Learning from The Wealth of the Commons: a review essay

Abstract

‘We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives’. This is the starting point for what David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, the editors of The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (2012), describe as ‘an extended global exercise in commoning’ – Peter Linebaugh's term for ‘the self-determination of commoners in managing their shared resources’ (p. 396). In other words, the book itself is offered as an active process of ‘making the path’ by presenting ‘some of the most promising new paths now being developed’. It is intended to be ‘rigorous enough for academic readers yet accessible enough for the layperson’. In this, it more than achieves its ambitions. The Wealth of the Commons is an edited collection of seventy-three short papers from thirty countries: ‘a collective venture of sharing, collaboration, negotiation and creative production among some of the most diverse commons scholars, activists and projects leaders imaginable’. This rich and diverse source of knowledge and inspiration could be described as ‘polyvocal’ in the sense that it presents a multiplicity of voices improvising around a single theme – sometimes in harmony, sometimes discordant, but always interesting. The book brings together an impressive collection of contributors from different places, backgrounds and interests to explore the meaning of the commons and to advocate for it ‘as a new paradigm’ for the organization of public and private life. In this sense, it represents a project rather than an analysis: essentially espousing a cause with imperative urgency. This is not necessarily a weakness, but it does raise specific questions about what is included and what is absent or marginalized in this particular selection of accounts, and what might be lost along the way. What counts as ‘commons’ or ‘the commons’ or ‘the common’ (all used in the text) is a subject of discussion and contestation here, as elsewhere. The effort to ‘name and claim’ is an integral aspect of the project. As Jeffrey et al. (2012, p. 10) comment, ‘the struggle for the commons has never been without its own politics of separation and division’, raising valid questions about the prospects for a coherent paradigm at this stage. At the very least, however, this rich resource may prove seminal in countering those dominant paradigms of growth and development in which structural and cultural adjustments ‘serve as a justifying rhetoric for continuity in plunder’ of common resources (Mattei, p. 41). The contributions fall into three general categories: those offering a critique of existing ‘increasingly dysfunctional’ market/state relations; those that ‘enlarge theoretical understandings of the commons as a way to change the world’; and those that ‘describe innovative working projects which demonstrate the feasibility’ of the commons. As acknowledged in many of the chapters, defining the commons in any consistent and convincing way can be deeply problematic. Like ‘community’ itself, it can be regarded to some degree as an ideological portmanteau which contains a variety of meanings. Nonetheless, there is a general commitment to confront such difficulties in an open way, and to be as clear as possible about what the commons might represent, what it might replace, and what it should not be confused with. Put most simply, the commons refers to what human beings share in nature and society that should be cherished for all now and for the future: ‘the term … provides the binding element between the natural and the social or cultural worlds’ (Weber p.11). Its profound challenge to the logic of competitive capitalist relations, therefore, is to ‘validate new schemes of human relations, production and governance … commonance’ (Bollier and Helfrich, p. xiv) that penetrate all levels of public and private life. This idea is explored in detail in many of the contributions. The commons, then, claims to represent a philosophical stance, an intellectual framework, a moral and economic imperative, a set of organizing principles and commitments, a movement, and an emerging ‘global community of practice’ (O'Connell, 2012). It has also developed an increasingly shared discourse, which is designed to unsettle institutionalized norms and values and to reclaim or remake the language of co-operation, fairness and social justice. As the editorial points out, the language of capitalism is one that becomes ‘encoded into the epistemology of our language and internalized by people’. In community development, and elsewhere, we have become sensitized to the way in which progressive language can be appropriated to support individualistic market values. When empowerment can mean facilitated asset-stripping of local communities, and solidarity targets can be set by government (e.g. Scottish Government, 2007), then we must be wary about assuming proprietorial closure on the term ‘commons’ itself. As Federici, in a particularly persuasive chapter, warns: ‘… capital is learning about the virtues of the common good’ (p. 46). She argues that, ‘since at least the 1990s, the language of the commons has been appropriated … by the World Bank and put at the service of privatization’. For this reason, it is important to think of the commons as a ‘quality of relations, a principle of co-operation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals’ (p. 50). This produces a different operational logic, which is explored in depth across the collection. To advance the commons as ‘a new paradigm’, it is necessary to locate it historically and to show the ways in which it has been colonized and compromised, as some of these pieces do. It may seem ironic that the meaning of ‘the commons’ to many people in the UK, for example, is that bear pit of parliamentary business, the House of Commons, in which adversarial rather than consensual politics is the order of the day. Reclaiming such foundational ideas is a lengthy and demanding process, as David Graeber shows in The Democracy Project, his recent account of the Occupy Movement, which for a time commanded considerable international interest. Drawing on Linebaugh, Federici contends that ‘commons have been the thread that has connected the history of the class struggle into our time’. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the volume fails to address the relationship between organized labour and the commons, as highlighted in the introduction, because there is a distinctive contribution to be made here. As Harvey (2012) argues, decentralization and autonomy are also primary vehicles for reinforcing neoliberal class strategies of social reproduction and producing greater inequality. For example, in urban environments in particular, ‘the better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximising interests’ leading inexorably to economic cleansing of whole areas. Gentrification and tourism are the clearest examples. The salience of class in general is an underdeveloped line of argument. If this authoritative collection is anything to go by, this may be a significant deficiency in the commons framework. Without historical continuity – honouring the contribution of those ‘commoners’ who came before in various guises and places – there is a danger of falling into the contemporary trap of regarding ‘innovation’ as a way of separating us from our past. History in the past as well as in the making is as essential a part of our commons as is the present and the future – material, temporal and spiritual. Some of the chapters are conceptual, some practical, some poetic, but all have at their heart the ‘duty’ not only to describe the problems of contemporary life, but to develop alternative ways of thinking about and living the relationship between individual and society, state and market, policy and politics. Since these relationships are, in broad terms, the primary focus of community development in theory and practice, commons perspectives have much to offer. Given the breadth of vision represented in this impressive book, and the restrictions of space here, I have limited myself to those chapters and issues that have particular relevance to community development. A fundamental concern is the tension between public and private spheres, and how these relate to the idea of the commons. The subtitle of the book makes clear that the ‘the wealth of the commons’ lies ‘beyond the market and the state’, emphasizing the private, communal or community spheres. However, it is important to acknowledge that ‘community’ has traditionally been as much a fiction of political contrivance as a real search for communal relationships. For example, in the current context, community is being systematically deployed as an alibi for decentralizing responsibility from the ‘public’ to the gendered ‘private’ community sector, en route to the ‘private’ commercial sector. If the potential for more democratic and meaningful social relationships is to be realized, then at the very least there needs to be recognition of the anti-democratic potential of community development in facilitating a ‘localism’ agenda which may deprive the poorest of key state services (a vital part of their particular commons heritage). There is clearly a qualitative difference between municipal co-operatives as an extension of ‘the public’ and community engagement strategies which are likely to lead to an extension of ‘the private’ in both senses of the word. The need for ‘reflexive decentralization’ in making these distinctions is beyond question (Graeber, 2013). Whilst community has always been a contested term, there is now a very real possibility that it becomes a victim of enclosure itself, in the sense that a ‘space for political empowerment’ is extinguished by default or by design, to be replaced by a process of managed compliance and privatization. At the same time, Harvey (2012, p. 70) argues, not all forms of enclosure can be dismissed as bad by definition. In fact, ‘some sort of closure is often the best way to preserve certain kinds of valued commons’. Kratzwald (p. 55), in her compelling chapter on rethinking the social welfare state in light of the commons, argues that one strategic way of avoiding wholesale appropriation of ‘commons’ ideology in the service of privatization agendas is to reconsider how services are provided – ‘by the state, controlled by those affected; by citizens, through various forms of government support and financing; or in self-organised social networks’ – and that such decisions must be made ‘anew in every individual case’. The precondition in all cases would be the strengthening of ‘political empowerment’ against privatization. This is essentially a call for ‘clarity through specificity’ (Cornwall, 2008), which could act as a very concrete corrective to some of the more grandiose claims of community development. In addition, the strategic application of the kind of filtering process suggested by Kratzwald may offer sustenance to beleaguered practitioners working with long-suffering communities to understand where their best interests might lie. It also validates the case for speaking out collectively ‘when the idea of the commons is used to justify cutting public expenditures’ (Kratzwald, p. 59) as in various versions of ‘the big society’. Re-theorizing both ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ in community development would help to expose the shallowness of much of the current drive towards community governance worldwide and help to repoliticize participatory democracy. Any serious case for a commons-based approach must be at least partially measured by the extent to which it expands democratic political space for those most removed from power. As Quilligan in particular argues (p. 73), there is always a tension between representative and participatory democracy, with community development often positioned as a mediator between state and civil society. However, in a global environment in which private ‘corporations have substantially invaded the sphere of government, demanding that the state functions mainly for their benefit’ (Rustin, 2013), that mediating position is severely compromised, if not rendered almost impossible. In this process poor people everywhere have been ‘responsibilized’ and ‘demonized’ while, at the same time, some sections of civil society have been ‘entrepreneurialized’ by being expected to take over substantial state functions, sometimes through competitive tendering processes, which produce low wages, poor services and increasingly divided communities. This creates the sharpest of tensions, considering that ‘the community solution’ has traditionally been framed within the politics of the state. There is a strong temptation therefore to regard the marketized state as beyond redemption, a central cause of the problems that currently beset democratic life. In this respect, Mattei (p. 