David Bollier

The Renegade Economist website has a clever and instructive video animation on how banks, corporations and governments use debt to prey upon needy countries and stay on top. As “Billion Dollar Bill,” the superhero banker, candidly explains, “The cheapest, most lethal weapon in the world [is].....spreadsheets!” 

The ingenious tool for consummating enclosures around the world is debt – loans made to impoverished countries with coveted natural resources that can be acquired via corrupt or gullible leaders. It works this way: Bankers and the U.S. Government persuade the countries to put the natural resources in hock in order to finance loans for infrastructure development (with lots skimmed off to the middlemen bankers and politicians, and kudos for "helping" poor countries "develop.").

The loans intensify pressures to monetize nature in order to come up with funds to pay the loans.  Government aid programs then collude with multinational corporations to enclose shared forests, pastures, water and other resources used by commoners.  Land values rise, along with rents, displacing poorer people from their apartments and homes, swelling the ranks of the homeless and "informal sector."  As the Renegade Economist folks put it, "It is not conspiracy -- it's structural economic behavior locked into Western Foreign Policy and therefore the global economy.  It's branded aid but really it's neo-colonialism." 

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Many people don't recognise that the commons is not just a thing – a physical element of nature or a resource like the Internet – but a distinct metaphysics and epistemology that challenges some deeply rooted premises of contemporary politics and policy.  James Quilligan probes this territory with a thoughtful piece in the latest issue of Kosmos magazine. In particular, he explores the “social nature of property”and how its individual, atomistic nature in liberal political philosophy is responsible for “its catastrophic impact on the commons.”

The essay is not a quick read, but it is a provocative and penetrating piece about some of the deeply rooted assumptions that shape our understandings of property, individual identity and how government and public policy should behave.  All such discussions must start with John Locke, the great 17th Century philosopher who created the enduring justifications for property rights.

One of Locke's central ideas is that property is inherently about individual rights of ownership and control, which means the right to exclude others and to ignore the larger social and ecological context of those rights, not to mention future generations. This understanding, in turn, entails an understanding of a human being as a dualistic creature, one who has a sovereign mind and a separate and independent material body.  The mind/body dualism is actually the basis for a larger political theory that assigns property rights to individuals (and not larger collectives) and charges governments with recognizing and enforcing those individual rights.

Is the pendulum swinging to a new vision of what human beings are? For decades the standard narrative of the economics profession has been that a human being is homo economicus, a self-regarding, materialistic creature who is constantly trying to maximize his utility through rational calculation. We all know that this is a caricature, but in the “real world” of markets and politics, it seems functional enough to accept as true. After all, we all know people who are nasty, self-serving and acquisitive.

While everyone has been focused on this aging model, however, a new body of academic literature offering up a new paradigm has been building for the past twenty years or more. It hasn't quite won mainstream acceptance, at least among economists, politicians and the public. But Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler aspires to remedy this problem with his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest. The book is an accessible and thorough overview of the literature of cooperation, as seen through the prism of economics, sociology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and other disciplines.

Scores of scientific studies and countless Internet-based examples are revealing that we humans aren't as irredeemably selfish and socially retrograde as economists make us out to be. In fact, science is telling us that humans appear to be hard-wired to cooperate within consensual social structures, rather than wage an endless competition of individuals against each other. Such findings have far-reaching implications for how public policy, law, regulation, business models and many other social structures should be designed – which is precisely Benkler's point in writing the book. We need to acknowledge our human capacities to work together collaboratively and to design appropriate institutions and policy systems to leverage our innate propensities.

Benkler's previous book, The Wealth of Networks, was an illuminating but dense and lengthy treatise on how digital networks are enabling “commons-based peer production” and markets that are more socially embedded and responsive. In many respects, that book, published by Yale University Press, is quite a contrast to The Penguin and the Leviathan, an anecdote-filled book published by Crown Business and aimed at a lay readership and businesspeople.

A new British publication, Stir, short for Stir to Action, has released its second issue as editor Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh bravely tries to give voice to a new kind of post-liberal, globally aware activist readership.  True to its name, Stir features a number of provocative articles and invigorating interviews with iconoclasts.  If we're lucky, this venture from the edge may actually help assemble a "constituency of unrealistic pragmatists," in the words of George McKay, author of a wonderful piece on on “radical gardening.”

In an interview with author Mckenzie Wark, we learn some of the lessons that the Situationists may have for contemporary political and cultural activism.  The Situationist International “was an extremely marginal avant-garde movement that was formed in 1957 and then dissolved itself in 1972,” Wark noted, describing his new book, The Beach Beneath the Street.  “Why the hell would anybody be interested in this tiny marginal activity? The footprint the Situationists left in political aesthetic culture is vastly greater than their actual numbers. As their leading light, Guy Debord, said ‘all you need is a few trustworthy comrades’.”

That’s a great premise for any movement:  a few trustworthy comrades with the imagination and daring to challenge the narcoleptic conformism of our times.  Even some of the most active activists that I know are half-asleep because they have so internalized the prevailing political paradigm and cultural norms.