Common Practice

The Commons narrative needs to include neo-liberalism's own narrative too

I thought I'd just explore in this post the idea that the Commons 'narrative' also needs to include the story of some of the forces that are working against the survival of the commons.

If commoners are going to be presenting themselves as being part of a new way of organizing economics that needs to be taken seriously then they will be proposing taking their place in the present economic arena amongst a range of other economic players.

Who else is selling economic solutions in the 'market-place' of corporate and international finance and monetary policy?

One economic organizing idea that has developed very rapidly in the past 30 years to become the dominant influence in the economics of most states in the global 'North' is known as 'neo-liberalism'

The neo-liberal brand of economic thinking is important for commoners to know about because it includes in its approach a specific economic agenda of enclosing (and thus destroying) as many of the commons as possible as quickly and completely as possible.

So, as commoners, it certainly helps to know something of the story behind how neo-liberalism came to be such a prominent influence in all our lives.

Jay Walljasper's excellent article about the "Commons Moment is Now" on the Worldchanging website is a good place to start for anyone wanting to know about the history of neo-liberalism.

In this article Jay talks about how the neo-liberalism movement developed during the 1980's, completely 're-branding' itself in ways that allowed it to become the dominant economic paradigm applied throughout the world for the past 30 years.

(If you are interested read the whole story of neo-liberalism's history here).

Since neo-liberalism's (un-official) mission is to utterly dismantle and dis-empower all attempts at commoning all over the world, it is worth knowing more how this quaint form of economic theory, that began in the early 1950's in Austria, ended up to be such a powerful force in shaping humanity's thinking about values and social organziation.

Here is an excerpt from Jay's post:

"The growing interest in creating a commons-based society is fueled in part by the auspicious historical moment that is dawning all around us.

It’s reminiscent of the time thirty years ago when liberalism was losing its footing and conservative policymakers refashioned their old political rhetoric based on social exclusion and apologies for corporate capitalism into a shiny new philosophy known as “the market.”

Previously the thrust of right-wing thought had been focused on what they were against (civil rights, labor unions, social programs etc.), but claiming the market as their mission allowed them to showcase what they were for. The success of that “re-branding” has shaped our world.

The commons now offers a similar opportunity to turn things around in the political and economic spheres. Yet unlike the theory of the market, the commons is not just old wine in new bottles; it marks a substantive new dimension in political and social thinking.

The promise of a commons-based society offers considerable appeal for progressives after a long period in which the bulk of their political engagement has been in reaction to right-wing initiatives."

One reason why the Commons matter right now

Maputo, Mozambique

One definition of the word 'common' is 'to board together, eat at a table in common'.

To live by the princple that we live in 'one world' - as commoners - means that we are also 'eating at the table in common' - sharing the food that is grown in this world and thus 'on the common table'.

This sounds a beautiful idea - but it is shocking to me how far it is from the reality we are presently facing in the world.  More than 900 million people go hungry every day, 1.4 billion in extreme poverty.

Two articles I read recently made me acutely aware that poverty can no longer be seen as just 'local' - within a particular region or State.

It has become totally obvious to me that every single one of us on this Earth is implicated in the fact that so many of us go hungry every day - and, thus, also implicated in being part of transforming this unacceptable reality into something new and different.

To give you a few, random examples of apparently 'local' issues relating to food that are actually part of a global web of forces that create the 'food crisis'.

• In the capital of Mozambique there have been 'bread riots' - people out on the streets protesting at the 30% rise in the price of a loaf of bread.
• Over the past few years 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide. The Indian Government has no policy to reverse this trend, despite numerous government reports. This has been described as the 'Slient Tsunami of Hunger'.
• In Madagascar a recent coup d'etat, connected with the leasing of large tracts of fertile land to an agri-business corporation in South Korea.
• Russia had droughts this last summer and has cancelled all exports of grain.
• Middle Eastern countries are setting up deals in Ethiopia and other north African countries for farm-land
• Brazil exporting its 'agri-business solutions' to other nations in the South.

India-Russia-Mozambique-Brazil-Madagascar -Middle East -South Korea...  we cannot deny it any more - we are all sitting at the same global table

 Sitting at the same table to eat does not mean we automatically have learned any appropriate table-manners.

