Posted
May 14, 2010

The Commons Meets the Community

How the commons boosts organizing and popular education campaigns.

By Julie Ristau and Alexa Bradley

In the past year the Grassroots Policy Project (GPP) established a collaboration with the On the Commons to develop a series of popular education modules that introduce the idea of the commons in an organizing context. We grounded this work in a sense of the commons both as a paradigm (a set of ideas) and as a material reality (a set of things which we experience, and interact with). More and more we have come to see that contemporary society is immersed in a market paradigm and so long as that is the framework in which everyone sees the world, we will not be able to really promote commons thinking let alone revive the actual commons.

cc license by vasta, nc, nd from Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/vasta/1579502484/

Part of our work is looking for those things that show how the conditioning of the market paradigm shapes people’s social, political and even personal consciousness. We recognize that cognitive analysis alone cannot counter the power of the market paradigm, nor push the commons paradigm to surface in people’s minds. That’s why we are deliberately exploring other ways to trigger non-habitual thinking about these subjects.

We are attempting to open up a space that lies at the point of engagement between the theory of the commons and the practice of organizers. We seek to understand what an appreciation for the commons can animate in our work??“a new conversation, a new practice, perhaps new directions in the work for justice.

Below are a few key elements we’ve discovered in our exploration so far:

Seeing and Naming

Beneath naming beneath words, is something else. An existence unnamed and unnamable. Wood in the table knows clay in the bowl. Air knows grass knows water knows mud knows beetle, knows the shape of the earth knows death knows not dying. And all this knowledge is in the souls of everything, behind naming, before speaking, beneath words. ??” essayist Susan Griffin

We cannot restore or expand or even protect something that we do not recognize. In other words, we cannot “lay claim” to the commons without first seeing and naming it. Things unseen have no name. Things unnamed cannot be valued. That which is unseen and unnamed becomes vulnerable and can be depleted/ eroded/ appropriated; can be lost, both in the present, and in our memory.

In our workshops with citizens and organizers, we note that the loss or erosion of many commons has gone almost unnoticed. We ask: What enables people to see the commons? What language do we need for expressing our relationship and stake in the commons? Seeing the commons is necessary before we recognize something as a commons. Naming the commons means that we assign a significance, meaning and value to something as a commons; we give it legitimacy and standing.

We experiment with using the architecture of “seeing, naming and claiming the commons” to make visible that which is rendered invisible by the market paradigm (and therefore out of range of our “claim”). This is about exposing the way in which the market paradigm has been made to seem the natural order of the universe—and about offering people an alternative

Laying Claim

Even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling…by such transmissions consciousness is woven. ??” essayist Susan Griffin

After 20 years of energy policy work, I only now realized, the power grid is ours! —an organizer in one of our workshops.

We have a relationship to the commons and a stake in its wellbeing. We have a relationship to the others who share this stake. There is responsibility involved. There is a “we” that stretches backward and forward in time. We belong to it and it belongs to us. We take care of it and it sustains us.

We lay claim to a commons by our insistence that it is a commons??“the joy in which we partake of it and the generosity of spirit we feel toward it. We lay claim by seeing ourselves involved??“as co-creators and sustainers of the commons.

We invite workshop participants to explore what working from a commons paradigm might inspire??“a different perspective about what’s at stake, a new sense of meaning that comes from commons relationships, fresh thinking about “ownership” (who owns what and how? what does is mean to collectively own something?)

We attempt to find language for what is threatened and what we long for. “Public vs. private” as a way of characterizing what is at stake doesn’t offer a rich enough landscape of meaning. We seek to surface words from participants that resonate more deeply: community, life-giving, interdependence, the sacred, mutuality, home, trust, etc). We hope to develop this further as we look at the contrasts in market and commons paradigms.

At the heart of the commons, we have a spirit of the collective, of the “we”—a force we all remember in some way and can reclaim. But we are separated from this “we”. Our world daily requires a different set of operating instructions: it is about me, it is about my health, my survival, my success. We are not standing with. We have lost hope. We cannot practice our imaginative potential; it is enclosed. The sacred is missing in our lives. We often do not feel it.

We experiment in our workshops with bringing people through the process of seeing and of naming until we get to reclaiming. In his book The Memory House, Henry Mansfield writes, “We have everywhere an absence of memory.” With every building leveled, in every neighborhood cleared we say we don’t want to hear about it anymore. We have made our bargain. We have speed and power, but no place; travel, but no destination; convenience, but no ease.” Yet we are bargaining that we have a collective unconscious that yearns for reclaiming the collective, the we, the commons.

Paradigm

We are living through a change of times. We reach for a rebeginning, the resurgence of buried realities, the reappearance of what was forgotten and repressed, a return to origins??“anything that will lead our weary world to regeneration. ??” Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

In one workshop, a person stands up to say, “ We have to understand the phenomenon of enclosure of the commons so we don’t have to re-understand it each time it comes up.” In another workshop: “Market fundamentalism colonizes our minds and everything about our lives.”

It is jarring to fully take in how far away from the commons paradigm our culture is today. Our sense of “we” has been assaulted, chipped away at, eroded. The idea here is not to go back to the past. But it’s important to explore questions: How is an important idea lost? Can it become so obscured by another set of ideas that it becomes meaningless? Can an idea become unthinkable?

