David Bollier

For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common law).  Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources.  Most of these governance traditions deal with natural resources such as farmland, forests, fisheries, water and wild game.  Commons law has existed in many forms, and in many cultures, over millennia.

Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law.  Over the past 200 years, individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners, it has contributed to the destruction of the Earth and its fragile natural systems.

To address this problem, the noted international law and human rights scholar, Professor Burns Weston of the University of Iowa School of Law, and I started the Commons Law Project in 2010.  We wanted to re-imagine the scope of human rights law, validate neglected forms of commons-based ecological governance and reframe the very notion of “the economy” to incorporate non-market sharing and collaboration.

It has been, I concede, an ambitious enterprise.  But we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much.  Indeed, the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years.  Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems – forests, wetlands, fisheries, coral reefs, the atmosphere, the polar zones, and more.

Leave it to the Dutch, who throw away only 3 percent of their municipal waste into landfills, to come up with a socially appealing innovation that does even more to reduce waste:  the neighborhood Repair Cafe!  As described in today’s NYT, volunteers with a talent for fixing things come together several times a month to repair anyone’s broken household items for free.  This includes lamps, irons, suitcases, toasters, coffee makers and even an electric organ on one occasion. 

What began in a theater foyer has now moved to a community center and spawned similar Repair Cafes throughout the Netherlands. The Repair Cafe helps fixers with time on their hands connect with people who don’t have much money or personal skills to repair their broken household items. The whole enterprise saves people money, builds community and reduces gratuitous consumption. 

Reporter Ilvy Nijokiktijien describes how the Repair Cafe idea got its start:

“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.

“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”

Whatever you may say about the marketing firms that help large corporations sell us products, they generally tap into world-class artistic talent.  They also make it their business to track breaking cultural trends aggressively in order to capitalize on them.  How interesting, then, that a New York City design firm, Collins, has produced a gorgeous little book, The Triumph of the Commons:  55 Theses on the Future.  I find it immensely attractive and artful, if conspicuously incomplete.  I also find it fascinating that a respected NYC design firm would have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the commons (at least, digital commons).      

But given the firm’s blue-chip clientele, which includes such corporate giants as Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Sprite, Dove and Microsoft, one must wonder:  Is this the beginning of the corporate cooptation of the commons?  Or merely a sign that the corporate world is starting to realize that it must respond to people’s palpable yearning for the commons?  Another question:  How much daylight exists between a marketing/design firm and its corporate clients, which tend to be more interested in monetizing and enclosing the commons than in defending it? 

Collins is clearly a firm that has a grip on the Zeitgeist.  It describes itself as “a multi-disciplinary design firm specializing in igniting mass collaboration.”  It adds, “The next generation of great brands will emphasize not mass communication but mass collaboration.  That means transforming your brand into a platform where communities discover, make and share new value in cooperation with your company.”  Very astute.

Collins sees this line of thinking as naturally leading to the commons.  The Triumph of the Commons, which it self-published late last year, is an “exquisite corpse,” a method of creating art pioneered by the Surrealists that relies upon the sequential, collective assembly of images or words.  As Wikipedia describes it, an exquisite corpse is made when “each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”  Thus, one artist draws on one quadrant of a piece of paper, then folds it over – and another adds to the drawing without seeing what the first artist already drew.  A third artist follows, and so on.

If you’re in London or nearby, don’t miss the opportunity to hear commons scholar James Quilligan present a twelve-part seminar series, “The Emergence of a Commons-Based Economy,” starting Monday, May 7.  If we’re lucky, there will also be a live webcast of the talks.

You can see the schedule of seminars and register for them here. A fuller description can be found here.  Each talk will focus on a specific topic, starting with “Democratizing the Global and Political Commons.”  It will be followed by talks on the political economy; financial innovation and the commons; property, value and the commons; organizational practice and the commons; among many others.  (See pie chart.)