Like ill-behaved brats at supper many different 'special interest groups' are just trying to grab as much as they can for themselves.

Without respect or compassion there is a competition game around the food that is  pushing aside those at the table less able to fend for themselves. And Dad and Mom seem to have disappeared or given up trying to keep order.

Devinder Sharma in his interview with Democracy Now gave a shocking statistic that stopped my mind for a moment:

        There is actually enough food in the world right now, despite all the failure of crops, to feed 11 billion people.

Scarcity is being created artificially - when there is no actual shortage of food at all. There is a 'food crisis' that has no reason to exist

For me this is a shocking example of what happens when parties - nations, corporations, Stock Exchanges - blatantly pursue policies of self-interest - ignoring all the consequences of the competition that is required to play these games with 'commodities'.

When self-interested actions are allowed free reign the 'externalities' of such actions are not accounted for. These are the 'hidden costs' that include: actual loss of human life, destruction of the environment, political instability and poverty.

Every day the common table at which we all eat together is being systematically desecrated.

This may become sufficiently unacceptable to a sufficient number of people at some point that alternatives are actively sought.

In fact, this is happening. Its one of the many reasons why the Commons matter right now - as described so well by Alexa Bradley and Julie Ristau in their recent post

Can a nation-state resurrect a Charter of the Forests?

Forest clearance, Sherwood Pines, Clipstone, UK

This is a continuation from the last post on learnings about nation-states....

It's less than two months before the UN Climate Change Conference begins in Cancun, Mexico on 29th November.

As happened in Copenhagen last year, delegates from the world nations will come together to negoiate new agreements for reducing global carbon dioxide emissions.

Less known about, perhaps, is another set of delegates, from the same nation states that will be in Mexico, are also busy negotiating for changes in climate change policy making. These delegates, however, have a very different agenda.

Their intention is to find ways to keep open loop-holes in certain international agreements. They are hoping to get the OK for totally unregulated de-forestation in their respective countries. De-forestation = greenhouse gas emissions.

The main States involved in this campaign are: Germany, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

They are actively working to make sure the nation states they represent can cheat in the greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges these states have previously made.

My first reaction on reading about this was a sort of dis-belief. How can a nation state be supporting greenhouse gas emission reductions in Mexico and, simultaneously,  having a group of representatives in Europe actively looking to cheat on those agreements?

What sort of 'double-think' within the governments of these States could make this nonsense possible?

Then I saw myself getting righeous: "See, obviously the whole model of the State has become hopelessly flawed - loss of integrity, out of control, compromised... etc. We just need to do away with the nation-states altogether - they are hopelessly out-dated!

The Commons form of governance of our resources is obviously what should replace the State... and so on...

I'm glad I came across an article about the same time in Michel Bauwen's excellent P2P Foundation blog that stopped me in my tracks a bit.

Written by Neal Lawson, a political commentator in the UK, he is pondering on the whole dilemma presently faced by the Labour Party in the UK - what stand should we now take in relation to the State?

In this article he writes:

We need to supersede both the bureaucratic state model and the market state and put the emphasis instead on the establishment of a democratic state; one that is made responsive and accountable through democratic engagement, and through people having a voice rather than expressing themselves only through exit or loyalty. It should be ‘our state’, doing things with us and not just to us.

From the parliamentary executive down to the local GP, we need innovative ways of holding power in check, with the greatest possible number of people determining the rules about how the state operates and in whose favour. This includes a much greater role for workers and users of state services in the co-production of those services.

It's too simplistic to think that all we need to do is remove the State that is so obviously failing us as commoners.

As Neal Lawson is suggesting - it could be possible to have a 'democratic state' that is 'our' state, working with us not against us.

Amazingly this idea for collaboration between State and people has been around for 800 years and the forests were, then as now, the arena in which such collaboration were proposed.

Peter Linebaugh and Professor Wolcher have both done a brilliant job in reminding us of the importance of the Charter of the Forests, a policy document created in 1225 in England, together with the Magna Carta, that specifically insisted that the King (State) take the needs and wishes of the common people of England into account, in law.

So, I'm grateful that we do have such a history to inspire us, and show what is possible - beyond just dismissing the State a lost cause.

