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Think Like a Commoner
A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons
David Bollier
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Think Like a Commoner
A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons
David Bollier
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About This Book
A new world based on fairness, participation, accountability is closer than you thinkif you learn to think like a commoner
The biggest "tragedy of the commons" is the misconception that commons are failures-relics from another era rendered unnecessary by the Market and State. Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons-an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.
With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating stories, Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:
- Is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption, and beyond
- Challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment
- Provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.
We have a choice: Ignore the commons and suffer the ongoing private plunder of our common wealth. Or Think Like a Commoner and learn how to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance. This accessible, comprehensive introduction to the commons will surprise and enlighten you, and provoke you to action.
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1
THE REDISCOVERY OF THE COMMONS
THE WOMEN OF ERAKULAPALLY — a small village two hours west of Hyderabad, India — spread a blanket onto the dusty ground and carefully poured sacks of brightly colored, pungent-smelling seeds into thirty piles: their treasure. For these women — all of them dalit, members of the poorest and lowest social caste in India — seeds are not just seeds. They are symbols of their emancipation and the recovery of their local ecosystem. The homegrown seeds have enabled thousands of women in small villages in the Andhra Pradesh region of India to escape their fate as low-paid, bonded laborers, and to remake themselves as self-reliant, proud farmers.
In 2010, when I visited Erakulapally under the auspices of the Deccan Development Society, Indian food prices were soaring by 18 percent a year, bringing social unrest and hunger to many parts of the country. But five thousand women and their families in seventy-five Andhra Pradesh villages not only had enough food for their needs — two meals a day instead of one, as previously — they had achieved food security without having to rely upon genetically modified seeds, monoculture crops, pesticides, outside experts, government subsidies or fickle markets. Their achievement of food sovereignty, as it is called, has been remarkable because they are outcasts many times over: they are women, socially shunned “untouchables,” poor, rural villagers.
During the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, governments and foundations in the West made a big push to introduce large-scale commercial rice and wheat production in so-called developing countries. This helped mitigate hunger in the short term, but it also introduced crops that are alien to many Indian ecosystems and that require harmful and expensive pesticides. The new crops are also more vulnerable to drought and volatile market prices. Tragically, the Green Revolution displaced the traditional millet-based grains that generations of villages had once grown. The expense and unpredictability of market-based monoculture crops — and the agricultural and financial failures that often resulted — are widely blamed for an epidemic of two hundred thousand farmer suicides over the past decade.
The women of Erakulapally discovered that traditional crops are far more ecologically suited to the semi-arid landscape of Andhra Pradesh and its rain patterns and soil types than proprietary seeds from the West. But to recover the old biodiverse ways of farming, the women had to ask their mothers and grandmothers to search for dozens of old nearly forgotten seeds. Eventually, in attics and family safe boxes, they found enough seeds to do a planting, and finally, after many additional rounds of cultivation, revived their traditional “mixed crop” agriculture. The practice consists of planting six or seven different seeds in the same field, which acts as a kind of “eco-insurance.” No matter if there is too much or too little rain, or if the rain comes too early or too late — some of the seeds will grow. Families will have enough to eat no matter the weather — and there will be no need to buy expensive genetically modified seeds or synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.
The recovery of traditional agriculture did not come through “technology transfer” or government-sponsored agricultural research. It came through a do-it-yourself process of recovering the “people’s knowledge” and deliberately encouraging social collaboration and seed sharing. In seed-sharing villages, every farmer now has a complete knowledge of all the seeds used, and every household has its own “gene bank,” or collection of seeds, at home.
“Our seeds, our knowledge” is how the women put it: every seed is a capsule of their knowledge. No one is allowed to buy or sell seeds; they can only be shared, borrowed or traded. The seeds are not regarded as an “economic input.” Villagers have a “social,” almost mystical relationship with the seeds, which is a subtle but important reason that the women were able to emancipate themselves. “Every crop has a meaning in a women’s life,” said P. V. Satheesh of the Deccan Development Society. “The seeds are a source of dignity.”
