Imagining a New Politics of the Commons: A fresh way of thinking about life beyond the market

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:




Imagining a New Politics of the Commons
A fresh way of thinking about life beyond the market

By David Bollier


A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability. It is a social form that has long lived in the shadows of our market culture, and now is on the rise.

The commons is still an embryonic vision with no single, unified political program. The definition above is my best attempt to explain the idea based on what I have seen and heard over the last few years at commons gatherings around the world. This vision, along with definition itself, will evolve with time. But it is a vision with great potential, because it is not being advanced by an intellectual elite or a political party but by a hardy band of resourceful irregulars on the periphery of conventional politics. (That’s always where the most interesting new things originate.) These commoners are now starting to find each other, a convergence that promises great things.

The Enclosure of the Commons

“The commons” is a useful term because it helps describe a nearly ubiquitous pathology of modern life, the enclosure of the commons. Governments throughout the world are conspiring with, or acquiescing in, the plunder of our common wealth. This is the net effect of the privatization of public resources and services being carried out as part of economic globalization.

Companies are taking valuable resources from the commons – the airwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum, deep-sea minerals, the human genetic code, public lands, and more – and exploiting them for profits. Once the cash value has been harvested from the commons, corporations tend to dump the wastes and accompanying social disruptions back into the commons, declaring to government and citizens, “It’s your problem.”

The dynamics of enclosure today are not much different from the 18th Century in England, when the landed gentry decided they could profit quite handsomely by seizing huge tracts of meadows, orchards, forests and other land that by long tradition were freely accessible to the commoners. With this enclosure, resources that had historically been managed by communities, through both formal and informal rules, were privatized into commodities to be sold in the marketplace. There were gains in efficiency and innovation from this process, to be sure – as well as the amassing of great private fortunes – but there was also massive economic disenfranchisement, ecological destruction, poverty and human misery. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/imagining-new-politics-commons

[Hannah Bell]

1. "The dynamics of enclosure today are not much different from the 18th Century in England" - exactly.

the lurch to privatization of public functions is a modern enclosure movement.

the british enclosures led to starvation, depopulation, & mass immigration out of desperation.

what wonderful results will ours yield?

[xchrom]

2. recommend

[OneGrassRoot]

3. K&R and thank you. :) n/t