The Commons Conversation and nation-states

 

        A few days ago I was sitting in the waiting room of a dentist in Germany, just across the border from where I live in Holland.

  I was listening on my computer to a radio interview John Schmidt recorded while in California with Kevin Hanson and Jason Bender (they were somewhere closer to the East Coast of America) about their fascinating  tour through the Gulf states of America. 

(Thanks to all of you for a most enlightening insight into the realities of what is happening in that part of the world!)

Kevin and Jason were commenting, amongst other things, on their conversations about the Commons with the chiefs of some of the indigenous peoples living in the Gulf of Mexico region .

  Thinking about this later, I realized this humble little set of coincidences in Germany at the dentist with the radio interview highlights something important about why the Commons are crucial for us to understand as we go forward into the future together.

This is what l've learned from this about the Commons: 

1) if we are honest with each other, we can admit that nation-states have almost no relevance any more, as a way of constructively thinking about things and living our lives together. 

The idea that nation-states are a necessary starting point when considering what needs to be done is, just simply, out-of-date.

Even more than just being out of date, if we insist on operating from the point of view of nation-states then they will continue to actually get in the way and will stop things happening that very urgently need to happen. 

We only have to remember what happened this last month in the 'international' response to the devastating flooding in Pakistan to see the obstruction that the nation-states mentality can cause.

2) which country or nation-state do I 'belong' to anyway? 

I was born in Zambia in Africa and now I'm living in a place called Holland, go shopping and have my teeth fixed in Germany, work with many friends in America and the Far East, and, 'belong' to England, according to my passport, although the Dutch government has assumed the right ask me to pay taxes to them. 

That's a complicated enough situation - and it's just one small person trying to get by and make sense of the world! 

What happens when we start expanding my one life out to millions of other people and their inter-connections .... it ends up with chaos and total administrative grid-lock of unbelievable proportions of unworkability!

Jay mentions the very same point in his conversation with John Schmidt - in this case relating it to addressing the environmental crisis caused by the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

The bio-sphere in that part of our world, that has been so tragically violated by the crude oil from the ruptured well, has no respect for national boundaries - United States, Mexico, Cuba and Caribbean countries. 

Call the bio-sphere the 'Gulf of Mexico Commons' and it starts to make the Commons a very important new starting point for taking action across national boundaries.

So how do we respond - as we must do now in the Gulf?

How do we talk to each other when our 'national interests' and nationalities have been obviously transcended and become irrelevant? 

We've got to find this out - and we can only do it by talking with each other in new ways.

If we are going to find effective solutions for trans-national crises such as what's happening at this very moment in the Gulf of Mexico, then we urgently need a bigger conversation to be happening. 

Nation states, however physically huge they may be, are obviously way too small an idea for such a conversation.

Same goes for the conversation we need to be having about the atmosphere.

When did the sky ever have any respect for 'sovereign territories' and borders? It, thank goodness, has always assumed the right to be everywhere and anywhere it chooses.

Also since when do 'carbon emissions' belong to just one country any more?

60% of China's carbon emissions are generated making things to be exported to other countries.

As Kevin and Jason were pointing out on several occasions during their interview - these are the reasons why the "Commons Conversation" is so timely, relevant and significant.

What Keith and Jason discovered on their tour and interviews with people in the Gulf States is such a great help in understanding how the Commons can work that this learning conversation will have to continue in some following posts. 

 

The Tea Party and Martin Luther King

The rally of the Tea Party in Washington August 28th, 47th Anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.

Today I read in the International Herald Tribune about the rally of the Tea Party in Washington.

Glen Beck, a Fox News presenter, gave a speech to a crowd of perhaps 300,000 people who had gathered at exactly the place where Martin Luther King declared "I have a dream" 47 years ago.

Martin Luther King was passionate about segregation and exclusion of black people from access to resources and opportunities being a violation of the self-evident truth that 'all men are equal'.

In the language of the Commons I'm learning segregation and exclusion are the result of "enclosures".

The enclosures that Negros in North America were experiencing in 1963 were not just physical exclusion from buses, restaurants and schools.

These enclosures were also the non-physical exclusions written into countless State laws and statutes. This 'culture of enclosure' divided communities and towns and split apart the whole of American society.

