A street-sweeping vehicle bears down on a cluster of Notre Dame students as it readies the piazza for another day in the city renowned for la dolce vita, the sweet life. The noisy machine swerves away at the last second as Professor David Mayernik, standing his ground, narrates the architectural history of the piazza �” which he interweaves with tales of Rome’s piety and peccadilloes.

The square’s oval shape testifies to its origins as a stadium for chariot races and jousting tournaments. Pope Innocent X, who enlisted Baroque master Francesco Borromini to design the Saint Agnes church overlooking the piazza, had plans to move the Vatican residence next door �” which, according to gossip, was the wish of his widowed sister-in-law, who seemed to wield more power around the papal court than he did.

“More than a nice spot for a stroll,” Mayernik tells his architecture students, “Piazza Navona is a theater, a world in miniature that represents creation, salvation and exploration �” a dream of what the world could be.

“People immediately are drawn to it, ” he continues, “even if they don’t know why. Americans instinctively know what to do in a piazza like this, though it’s not part of our culture.”

This would imply that a sense of the commons is intrinsic to all human beings, that we are naturally attracted to public spaces where everyone gathers to become part of the broader whole. While the streetlife of Italy fosters the particularly rich form of commoning that goes on day and night in Rome’s piazzas, all of us long for something similar in our own hometowns.

In his book Timeless Cities, Mayernik, an associate professor at Notre Dame’s School of Architecture as well as an architect and painter, muses about what might happen if the thousands of Americans visiting Rome each month returned home fired up about improving their own communities. “How much better it would be if these urban tourists came home and went about lobbying for better neighborhoods, accessible and beautiful public space or some kind of limit to sprawl?”

An Eternal Sense of Place

But many wonder what a 3,000-year-old city possibly teach us about life in a modern nation like the U.S. or Canada? Well, if we can’t learn anything from Rome, where can we? It is, after all, the Eternal City �” an Imperial capital of 1 million at the time of Christ, which dwindled to a village in the Middle Ages and then bounced back to become an epicenter of religion, culture, food, glamour and tourism today.

What is it about the place that seizes our imagination �” that renders it holy or unforgettable to so many people? That question slips into the mind of most visitors, even non-Catholics going back as far as the German philosopher Goethe, who declared, “In Rome I first found myself,” and the English poet Lord Byron, who called it “the city of my soul.”

The answer lies in the exhilarating sense of the past that surrounds you, layer upon layer all jumbled together. You can watch people lay flowers at the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated, stare up at the balcony where Mussolini delivered blustery speeches, admire Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer sculpture in the Santa Maria sopra Minerva basilica, tour a Roman temple consecrated 1,400 years ago as a Christian church (the Pantheon), stroll lanes trod by centuries of pilgrims and then indulge in café society on Via Veneto just like Fellini’s characters in the 1960s film La Dolce Vita. All this history can be experienced on foot, without breaking a sweat, between a lunch in the Jewish Ghetto and cocktail hour at the Caffé Greco �” where you can then raise a glass to toast the lingering ghosts of Keats, Shelley, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Mark Twain and Buffalo Bill.

“Romans understand the idea of ‘spirit of place’ very literally,” says Professor Steven Semes, academic director of Notre Dame University’s Rome architecture program, “and I must say that in the evening around 6 p.m., when all the church bells start to chime, you’d have to be pretty hard-crusted not to agree with them. At that moment it seems that all the people who ever lived here are still here now. That’s why they call it the Eternal City.”

The Teachings of Rome

Rome offers many lessons not just for good architecture but for a good life. The importance of family, friendship and food in daily affairs. A deep sense that sacred and secular naturally coexist with no dividing lines. The belief that all of life should be approached as a work of art, not simply as tasks to rush through on the way to the next thing. And the whole-hearted embrace of complexity, which is what makes this city alluring, holy and pleasurable.

All these ideas come gloriously to life in Rome’s piazzas �” the Italian word for “square,” but which carries greater depths of meaning. In a city so densely populated, piazzas serve as the front yard, back yard, playground, community center, market and town common all rolled into one. Some are world-famous landmarks, such as Piazza Navona and the Spanish Steps, while others are simply wide spots in the street where neighbors gather.

Historian and Notre Dame Professor Ingrid Rowland, a longtime Rome resident, says, “The history of Rome is really just the story of meeting places like these. In my neighborhood everybody in the piazza knows the names of each others’ pets. People are still that close, although I worry about the effects of increasing traffic and the privatizing influence of iPods.”

Saint Angela Merici, founder of the Ursuline religious order, counseled her followers to “be like a piazza.” For Tracey Lind, dean of the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, that means being “open, gracious, hospitable, playful, restful and engaged in the world.”

Saint Angela’s teachings motivated Lind to launch a project called Trinity Commons �” the most ambitious new development for her neighborhood in decades �” that brought a coffee shop, independent bookstore, Ten Thousand Villages fair trade store, art gallery, labyrinth and public square to the grounds of Trinity Cathedral, which itself welcomes anyone inside to pray, reflect or relax.

“Last year we had 80,000 people visit for public events,” she enthuses. “Like Italian piazzas, we are a place for conversation, commerce, worship and celebration.”

A Piazza in Every Neighborhood

Mark Lakeman, an architect in Portland, Oregon, returned home from Italy excited about the idea that every community needs its own piazza. But how could that happen in his own largely blue-collar neighborhood without tearing down someone’s house or radically redesigning existing streets?

Lakeman and some neighbors put their heads together, coming up with an innovative plan for the corner of Southeast 9th Avenue and Sherritt Street. They began by setting up a portable teahouse, which drew many dozens of people out of their homes on Monday nights to mingle. The next step was to paint the pavement in vivid colors, sending a clear message to passing motorists that this was not your ordinary intersection. As social activity began to move out into the street, drivers and pedestrians instinctively learned to share the space, thus its name: Share-It Square.

But what did the neighbors think? Challenging the dominance of automobiles on American streets is a brazen act, especially to older people who came of age in the car-crazy 1950s. Lakeman worried about angry opposition arising to quash the experiment, until talking to Brian Shaw, who lived right at the corner.

“Brian said that his father had fought in Italy during World War II and would tell stories about how, when they liberated a village, everyone would automatically gather in the piazzas to celebrate,” Lakeman recalls. “He said his dad always used to sing an Italian song with lyrics saying, ‘if you don’t hear voices in the piazza when you wake up in the morning, then you know something is wrong.’

“Something is wrong with too many places in America today,” Lakeman says.

Projects similar to Share-It Square have now popped up at 19 other Portland intersections, with at least a dozen more in the works. Lakeman and his collaborators went on to found City Repair, a nonprofit organization promoting a whole host of initiatives to help communities create new public spaces. And these ideas are spreading across the continent with new “piazzas” sprouting in at least 15 cities from Rochester, Minnesota, to San Diego to Toronto.

Finding the Spirit of Rome in My Own Backyard

Yet even with the traffic, I was thoroughly captivated by the spirit of Rome, especially its piazzas. In a week of wandering through the city, I again and again found a rare sort of peace and contentment in these squares. They offered not just refuge from the chaos and noise for which Rome is notorious, they opened an entrance to someplace special inside me. Watching water spout in a fountain, looking up at an eye-pleasing church, relaxing at a café, soaking up the human pageant unfolding all around, I felt intensely linked to the flow of life.

Back home in Minneapolis, a city quite unlike Rome with uniformly straight streets and great expanses of green space, I claimed my own sacred spot �” a hilltop in a nearby park that on warm or sunny days attracts a lively cross-section of humanity. Sitting there beneath a towering cottonwood tree �” watching the lovers stroll by, hearing children shout, running into friends �” I feel connected to all of heaven and earth.

This is adapted from an article in Notre Dame magazine (Autumn 2009).

Jay Walljasper is co-editor of OnTheCommons.org and author of the forthcoming book What We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons (New Press). He is also a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces. www.JayWalljasper.com

Another study found that American children are showing up in doctors’ offices with arteries that look like those of 45 year olds.

Most readers probably didn’t connect these stories to the world’s financial morass. For the media these are separate compartments – human health versus economic health. And yet the two have become related in a perverse way. The new diseases of childhood drive an increasing part of GDP. And they are part of what current efforts to “stimulate” the economy are likely to promote.

As America exports its lifestyle and junk food habits, moreover, these pathologies are spreading. Even the Philippines, a poor country, is beginning to show an obesity epidemic. Yet seen through the lens of conventional economic reckoning, such increased “consumption” is a growth engine – whether it’s the consumption of processed food, or the consumption of medication that purports to deal with the effects. Both prompt more spending, and thus an increase in the GDP.

And though no one in the policy establishment seems to realize it, efforts to make “the economy” better could make those who comprise the economy – in the developed countries at least – worse off.
 But the discussion is cast almost entirely in economic abstractions. The aim is to bestir “consumption”, whatever that might entail; the various proposals – tax cuts, unemployment and other benefits, public works – are judged almost entirely according to that criterion. Yes, we may also develop more efficient use of energy, and cleaner sources of it. That’s the hope at least. But exactly what will happen with that greater efficiency, and to what end?

The question might sound philosophical, or impertinent, or even subversive. In the past it has been considered all of those. The market knows best. Whatever people choose to buy is by definition good – because who knows better what people need than they themselves do? Only those of questionable ideological intentions would want to inquire further. That was the attitude in simpler times, when human needs could be presumed to be as “infinite” as the resources presumed available to meet them.

But now the economy has taken a grim new turn, such that an enlarging part of it consists of problems that the market itself has created. What right-wingers say about the government bureaucracy – that it constantly creates new work for itself – has become true of the economy at large. Growth has become iatrogenic. A process supposed to be conducive to well-being has become instead a continual disrupter of it, so as to stir the pot of expenditure and growth.
Obesity is just one example. The others are legion. Consider the $150 billion or so that Americans spend each year to repair the damage from auto collisions. Much of that comes from increasing traffic, which comes in turn from more sprawl and cars – growth engines both. (Americans spend some $9 billion alone on gas they burn to sit stationary in traffic.)

Antibiotics beget resistant strains of viruses that require new and more expensive antibiotics. Ditto for agricultural pesticides. Urban noise begets special insulation, double pane windows and white noise machines. Traffic begets bad air, which has helped give rise to an asthma treatment industry of about a billion dollars a year for children alone. The list goes on and on.

The human body is where it all comes most vividly to roost. Consider AstraZeneca, a multinational company that until recently made tamoxifen, a drug used to combat breast cancer; the corporation also makes fungicides, herbicides, and other chemicals widely implicated in causing cancer.



According to current projections, within a decade or two about a quarter of the American GDP will consist of medical care. Business Week magazine reported that, since 2001, every net new job in the U.S. has come from the medical sector. Some new growth comes from preventive medicine, to be sure. But disease, not health, is the driver; and much of that disease is a product of consumption itself.

Yet what is the alternative? “We have to spend our money on something,” a Stanford University economist shrugged when asked about the economy\‘s growing disease dependence. The question, it seems, is not what we need from the economy, but rather what the economy needs from us.
The roots of this strange dilemma go back to the beginning of the mass consumer market, when industrial capacity began to outstrip human need. But the more immediate story begins in the latter years of the Second World War, when there was brooding concern in U.S. business circles over what would happen next. What would keep the factories busy once the troops came home?

One answer came in the form of a Cold War. Another came from a young economist by the name of John Kenneth Galbraith, fresh from the wartime Office of Price Administration, who addressed the “What next?” question in a series of articles for Fortune magazine in 1944. He tackled the issue with the zest of an ardent Keynesian for whom the answer was clear. The returning troops could hand off the baton of high national purpose to the shoppers – who were soon heading off to a new base of operations, the mall.