THE SEED-SHARING COMMONS of Andhra Pradesh illustrate an important feature of commons: they can arise almost anywhere and be highly generative in unlikely circumstances. There is no master inventory of commons. They can arise whenever a community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.
The title of this chapter, “The Rediscovery of the Commons,” has a certain ironic edge because for hundreds of millions of people around the world, the commons has never gone away. It has been a part of their daily lives for centuries. It nourishes them every day with food, firewood, irrigation water, fish, wild fruits and berries, wild game and much else. But these commons, like those of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, have often been regarded, even today, as invisible or trivial. As most economists will tell you, only markets have the power to meet our essential needs. The recent “rediscovery” of the commons suggests otherwise. Market-obsessed industrialized societies are coming to realize that the Market and the State are not the only ways to organize society or manage resources.
But the path to understanding the commons requires a willingness to think in particulars, see the creative potential of social relationships and surrender the search for abstract universals and predictable certainties. The commons works because people come to know and experience the management of a resource in its unique aspects. They come to depend on each other and love this forest or that lake or that patch of farmland. The relationships between people and their resources matter.
History matters, too. The particular historical circumstances, leaders, cultural norms and other factors at a given moment in time can be critical to the success of a commons. Commons persist and grow because a defined group of people develop their own distinctive social practices and bodies of knowledge for managing a resource. Each commons is special because each has evolved in relationship to a specific resource, landscape, local history and set of traditions.
Consider the improbable circumstances that gave rise to one of the most successful, widely used software programs in history, the commons known as GNU/Linux.
LINUS TORVALDS was a 21-year-old undergraduate in Finland in 1991 when he decided to write his own computer operating system. It was a ridiculously ambitious project because operating systems are horrendously sprawling and complicated — things that only large corporations can afford to create and distribute. But Torvalds was fed up with the cost and complexity of Unix, a leading mainframe program, so he set out to build a Unix-like operating system that would work on his personal computer. As luck had it, the Internet was just coming into vogue as a popular medium for email and file transfers (the World Wide Web had not yet been invented).
Torvalds released an early version of his program to an online group, and within a few months, hundreds of people had volunteered useful suggestions and bits of code. Within a few years, a collaborative community of several hundred hackers had come together to work on the new program. He called it Linux — a wordplay that combined “Unix” with his first name, “Linus.” Several years later, when the so-called Linux kernel was combined with a suite of programs known as GNU developed by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, a complete operating system that could work on personal computers was born: GNU/Linux, often known simply as “Linux.”
This was an astonishing and unexpected achievement. It not only demonstrated that amateurs could create a highly complex software program; it also showed that the Internet is a highly productive hosting infrastructure for social collaboration. A virtual community of self-selected hackers, with no payroll or corporate structure, had organized themselves into a fiercely creative, innovative, merit-driven commons. Remarkably, it worked!
The Linux experiment proved to be a foundational model for what is often known as “commons-based peer production,” a type of online collaboration that invites huge numbers of people to join forces via open network platforms. The GNU/Linux model of commoning was the social pattern that later inspired collaborative projects like Wikipedia (and hundreds of less renowned wikis) and open-access scholarly journals, in which academic disciplines reclaim control over their work from commercial publishers and make it free and shareable. Linux has also made possible such recent innovations as social networking; crowdsourcing of information and fundraising; and open design and manufacturing projects such as the Global Village Construction Set, a collection of fifty types of affordable farm equipment produced using open source principles.
As we will see in Chapter 8, the Linux experiment defied some seemingly inviolate principles of economics. It showed that the interplay of rational, self-interested individuals bargaining in the marketplace is not the only way to create wealth. Indeed, it showed that “wealth” itself is much more than fabulous sums of stocks, bonds and cash. Serious wealth can also be a community asset and the rich set of social relationships that make community possible. The Linux story is a stunning proof that the commons can be highly generative and contemporary as well as being entirely practical and effective.
