Germany

Below are slightly edited remarks that I delivered at a a workshop, "Beyond Liberalism: Commons, Constitutionalism and the Common Good," in Berlin, Germany, on May 31, 2023. The event was hosted by the  Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the Heidelberg Law Department at the University of Würzburg, and The New Institute (Hamburg, Germany). 

A video version of the talk (with my slides, two formal responses, and audience Q&A) can be found here: https://youtu.be/ckseZNahi84  My talk begins at the 5:32 timecode.

The Commonsverse as a Parallel Polis: Opportunities and Challenges

The dialogue provoked by this workshop is timely and necessary because so many of the certitudes of political economy and culture are slowly crumbling before our eyes. It's fair to say that so many grand narratives of our time -- about citizenship, freedom, property rights, economic growth, and theories of value – have been called into question these days. Existing institutions and categories of thought aren't working so well.

On the one hand, few people want to talk about structural change and necessary alternatives lest it open a Pandora's Box of monsters and chaos. On the other hand, as we move more deeply into the danger zones of climate change, authoritarian nationalism, savage precarity and inequality, and institutional breakdown, we have little choice. We need to abandon some settled habits. We desperately need to find a new North Star and a more stable, wholesome order.

Today, I'd like to introduce the idea of the commons to you and suggest its enormous potential for re-imagining so many things – the capitalist political economy, state power, our social relations and hierarchies, our relations with the Earth, our inner lives. To be sure, this is a daunting proposition and a long-term project.  We not only have to develop some very different social logics and institutional forms while entrenched in a problematic system. We also have to change ourselves. We have to find ways to overcome the unresolved traumas of capitalism, colonialism, and centralized state power whose norms we have internalized or repressed.

In my remarks, I'd like to suggest that commons and commoning can provide us with the scaffolding to reinvent a vision of the common good. It can help us develop more humane social practices and ethical behaviors at the cellular level, which, as they expand, can help us move beyond a world of capital accumulation, consumerism, and progress-through-growth.

To be sure, most commons today are dismissed as too small-scale, local and cash-poor to be significant. To the mainstream, they appear to be archaic oddities. Respectable opinion assumes that the market and state are the only two serious regimes for "getting things done." There is the “private sector” and the “public sector,” and not much else really matters. 

It's exciting to see how an Indonesian artists collective, ruangrupa, is attempting to elevate the ideas of commoning in the international art world. A few years ago, ruangrupa, based in Jakarta, was selected to curate one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world, documenta. The event is a showcase for cutting-edge artistic work, held in Kassel, Germany every five years for only 100 days. This 15th edition of documenta ("documenta 15") confirms that commoning is surging as a way to re-imagine the political economy of art-making.

Any artist knows that making a livelihood from one's creativity means coming to terms with the brutal realities of markets. The economics of painting, music, photography, and performance are each different, of course, but they generally privilege individual artists over groups, require that artworks be converted into commodities, and tend to splinter and transform coherent artistic communities as market players buy artworks they regard as prestigious, fashionable, or lucrative investments.

This process can be necessary and benign, and at least help secure artists' livelihoods. But it can also end up corroding the ethic of collaboration and sharing that are indispensable to any creative genre. Whether it's jazz, hip-hop, painting, conceptual art, or sculpture, artists need each other to flourish. They need a community of caring colleagues who can mentor, criticize, inspire, imitate, and mutually support each other, especially when livelihoods are precarious.

Thanks to ruangrupa, documenta 15, which opened in June and will run through September, is not just an art exhibition. It's an attempt to re-imagine the political economy of art and artistic cultures. 

My latest episode of Frontier of Commoning (Episode #29), I speak with Farid Rakun, a member of ruangrupa, who discusses how his collective used their documenta curation to convene a global assembly of artists to develop new ways to organize and support art-making.

This Friday marks a special date for me – the release of the German version of my new book with Silke Helfrich -- Frei, Fair und Lebendig: Die Macht der Commons -- published by transcript Verlag. The English version -- Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons – will be published in September by New Society Publishers.

On April 12, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, which sponsored the writing of our book, will be hosting a public event to launch the book. Silke will be there, of course, and after speaking she will have a conversation with the prominent German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa; Robert Habeck, the Federal Chairman of Alliance ’90/The Greens; and Elisabeth von Thadden, editor of DIE ZEIT.

There will be a livestream of the event at 19:30 CET. A 96-second trailer about the German edition of the book can be found here.

We have been working on this book for much of the past three years, so I am thrilled by its completion (from which I am still recovering). Let me hoist a transatlantic toast to my dear friend for her brilliant ideas, warm collegiality, and sheer persistence throughout this odyssey.

I will offer a longer introduction to the book as the release of the English edition draws closer. For now, let me just say that our book is an ambitious attempt to build on Elinor Ostrom’s work by providing a deeper understanding of the commons as a living social organism. Our new framework – the Triad of Commoning -- focuses on the commons in three interrelated aspects – the social, the political (peer governance), and the economic (provisioning). We also look at how one’s view of elemental reality shapes one’s sense of political possibility, and how language plays a critical role in making commoning visible.