But then Galbraith started to have second thoughts. About 10 years after he wrote the Fortune articles, Galbraith, then a professor at Harvard, published The Affluent Society, which cast a skeptical eye on the consumption economy whose blueprint he had helped to develop. The basic problem was what he called the “production imperative” – the belief that the market always must produce more, and then more on top of that. Yet look around us, Galbraith said. If it takes the marketing sector over $150 billion a year to prop up what economists quaintly call “demand”, is it really demand in any sane sense of that word? Does it really have the urgency and unquestionable sovereignty that economists assign to it?

Galbraith was suggesting heresy – that there might be a systemic point of diminishing returns to the corporate market. Wouldn’t it make sense, he said, to shift some resources from private wants that had been poked and prodded into being and put them towards public needs that were indisputably great?

The book touched a brooding unease about the corporate economy. It became a bestseller and provided a landmark rationale for liberal economic policy and increased expenditure by the state. But then came the Vietnam War, and after that the economic challenges from Asia. The Affluent Society began to seem an artifact of the 1950s. Now the U.S. had to compete with the Japanese – and the Chinese after them. Who cared what the economy produced, so long as it was growing?
The environmental crisis complicated that script, however. And now comes the inconvenient new realities of “consumption” itself. We have moved far past the Affluent Society and its marketing-aroused wants. Now it\‘s real life problems – from traffic to disease – that the economy creates and then sells remedies for. In theoretical terms, environmental problems are a genre of what economists call “externalities”, which are unwanted side effects of consumption otherwise assumed to be benign. Now we are entering the realm of what might be called “internalities” – which is to say, dysfunctions inherent in consumption itself.

This is a black hole to the conventional economic mind. Economists don\‘t even have a language for it; the reigning vocabulary is encoded with the production imperative. An economy consists of goods and services. There are no bads or disservices – no negative products of any kind. What we call the “dismal science” actually looks at the world through eyes that see no evil where consumption is concerned.

Nor can economists deal with related new complications, such as the epidemic of compulsive buying. They assume a “rational” consumer who makes informed choices through an unfailing internal calculus of loss and gain. Thus whatever this hypothetical consumer buys can be assumed to contribute to their “welfare” in proportion to the price paid. But what about the millions today in the “advanced” economies who are engaged in a grim daily battle with themselves to consume less – to eat less, gamble less, shop less period? How can economists say consumption is good when the consumers themselves think it is bad?

This is something new in human history – an economy “in need of need,” as John McKnight of Northwestern University has put it. We can never overcome poverty, among other things, because our economic logic requires us constantly to reinvent it. In terms of policy, we are in a no-man’s-land. The old maps don’t work because they don’t even recognize the problem. Liberal and conservative nostrums have become, basically, different routes to an outdated end.

As Barack Obama and his counterparts around the world try to plot their way out of the morass they will almost certainly use those old maps anyway, because there are no others. We have to spend our money on something. But lurking in the background is this conundrum that will not go away. The financial crisis presents a rare opportunity to begin to find our way out.

Major dailies like Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have crumpled into extinction. Philadelphia’s two papers are both on the ropes. And Ann Arbor, Michigan has won the distinction of being the first U.S. city with no traditional daily newspaper.

According to almost everyone, including reporters and editors in most newsrooms , the era of the daily newspaper is over. They simply cannot compete with the internet, which is scooping them on breaking news and rustling most of their advertisers.

But this obituary gets the facts wrong. Actually, the readership and reach of quality newspapers is stronger than ever because of the web. Even as home deliveries and newsstand sales slide, the internet is bringing huge numbers of new readers seeking the in-depth reporting that newspapers offer.

It’s not newspapers themselves that are outdated (presuming you still call them newspapers when printed online) but the business model that carried them through the 20th Century—slender profits from circulation on top of fat money from advertising.

To conceive a different business model for newspapers to survive, we must start by thinking differently about newspapers themselves—not as a business at all but as a public service, a part of the information commons.

A city with a good newspaper (whether online, print or, ideally, both) benefits in numerous ways beyond the profits (if any) it re-circulates through the community. Local businesses, the government sector, the arts scene, the sports world, neighborhoods and citizens in general are all better off thanks to the useful information that newspapers provide. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom sums it up well in thinking about the precarious fate of his city’s leading daily: “The Chronicle plays an important role in our civic life and we don’t want to see this treasured institution close its doors.”

The horse-and-buggy analogy truly doesn’t work with newspapers. Horse-and-buggies were replaced with something that did their job just as well (even if it did pollute the air and wreak havoc in city streets). That’s not the case with newspapers. Radio or TV news, weeklies and the proliferation of niche websites hardly ever provide the same kind of community forum as a traditional newspaper with a newsroom full of reporters eager to explore the breadth and depth of the city in search of what people need to know.

Like libraries, good schools, civic organizations, public transit, social services, parks and police (none of which are expected to turn a profit) newspapers are part of what ensures a healthy, prosperous, vital community. All these vital public assets are a part of the commons.

If newspapers look odd on this list of institutions that are primarily the responsibility of government agencies or non-profit organizations, that’s because we are stuck in old ways of thinking about information. We live in an era frequently characterized as the “Information Age” or the “Knowledge Economy,” which means that reliable sources of news are more essential to our lives than ever.

Before World War II, most public transit agencies were privately owned and would have looked funny on a list like this. And like good newspapers today they were generally run to benefit the community rather than just their shareholders, who often were real-estate developers or major employers who made money indirectly from trolleys and buses.) But today no one would exclude public transit as a central part of the commons. And in a few years, no one will question newspapers—that is, if they make it.

If we view daily newspapers as an essential public service that we cannot afford to lose, how do we keep them publishing? There’s probably not one answer, but in looking at how other important but not-necessarily profitable institutions survive, here are some commons-based solutions.

Taxpayer Support through an Independent Agency. Search no further than NPR, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a successful example of Americans receiving high quality news and culture in return for a tiny portion of their tax dollars.

Reader Support and Sponsorships. Public radio and television offer other practical ways for paying the high costs of providing information. Readers, foundations, civic organizations and perhaps businesses could underwrite quality reporting.

Community Ownership. No one owns the Green Bay Packers. Shares of the team are widely spread out among people of the community. Why not the Los Angeles Times or Boston Globe?

Non-Profit Status. Own of America’s most respected newspapers, the St. Petersburg Times, has been owned for many years by the non-profit Poynter Institute. A number of other non-profit experiments are underway, including MinnPost, a new online daily in Minneapolis-St. Paul that boasts that it the only news organization to open—rather than close—a Washington bureau last year.

9. Hermann Hatzfeldt on Sustainable Forestry

During an afternoon break at the retreat, Hermann Hatzfeldt led the group on a walk through a forest preserve adjacent to Crottorf Castle. Hatzfeldt pioneered the a number of sustainable forestry practices on the 7,000 acres of nearby forest that he owns, the third largest privately owned forest in Germany. He explained that his management philosophy is to work in partnership with nature rather than trying to dictate to nature — because the results are more stable and productive over the long term. Hatzfeldt’s enterprise is essentially about the sustainable management of a common pool resource by a private owner.

Conventional forestry management requires planting, cultivating and harvesting. A monoculture of trees is typically planted is rows to maximize the efficiencies of performing these tasks. But such Fordism is more costly over the long term, said Hatzfeldt, and it results in a more fragile ecosystem. In sustainable forestry, by contrast, the goal is to cut and tend the forest to enhance its natural inclinations, a process that also renews and improves the forest. So, for example, trees that fall to the ground are allowed to stay there. This will allow more moss to grow, which elevates the humidity of the forest, which aids forest growth. Mushrooms can grow on the forest floor, and their later decomposition improves the soil. And so on. A general lesson that might be drawn: sustainable management can elicit “hidden economies” that only manifest themselves over time, and may elude direct measurement.

The view from Crottorf Castle. Photo by Prashant Iyengar.

It would appear that many commons, by encouraging sustainable management of resources, may also create value in counter-intuitive, “hidden” ways. The most obvious example is free software. The proprietary industry never imagined that personal passions, social collaborations, shared ideals and other “soft” factors could be so consequential in building complex software programs. The Native Americans in New Mexico who manage precious supplies of water under the acequia system have a similar counterintuitive approach to managing the commons of water. They do not try to capture every last drop by putting concrete floors in irrigation ditches; instead they let some of the water seep into the ground, which in turn allows trees to grow nearby, which shields the fields from the wind, helps preserve topsoil, creates shade and lowers temperatures.

By honoring the organic integrity of a resource and its own natural propensities, the commons helps cultivate a “value proposition” that the neoliberal markets cannot understand or capture.

10. The Global South and the Commons

The commons has a special importance to people of the global South, many participants agreed. Nicola Bullard (Focus on the Global South, Bangkok) declared that there is “a profound crisis of the commons in the global South,” citing the many enclosures of seeds, minerals, ethnobotanical knowledge and much else.

Corporate enclosures of the South are so extreme that “capitalism is trying to resurrect the commons in its own image,” said Prashant Iyengar (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India). “The commons is used in the sense of a presumed space of freedom with no traditions or rules — to convey the feelings of early settlers,” he said. The commons is associated with open source software, which is only available to those who can afford computers and have access to electricity. In Indian culture and history, by contrast, the commons is far more organically rooted in the timeless dimensions of the natural world and in spirituality.

In recent years, the global South has been developing a number of commons-based responses to enclosures. The Solidarity Economy movement is one example. This movement originated in Brazil in the 1990s, said Andreas Exner of Klagenfurt, Austria, an ecologist who works closely with the Solidarity Movement. The idea behind the Solidarity Economy, said Exner, is to use bottom-up social cooperation and sharing to build new types of institutions and practices for performing needed work.

Examples include fair trade organizations and cooperatives that help farmers get fair prices, trade unions, open source software projects, local currencies, and “free shops” where there is no exchange or prices to obtain goods. “The goal of the Solidarity Economy is to change the relations of production,” said Exner. “We need to break the market’s role in mediating production and build up new production chains within the Solidarity Economy, and then link the different parts together.”

In Durban, South Africa, Richard Pithouse reported on how squatters are re-appropriating urban spaces, creating new types of commons in the process. They are not “traditional” commons, but they are certain commons in the sense of being self-governed collectives managing a shared resource for the benefit of its participants.

A particularly striking feature of some South African commons, said Pithouse, is the insistence of the commoners are “asserting the right to be intellectuals” who can interpret their circumstances directly, in their own voice. “We are the professors of our own suffering,” said one protest banner. Another said, “Talk to us, not of us.” The point is to avoid a movement struggle led and defined by experts, and to enable everyone participating in the struggle to be a peer.

Another initiative emerging from the global South is a “Reclaim the Commons” manifesto issued by the World Social Forum, launched in January 2009. (Link: http://bienscommuns.org/signature/ appel/?a=signer&lang=en appel/?a=signer&lang=en ) Miguel Vieira, a planner with the World Social Forum (São Paulo, Brasil), explained the origins of the manifesto at the organization’s January 2009 gathering, and urged individuals and organizations to formally sign the manifesto. The document reads:

Humankind is suffering from an unprecedented campaign of privatization and commodification of the most basic elements of life: nature, culture, human work and knowledge itself. In countless arenas, businesses are claiming our shared inheritance – sciences, creative works, water, the atmosphere, health, education, genetic diversity, even living creatures – as private property. A compulsive quest for short-term financial gain is sacrificing the prosperity of all and the stability of the Earth itself.

