Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse
* Article: Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse. David Bollier. International Journal of the Commons, V. 18, N. 1, pp. 288–301, 2024.
URL = https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389
"Over the past two decades, hundreds of different commons around the world have arisen and developed working ties with peers, creating what might be called the Commonsverse. To elected officials, legislatures, bureaucracies, courts, and business people, the commons continues to be seen as a failed management regime, one that implicitly needs state or market intervention and control. As the essays of this special issue suggest, however, many projects and activists are seeing commons as a powerful, versatile force for change. The piecemeal efforts to build a Commonsverse amounts to a quest to build a parallel polis. Commoning honors wholesome values and different ways of being, knowing, and acting while allowing ordinary people to assert some measure of self-determination in the face of capitalist markets and state power.This essay explores a broad range of contemporary commons activities, the “ontological politics” they are engendering, and the challenges they face in expanding and institutionalizing commoning. Future development should focus on the potential of commons/public partnerships, new infrastructures to make commoning easier, legal hacks to open up zones of commoning, the potential of relationalized finance, and new institutional structures of care."
Excerpts
Commons-Based Identity Shift
David Bollier:
"The practice and the discourse of commoning has an elemental character: it reflects a desire by people to provision their needs directly, as self-governing communities working outside of the usual circuits of capitalist markets and state power.
Such realizations can entail a shift of identity and culture. Participants come to see that they are not “citizens” petitioning a remote, powerful state. They are not “consumers” seeking satisfaction through the market or “volunteers” donating their time to good causes. People realize they are commoners whose peer-governed activities are helping to constitute a different social and political mise en scene. They realize that their commoning enacts a different social logic, set of provisioning practices, and cultural ethos than the dominant ones of capitalist modernity and liberal, representative democracy."