Mindful Commons

Discussion

Towards a mindful commons

Peter Doran:

"Activist and academic champions of the commons ... have begun to respond to neoliberal capitalism and consumerism with a series of critical counter-practices, piloting a radical alternative to the prevailing hyper-individualist and consumerist ethos that recycles ‘biological necessity into commercial capital’ (Bauman 2010: 67).

A commons has a number of important characteristics:

• It is a social (sometimes legal) system with some self-organizing capacity and a commitment to preserving and sharing a local resource and working together with shared values and identity.

• Access to the protected resource is organized on an inclusive and equitable basis.

• A commons is often identified with the particular resource that it has evolved to safeguard, use and preserve. In fact, a commons is always morethan-a-resource. It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.

• Finally, there is no commons without commoning or the practices that embody the social practices and norms for managing a resource for collective benefit.

As Ugo Mattei, one of the premiere theorists of the law of the commons, explains:

- phenomenological understanding of the commons forces us to move beyond the reductionist opposition of ‘subject–object,’ which produces the commodification of both. It helps us understand that, unlike private and public goods, commons are not commodities and cannot be reduced to the language of ownership … It would be reductive to say that we have a common good. We should rather see to what extent we are the commons. (Mattei 2012: 5)

Silke Helfrich (2012) has identified a number of core beliefs that seem to be intrinsic to the practice of commoning and the organization of the commons, including: for rivalrous resources there is enough for all through sharing; while for non-rivalrous resources, there is abundance; humans are primarily cooperative; knowledge is produced through peer-to-peer networking or collaboration; and the vision of society foregrounds a conviction that one’s personal unfolding is a condition for the development of others.

A feature of this contemporary commoning movement is the shift from a view of the commons as a ‘thing’ or even as a set of arrangements to a phenomenological emphasis on the active promotion of commoning as a way of being, doing and seeing the world (Bollier 2014). Commoning has been described (Weber 2013: 44) as an attempt to redefine our very understanding of ‘the economy’, to challenge a dominant understanding that valorizes rationality over subjectivity, material wealth over human fulfilment, and the system’s abstract necessities (growth, capital accumulation) over human needs.

Commoning shatters these dualisms and reconfigures the role of participants so that we are not simply reduced to the roles of producers or consumers but come to be regarded as participants in a physical and meaningful exchange with multiple material, social and sense-making needs. Commoners realize that their household needs and livelihoods are entangled with the specific place and habitat where they live, and with the earth as a living entity. The recovery of the commons is a collective act of restorative memory and remembering (Bollier 2014), practice, and a rendering visible of new possibilities for economic and legal forms in the face of a failed attempt by champions of capitalist power to impose a false arrest on the historical evolution of economic ideas: to revive and re-embed slow practices in an ethos that is local or situated, entangled in relationships that are human and non-human, and that command an ethics of care, reciprocity and interbeing (Weber 2013).

Rowe describes the commons as the ‘hidden economy, everywhere present but rarely noticed. It provides the basic support systems of life – both ecological and social’ (Rowe 2001a). He notes that the ‘destruction of the commons has been the leitmotif in much that passes for “development”. It is the threat that connects many of the problems that beset the world’, from pollution of the water and sky, to the breakdown of community, the toxic entertainment industry, and attempts to engineer and patent the genetic substrate of life itself. Bresnihan (2015) sums up one perspective of the commons, one that refuses to fix the idea to that of a ‘resource’, for the commons is not merely land or knowledge but the way these, and more, are combined, used and cared for by and through a collective that is not only human but also non-human.

Commoning, then, denotes the continuous making and remaking of the commons through shared practice. Bresnihan (ibid.: 4) adds that at the heart of this relational, situated interdependence of humans and non-humans is not an impoverished world of ‘niggardly nature’, nor an infinitely malleable world of ‘techno-culture’, but a more-than-human commons that navigates between limits and possibilities as they arise."

Source

• see the book by Peter Doran: Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism