conferences

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.”

The Occupy movement is beginning to discover the commons, and the result could be a rich and productive collaboration.  This was the lesson that I took from a three-day conference, “Making Worlds:  A Forum on the Commons,” hosted by Occupy Wall Street in Brooklyn this past weekend. Rarely have I seen so many ordinary people from diverse backgrounds embrace the commons idea with such ease and enthusiasm.

There was a certain cosmic appropriateness that this gathering was held in a church meeting hall, the Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  This is the kind of humble, out of the way setting that gave rise to the civil rights movement 50-60 years ago.  Church basements virtually require us to shed our pretensions and credentials, and to get real with each other.  As they say in the Occupy world, this was a “truth event” – an occasion meant to rip a hole in the fabric of mainstream culture and provoke some deep and honest reflection on the truth.    

Can the commons paradigm take us to higher ground?  For the 100-plus people who showed up, the forum was an occasion to consider how the commons can open up new vistas in “alternative economies, open source, education, environment, technology, labor, politics, race, gender, sexuality and more.”  In typical Occupy style, the meetings were run in a fairly loose fashion; it was not always clear who was “running” the meeting because many people intervened at various times. 

And yet things never got out of hand, and I cannot recall a meeting of this size that was richer, more provocative and constructive.  People really listened to each other.  People actively invited everyone to speak out, especially those who were more reticent.  Your professional credentials were a secondary matter.  And if someone got too agitated, people would use calming hand gestures to cool things down. The dialogue was an intelligent, passionate, highly sophisticated and practical dialogue of ordinary American citizens.  Refreshing!  Now if only such traits could somehow be engineered into our mainstream political culture and media!

While it may be tempting to divide the world into two separate camps, market and commons, some of the most interesting territory lies in the spaces in between – namely, in the non-capitalist, commons-based marketplace.  In France, they call it the “social economy” – the segment of commerce serviced by cooperatives and mutual enterprises.  Such companies meet their members’ commercial needs while also trying to address broader social, ecological and democratic concerns.

I spent the past three days at a gathering, the Mont Blanc Meetings (Les Rencontres du Mont-Blanc) dedicated to exploring how economic efficiency and social equity can be balanced through coops, and how the social economy can be a political force for a new vision of society.  The Mont Blanc Meetings have been held every two years since 2005 as a kind of alternative to both Davos (World Economic Forum) and Porto Allegre (World Social Forum).  The Mont Blanc Meetings are the social economy’s attempt to build an international identity, collaborate on practical projects and promote a new political vision. 

I must say, the organizers certainly chose a lovely place to meet – Chamonix, France, a small resort village nestled in the shadow of two majestic mountain ranges that tower more than two miles above the 3,000-foot valley floor.  What a combination:  European charm, good food, scenic beauty and bracing political discussion.

There's some interesting stuff going on over at Shareable.net, the website-salon-activist venue that explores the outer frontiers of DIY, collaborative consumption, urban life, and the commons, all with an accent on innovations being pioneered by hackers, twenty-somethings and urban activists.

The website had a recent series on the history, growth and variety of crowdfunding projects, including a separate look at crowdfunding of social change. The site's tracking of new forms of collaborative consumption – tech-enabled forms of sharing, lending, bartering, and borrowing – is especially good. A classic example is AirBnB, a service that is the paid equivalent of Couchsurfing which lets people earn income by renting extra rooms in their homes to travelers.  Other examples include the operating system Ubuntu, ride-sharing, libraries and online reputation systems.

In a timely gambit planned months ago, Shareable is teaming up with the Parsons Desis Lab to host an event, Share New York, on Nov. 19-20, to discuss the challenges of making it in today's troubled economy. As the site bills it, “SHARE NY is designed to give you the tools, knowledge, and connections to help you create your own future – one that is more affordable, sustainable, and connected within a new economy that thrives on sharing.” The event hopes to bring together students, social innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs who have “created their own jobs and are pioneering new ways of working, living, and creating.”  More info here.

I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp.  In preparation for a talk that I gave at the Caux Forum for Human Security, near Montreux, Switzerland, I came up with a fairly short overview, which I have copied below.  I think it gets to the nub of things. 

The commons is….

• A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity. 

• A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.

I was on a panel, “Artists and Advocacy,” at the National Conference for Media Reform Conference the other week.  The other panelists focused on innovative tactics to gain visibility and influence for pushing a policy agenda.  That's an essential task, but I decided to focus on a different way to advance our interests in a way that is arguably more durable.  Why not build our own commons-based markets and commons infrastructures? 

The existing policy process is systemically corrupted by corporate money and influence, making it a Herculean task for public-interest advocates to prevail.  Just look at the fate of net neutrality to date.  And even if you do prevail, the political winds may blow the other way and erase those gains later. 

Mind you, I am not making an either/or argument, but rather a both/and argument.  We obviously still need to persevere in conventional policy advocacy, particularly on net neutrality.  But with the Internet providing a easily accessible platform for wide-open creativity and the viral amassing of audience/participants, we should find ways to bypass policy altogether and develop our own enterprises to advance our interests.  

The International Commons Conference in Berlin continues to generate some interesting follow-up work.  One of the most engaging is a series of videos shot by Alain Ambrosi of Remix the Commons.  The day after the conference, Alain interviewed ten commoners, including me, asking each of us the same questions, such as "What struck you most about this conference?"and "Would you say there is a commons movement?"

The Remix the Commons project is still a work-in-progress and won’t be fully operational for a few months.  However, in the meantime, two different series of videos are available:  “Define the Commons / Définir le Bien Commun / Definir el Procomùn,” and  “Framing the Commons in Berlin.”  The latter consists of a series of  nine separate interviews with  Silke Helfrich (Germany), Michel Bauwens (Thailand), Julio Lambing (Germany), Beatriz Busaniche (Argentina), Frédéric Sultan (France), Valérie Peugeot (France), Rosa Maria Fernanda (Ecuador), Alberto Acosta (Ecuador), Hervé Le Crosnier (France), and me.  Each interview is conducted in the interviewee’s native language.

The conversations that I encountered at the International Commons Conference in Berlin, Germany, three weeks ago are still reverberating through my mind.  I’m not sure if any of us really knew what a group of 180 self-styled commoners from 34 countries would look like.  But just experiencing the transnational tableau of commoners – each with different voices and passions, but united by a commitment to the idea of the commons – was energizing and inspiring. 

The conference was sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in cooperation with the Commons Strategy Group (of which I am a part) after months of planning, primarily by Silke Helfrich.  The event had an ambitious focus – “Constructing a Commons-Based Policy Platform” – that, in retrospect, was not entirely achieved.  There were just too many commoners meeting each other for the first time, each coming from different intellectual and cultural traditions, with no lingua franca or shared agenda yet.  We are still learning who were are, how we think and our aspirations for the commons.  (It was quite obvious, however, how we feel.)

The conference's most significant achievement may have been the in-person convergence of so many committed commoners -- and the many new relationships and collaborations that have been spawned.  And even if the framing of the conference was ambitious, it was precisely what we need to be talking about.