A conversation with David Bollier
In 1832, when researching the recurring devastation of common pastures in England, the political economist at Oxford University William Forster Lloyd asked: "Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures?" The answer he settled on was that it was born by self-interest; a herder might add another animal to their herd, although the carrying capacity of the common had reached his full potential. By doing so, the herder would solely benefit, but the common, a shared resource, would be depleted — affecting all herders.
This is known as the tragedy of the commons.
Although the term was coined in 1833, people had widely believed that the commons could not be self-governed for some time. In 1788 James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." In Econlib, Garrett Hardin, the American ecologist who warned of the dangers of human overpopulation and worked to explain the tragedy of the commons, outlined, "The spoilage process comes in two stages. First, the non-angel gains from his "competitive advantage" (pursuing his own interest at the expense of others) over the angels. Then, as the once noble angels realize that they are losing out, some of them renounce their angelic behavior. They try to get their share out of the commons before competitors do. In other words, every workable distribution system must meet the challenge of human self-interest. An unmanaged commons in a world of limited material wealth and unlimited desires inevitably ends in ruin. Inevitability justifies the epithet "tragedy.""
This move from the commons to enclosure, a term used in English landownership that refers to the appropriation of "common land" enclosing it and depriving commoners of their ancient rights of access and privilege, has roots in the 12th century. By the 1700s, the British parliament passed legislation, referred to as the Enclosure Acts, allowing the common areas to become privately owned. This act led to wealthy farmers buying up large sections of land to create larger and more complex farms.
The tragedy of the commons is a widely told story, a warning of what could happen if shared resources weren't managed. However, over the past 20 years, there has been a move to challenge this. In 2009 Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for economics with her research into the non-tragedy of the commons. Through field research in Maine, Indonesia, Nepal, and Kenya, she argued that common resources are well managed when those who benefit most are near that resource. The tragedy occurred when external groups exerted their power (politically, economically, or socially) to gain a personal advantage. Her work led to the development of a set of design principles that have supported effective mobilization for local management of common-pool resources (CPR) in various areas.
One of the people mobilized by Elinor Ostrom's research was David Bollier, my interviewee this week. An author, activist, blogger, and consultant Bollier spends a lot of time exploring the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics, and culture. On this trail for about twenty years, he has worked with a variety of international and domestic partners. In 2010, he co-founded the Commons Strategies Group, a consulting project that works to promote the commons internationally. More recently, he has become Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
All images featured this week were found on Creative Commons.
Shonagh Marshall: Some of the people reading this perhaps have never heard of the commons. Could you briefly sum up what it is?
David Bollier: The best way to think about it is a social system for managing shared wealth. The commons has deep historical roots and is often associated with medieval England where there were land commons, or commons of forests, wild game and water, and so forth. But I think commons go back to the dawn of human history where we've shared wealth that we manage collectively, not as private markets, the way capitalism has evolved in the past two centuries.
The default system for managing wealth that's important to a community is as a commons, and it's been largely forgotten or papered over, in the past two or three centuries. Now we presume that everything's about individual property rights and market exchange. I think we're approaching a point where that sensibility has become so hyper-developed that it's destroying the planet, quite literally. Many people are rediscovering that there are shared social systems for managing digital code, urban spaces, knowledge produced in academia, creativity, culture, community, various social regimes, and so forth.
Part of my work is about documenting and describing the vast diversity of the commons.. It's not just a project here, a project there; it's about large movements. We see it in the open-source software movement and the open access scholarly publishing world, and in Europe with the urban commons movement. There are places, like the fashion industry, where people are starting to say, you know, we can do things differently.
The commons is a big topic that has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, and indeed, the capitalist world, because the idea of the market/state as the only system for managing things is so dominant and normative.
Shonagh: It is fascinating that we have forgotten something so instinctive to us as human beings.
David: We've forgotten, and I think it’s one of the subterranean, internal things we're rediscovering. I find that people have this gravitational pull of wanting to connect, wanting to think long term, wanting to connect with ancestors, wanting to be a good ancestor for future generations.
There are these cultural tropes that mislead us, however. We've been brainwashed by glib stories such as the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story, which is drummed into every undergraduate. It argues that nobody will have a rational incentive to hold back if you have a shared resource, like a pasture. Everybody will graze their sheep or cattle on the common, and it will be overexploited and ruined. Politicians and economists tell that story in the mainstream world as a quick-and-dirty way to say, “Don't bother trying to manage it collectively; private property rights or state regulation are the only ways we can deal with this problem.”
