The Commons

Football As A Commons

September 15, 2024 Yavor Tarinski, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Privatization, Soccer, Sports, The Commons

In his book Football in Sun and in Shadow, Eduardo Galeano pointed at the commercialization of the world’s most famous sport and its detachment from the grassroots. In it he says that “when the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play, got torn out by its very roots. Professional football condemns all that is useless and useless means not profitable.”2 Once again we saw this in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil where modern football appeared for what it really is: a mechanism serving the logic of constant capital accumulation, aggressive towards those at the bottom who cannot afford to participate in this celebration of modern consumerist culture.

Cascadia And The Global Resurgence Of Bioregional Activism

September 1, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Bioregions, Cascadia, Ecological Systems, The Commons

One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication. A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California.

Solving The Housing Crisis Via The Commons

August 23, 2024 Dil Green, Resilience. Create! Housing, The Commons, United Kingdom (UK)

In Stroud Commons, we’re looking to find ways to speed up the building of the commons – especially the housing commons, which we were talking about in terms of ‘the rock on which the commons can be built’ before we’d even formed the core group in Stroud. Dil Green of Mutual Credit Services (MCS – who design models for the commons in all sectors), posted a message in our chat group, giving his take on the housing crisis, and how we might speed up the housing commons by allowing / helping / encouraging people to put their house into the commons, and carry on living in it for the rest of their life – and pass it on to their family, too.

Bridging The Human / Nature Divide Through Convivial Conservation

August 1, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Capitalism, Conservation, Environment, The Commons

The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves. More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection. The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.

The Library Is A Commons

July 15, 2024 Emily Drabinski, In These Times. Strategize! Libraries, Socialism, The Commons, Worker Rights

The Montana State Library Commission voted 5-1 (with one abstention) in July 2023 to rescind its membership in the American Library Association because of the ALA’s then-president: a self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian, which is to say, me. Despite their claims, that does not mean the entire field is socialist, nor is the professional association, which is nonpartisan and dedicated to advocating for libraries and the professional development of library staff. Who knows how many of us are card-carrying socialists (probably not too many, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a total 140,000 library workers while membership in the Democratic Socialists of America stands at about 80,000, most of whom likely don’t work in libraries — yet), but there’s a reason the Right is suspicious of libraries as an institution.

Lessons Of Desert Oases For Eco-Resilient Transformation

July 3, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Deserts, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Global South, History, The Commons

To the Western mind, the presence of lush oases in the middle of deserts is a strange aberration, almost a dream. What moderns fail to appreciate is that oases are actually deliberate human creations, socio-ecological examples of commoning. Colonial powers may see oases as a miraculous fantasy, but locals realize that their cultures of interdependence over the course of millennia have made oases possible, enabling them to collect and sustain natural flows of water in arid climates. Safouan Azouzi, a scholar of the commons, grew up in Gabès, Tunisia, where as a boy he lived within ancient traditions that sustain oases in the desert.

Urbánika’s SolarPunk Bus Tour And Video Course On The Commons

June 26, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Governance, Latin America, Solar power, The Commons

Urbánika is an international collective of tech commoners that calls itself an "immersive activism school." Led by Humberto Besso-Oberto Huerta of Mexico, the group wants to help build peer-governed, climate-resilient smart cities and communities, especially in Latin America. For this ambitious goal, Urbánika has nearly finished kitting out a climate-positive "SolarPunk Bus." The amazing vehicle will serve as a mobile learning center as it tours Latin American cities in coming months. More about that in a moment. But first, some news about another innovative Urbánika initiative: an educational video series, "PostCapitalism and the Commons."

How To Unite Local Initiatives For A More Sustainable Global Future

May 5, 2024 Vasilis Kostakis and Nikiforos Tsiouris, Resilience. Create! Local Economies, Sustainability, The Commons, wealth inequality

This article challenges the belief in high-tech solutions to solve socio-environmental crises, proposing a political vision beyond “green growth” and “ecomodernism.”. It advocates for a commons-based technology framework, promoting collective resource management for sustainability. We thus introduce “cosmolocal” production, a configuration that strives to connect communities around shared resources and serve their needs while minimizing ecological impact. Despite acknowledged tensions, we contend that the cosmolocal framework could foster institutional and social change, aiming to address environmental degradation and wealth inequality.

