Crossing the Commons: From Inner Change to Systemic Change

By David Bollier

“Be the change you want to see in the world!” is the familiar counsel of great social movements. The advice echoes the lyric from the great African-American song, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” 

But how, exactly, might our inner epiphanies and transformations catalyze systemic change? We may individually develop new insights and values from wisdom traditions and contemplative practice, but how might they radiate out into something larger, collective, and consequential?

At this particular moment in modern civilization, as societies grapple with climate change, savage inequalities, and authoritarian rule, the pathways for bringing about change seem terribly murky. Our political life seems stuck at philosophical and practical impasses and paralyzed by failures of the imagination. It’s not clear what organizations, movements or cultural voices may actually have the capacities to fulfill our yearnings for a better world.  What strategies and approaches might be effective?

A gap needs to be bridged between our individual spiritual lives and the social and political institutions that we need to actualize a compassionate vision. There is no single pathway forward, if only because humanity is so diverse, thanks to countless “accidents” of geography, history, culture, and politics. Moreover, contemplative practices don’t necessarily yield specific legal or political agendas. 

I believe that the pathways to social action must go through a crucial checkpoint, a border-crossing into a new territory. We must leave the world of the individual, transactional, and economic – those pillars of modern capitalist culture – and migrate into the richer, more satisfying world of the relational. 

For me, this is the world of the commons, an ancient but newly rediscovered social form. Commons are all about seeing human life as embedded in dynamic, symbiotic relationships. Instead of seeing a world of separation, as advanced by capitalist modernity, commons invite us to enter into complex, generative relationships with each other. It sees humans as intertwined with earthly landscapes, with other creatures and Gaia, and with past and future generations. Commons serve as vehicles for getting practical tasks done while developing a sense of living presence, meaning, and interdependence. 

Conventional economists usually see the commons merely as a resource prone to “tragedy” – the alleged tendency of rational individuals to overexploit a pasture and other shared wealth, leading to its destruction. This idea was popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” But Hardin and others were actually describing a free-for-all or open-access regime of individual appetites running wild. 

That is not, in fact, a commons. A commons is a bounded community of shared purpose that stewards its collective wealth with self-devised rules of care, fairness, and mutual benefit. The history of humanity over millennia shows that this is a default social form. Groups of people tend to come together to negotiate their individual differences and come up with creative, stable, sustainable forms of governance and provisioning. 

While commons are not utopias, they have the virtue of recognizing cooperative relationships as a fundamental reality of existence. As Martin Luther King, Jr., memorably put it, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

While the “commitment pooling” of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities are often admired while patronized as premodern, commoning is in fact an utterly contemporary phenomenon. It is catalyzing societal transformations in wildly diverse theaters of action, such as mutual-aid networks and timebanking service-exchanges; agroecological projects and community land trusts; complementary currencies and mutual credit systems; neighborhood solar commons and open-source design and manufacturing networks (“cosmo-local production”); and diverse types of cooperatives.

A few examples suggest how place-based commoning can build a more convivial, responsive, and stable social order:

• Dozens of self-organized groups in Portland, Oregon, working through the City Repair Project, have organized freecycle projects, street beautification and urban gardening projects, buy-local campaigns, and neighborhood festivals.
• In Minnesota, the Solar Commons Project brings together community groups, Native Americans, regenerative farmers, and others to build solar energy arrays, which are then managed as an independent community trust.  The electricity sold to the utility grid is used by Solar Commons to support local food systems, low-income home weatherization, among other needs.
• Soul Fire Farm, an agricultural community of Afro-Indigenous peoples near Grafton, New York, relies on bottom-up, participatory practices to grow nutritious food for people living in food deserts. It also trains the next generation of farmer-activists in regenerative agriculture, and advocates for reparations and the return of stolen land.
• In the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts, people use the complementary currency Berkshares, now accepted by over 400 regional businesses, to buy everything from bakery bread and clothing to an hour of a local lawyer’s time. The currency, overseen by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, strengthens local businesses and cultural identity in the face of pressures by “Big Finance” and national corporations.

Commons are not just profoundly relational forms for meeting needs often ignored by conventional markets, finance, and government. They are vehicles for changing people’s everyday subjectivities. Through working collaborations, they make it easier to imagine and experience new ways of enacting social and political change. 

But how does one proceed in the face of a totalizing, coercive system that is not really amenable to rational persuasion or civic negotiation? How does one move beyond the power-centric, realpolitik worldviews of the nation-state and market, and their reductionist ideas about human flourishing?

Vaclav Havel, as a cultural dissident in the 1970s, explained the strategic value of developing a “parallel polis,” an idea that more or less describes the Commonsverse. It’s all about building an independent parallel economy and prefigurative social order. Rather than become paralyzed by a closed, oppressive system and fear, ordinary people can assert moral agency and speak the truth. They have opportunities to express wholesome values and social solidarity despite a hostile context. The very process of building a parallel polis helps rehabilitate social trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love in public life. 

The sovereignty of our experiences can be expressed and enacted at meso-level spaces that sit between our private lives (micro) and national and global institutions (macro). As geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham have noted: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history is never a distant one, but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.” In this sense, new forms of democratic possibilities are already unfolding via the Commonsverse. We simply need eyes to see them and develop them further.

Far from being an ineffectual management regime, a commons is a powerful value-proposition. It’s just that the value generated generally doesn’t involve market exchange, private property rights, and legal contracts. The value is not monetized or defined by price. It is collectively stewarded as a living social system. This isn’t altruism or do-gooding, but the artful alignment of collective action with individual interests. The South African Bantu have a term for this ideal – “Ubuntu” – which roughly translates as “I am because we are.”  

A commons elicits from its participants – commoners – behaviors and feelings that modern capitalist markets and the culture of consumerism cannot reliably summon and sustain. The transactional, competitive individualism of market culture prefers to regard us as isolated individuals defined by the imperatives of money, markets, and economic growth. This often produces desperately hungry ghosts incapable of sating their appetites.   

By contrast, commons as relational social forms invite people to give of themselves in collaborative communities, pooling and orchestrating diverse talents to meet real needs. These dynamics can play out everywhere – in the stewarding of land, the writing of software code, the protection of rivers and lakes, the management of timebanking service-exchange, the sharing of risks and benefits in CSA farms, and countless other modalities.

The point is to enable people to enjoy freedom without repressing others…to enact fairness without bureaucratic control…to foster togetherness without compulsion…and to assert sovereignty without nationalism. Guardian columnist George Monbiot sums it up well: “A commons…gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It provides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a politics of belonging.” 

Entering into circuits of commoning can bring a deeply satisfying sense of purpose and connection. George Bernard Shaw was familiar with this dynamic when he wrote: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.” 

In these troubled times, a parallel polis of commoning could open many promising doors of possibility.

[David Bollier is the Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. He has just published a significantly updated and revision edition of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.]