That's just empirically false. First of all, the story of the tragedy of the commons doesn't take into account that people can communicate with each other. They might be neighbors. People have to take account of each other. Maybe they have even come to trust each other. In any case, they can usually negotiate and work things out. In human history, that is typically how things work. Therefore the idea that we are isolated individuals who consider it “rational” to overexploit something of value to the entire community is ridiculous. This idea, not coincidentally, happens to be very compatible with capitalist ideology. Capitalists like to regard the commons as a free-for-all, as resources that are free for the taking. It's a very colonial and imperialist mentality: Take as much as you can for yourself, and that's the way it is. In this mindset, the idea that there's a restraining social ethic does not compute.
"Middle Ages Farming" Image in the public domain
Shonagh: It also is a morality tale. That people are inherently greedy.
David: If you've ever taken an Economics 101 course, the first thing they tell you is that all human beings are homo economicus. Meaning, we're isolated individuals with no larger history or cultural commitments, and that we consider it rational to maximize our material self-interests. And if that means destroying our community, or the landscape, or the environment well, that's “rational.” That's what economics is dedicated to. And we have vast, powerful institutions known as corporations and businesses that are pathologically oriented towards that mindset.
The real world, of course, doesn't work that way entirely. “Rational self-interest” is the theoretical, aspirational ideal to which they try to get the world to conform. That's what the globalization of the economy is all about. And that's what Western development and consumerism are all about, especially in relations with the Global South.
"Field in England", Image by Turkinator
Shonagh: I am interested in when you became interested in the commons. What led to the work you do today?
David: I'm an autodidact. I had, however, an excellent political education in the 1970s and 80s, working for Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate. My activist peers and I were attempting to prevent what we would now call “enclosures of the commons” -- meaning, the privatization and commodification of shared wealth, whether it's public lands or federally funded research, or the airwaves that broadcasters use for free, or many other similar examples. This was my political education in my twenties, in the late 1970s.
Only later, around the late 90s, did I discover the commons and its great potential. I encountered open-source software and Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist whose scholarly work on the commons won her the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. At the same time, I saw that conventional electoral politics and progressivism, from Bill Clinton to Washington nonprofits, were not getting us where we needed to go. I came to see that the commons had some possibilities and fell in with a cohort of similarly questing and disaffected political activists. I found the discourse of the commons so promising because it starts to name, what you might call, a theory of value that goes beyond market price system. Progressives don’t really have a coherent theory of value beyond price. Progressives have little carve-outs here and there, usually relying on the state to make exceptions to the presumptive legitimacy of so-called free-market exchange. But progressives don't have a coherent way of talking about how something might be valuable beyond what market capitalism declares it to be.
For the past 20 years, I've been on a journey as an independent scholar and activist, especially with Europeans, who are more sophisticated about these things, to develop the idea of the commons. In some ways, the challenge is not to create commons, but recognize the commoning that already happens in countless areas and give it a fresh cultural interpretation so that they can become visible. So many things are happening that are commoning, the verb, the social practice of managing and creating commons. But the prevailing discourse that we think and talk about just doesn't recognize it.
"Elinor Ostrom" By Sustainable Economies Law Center
Shonagh: You've touched upon what happened in England when enclosure happened. I read an article you wrote linking contemporary practice to what happened in 18th century England. What happened, and how does it resemble what is occurring today?
David: Today, what's happening is a massive global reiteration of the enclosure movement, which occurred over centuries, but particularly in the 17th, 18th, and a bit in the 19th centuries in England. The landed gentry and aristocrats realized they could exploit many traditionally managed rural or forest commons for market purposes. In England, especially, the goal was to use land to make money for private gain. For example, converting common lands into pastures to raise flocks of sheep, to create wool that could be sold on the burgeoning export market. This was the beginning of the market exploitation of resources for private gain: capitalism.