THERE IS NO STANDARD FORMULA or blueprint for creating a commons; that’s what examining any particular commons reveals. Nor is the commons some panacea or utopia. Commoners often disagree among themselves. There are personality clashes as well as internal debates about what works best and what’s fair. There can be structural governance problems and external political interference. But commoners are intent on addressing difficult practical questions such as, What’s the best way to irrigate these forty acres when water is scarce? and What’s a fair way to allocate access to a dwindling fishery in this coastal bay? Commoners are also not afraid to tackle the problem of shirkers, vandals and free riders: individuals who want benefits without corresponding responsibilities.
The point is that the commons is a practical paradigm for self-governance, resource management and “living well.” Commoners can often negotiate satisfactory resolutions to meet their common purposes without getting markets or government bureaucracies involved. They struggle to figure out the best structures for managing a collective resource, the procedures for making rules and operational norms that work. They understand the need to establish effective practices to prevent over-exploitation of their forest or lake or farmland. They can negotiate fair allocations of duties and entitlements. They like to ritualize and internalize their collective habits and stewardship ethic, which over time ripen into a beautiful culture.
A constant challenge is the tendency of some people to “defect” from a common agreement and undermine potential schemes that would otherwise benefit everyone. This can lead to private profiteering from a collective resource or, worse, a chaotic free-for-all that destroys the resource. This is known as a “collective action problem.” Social scientists spend a lot of time studying why collective action problems can be so intractable and how they may be overcome. We will explore this issue further in Chapter 2.
It helps to understand that commons are not just things or resources. Outsiders to commons scholarship are prone to this mistake, either because they are economists who tend to objectify everything or because they are commoners declaring that a certain resource ought to be governed as a commons (what I call an “aspirational commons”). Commons certainly include physical and intangible resources of all sorts, but they are more accurately defined as paradigms that combine a distinct community with a set of social practices, values and norms that are used to manage a resource. Put another way, a commons is a resource + a community + a set of social protocols. The three are an integrated, interdependent whole.
Seen from this perspective, the question is not whether Pink Lake in Senegal or genomic databases on the Internet are commons, but rather whether a particular community is motivated to manage such a resource as a commons; and can it come up with the rules, norms and enforceable sanctions to make the system work? When put this way, it is interesting to consider the improbable types of common-pool sources that can be governed as commons.
A CLAN OF MUSCLE-BOUND SURFERS on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, share a passion for catching big waves at Banzai Pipeline Beach. The Pipeline has been likened to the Mount Everest of surfing — a place where the best go to prove their mettle and talent. Not surprisingly, there is enormous competition over who is entitled to ride which waves — and resentment against outsiders who don’t respect the surfing protocols that the local crowd has developed. “It’s a dangerous environment, and without a self-governing control pattern, it would just be chaos out there,” Randy Rarick, executive director of the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing competition, told a reporter for the New York Times. Another surfer pointed out that “there are serious consequences if you drop in on somebody and they got hurt, or if you wipe out and hurt yourself.”
To deal with these issues, a self-organized social collective known as the Wolfpak came together to manage how people may use a beloved but scarce local resource: the massive waves. Wolfpak members have evolved their own rules for the orderly, safe and fair use of the waves, and for maintaining their own community. They decide who can catch which waves, and they punish those who violate their social code of surfing etiquette. Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, a history professor who has written about the surfing culture on North Shore, noted, “For the Hawaiians, respect is an important concept, particularly when it comes to being in the ocean.” When surfers from Australia and South Africa arrived at the beach, boasting of their prowess, the locals at the Pipeline didn’t take it very well.
There have sometimes been conflicts among surfers, especially between locals and outsiders. Which raises an interesting question: Who is the more legitimate steward of the Pipeline, the local surfing fans or the state authorities, who have the legal authority to manage the beach? Should the concerns of local surfers be allowed to trump those of outsiders? Whose commons is it, anyway? And what are the fairest, most effective means for protecting it?
The Wolfpak commons resembles certain Boston neighborhoods that have come up with their own rules of managing street parking during the...