David Bollier

How does commons activism differ from conventional political action, and how might it transform the very practice of democracy and governance?  In a must-read essay, Tommaso Fattori explains how several voter referenda in Italy on June 12 and 13, 2011 validated the commons.  He describes how the votes – two to prevent privatization of water management – represent a stunning repudiation of the market/state duopoly and its anti-democratic “public/private partnerships” to carve up the commons.

Fattori's essay is called “A CounterStrike Strategy: Fluid Democracy – Story of the Italian Water Revolution”; it originally appeared in the Rome-based review Transform! in September 2011. (I located the article on the website for Social Network Unionism, a group dedicated to “a peer to peer, transnational commons, and hyperempowered labour class movement.” Thanks for the alert, Michel Bauwens!)

The June referenda were a shock to the Italian political and corporate establishment because voters resoundingly rejected laws that privatized water, supported nuclear power and granted special legal immunity to the Prime Minister and other government officials. It bears noting that Italian referenda can only repeal existing laws that are disliked; they cannot write new ones. That makes the results even more remarkable. With more then 57% of the eligible Italians voting, each of the four referenda received 94% or more of the vote!

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A beloved place in my town is Amethyst Brook, a gorgeous wooded area with majestic stands of trees, a cheerful, babbling brook and a few open fields.  This patch of natural beauty is the theater in which various townspeople walk their dogs, socialize before and after work, garden, exercise and commune with nature.

The place is a classic mixed-use commons. In the summer, the community garden plots sprout all sorts of vegetables and sunflowers. There are occasional convoys of runners. Dog walkers revel in being able to let their dogs off-leash. There are bird-watchers. Kids sometimes wade in the brook. I once encountered a bearded college student playing a harp under the canopy of the trees, next to the brook. Fantastic!

But there are also tensions between the commons and private landowners, leaseholders and among the commoners themselves. On an open field in the park, a private farmer leases land from the town to grow vegetables. But he wants to expand. Should that be allowed? A private landowner on an adjacent swatch of land lets the public use his forest land for hiking – wonderful! – but he has also been known to dump farm animal carcasses on his land, which lets a truly foul odor waft throughout the area.  Don't nuisance laws cover this sort of thing? Yes, but he could well decide that hikers are “nuisances” that intrude on his private property.

Here are two great video commentaries on our screwed-up consumerist society.  The first, by Charles Veitch of the Love Police, is a hilarious performance art piece filmed at London's Canary Wharf.  A man with a megaphone (Veitch) assures passersby that "Everything that you read in the media is true," and "If you don't have a job, you are a worthless human being!"  What might come off as a crank protester haranguing a crowd is in fact an amusing, entertaining commentary that "breaks the fourth wall" of everyday street life.

Another video worth watching is Annie Leonard's new release, "The Story of Broke:  Why There Is Still Plenty of Money to Build a Better Future."  Leonard is famous for her viral smash, "The Story of Stuff."  In the same spirit, "The Story of Broke" simplifies a problem that is deliberately made more complicated than it needs to be, masking the solutions that will help the 99%.  The video makes the basic point: 

"The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gases and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars."  

Leonard urges "government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better."

An illuminating, inspirational video by a master of plain talk.

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One of the great achievements of the Occupy Wall Street movement, after only six weeks of protest, has been its unmasking of some deeply entrenched illusions about our rights of free speech, access to public spaces and the meaning of democracy. OWS has done this not with words alone (truth-telling tends to be consigned to the fringes of respectable opinion), but through mostly peaceful public confrontations of Power. 

As we saw in the Sixties, it takes such direct confrontations to force Power to reveal ugly truths that otherwise must be masked.  In the case of the Occupy protests, it is the truth that public spaces do not really belong to the citizenry; that private powers can curb dissent through procedural pretexts notwithstanding the First Amendment; and that democratic accountability as now practiced in the American empire is mostly a charade.

When an outburst of real democracy emerges, as it has in hundreds of Occupy cities, it sends shockwaves of fear throughout the political establishment and business – because real democracy advances a whole set of interests that are anathema to the elite consensus and pseudo-democracy that now prevails. 

Blogger Namiza Naqvi makes some penetrating points about these issues in a fascinating post about the re-privatization of public spaces.  Naqvi writes:

"An overarching issue is the public versus private ownership in everything from police to politicians to parks to property all over the planet in its cities and its villages. Whether it is a military or it is police the purpose seems to be to serve this end of privatization.

"The reaction by the law enforcement agencies to the [Occupy] protests have proven that people protesting the occupation or privatization of public property are viewed as criminals by the privately owned 21st century state..... In the eleventh hour of the 21st century in Times Square: I watched the police pushing the barricades even further in on the sidewalk cramming the demonstrators even further on an already narrow space and creating a potential crisis if the crowd got jammed in and someone fell or a stampede broke out because of all the police on horseback. The police steadily pushed back the barricades and diminished the space where protesters could stand and it seemed that the cops by doing this were forcing the crowds to overflow onto the street and creating the pretense for arresting people for not remaining within the designated area for the protests.  As I watched this situation at Time Square I thought of all the fences and blockades and barricades in other parts of the world where people are squeezed off of their lands—their homelands—their homes razed to the ground and bulldozed turned into private properties---while the people are forced into dangerous environments—flood basins or coastlands or unwelcoming hostile cities in their own or foreign countries—in the path of disaster—or into cities where they have no chance of incomes—living in ghettos—begging, living on the streets homeless—only to be further abused and harassed by police and militaries.