39) argues that the conventional state/market dichotomy is a ‘distinction without a difference’. And there is no shortage of evidence of the combination of market economics and bureaucratic politics that have so undermined democratic structures and cultures. Nonetheless, an insistent question remains as to whether the state should be surrendered so readily, and what might take its place as an institutionalized expression of the collective will of citizens in defence of ‘their sovereign rights … to their common goods’ (Quilligan, p. 81). The state is essentially an ambivalent formation, which has been fought over and fought for in many different contexts over time. As it has been gradually hollowed out by the virus of neoliberalism, it is tempting to erase from collective memory those democratic struggles over the state through which marginalized groups have fought their way towards some degree of social protection, cultural recognition and material redistribution. Through representing their claims in and outside of state structures, social and political movements have shifted the balance of power in many situations for the better. There is a dialectical relationship between the state and civil society, between representative and participatory democracy. To construct the state as the enemy, or at least as an unwanted encumbrance, is to reduce confidence in collective social and economic solutions as they may be expressed and evolved through democratic politics. As Kratzwald argues, what is required is a reclaiming of the state and the public sphere by ‘stepping out of the private sphere’ and into the sphere of politics. This could be a promising position for community development workers to put to the test. Operating both within the ‘invited spaces’ of policy and the ‘demanded spaces’ of politics, practitioners and community groups continuously need to make a critical assessment of the opportunities and challenges of both strategic participation and strategic non-participation in existing structures and programmes. Indeed, society from the as it (p. presents a key challenge for and community development (p. approach to reclaiming the state a and for thinking about the politics of take are in a and people over their and are to take responsibility for also a central for the state, as citizens active in such various to the state or the In is through the and the people In this way the democratic state is from the of the market through the made of it by an and active civil society. It is also different to those contemporary versions of in which the of power is through the of representative has always its history us that people with their that which they could never to in the market and other public 2012). To and for a democratic state that on the of human and social need as a central of the commons its because it provides a political focus for the kind of of and communal necessary to public in any way. This reclaiming the state as a shared a is regarded by some as a lost or but it is no more so than the commons project itself. Whilst there is an to be by with what is as the project of the social welfare state, it is where there is of this position that the commons idea at its and least There is no from politics, and it to that ideas are at their best they are made argues that of the of the of is that the very idea of a and of a alternative has been almost from the of It is for example, that there is not a single in the of this to is there much of other political and in at any What are we to make of The commons could be to a broad an which has an important in and to an alternative social However, there is a broad commitment to are framed in ways that its is essentially ideological and cultural rather than This is not in the contribution it could make to the development of a project. As (2012) argues in his assessment of social movements in the ‘the fundamental power struggle is the for the of meaning in the of people’. one of the most about the collection of ideas and which the commitment to is that it is an active which does not in the in which all often to politics community development. At the same time, this may also be one of the in to a coherent commons of ‘the commons’ is a of claims therefore, always such social and political As in his critique of the urban commons (2012, p. argues, the of it the is often with a are common interests to and by what are essentially political The potential for the rich to lead and to in communities and to an commons is all A more epistemology may be required to take account of or The of commons may be necessary in to and a vision of an alternative moral which would for but an of of power a more dialectical of cause and For example, the and of certain sections of the are as of – be they welfare at one of the or and at the Whilst it is clearly that and can the kind of wealth which in some world over whole are increasingly on their it is the of economic in order to produce those very that is the to the kind of commons which would society. In a of by – from public through to – the of an must confront the of an for enclosure has always been the default and who autonomy to their one of the most significant contributions of the commons then, is in the ideological and cultural challenge it presents for community development. In this respect, it is important to that capitalism itself is if not an ideological with profound cultural in of how people to and Graeber makes a but between the and the in politics, both as an and the Occupy Movement, in the The as are with structures, process being a The on the other are in of which will construct the as yet important of politics therefore is that it through its in the and to offer a of the future it is – to it as it This kind of politics is also in much commons thinking and community development. The dialectical process of in of power by the claims of marginalized groups expressed through is what community development should be In other words, greater to democratic democratic structures that in the in which those are or As it (p. need a state that expands our for community To what might be a which practitioners to the of and critical framed within an of collective and and to an of the structural of could help to community This book provides a to ways of thinking and that at the very least, our from and beyond the and in which many of us are It us of the of the of in our to rather than or of a more world – and then to for