Table of Contents
- You Bet Your Sweet Release I’m A Commoner
- Your Livin In The Past, Man:
- We Don’t Need Heroes, We Need Commoners: Lots And Lots Of Commoners
- Dude, You’reSo Basic
- Btw: and this is Super Important – “Basic” does NOT mean “simple”, it means “at the base” or the bottom, as in what everything else is built on top of.
- The Commons As The Meeting Place Between Humans and World
- The Commons As Certain Types Of Projects
- Why Projects Are So Important For Human Beings
- The Commons: Where Projects Go To Live Forever
- The Coming Commoning
- Now You, Too, Can Become A Commoner In One Easy Step:
You Bet Your Sweet Release I’m A Commoner
Full disclosure: this little what-have-you is where I’m gonna lay out my personal political agenda – and don’t worry it’s pretty simple. The World is complex, but how humans should relate to it both individually and collectively is actually pretty simple – at least as far as the principles that should guide it, the actual practices are infinitely diverse in case you were worried about things being too simple.
Your Livin In The Past, Man:
A New Age Requires New (Actually Old, But You Get It) Politics
Before I get going though, I gotta tell ya – I don’t think that most modern political ideological categories are really very useful. I mean all the crap that we’ve inherited from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. You know the ones I mean: conservative, liberal, communist, stuff like that. At their core, all of these types of ideologies are based on how people should collectively relate to the bureaucratic nation-state.
“Yeah, okay nerd, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Well, basically, all of these political ideologies take countries (you know what i mean – you’re probably in one right now, even if it is showing major signs of disrepair) as the basic unit of politics – there’s national politics (pretty sure this is the Main one in most people’s mind), then international and various forms of local – but still attached to a hub of national politics that those other kinds have to fit onto.
Okay, fair enough, nation-states were the major players of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century – I would say they had a good run, but they broke fucking world and some of them are continuing to make it extremely difficult to deal with all the problems that they had a major hand in creating. Anyway, “good runs” aside – their time as the major player on the world scene and in national and local politics is well in the past at this point.
Neoliberalism May Be Dying But It’s Fully Dystopian Child Is Trying To Be Born
Here’s the thing about neoliberalism: from it’s very beginning it was a project to replace nation-states as the center of all levels of politics with the private corporation, the megacorp-transnational-millions-of-shell-companies-so-no-one-knows-who-actually-owns-what type of corporations as it turns out. And due to the nature of imperialism and world power dynamics, they won early on in a lot of places, and due to the nature of imperial cores eating themselves when their unsustainable systems start to fall apart, the neoliberals have finally won in some of those places that always thought themselves immune to the those kinds of troubles. Alas!
The world is rapidly changing and one of the paths I don’t really see altering in the next few years is the rise of megacorps as the central players of politics at every level. It’s been coming for a while, and it’s been awful the whole time, and everyone has always known how bad the end result would be but I guess always assumed it would happen to their grandkids so what-can-ya-do. Anyway, it’s here: Now Is The Time Of Monsters (TM).
“Okay, then, smart guy, if ‘Megacorps’ or whatever are gonna become the most important things in politics, then what does that mean in real life? How is this any really different than now – corporations have been making rules for a long time already.” Yeah, here’s the thing – no one really knows how the world is gonna shake out over the next decade or two. But, and this is important, you don’t really need to know the future to know that it’s not gonna go so well when you give more power to and remove more accountability from the corporations that destroyed the world in the first place. It’s bleak.
Anyway, if “your” political belief system loses its usefulness when confronted with a shift this major (and it will be, friends, and traumatic in so many ways – this process is definitely where a lot of those man-made horrors defying comprehension will be birthed) – then maybe it’s time to find new ways to orient yourself.
We Don’t Need Heroes, We Need Commoners: Lots And Lots Of Commoners
So new world, new ideologies. Actually, what I think we need is a really old ideology, like the oldest and most basic way for human beings to collectively relate to the world and to one another – as Commoners, of course.
So yeah, I am a Commoner – and I’m not the only one. A very large portion of the “anti-globalization” or “alter-globalization” or what-have-you movements of the 21st century have Commoning as their alternative to the twin tendencies of privatization and managerialization of neoliberalism – which has been shaping the world system for the past half-century to not so awesome results. Anyway, there are tons of resources out there, I suggest checking out anything by the historian Peter Linebaugh, I find his work interesting, informative, and very accessible. Stop Thief!: The Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance is a great place to start, but so is his book with Markus Rediker The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – which is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read.
