Sources of Commons Law

Discussion

Trent Schroyer:

Regarding the Commons Abundance Debate

"As I read this discourse I had a sense there are many other overlapping and converging views that were not discussed at the Berlin Commons conference that could be cognitive resources for the commons movement- such as:

- Henry George , (1839-1897) argued that the economic rent on land should be shared by society and that land must be common property. Georgism has been a constant alternative economics since that time and today has many advocates such as the Earthrights movement <http://www.earthrights.net/>www.earthrights.net Consult Alanna Hartzok, Co-Director Earth Rights Institute

Also called by Jeffery Smith ‘Geonomics’ see - http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/smith-jeff_geonomics-and-working-conditions.html

- Ward Morehouse is an author, publisher, activist, and a co-founder of POCLAD, an American anti-corporate research collective. He worked on the Bhopal Gas accident in India and is the founder of the Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA) in 1954 and the Apex Press, a book-publishing imprint, in 1990. He was also the founder of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), which focuses on bringing victims to the attention of the public, and organizing tours of the United Kingdom, Europe and United States, and has worked to keep the issue from fading from the international stage.

Most relevant to the commons law project he is constantly talking about 'people's law' as a legal commons that can emerge where ever needed to indict corporate and state crimes. He has created peoples tribunals at the U.N and others named in the following quote from a private e-mail :

- "The Permanent People's Tribunal should be part of the Commons debate. Its origins go back to Bertrand Russell and the war crimes of the 1970s and include the Algiers Declaration of the Rights of Peoples in 1976. The repository of more recent tribunals is the Lelio Baso Foundation in Rome and the coordinator in Milan, G. Tognoni

Even more relevant to the "Commons Debate" is the Charter on Industrial Hazards and Human Rights which grew out of a series of tribunals (including Bhopal) in the 1990s. The text of the charter is given in Brigit Hanna, Ward Morehouse, and Satyu Sarangi, The Bhopal Reader, 2004" (quote from ward morehouse e-mail of 11/14/100

- Ivan Illich talked about local self-reliant free spaces as a ‘vernacular domain' that has been undermined by the church and state’s ‘ war against subsistence ‘ for the last 500 years. From his ‘Tools for a Convivial Society’ (1973) , and in a series of later historical reconstructions, he has argued public choices about the appropriate means of production, the selection of forms of community, or regional forms of intermediary structures, are the trade -offs between growth and free choices by non-experts.

- Illich is a source of what academics call ‘post-development theory’ – see Wolfgang Sachs ( editor) ‘The Development Dictionary ‘ (1992)

This is an argument for local autonomy and a source of Wolfgang Sachs 'cosmopolitan localism' notion I used this a key notion in Trent Schroyer ' Beyond Western Economics' ( Routledge 2009- chapter 2 & 4) for a chapter on Illich and Polanyi that argues the sustainability of small communities, in a post-secular argumentation. Where ‘post-secular’ means engaging faith communities narratives as a means of critically interpreting their contemporary ethical and political claims. The commons movement has been- as I have encountered it - too secular and fails to see the necessity of post secular discourse.

- Mahatma Gandhi's notion of swaraj, or self rule, and swadeshi, self-reliance, remains a source for reflection by the commons movement. I do not think it has received the recognition it needs – even in India. These are seminal ideals that both critics of small communities and defenders will find challenging. I argue both sides of this case in 'Beyond Western Economics' chapter 5

- Finally the marxism really relevant to the commons movement are the cultural marxists - especially Jurgen Habermas whose Universal Pragmatics and Discourse Ethics constitute a unique argument for the commons of speech acts, or ordinary language, that is intrinsically oriented toward inter-subjective understanding. This view is the ultimate critique of positivism, economic individualism and the politics of productivism. His critical studies of the public domain have culminated in an advocacy for German procedural constitutionalism as an unfinished fallible learning process. He has been wrongly labeled a liberal after publication of 'Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy' ( 1996.

- The commons movements would be advanced, in my opinion, by absorbing his philosophical , societal and legal theory of communication.

See also: trent schroyer ' Beyond Western Economics' ( Routledge 2009- chapter 2 & 4)): chapter on Illich and Polanyi that argues the sustainability of small communities in a post-secular argumentation."