And the manifesto concludes:

This Manifesto calls upon all citizens of the world to deepen the notion of the commons and to share the diverse approaches and experiences that it honors. In our many different ways, let us mobilize to reclaim the commons, organize their de-privatization and get them off markets, and strengthen our individual initiatives by joining together in this urgent, shared mission.

11. The Dark Side of the Commons

A number of participants proposed that the commons is not necessarily a wholesome, constructive force. For example, there are communities of “open-source biologists” who are trying to create their own “do it yourself” genes, which could wreck catastrophic disruptions on nature. The residents of the black “homelands” of South Africa once govern themselves as commons, but the government strictly limited their sovereignty and resources.

As mentioned earlier, nations that invoke the “common heritage of humankind” often do so to justify the expropriation of resources from others. The workers of a factory may interact on the shop floor as a commons and yet still be subject to corporate management. And the “care economy” of child-rearing and housekeeping that women participate in may be a gift economy functioning outside of the marketplace – but it is clearly more exploitative than emancipatory. A gift implies a choice, but these commons are often marked by coercion.

Sylvia Federici also pointed out how the World Bank “discovered” the commons in the 1990s as a way to domesticate its possibilities in Africa. Neoliberalism came to recognize the commons, but took steps to ensure that it would evolve in ways compatible with the larger market agenda.

It was pointed out by Wolfgang Sachs, however, that historically most commons have not involved choice. And gift economies have power and rules notwithstanding the exchange of “gifts.” Another participant pointed out that many if not all of these scenarios are not truly commons. They resemble open-access regimes (or tragedies of the commons) in which the commoners do not truly govern themselves or establish their own rules and sanctions; they are failed commons.

The paradigm of “compromised commons” can be seen in many online spaces such as Facebook and MySpace. On such sites, the host company’s “terms of service” contracts are the real governance rules for the “community.” Bollier calls these commons “faux commons.” Lawrence Lessig has called them instances of “digital sharecropping,” a kind of debt-servitude that occurred following the American Civil War, in which African-Americans paid for use of farming land by paying their white landlords with a share of the crops they grew.

Do these compromised forms of collective governance constitute commons or not? These are theoretical and definitional issues about the commons that deserve greater exploration.

12. The Future of the Commons: Unresolved Issues

Needless to say, there are many unresolved issues in moving a commons agenda forward. Much of the conversation focused on how to shape the commons as a viable political project.

Institutionalizing a commons strategy and agenda. “We are beyond the period of window-shopping for new master narratives,” said Wolfgang Sachs. “These Crottorf discussions may be a place to show the complexity of the commons discourse to the outside world. But we need some institutionalization to bring together the isolated pockets of commons work.”

Sachs continued: “World society is about to give itself political institutions [to deal with climate change and the financial/economic crisis]. How can we affirm protection for the commons without falling into the trap of expert-run planetary management? Since the age of unlimited economic growth is coming to an end, what are other sources of well-being? How can we foster sources of well-being that are not exclusively monetary? What is the politics of fostering well-being instead of GDP? We must find ways to secure rights and well-being with less money than before.”

A key strategic issue, therefore, is to locate the places in which the commons can be deepened. George Caffentzis suggested that we must study how commons come into being. Often, they arise as a result of tragedies of the commons or enclosures. One difficult task is to mobilize the social and political energy and imagination to build new commons. We must prod people to go beyond their usual norms and sense of the possible.

This will pose special challenges for the global South, Richard Pithouse (Durban, South Africa) pointed out. Any changes sought by the North must include a commitment to global justice for the South; the invention of new types of alternative livelihoods; and a recognition that a no-growth economy will be disastrous for the South.

Wolfgang Sachs sees four possible responses to the scarcity that lies ahead: 1) Use social exclusion to limit access and benefits from scarce resources; 2) Expand the means of production at any cost (through nuclear, biomass, genetic and biotech engineering, etc.); 3) improve the efficiency of energy use; and 4) revise our collective goals and aspirations so that an ethic of “sufficiency” can take root.

From the commons perspective, the first two choices – social exclusion and increased production – are not solutions at all, from the commons perspective. The third choice, greater efficiency, will not work because aggregate growth will simply eclipse whatever efficiency gains are introduced. Only the fourth choice is promising, and that is where the commons could be an important part of the solution. “Our only hope is to make economic power that is based on fossil fuels less attractive,” said Sachs. “We also have to de-couple well-being from economic power.”

The state and the commons. One unresolved issue involves the role of the state with respect to the commons. It has already been noted that the commons discourse offers a defense against the state. But it remains a unclear how the state should interact with the commons. What degree of sanction and support should it provide, and what degree of independence? Caffentzis noted that the Zapitistas have embraced the commons as a constitutional matter; the Bolivians are considering constitutional changes that would recognize common property; and Ecuador has adopted a new clause in its constitution explicitly recognizing the rights of the environment.

But the risk is that a commons would be seen as state-managed property. This would undermine the commons because people would have no direct sense of responsibility for collective resources; authority would be delegated to government and politicians, and familiar patterns of capture and corruption would re-appear.

Any discussion of the commons raises the issue of whether it is a means of defensive resistance or a pro-active strategy. Different participants aligned themselves with one or the other perspectives, but Stefan Meretz pointed out that the two are really the same: “We produce our own commons and we defend them. Some of us are ‘dam-builders’ and some of us are ‘ship builders.’”

The digital commons and natural/physical commons. Another issue is the relationship between the emerging digital commons and the “physical” or natural commons. One reason the former function so well is because their resources are intangible and non-rival; they do not get “used up” and so the politics of allocating use and benefit from them are much easier. There is a “cornucopia of the commons” rather than a “tragedy of the commons.”

And yet even though the resources and politics of the two classes of commons differ greatly, they are not entirely different beasts with nothing in common. Digital tools are often used by commoners to help manage and improve natural and physical commons. People in poor, rural areas in developing countries may find valuable knowledge, assistance of coordination of work through the Internet. Franz Nahrada cited his experiences with the Global Villages Network, which is a worldwide community of villages that use the Internet to promote economic and social innovation. His experience is that digital technologies can help increase collaboration with nature.

On the other hand, the denizens of the digital commons are generally oblivious to the material bases of computer production and its environmental effects (the mining of minerals, the disposal of old computers, etc.) And in many countries, the “digital divide” between rich and poor remains a significant fact. In such circumstances, reliance on online commons is seen as exclusionary.

What is needed is a critical perspective on material basis of new technology and its designed-in behaviors. We also need to explore the ways in which digital commons and natural commons interact.

There are, of course, many other unanswered question. How should the commoners engage in the battle of ideas with neoliberalism? What venues or issues are most promising? Which people and organizations can help advance these goals?

Another key issue that deserves more attention: How can the commoners generate income for commons advocacy, networking and innovation? Funding for building commons infrastructure is much-needed and highly efficient. So is funding of salaries for people engaged in commons advocacy and have no “day job” to support their work. By leveraging the energies of the commoners, such people, using commons infrastructure, can unleash surprising amounts of social engagement and economic value. To take one example, the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports Wikipedia and several other wiki projects, has an annual budget of only US $2 million a year and a small staff.

* * *

It is no exaggeration to say that the three-day Crottorf retreat represented one of the most intensive and sophisticated dialogues about contemporary commons ever held. It was distinguished by its diversity of perspectives from academics, activists and irregulars from many disciplines and policy arenas. Although many vexing issues remain, there was a consensus that the commons offers many attractive possibilities for those commoners wishing to confront the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. It also offers the inspiration and legitimacy of history, and many successful models of commoning.

This, truly, may be one of the most important contributions that the commons may make: helping us to learn new ways of knowing and being, and new ways of interacting with each other and with the Earth. Politics and economics are not something that occur in a zone apart; they exist in our consciousness and culture. The commons speaks to all of these realms, and therefore offers some hopeful paths toward the future.

Appendix A: Retreat Participants

• Andoni Alonso, Madrid, Spain

• Michel Bauwens, Bangkok, Thailand, is an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has been an analyst for the United States Information Agency, knowledge manager for British Petroleum, eBusiness Strategy Manager for Belgacom, as well as an internet entrepreneur in his home country of Belgium. He has co-produced the 3-hour TV documentary Technocalyps with Frank Theys, and co-edited the two-volume book on anthropology of digital society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is currently Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008). In February 2009, he joined Dhurakij Pundit University’s International College as Lecturer in Bangkok, Thailand, assisting with the development of the Asian Foresight Institute. Main site at http://p2pfoundation.net; Bibliography at http://p2pfoundation.net/Bibliography_of_Michel_Bauwens; Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens

• Iain Boal, Berkeley, California, USA, is an Irish social historian, half educated in England. He has been resident in Berkeley since 1985. He is associated with Retort, a group of antinomian writers, artisans and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was co-editor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, City Lights Press,1995, and one of the authors of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2nd edn, Verso, 2006), which Michael Hardt described as a “venomous and poetic book” and Harold Pinter as “a comprehensive analysis of America’s relationship with the world. No stone is left unturned. The maggots exposed are grotesque.” In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology. He is affiliated with the Geography Department and the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. Areas of Special Interest: The social history of science, technics and medicine; luddism and anti-modernity; science and visual culture; commoning and communalism; language and the technics of communication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Boal

• David Bollier, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, (www.bollier.org) is an American author, activist, blogger and consultant who spends much of his time studying the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He pursues this work as an editor of Onthecommons.org and and Fellow at On the Commons, in collaboration with various U.S. and international partners. Bollier is the author of three books on different aspects of the commons: Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Commons Wealth (2002) is a far-ranging survey of market enclosures of public lands, the airwaves, creativity, scientific knowledge, and much else. Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (2005) documents the vast expansion of copyright and trademark law over the past generation at the expense of the public domain. And Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009) describes the rise of free software, free culture, and the movements behind open business models, open science, open educational resources and new modes of Internet-enabled citizenship. Bollier is Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and co-founder and board member of Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the information commons.

• Nicola Bullard, Bangkok, Thailand

• George Caffentzis, Portland, Maine, USA, is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and a coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. He has taught in many universities in the US and at the University of Calabar (Nigeria). He is presently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, USA. He has written many essays on social and political themes. His published books include “Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money”, “Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money”; “No Blood for Oil!” (an e-book accessed at http://www.radicalpolytics.org/). His co-edited books include: “Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992)”; “Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War”; “Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities.”

• Massimo De Angelis, London, England, *1960, currently lives with his family in a small village in the Apennines in the province of Modena (Italy) where he is learning the ways of rural commoners while teaching music at the local nursery school and exploring the possibility of forms of association promoting commoning in those areas worst served by public services. As a teenager he participated in the revolutionary ferment of the the 1970s Italian movimento and ever since cannot consider himself whole without some engagement in meaningful emancipatory projects. He is also professor of Political Economy of Development at the University of East London. In 1995 he obtained his PhD in Economics at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA. He has published two books, Keynesianism, Social Conflict and Political Economy (2000) and The Beginning of History: Global Capital and Value Struggles (2007) as well as numerous articles. He is the editor of the web journal The Commoner (http://www.thecommoner.org) which he founded in 2000. His current research is centred on the relation between capitalist crises and commons.

