C’mon the commons - Village Magazine

6 8 April 2017

OME COMMONS still exist: community-owned

forests in Nepal and Romania, lobster ﬁsher-

ies in Maine, pastures in east Africa and

Switzerland, the internet, Wikipedia, Linux,

journals published by the Public Library of

Science, the timebank in Helsinki, local currencies and

open-source’

With one breath, the friends of power told us that

global capitalism was a dynamic, disruptive force, the

source of constant innovation and change. With the next,

they told us it had brought about the end of history: per-

manent stability and peace. There was no attempt to

resolve this contradiction. Or any other.

We were promised unending growth on a ﬁnite planet.

We were told that a vastly unequal system would remove

all differences. Social peace would be delivered by a

system based on competition and envy. Democracy

would be secured by the power of money. The contradic-

tions were crashingly obvious. The whole package relied

on magic.

Because none of it works, there is no normal to which

to return. The Keynesian measures espoused by Jeremy

Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – in a world crashing into

environmental limits and the mass destruction of jobs

– are as irrelevant in the 21st century as the neoliberal

prescriptions that caused the ﬁnancial crisis.

Pankaj Mishra, in his book Age of Anger, explains the

current crises as new manifestations of one long disrup-

tion that has been ripping up society for 200 years or

more. Our sanitised histories of Europe and America

allow us to forget that bedlam and carnage, civil and

international war, colonialism and overseas slaughter,

racism and genocide, were the norms of this period, not

exceptions.

Now the rest of the world is confronting the same dis-

ruptive forces, as industrial capitalism is globalised. It

destroys old forms of authority while promising univer-

sal freedom, autonomy and prosperity. Those promises

collide with massive disparities of power, status and

property ownership. The result is the global spread of

the 19th-century European diseases of humiliation,

envy and a sense of impotence. Frustrated expecta

tions, rage and self-disgust have driven support for

movements as diverse as Isis, resurgent Hindu nation-

alism and stomping demagoguery in Britain, the US,

France and Hungary.

How do we respond to these crises? Raymond Williams

said that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible,

rather than despair convincing”. I know I have made the

case for despair seem pretty convincing in the past. So

this column is the ﬁrst in an occasional series whose pur-

pose is to champion new approaches to politics,

economics and social change. There is no going back, no

comfort in old certainties. We must rethink the world

from ﬁrst principles.

There are many points at which I could begin, but it

seems to me that an obvious one is this. The market

alone cannot meet our needs; nor can the state. Both,

by rooting out attachment, help fuel the alienation,

rage and anomie that breed extremism. One element

has been conspicuously absent from the dominant ide-

ologies, something that is neither market nor state: the

commons.

A commons is an asset over which a community has

shared and equal rights. This could, in principle, include

land, water, minerals, knowledge, scientiﬁc research

and software. But at the moment most of these assets

ENVIRONMENT

by George Monbiot

On a ﬁnite planet there is no going back but reviving

common ownership is one possible route to social

transformation

Because none of it works, there

is no normal to which to return.

Keynesianism is as irrelevant

in the 21st century as the

neoliberal prescriptions that

caused the ﬁnancial crisis

C’mon

the commons

April 2017 6 9

have been enclosed: seized by either the state or private

interests, and treated like any other form of capital.

Through this enclosure we have been deprived of our

common wealth.

Some commons still exist. They range from commu

nity-owned forests in Nepal and Romania to lobster

ﬁsheries in Maine, pastures in east Africa and Switzer-

land, the internet, Wikipedia, Linux, journals published

by the Public Library of Science, the timebank in Hel-

sinki, local currencies and open-source microscopy. But

these are exceptions to the general rule of private and

exclusive ownership.

In his book Land, the community organiser Martin

Adams urges us to see the land as something that once

belonged to everyone and no one, yet has been acquired

by a minority that excludes other people from its enjoy-

ment. He proposes that those who use the land

exclusively should pay a “community land contribution”

as compensation.

This could partly replace income and sales tax, pre-

vent land hoarding, and bring down land prices. The

revenue could help to fund a universal basic income.

Eventually we could move to a system in which land is

owned by the local community and leased to those who

use it.

Similar principles could apply to energy. The right to

produce carbon by burning fossil fuels could be auc-

tioned (a smaller pool would be available every year).

The proceeds could fund public services and a transition

to clean energy. Those who wish to use the wind or sun-

light to generate power should be asked to pay a

community contribution. Or the generators could be

owned by communities – there are already plenty of

examples in Scotland.

Rather than allow corporations to use intellectual

property rights to create an artiﬁcial scarcity of knowl-

edge, or to capture the value generated by other people

(such as Google and Facebook), we could move towards

a “social knowledge economy” as promoted by the gov

ernment of Ecuador. A share of proﬁts could (with the

help of blockchain technology, which underpins digital

currency Bitcoin) be exchanged for helping to build

online platforms and providing the content they host.

The restoration of the commons has great potential

not only to distribute wealth but also to change society.

As the writer David Bollier points out, a commons is not

just a resource (land or trees or software) but also the

community of people managing and protecting it. The

members of the commons develop much deeper connec-

tions with each other and their assets than we do as

passive consumers of products.

Managing common resources means developing

rules, values and traditions. It means, in some cases, re-

embedding ourselves in the places in which we live. It

means reshaping government to meet the needs of com-

munities, not corporations. In other words, reviving the

commons can act as a counterweight to the atomising,

alienating forces now generating a thousand forms of

toxic reaction.

This is not the whole answer. My hope is that, after

exploring a wide range of potential solutions, with the

help of your comments and suggestions I can start to

develop a synthesis: a new political, economic and social

story that might be matched to the demands of the 21st

century. Realising it is a further challenge, on which we

also need to work. But ﬁrst we must decide what we

want. Then we decide how to get it.

First published in the Guardian. www.monbiot.com

Some commons still exist:

community-owned forests in

Nepal and Romania, lobster

ﬁsheries in Maine, pastures in

east Africa and Switzerland,

the internet, Wikipedia, Linux,

journals published by the Public

Library of Science, the timebank

in Helsinki, local currencies and

open-source