As the Commonsverse becomes more robust worldwide, a more urgent question is arising:Can commoners work constructively with the state, and if so, how?
State power tends to have its own narrow ideas about how to get things done – and what governance, law, bureaucratic power, and public participation should look like. Commons open up new possibilities for getting things done, however. They can generate types of value that elude markets and bureaucracy, and offer new ways of knowing and being.
But there’s a catch. It can be tricky and difficult for the state and commons to work together. Each has such different premises about power and worldview. Can they develop some sort of rapprochement?
Torange Khonsari of Public Works Group
One of the more astute commentators on this topic is Torange Khonsari, a professor of architecture and design activism for more than 20 years at London Metropolitan University and other universities. An academic until recently, Khonsari is unusual in focusing on community-driven development projects, especially involving art, performance, and architecture.
Through the nonprofit group she cofounded, the Public Works Group, she instigates bottom-up commoning initiatives while navigating around barriers erected by the state, but sometimes actually facilitated by it.
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 third section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining two sections will be published tomorrow and Saturday. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here.
3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning)
In rethinking how “nature finance” should be structured, the distinctive modes of value-creation in commons and bounded markets are often misunderstood. Standard economics sees market exchange, money and growth as the only significant engines of wealth-creation, a process that finance purports to facilitate. It is therefore difficult for conventional finance to understand that there are many other distinctive species of “value” that ecosystems and organized commoning generate.
The word “value” brings to mind money and markets, but the value generated by nature is quite different in an ontological sense. The bounty brought by rainfall, fertile soil, and biodiversity cannot truly be expressed through quantitative proxies, prices, algorithms, or markets because this “wealth” doesn’t exist in static, objectified forms or essentialist identities. Humans may equate fish with food and trees with lumber, but of course fish and trees play many other ecological roles in sustaining life.[12] The value of living entities subsists within their symbiotic relations – the dense web of interdependencies that generates abundance in a robust, self-sustaining system. This matrix is far more complicated than standard economics or markets can begin to represent.
While it’s possible to see abundance in objectified units (a bushel of apples, a hectare of land), the reality is that this value arises only as part of dynamic, evolving living systems whose actual value eludes quantification and monetization.[13]It may take “thirty leaves to make the apple,” as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, but businesses, fixated on the marketable fruit, have only a narrow, economic self-interest in the leaves, roots, tree trunk, orchard, ecosystem, and weather.
Community Economics Research Network, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International License
Inspired by feminist economic theory, J.K. Gibson-Graham proposed an iceberg image to suggest how much of “the economy” actually subsists outside of formal markets, remaining largely invisible and treated as inconsequential. The behaviors enumerated by the illustration below suggest how much economic work takes place in non-monetized forms, outside of wage labor and production for capitalist markets. These robust circuits of value-creation, often marginalized by standard economics and finance, can be seen in the generativity of living systems with sufficient organization: ecosystems of diverse organisms, agroecological farming, permaculture practices, online communities of collaboration, mutual aid networks, gift economies such as blood banks, scholarly disciplines, and artistic circles, timebanking collectives, and so on. Their contribution to “the economy” is enormous, but it is typically understated or ignored.
Have you noticed how the term “bioregional” is becoming a new eco-buzzword and greenwashing term? At the same time, many ordinary people are genuinely excited about the idea of bioregionalism as a constructive way to focus activism and socioeconomic innovation. Bioregionalism offers a practical, politically accessible space for addressing climate change, social inequality, the eclipse of democracy, out-of-control oligarchs, and capitalist growth.
To try to make sense of the current state and future of bioregionalism, my Amsterdam colleague Natasha Hulst and I decided to pull our thoughts together in a just-completed essay, “Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions.”
Because the piece is more than 13,000 words, I've decided to serialize the essay here, with one new section added every day this week. I am also posting a downloadable PDF of the 27-page document here.Natasha posted the essay on her Substack page as well.
In our piece, we wanted to assess the transformational potential of bioregioning in both a macro-conceptual and applied way. How exactly should bioregional initiatives proceed, and with what theory of change? What role can commons play in actualizing a bioregional transition in the economy? How can the extractive, predatory aspects of capitalism be kept at bay and practices of commoning fortified? What are some of the notable bioregional activities already underway?
Besides exploring these questions, Natasha and I propose an alternative theory of value (to market price), and sketch out various strategies by which (noncapitalist) “socio-ecological markets” might arise and intensify intra-regional commerce.
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.
Stephanie Rearick of Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative
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.
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.
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.
Writer and farmer Chris Smaje
“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.
Isabel Carlisle is a leading figure in bioregional education and action who has a great term for describing the planetary eco- mayhem now underway -- “Gaia on the move.” As climate change intensifies and humankind disrupts ecosystems, Gaia is causing ice caps and glaciers to melt and the atmospheric jet stream to skitter and shift course. The Amazonian forest becoming a net emitter rather than absorber of atmospheric carbon
As these system-changes disrupt local ecosystems, through coastal flooding for example, Carlisle sees cues for how to move forward. The disruptions “reveal where the fragility is,” said Carlisle, and that’s where to focus attention.
“By working into those points of fragility, we think we can flip them around and make them leverage points for change,” she said. “We can start to demonstrate the value of bioregioning and what it is.”
Isabel Carlisle, Director of Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, England
Carlisle founded and now directs the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, England, in 2017. Over the past eight years, she and a modest team have taken a leading role in mobilizing bioregional action at practical, strategic, and policy levels. One sentence nicely captures the group’s mission: “We generate trust through partnership, resource others, lay out pathways for practical action, inspire and demonstrate.”
