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A recurrent problem for any successful digital commons is the temptation to privatize and monetize the value generated by it.  Once enough value has been created (impressive web traffic, cool software, a repository of information), the people in charge inevitably get to thinking, “Hey, this could be worth a lot of money!”  And so begins the insider-driven enclosure of an informal commons, usually cloaked in soothing rationalizations.

The latest example is CouchSurfing’s lunge toward the marketplace.  CouchSurfing is an international gift economy that lets people find a free “couch” to sleep on in more than 81,000 cities around the world.  Begun in 2003, the website has always prided itself on being a self-organized, tightly knit and trusting community for authentic cultural encounters and generous hospitality.  It has been the deliberate antithesis of crass tourism and commercial travel.  Travelers are actually prohibited from paying their hosts because the whole enterprise is meant to foster meaningful social encounters.  The whole enterprise has been run as a community, not as a business enterprise.  (I blogged about CouchSurfing here in 2010.)

Imagine the shock and dismay of many CouchSurfers to learn that “their” website is now a for-profit corporation that recently raised $7.6 million from Benchmark venture capital and the Omidyar Network.  The official reason given is that CouchSurfing needs to hire ten top-notch programmers to assure that the website can stay current and compete with a number of for-profit travel/hospitality sites that have arisen, such as Tripping.com, AirBnB and OneFineStay.com.  To its credit, CouchSurfing “owners” have filed to become a “B Corporation,” which legally allows to pursue mission-oriented goals as well as financial ones.

The following remarks are excerpted from a talk that I gave at the Vis Green Academy in Croatia, on August 25, dealing with the commons and its potential to remake cities and city life. My interview on the commons (in Croatian translation) with the Croatian environmental magazine H-Alter.org can be found here.

I have been asked to address what the commons might have to say about urban spaces and urban life.  The short answer is, a lot!

First, the language of the commons helps us assert a moral entitlement to public spaces again.  It lets us challenge the unholy alliance of politicians, developers and professional architects and planners, and insist that city spaces serve our needs as ordinary people.  This means, first of all, that commercial considerations cannot crowd out vital common purposes – as we see when the market or authoritarians take over.

I like how Pulska Grupa, a group of architects and urban planners from Pula, Croatia, put it in their Kommunal Urbanism Social Charter.  They write:  

“We imagine city as a collective space which belongs to all those who live in it, who have the right to find there the conditions for their political, social, economic and ecological fulfillment at the same time assuming duties of solidarity.  This concept of the city is blocked by capitalist dialectic based on difference in public and private good.  From these two poles State and Market emerge as the only two subjects.  We want to escape this dialectic, not to focus on eventually “third subject,” but on a group of collective subjectivities and the commons that they produce.”

One of the treats at the Vis Green Academy in Croatia last week was seeing an exhibit of photographs by Marina Kelava, of Bjelovar, Croatia, who works as a journalist and photojournalist for Croatian Internet magazine H-Alter.org, which focuses mainly on environmental issues.  The exhibit included a number of photos documenting various enclosures of the commons in Croatia as well as photos taken while covering large international events, from the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the World Social Forum to the beginning of Radovan Karadzic’s trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. 

Kelava graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb, with a degree in journalism.  A larger collection of her photos can be seen on Facebook at Marina Kelava Photography. 

I met Marina when she interviewed me for H-Alter.org.  Then I saw her photos on the wall and was impressed by their power in depicting the personal, social and emotional dimensions of commoning, the social practices of defending and celebrating a community's shared wealth.  The photos are simultaneously political and human, which is not always an easy thing to combine in rich, subtle ways.  Kelava's photos do.

View from the untouched hill of Srdj above Dubrovnik, Croatia, where a huge golf project is planned and the civil initiative "Srdj is Ours" is fighting against it.

To my readers -- my apologies for my infrequent posts over recent weeks.  I’ve been overwhelmed with a writing deadline on my Commons Law Project, happily sidetracked by a vacation, and attending a conference.  But I promise to be posting more frequently in coming weeks and months.

My visit to the Vis Green Academy in Croatia last week taught me more about the transnational scourge of enclosure and the potential of the commons as a lingua franca for resistance.  The occasion was a major gathering of 200-plus Green Party activists and elected officials throughout eastern Europe, but especially Croatia.  Held on the lovely island of Vis, a former Yugoslavian military base until 1992, the gathering was entitled, “The Crisis of Political Imagination – and the Transformation of Green Politics."

The recurrent pattern of enclosure in Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Herezogovina and other parts of the region is commercial development of urban public spaces and government collusion with speculators and developers in giving away prime coastal real estate.  Corruption is rife.  Political transparency is rare.  Civil society is weak.

One of the most penetrating essays on the commons that I have encountered in the last few years was published this year by Italian comparative law professor Ugo Mattei, who teaches at the International University College of Turin (Italy) and the University of California, Hastings College of Law.  Professor Mattei deals with a topic that gets very little attention – how the commons relates to the State and Market – and does so in the broadest philosophical scope imaginable and with great sophistication.

So far as I can tell, Mattei’s essay, “The State, the Market, and Some Preliminary Question about the Commons,” (in English and French) written this year, has not been published in any scholarly journal.  This is not entirely surprising:  the short essay is too cutting-edge for in its theorizing, and the commons itself elicits limited interest in mainstream academic disciplines beyond the ritualistic flogging of Hardin’s “tragedy” essay.

