What You Should Read To Understand the Commons

Personal recommendations by Michel Bauwens.

The Context

* The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. by Kojin Karatani. Duke University Press, 2014

The commons, i.e. 'communal shareholding', is one of the four important ways humanity has used to exchange and allocate resources, together with the gift economy, distribution according to rank, and the market. Alan Page Fiske's The Structure of Social Life documents many examples of each, but Karatini's great contribution is to historize this evolution. It's a rather fantastic synthesis of the anthropological and historical literature on the subject, and I very warmly recommend it.

For details, see: Evolution of the Structure of World History Through Modes of Exchange

* Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (1944)

This is a great history of industrial capitalism, from its emergence in the UK in the late 18th century, after the enclosures of the commons and the destruction of the basic income provided by the Tudor Kings, up to WWII. It describes a 'double movement' between periods of liberalization of the market, in which market forces want to be freed from societal regulations, and the periodic efforts of people's movement, to re-embed the markets in society. Polany is the great author and historian about how pre-capitalist markets functioned.

* The Ever-Present Origin. Jean Gebser.

It's not enough to understand the evolution of socio-economic structures, we must also understand the cultural intersubjective and subjective mentalities that co-evolve with them. This is 'the' book , to understand the evolution of consciousness, in its archaic, magic, mythological and rational forms. Gebser sees how each mode of apprehending the world, has its generative phase, but also its 'deficient' or degenerative phase. The rational mode of consciousness becomes deficient when calculations dominate everything, and the whole can no longer be seen.

* Rethinking the World. Peter Pogany. 2006.

If you have read Karatani to understand the evolution of socio-economic systems and Gebser for the attendant 'modes of consciousness', then we still have the task to integrate them. No one has done this so far, but Peter Pogany, a Hungarian trans-disciplinary researcher, who has also connected socio-economic structures in their thermo-dynamic realities. So this is basically a three-level history of the world (thermo-dynamic reality, socio-economic system, mode of apprehending the world). His second book is focused more explicitely on the current transition and is called Havoc. How does the global system evolve to finally take into account the planetary boundaries that determine the survival of any form of civilization ? I recommend reading Havoc first, it's about 60 pages, and if you are hooked, you can go for the real meat, i.e. his first, more theoretical book. Pogany's theory of change is a theory of pulsation: from stable system, via chaotic transition, to new stable systems, and so on, for ever.

* Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan, Europe. by Mark D. Whitaker

We have learned from Pogany that societal evolution works through 'pulsation' but how exactly. This book is perhaps not very well written, but it is very important for the examples it gives. Confirming the famous HANDY study about collapsing civilizations (all civilisations since the neolithic have collapsed), Mark Whitaker details important cases. Basically, every society that is a class society in which ruling classes compete with each other in a peer polity system, will inevitably overreach in the use of its own resource base, leading to eventual collapse. But this collapse is met with the opposition of popular movements, which used to be religious and spiritual movements, and have now become political in our secular age. It is these movements which bring back the commons as the solution against the over-reach of the extractive classes. And so we can now understand the pulsating rythm which regularly brings back the commons as a vital societal institution.

For more details, see: Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions

* R. I. Moore. The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215. Oxford and New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2000

Now you are ready for a real and more in-depth case study. Here is a book that details the first societal revolution in the western system, which took place from 975-1050, after the emergence of the 'Peace of God' movement, which created the conditions for a new social compact, that would allow European society to double its population in the next three centuries, and allowed the free, guild-managed medieval cities to emerge. As shown by Tine de Moor's essay on the Emergence of Commons and Guilds as Silent Revolution, this was the time of the rapid emergence and expansion of guilds and contract-based rural commons, and as Adam Arvidsson has shown in his essay, Capitalism and the Commons, these commons were instrumental in creating the bottom up ethical economy that was the market form in the free cities of the medieval west until capitalism (which has entirely different roots), took over. What Moore does is to show the non-linear transition that completely changed European civilization in just a few decades.

* Adam Arvidsson. Changemakers. The Industrious Future of the Digital Economy.

You've studied the past transition described by R.I. Moore, but what about today. While we focus on the post-capitalist potential and effets of the new commons at the P2P Foundation, Adam Arvidsson focuses on the coming transition, and how the new commons is once again creating new market forms. He describes how both the downwardly mobile precarious classes in the West, and the upwardly mobile classes of the poor in the Global South, use the commons to bypass capitalism and create market forms that work for them. Arvidsson is a very keen observer of both the commons and the new markets, and so this is also a crucial book, which augments the earlier insights of Alain Tarrius ('Etrangers de Passage, Poor to Poor, Peer to Peer').