• Andreas Exner, Klagenfurt, Austria, *1973. Academic studies in ecology, research of vegetation ecology, social work. Former militant activist within the ecology movement, former attac-activist, former member of the network for a basic income. Currently crossbench councelor in the chamber of labour for the Green and Independent Unionists in Kärnten (www.grueneug.wordpress.com). Editor of “Streifzüge” (http://streifzuege.org) and member of SINET (http://social-innovation.org). Activist at http://solcom.ning.com, http://transitionaustria.ning.com, http://transitioneurope.ning.com. Books: together with Lauk & Kulterer “The limits of capitalism. How we fail on growth” (Ueberreuter, 2008, in German); together with Rätz & Zenker: “Basic income. Social security without work” (Deuticke, 2007, in German). Main focus of activities: Resources and capital, SolidarityEconomy; present in Facebook.

• Silvia Federici, Hempstead, New York, USA, is a long time feminist activist, teacher and writer. She was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the New York Wages For Housework Committee, the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She has taught at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and Hofstra University. She has authored many essays on feminist theory and history. Her published books include: “Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation”; “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others” (editor); “Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities” (co-editor). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_Federici

• Hermann Hatzfeldt, Crottorf, Germany, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Graf_Hatzfeldt (German)

• Silke Helfrich, Jena, Germany, has studied romance languages and pedagogy at the Karl-Marx-University in Leipzig. Since mid of the 1990s activities in the field of development politics, from 1996 to 1998 head of Heinrich Böll Foundation Thuringia and from 1999 to 2007 head of the regional office of Heinrich Böll Foundation in Mexiko City focusing on globalisation, gender and human rights. She is running the German-speaking CommonsBlog at http://commonsblog.de

• Prashant Iyengar, Bangalore, India, is a Technology/IP lawyer, academic and a new media activist based in India. He runs a free database of Indian Supreme Court cases (OpenJudis), and is currently a researcher with the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. He has also previously (2006-07) been an International Policy Fellow with the Open Society Institute.

• Rainer Kuhlen, Berlin, Germany, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Kuhlen (german)

• Peter Linebaugh, Toledo, Ohio, USA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Linebaugh

• Stefan Meretz, Berlin, Germany, *1962. Ph.D. in material science, diploma in computer science, webmaster at german united services union (ver.di), managing free software projects. Research of political economy of free software and member of the Oekonux (Economy & GNU/Linux) network. Teaching German Critical Psychology. Co-founder of the Keimform blog (http://keimform.de/), a blog investigating germ forms of a new commons-based society. Running several web projects (http://meretz.de/), member of Facebook.

• Pat Roy Mooney, Ottawa, Canada, Executive Director. For more than thirty years, Pat Mooney has worked with civil society organisations (CSOs) on international trade and development issues related to agriculture and biodiversity. Mooney has lived most of his life on the Canadian prairies. The author or co-author of several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity, Pat Mooney received The Right Livelihood Award (the “Alternative Nobel Prize”) in the Swedish Parliament in 1985. In 1998 Mooney received the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada’s Governor General. He also received the American “Giraffe Award” given to people “who stick their necks out”. Pat Mooney has no university training, but is widely regarded as an authority on agricultural biodiversity and new technology issues. Together with Cary Fowler and Hope Shand, Pat Mooney began working on the “seeds” issue in 1977. In 1984, the three co-founded RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation International), whose name was changed to ETC group (pronounced “etcetera” group) in 2001. ETC Group is a small international CSO addressing the impact of new technologies on rural communities. ETC has offices in Canada, the United States, and Mexico; and works closely with CSO partners around the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Roy_Mooney

• Franz Nahrada, Vienna, Austria, *1954, academic studies in sociology, philosophy and political science, which lead to intensive studies of university politics and critique of current science in the context of various marxist political approaches. The discontent with both neglectiveness of theory and the need for social alternatives led to a quest how both can be reconciliated. In the meantime, on the professional side, because of the refusal to work towards an academic career, several factors converged: involvement in tourism (management of the family hotel), software development (same reason), work for Apple Computers 1987 – 1992 (HyperCard developer support), knowledge organisation. Experiences with the destructive social impact of tourism in Greece led to ideas of new integrative village development (alliance of nomadic knowledge workers and traditional village population = Global Villages). In seven field trips to California and other states (1988 – 1995) both technology development and the social innovations that make them meaningful were the main subject (for example Arcosanti). Tried to apply this strand in Austria, succeeded with the Global Village conferences (1993 – 2000) and the Cultural Heritage in the Global Village (CULTH) conferences (1998 – 2002). Founded the Global Villages Network to create a worldwide community of village innovators. Worked on redefinition of locations: Electronic Cafés, Monasteries, Libraries. On the political side: working on New Work movement for radically facing permanent unemployment and nonmonetary economies, studied patterns of emerging civil society, worked with Oekonux and co organized the third conference, studied traditional native council wisdom and timeless cultural patterns with several teachers. Still seeks to build up a research institution (GIVE – Laboratory for Global Villages). Currently working with Andreas Exner and others on Transition Austria and SOLCOM, with Andrius Kulikauskas on a global learning & life maintainance community called Worknets, with others on Open Source Ecology, and is also president of ECOVAST (European Council of Villages and Small Towns) in Austria. Currently working on a book “invisible intelligence” (following a conference organized together with Peter Weibel) to foster theory-culture that connects serious analyses, bold visions and diligent practice. Curently working also on a “pattern language for the postindustrial society” in general and a “pattern language of the solar age” in particular.

• Richard Pithouse, Port Elisabeth, South Africa, is an activist, academic and journalist from South Africa. He is currently focussing his energies on popular struggles for the right to the cities and is interested in exploring the idea of the urban commons. He teaches political philosophy at Rhodes University.

• Christian Siefkes, Berlin, Germany, *1975. Ph.D. in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin; works as a freelance software engineer. Co-founder of the Keimform-Blog (http://www.keimform.de/), a blog investigating how far the potential of commons-based peer production extends: Is a society possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production, and how could such a society be organized? Book: “From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World” (Berlin, 2007, http://peerconomy.org/), German translation: “Beitragen statt tauschen” (Neu-Ulm, 2008).

• Wolfgang Sachs, Wuppertal, Germany, author, university teacher, journal editor. 1966-1975 studies in theology and social sciences in Munich, Tübingen and Berkeley. Since 1993 Senior Fellow at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Head of research on globalization and sustainablility. Honorary Professor at Kassel University and regular lecturer at Schumacher College, England. Member of the Club of Rome. Research areas: Globalization, development, environment, new models of wealth. Recent books in English: ”Planet Dialectics. Explorations in Environment and Development”, London: Zed Books, 1999. „Slow Trade-Sound Farming“ (ed.), Berlin: Misereor/Heinrich Boell Foundation, 2007. „Fair Future. Resource Conflicts, Security, and Global Justice“, (ed with T. Santarius) Zed Books, 2007. Website: http://www.wupperinst.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Sachs

• Miguel Vieira, São Paulo, Brasil, is a researcher in the field of access to knowledge, currently preparing a master’s dissertation on the subject of “Intellectual commons and commodification”, at the University of São Paulo (Education Faculty, department of Philosophy of Education). He has graduated in Communications (minor: Publishing) and Philosophy, both also at the University of São Paulo, and has a specialization degree on intellectual property (the course was promoted by UBV, SAPI and OCPI — respectively: Bolivarian University of Venezuela, and the Venezuelan and Cuban intellectual property offices). He has published some texts on the subjects of intellectual property and, more recently, collaborative production and the commons. Other academic interests include philosophy of science and technology, marxism, democratization of communication and the publishing industry. (Although right now focusing exclusively on the graduate studies, pursuing a professional career in the field of publishing.) He is also involved with access to knowledge through political activism. He is part of a brazilian collective called Epidemia, which keeps an eye on the intellectual property-related agenda, and has been active in the planning of the Science & Democracy World Forum (a side event to the WSF 2009) and in the demonstrations against “Projeto Azeredo” (a brazilian proposed law that would endanger privacy and threaten the existence of open wifi).

Appendix B: Suggested Readings

• A Letter to the Commons (2006), http://icommons.org/articles/a-letter-to-the-commons

• Michel Bauwens (2005), The Political Economy of Peer Production. CTheory, October 2, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499 ; Re-published Post-Autistic Economics Review, issue 37. Retrieved from http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue37/Bauwens37.htm

• Michel Bauwens (2008), The Political Implications of the Peer to Peer Revolution. Knowledge Politics, Volume 1 Issue 2 (April 2008), pp. 1-24 . Retrieved from http://www.knowledgepolitics.org.uk/kpq-1-2-Bauwens.pdf

• Michel Bauwens (2008), The social web and its social contracts. Re-public. Retrieved from http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261

• Iain Boal (2007), Feast and Famine: A Conversation about Scarcity, Apocalypse, and Enclosure, Retort Pamphlet Series #4

• David Bollier (2002), Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Commons Wealth.

• David Bollier (2009), Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own.

• Lawrence Liang, Prashant Iyengar, Jiti Nichani (2009), Commons for the Commoner in Asia. How Does an Asian Commons Mean. Paper available from Prashant Iyengar.

• Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker (2000), The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.

• Peter Linebaugh (2003), The London Hanged. Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.

• Peter Linebaugh (2008), Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All.

• Thomas Paine (2009), Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Agrarian Justice, with an introduction by Peter Linebaugh (proposing to understand Paine through his commoning and anti-enclosure experiences).

• Christian Siefkes (2009), The Commons of the Future. Building Blocks for a Commons-based Society. http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=78

• Christian Siefkes (2007), From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. http://peerconomy.org.

5. A Developmental Theory of the Commons

Stefan Meretz (Keimform blog, Berlin, Germany) proposed that the commons represents a qualitatively new step in history. The core problem is to overcome the classical market economy’s power to order most of life. Why should the formal economy, which governs approximately one-third of the world’s resources (by the reckoning of one study), control the other two-thirds of the world’s resources?

A central problem in modern life is that our economic relations to each other govern our social relations. Our identities as employees and consumers predominate, and so the marketplace becomes our primary source of social and personal meaning. Market production dominates society, and the value of anything is determined by the price it can command. The main question for any endeavor is whether its output can be sold, not whether it has intrinsic value to human or ecological well-being. Our relationships end up being indirectly mediated by products and things.

The moat around Crottorf Castle. Photo by Prashant Iyengar.

The commons paradigm challenges this paradigm of neoliberal capitalism by introducing direct social production. Individuals know their own needs, by themselves, and can self-select tasks that engage their talents and passions. Socially based production in this scenario becomes the basis of social relationships; the making of a livelihood (money from the market economy) blends with the making of a life (purpose and meaning).

Meretz bases much of his analysis on the social dynamics of free software development, a process that depends upon self-directed, passionate, voluntary engagement in a collective production process. Meretz sees this paradigm, which has been pioneered by free software, as the harbinger of an epochal shift in the economy.

He proposed a five-step process by which the current neoliberal regime could give way to a commons-based regime:

1. People begin to identify the seed forms of new modes of producing our livelihoods. This will occur in “secured places” where commoners can experiment and build new models without interference.

2. A crisis in existing production modes will allow the new seed forms of commoning to grow and become an historical force.

3. Niche modes of commoning will expand and become a relevant force in the economy and society at large.

4. New modes of commoning will become dominant and replace the old logic of neoliberalism with a new logic of the commons.

5. The new institutions and production practices will consolidate and realign themselves over time.

Meretz called attention to Stage 3 as critical. “Expansion requires that new modes of production be compatible with old modes. This is occurring right now. Some companies are using commons because it helps lower their costs and compete more effectively in the marketplace.”

Strictly speaking, commons used in a business context are not necessarily about maximizing profit. Yet they are valued nonetheless because they help companies “solve” their competitive challenges. Think of large tech and media companies that rely on user-generated content or free content to attract Web traffic, market their brands, and earn advertising revenues.