After reading the news of this Tea Party rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech I was inspired to re-read the text of the original speech from that memorable day in August 1963.

It was moving for me to feel how this great man of vision had chosen a strategy of no-reaction to the oppressive forces of discrimination.

He chose to do something very different. The strategy he chose managed to inspire not only the thousands who had travelled in buses for many hours to stand in the hot sun and listen to him - but also all the millions since from around the world who have heard or read his passionate calling.

He simply and powerfully stated the self-evident truth:

"All men are equal and have an equal right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

His communication behind these words was -  who can possibly be opposed, in their hearts, to this inherently obvious truth?

Mr. King warned, in his speech, against the dangers of getting into conflict and confrontation with the forces that were imposing the exclusion of black people from their natural rights.

He was stating, with great power and eloquence, truths that were not in opposition to anyone.

My sense is that the truths embodied in the Commons have the same self-evidence to them as those Martin Luther King expressed on our behalf 47 years ago.

This means the Commons are not being proposed in opposition to any other presently enforced political, cultural or economic order.

It also implies that those who wish to support the development of the Commons are not, thereby, having to choose to be in conflict with anyone or any group, institution or State.

There is no battle to be fought and won for the Commons to become accepted.

This is what I've learned today about the Commons - thanks to Martin Luther King.

As for Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, Fox News and the Tea Party.... nothing more needs to be said.

The Dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey - enclosure by a King of England

Yesterday, on my way back to Holland after visiting my family, I was lucky enough to be able to make a sort of pilgrimage to Glastonbury, in the county of  Somerset.

I climbed up Glastonbury Tor in the early morning mist and felt the timelessness of such a place - that has been the home of many legends and mysteries and tragedies over the years.

The Tower of St Michael's Church, Glastonbury Tor in the mist 

Down in the town are the impressive ruins of Glastonbury Abbey - reputed to have been the largest and most wealthy of the 800 monasteries and nunneries that existed in England in the reign of King Henry VIII of England.

Glastonbury Abbey as it was just before being 'dissolved' in 1539. 

Between 1535- 1541 all 800 monasteries were 'dissolved' (destroyed), their wealth confiscated and lands given to those who were in favor with the King. 

The King gave himself the right to make these enclosures by two Acts of Parliament - literally called the First and Second Acts of Supression. 

   
The remains of Glastonbury Abbey's main tower

It was a very powerful experience to me to walk over the grass that had once been the floor of this enormous abbey church and to look up at all that remains of the grand arch that would have been at the base of the once 66ft-high tower of the Abbey. 

There is even a location marked at one spot near the great tower that is reputed to be the burial site of the legendary King Arthur. 

But what impressed me the most about this extraordinary place, that carries 900 years of history in its soil, is the quiet witness it is making to the devastation and destruction that enclosure can bring.

 What cold, calculated force and ruthlessness it must have taken to destroy such a beautiful structure and all the living and ancient culture it contained and maintained.

It is difficult to imagine the extent of dislocation and chaos that must have been left behind when the Abbey was ransacked for its gold and silver, its roof ripped apart for the lead it contained, its Abbot hanged on the top of Glastonbury Tor and all the complex systems of governance and influence that it had developed for hundreds of years over of thousands of people and thousands of acres of land and forests - just swept away to nothing in a few short months. 

I had read about the 16th Century being the time of the 'Great Enclosure of the Monasteries' by the King and his government. 

But to just walk around the ruins of this great Abbey, feeling the size of it all through the outline of the cloisters where the monks would have sat and worked, going past the remains of the great dining hall and its underground store-house, over to the Abbot's high-ceilinged kitchen with its four fire-places - it all brought the feeling of the dis-possession that 'enclosure' can mean right into my body and heart 

The discovery of just how pervasive and destructive the enclosure of the Commons has been for so many centuries has been one of my biggest lessons on this learning journey so far

Another important awareness about enclosure and the Commons is also growing in me day by day.

I'm beginning to be more sensitive to the sort of force it takes to impose an enclosure on any Commons.

Its becoming clearer just how destructive such forces can be - not just to the particular Commons that are being enclosed but also destructive of the very intricate web of relationships and connections that penetrate and reach out any such Common. 

Enclosures cut across these inter-dependencies with an externally applied force that destroys all livingness in a system.  

