Pulsation of the Commons

Discussion

The general idea of this concept is that human history evolves in recurring patterns, whereby more extractive/degradative phases of human history, driven by competitive state elites, are followed by regenerative phases, during which the more strategic roles of the commons revives.

Human history starts with kin-ship based and nomadic tribal forms of organisation, which gradually led to the earlier forms of non-state agriculture, sedentarisation and urbanism (10,000 BCE ?). Around 5,000 BCE, we start seeing the earliest signs of state formation, which means the land has to be exploited in order to sustain a ruling class, specialized non-material producing groups of people such as priests, non-agricultural professions and the like. This sets in motion a spiral-like process of material and cultural development that involves the greater scale of political units. Mark Whitaker ususally distinguishes the processes of state formation and expansion as 'slow ecological revolutions', which gradually exhaust their core areas (over-use and degradation of soils around the center), and creates ecological degradation, which affects the health and prosperity of the local population. This then creates counter-movements, which take a religious-cultural-ideological form, and ushers in periods of 'fast ecological revolutions'. Once the effects of these revolutions consolidate, a new elite can undertake new phases of scale expansion and expanded state formation, using elements of these ideological reforms, to establish new rationales for the social order.

This has effects in terms of identity formation as well. People are originally attached to their locak kinship, and the 'ethno-botanical' identity of their regions, but these are disrupted by the effects of state formation, requiring new forms of expanded identity which will be more humano-centric. Many of the counter-cultural movements aim to do precisely that, to achieve a deeper humano-centric identity, which is critical of the identity limitations of existing state forms.

Mark Whitaker describes one such process. The earlierst state formation originates with the Zhou kingdom, which establishes a state ideology in favour of the royal bloodline. But as the state expands, and as the core gets exhausted, the artistocratic bloodlines of peripheral zones become stronger than the core, until the system implodes in various statelets, constantly at war with themselves. Confucianism emerges, seeking a new identity in a conscious citizenship, that no longer is based on bloodlines but on personal virtue. It is an elitist but counter-cultural movement which appeals to city-based professionals (the 'shi') and the declassed Zhou aristocrats. A few centuries later, purged from its revolutionary aspects, it becomes the basis of an expanded state formation. This is how Mark Whitaker, critically evaluating the role of Karl Jaspers, sees the role of the axial religions, which everywhere set the basis of more human-centric identities. Whitaker stresses that accompagnying the humano-centric identities, also come environmental ideologies, which seeks to protect local ecological balance and human health. So both concepts are fused in the counter-cultural 'fast ecological revolutions', with the difference that the local is no longer identified with bloodlines and kinship, but is expanded to the inhabitants of a region.

My own hypothesis adds to these cyclical patterns by adding attention to the commons. The basic idea is that state formation and merchant pressures for profit tend to degradative outcomes and to eventual exhaustion of the territories of the states. The process is therefore accompanied by a pattern of decentralisation-recentralistion-decentralisation. In the regenerative periods, the role of commoning and the commons, i.e. co-producting and protecting local resources over the long run, take a more important center stage.

Peter Turchin and others have demonstrated how this pulsation occurs regularly in agricultural type civilisations. Capitalism however, has suppressed this pattern from the 16th cy onwards, because as the first truly global system, it had access to frontier areas, which could overcome temporary setbacks due to the exhaustion of certain areas. But the result is that the earth is now full, and that global resources are over-used in a systematic manner everywhere on the planet. We are now facing a downward spiral due to this global exhaustion, and we see the same reactive pattern occuring.

One reaction pattern, which we identify with the political right, involves a focus on ethno-national identities, and a desire to reinstate the primacy of the nation-state form and popular sovereignity, and it is specifically hostile to 'globalism'. The danger of this reaction in the current conjuncture is the heightened tension between nation-states, engaged in zero-sum games for access to ever-more scarce material resources. This form of social movement is gaining popular support, especially amongst the working classes in the materially productive sector (industrial workers, rural population, small businesses).