Over the next two centuries, the whole phenomenon of privatizing and marketizing shared wealth has proceeded at a pace such that nowadays, we have nanomatter and genes that are patented for private market gain. A breast cancer susceptibility gene was patented for a long time, impeding breast cancer research. There are all sorts of seeds that are patented so that you can't legally share them. I've written a book called Brand Name Bullies about the use of trademark and copyright to lock up creativity and culture so that you can't sample two or three seconds of us a song because that's a copyright violation. There are even certain kinds of smells and colors that are trademarked.
The phenomenon of enclosure of the commons is a pervasive one, but given the dominant capitalist ideology, it is rarely remarked upon. Instead, enclosures are seen as an engine of progress and growth, in other words, as something positive. Even social life is becoming monetized. We see social influencers online who are dedicated to making money from their social reputations. In other words, the pathologies of enclosure penetrate very profoundly in terms of culture and how we behave.
Shonagh: You have written about how a community is integral to commoning. Why is building a community important? Is it one of the ways to protect it from capitalism gobbling it up?
David: You raise an excellent point. To be successful, commons need to devise ways to protect their shared wealth against inevitable attempts to enclose it. Because capital, when it sees value, wants to appropriate it for itself and make money from it. The law has very few tools to allow people to protect their shared wealth, however. It’s mostly geared toward facilitating market growth and corporate profit and privilege.
One of the paradigmatic legal tools used to make open-source software shareable as a legal matter is a license called the General Public License. This was where somebody who has a copyright on a computer program can say, “I'm putting this license on it, and anybody can use it for free and modify it as they wish. But if anybody uses it, they have to license any derivative work with the same license. The point is to assure that the code will always remain open and useable, and to prevent anyone from taking it private. You can make money off free and open source software by selling it, but you couldn't take the code private. This is the same philosophy that the Creative Commons licenses now use. These are public licenses in which a copyright holder can say, this video, this text, this photograph, this music, has this license authorizing anyone to use and share the work without permission or payment. So that's another way to keep things in the commons.
It gets more complicated when you have a depletable finite resource like land or natural resources. But there are things like community land trusts, which are ways to ensure that farmland, for example, is accessible and usable for shared purposes. One of the challenges today is inventing the legal and institutional structures, and at least in the online world, the technological barriers, to protect the wealth. But it's also a matter of protecting the wealth through shared social commitments and culture..
Some people develop shareable seeds or heritage seeds, in which they sign a pledge. They're trying to make it a public norm so that if you are encouraged to make your seeds shareable, and if you don’t, you are publicly shamed. So there are different ways to try to keep commons assets shareable, and many experiments to develop novel protections against enclosure.
The last resort is whether the state itself will intervene to help create or protect shared wealth. But because the state is so oriented towards fostering market growth and individual property rights, it's not a very reliable partner. Most ways to protect shared wealth are essentially legal hacks that emerge from outside of the system.
"Sharing" Image by Leezie5
Shonagh: You mentioned a few ways the commons are in action. Have you found a geographical place where the commons are being taken up by society?
David: It's happening in many fields. There is no particular geographic hot spot, except perhaps some cities. For example, in Barcelona, with the election of a party called Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), over the past several years there have been fantastic innovations and experiments to develop commons. Everything from a social reputation currency to new types of neighborhood engagement to city partnerships with commoners. Catalonia has a great WiFi system, Guifi.net, that is run as a commons. The Barcelona city government is trying to prevent the hollowing out of neighborhoods that Airbnb inflicts, which is a big, big deal in Barcelona. Essentially, Airbnb is making money from tourism rentals, which is making apartments and neighborhoods too expensive for ordinary people.
In other places, like in the Global South, commoning is often the social norm. Here, capitalists are trying to displace traditional forms of commoning to introduce the western way of privatization and commercialization, and this often provokes resistance. Commons in the Global South, such as lands stewarded by indigenous cultures, for example, are starting to say, “Hey, we've been commoning for millennia.” But people often haven't had a language to express these traditional ways, and defend them, against the market discourse of trade treaties, price as the measure of value, and globalization.
I would add that there are many different schools of thought in approaching the commons. Professor Elinor Ostrom represents the academic, scholarly approach. There are also Autonomous Marxists for whom this is an element of that framework, but they embrace many core Marxist concepts in understanding commons. There are people from the Global South who see the commons in the context of imperialism and colonization. Some digital activists talk about the commons, sometimes with a political dimension, and sometimes just as pragmatic-minded analysts trying to make systems run better. There are still other commoners who don't have political interpretations of the world; they merely know that they love the landscape or fisheries or bodies of water in their lives, and they want to protect them from some business or government taking them private. So the Commonsverse does not speak as a uniform school of thought. There are many different approaches.