Thomas Kuhn, the scientist who helped coin the phrase “paradigm shift” defines a paradigm as: “an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community… a set of unassailable, unconsciously accepted truths.” He goes on to describe the revolution of thought that is needed to make a shift??“a leap, a break with or rupture of past paradigms. Revolution here is defined as a complete revolving, a turning upside down of current thought patterns and working assumptions.

If we apply this sensibility to commons work, it may run up against the working theory that describes a harmonious re-balancing of sectors??“the commons sector rising to counter balance the market. The paradigm theory here suggests a more fundamental shift from the current realities.

In one of our workshops participants hit on the idea of colonization as a way to describe how we have become separated from the commons. Our culture is saturated in and dominated by a market paradigm. The concepts of consumer, ownership, private, worth and profit defines how we think about ourselves, our relationship to each other and to everything we encounter. It displaces all other ways of making connections and finding meaning. It is as though we ourselves are colonized. Colonization describes a system of domination, appropriation and enclosure. It also instills a belief system??“a paradigm??“that legitimizes and this activity and makes it seem entirely natural.

The market paradigm makes if difficult to understand or imagine the commons. Indeed, it dismisses the commons as naïve and romantic. The commons cannot thrive in a market paradigm. The dominance of the market paradigm leads to and legitimizes the colonization of the commons. That is seen as how things naturally happen. In accepting a market paradigm, we unconsciously relinquish a sense of the commons, and ignore that part of ourselves that is sustained by the commons.

Imagination and Hope

Transformed realities require transformed imagination. ??” theologian Walter Brueggemann

From many of us who lived in the communist world, waiting was often, if not always, close to an outer limit. Surrounded, enclosed, colonized from within by the totalitarian system, individuals lost any expectation of finding a way out. In a word, they lost hope. Yet they did not lose the need to hope, nor could they lose it, for without hope life loses its meaning. ??“Playwright, philosopher, and politician Vacel Havel

Imagine what would happen if the commons paradigm became the fundamental orientation for our lives. It requires a break in habitual thinking. A jolt. A leap. We step through the looking glass. We look back at the earth from the moon. We cross over. Paradigm shifting. It will take some imagination. It will take some excavation of memory and feeling.

Working on the commons is in part, about cracking open the constraints on our imaginations that keep us from even seeking a transformed reality. The commons has power in the way that it has both a material basis and a history??“there are and have been many commons which people have observed and benefited from??“and there is an idea of commons that has existed and evolved over time.

We have found that people can identify commons experiences in their own life , as well as the history of their families, communities and country. A commons is an imaginable if largely forgotten reality, not just a theoretical idea. What reawakens our ability to think from the perspective of a commons paradigm? We wonder, what is the role of memory in imagination and hope?

Memory could play a central character in the “naming” aspect of our work. When we exchange memories, even when we silently remember or write down something from our past, then we notice that memory puts together the experiences which have been stored in our mind in a new manner. Memory does not just recall, but rather it is a creative process, it builds new connections. It works associatively, narratively like poetry. It is a matter of putting together the story anew. And in this form of remembering, something very important happens: it’s not that we can return to the past, but rather we appropriate it, we recover and use it for our present day life in a manner which is useful to us and our relationships with one another.

We have been focused on significance and meaning in the naming part of our workshop. The question we follow up with after we have named (what is one commons you can think of) is one about meaning, when perhaps we should be more dwelling in the realm of what is your memory of what you see (named).

Yearning

The commons must affirmatively fill a strategic or political or psychological need in people or it will not be adopted, On The Commons Fellow David Bollier.

The idea of introducing a framework of ideas that sparks imagination, that invites bolder thinking about what is possible, that connects people with their own yearnings for meaning and connects them with others working from similar desires is crucial.

The radical acceleration of privatization and enclosure in our world has diminished the number and quality of commons experiences in our lives. And, as our experience of commons dwindle, so does our ability to think in terms of the commons, to even believe the idea of the commons. Yet even as the commons has been eliminated from our thought and lives, it continues to rise up from our yearning and imagination as much as from our memory and history. It is rising because of some deep human need. It is not lost.

And a surprising and unexpected revival of commons thinking can be seen in the fields of Internet and copyright policy, in a flowering of new interest about public space and other “places” where people can gather. This emerging interest about commons is promising.

In relation to this actual bursting of new commons-based activity, we also see power in the idea of organizing from a sense of yearning rather than loss. To the extent to which organizing work has been defined by opposition and resistance we have lost sight of another critical strand: the creative or transformative, that which creates and lives into a vision, that offers hope, meaning, joy, relationship.

In our workshops we are actively working to test this concept of power in the yearning. We lead activities to help people surface memory and personal history linked to commons experiences as a way of tapping their emotions about it. While we help people identify loss, we actively move towards yearning and imagination for the future rather than nostalgia for the past by offering unusual vantage points for reflection (visual, experiential) to bring people to new observations /thinking.

In closing, we are heartened by Rabbi Irwin Kula’s Jewish wisdom: “We are taught that our yearnings generate life. Desire animates. We are urged to go for it, to seek answers to our deepest questions. When we uncover our deepest longings life yields illumination and happiness. Far from being a burden, our yearnings become a path to blessing.”

Julie Ristau and Alexa Bradley both have long experience as community organizers. Ristau is Managing Fellow of On The Commons and Bradley is Associate Director of the Grassroots Policy Project