There are lots of other people talking about all types of Commons – lots of cool stuff being done in Digital Commons and Creative Commons projects that you may have heard about, certainly a lot in local land uses. Look around if this stuff is interesting to you – maybe you will even find a commoning project that you would like to be involve in. Then you should get involved in it however you are able, because that is what Life is all about – finding cool and/or important projects that interest you and then doing them with other people who are also interested in them. It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
A Brief Aside
Dude, You’re
So Basic
A Brief Aside On Simplicity, Complexity, and Conceptual Categorization
Btw: and this is Super Important – “Basic” does NOT mean “simple”, it means “at the base” or the bottom, as in what everything else is built on top of.
Do not ever confuse Basic with Simple – especially when we are talking about something as internally diverse as “ways for humans to relate to the world both individually and socially”, because it’s not simple. But also “complex” doesn’t mean chaotic – it just means that there are a lot of parts with diverse connections and some of those parts have parts which have parts, etc, etc. You’re body is extremely complex,too, but when I look at you I don’t see a chaotic orchestra of cellular processes, I see something that is recognizably human.
But wait! There’s more! The differing details of all that complexity means that I can identify one general human shape from another and even if they might look quite different I can easily tell that they are both human. But even as people look more alike – the better you get to know them the better you can tell them apart.
It’s such a basic (there it is) human thing to do – to recognize and understand people in this way – that we don’t really notice it normally. But it’s a wonderful process that works for other large concepts as well. Let’s see:
Now to make some use of the metaphor: The Commons are like Humans in this metaphor. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes but there are some key basic (ooh, look at that) features and structures that give it a generally recognizable shape (head above the torso, up to four limbs that should be placed thusly, etc, etc). Internal workings, too, like one heart going roughly here, brain goes here, etc, etc. I think you get the point.
And we can talk about humans in general in so many different frameworks and focuses – and it’s okay to bracket out everything else when we pick a specific framework because honestly, I ramble enough when I have a focused topic lol.
Of All the Very Narrow and Dwindling Paths We Realistically Have Towards a Livable Planet EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM Go Down the Commoning Path. No Exceptions.
Anyway, my point with this aside is that I personally am going to focus on a very narrow part of what makes the commons The Commons – and if you find this stuff interesting I implore you to investigate further and see what other people are saying and doing in the different Commoning projects going on around the world. It is my firm belief – and I mean that I more certain of this than I am about anything else that has to do with the future – that of all the very narrow and dwindling paths We (Humanity and a huge chunk of the other forms of Life on Earth) realistically have towards a livable planet EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM go down the Commoning Path. No exceptions.
The Commons As The Meeting Place Between Humans and World
Okay, now that you know I’m serious, I think we can proceed with the definition. Remember, the larger framework I’m using is that The Commons is a basic way of humans to relate to the world, but especially as groups or collectives, so the rest of the definition is going to attach to that framework.
First, The Commons are built on an ethic of sharing rather than on concepts of ownership. The “products” of The Commons aren’t mine or yours – they’re not even ours. They “belong” to the World, which we happen to be a part of – but we also take part in it. So we get to use stuff – it’s a pretty good deal, actually.
“Egads! Nat, you just ran straight into the Tragedy Of The Commons – the idea that if people keep taking from The Commons it will eventually get depleted because people are greedy and selfish. Alas!”
Settle down, junior, “The Tragedy Of The Commons” is a straw man myth made up by thieves and their mouthpieces. It might be the single most stupidest concept in the history of humanity, please stop thinking it insightful if that’s your jam. It’s not, and here’s why:
Despite recent turns of the screw, Humans are actually pretty intelligent as a species – we would not have gotten to the point where we could let a small, powerful, and psychotic sub-population of us to destroy the whole planet if we weren’t [shrug emoji]. And something the first identifiably human Humans (or pretty soon thereafter as far as geologic time goes) probably figured out pretty early on that if you take care of things they last longer, and some practices definitely land in the “taking care of something” category while some do not. Like using a resource to depletion and then moving on –I’m sure you’re all familiar with the process, but it’s not what happens to the Commons until they are stolen (enclosure, privatization, etc).
