Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Because most political, social and working life is enclosed, people falsely conclude that our struggle must be to improve those enclosures – not to step gently into the wood. That choice, to weave improvements into the wires, is the course taken by most of the liberal left. It endorses enclosure.
What if community development was actually shaped by all members of the community, not just the most privileged and most likely to profit?
The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is an impressive burgeoning commons legal institution that’s aimed at the decommodification of housing.
I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. Here is a fairly short overview, which I think gets to the nub of things.
An enclosure is no less than right to amorality, freed from the ancient obligations of the common. It follows that our task is to evacuate enclosures and reclaim the common.
Hence the commons, by growth, can reduce its need for interaction with the circuit of capital via the cash nexus, and incorporate more and more basic functions of life into itself. The commons are constrained by the fact that they coexist with capital and the state.
These three commons legal institutions exemplifies, in different ways, a central feature of the commons as described in the previous piece: namely, decommodifying access to a common good by taking homes permanently off of the speculative market
We need something like the guilds in the Middle Ages. We need leagues of cities. We need leagues of co-ops. In Fukushima you can’t just say, “I’m going to have a fishing co-op in my village”. Sometimes you need scale to answer certain issues that can’t be solved at any local level.
Peer to peer is a relational dynamic which allows every individual to connect ‘permissionlessly’ to any other individual. You could call it ‘networking freedom’ if you like.
When I tell people that I work on inshore fisheries management the response is inevitably disparaging. Most people continue to assume that the commons is an ecological disaster waiting to happen and that all fishermen are greedy individuals.
Nestled in Galicia’s fertile hills, the commons community of Froxán is engaged in a struggle to protect its territory and history from Spanish miner Sacyr’s plans to re-open the San Finx tungsten mine. The defining feature of Froxán’s resistance has been the community’s decision to counter the advances of mining by working positively for land, culture and the commons with new vigour.
I realized that the commons had great potential as an alternative political vision that is not some unified movement or ideology, like in the past, but something that is locally distributed and grounded in things that people love and want to protect. So, the commons is about sharing those things that belong to all of us that we want to protect in our ability to manage them for our purposes.
