language

Language is surely one of the greatest political weapons ever invented because it invisibly defines the world in narrow ways and can impair our capacity to see and think clearly. This is one of the takeaways I had after looking through Sian Sullivan’s new website, “The Natural Capital Myth and Other Stories,” which collects twelve years of her writing (2008 to present) on this theme. 

Sian has long brought laser-beam clarity to the ways in which capitalism redefines the more-than-human world in financial terms. The investor class has not just introduced a handful of words; they have invented an entire worldview that erases nature and turns it into an essential element of capitalist production and profit. The natural world is re-interpreted through the scrim of money. That may not be pernicious in and of itself, but now that this perspective informs how the market/state order relates to the natural world, well….that’s a serious problem.

By “financialization,” Sullivan means the “revisioning and rewriting of the natural world in terms of financial terms and concepts.” She also means that banks and financiers regard “environmental conservation activities as new possibilities for speculative investments and products” – a new zone for profiteering and capital accumulation. 

This is deeply concerning because, as conservation itself becomes a way to make money, the line between “nature” and “capital” is starting to blur. The Orwellian term “natural capital” has become a way to justify a relentless extractivism, in the name of preserving nature!

As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers -- as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind -- I’ve concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.

Scientific rationalism and economistic thinking may be the dominant forces of our time, but they aren't so good at creating social purpose and meaning. Which may help explain why evidence of a new animism keeps popping up as a way to re-enchant the world, often finding its voice through commoning. This should not be too surprising, suggests ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, because the biology of life points to reality itself as a commons.

Commons are realms of life defined by organic wholeness and relationality. They stand in stark contrast to a modern world whose hallmark is separation -- the separation of humans from “nature”; of individuals from each other; and a separation between our minds and our bodies.

To be sure, animism has a problematic history. Early anthropologists generally projected their own worldviews onto tribal peoples, denigrating them as backward. As staunch Cartesians and moderns, they saw body and mind as utterly separate. So anyone who ascribed a living presence to animals, mountains and natural forces could only be seen as "primitive" and "superstitious."

But today’s animism (as seen through western eyes) is different. It sees the experience of life as a dynamic conversation among the creatures and natural systems of the Earth. It is about surrendering an anthrocentric vision and seeing the world as “full of persons, only some of whom are human,” in which “life is always lived in relationship with others,” as religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has put it. Animism is “concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons.” It resembles the “I-thou” relationship of respectful presence proposed by theologian Martin Buber.

Book tours are known for being grueling odysseys. While it wasn’t a breeze to speak at two dozen events in ten weeks of travel in Europe, UK and the US, it was a joy for me to connect with so many different commoners. I found my visits often amounted to field research filled with unexpected discoveries and chance insights. At events I invariably wound up meeting several fascinating commoners and learning about some amazing research initiative. 

My general conclusion:  The commons world is quite robust -- but it’s not terribly visible to mainstream culture. So the book tour confirmed the aspirations that my coauthor Silke Helfrich and I had for the book, Free, Fair and Alive. We wanted to generate some new concepts, vocabulary, and analyses to bring commoning into sharper focus. That forced us to dig more deeply into the inner dimensions of commoning and into its political implications, especially as it bumps up against property rights and state power.

I'm happy to say that all of our efforts paid off in the end. I kept meeting people who are all too ready to move beyond conventional politics and explore the rich possibilities of the commons. 

To recap for newcomers: Free, Fair and Alive is one of the most comprehensive, in-depth looks at what the commons means in contemporary life. Silke and I spent almost three years trying to make sense of the countless commons we had observed over the preceding 15 years. From her village in Germany and on trains criss-crossing Europe, and from my office in Amherst, Massachusetts -- with occasional in-person work sessions -- we plunged into a serious mutual debriefing about what we had each learned. We wanted to see if we could conceptualize the commons in ways that truly reflect what we had witnessed in Mexico and Greece, India and Germany, the US and UK, and many other places.

Halfway through our research, we realized with a shock that much of the language we were using was seriously wrong and misleading. When using words like “individual,” “rationality” and “resources,” for example – the standard vocabulary of modern economics – we found ourselves locked into a deeply troubling worldview. Do we really wish to regard human beings -- as economists ostensibly do -- as isolated individuals striving to maximize their material self-interests and “externalizing” costs on to “nature.” Is this what "rationality" is?  

Every so often I am invited to write a piece that in effect answers the question, “Why the commons?”  I invariably find new answers to that question each time that I re-engage with it.  My latest attempt is an essay, “Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm,” which I wrote for the Next System Project as part of its series of proposals for systemic alternatives. 

For those of you have been following the commons for a while, my essay will have a lot of familiar material.  But I also came to some new realizations about language and the commons, and why the special discourse about commoning and enclosures is so important. I won’t reproduce the entire essay – you can find it here as a pdf download or as a webpage at the Next System Project – but below I excerpt the opening paragraphs; the section on the discourse of the commons; and the conclusion.