This approach emerged after months of working on our book. Silke and I concluded that we just couldn’t convey the realities of commoning if we remained captive to the rational-actor, resource-focused framework used by so many economists. Much of that language points us in the wrong direction by downplaying or ignoring the social, personal, and ecological relationships that live at the heart of a commons.

As more and more plant varieties have become privatized through patents, and as large corporations have bought up smaller seed breeders, a dangerous consolidation has occurred. The genetic diversity of agricultural crops has shrunk, making crops more vulnerable to disease and our food supply more insecure. Meanwhile, farmers and the public have become more dependent on a few large agrochemical companies.

In short, seed patents have become a tool for privatizing seed from the pool of open and commonly owned plant genetic resources: an insidious enclosure of seed commons.

This scenario is eerily similar to the consolidation of software for personal computers some twenty years ago.  Microsoft used its market dominance to incorporate all sorts of software programs into its Windows operating system, a strategy sometimes referred to as “embrace, extend and extinguish.”  As Microsoft exploited its de facto monopoly over common software systems, programs for word-processing, spreadsheets and other functions began to go out of business.

But just as open source software served as a powerful antidote to proprietary software, so a group of academics, activists and plant breeders in Germany has now pioneered a similar antidote to seed patents:  an open source license.

The Open Source Seed license, recently released by a group called OpenSourceSeeds, is trying to “make seeds a common good again.” The license amounts to a form of “copyleft” for new plant varieties, enabling anyone to use the licensed seeds for free. Like the General Public License for free software, the seed license has one serious requirement: any seeds that are used, modified or sold must be passed along to others without any legal restrictions.

The relationship between law and the commons is very much on my mind these days.  I recently posted a four-part serialization of my strategy memo, "Reinventing Law for the Commons."  The following public talk, which I gave at the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin on September 8, is a kind of companion piece.  The theme: this year's celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and its significance for commoners today.

A video version of my talk can be seen here -- along with a talk on P2P developments by my colleague Michel Bauwens, and general discussion with the audience moderated by Silke Helfrich.

Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight about the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta and the significance of law for the commons.  It’s pretty amazing that anyone is still celebrating something that happened eight centuries ago!   Besides our memory of this event, I think it is so interesting what we have chosen to remember about this history, and what we have forgotten.

This anniversary is essentially about the signing of peace treaty on the fields of Runnymede, England, in 1215.  The treaty settled a bloody civil war between the much-despised King John and his rebellious barons eight centuries ago.  What was intended as an armistice was soon regarded as a larger canonical statement about the proper structure of governance.  Amidst a lot of archaic language about medieval ways of life, Magna Carta is now seen as a landmark statement about the limited powers of the sovereign, and the rights and liberties of ordinary people.

The King’s acceptance of Magna Carta after a long civil war seems unbelievably distant and almost forgettable.  How could it have anything to do with us moderns?  I think its durability and resonance have to do with our wariness about concentrated power, especially of the sovereign.  We like to remind ourselves that the authority of the sovereign is restrained by the rule of law, and that this represents a new and civilizing moment in human history.  We love to identify with the underdog and declare that even kings must respect something transcendent and universal called “law,” which is said to protect individual rights and liberties. 

In this spirit, the American Bar Association celebrated Magna Carta in 1957 by erecting a granite memorial at Runnymede bearing the words “Freedom Under Law.”  On grand public occasions – especially this year – judges, politicians, law scholars and distinguished gray eminences like to congregate and declare how constitutional government and representative democracy are continuing to uphold the principles of Magna Carta.  More about that in a minute.

Is it possible to imagine a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other? 

That was the animating question behind a two-day workshop, “Toward an Open Co-operativism,” held in August 2014 and now chronicled in a new report by UK co-operative expert Pat Conaty and me.  (Pat is a Fellow of the New Economics Foundation and a Research Associate of Co-operatives UK, and attended the workshop.) 

The workshop was convened because the commons movement and peer production share a great deal with co-operatives....but they also differ in profound ways.  Both share a deep commitment to social cooperation as a constructive social and economic force.  Yet both draw upon very different histories, cultures, identities and aspirations in formulating their visions of the future.  There is great promise in the two movements growing more closely together, but also significant barriers to that occurring.

The workshop explored this topic, as captured by the subtitle of the report:  “A New Social Economy Based on Open Platforms, Co-operative Models and the Commons,” hosted by the Commons Strategies Group in Berlin, Germany, on August 27 and 28, 2014. The workshop was supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, with assistance with the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation of France. 

Below, the Introduction to the report followed by the Contents page. You can download a pdf of the full report (28 pages) here. The entire report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 3.0 license, so feel free to re-post it.

In a sign of the growing convergence of alternative economic movements, the Degrowth movement’s fourth international conference in Leipzig, Germany, last week attracted more than 2,700 people.  While a large portion of the conference included academics presenting formal papers, there were also large contingents of activists from commons networks, cooperatives, the Social and Solidarity Economy movement, Transition Town participants, the “sharing economy,” and peer production. 