The commons, in other words, can be tolerated by profit-seeking companies, or in many instances, provide genuine competitive advantages. But what is significant from the commoners’ perspective is that commons-based production cannot be absorbed by the market system. It is a protected zone of endeavor.

As such, this stage represents a inflection point that allows the commons to take root in the neoliberal system without being violently rejected by it (which would otherwise be the expected response). Over time, the deficiencies of the old neoliberal system will become evident; the system will lose its strength and stability; and it will be supplanted by a commons sector that will out-perform it with its own, quite different logic. This is Meretz’s theory of how the commons can develop from within a hostile neoliberal environment.

At Stage 3, a shift in logic occurs, said Meretz. The market typically requires competition at the expense of others. My success in producing a higher-quality product or more productive process means a loss for someone else. This is not a personal thing. It is just a systemic feature of the market capitalism. It is a structural relationship that we cannot overcome individually.

By contrast, a commons allows value to be produced only if others are participating. This dynamic is based upon an elemental principle of human life: self-development requires other people, in the positive sense. Without a community, nothing is possible. Again, this idea is grounded in the empirical realities of free software. One version of the Linux operating system is Ubuntu, an African term that comes from the phrase, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” which can be roughly translated as “A person is a person through other people” or “I am what I am because of you.” This principle is intrinsic to so much song, dance and music in Africa, where all individuals in a community are involved in the process of creation.

The commons induces a positive feedback cycle of “I need others and others need me,” said Meretz. This can be seen in numerous online communities. If others do not come forward to co-create, then it’s not a commons. George Caffentzis suggested that just as Machiavelli described the transition from feudalism to capitalism, so we may need “a new Machiavelli” for our times to help describe the transition from capitalism to the commons.

6. The Power of Peer Production

Michel Bauwens of the Peer to Peer Foundation (Bangkok, Thailand) made a presentation about the self-organizing capacities of people on the Internet, often known as commons-based peer production.

It is significant that Web 2.0 software took off just as the tech industry crashed, in April 2000, he said. Investors fled the field and refused to provide capital. Yet a single individual working without staff or capital, Bram Cohen, was able to build and launch BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing software that has dramatically lowered transaction and coordination costs among people. BitTorrent has become a key tool for many legitimate scientific, business and commons enterprises (as well as illegal music file-sharing).

The success of BitTorrent and other commons-based systems implies “a revolution in organization and value systems,” said Bauwens. “We are not going back to pre-modern holism. Relationalism is the future.” By this, he means that “affinity-based communities based on a sense of belonging” are the archetype for the future. Production will become a goal-driven affair among participants who jointly negotiate understandings among themselves.

It is now customary for for-benefit associations to guide and assist the social/technological innovation of volunteer-driven communities, often by raising and allocating money to specific projects. Most of the major free and open source software projects – Linux, Apache, Ubuntu, Debian, Wikipedia, etc. – have affiliated software foundations. The foundations do not direct the course of software development, but they do provide critical funding for the infrastructure of cooperation. Yet another layer of institutions frequently arise “on top of” the software commons – an ecosystem of businesses that interact symbiotically and respectfully with the various communities.

Bauwens asserts that commons-based peer governance and production will tend to prevail over closed, proprietary business systems. He argues that companies that open up their organizations will out-compete and out-cooperate closed companies in the marketplace. Alliances of open projects will prevail against closed systems as well.

It appears that conventional markets do not work well in a field of non-rival goods (“free information”) that is the norm on the Internet, said Bauwens. Such companies can only make money by working at the margins of open communities. Industry analysts point out that even companies with enormous market capitalizations such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter do not earn substantial profits (yet).

Besides inaugurating a new organizational form, peer production has historic significance in the history of capitalism. “Capitalism cannot reproduce social relations or society any longer,” noted Franz Nahrada. The social order need not be entirely submissive to the masters of economic production; they have protectible commons.

This is the general theme of Bollier’s book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. The book describes how loosely federated tribes of commoners have built a quasi-sovereign system of technological infrastructure, legal licenses and social ethics to govern themselves. They are able to control and manage the resources that they generate. This can be seen in remix music and video mashup communities; in the many creative sectors and scholarly disciplines that use Creative Commons licenses to create viable commons of creative works and information; in the proliferation of open education and open science project-communities; and in new forms of citizen affinity groups that self-organize to advocate their own causes.

7. A Divide Between Digital Commons and Physical Commons?

A number of participants questioned whether digital commons on the Internet truly have much in common with natural resource commons. After all, the “two cultures” — digital and physical — do not appear to have much to do with each other. Moreover, natural resources are finite or depletable, unlike digital resources, and so the management strategies and politics of these two broad classes of commons are quite different.

Richard Pithouse of Port Elisabeth, South Africa, pointed out that among the squatters and other urban activists with whom he works, “online practices are seen as exclusionary.” Most people do not have email accounts, and any collective projects require in-person meetings after work hours. Much of the global South does not have easy or cheap access to the Internet, and rates of Internet access vary even in industrialized countries based on one’s age cohort, ethnic background and income.

And yet the digital and physical commons are interconnected. The infrastructure of computer and communications lines are physical products that must be built, and that have environmental impacts. The two realms are integrated in another sense, through culture. We bring our cultural worldview and relationships to our dealings with the digital commons as well as with natural resource commons.

Significantly, there are some intriguing bridges being built between the two. Rainer Kuhlen of the University of Konstanz in Berlin, cited the case of community gardeners using electronic technology to manage their shared gardens. The Transition Towns movement is another example. More than 150 towns around the world are trying to re-invent their local economies and cultures in order to anticipate the coming impacts of climate change and Peak Oil. These communities use digital technologies to communicate collaborate and share with each other.

Franz Nahrada of Vienna, Austria, founded the Global Villages Network in order to link together a worldwide community of village-based innovators. He cited instances of communities using digital technologies to improve their economic autonomy and improve their stewardship of the environment. Nahrada cited instances of visionary design that show the full potential of integration of human habitat into the environment, if treated as commons. The communities would maintain themselves largely by leveraging connections to knowledge and knowhow (maybe some still aggregated in urban nodes) relayed by information technologies. In this way people would maintain connections to their larger urban, global and cultural millieu while on the other side strongly and intensively interacting with their immediate natural environment. The aggregate effect would be to foster planetary stewardship.

One compelling and iconic yet very utopian example is Vincent Callebaut’s “Lilypads” project, in which cities would freely float in the oceans while having a flower-like, symbiotic relationship with the water world. Another model is Arcosanti, which would reduce the size of human habitat into three-dimensional structures (arcologies) and reduce the waste of time and energy of single-family homes, re-opening vast suburban land to the public while taking care of it. John Lyle at Pomona College has proposed another way of integrating living systems with architecture and habitat in his landlab. John Todd of New Alchemy built the archetypical “bloodstream” of water acting as material carrier of nutriients and waste between organically connected community functions. “Village Towns,” by Claude Lewenz, are built around plazas, making the common place the centerpiece of habitat.

The Global Villages Network, which is dedicated to these sorts of projects, says in its founding declaration: “One of the most powerful potentials that we are just beginning to unleash, is the feeling that in a time of increased global competition, diminishing resources and growing uncertainty, we have to use our local resources more wisely and that we can increasingly do so with the access to global knowledge, the sharing of experiences, the division of mental labor and the local connectedness that new information technologies make possible.” The Global Villages Network seeks to discover “the full potential of this combination between local resources and global knowledge.”

Michel Bauwens gives a glimpse of the under-leveraged synergies of technology and local communities in an essay, “Russia and the Next Long Wave, and Why Its Agricultural Villages Are Important” (http://globalvillages.ning.com/profiles/blogs/russia-and-the-next-long-wave). Bauwens notes that the open design principles of free and open source software have profound implications for local communities as they try to gain greater control of their economic and cultural lives.

Citing the archetypes of Google, eBay and other Internet-based enterprises, Bauwens writes: “Companies will need to open up to co-design and co-creation, while the distribution (miniaturization) of the means of physical production, liberates the possibilities for smaller more localized production units to play more essential roles.” In particular, “software development can be generalized to the promotion of open design development, including applications in the field of farming and land use,” he writes. Bauwens summarizes his vision:

With the easy availability of carbon-based fossil fuels, it made sense to bombard the productive process with massive but wasteful energy usage, which has been the hallmark of the ‘western industrial method’. However, there is an alternative which will be particularly appropriate in the coming period. This alternative is based on the use of ‘smart renewable energy’, i.e. precision agriculture. Such agriculture would require intensive knowledge of the natural habitat, something which agricultural workers naturally possess, but interconnected with global open farming communities, so that knowledge can be exchanged on a permanent basis. In this way, the global knowledge of farming, can be applied to any locality.

Another vision for connecting the digital commons with the physical environment is set forth by Christian Siefkes in his 2007 book, From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. Siefkes, a computer scientist from the Freie Universität Berlin, is Co-founder of the Keimform-Blog (http://www.keimform.de), which investigates how far the potential of commons-based peer production extends.

Siefkes’ book offers an ambitious theoretical framework for building a “peer economy” in physical contexts by generalizing the principles of peer production. He addresses such basic issues as coordinating the producer side with the consumer side, resource allocation, decision-making, management challenges and maintaining peer production as a separate realm from the market economy.

8. Enclosures of Bytes, Atoms, Nano-Matter and Geology

Pat Mooney, Executive Director of the ETC Group, summarized some of the leading work that he and his colleagues are doing to fight enclosures of “bytes,atoms, nano-matter and geology,” or what he expresses with the acronym “BANG.” Mooney painted a sobering picture of just how far enclosures are proceeding as a result of corporate consolidation, cutting-edge technologies, stricter intellectual property laws and corporate-state partnerships.

“Industry concentration is driving a huge loss of biodiversity,” he said, noting that 75% of seed stock diversity is now eroded. In 1977, there were 7,000 seed companies in the world. Now, only ten companies control almost 70% of the global seed market. Three companies — Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta — control half of the market. This market consolidation has in turn greatly strengthened the political power of seed and agricultural companies, who frequently dominate legislative and regulatory debates that seek to contain the risks of these new technologies.

The ETC Group is concerned about a number of other profound enclosures-in-progress. These involve matter at the atomic level; the invention and ownership of new types of self-replicating lifeforms; and the integrity of basic geological conditions on Earth.

Nanotechnology, for example, is an attempt to build new types of matter, atom by atom. The idea is that synthetically engineered matter can be made more efficiently and with less waste than natural materials. Nickel might be altered to be a cheaper commercial substitute for platinum, for example, and sand might be modified to perform as a cheaper substitute for copper (both developments that would be hugely disruptive to the economies of nations that now mine these metals). Already Harvard University holds patents on 23 elements of the Periodic Table to use at the nano-level, said Mooney. By 2015, Mooney estimates that there will be a $2.5 trillion market for nano-engineered components.

What’s worrisome about these developments is that even scientists do not really know the implications of altering the commons at the level of the Periodic Table. There are also potential weapons applications of the technology, such as a “nano bomb” that could explode nine city blocks, said Mooney.

Synthetic biology is another frontier enclosure. In this case, patents may not even be able to control the proliferation of homegrown DNA-splicing because there are “open source” methods that are evolving. This raises the question of whether “Do It Yourself (DIY) DNA” could be adequately policed by its participants. Here again, the biggest chemical and energy companies are heavily involved in developing this technology. It has been calculated that “only 23.8% of the Earth’s biomass is capable of being commodified at this point,” said Mooney; synthetic biology aspires to expand industry access to the remaining three-fourths of the commons is not yet technically accessible.