The empty, broken arches of Glastonbury Abbey bore testimony to this most starkly for me yesterday.

All that remains of the church of St. Michael, Glastonbury Tor, where the last Abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whyting, was hung on November 15th 1539 

African examples of the enclosure of knowledge

The 'voortrekkers' laager' - circle of wagons: South Africa 1860's 

Continuing the theme of Africa and enclosures from yesterday's post - this is another story from my father about Kenneth Kaunda's part in the struggle for independence in Zambia in the 1960's.

It is a good illustration of some important points about the enclosure of knowledge in Zambia (and other African countries) and how this enclosure was used to exclude people from access to the Commons.

Kenneth Kaunda, as part of his political action to free the Zambian people from the rule of the British colonial government, decided one day to make a protest about the law in his country forbidding African people from buying goods in shops owned by non-Africans (the 'whites').

He collected together a group of his supporters, had them stand outside a shop in the capital city of Lusaka, and intentionally walked inside and asked white store-owner if he could buy a book. 

There were two other shoppers in the store when Kenneth Kaunda walked in - both white men belonging to the Africaner community (with roots in the Afrikaans culture of South Africa).  Afrikaans people from Southern Rhodesia and South African had colonized Zambia along with the British colonialists.

The store-keeper gave a sign to these two white men who promptly took hold of Kenneth Kaunda, manhandled him out of the store and threw him onto the street in front of his group of supporters. 

The group of supporters, on cue, began to shout and protest at the treatment Kaunda had just been given in his simple request to be able to buy a book.

To understand the full significance of this story, which sounds very similar to the stories that come out of the Deep South of the United States of America, it is important to know something more of the unique history of the country of Northern Rhodesia at that time, in the 1950's and 1960's.

Very rich deposits of copper had been discovered after the Second World War in the north of the country. They were being exploited by mining companies based in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. 

The land in Northern Rhodesia was also very fertile and ideal for growing tobacco and maize crops for export. Many white farmers had migrated up from the South to take over huge tracts of this 'empty' country and turn to virgin land into huge and very lucrative farms.

 It was a country full of riches and promise and the colonialists - both British and Afrikaans were very intent on not sharing this wealth with the local population of Africans. 

One of the main reasons why the 'apartheid system' was constructed and enforced was to ensure that no Africans ever had the chance to become educated sufficiently or to learn necessary skills and trades that could, in any way, threaten the monopoly that the white people had established over all sources of wealth-generation in Northern Rhodesia. 

Africans were excluded from every possible access to the knowledge and education that might lead them to be potential competitors in the market-place for jobs and business.

Kenneth Kaunda as literally thrown on the street when he attempted to breach this 'encircling of knowledge' that permeated the culture of ruling elite in Northern Rhodesia at that time by asking to buy a book.

The principle we are seeing repeated over and over again here, when we study the history of any culture, is: 

     - access to knowledge = access to the possibility to live self-determined and self-governed lives. 

   Those who wish to control a group of peoples need to ensure that those people  are denied access to the knowledge that they might be able to use to self-organize themselves to even become independent of the controlling group and its power and markets.

As illustrated above - the system of 'apartheid' in Africa was specifically created to deny access to certain sorts of  knowledge and opportunities (e.g. knowledge and opportunities  about mining and farming) to certain groups of people.

However, this exclusion from access to knowledge has also happened in a very different way in African history. 

Kitchen in a Daraga home, Burkina Faso

Malidoma Some, a medicine man of the Daraga tribe in Burkina Faso, has written a fascinating account of his ordeal of being 'given' by his father, as a 4 year-old boy, to the local Catholic Catholic priests to be educated in 'modern' ways. 

Malidoma spent 17 years of his life at school on a Catholic Mission station -  completely excluded from contact with his family and village and the indigenous knowledge of his native tribe and the elders of his tribe. 

Fortunately for him, and for us, Malidoma Some was able to escape from the Catholic Mission, by literally running away.

 After a tremendous ordeal he managed to return to his roots and re-connect with the knowledge of the Daraga elders in his village. Eventually he was even able to share this indigenous knowledge through his books with the rest of the world.

Denial of access to indigenous knowledge is also a form of control exercised by those who elect themselves to be rulers or the makers of law in any society. 