The Commons As Certain Types Of Projects
Okay, so here is the basic problem: how to develop and institute the best practices for taking care of something, like say a spot where a lot of berries grow or regular drinking water for your village? And Humans being the problem solvers that we are come up with a pretty elegant solution: organize all the important things in Life (like food, shelter, education, art, water, etc, etc) into Projects. [If you’ve read much of anything else on this site then I’m sure you’ve seen me use the term once or a dozen times or so. Now I’m about to explain my obsession (though I personally wouldn’t call it that) with the term.]
Why Projects Are So Important For Human Beings
Projects have certain key features that all mutually reinforce each other:
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Projects Are Goal-Oriented
Projects exist in order to do something whether it’s to make art or a community garden or a sewage system to remove waste. All projects have a goal. If they don’t then they are something else. Free time and play isn’t wasted activity, you know, they just aren’t themselves projects.
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Projects Are Strategic
Projects are the means to systematically carry out different strategies in order to develop and institutionalize best practices for accomplishing the project’s goals in its given context. (eg what works for supplying food and water in one place often doesn’t work in others, but you see the general principle)
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Projects Are Structured
No matter how loose it is, there is an internal logic that will tell you things like “who” takes part in the project and what degree of responsibility or decision making the different participants have; what the overall goals of the project are; what other projects it’s associated with; what kinds of strategies the participants come up with for accomplishing the project’s goals; etc, etc.
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Projects Are Social In Nature
Even solo projects generally could be shared and the ones that truly cannot be shared there must be a reason why it is a special case. And this has to do with the nature of being structured around strategies for accomplishing goals. That type of stuff is one of the things human language was built for (not the only thing, mind you, information exchange is probably only like the third or fourth most important aspect of language).
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Projects have Duration
This is such an important point but one that I think is easy to overlook – but fortunately I soaked my brain with heavy doses of Henri Bergson’s philosophy and so Duration is something I’m generally on the lookout for when I’m doing conceptual analysis. (sure, nerd) Anyway, Projects take time, they have a life-cycle that has everything to do with the project’s goals, their context, and their favored strategies.
Duration & The Life-Cycles Of Projects
Like I said, Duration is an important part of the philosophy of Henri Bergson – but before we get too far into it, I gotta say that if you aren’t aware of Bergson’s work then you should check him out – he was a hugely influential intellectual at the beginning of the twentieth century (Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is pretty much a narrative investigation of Bergson’s basic philosophy, for example) but whose star fell quickly when it abruptly stopped being popular to quote jewish intellectuals at cocktail parties or pretty much anywhere else in Europe for that matter. Anyway, a lot of folks have gone back to look at his work in recent years, and if you enjoy philosophy he’s definitely worth a dive.
Anyway, let’s spend a little time on duration. (nice joke, nerd). Basically, Bergson is pointing out that everything that exists not only exists in time (no duh, right?) but that the way they exist in time is by having duration: a thing begins, it exists for a while, it’s component parts gets repurposed by the Universe. And this applies to everything that tangibly exists, no matter how long or short that duration is (from stars to quarks, scales of billions of years to nanoseconds –and somewhere in the middle-ish of that scale is where “Human Time” sits, where all the durations we can actually wrap our minds around exist, too. So we’ll stay in that neighborhood for this discussion. Right).
Bergson reasoned, and quite rightly imho, that because everything that exists has duration, it must be a pretty important part of existence. So much so in fact that the scale or range of duration of a thing is usually a pretty good start for telling you what type of thing it is that we are talking about. Again, if we are talking about Human Things (in the sense of the stuff we do, not our inner cellular processes type stuff) we don’t expect to be talking about duration in terms of billions of years or nanoseconds.
Projects have different scales of duration based on what type of project they are: is this project meant to accomplish one major goal once (build a library, sure it needs maintenance, but in “normal” course you shouldn’t have to keep building it over and over) or is it something that will be ongoing with no foreseeable end, like a sewer system?But Human Projects come in all types –the duration of an art project might be measured in hours, while some projects like Cathedrals are meant to take generations. Some Projects have no foreseeable end, and this turns out to be a pretty good thing.
