<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>From:</b> "Brian K. Murphy" <<a href="mailto:brian@radicalroad.com">brian@radicalroad.com</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 13 augustus 2014 14:05:37 CEST<br><b>To:</b> <<a href="mailto:worldsocialforum-discuss@openspaceforum.net">worldsocialforum-discuss@openspaceforum.net</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>[WSF-Discuss] Richard Swift : Contemplating the Commons.</b><br><b>Reply-To:</b> Discussion list about the WSF <<a href="mailto:worldsocialforum-discuss@openspaceforum.net">worldsocialforum-discuss@openspaceforum.net</a>><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div>
<title>Richard Swift : Contemplating the
Commons.</title>
<div>Excerpted with permission from<i><b> S.O.S: Alternatives to
Capitalism</b></i> by Richard Swift, Between the Lines, 2014<font size="-1"> [<a href="http://btlbooks.com/book/sos">http://btlbooks.com/book/sos</a> ].</font></div>
<div>*****************************************</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><a href="http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1006.php">http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1006.php</a></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#0000FF"><b>The Commons As a Fount of
Hope</b></font></div>
<div>by Richard Swift<br>
<br>
The commons is not just a battlefield between corporate predators and
those who resist them - it is also a source of hope for those
willing to imagine a world beyond capitalism. It represents a space
between the private market and the political state in which humanity
can control and democratically root our common wealth. Both the market
and the state have proved inadequate for this purpose. In different
ways, they have both led to a centralization of power and
decision-making. Both private monopolies and state bureaucracies have
proved incapable of maintaining the ecological health of the commons
or managing the fair and equitable distribution of its benefits.<br>
</div>
<div>The conservative ecologist Garrett Hardin's belief that the
commons is facing a tragedy was based on the notion that individual
self-interest in exploiting common resources was undercutting the
overall health of those limited resources.[1] Hardin maintained that
individual self-interest trumps any more-thoughtful notion of
preserving resources for future use. External restraints needed to be
imposed. To prove his point, Hardin used the example of the individual
herder taking more than their share of pastureland. It assumes a human
behavior that is all too familiar to those who have seen the global
fishery depleted and seen watersheds destroyed by those hungry for
land to grow crops.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Hardin's solution was to divide up the commons into private
property and public goods administered through the market and the
state. But it scarcely seems to follow that if the commons is turned
into private property or put under the supervision of some distant
state bureaucracy that it will fare much better. These days, the two
will likely form a 'public-private partnership' and any regime of
fair-use regulation will go out the window. There is also a question
of scale. Is it better to have many small inshore artisanal fishers or
to turn the fishery over to Big Capital and the high-tech trawler
fleets? How could it make sense to push small farmers off
food-producing land so that large biofuel producers can help keep our
unsustainable love affair with the private automobile alive? When
Hardin's self-interested human nature is combined with large-scale
private ownership, it is likely to yield ever more short-sighted
results. It is no way to manage the commons.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>Managing the Commons</b><br>
It is far better to rethink how the commons is managed and to include
as many of the players as possible so as to achieve a better result.
If decisions rested with local communities or regions, in combination
with users of various types both local and remote (environmentalists,
fishers, miners, farmers, consumers), and were placed within a legal
framework that takes future generations into account, it would seem
likely to produce a more durable form of stewardship. This might also
in the long run develop other potentialities of human behavior than
the narrow self-interest that Hardin so feared.<br>
</div>
<div>An alternative to capitalism must in the end be based on a more
complex sense of the human than orthodox economists' notion that we
are all hardwired to a rational calculus of individual costs and
benefits. The influential commons theorist Elinor Ostrom proposes a
different, more optimistic, notion of the human potential for managing
the commons. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for her seminal
1990 work<i> Governing the Commons</i>.[2] She believes that:</div>
<blockquote>"we live in a web of social relations infused with norms
and values; we are intrinsically co-operative and as a result
collective action is possible and may lead to sustainable and
equitable governance practices."[3]</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div>Ostrom does not commit herself to an ambitious political program
of replacing state and market with more direct democratic practices.