By my rough calculation from browsing the conference program, there were more than 350 separate panels over the course of five days. Topics ranged from all sorts of economic topics (free trade, business models for degrowth, GDP and happiness) to alternative approaches to building a new world (Ivan Illich’s “convivial society,” permaculture, cooperatives, edible forest gardens). 

Degrowth?  For most Americans, the idea of a movement dedicated to non-growth, let alone one that can attract so many people, is incomprehensible.  But in many parts of Europe and the global South, people see the invention of new socio-economic forms of production and sharing as critical, especially if we are going to address climate change and social inequality. 

Some degrowth activists are a bit defensive about the term degrowth because, in English, it sounds so negative and culturally provocative.  (The French term décroissance, meaning “reduction,” is apparently far less jarring than its literal transation as “degrowth.”)  One speaker at the conference conceded this fact, slyly noting, “But unlike other movements, it will be exceedingly hard for opponents to co-opt the term ‘degrowth’”!

In a 2013 paper, “What is Degrowth:  From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement” (pdf), Frederico Demaria et al. write:  “”’Degrowth’ became an interpretive frame for a new (and old) social movement where numerous streams of critical ideas and political actions converge.  It is an attempt to re-politicise debates about desired socio-environmental futures and an example of an activist-led science now consolidating into a concept in academic literature.”  A new beachhead of this academic inquiry is a book Degrowth:  A Vocabulary for a New Era, due out in November.

There are a number of upcoming conferences focusing on various sorts of commons.  For those of you with a passionate interest in any of the following, check out these four gatherings in coming months:

A Virtual Town Hall for the Great Lakes Commons, March 18

What would happen if the Great Lakes in North America were managed on principles and practices that empower communities to become stewards of the water?  What if decisionmaking was local and collective? To discuss these themes, several organizations are convening the first webinar in a series, “Protect the Great Lakes Forever Virtual Town Halls.”  This first one will take place on March 18 from noon to 1 pm ET. For more information, visit here.  Or check out the Facebook invite. 

The event is convened by Alexa Bradley (Program Director for On the Commons), Sue Chiblow (Environmental Consultant for the Mississauga First Nation) and Jim Olson (Founder and Chair of FLOW for Water). Emma Lui (Water Campaigner for the Council of Canadians) will be moderator.  The organizers want to use the commons to “prioritize the basic needs of communities, the rights of indigenous peoples and the sustainability of the land,” noting that “the lens of the commons can act as a political framework for many Great Lakes issues including extreme energy projects, bottled water extraction, invasive species and pollution.”

Knowledge Commons Conference in September

Make plans now to attend the International Association for the Study of Commons’ second Thematic Conference on Knowledge Commons, to be held at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law and Policy, from September 5 to 7, 2014. 

The interdisciplinary conference seeks “to better understand how knowledge commons work, where they come from, what contributes to their durability and effectiveness, and what undermines them.”  This year, the focus will be on “Governing Pooled Knowledge Resources, with special attention to the fields of medicine and the environment.” 

Keynote talks will be given by Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School of Management), and Michael McGinnis (Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington).  Co-chairs of the conference are Katherine Strandburg, NYU School of Law, and Charlie Schweik of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More information at the conference website.  

CommonsFest in Greece To Explore Peer to Peer Civilization

CommonsFest is an initiative to "promote freedom of knowledge (or free knowledge) and peer-to-peer collaboration for the creation and management of the commons." The focus of CommonsFest will be on “the emergence of the peer to peer civilization and political economy.” Festival organizers explain that peer production "has spread through free software communities and extends to many aspects of our daily lives, such as the arts, governance, construction of machinery, tools and other goods. Through an exhibition, talks, screenings and workshops, the aim of the festival is to promote the achievements of this philosophy to the public and become a motive for further adoption."

The co-organizers of the Economics and the Commons Conference (ECC) held in Berlin have just released an 80-page report (pdf file) that distills the highlights of that landmark gathering in May 2013. The conference brought together researchers, practitioners and advocates from around the world to explore the relationship of conventional economics and the commons. 

Discussion focused on several key themes: 

·      The commons as a way to move beyond conventional economics;

·      Alternative economic and provisioning models;

·      The transformations needed to move to a new type of economy.

The report consists of abbreviated versions of all ten keynote talks; brief summaries of the stream discussions; short overviews of each of the side events (with contact information for the hosts); a guide to the wiki resources on commons and economics; and an account of the Francophone network of commoners.  Videos of the keynote talks have been posted here, and as noted yesterday, Remix the Commons is releasing a series of video interviews that it conducted during the conference. 

The ECC Report also includes some final reflections by the Commons Strategies Group on the event’s significance for the commons movement.  We look back at the 2010 International Commons Conference and consider some of the ways in which our efforts have matured, and at some of the challenges that we face in the years ahead.