Further Reading on the Commons Probably the best introduction is a new book by David Bollier called Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of our Common Wealth. (Routledge, 2002). Bollier develops the connection between social and natural commons. There are excellent footnotes for those who want to dig deeper. Another good introduction, especially in regards to the natural environment and “developing” countries, is Whose Common Future? by the staff of the Ecologist. (New Society, 1993) What would happen if we approached environmental problems such as global warming with commons-based policies instead of market-based policies? Peter Barnes, a founder of Working Assets, lays out one possibility in Who Owns the Sky (Island Press, 2001.) A number of recent books explore the creeping enclosure of cyberspace, innovation and the ultimately the mind. Two good ones are The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, by Lawrence Lessig (Random House, 2001) and Shamans, Software, and Spleens, by James Boyle (Harvard, 1996). Lessig is a Stanford law professor and was a key government witness in the Microsoft case. Boyle teaches at Duke Law School. In Owning the Future (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), Seth Shulman reports on how corporations are taking control of everything from university research to the genetic code of life itself, with implications that do not bode well. |
Words are a form of magic. They conjure thought out of the confusion of
experience, and they form the lens through which we see the world.
Politics is largely a contest over words - over a version of reality.
Those whose words prevail, rule; and those who rule choose the words.
Nowhere is this more evident than in economics. Though couched in the
trappings of science, economics is basically a word game. Define
anything produced as a “good,” and the debate is over before it starts.
Who wouldn’t want more “goods?” Define “growth” to mean simply an
increase in monetary expenditure, and you can claim economic “progress”
even if much of that expenditure results from “goods” that are not so
good - the obesity and medical bills arising from junk food, for
example.
Such words are tools of power. They drive thought towards predetermined ends. Where would the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal be without the term “market” to cast a devotional glow upon the most
mundane commercial transaction? It would be left with just a welter of
little issues to complain about - a tax matter over here, a trade or
regulatory matter over there. These would be separate things, joined
only by the fact of economic interest, which would be on the table for
all to see.
The word “market,” by contrast, invests these little money issues with
a cosmic significance. It turns the mundane acts of selling and getting
into a cosmology, and greed into the engine of a divine plan. The Wall Street Journal editorial writers do not have to articulate this, of course. The agenda
is embedded in the word, which turns one facet of human experience into
a summation of all existence. Within the cosmology of the market there
is little room or justification for anything that is not the market. As
in language, so in life. In the beginning was the word, indeed.
It was a great achievement of the environmental movement to open a
crack in the cosmology. The concerns that came together in the movement
existed long before the movement itself: “Resource conservation,
wilderness preservation, public health reform, population control,
ecology, energy conservation, anti-pollution regulation, and
occupational health campaigns,” as Mark Dowie recounts them in his
book, Losing Ground. But these were enclaves within the old gestalt; and most public health
workers, say, did not see themselves as part of a movement that
included hunters and fishing people as well.
Then Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, and the many
became one. They were now aspects of the environment, a realm of
reality and value that lies outside the market and that the market is
not automatically entitled to claim or degrade. The word invested the
smallest parts with the significance of the whole, much as the term
“market” had done for business. Smog no longer was just smog; snail
darters no longer were just little fish. They now were parts of larger
system, in which the health of the whole was bound up with the health
of the smallest parts.
For millions, the term “environment” provided a link between their
intuitive concerns about the world and a larger and potentially
political whole. It gave the concerns a name, and therefore a reality;
and this galvanized a movement that changed the nation’s political map.
Now however, the movement is stalled and on the defensive. The signal
triumph of the year - the defeat of oil drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge - was a defensive victory, and rested on a slim
majority in the US Senate. (See page 20.)
Given the forces arrayed against the environment, this is not
surprising. It hasn’t helped that the movement has become so
institutionalized and centered in Washington. But there’s a problem
also with the word. The “environment” suggests something at the edges
of daily experience rather than central to it. In reality, of course;
nothing is more central than air, water, and the rest. But the
impression lingers. It plays into the polemic that casts
environmentalists as the enemies of jobs - of central life concerns. It
plays also into the economist’s view that the environment is a mere
“externality” to the core reality of the market.
The environmental movement emerged by addressing immediate threats to
health and safety. It grew by starting to extend such concerns to
voiceless populations under the rubric of “environmental justice.” Now
it needs to claim more of that center - not of the political spectrum
but of daily experience. It needs to align consciously with a host of
issues there that do not involve the natural environment per se but
which are akin to environmental issues and involve the same underlying
play of forces.