But she opens up the debate about how the commons should be governed
rather than just assuming the market abetted by the state can handle
the job. For Ostrom, a process of 'deliberative democracy' is
essential if there is to be proper human stewardship of the commons.
Others in the commons movement carry the analysis further and see in
the commons the potential to restructure the underlying configuration
of power between markets, states and societies.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>Democratic Promise</b></div>
<div>This begins to give some indication of the democratic promise of
the commons as a potential cornerstone in working out an alternative
to capitalism. It takes on the ascendant neoliberalism of the commons
privatizers while avoiding the dysfunctional effects of top-down state
planning and centralized public ownership that have undercut previous
efforts to build a socialism centered on the state. It moves beyond
the sterile debate between an inadequate state and a rapacious market.
Instead it explores the idea of a decentralized eco-democracy founded
on what in the commons is vital to both human and biosphere survival.
It extends democratic decision-making to ensure egalitarian economic
outcomes. Here is one example of a commons-based popular initiative
from Greece (made vulnerable to privatization pressure because of the
debt crisis):</div>
<blockquote>"In the Greek city of Thessaloniki, a coalition of
citizens' groups called Initiative 136 is creating a new
organization to compete with Suez [a French water corporation] in the
tender for the Rebuilding the alternatives Southern-style acquisition
of the shares and the management of Thessaloniki's Water and Sewerage
Company. The dual goal is to prevent privatization and replace the
model of state administration that has failed to protect the public
character of water resources and infrastructure, and secure genuine
democratic control of the city's water by its citizens. The management
would be organized through local co-operatives, with citizen
participation. Initiative 136 is an effort to pre-empt privatization
before it is implemented, with an attractive concrete alternative in
the form of improved public management."[4]</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div>Multiply such initiatives many times and root them in the
plethora of different struggles currently being waged over the commons
and you start to get a sense of radical democratic promise. While the
term 'commons' has many meanings, both spiritual and
philosophical, it is explored here mainly as a political project. The
core strategy is to design institutional arrangements that move beyond
state and market and put the commons back into the service of society
as a whole. The underlying principles of such institutions need to be
based on a variety of forms of self-organization and collective
ownership rights, which is exactly what Initiative 136 in Thessaloniki
is attempting to achieve.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>There are many other examples. The fishers of the Turkish port of
Alanya manage their part of the global commons by allocating each
fishing boat a clearly prescribed area of the Mediterranean according
to the results of a lottery. They then rotate from area to area: from
September to January, every day, each boat moves east to the next
location. From February to May they move west. All fishers get the
same opportunity as the fish stocks migrate. The system is
collectively monitored and enforced. Problems are rare - and
generally resolved in the local coffee house. As Ostrom notes,
"Alanya provides an example of a self-governed, common-property
arrangement in which rules have been devised and modified by the
participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by
them."[5] The co-operative self-management of a particular commons is
likely to pay more attention to its long-term health and viability.
The implications can be far-reaching.:</div>
<blockquote>"...the abiding logic of the commons is not based, as we
have seen, on a balancing act between the roles of the state and the
market, but on the idea of a polycentrism, decentralization and
agreement between those touched by common problems. More co-operation,
less competition. More conservation and the dynamics of resilience
with regard to resources and their relationship with the environment
than erosion, limitless exploitation and unstoppable
appropriation."[6]</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<div><b>New Horizontal Commons Democracy</b><br>
Other commons-based movements, striving for an alternative ethos, are
just getting started. Attempts to create a horizontal commons
democracy include the Right to the City movement and other urban
initiatives inspired by the French libertarian Marxist Henri Lefebvre.