Yet another frontier of market enclosure is geo-engineering, which is increasingly being considered as a way to deal with global warming. Some scientists are proposing changing the surface of the oceans to make them less reflective, for example. Another proposal would blow salt into the stratosphere to create a “solar screen” to ward off the sun’s heat. The obvious dangers are tinkering with the Earth’s basic ecosystems; no one really knows what might happen if the basic processes of the oceans and stratosphere were altered.

The commons may be a useful concept to defend against these and other enclosures, said Mooney, because it offers a defense against the primitive accumulation of those in power. It helps assert the intrinsic value of such elemental commons as food crops, biodiversity, the stratosphere and the Periodic Table of matter.

Tomorrow: the rest of the report on the Crottorf retreat.

The meeting did not have an explicit agenda, yet it yielded extraordinarily rich results: a clearer sense of how a new discourse of the commons might be developed; how it could be used to confront the savage pathologies of neoliberalism; and how it could serve as a proto-political philosophy for building more eco-friendly, humanistic forms of self-governance.

What follows is a selective and partial – yet lengthy – distillation of the discussions. I have divided it into three parts, and will post Parts II and III tomorrow and Friday.

Photo of Crottorf Castle by Prashant Iyengar.

This document is draws from my notes and memory, and therefore reflects my personal perceptions of the event. Quotations below have been reconstructed from notes, and not a transcript, so they are approximate and not necessarily verbatim. Because I wanted to keep this report fairly succinct and focus on the commons paradigm itself, I have given only brief treatments of many conversations that deserve lengthier treatments in themselves.

These topics include the biotech industry’s enclosure of seeds, nanotechnology and the privatization of basic elements of matter; the Google Books project that is digitizing the books of university libraries; the South African government’s repression of squatters and other commoners; as well as the hopeful activities of the Solidarity Economy movement and the Transition Towns movement. I have also taken liberties in the ordering of topics and themes, which were not discussed in the same sequence of this text. A list of participants and suggested readings are included as appendices.

For those who wish to listen to actual conversations, the Crottorf dialogues have been divided into thirteen separate segments, which can be streamed from the Web or downloaded in two file formats (MP3 and Ogg Vorbis) at http://www.archive.org/details/crottorf-commoners..

Finally, it must be noted that this report does not purport to be an official statement of the retreat participants. It reflects my personal interpretations alone. That said, I have attempted to faithfully represent the proceedings in the hope that this report will be useful.

1. Neoliberalism as the Catalyst for A New Commons Movement

There is a reason why so many diverse and unrelated people around the world are showing a keen interest in the commons: market enclosures are growing and intensifying. Much of this stems from the normal logic of neoliberalism, a particular kind of capitalism that took root in the 1980s with the ascension of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Over the past generation, neoliberalism has steadily expanded to become the default worldview governing economics, public policy and human aspiration more generally. It is a system that seeks privatization, deregulation, strict limits on government social programs, state action to protect capital, and debt-servitude for developing countries.

“Neoliberalism is directly intent on destroying the commons,” said George Caffentzis (University of Southern Maine), noting that it combines sophisticated human intelligence with great brutality in its primary mission – “the totalization of the commodity form.” In pursuit of this mission, neoliberal capitalism asserts its domination of nature and crushes social relations that would impede its ordering principles. See, e.g., “Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons,” a 2009 essay by the Midnight Notes Collective and Friends (http://www.midnightnotes.org/Promissory%20Notes.pdf).

In its quest to commodify everything for maximum return on investment, neoliberalism frequently experiences crises, noted Caffentzis. One example was the mass resistance to globalization that arose in the 1990s, especially following the Seattle protests in 1999. Some crises, however, can threaten the very existence of capitalism as a system of power and social order. This occurs when neoliberalism is unable to achieve its primary aim, which is to make the commodity form a global reality.

This goal necessarily entails enclosures of the commons. There are limits to this enterprise, however. The Earth’s resources are finite and the commoners tend to resist global capital’s attempts to privatize and commodify our shared atmosphere, oceans, land, genes, cultural works and other resources.

After decades of enclosures, the various resistance efforts initiated by commoners are starting to coalesce. People are starting to self-identify themselves as commoners with a stake in the resources that neoliberal markets seek to appropriate. And so there is a gathering resistance to the neoliberal project. Commoners are now more able to name the problem and to identify its structural dynamics as a core feature of the neoliberal worldview and economics.

The symptoms of the great financial crisis are now being addressed, noted Caffentzis, but not its roots. Attacks on the commons will therefore continue. This will entail new attempts to criminalize the behavior of commoners for resisting enclosure – and this will result in various sorts of litigation, social conflict, repression, imprisonment and war. “Blood and fire,” unfortunately, is a recurring theme in the history of the commons, Caffentzis said.

Besides resorting to repression, the joint managers of the neoliberal project – capital and the state – will invariably attempt to coopt the commoners. They seek to tempt them to use the commons against itself. Sylvia Federici (Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York) noted that the “common good,” “clean energy” and the “global commons” will be used as an excuse for expropriation and enclosure of local and regional commons.

The global North, for example, will invoke the “common heritage of humankind” as a justification for corporate exploitation of genetic biodiversity in the South. It will invoke the Amazon as “the lungs of the world” to inhibit self-determination of Brazilians and indigenous peoples there.

2. The Notion of the Commons

As neoliberalism intensifies its agenda, due in no small part to the current crisis, interest in the commons is growing. It offers both a powerful intellectual critique for naming the process of enclosure and a scaffolding for re-imagining economics and social order. David Bollier (Onthecommons.org, Amherst, Massachusetts) made a presentation about the potential of the commons discourse not just in confronting neoliberalism, but in imagining modern commons that enable people to live their lives and earn their livelihoods in new and better ways. The challenge is to devise commons regimes based on people’s participation and consent while establishing rules that assure the continuity of the commons itself over time.

The commons is appealing, Bollier argued, because it offers a new vision and worldview that is historically rooted, politically insightful, culturally attractive and practical. It is a new master narrative that can connect and coordinate many disparate, seemingly isolated campaigns. The commons can play a unifying role because it posits some general principles that apply to all commons:

• stewardship of a resource over the long term;
• equitable access and benefit for the personal (non-market) use of the commoners;
• transparency and accountability within the commons;
• the capacity to identify and punish free riders, vandals and appropriators; and
• the capacity to determine whether the resource shall be alienated for market use or not.

The most basic principle of commons governance, he said, is, “That which is generated by the commons must stay within the commons (unless the commoners collectively decide otherwise).”

Unlike a conventional ideology, which sets forth fixed principles that apply universally, the commons functions as a kind of scaffolding or meta-ideology, said Bollier. Its general principles can only be actualized within a specific context just as DNA is under-specified so that it can adapt to local conditions. A community’s specific history, local circumstances, cultural norms, social ethos, and the nature of the specific common resource, all matter. Particularity is a principle of the commons. There is no single inventory of commons or formulaic set of universal principles that apply.

The power of the commons discourse stems from its ability to speak not just to economics, public policy and politics, but to culture, ecological realities and everyday life. Implicit in the commons is a different epistemology and ontology than that implied by the neoliberal marketplace and state. The commons implies different ways of knowing and being that are based on the personal, the social, the historical and the tacit. To talk of the commons is to assert that all of these factors matter (notwithstanding the tendency of market transactions to declare that they do not matter because they might impede efficiency, profitability, etc.).

The commons discourse is provocative and potentially transformative because it helps us assert new relationships between ourselves and a given resource; between ourselves and the state; and between ourselves and our fellow human beings. It amounts to a different worldview.

The commons is thus both a discourse and a way of being in the world. Or as Peter Linebaugh has put it, the commons is about commoning. The commons is not just a noun, but a verb as well. We are not just discovering the commons; we are inventing it as well. We are learning how to interact and take responsibility in ways that are both new and old. In a sense, after the long drama of the 20th Century and the consolidation of power by the state and corporations, we are rediscovering some more elemental ways of interacting and organizing social and economic life. We are resurrecting some forgotten traditions and cultural practices of commoning.

By asserting a collective interest in resources, the commons helps us call into the question the familiar justifications for private property rights. The commons helps us see that even private property rights are embedded in social and community relations, which must be given their due respect. The commons asserts a heresy – that there are limits to the claims that private property may make upon the community and upon the Earth.

The neoliberal polity has trouble acknowledging this fact. Indeed, capital typically resists efforts by even democratic polities to make it abide by certain social, ethical and ecological limits.

By opening up new ways to critique the scope of property rights and markets, the commons discourse helps us get beyond the contrived illusions and secret betrayals of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism promises freedom and respect for humanistic values, but only within the framework of “free markets” – and we already know where that ends up.

The commons discourse also helps the commoners assert a social solidarity among themselves. It re-situates the human species as a creature of the Earth. Culturally, the commons serves as a useful kind of “social signaling” cue that lets different sorts of commoners identify each other. This is an important function in the face of the fragmentation of so many resistance efforts today – and of the neoliberal order’s renowned capacity to coopt dissent and resistance.

Finally, the commons has great power because it is not merely reactive. It is not just a critique of what’s wrong. It is generative. It offers affirmative alternatives to markets and neoliberal policies. It offers bottom-up, self-organizing ways to manage resources democratically and sustainably, and to do so in ways that do not necessarily require a direct government role. This reality has its purest incarnation on the Internet, where the commons is proving itself to be an effective vehicle for generating value in its own right, alongside the market.

It bears noting that the commons is neither communism nor socialism. It may have a kinship with those earlier efforts – e.g., a similar commitment to equality, community and freedom – but the commons is not chiefly about government and public policy. It is about the commoners, their resources and their social practices in managing them. The commons not only proposes a more holistic and sustainable economics, but very different models of political culture. It elevates very different visions of human fulfillment than communism, socialism or capitalism.

3. Aspects of the Commons

For Wolfgang Sachs, it is not necessary that we absolutely define the commons. “Instead we can look at the commons as a piece of wood to grasp as we drift in the ocean. It is a shared ‘problematique.’” One of its greatest values may be in helping to assert limits on human activity. It describes “a no-go zone.”

Sachs elaborated on this idea in the context of global warming: “The Earth is the single most important commons that we have; it is an immeasurable gift. That gift is of such complexity and beauty that you just don’t tinker with it. The task of any generation is to pass that heritage on. The commons in this sense serves as a secularized version of Creation. This is a powerful discourse for asserting limits on technology and markets.”

In China, for example, peasants are being pressured to relinquish their resources for Shanghai markets. Historically, this is of a piece: the commoners have always been forced into submission by market players who wish to exploit the shared resources. But to speak of the commons is to call this exploitation into question. It is to make a critique of development economics and politics, and of sustainability (or the lack thereof).

George Caffentzis went further: “The commons is a defense against the state and its criminalization of commoning.” Some participants questioned whether the commons is primarily defensive, asserting that it is also a realm of co-creation and generativity, as seen in free software and other online commons. But there was consensus that the naming of a resource as a commons helps in its defense.

The commons does not compete on price or quality, but on cooperation, it was noted. The commons “out-cooperates” the market. It does this by itself eliciting personal commitment and creativity and encouraging collective responsibility and sustainable practices.

Andoni Alonso (Laboratorio del Procomun, Madrid) described how his group has been developing an ontology for the commons using a new type of Semantic Web software.* Still in a beta format, the software proposes a taxonomy that divides the commons into four elemental categories – commons of the body, natural commons, commons of the polis, and digital commons. It divides these commons into “parts,” “functions” and “representations” of each commons. It also distinguishes “elements” of commons, “instruments” of their functioning, and “attributes.”