The natural environment itself is part of something larger - the
commons, the shared heritage of us all, for which we all serve as
trustees. The commons is not the market and it is not the state. It is
the space around and between, the source and context of both. It has a
natural dimension, such as the oceans and atmosphere, rivers and wild
places, the diversity of species, the quiet of the night. The commons
has also a social dimension: language and culture, the stories and
games of childhood, the street life of cities, the vast stores of human
know-how and knowledge, the new informational crossroads of the World
Wide Web.
The commons unites the social and the environmental, much as Carson’s Silent Spring united wilderness preservation and toxic pollution. It is a generic
term for all that is subject to corporate (and governmental) trespass,
expropriation, despoliation, and abuse. The concept provides the
missing link between the ecosystem and the social system; between the
assault on earth’s atmosphere and the assaults on the cognitive
atmosphere of urban spaces; between the depletion of the ozone layer
and the depletion of our peace and serenity; between the destruction of
species and the destruction of languages and cultures; between the loss
of rain forests and the loss of traditional games and stories of
childhood. And on and on.
The commons occupies the place in the economy that women once did, and
to some extent still do. It is a realm of productivity that gets little
recognition or respect. It does much of society’s work and often the
most important work. Which would be of greater use to most Americans: a
new DVD drive for their computer, or a new neighbor who could look
after their kids if they had to stay late at work? Which could they do
without more readily: Coca-Cola or clean air?
The market itself cannot function without a commons. Consider the shops
on a traditional Main Street. They need sidewalks to bring customers, a
common language with which to transact business, a system of accounting
that is similarly shared, an ambient civility and respect for law, and
on and on. Functionally, the social commons is the air that commerce
breathes. (And speaking of air, commerce cannot function without that
either.) Even in the rarefied realms of high tech, the commons serves a
central role. Innovation depends upon an intellectual commons of
research and knowledge embodied in the university and public library -
and more recently the World Wide Web as originally conceived.
The issue here is not the government, the commoditized services of the
state. Those are important too, but they are different from the
commons, which is the realm of society and nature that is distinct from
both the market and the state. The commons serves also by not doing. It
is the quiet in the midst of noise and din, the open and unspoiled
places that provide peace and rest, the streetscape that is uncluttered
by advertising, the children’s game that is uncontaminated by some
media corporation’s wiles.
In a nation glutted with stuff but suffering an increasing scarcity of
quiet and peace, this role as refuge from production - the capacity to
produce nonproduction - is increasingly important. Yet it is something
the official policy mind cannot grasp. Where the commons is producing
abundance, this mind sees only a void - an absence of stuff.
Recasting history
Every movement needs a story. To claim the future we need to explain
the past. The story of the commons does this. It helps explain how the
nation lost the capacity to see the sources of its own wealth, and how
it came to regard the destruction of its commons as the growth of its
economy. It explains how the market became both center and
circumference of our sense of freedom and prosperity. So doing, it
challenges the dominant narrative today, which is the triumph of the
market over ignorance and repression - of stuff over the supposed void.
The conventional account goes something like this. Long ago, in the
Dark Ages of history, much land in England and Europe was a commons.
Ordinary people had the right to farm and forage, hunt and fish, on
property they did not technically own. People did eke out a living. But
the system was essentially static. No one had an “incentive” to
innovate or improve. Finally the British Parliament saw the light. It
passed a series of “enclosure” acts - over 7,000 in all - which
stripped commoners of their legal rights and banished them from the
land. Land became real estate and the commoners became an urban “labor
force” for the factories and mills that were sprouting up.
It was the beginning of the modern market economy, and of “progress” as
conventionally conceived. It was also social engineering on a massive
scale, and a massive “taking” of property rights as well. But because
it was done on behalf of the rich, it has gone down in the history
books as “progress” instead. To a degree it was. The dislocations were
brutal, the plight of the new urban factory workers as grim as Dickens
and others portrayed. (Karl Marx didn’t come from nowhere.) But there
is no denying that the enclosures, combined with new technologies like
the steam engine, bestirred energies of enterprise and invention that
eventually improved the lot of most people.
The trouble is, the conventional economic mind froze into place around
these early enclosures. Henceforth, whenever the market enclosed a
commons - whenever a corporation turned something that belongs to all
of us into a commodity, or else used it as a dump - the result was
deemed progress by definition. Displace storytelling with a corporate
entertainment industry? That’s progress. Displace Main Streets with
shopping malls? More progress still. No further inquiry was required or
even permitted.
It’s a case of arrested conceptual development, and it has become the
master script for virtually every news story on the economy and every
political debate. It is built into the reigning index of progress, the
Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Every enclosure is by definition good,
even if the actual results are bad - and even if the commons enclosed
was more productive, and created more value, as a commons. Is
McDonalds’ cooking better than the kind parents used to do for kids?
Are Terminator seeds really an improvement over traditional varieties?