Introduction

In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change? Our challenge is not just articulating attractive alternatives, but identifying credible strategies for actualizing them.

I believe the commons—at once a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices—holds great promise in transcending this conundrum. More than a political philosophy or policy agenda, the commons is an active, living process. It is less a noun than a verb because it is primarily about the social practices of commoning—acts of mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to manage shared resources. This process blends production (self provisioning), governance, culture, and personal interests into one integrated system.

This essay provides a brisk overview of the commons, commoning, and their great potential in helping build a new society. I will explain the theory of change that animates many commoners, especially as they attempt to tame capitalist markets, become stewards of natural systems, and mutualize the benefits of shared resources. The following pages describe a commons-based critique of the neoliberal economy and polity; a vision of how the commons can bring about a more ecologically sustainable, humane society; the major economic and political changes that commoners seek; and the principal means for pursuing them.

Finally, I will look speculatively at some implications of a commons-centric society for the market/state alliance that now constitutes “the system.” How would a world of commons provisioning and governance change the polity? How could it address the interconnected pathologies of relentless economic growth, concentrated corporate power, consumerism, unsustainable debt, and cascading ecological destruction?

....

At the recent Economics and the Commons Conference, the charismatic Jem Bendell, Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambia (UK), made an offhand reference to “commoneering.”  The novel term is apparently a play on the terms “commandeer” and “pioneer.”  I must admit, the words had a nice, solid ring to it.  I think it’s the hard “eer” that sounds so good; it have a more assertive tone than the more familiar “commoning.”  Commoneering almost has a certain aura of cool to it.    

But should we embrace such a new term?  The topic provoked more controversy than I might have imagined – and perhaps deservedly so.  The arguments generally went like this:  “Commoneering” implies that there is a certain class of people who are skilled in designing a commons or in pioneering its development.  The word implies this group of expert designers work separately from ordinary commoners and have some special knowledge for setting them apart as “commoneers.” 

This, of course, is an affront to the very idea of commoning.  It implies that commoneering is something that is different from (and better than?) “ordinary” commoning.  Commoning is something that all the talents of the entire community do together, in collaboration.  Commoneering feels vaguely elitist.

This may be reading a lot into a term that was, after all, presented in a rather casual manner.  Bendell didn’t even really give a serious definition to the term.  And I usually don’t like for anyone to set themselves up as “language police.” 

But to the extent that commoneering has a substantive meaning that is different from commoning, I think it may be best to simply avoid using the term.  It invites needless controversy.  We have plenty of serious challenges to meet without wading into a swamp of linguistic debates about a term that we don't seem to need.  Why not nip this one in the bud? 

By the way, Jem Bendells’ talk on money and credit as a commons was terrific.  I highly recommend that you watch the video of his talk here.

Vancouver poet Stephen Collis offers us a wonderful meditation on commons as both anti-capitalist and beyond politics in a wonderful essay, “On Blackberries and the Poetic Commons.”  Noting that the culture of private property is pervasive and suffocating in modern life, Collis sets out to identify what makes an already existing commons a commons.  

He concludes that it is somewhat a fiction that we make up.  If the idea of “the market” is something that we must dream up and sustain together -- a “social imaginary” that organizes our physical and social realities – then surely we need to dream up the commons in the same way, as “imaginary alternatives.”  That is the only way to summon the commons into reality.

To this task, Collis recommends the lowly blackberry: 

"Blackberry brambles are the marginalia of the urban and suburban city/text.  Occupying unused or underused spaces, they hold forth common abundance where private property is ambiguous or in disuse, decline or abeyance.  We troll through our neighborhoods and even into the center of the city.  Along easements and the sides of highways, at the ends of cul-de-sacs and in vacant lots, along open ditches and decrepit fencing, in the deteriorating zones of post-industrial wastes, the ramble entangles and marks the very edges and gaps in the regime of private property.  They mark lulls and failures in capital, the moments of decay and depreciation after industrial production and before gentrification.  In taking to our fences, the brambles even appears to be attempting to stand between properties, on their margins, on that thin line that is neither mine nor thine.

"….We assume blackberries to be a common resource – no one in his or her right mind would pay for blackberries, though I have seen them, and scoffed, in a supermarket.  Like the historical English commons, the ‘patriomony of the poor’ (Neeson, 55), the blackberry bramble is governed by certain customary rules of use.  Take only what you need and leave enough for others.  Those in a neighborhood have first dibs on the neighborhood patch (you don’t drive in from the outside) – unless the patch is in parkland or other non-residential spaces.  The berries high up or deep in a patch are for the birds and the soil and next year’s fruit – you don’t damage the brambles to get at the difficult to reach berries.