David Bollier

British songwriter and musician Adrian Renton decided it was time to confront the outrages of our time by resurrecting a classic form – folk protest music. Inspired by a 1960s album, “Moving On,” by Scottish musician Nigel Denver, Renton pulled together some friends from Essex, Berkshire and London to re-record some very old English songs. They also wrote some new songs in the same spirit of protest. 

The result is the Wicca Men's recent album Albion’s Darkness, a moving history lesson and contemporary political commentary wrapped in some haunting music. The album draws a straight line from the peasants’ revolt in Essex in 1381 to contemporary struggles against neoliberal capitalism and Boris Johnson. The dynamics of enclosure are brutally similar then and now, even if the means used today – international trade law, intellectual property law -- are sometimes different. 

One song, “Goblins,” is particularly timely even though it was inspired by a Piers Plowman song, “a complex and satirical allegory written by William Langland around 1370, which denounces the greed, falsehood and hypocrisy of the Church and State in England, and also gives the first recorded mention of Robin Hood.” In the new lyrics, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several Cabinet members are ridiculed as “this troupe of clowns, dressed in friars and wise men gowns / Lying to people to profit to themselves and to keep…/ The Bumpkins down.”

In 1979, I remember reading Lewis Hyde’s stunningly wise essay about the social dynamics of gifts in CoEvolution Quarterly -- the offshoot of the Whole Earth Catalog. I was twenty-three, and immediately chased down the book from which the essay was drawn, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. The book has gone on to become a classic, especially revered within artistic and cultural circles, enough to warrant a 25th anniversary edition (with the disappointingly flat new subtitle Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World – and in the current edition, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World).

Hyde’s book explores the strange dynamics of creativity as a mysterious, beautiful gift. While markets try to turn creative works into (private, bounded, inert) property and make money from them, they cannot really understand or explain the origins of creativity; that is an irreducibly human, poetic, and mythological enigma. Yet the culture of giving gifts is profoundly important because it brings people together in enlivening ways and enlarges the human spirit across time and space.

In Hyde’s reckoning, “the gift must always move” – it must constantly circulate if its value is to be sustained. So it is only appropriate that his book has now, finally, inspired a film to showcase the spirit of the gift. The wonderful new documentary film Gift is itself the result of many gifts -- “invisible means of support” from strangers and friends -- given to Canadian director Robin McKenna as she struggled to bring the ethos of the gift to the big screen.

McKenna toiled for years finding and shooting a diverse variety of gift cultures and raising the money to complete the film. And while the theme is inspirational, it is hardly commercially attractive. The film bravely challenges the juggernaut of market culture, showing us that the most valuable things in life are gifts that cannot be monetized; indeed, introducing money into a situation often destroys value and creative vitality.

It’s only a short article with not much analysis or detail, but The Economist magazine seems to have embraced the commons. This is a stunning reversal for a publication that has long regarded Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” fable as gospel and sufficient reason to expand private property rights.

Yet there it was, in the September 12 issue: “The alternatives to privatization and nationalization,” the headline declared, proposing commons as a better way to manage wealth. This was followed by the heretical subheadline: “More public resources could be managed as commons without much loss of efficiency.”

Gobsmacked by this conclusion from a champion of market economics, I immediately pored through the unsigned article to see the reasoning behind the article. Alas, there was not the indepth analysis that I had hoped for. Still, it was encouraging to see The Economist reconsider the English enclosure movement. Instead of celebrating the Industrial Revolution as a necessary Great Leap Forward, the article questioned whether enclosures actually resulted in productivity gains, as frequently claimed by capitalist historians.  

“Privatising shared resources, it turns out, does not always lead to a productivity boom,” writes the author, nor does it “always lead to a productivity boom.” Citing research by Robert Allen of NYU Abu Dhabi, the author notes that English lords did not necessarily reinvest their profits to improve productivity and spur innovation: “Most indulged in fine living; many were debtors rather than savers.” 

The Great Transition Initiative recently hosted one of the most thoughtful, robust exchange of ideas about “localism” that I’ve seen in a long time. It was kicked off by an essay by environmental activist and author Brian Tokar called “Think Globally, Act Locally?” which explored “the promise and pitfalls of localism, theories of ‘glocalism’ and scaling sideways and up.” 

What followed were some probing responses by fourteen notable activists and academics who have thought long and hard about this topic – folks like Richard Heinberg, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Gwendolyn Hallsmith, Meg Holden, Frank Fischer, Arturo Escobar, and me, among others. Tokar gives a final round of responses to all of these commenters.

Tokar’s opening essay calls attention to the resurgence of progressive action at the local level and asks:  “What are the prospects for such locally centered political engagement in a time of rising political polarization and conflict? How can local action help advance personal liberation and social justice? More broadly, how can it further our goals for global transformation?”

His review of the current state of localism is masterfully succinct yet broad-ranging. He rightly cites the great influence of Murray Bookchin and social ecology on the thinking of local activism from Kurdish militants in Syria and Turkey to North Americans and Europeans. Today there is a growing mosaic of local initiatives that is starting to take note of each other's efforts. There is community-based resistance to fracking in dozens of places, rural French workers revolting against regressive tax policies, climate action in hundreds of cities, a “municipalist” movement that is flourishing in cities like Barcelona and Jackson, Mississippi, and the expansion of the Symbiosis research network that is focused on localism.