Shonagh: You have done some thinking about what fashion would look like in a commons framework. What could our clothing systems look like if we were to unshackle them from capitalist growth?
David: Most people think of fashion in terms of cultural preening and spectacle, and not so much as an industry. As you're well aware, it's one of the more polluting industries; it relies on sweatshops; and its commercial activity has all sorts of economic and ecological implications.
I've had only limited contact with the fashion world, but in 2005 I was involved in organizing a conference about the intellectual property of creativity in fashion. What's so fascinating and counterintuitive is that fashion is essentially an open-source regime where you can't own your creativity; you can own the trademark for your brand name and sell it under that mark. But you can't own a herringbone suit, or a peasant dress, or this design cut or that design cut. Anybody can imitate that creativity. In fact, the dresses worn on the red carpet at the Academy Awards are knocked off the next day for people who want to try to buy knockoffs. Knockoffs are entirely legal.
Interestingly, despite this lack of tight ownership of creativity, it's an exceedingly robust economic and creative industry. So there are some deep lessons here that the wider world and other creative sectors need to become aware of and honor. That was one of the problems with the music industry in the early 2000s, They tried to lock down so much music that it couldn’t circulate socially. But it turns out that this free social circulation of music is what make music a robust field of creativity and economic activity. Instead, the music industry made all these expansive, aggressive ownership claims for music sampling and so forth, sabotaging their own future creative vitality.
This example shows that a lot of capitalist enterprise, especially in creative and cultural sectors, really rely on the commons in a backdoor way that they don't want to acknowledge. All they want to do is monetize as much as they can for themselves. They don't want to nourish and replenish the culture except insofar as it makes short-term profits. They don’t want to give creativity the space or time to breathe, or to evolve unpredictably. They simply want to appropriate whatever cultural trends can be monetized.
"Fashion Icon" Image by Swiss James
Shonagh: It's fascinating. I am part of the group Fashion Act Now, and we talk a lot about reclaiming our clothes. Would we strip clothing of the competitive edge that defines the financial growth model and let it run free in the commons?
David: Here's where the creativity in organizational design and law might be necessary. Some sort of defense of the commons is needed because, in a capitalist system, the fruits of your imagination will be captured by The Man, just the way street fashion is picked up by the major fashion houses. They then tout their discoveries on the street and use them as free creativity for themselves. The question is how to allow creativity to flow yet still be able to earn a livelihood, or mutualized benefits. These are things that should be talked about. There should be new experiments to develop new social norms and organizational structures. In the music and film world, there are guilds and collectives that might try to get a brand reputation that they can monetize while still allowing the creativity to flow, perhaps by being a trustworthy locus of creative talent.
Shonagh: I also think of cultural appropriation and how big fashion houses have frequently taken inspiration from indigenous clothing without any form of credit or remuneration.
David: They're increasingly being called out for that, and I think that maybe we have turned the corner where these companies can't do that with the same kind of impunity.
As our friend Sandra Niessen has discovered, it's tough to devise a system that can protect what is simply seen as folk culture or antiquated, archaic creative practices. How do you save that in today's world to sustain itself, so that it’s not simply ripped off for its creativity as if it's a free asset? That's a really difficult challenge.
If you trace this capitalist mindset more deeply, it goes back to indifference or contempt for the community that created that creativity. So how do you honor that community and its social relationships that gives rise to that creativity? How do you honor respectful engagement with the earth beyond its exploitative use as virtue-signaling marketing value?
Shonagh: Someone told me recently that some of the material innovation that is happening, for example, the way recycled plastic bottles or mycelium are used in a design, is being patented by companies, so others cannot use them.
David: That is both shocking, and I suppose, not surprising. I'm pretty familiar with the digital world, and we've seen how you can create these encryption systems and proprietary systems. They're kind of gratuitous attempts to control their market share and brand franchise. Lots of design protocols could be made compatible with the rest of the industry. But they're deliberately designed not to be compatible so that the company can protect its competitive edge. Over the long term, this is hugely destructive ecologically, not to mention economically for consumers who have to pay higher prices.