So the enclosure of knowledge can work in both directions. The recent history of colonial Africa gives us ample examples of how this has happened - and still continues to happen to this day.

 

Mama UNIP and re-claiming the Commons in Zambia

I was with my 90-yr. old father today in Honiton, England.

He was telling me stories about his time in Zambia, Africa in the 1960's as a Methodist missionary.

At one point my father met Kenneth Kaunda, who was to go on to become the first president of the newly-independent state of Zambia (formerly the British colony of Northern Rhodesia) in 1964.

At that time Kenneth Kaunda has just set up a new political party - the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and was trying to do political campaigning all over the country. 

He wanted to raise awareness for the need for the local Zambians to demand back from the British colonialist government their natural rights to choose for themselves how to run their country. A classic example of a 'double' enclosure of the Commons in Africa. 

Not only were the natural common lands of the tribes artificially divided up and enclosed by the British Government to become a nation state of Northern Rhodesia. That nation state itself was, in the beginning, not even ruled by the inhabitants of the State but was ruled by a British Governor, appointed by the British Government in London. No citizen of Northern Rhodesia was allowed to vote in any elections. Votes were reserved for white people.

Kenneth Kaunda had one very serious problem in getting his campaign off the ground. 

Zambia is  about the size of the state of Texas in the United States and Kenneth Kaunda had no transport. His campaign was being done by begging lifts or getting buses when he could.

At that sort of 'accidental' meeting my father found himself, much to his own surprise, offering Kenneth Kaunda a Land-Rover for his campaign.

My father worked for Christian book-selling business that happened to have this Land-Rover that was no longer being used at that moment. 

The gift transformed Kenneth Kaunda's political future on the spot. In the next few years before Independence was granted to Zambia that Land-Rover was driven more than 300,000 miles to almost every village and town in Zambia taking Kaunda's message of  'One man, one vote' (Re-claim your Commons!) to the people. 

The Land-Rover was given the affectionate name "Mama UNIP". An acknowledgment of the unique role that piece of British engineering had played in the success of the struggle for independence in Zambia from British rule that Kenneth Kaunda had led, standing on the roof of Mama UNIP speaking to many crowds of people day after day ....

Mama UNIP was even, for a time, proudly displayed outside the UNIP headquarters in a township outside Lusaka, as a symbol of that struggle to re-claim the Zambian Commons.

A humorous twist to the story was that the Land-Rover that my father so spontaneously offered to Kenneth Kaunda was not actually his to give away. 

He was told the next day by his boss that he had two weeks to come up with £ 700 to cover the cost of the Land-Rover that the business had just 'given' to Kaunda. 

My father was a missionary on a missionary's stipend and £700 was an impossible amount of money to find in those days. 

A day before the dead-line to pay up was due a stranger walked into my father's office and placed 700 £1 notes on his desk. When asked by my father who he was he only said 'Ask no questions and I will tell no lies' and left.

There is another whole story to tell about what had actually happened behind the scenes to end up with that money arriving on my father's desk just in time.

That will have to be in another post and could be a good introduction to another aspect of Commons Practice that I'm learning about at the moment.

The Mama UNIP story is an excellent example of what sort of work it takes to re-claim a commons using the political approach

There were other stories about Kenneth Kaunda that my father told me today that relate to another important Commons  - the knowledge commons and how that was being affected in Africa. 

I've written about the African Knowledge Commons in the following post.

Blueberries and memory

I'm off to visit my family this evening - driving through the night from Holland via Dunquerque and Dover, all the way down to Devon in south-west England. It's a 8 hour drive plus Channel crossing.

 When I make this summer trip to England the custom is for me to bring a big bucket of blue berries with me for my family. We are lucky to have a blue-berry farm just five minutes up the road from here - with 'pick-your-own' for the local people.

So this morning I picked this 8 kg bucket full and they'll be going with me over to Devon.

While picking, I was enjoying just being outside and surrounded by the  over-the-top, throw-away abundance of Nature. I'd forgotten what it looks like to see literally hundreds of blue-berry bushes all weighed down with great, fat, hanging clusters of berries. 

There was a group of about 30 of us up there all picking and conversations were going on around me in the local Dutch Limburgse dialect, German, French and Polish. The farm is only 5 minutes from the German border and Beligum is also only about 15 minutes in the other direction.  