Cooking Sections’ Singular Stew Of Art, Activism, And Local Food

May 4, 2024 David Bollier. Strategize! Activism, Art, climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, The Commons

What a delight to encounter the work of the British artistic duo Cooking Sections, two British artists whose virtuoso artworks effortlessly blend art with activism, local commoning, and eco-stewardship in the service of climate-friendly foodways. Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual -- Senior Research Fellows at the Royal College of Art in London – create distinctive works of art about modern food that are also enmeshed in the fabric of everyday life: land, intertidal waters, restaurants, buildings, social festivals. The canvas for their art is large and unconventional: the bioregional theaters of the world where food is grown and harvested, from Scotland and Istanbul to southern Italy and South Korea, and beyond.

Advancing The Commonsverse

April 23, 2024 David Bollier. Educate! Capitalism, Commoning, New Economy, The Commons

Bollier and Helfrich’s theory restores an older tradition of a moral critique of capitalism in the tradition of “moral economists” such as Karl Polanyi and H.P. Tawney. It raises important questions about the socio-ethical foundations of our society and economy, the relationship between civil associations and the state, and the nature of the state. In the final part of this introduction, we discuss the complex relationship between the commons and the state. We frame this relationship as one of mutual dependency and argue for the careful redesign of our institutions of public administration and democratic governance to make them more receptive and accessible to the creative powers of the commons.

Building Democratic Governance On The Internet

April 5, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Democracy, Internet, Media, Media Democracy, The Commons

The default form of governance on Internet platforms is "implicit feudalism," Nathan Schneider provocatively declares in his new book Governance Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. Implicit feudalism is "a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms," in which founders become "benevolent dictators for life," he argues. Unfortunately, authoritarian governance is not confined to social media platforms. The same tendencies bleed into the "real world," too, if only because the lines between online and "real life" have become quite blurry these days.

Using Solar Commons To Decentralize And Share Solar Energy

February 4, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Community Wealth, Energy Democracy, Solar Energy, The Commons

Energy from the sun is sure one of the most pervasive forms of common wealth. So why not capture and share that wealth more widely with everyone? That's the basic idea behind the Solar Commons, a prototype project that uses revenue streams from solar energy and partnerships to build community wealth. The primary vehicle is a Solar Commons trust agreement among diverse community groups and the owner of a solar power array. The driving force behind this socio-legal innovation has been Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar, writer and energy democracy advocate.

Commons And Commoning: A Progressive Vision Of A Good Society

January 14, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Capitalism, Constructive Program, The Commons, Transformation

Established systems don't welcome fundamentally new ideas – even when they desperately need them, even if people are clamoring for them. Entrenched systems see new ideas and logics as disruptive. They see them as threatening and even incomprehensible. And yet, as Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them." We're at an impasse today because contemporary institutions keep bringing the same mindset to solving problems that need some fresh and strikingly different approaches. The many problems afflicting agriculture and the food system today are fundamentally similar to those afflicting the rest of society. They are just another theater for rentier capitalism, which relies on market/state collusion, extractivism of nature, and systemic precarity for many ordinary people.

Reimagining Economics Education

January 1, 2024 David Bollier. Strategize! Economics, Education, Finance and the Economy, The Commons

Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator and curriculum developer, had long been appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people. Students at middle and high schools learn about a "degenerative economic system," as she puts it, in which "the economy" is framed as something separate from society and nature. With little sense of contemporary realities, economics courses assume that endless economic growth is desirable and possible. It focuses on businesses and markets, ignoring the vital role that household care and the commons play.

The Right To Repair And Other Forms Of Peer Creativity

December 2, 2023 David Bollier. Create! Arts, cultue, Right to Repair, The Commons

Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money? Copyright and trademark law are certainly designed for those purposes. They presume a market identity for creators of art, software, and new knowledge. And in fact, the corporate world routinely vacuums up creativity that's developed through commoning – images, music, know-how, social sharing. Yet history tells another story. It shows that creativity naturally thrives in commons, and need not enter the marketplace to find support or fruition.

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