There's a higher legal barrier to get a patent than a copyright. But at the same time, patents nonetheless carve out and capture market share in unfair and contrived ways. Because, you know, many innovations are not so remarkable and perhaps should be patentable. Remember how Amazon tried to patent “one-click” shopping carts online? The patent system is set up for abuse by granting overly broad patents. We see a lot of dubious patents in the agriculture and seed world. Quite famously, a lot of Ag-biotech companies have prowled the world trying to get patents on traditional knowledge, plants, and seeds. A company went to India and asserted a patent on neem, a familiar medicinal seed, a naturally occurring plant. It got so bad that Indians have created a database documenting what is traditional knowledge so that there would be a record of “prior art” to invalidate any future patent claims by companies.
"Plastic Bottle" Image by Gene Hunt
Shonagh: I want to ask you about your opinions on degrowth. I wonder if the commons fit into a degrowth model?
David: Well, degrowth is one school of thought. It is an activist-motivated school of thought and scholarship about how we get a society that doesn't have the imperative to grow. Given how growth is closely linked to carbon energy usage, we need to talk about it. Degrowth is more developed in Europe than in the US; the US laughs off the idea of degrowth or no-growth as ridiculous. Even US climate activists are hard-pressed to embrace degrowth too visibly because they fear it might jeopardize their short-term tactical policy advocacy.
In terms of the commons, it is certainly aligned with and an ally of the degrowth movement. Commons do not have the structural need to grow. They don’t rely on commodifying everything; they try to treat collective wealth inalienable. Meaning, let's not turn it into a market commodity; let's keep it as a shared wealth and distribute the benefits in kind or in non-monetized ways. Commons are attempts to escape the tyranny of capital-driven markets. (By contrast, localized, socially embedded markets tend to be more benign and respectful of the environment and social needs.)
These themes are what my book Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons is about—getting down to the nitty-gritty level about how commons functions in terms of provisioning, peer governance, and social life. My coauthor Silke Helfrich and I wanted to get quite serious about how commoning works at both a theoretical and practical level. We wanted to show how you can meet needs without being compelled to grow economically. But this idea requires jumping the philosophical tracks of capitalism and developing mutually supportive alternatives, from finance to intellectual property to supply chains, that can move beyond the whole consumerist ethic.
So, where to begin? What's the access point? That's the tricky part. But many of us are convinced that we have some severe transitions ahead. And that degrowth and commons will be part of finding new solutions.
Shonagh: Thank you so much for talking to me today, David. I have learned such a lot. My final question is: do you have a vision for utopia? If you do, what would the ideal David's world be like?
David: I don't have to idealize it because, in some ways, people are already commoning in countless ways. In addition, it's possible to reorient ourselves to the commons any time we choose to, and to invent new systems of cooperation, just as countless mutual aid networks have done in response to the pandemic. It’s just that the utopias that are already in our midst are often not recognized, validated, and supported.
So I would dream that this activity could be more publicly recognized and therefore seen as a more credible aspiration for everyone and for our institutions, including the state. I dream that we can have infrastructures to make it easier to become a commoner, so that commoning does not require heroic individual effort or massive resources and paradigm-busting every time.
You could have state-sponsored incubators to help develop commons. You could have new systems of collaborative, noncapitalist finance. You could have legal recognition for commoning and not be criminalized. You could have transnational collaborations that promote new commons through a process that Silke and I call emulate and federate. The point is not to try to scale these efforts into one massive, single organization or network. The point is to have a diversity of commons with the appropriate scale -- scale that is therefore responsive to your needs, locality and distinctive group of commoners. The whole idea of emulate and federate is the way we see the commons growing bigger. We already see this phenomenon in the digital world, where all sorts of different digital commoners -- open source programmers, wiki users, open access publishers, the open educational resources movement, open science, and many others -- are emulating and federating each other with abandon.
I think this could happen more broadly in real spaces with natural resources, social, organizational models, and finance models. Silke and I call it “relationalized finance,” which are systems of finance that don’t require the debt and equity of capitalist extraction. It’s a community financing itself without the outside, predatory extraction of conventional finance. But we must remember that commoning is not a destination down the road; it’s more of a developmental pathway. We have to co-create these new systems over time, with creativity and social solidarity, because this co-creation is part of the utopia.