Professor Mattei starts by pointing out how the categories of “public” and “private” impoverish the possibilities of modern political life.  The former is seen as the realm of the State and citizens, and the latter is the realm of the market and private property.  All of politics is framed by this axis, casting us as “for” or “against” the Market or the State, respectively.  But the very idea of “public vs. private” is, as Mattei puts it, “a distinction without a difference,” one that furthermore shuts down other ways of being, knowing and seeking change. 

I gave the following talk at the Caux Forum for Human Security in Montreux, Switzerland, on July 13, 2011. 

The commons is, at its core, a very old – and a very new, recently rediscovered – system of governance for managing resources.  It has deep roots in history as a system of self-provisioning and mutual support.  It is also a way of being a human being that goes beyond the selfish, rational, utility-maximizing model of homo economicus that economists say we are.  The commons presumes that humans are more complex, and that more holistic, humane types of human behavior can be “designed into” our governance institutions. 

In its largest sense, the commons is about stewardship of the things that we own in common as human beings.  It’s about ensuring that we protect them and pass them on, undiminished, to future generations. 

Let me add, the commons is also a growing trans-national movement that manifests itself in many different ways.  The commons extends from cyberspace to the many commons of agro-ecological knowledge managed by indigenous peoples.  It reaches from the world’s city squares and parks that are the cradles of community, to the vast repositories of information and creative works that must be shared if they are to be kept alive.

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.

Kevin Hansen has released a twenty-minute trailer – really, more of an excerpt or preview – to his new film, Common Healing, which surveys the commons in a variety of international settings.  The film contains some beautiful, inspiring vignettes, and is a great introduction to the commons.

Hansen has traveled the world capturing some wonderful images of working commons and the people who rely upon them.  There is the Amazon Theatre Plaza in Manaus, Brazil, a gorgeous urban space in which people carry out their community life; the Gulf Coast off of Louisiana, which was decimated by the BP oil spill at the expense of shrimp and fishing fleets; and the climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

Hansen also traveled to the Internatiional Commons Conference in Berlin last November, where he filmed a number of commons advocates describing various enclosures and explaining why and how the commons is important.  Distilling some of the lessons from his travels, Hansen has prepared a short statement, “Twelve Benefits of a Commons-Based Approach,” which is included on the Vimeo website for the film.  Here’s his list:

One: A commons approach is actionable now. It can resolve stalled situations by providing new opportunities for movement. A commons framing does not require government approval as a prerequisite. Two: A commons approach is declarative. By invoking action via a declaration, it redefines the entire situation on commons terms. The striking act of declaring a new sovereignty over a commons could garner wide interest.

For those of you who read French, a terrific new collection of 30 essays about the commons of knowledge has just been published.  Libres Savoirs:  les biens communs de la connaissance, edited by the French organization Vecam, features essays from authors around the world writing about the knowledge commons.  The pieces focus on educational resources, open source software, open access publishing, the patenting of seeds, health, the commons as a movement, and many other topics. 

Among the authors: Charlotte Hess, Prabir Purkayastha & Amit Sengupta, Jean-Claude Guédon, Philippe Aigrain, Peter Linebaugh, Michel Bauwens, Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam & Barbara Kirsop, Gaëlle Krikorian, Madhavi Sunder & Anupam Chander, Xuan Li, Claire Brossaud…and many others.

Libres Savoirs is the first such book on the subject published in France, and is available at the online bookstore of C&F editions.  The organization that edited the book and provided French translations, as needed, is Vecam, a group dedicated to helping citizens understand the economic and political implications of the new knowledge commons.  A hearty salute to Valérie Peugeot, Frédéric Sultan, Hervé Le Crosnier and Nicolas Taffin for their role in pulling this volume together!  It is likely to spread awareness of the commons in France.

Some fascinating commons-animated political undercurrents are starting to surface in Ireland and Spain, two of the “troubled” nations of the Eurozone.  (I will focus on Ireland today and Spain later this week.)  In Ireland, a new all-Ireland political federation, Fís Nua hopes to shake things up.  Its self-professed goal is “to bring together, under one umbrella, all those disaffected with the corruption in politics and government and who feel that they have been left without a voice within the political arena in Ireland.”  (A tip o the hat to Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation blog for this news.)

Fís Nua, a registered political party, wants to open up a new sort of political conversation and agenda.  The catalyst for the movement is the systemic ripoff of the Irish people in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.  As the Fís Nua website puts it: 

We believe that up to 90 billion Euro of our tax money that is presently being used to ‘bail out’ or pay for the corruption of politicians and banking officials is the greatest crime in Irish history, one that we are paying for with a collapsed economy, soaring unemployment, diminishing social facilities and a scarred environmental and cultural landscape.  We believe that this money belongs to the Irish people and it should be devoted to dealing with our present crisis rather than guaranteeing the profits of criminal developers, bankers and corrupt politicians.

As set forth in a bracing manifesto, Fís Nua seeks to draw upon the work of social justice, ecology and anti-corruption constituencies “with the intent of breaking the mould in Irish politics.”  The party’s manifesto is comprehensive, thoughtful and well-worth reading.  But what I found especially exciting were Items #6 and #7 in the party’s “Ecological Economics” platform: