Many are quick to identify structural faults in our current systems, but few manage to advance a novel alternative. David Bollier makes a case for the insurgent potential of the commons for re-imagining the capitalist political economy, state power, our social relations and hierarchies, our relations with the Earth, and our inner lives.
It's fair to say that so many grand narratives of our time – about citizenship, freedom, property rights, economic growth, and theories of value – have been called into question these days. Existing institutions and categories of thought aren't working so well.
On the one hand, few people want to talk about structural change and necessary alternatives lest it open a Pandora's Box of monsters and chaos. On the other hand, as we move more deeply into the danger zones of climate change, authoritarian nationalism, savage precarity, inequality, and institutional breakdown, we have little choice. We need to abandon some settled habits. We desperately need to find a new North Star for building a more stable, wholesome order.
In this article, I introduce the idea of the commons – as rediscovered in its modern form – and suggest its enormous potential for re-imagining the capitalist political economy, state power, our social relations and hierarchies, our relations with the Earth, and our inner lives. To be sure, this is a daunting ambition and long-term project. We not only have to develop some very different social logics and institutional forms while entrenched in a problematic system. We also have to change ourselves. We have to find ways to overcome the unresolved traumas of capitalism, colonialism, and centralized state power whose norms we have internalized or repressed.
Commons are systems of shared wealth managed through bottom-up participation and peer-organized rules, with an accent on fairness and long-term stability. Examples range from open source software communities and agroecology to mutual aid networks and Indigenous cultures, and many others, as described below.
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Despite divergent priorities, state and market are utterly symbiotic – enough that it makes sense to speak about the market/state system. It is this regime to which the commons offers an alternative vision.
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Most commons today are dismissed as too small-scale, local and cash-poor to be significant. To the mainstream, they appear to be archaic oddities. Respectable opinion assumes that the market and state are the only two serious regimes for "getting things done." There is the “private sector” and the “public sector,” and not much else really matters.
Yet this is a specious debate or at least very narrow framing of our problems. Market and state both celebrate economic growth and are deeply allied (with different roles) in promoting a liberal political and economic order. The state wants unfettered markets to generate growth, tax revenues, and social mobility for its citizens, while corporations and investors want the state to provide stable governance, legal privileges and subsidies for business, and the cleanup after financial crashes, ecological catastrophes, market abuses, and other "market externalities."
Despite divergent priorities, state and market are utterly symbiotic – enough that it makes sense to speak about the market/state system. It is this regime to which the commons offers an alternative vision.
24th July 2023
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