Right to the City has gained traction in South Africa with the
Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) shackdwellers' movement, which is active
in a number of cities across the country, and in the German city of
Hamburg, where it has inspired a network of squatters, tenants and
artists. It has become a rallying point also in U.S. cities such as
Miami and Boston, and a source of inspiration in India, where
Rajapalaya Lake in central Bangalore has been the focus of a fight to
maintain a livable urban commons in very crowded conditions.</div>
<div><br>
Some struggles combine resistance and vision. In Quebec, 2012
witnessed a remarkable movement of students against the
commodification of education, which put the besieged notion of free
advanced education back on the public agenda. Their struggle, which
helped to bring down a provincial government, could act as a template
for those trying to recover the educational commons from the pressures
of commercialization. In the 1990s there was a successful national
fishers' strike in India that prevented the government of the time
from handing over the Indian fishery to big trawler operators.
Countless other examples, big and small, dot the daily press but are
often just restricted to obscure websites.<br>
<br>
Commons battles tend to gain attention when they precipitate or are
part of some larger struggle that involves active confrontation with
those in power. This is, however, really just the tip of the iceberg.
If you examine the specialist literature you will discover that almost
everywhere there are attempts to make the self-management of the
commons a reality. There is an International Journal of the Commons
which acts as a forum for debate about commons issues and case studies
of successes and failures. A quick look through the table of contents
provides a sense of both the scope of the commons and of initiatives
being taken to extend their democratic self-management. Here are but a
few of the examples:<br>
</div>
<div> * The commons in a multi-level world<br>
* The European Union Baltic fishery<br>
* Irrigation systems in southeastern Spain<br>
* A new marine commons off the Chilean coast<br>
* The cockles fishery in coastal Ecuador<br>
* Commons resource management in southern
Namibia<br>
* Technology-dependent commons<br>
* Participative action in Kafue Flats in
Zambia<br>
* An environmental response to the globalizing
forestry industry</div>
<div> * Southeast Asia: rewarding the upland poor
for saving the commons<br>
* Self-governance of the global microbial
commons</div>
<div> * Icelandic health records</div>
<div> * The commons and community development in
the eastern Caribbean.[7]<br>
<br>
This list provides evidence that the commons is not some obscure issue
but one that runs in one way or another through the lives of
most of the world's people, often on a daily basis. The scope is truly
impressive. It also has a lot of complex nuts and bolts to it with
which we need to get to grips. But it is a complexity we need to
embrace, eschewing simple-minded monocultural solutions in the
process. This is an ongoing effort that will involve many.<br>
<br>
But it must remain beyond the scope of this essay. Here we are just
emphasizing the peril and potential of the commons. It has the
potential to become a new legal basis for the foundation of common
rights to set against the threat of public-private partnerships. If
this does not succeed, then we risk everything, not least our genetic
make-up and that of the plants and animals with which we share the
earth, being turned into corporate private property. The stakes are
high. The commons are connected to our sense of place, to our
identities, livelihoods and self-expression - ultimately even to our
survival as a species. This is a good place to start envisioning a
radical democratic alternative that gives people a fundamental say in
their individual and collective futures. As such, recasting our
relationship with the commons should take pride of place as we build
an alternative to capitalism. *</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Excerpted with permission from<i> S.O.S: Alternatives to
Capitalism</i> by Richard Swift, Between the Lines, 2014<font size="-1"><i><b> [SEE : <a href="http://btlbooks.com/book/sos">http://btlbooks.com/book/sos</a>
]</b>.</i></font></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><i><b>Endnotes:</b></i><br>
<br>
1. Garrett Hardin, "The tragedy of the commons," Science 162
(1968).<br>
<br>
2. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press,
1991.<br>
<br>
3. Danijela Dolenec, "The commons as a radical democratic project,"
<a href="http://br.boell.org">br.boell.org</a> Nov 2012.<br>
<br>
4. <a href="http://municipalservicesproject.org">municipalservicesproject.org</a><br>
<br>
5. <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Cybernetics_of_the_Commons">p2pfoundation.net/Cybernetics_of_the_Commons</a><br>
<br>
6. Joan Subirats, "The commons beyond state and market," 12 Jul
2012.<br>
<br>
7. <a href="http://thecommonsjournal.org">thecommonsjournal.org</a></div>
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