Nature, for example, has many parts (water, atmosphere, wildlife), and many functions (biodiversity, ecological laws), etc. Andoni concedes that his commons ontology could honor different types of distinctions than the ones it does, but the point is to provide a better cognitive approximation of the commons: “You don’t need to know exactly what life is to be a biologist.”

Other participants offered some arresting images and epigrams about the nature of commons:

• If the Invisible Hand assumes mutual selfishness – a kind of insect-driven behavior based on the crudest impulses – the commons values human intentionality and intelligence around shared values. It is not altruistic as such; individual self-interest is simply brought into alignment with collective interests and inscribed within the system itself. (Michel Bauwens, Peer to Peer Foundation, Bangkok, Thailand).

• The commons in our time differs from earlier commons by combining pre-modern collectivity with modern individuality. Contemporary online commons, for example, are both particularistic and collective. (Michel Bauwens)

• Our goal in designing commons should be to make moralizing superfluous, so that the system does not require altruistic individuals. “Reliability is a product of good design. So it is with the commons mode of production.” (Franz Nahrada, Vienna, Austria)

• One definition of “commons” in the Oxford English Dictionary is “a board upon which you have a meal.” Seen in this light, participation in the Christian ritual of the Eucharist can be seen as a form of commoning. (Peter Linebaugh, University of Toledo).

• For the late social critic Ivan Illich, the commons is less about the inalienability of a resource (i.e., its non-commodification) than about a lack of institutional control and the freedom that results. The commons is, for him, a “de-institutionalized zone.”

4. The History of the Commons and Why It Matters

Peter Linebaugh (University of Toledo) argues that the history of the commons is indispensable to understanding contemporary commons and the political threats they face. “So much of commoning depends upon memory, elders and precedent,” he said. The persistence of the commons over time has its roots in social sociality, the particularity of practices and the local. These things must be recognized so that other senses of time and commitment – “when the memory of time runneth not” – can be honored.

Linebaugh noted that the commoners often do not even know their own history. By contrast, the bourgeois narrative of property tells people where they have come from and where they are going. People today do not realize that the Magna Carta emerged as a kind of armistice in a civil war between the commoners and King John. It and the accompanying “Forest Charter” constitute landmark statements of commoners’ rights.

Yet in the 1870s, the champions of Anglo-American capital recast the Magna Carta to justify their imperial ambitions and racist politics. Certain portions of the Magna Carta have been celebrated and enshrined while other portions – especially those dealing with commoners’ rights to the fruits of the commons – have been portrayed as feudal relics and local particularities.

Seen from this perspective, history is “a set of presences that are still around us,” said Linebaugh. The history of the commons illuminates the dynamics of dispossession, the political struggles to maintain control over shared resources, and the hostility to women which is associated with enclosures (as reflected in witch hunts and enclosures of women’s bodies and the knowledge of procreation).

So what does this history have to do with contemporary political struggles?

The crisis of human subsistence in today’s world – housing, food, water, knowledge – has a lot to do with the enclosure of the commons, said Linebaugh. We need to understand this history to understand the great crimes of the present that are destroying subsistence, and to see that we can overcome such criminality. Our history needs to be re-written root and branch, he said.

It helps to see the Magna Carta and the Forest Charter as living charters that are relevant even today. People have fought over the meaning of these charters in the past. Recognizing the great struggles of the past invites us to look around our own world and recognize that people are still commoning today.

Iain Boal (University of California at Berkeley) noted how the deep history of the commons has been of great help in the struggles against enclosures of germplasm today. He cited Kett’s Uprising in 1549, one of the last great peasant revolts seeking “the freedom of just conditions.” Activists fighting genetically modified organisms in 1999 used the example of Kett’s Uprising to inspire their own advocacy and defense of seeds as a commons. Boal argues that “commons language mobilizes social memory and invokes the political economy,” citing Christopher Hill’s book, A World Turned Upside Down, a history of the Diggers, Ranters and Levellers in the 17th Century.

“If you don’t have history on your side,” said Sylvia Federici, “it will be used against you.” She noted the work of the Bristol Radical Political History Group (http://www.brh.org.uk), a group of commoners in Bristol, England, who are dedicated to revitalizing and recreating the collective memory of their city and its connections to the commons, and people’s resistance to enclosure and to the Atlantic slave trade.

Massimo De Angelis quoted from Linebaugh’s The Magna Carta Manifesto to illustrate how an historical understanding of “commoners’ rights” could help us situate our political struggles today:

Common rights are embedded in a particular ecology with its local husbandry. For commoners, the expression ‘law of the land’ does not refer to the will of the sovereign. Commoners think first not of title deeds, but of human deeds: how will this land be tilled? Does it require manuring? What grows there? They begin to explore. You might call it a natural attitude. Second, commoning is embedded in a labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of field, upland, forest, marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor. Third, commoning is collective. Fourth, being independent of the state, commoning is independent also of the temporality of the law and state. Magna Carta does not list rights, it grants perpetuities. It does deep into human history. (The Magna Carta Manifesto, p. 45)

To understand this history is to understand that commons rights are a birthright entitlement, a reclaiming of our own identity through history. History is also a way of finding courage, through stories.

History can help us rediscover “the indigenous in us,” said Massimo de Angelis (University of East London). “We need to find and shape an identity rooted in history and an awareness of what has been taken for us, in terms of what we used to have.”

The goal is not to romanticize the commons, but to recover a collective memory that can help us recognize and name oppression in the moment as enclosure – and pierce the presumption that only elite managers and experts can govern. By claiming commons governance as a historical reality, we can defend our customary rights and assert the legitimacy the commons.

Tomorrow: A Developmental Theory of the Commons; The Power of Peer Production; and More!

“Unlike oil, there’s no substitute for fresh water,” says Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly. “We all need it.”
This dawning recognition of the indispensability of water has raised the profile of a number of groups arguing that we should treat water as a common good. Put simply, this idea means that water is no one’s property—and everyone’s. It is part of the commons, rightfully belonging to all of humanity, nature and to the earth itself.

p(photo-credits). photo by Keith Bacongco under a Creative Commons license stipulating no commercial use or alteration

People in Davao City, Philippines, protest plans to turn over the local water supply to a private firm

Across Latin America and Africa, consumer, human rights, and environmental organizations have campaigned successfully for constitutional amendments and laws enshrining water as a human right. At the recent World Water Forum in Instanbul, 25 countries signed a declaration affirming that same right (the official declaration weakly suggested that it was simply a human need).
Here in the United States, a bi-partisan group of Vermont legislators working with the citizen’s group, Vermont Natural Resources Council, enacted legislation to protect the state’s groundwater. The 2008 law declares groundwater a public trust and requires industries to acquire permits for withdrawals of more than 56,000 gallons a day.

Yet it remains an uphill battle to shift policies and public consciousness to ensure that water is managed as a commons that belongs to everyone. This work is made more difficult by the fact that the principal venue for global water policy discussions is not the United Nations but the World Water Forum, a mostly pro-privatization, tri-annual gathering of government delegations, non-governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and private industry representatives. It is convened by the World Water Council, a French non-profit whose board of governors is dominated by the powerful water industry.

At the latest World Water Forum meeting March 16 to 22 in Istanbul, the dominant view of water-management issues prevailed. Whether discussing the Parisian water system or problems in South African townships, the prescription was the same: full cost recovery, which means that agencies, even public ones, that provide water must recover the full costs associated with delivering the service. This leaves the door wide open for privatization of our water. Increasingly pro-water-privatization development agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), are insisting that consumers pay more for water.

Full cost recovery policy is immoral, claim organizers of the People’s Water Forum – an alternative to the World Water Forum advocating that water to be managed as a commons for all rather than a commodity for the profit of a few. Water commons activists point out that the full cost recovery strategy is applied only selectively. Poor users who consume the least amount of water bear a disproportionate burden of the cost. A better system would use progressive taxation programs to support public water systems just as they do public schools.

Consider the example of the Finnish company Botnia, operating in Uruguay. Its production of cellulose products consumes 80 million liters of water per day, using a large percentage of the daily output of Uruguay’s public utilities at a low, subsidized price. Similar regressive anti-conservation subsidies are found throughout the world – especially in the United States – where irrigation water is priced far below cost, a boon for water intensive agribusinesses and a blow to family farmers.

Unlike air, it costs money to deliver clean water, so it’s necessary to put a price on its management while taking care not to turn the water itself into a commodity. But the largest users – and the wealthiest ones – should pay their fair share and subsidize water use by the world’s poorest families.

Another Water World Is Possible

Citizens and government officials around the world have challenged the way we think about water. In Bangladesh and Brazil, for instance, public water utilities are seeking public loans rather than private equity to improve water delivery infrastruc¬ture. They are bucking the privatization trend, refusing financing from development agencies like the World Bank when privatization is one of the conditions to receive a loan.

Innovative financing approaches like this go hand in hand with new approaches to water management. Local authorities world-wide are beginning to base water governance less around often arbitrary political borders and increasingly around watersheds, through which the shared nature of water across boundaries becomes crystal clear.. This watershed governance approach has been at least partially inspired by the citizens group Tarun Bharat Sangh, which has shown great success increasing the water supply in this arid region by constructing johads—small-scale earthen reservoirs that help to harvest rainwater and improve the recharge of groundwater resources.

Many other examples of innovative water policies are outlined in a new report, “Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge”. LINK http://www.onthecommons.org/media/pdf/original/WaterCommons03.pdf.

Maude Barlow suggests 10 principles to create and manage a water commons. These principles are broad-ranging, ranging from applying human rights and public trust law toward water management policies to improving conservation and public delivery. She, too, sees privatization of water supplies as antithetical to this notion of the commons. She cites the case of Felton, California, which has taken back its public water system after a failed privatization experience. Cochabamba, Bolivia is experimenting with community-managed water utilities to deliver quality water at fair prices. In South Africa, communities have rejected pre-paid water meters and pricing schemes that undermine families’ water security.

Adriana Marquisio, president of Uruguay’s water workers union, insists that public water management must be improved but is equally adamant that water remain a public good. She calls for measuring efficiency not just in terms of liters flowing per second but through public oversight over water fees and system improvements, public health indicators, innovations in community management, and the ecological health of groundwater reserves.

Flawed U.S. Policy

In the U.S., the principal proposal on world water policy is the Water for the World Act of 2009, which would push privatization schemes through an Office of Water within USAID, an agency which consistently seeks to shrink the public sector.

If passed, the Water for the World Act will further force private investment in public drinking and waste water infrastructure on developing nations, according to Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch. “Water privatization has proven a commercial failure in most countries around the world because private companies have, time and again, proven incapable of meeting their obligations to both their customers and their shareholders,” she explains. “Reinforcing the role of private investment in the water infrastructure systems of developing countries will only perpetuate the problems that this well-intended act is designed to solve. Instead, we must work with developing countries to implement sound water policies based on public management of this essential resource.”

In reports to Congress, USAID largely measured its success in implementing earlier water acts by the amount of dollars spent on water systems. Certainly, the recent damage caused by channeling public monies to poorly regulated mortgage companies ought to offer pause about a similar strategy for water. These funds must be channeled to local governments and public utilities (with no strings attached mandating privatization) and to non-governmental organizations working on community-led, commons-based water strategies.

The Obama administration’s performance at the World Water Forum was lackluster. It did not sign the alternative declarations to declare water a human right or seek to move policy deliberations about water to the UN. Whether the administration’s plate is too full to pay attention or it is intentionally repeating the Bush administration’s poor stewardship of the globe’s natural resources is still unclear.