Don’t bother asking. Enclosure means money, and money is the only thing
the economic mind knows how to see. So it can’t see that growth
increasingly has become a process of cannibalization. The market
literally devours the natural and social basis of its own existence.
Every aspect of human experience and every inch of space - physical,
social, psycho-emotional - must be enclosed and turned into something
for sale. Like the beast in Dante’s Inferno, the market gets hungrier the more it is fed.
Most of us are aware of this at some level. But usually it is a vague
gnawing, a nemesis without a name. The commons provides a name and
thereby an understanding. It identifies not just the aggressor but also
the thing aggressed upon - namely our common property, a source of
wellbeing that we all share. This is a new master script, and it opens
the way to a new politics that is outside the hoary Left/Right mold.
Since the commons is not the market and not the state, advocates for it
are not part of either camp. They seek to enlist the state exactly the
way the partisans of the market do - to establish ground rules and
boundaries, and to protect property, which in this case is common
property. They seek ground rules to protect the quiet, for example -
not so that government can occupy that space but so that our own
thoughts can. They seek to restrain the spread of WalMarts and
mega-malls, not so that government can provide the alternative, but so
that the social ecology of traditional Main Streets can.
If the government could re-engineer an entire society to create a
market, why can’t it enact modest new ground rules to protect the
commons? If it can provide a legal structure for an institution called
the corporation to manage and dominate the realm of private assets, why
can’t it provide legal structures for institutions to manage common
assets? In his book Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism, Peter Barnes proposes
just that, in the form of a Sky Trust to manage the atmospheric
commons. Many such new structures are possible.
The goal is not to replace the market with a commons; that would be
absurd. The goal, rather, is to establish an equilibrium and balance of
a kind the economics texts do not recognize: an equilibrium not just
between supply and demand within the market, but more importantly
between the market and the commons which lies outside it. Yesterday’s
answer can become today’s problem. What was once progress can become
regress if extended too far.
If one looks closely, one can see the beginning of a new commons
movement stirring across the land. One sees it in the anti-WalMart
battles, in the fight to get advertising out of the schools, in the
persistent concerns about genetic engineering and the corporate
ownership of the genetic commons. One sees it too in the opposition to
the sale of the names of sports arenas and other public places to
corporations. Even Jim O’Brien, coach of the professional Boston
Celtics, wished out loud that the city’s sports arena, the Fleet (Bank)
Center, could have the name of its predecessor, the Boston Garden.
(Some localities are reaping what they sow, as Houston discovered when
it found itself with an Enron Field.)
In response to rider pressure, Amtrak has established “quiet cars”
where no cellphones are allowed. This illustrates the desire of many
Americans to draw a line and say to the forces of enclosure, “Thus far
and no farther.” This is not a liberal or left-wing cause. Phyllis
Schafley and Ralph Nader work together to get advertising out of school
classrooms. Sports fans are not always known for their radical
political views. Regarding the destruction of traditional Main Streets,
Don Eberly, a prominent conservative, says “I am anti-Walmart. Economic
life has to be anchored in the moral and social life of the nation.”
This is a new kind of freedom movement, a fight for freedom not just
from the state but from the market as well. It recognizes that the
market isn’t everything, and the beachhead of this movement is an
unlikely place - high tech. Much of the outrage at Microsoft, for
example, stems from the way the company has taken the underlying
language of computation - the operating system - and turned it into
private property in the form of Windows. It’s as though a corporation
claimed ownership of the English language, so that we all had to sign a
licensing agreement before speaking, and could speak only the words
that the corporate owner had approved.
This has prompted a reaction in the form of an open software movement,
the centerpiece of which is Linux, the operating system that was
developed through a cyber-commons on the Web. Linux illustrates the
fecund productivity of a commons, and its connection to genuine freedom
as well. (With Linux, users are free to tinker and improve, just as we
English speakers can invent our own words.) A similar drama is playing
out in university research labs, where corporate funds and a patenting
frenzy have turned the traditional commons of shared knowledge into a
petri dish of secrecy and paranoia.
In the past the commons has been easy prey because the people most
affected - the commoners - by definition didn’t count for much. In high
tech, by contrast, the commoners are articulate and influential. A
spate of recent books by Stanford University’s Lawrence Lessig and
other prominent law professors has given the concept a respectability
it didn’t have before. (See box) There’s a rare opportunity to advance
the commons more broadly. When a concept proves its worth at the
cutting edge of techno-economic change, it can hardly be called
reactionary, or anti-freedom - or anti-market, for that matter.
To the contrary, the cause of freedom is about to take another turn.
Jonathan Rowe is Project Director of the Tomales Bay Institute, an
Earth Island project, and a contributing editor of the Washington
Monthly.
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