David Bollier

My commons colleague in Germany, Silke Helfrich, has pulled together a succinct, persuasive account of how the commons helps us get beyond the relentless growth imperatives of the contemporary economy.  She presented her ideas two weeks ago at the Attac Congress, “Beyond Growth,” in Berlin.  (A German version of her talk, “Commons Beyond Growth,” is available here.) 

Below is Silke’s penetrating analysis about how the commons can help cultivate practical new models of provisioning without the pathologies of compulsive, unsustainable growth:

Summary

• Commons reduce money-induced growth because they make us more independent of money. The more we produce commons, the less we or the state has to pay for goods.
• Commons reduce population-induced growth because they are associated with a multiplicity of sufficiency strategies which create prosperity by sharing.
• Commons escape the growth compulsion, because all those things that are produced as commons, do not have to be made artificially scarce. And there is no incentive for artificial scarcity because commons are not produced as goods to be exchanged but they foster and maintain social relationships, satisfy needs and solve problems. Directly.

Thus far the vision of the future – but we have not got there yet. In the here and now a lot more must be thought through, discussed and fought for. Therefore, in what follows I will briefly give my reasoning.

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:

I delivered the following remarks on May 11 as part of The Illahee Lecture Series 2011, "Searching for Solutions:  Innovation for the Public Good," in Portland, Oregon.

This evening, I’d like to get innovative about how we think about innovation itself.  The corporate cliché is to “think outside the box.”  That is such an inside-the-box way of thinking!  I say let’s get rid of the box!  Tonight I want to talk about a new vector of innovation:  how we’re going to manage our dwindling, finite natural resources and arrest the pathological growth imperatives of our economy while recovering a more sane, socially constructive way of life for human beings.  Now there’s a radical innovation challenge!

The subtext of most innovation-talk these days is efficiency and profitability.  Innovation is essentially the bigger-better-faster ethic – the next super-computer or bio-engineered cow or Segue scooter.  But the grim reality is that there are a whole class of societal problems that are not likely to become market opportunities,ever. 

Worse, conventional markets, in the course of creating new wealth, are generating all sorts of illth, in John Ruskin’s phrase – cost, unintended byproducts that must be put on the ledger sheet in any calculation of our supposed wealth.  Our market economy is generating whole new classes of illth such as  global warming, dying coral reefs, biodiversity loss and species extinctions.

In the latest American Prospect, Harold Meyerson tells a good morality tale about how certain types of businesses can succeed only if managed as public trusts, if only in spirit.  He documents the ignominious decline of the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Dodgers after each was taken over by men "so venal, cynical, incompetent, and egomaniacal that they gutted them in just a couple of years.”  Both Sam Zell (who acquired the Times after buying the Tribune Company) and Frank McCourt (a Boston parking lot mogul) treated the revered corporate institutions that they bought as personal piggybanks.  The public was a mere afterthought -- helpless dependents on seemingly impregnable monopolies.

While the idea of running one’s business as a public trust has historically gotten a lot of lip service, at least in the newspaper business, today the barbarians who pass as CEOs and investors virtually go out of their way to flaunt their coarse, selfish personalities.  The schadenfreude at the fall of Zell and McCourt is therefore deeply satisfying.  Writes Meyerson:

Zell installed talk-radio executives who knew nothing about newspapers. He derided the editorial staff at the Timesand the Tribfor not producing the kind of copy that would turn the industry's fortunes around, and made clear that editors and reporters concerned with editorial autonomy and quality journalism were elitists who were no longer to be indulged. He instituted layoff after layoff, so that the Times, which had had an editorial staff of 1,200 in 2000, saw its ranks reduced to roughly 500 today. A little more than a year after his purchase, with the recession clobbering revenues and Zell's executives still clueless about how to run a newspaper, Tribune entered bankruptcy proceedings, where it remains mired to this day.