In his inaugural address, President Obama promised to the world’s people “to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow.” So there is hope that the administration has been too busy to give this important issue proper attention. But hope is a poor substitute for action. It is still early in the new administration, giving citizens time to press for change. That change will happen when we insist that water debates are public debates about how to best manage our common water resources.

The original version of this article appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus in June, 2009.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there.

Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means tobe a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

p(photo-credits). Photo by Visionshare under a Creative Commons license

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some
semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown —Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than here are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those
molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

As I live and write in a little house on a small lot in Augusta, Maine, I breathe in the stoic veneer covering sharp anxiety all around this place. I’m unemployed, although I gave ample notice of my resignation last October, so my joblessness isn’t a result of the international financial mess and continuing rounds of layoffs. Savings I socked away while I had a job are paying the bills for now. I’m grateful for time to attend to important things, like my marriage, fleeting phone calls with my busy daughter, and long talks with Phoebe, our stray long-haired cat who moved in shortly after Sammy, the last of four long-lived short-hairs, died a couple years ago.

p(photo-credits). -photo by Charlie Bernstein_

There’s time to notice the last of the gritty snow melting in the drizzle of spring rain and listen for the postal truck as it climbs the long incline to our mailbox. I have abundant time to read and keep in touch with friends and neighbors, volunteer for community projects, make dinner and stir up a batch of pumpkin bread for breakfast. When the soil warms up and dries out a bit, there will be time to plant a garden and grow food that tastes better than produce from the grocery store, and visit the weekly outdoor market at the foot of our hill to buy food from people who produce it on their small farms outside town.

p(photo-credits). photo by Charlie Bernstein

I’m privileged to have all I need and then some, and hope the anxious people with big mortgages and other commitments they can’t pay for will be able to restructure them, because oversized consumer debt carries unnecessary obligations that divert us from necessary ones. Mortgage lenders evicting people for lack of payment leave abandoned houses, deteriorating neighborhoods, and family and social disruption that diminish our resources for building an economy and common life that make sense. Let the homeless back into their homes, keep those on the brink of foreclosure under their debt-ridden roofs, and work out a simple arrangement for each focused on what they can contribute instead of what they can’t repay.

We need economic activity that heals instead of destroys the commons. For example, the road to my house, and maybe the one to yours, is an eyesore. The tar has crumbled for years as public funds for street maintenance have been outstripped by the costs of even basic care. Many of the old houses along its route are clad in noxious vinyl siding and need weatherization and repair. The yards could produce vegetables, fruit, and flowers where ragged lawns and broken pavement now prevail. Our neighborhood is powered by heating oil and electricity from coal-fired plants, neither one sustainable nor good for our health, while a breeze blows briskly from the river to the top of the hill, where a patch of public land owned by the local utility district could serve as a wind turbine site to generate electricity for the neighborhood.

p(photo-credits). -photo by Charlie Bernstein_

The view across the river includes a car dealership with bright electric lights on its vast paved lot, and an abandoned paper mill slowly leaching chemicals into the ground and water. The obligation here is to clean up the community and fill it with healthy houses, factories, shops, and services to sustain people who call this place home. There’s no local transit system to serve as an alternative to personal vehicles. Perhaps the auto dealer could run a trolley system instead, and we could recycle our cars, exchanging that pollution of the commons for cleaner dependable transport to work, schools, libraries, city hall, and modest shops owned and run by local people.

Here the schools face budget cuts, and perhaps we spend more than we should for the system we have. The children need educations, with inspired and inspiring educators to lead them in discovering how to refashion this place to be more livable, and encourage the bright and not-so-clever alike to engage with hope and resolve to build a stronger community and cleaner economy than we’ve passed on to them.

President Barak Obama said recently, “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand.” This gives me pause, since the neighborhood I live in is named Sand Hill, and there is no other place for me to participate in rebuilding the economy but here on this same pile of sand. The ground we live on isn’t the problem, whether vast level farmland, gritty coastal ports, bustling great cities, or the semi-abandoned mill and mining towns like Augusta scattered across the nation. Wherever we may live, the point is that the change we seek isn’t a return to the past, but a transformation of the present. We have an opportunity to imagine beyond glib beliefs in free market capitalism, brutal competition, abandonment of those least able to earn a living, passive entertainment, and mindless consumption in order to focus on producing projects and products that make improvements now and leave a legacy worth building on for generations to come.

We can take practical steps, with hope that doing so will forge new paths to a better life for all of us. We can live more satisfying lives right now not only by reducing some types of consumption, but by increasing the quality of what we actually need to produce. This means consuming less of what is cheap and flimsy, shipped around the planet for sale at energy-guzzling consumer outlets, but more importantly it means producing more goods we need most, at a high level of quality, close to home. We can wade out of our worries into our communities, not to foist ideological opinions on one another about what went wrong, but to meet more of the people who live closest to us and deepen our exploration of what we really hope for and how to get there. And we can join the visionaries and leaders who risk taking a place at the table of public policy to forge a better way forward, debating and shaping the direction of the country, globe, and our common life together.

p(photo-credits). -photo by Charlie Bernstein_

Let’s responsibly produce, rather than only consume, what we really need – high quality food, energy, shelter, health care, clothing, transportation, education, sanitation, news coverage, art and music, just and merciful care for those unable to function in society. Shifting to clean sustainable energy alone will provide us with ample worthwhile employment in healing the damage we’ve done to the commons for generations to come. The dire financial situations so many of us face, with the emotional and social tolls these take, point us to a better life, one in which we responsibly produce what we need to consume and publicly push our economic system and institutions, parts of human culture we all create and share, to honor the unearned gift of the commons that gives us air to breathe, water to drink, and land, including humble hills of sand, to call home.

p(photo-credits). -photo by Charlie Bernstein_

The Definition of “Work”
We are today surrounded by an abundance of productivity that the market does not recognize or value. In this consumer society, we think about “work” as what people do to pay for goods and services in the marketplace. If our work doesn’t earn money, it’s not counted as an economic asset. The power of the market is so strong that we often don’t recognize or value work that is essential to society’s future. The unpaid contributions of homemaking, parenting, volunteering, care giving and citizenship are not valued or nor appreciated.

Americans (and many others in the modern world) have internalized a limited definition of work defined exclusively as employment in the market economy. As a result, we have discarded the real and potential productivity of young people and retirees—and everyone else who is outside of the paid workforce. Consider the impact this has upon many people:

• Homemakers, who feel ashamed when they are asked, “And what do you do?” and answer, “Nothing.”
• Single parents, who have been pushed off welfare into work because the task of child-rearing is not valued as work (unless they are paid for it as foster parents or professional child-care providers).
• Students, whose commitment to learning is belittled when they are asked, “So how are you going to make any money studying that?” When are you going to join the real world and start working?”
• Retirees, who say, “Work was my life, and now I have no life.”

Consider the many ways in which an expanded definition of work would affect everyone’s view of themselves and the society we share in common. We would understand that each of us matters in ways other than as an employee, boss or consumer. We would recover our identities as neighbors, homemakers, caregivers and as co-creators who joint together to make things happen.

The Attributes of Good Work
As longtime social activist Edgar Cahn says well in No More Throw-Away People (2000), “Work must be redefined to include whatever it takes to rear healthy children, preserve families, make neighborhoods safe and vibrant, care for the frail and vulnerable, redress injustice, and make democracy work. The new definition must be one that mobilizes capacity, links capacity to need, rewards contribution, builds the village.”

Cahn’s statement goes beyond defining work to actually describing “good work,” which claims, protects and improves those things that society as a whole shares and values—the commons. Similarly, President Obama emphasizes good work when he outlines a 21st century to build capacity for the future:

• Good work will improve access to the Internet and connections for windmills to the electricity grid.
• Good work will build bikeways and walking paths through neighborhoods.
• Good work will include community service.

Good work is defined by the value of the outcomes that it generates – whether physical infrastructure, human services, or neighborhood safety.

The Attributes of Meaningful Work
Work is meaningful based on how it is valued, structured and managed. These attributes matter whether the job is picking up trash, planting trees, manufacturing widgets, piloting a spacecraft, or cashiering in a store.

The good news is that any work is meaningful if it is:

• performed within a culture of respect
• matches with the worker’s interests and skills
• requires mindful engagement
• produces some identifiable results
• attracts positive reinforcement (income, applause, expression of appreciation)
• stimulates learning
• benefits others

Why is it important for work to be meaningful? Whether paid or unpaid, meaningful work boosts the common good—for the workers who are using their skills, and for the community that benefits from their work. People who believe they are doing something useful for themselves and their communities feel better about themselves, stay healthier, and live longer. Meaningful work teaches the skills, habits and attitudes that generate productivity.

What’s the flip side of “meaningful work?” Every day, I hear stories about the pain caused by poor workplace communication in my role as the co-founder of SHiFT, a network for people in transition seeking greater meaning in their life and work. Stories like these:

• Experienced workers who have been downsized yet one more time describing the pressures of working overtime for stressed-out supervisors who seldom if ever recognize their good work.
• Middle-aged men with kids in college and no savings in the bank describing the impact of suddenly, one morning, being told, “This is your last day. Clean out your desks and leave the office by noon. You will receive one month’s severance pay.”
• People of all ages saying, “Applying for a job online and sending your resume to a company is like sending it into a black hole. By the time you see the job posted, it’s probably already been filled. And you shouldn’t ever expect an answer back to tell you that you are out of the running.”

Assuring Good, Meaningful Work through the Stimulus Job Programs
It would be a great mistake to send stimulus money to employers who will treat more people like this. There are other ways to create employment. Both the Reinvestment Act and the Serve America Act will fund job programs, the latter for volunteer stipends rather than full pay. Stringent requirements for subsidized jobs must be tuned to guaranteeing both good and meaningful work.

The basic principles for meaningful work should be clearly stated in government program regulations. Ultimately, this will only happen when policymakers and managers responsible for job programs internalize certain basic values and leadership skills. These involve seeing good work means as extending our personal sense of responsibility to something larger than ourselves, which is another good definition of the commons. In a democratic community, all citizens are treated as co-creators of the common good.
A culture of respect recognizes that everyone has special assets to offer as well as something to gain. Everyone is seen as a teacher as well as a learner. Jockeying for status gives way to teamwork. Rewards go beyond money. Open, two-way communication is constant. The sense of interconnectedness is palpable.

Does this sound idealistic? Where there’s a will, there’s a way! On April 3, 1933, one month after his inauguration, President Roosevelt sent out the call for 25,000 unemployed men to enroll in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Co-managed by the Departments of Labor, War, Agriculture, and Interior, the CCC had been signed into law on March 31. Young men loaded onto buses and trucks and took up work assignments in forests and parks across the country. By mid-July, 275,000 workers were housed, fed, and employed at more than 1,300 camps. Just as Roosevelt had hoped, young men (and later, young women) built roads, trails, camps, and picnic grounds. They worked on erosion and flood control projects and planted trees. Most earned $30 a month, and sent $25 of it home to support family members. And they learned new skills. My brother learned welding at a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in northern Maine. That welding skill got him into a school for ground mechanics and a good position in the Naval Air Force through WWII. More important, he now talks about how CCC turned him from a loser to a learner.

We need more of the determination to make things better for people that characterized the New Deal. Young and old, we are yearning for more meaning in life and work. There is much work for us to do, whether as paid workers or as unpaid volunteers. Everyone should be offered chances to participate in defining, restoring, managing, leading, governing, and owning those things that are important to the future of the community.

by Jan Hively (Janet M. Hively, PhD), hivel001@umn.edu, 612-379-4124