I was also thinking a bit while picking about something Peter Linebaugh said during one of the Crottorf Castle conversations (see previous post for details of these conversations on the Commons). 

I'd heard him talking while driving up to the blue-berry farm, about  making contact with the details and particularities of commoning. In past times these details were embedded in the culture, maintained by the elders, passed on from one generation to the next. 

Today we don't have that cultural stream so available. We don't have a group of elders who ensure that the cultural heritage of commoning is not lost.

Studying the history of the commons helps us to re-connect with this different way of being - as commoners.

While up in the blue-berry fields picking the berries into my bucket, with all the other pickers around me, I had the feeling of re-connecting in some way with that past of communal labour, and commoning that is much deeper than all the thoughts and ideas about it.

I was connected to the Earth that provides sustenance, holding the fruit in my hands on the bush with some of those large and juicy berries going straight into my mouth as I picked. 

I need to leave for England now - but more on this subject in a following post....

 

The Crottorf Castle conference on the Commons

Photo of Crottorf Castle by Prashant Iyengar.

When I first thought of writing this blog about a learning journey it seemed I'd do it chronologically - starting in May this year when I visited Interlaken in Switzerland.

Very quickly it's become clear that there is no sense in doing a 'time-line' sort of story about my discoveries.

New things are happening every day. It will be better to be doing this blog as a 'report from the Commons Front Line' -more immediate and less contrived.

So I'll start at Crottorf Castle (see above). I'm not physically at the Castle but  I'm listening my way through the recordings of a fascinating 4-day conference called 'The Future of the Commons' held at Corttorf Castle, near Cologne in Germany at the end of June 2009.

David Bollier has posted an excellent summary , in three Parts, of all that was covered in this conference - taken from his own personal notes and memories of the discussions.

I listen to these conversations as I'm driving back and forth in Holland and Germany at the moment.

The 21 people who came together for this conference are some of the very best researchers and thinkers and practitioners of the Commons in the whole world. (see here for a list of the participants at the end of Part III of David Bollier's report )

What this group has managed to do already, even though I'm only 2 hours into the 15 hours of conversations - is to completely destroy my nice, cozy idea of making a "learning journey through the Commons". 

My illusions about the Commons are getting ripped away in great sheets - even the illusions I didn't even realize I had! 

My approach to the Commons in the four months of this learning journey has clearly been ... 'twinky', 'naive', 'romantic' ..... that sort of level.... . 

It's embarrassing... but better to know now than a long way down the road!

It feels I have a chance to get more serious at the beginning of my learning about the Commons. I've been given such excellent pointers to focus my attention on what are the key issues in the Commons. This is invaluable.

In some way these Crottorf Castle conversations are an invite to join those who are dealing with the Commons 'on the ground' - in real-time and real-life. You might call it a 'Commons community of practice' - where the real learning about the Commons is happening.

Suddenly and unexpectedly on this journey there is the crest of a hill. I'm standing before a whole, vast expanse of the Commons that I never even knew existed.

What's so interesting for me is that all is not beautiful and inviting. I'm seeing areas of the Commons that are contentious and challenging. In in some cases the Commons do not even have any guarantee of survival.

I'm now more sensitized to dangers and possible threats to the Commons - what needs to be prepared for and taken into account if these threats are to be averted. 

Uncomfortable paradoxes inherent in doing commoning have to be accepted. That's pulled off a few more of my illusions right there.

And, at the same time I'm sort of exhilarated by all this disorientation and re-orientation.

The speakers were pointing out places in the Commons that I'd never even thought to explore. All sorts of connections and 'Aha's!' are fizzing around in my thoughts.

Here's a few of the perspectives that are opening up for me. I'm hoping to share my ideas about all these in the upcoming posts on this blog:

• Forces that actively do not support the growing awareness about the Commons 
• Creating a global commons that does not exclude those of us who are not connected to the global network of the Internet
• Role of women in the Commons - e.g. un-commodified labor
• Education and knowledge the Commons - the destruction of knowledge that is happening with enclosure
• What values are we using when making decisions about the Commons?
• How many Commons are there? 
• Can we have Commons operating within the capitalist system of Markets and the State?