Commoning as a transformative social paradigm

See this article. It's a theme Michel and I are exploring in our paper on collective enlightenment. Ecological consciousness not only integrates the various internal aspects of self, but also various external domains like politics, the economy and the environment with the self. Commoning is a highly evolved, transformative spiritual endeavor.

From the introduction:

"Before introducing the commons more systematically, let me just state clearly what the commons movement seeks to achieve. Commoners are focused on reclaiming their 'common wealth,' in both the material and political sense. They want to roll back the pervasive privatization and marketization of their shared resources—from land and water to knowledge and urban spaces—and reassert greater participatory control over those resources and community life. They wish to make certain resources inalienable—protected from sale on the market and conserved for future generations. This project—to reverse market enclosures and reinvent the commons—seeks to achieve what state regulation has generally failed to achieve: effective social control of abusive, unsustainable market behavior."

And this:

"Commoning cultivates new cultural spaces and nourishes inner, subjective experiences that have far more to do with the human condition and social change than the manipulative branding and disempowering spectacles of market culture."


I appreciate the term 'polyarchy' for diverse, nested government coined by Elinor Ostrum, 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics, in her 1990 book Governing the Commons. It's quite consistent with this forum. Also on interest is how commoning displays the sort of spiritual consciousness Scharmer talks about. It is one in which a community responds to a particular domain, like say a garden, in a novel way suitable for those local conditions. It takes quasi-universal principles and applies them differently depending on the community and the domain of particular management. Very polyarchic.

I also appreciate this comment about the modernist worldview, one which dominates both the model of hierarchical complexity and kennilingus, for "they cannot abide the idea that everything cannot be neatly classified into standard, universal categories, the sine qua non of neoliberal market culture."