The Bioregional Learning Center (BLC) is chiefly concerned with improving the resilience of its own regional ecosystem in southwest England. But it has also become an important node in the global network of bioregional activists. BLC hosted a major virtual conference on bioregioning in 2022, which helped re-energize a field of activism that had been somewhat dormant since its heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Why is the commons a useful perspective for thinking about urban design and architecture?
Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues.
"The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism," said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. "Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets."
Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, "they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly." Much of Gruber's work has therefore focused on urban zones where the struggle between capitalism and commons is playing out, with an eye toward learning how commons can prevail, sometimes through commons/public partnerships.
Professor Stefan Gruber
Gruber explores these themes in a course that he teaches, "Commoning in the City," which examines how transitions towards just, regenerative, and self-determined communities in the city might develop, beyond the paradigms of the market and state.
With six co-curators, he has also helped launch a traveling exhibit called An Atlas of Commoning: Spaces of Collective Production,which showcases notable urban commons projects. The Atlas, now on a ten-year international tour, is part of an ongoing visual archive of initiatives that use participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public collaborations to reinvent city life. The Atlas is a collaboration with the German cultural organization ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and ARCH+, a German magazine for architecture and urbanism.
In a few days, the exhibition will have a major opening in Tbilisi, Georgia, a place where "the notion of commons is intertwined with the historical legacies of Soviet collectivism and traditional community practices," and then by rapid urbanization and privatization of public spaces following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary grassroots initiatives have therefore focused on reclaiming shared (non-state) stewardship of communal spaces, cultural heritage, social practices, and the environment.
The ambitious goal of the Atlas of Commoning is "to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of 'us' as a concept." As the book's preface explains:
As human beings, we are both individuals and members of a community at once; we are interconnected, and that interconnection needs to be given expression—we need places that are dedicated to communal life and that we shape together, conscious of our shared responsibility for them, places where community becomes a lived reality.
The author of the preface, Elke aus dem Moore, cites a Hamburg, Germany, project in the 1990s, "Park Fiction," which invited citizens to articulate their wishes for a future park in pictures or words. The initiative became a participatory art project and then a political vehicle for asserting the needs and desires of residents, eventually defeating the plans of privileged commercial interests.
In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #55), I talk with Stefan Gruber about the Atlas of Commoning, special challenges of stewarding commons in cities around the world, and his philosophical approach to the topic.
I delivered the following remarks last week at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, in Oxford, England, on January 5, 2024. It was part of a session in the Oxford Town Hall with the noted British activist-scholar-commoner Guy Standing, entitled, "Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society."
Below is my prepared text. A video can be found here (starts at 3:35 timecode). Guy Standing's excellent talk, reflecting a British perspective and themes from his books, The Blue Commons and The Politics of Time, can be found at the same link (starts at 30:30 timecode). There is audience Q&A with Guy and me following our talks.
Established systems don't welcome fundamentally new ideas – even when they desperately need them, even if people are clamoring for them. Entrenched systems see new ideas and logics as disruptive. They see them as threatening and even incomprehensible.And yet, as Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them."
We're at an impasse today because contemporary institutions keep bringing the same mindset to solving problems that need some fresh and strikingly different approaches. The many problems afflicting agriculture and the food system today are fundamentally similar to those afflicting the rest of society. They are just another theater for rentier capitalism, which relies on market/state collusion, extractivism of nature, and systemic precarity for many ordinary people.
I don't want to denigrate the need for critique because the prevailing market/state system must be properly understood in all its awfulness. But what we most need is creative experimentation in developing a new, more wholesome paradigm. So my remarks will focus on how we can make some ambitious, creative leaps forward, and how the commons – as a discourse, social practice, ethic, and worldview – can be very helpful in meeting this challenge.
Below are slightly edited remarks that I delivered at a a workshop, "Beyond Liberalism: Commons, Constitutionalism and the Common Good," in Berlin, Germany, on May 31, 2023. The event was hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the Heidelberg Law Department at the University of Würzburg, and The New Institute (Hamburg, Germany).
A video version of the talk (with my slides, two formal responses, and audience Q&A) can be found here: https://youtu.be/ckseZNahi84My talk begins at the 5:32 timecode.
The Commonsverse as a Parallel Polis: Opportunities and Challenges
The dialogue provoked by this workshop is timely and necessary because so many of the certitudes of political economy and culture are slowly crumbling before our eyes. It's fair to say that so many grand narratives of our time -- about citizenship, freedom, property rights, economic growth, and theories of value – have been called into question these days. Existing institutions and categories of thought aren't working so well.
On the one hand, few people want to talk about structural change and necessary alternatives lest it open a Pandora's Box of monsters and chaos. On the other hand, as we move more deeply into the danger zones of climate change, authoritarian nationalism, savage precarity and inequality, and institutional breakdown, we have little choice. We need to abandon some settled habits. We desperately need to find a new North Star and a more stable, wholesome order.
Today, I'd like to introduce the idea of the commons to you and suggest its enormous potential for re-imagining so many things – the capitalist political economy, state power, our social relations and hierarchies, our relations with the Earth, our inner lives. To be sure, this is a daunting proposition and a long-term project. We not only have to develop some very different social logics and institutional forms while entrenched in a problematic system. We also have to change ourselves. We have to find ways to overcome the unresolved traumas of capitalism, colonialism, and centralized state power whose norms we have internalized or repressed.
In my remarks, I'd like to suggest that commons and commoning can provide us with the scaffolding to reinvent a vision of the common good. It can help us develop more humane social practices and ethical behaviors at the cellular level, which, as they expand, can help us move beyond a world of capital accumulation, consumerism, and progress-through-growth.
To be sure, most commons today are dismissed as too small-scale, local and cash-poor to be significant. To the mainstream, they appear to be archaic oddities. Respectable opinion assumes that the market and state are the only two serious regimes for "getting things done." There is the “private sector” and the “public sector,” and not much else really matters.
Recent comments