David Bollier

It’s hard to recall exactly when my friendship and countless collaborations with Silke Helfrich began. In a strict sense, they began at the first-ever activists’ conference on the commons –  one that she organized in Mexico City in 2006 as head of the Heinrich Boell Foundation’s Mexico and Caribbean office. Silke had invited me to speak because -- even though we came from very different worlds -- we both recognized commons as effective systems for defending our shared wealth – from software to seeds to land and beyond – against capitalist enclosures.  

But our loose partnership did not really take shape until two years later, in 2008, when we both attended another early, rare gathering of activist commoners – the Elevate Festival, a four-day gathering in Graz, Austria, for indie music and political culture. In a venue literally carved out of solid rock in the 170-meter Schlossberg Hill, I heard bracing presentations about the fledgling Creative Commons project, the Science Commons and History Commons initiatives, and a mind-altering performance by remix artist D.J. Spooky interpreting Walter Benjamin’s “The Spectacle of Modernity.”

It became clear to me that this budding international subculture of commoners was a rich zone of underexplored promise – a mystery well-worth plunging head-first into. I did. Over lunch the next day at Ginko, a vegetarian restaurant, Silke and I were bubbling over with enthusiasm about “what next?” And so we began.

Over the next thirteen years, to my astonishment, we ended up working together on dozens of major and minor projects. We had no formal jobs or institutional overseers, a situation that sometimes proved precarious. But we had the freedom to do what we wanted, in the ways we wanted. And we knew we had to do this work. We somehow learned to become participant-anthropologists-activists-strategists-allies-networkers-popularizers for all things related to the commons.

Silke and I didn’t want merely to study commons as economic resources or property, in the style of traditional academics. We wanted to understand the commons as a new/old worldview that could transform the capitalist market/state system. We wanted to learn how commoning could remake the very character of politics, culture, law, ethics, and modern understandings of life itself. After experiencing decades of tepid, ineffectual results from mainstream politics, we figured, why not go for it?

And so, with an open agenda and raw curiosity (an optimistic naivete is essential to real creativity), we set out on a journey to reinvent the commons, and never looked back. A famous observation by Goethe described our rough working faith: 

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans – that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man [sic] could have dreams would have come his way. 

Goethe memorably advised: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

I gave the following remarks about commons governance on September 27 as part of the U!REKA Lab Lecture Series. U!REKA -- which stands for Urban Research and Education Knowledge Alliance -- is a consortium of eight European universities that studies urban commons. The subtitle of my talk was "Find Answers by Living the Questions." 

Thank you, Sandra Bos and the U!REKA Lab, for inviting me to share my ideas about commons governance with you today. It is a great privilege and pleasure.

As I began to gather my thoughts on this topic, I realized that the framing needed to expand. Yes, we must better understand commons governance and the commons more generally. But we must situate this discussion within the larger market/state system that dominates our societies.

This is necessary because commons and the market/state system are so deeply intertwined – even if their co-entanglement is not usually acknowledged. The two systems each represent very different ways of knowing, acting, and being. The struggles between the sovereign and commoners have a long history! They have been intimately conjoined, at least since the 13th Century, when King John signed the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest.

The sovereign today is not a monarch, but the market/state – a system of governance that is an alliance between market and state institutions. Each has its own realm of authority -- production and governance, respectively – but they both share a deep utopian commitment to endless market growth and “progress.” Today, however, in the face of climate collapse and cascading ecological crises, respectable opinion is slowly come to realize that this vision may itself be a problem. Indeed, this may account for notional mainstream interest in the commons as a source of new ideas.

One stinging lesson that we are learning from the pandemic and climate collapse is that states and markets are not really on top of the situation. They can’t restrain capitalist appetites or provide existential security. I concede that this may be seen as an ideological conclusion, but it is equally a factual observation about the structural limitations of centralized, formalistic, bureaucratic systems. Totalistic regimes of control have trouble managing distributed complexity and change that arises from below.

Outside of the gaze of formal finance, an often-demonized form of informal social finance flourishes. This finance consists of the regular pooling of money among friends and neighbors. It’s a way for individuals to amass chunks of money for paying for a new (used) car, educational expenses, household emergencies, and other major expenses. The system is relied upon by millions of Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America as a trusted alternative to formal banking systems that often exclude them. 

There are many names for these traditional systems – susu, partner, meeting-turn, box-hand, sol, depending upon the culture in which they arise. But they are generically known as ROSCAs, an acronym for “rotating savings and credit associations.” ROSCAs are a vital way for people of color and modest means to take care of their financial needs when banking systems are unfriendly or unaffordable, often for racialized reasons.

Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein has studied the Black social economy for years, and especially cooperatives and informal economies. She has paid particular attention to ROSCAs as familiar, practical social vehicles for savings and credit.

In my latest Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #18), Professor Hossein and I discuss the largely unknown realities of informal banking and the power of the Black social economy.

Black people have been “so traumatized by formal finance,” said Hossein, “that there are people who are unbanked or they choose to be under-banked. This means they’ll do the most minimal activities [with banks] because of the horror stories they have to endure – racism. Anti-black racism in commercial banking is not a secret anymore,” she said, which explains why many African-American women choose to “avoid those kind of stresses and engage with people who actually value their humanity” – their friends and neighbors.

Nearly twenty years ago, just after I published Silent Theft, my first book about the commons, I was mingling with strangers at a conference reception at Georgetown University. The World Wide Web and open source software were still in their infancy, and few people in mainstream circles gave much thought to the implications of copyright law on human freedom and creativity. Suddenly a French fellow appeared out of nowhere and introduced himself to me, saying that he wanted to talk about the commons.

And that is how Philippe Aigrain soon became a friend and my first European colleague in studying the commons, circa 2003. With great sadness, I learned last week that Philippe died on July 11 following a hiking accident in the French Pyrénées, at age 72. I share the heartbreak expressed by Francophone commoners and beyond at this crushing news.

Philippe was a computer scientist and activist who led many early fights against software patents, especially as director of the Software Freedom Law Center. He was also a cofounder of the French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net in 2008, which fights for basic human rights on digital networks, free software, and the commons.