The Commons: Where Projects Go To Live Forever
[*unicorn sigh*]
Do you remember what seems like ages ago when I said:
Okay, so here is the basic problem: how to develop and institute the best practices for taking care of something, like say a spot where a lot of berries grow or regular drinking water for your village?
So, what I’m getting at is that The Commons are certain types of long-term “for the benefit of all” Projects organized in ways that are based on (a) solving collective goals that seemingly won’t be changing any time soon, like making sure a specific type of food is available when it is expected to be so; (b) developing “best practices” for accomplishing the project’s main goals and systematically making sure that people are using those best practices; and (c) the capacity for projects to have as their duration “for the foreseeable future” (this is not a capacity that individual humans have btw, our personal durations have limits).
Projects are simply ways for human beings to accomplish their goals, and The Commons are what we call projects that we want to “go on forever” (like access to potable water) and that are conducted for the benefit of all (some of the definitions of “all” that specific human groups have come up with irl suck some serious donkey ass, but a corruption of the logic isn’t a refutation of the logic, so…) and are built with an ethos of sharing and participation rather than ownership rights.
The Coming Commoning
Now ain’t that pithy?
Anyway, I think I’ve rambled and tambled enough to achieve what I set out for in this little what-have-you.
Namely, what I mean by Projects and why they’re important – and speaking of the importance of Projects, how about the most important Project of all for the 21st century (ofc only if a “livable future” is important to you, and these days that doesn’t seem to be given): Commoning, or restructuring the world around various Commons Projects. Tbh, my biggest hopes and dreams for Generation Apocalypse Webzine is that it become a part of that ecosystem of Commons that many many people are in the process of building right now. Which brings me to my final point:
The world is changing. The basic structure of social life is changing – including what jobs are how they relate to the rest of your existence, and if I’m being totally frank, it’s not looking like it’s moving in a positive direction in most places. Seriously, you may not know exactly when the Dystopian Express is coming to your town, but we’re all pretty sure it’s coming.
Now You, Too, Can Become A Commoner In One Easy Step:
Start Commoning!
So find the people and groups out there trying to forge a new Commons that encompasses one of your interests – and then get involved. Create an alternative for yourself before the Dystopian Express pulls up to your stop. Talk to the other people involved in the projects that you get involved in and use them as a resource to find other Commoning projects, because most of us have more than one interest and enough time in the day week month to do more than one thing (honestly the job system under capitalism is one of the stupidest ways to allocate work imaginable, but that’s a totally different digression lol).
Last Part of the Last Point: when the bottom falls out in different places it’s gonna get real ugly for a lot of people there is no avoiding it at this point, and I think everyone knows that but the only people who seem to have any power to do anything to prevent catastrophe also really (like reaaaaally) want catastrophe. It sucks. But ignoring facts just because they suck is a pretty sure way to make sure they’re gonna suck even worse when the time comes.
Anyway, the only real way beyond “100% completely random luck” of increasing your odds of getting through a collapse with as much of your humanity intact as possible (of whatever scale – a (socially/politically) collapsing city is enough catastrophe for everyone in that city, right?) is to have a robust social network. Well, what a coincidence that one of the top reasons a lot of the places that are on the verge of collapse are there largely because they have dismantled most formal and informal social networks and replaced them all with subscription services. This is bad.
Bad, but not lost. Not yet. The Commoning movements of the 21st century have largely been answers to this particular problem or set of problems. They are answers to of how people should relate to the world, yes (eg the world’s got water, people need reliable and continued access to water) but they are also fundamentally concerned with how people relate to each other built on an ethos of sharing, straight down to the base of shared being in the world (that asshole Heidegger had some pretty dang crack analytic skills which we should all take advantage of, even while reserving a right to shit on everything else about the nazi-capitulating bastard).
The Last Part of the Last Part of the Last Point: people are already trying to put alternatives to this shitty society in place that are better than what it has been and where it is going. Some of them are bound to be perfect fits for you, dear reader. Find them and start doing stuff with them. Seriously, it’s time to set yourself the Quest of Surviving the Apocalypse – and step one should be to find your questing party before your prologue starts to take on an irreversibly dystopian cast. Just sayin.
About Me
