging – that manifests as if by grace. 

These ideas had obvious value when I began exploring the commons in the late 1990s. Hyde cites many examples in all sorts of unexpected realms of how gift exchange animates a gentle reciprocity and mutual benefits – blood banks and organ donation systems, Indigenous culture and countless artistic contexts. The generativity of gift-exchange has an almost mysterious aura and spiritual dimensions, as ratified numerous fairy tales affirm. 

After being so influenced by The Gift in my younger day, I recently asked Hyde to join me for a conversation on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #70). I wanted to see how his and my perspectives of gift economies and commons may have evolved over the years, and what topics may be in his field of vision today. (One is AI.)

We also spoke about his classic 2010 book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, which explores how creativity and culture have always functioned as commons. The US Founding Fathers recognized the importance of freely available knowledge and creative works in the late 1700s, for example. Hyde spent an entire chapter in the book describing how Benjamin Franklin – otherwise celebrated as a commercially minded individualist and entrepreneur -- is more accurately called a “founding pirate” for insisting that the free flow of ideas and inventions should override expansive patents and copyrights.

This is the fourth section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining section will be published tomorrow. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here. Previous sections appeared in sequence immediately before this one, at these links: Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning; 2. Commons as Relational Provisioning and Governance; and 3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative. 

4. Toward Socio-ecological Markets

If bioregions are going to become more economically self-reliant and culturally self-directed, they must be able to insulate themselves from the neocolonial workings of global finance and markets. This means that bioregions must be able to assert their own investment priorities and become more self-reliant by intensifying their intra-regional commerce. Their basic challenge is to fend off outside commercial control and extraction (while obviously continuing many commercial dealings) so that the regional economy can benefit from the “multiplier effect” of locally circulated money while ensuring strong ecological stewardship and regional identity and culture. 

Without some deliberate strategies for consolidating market activity within bioregions – making enterprises more interdependent and regionally focused – the priorities of capitalist businesses and global capital will override regional eco-stewardship and self-determination. Attempts to build a coherent regional economy and identity will be subordinated to “free market” imperatives and everything they privilege

It is impossible to prescribe a single strategic template for addressing these issues, however. An agenda this broad, ambitious, and long-term will necessarily vary from one bioregion to another. That said, in conjunction with commons, bioregional market structures and strategies could prod commerce to become more place-committed and socially embedded. These bioregional strategies include:  

A.  Community-designed infrastructures for bioregional production. Community participation in creating and managing small, shared infrastructures can be catalytic for the bioregional economy in general (commercial, commons-based, social, ecological). Shared bioregional infrastructures can reduce overhead, transport, and retail costs. It can make essential services like WiFi access, solar energy, water systems, grain milling, information-sharing, and databases -- more accessible and shareable, all while strengthening social cohesion and bioregional identity.

B.  Inalienable shared assets. Assuring that major bioregional assets like arable land, groundwater, housing, forests, and other “natural assets” remain inalienable – off-limits in perpetuity to private purchase – makes a bioregion more stable and secure. It prevents companies and private equity funds from acquiring essential infrastructure through which they would extract exorbitant rents, siphoning money away from the bioregion. Keeping shared assets inalienable also addresses social inequity by making essential equity assets free or lower-cost, and available in perpetuity. For example, groups like Agrarian Trust (US) and Terre de Liens (France) rely on community land trusts to make land inalienable and stewarded as commons, which has all sorts of salutary effects: farmland for a younger generation of farmers, reduced equity costs that enable organic, local agriculture, and meaningful long-term employment for local residents.

This is the second section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining three sections of the essay will be published in the remaining days of this week. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here. 

2.  Commoning as Relational Provisioning and Governance 

Commoning plays a crucial role in the implementation of bioregional action – and relationalized finance – because it is a proven set of social practices and organizational forms for bringing people together into shared purpose. At their core, commons are vehicles for collaboration and peer governance that are capable of limiting or neutralizing capitalist domination and control. As described in Bollier and Helfrich’s book Free, Fair and Alive, there are recurrent patterns of commoning by which commoners successfully shape the terms of their own governance, provisioning, and allocation of benefits.[6]

Commons are not a new phenomenon; they have been a consistent, productive presence throughout history. Indeed, an estimated two billion people worldwide, operating outside of the market system without private property rights or money, meet their needs through commoning, according to the International Association for the Study of the Commons. This activity can be seen in commons for stewarding land, coastal fisheries, community forests, farmland, water systems, and regional food webs. 

Commoning also manifests in a growing international Commonsverse of projects in diverse modern contexts. Urban commoners use public spaces and buildings, mutual aid networks, alternative currencies, peer-savings clubs, timebanking, and urban agriculture to meet needs. Digital commoners have developed a vast oeuvre of shareable software code, network infrastructures and protocols, Fab Labs and hackerspaces, platform cooperatives, shareable content using Creative Commons licenses, open-access scholarly journals and websites, and open educational resources (curricula, syllabi, videos). The practices of commoning can also be seen in co-operatives, informal care commons, co-housing, and arts and culture collaboratives.[7]

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.