Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In recent weeks, we commoners have lost three great visionaries. Each spawned robust institutions and movements to carry their visions forward; the continuing vitality of their projects confirm that their spirits remain very much with us. We should pause to reflect on and celebrate their towering contributions.
In these and many other battles, commoners heroically fought to preserve their land and rights, but they were unable to stop the growth of a highly-profitable industry that was supported physically by the state and legally by the courts. As elsewhere, capital defeated the commons.
It’s been more a year and a half in the making, but I’m pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead!
The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.” Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
Modern capitalism has the conceit that only individual property owners create wealth and they therefore deserve all the rewards. It cannot comprehend the idea that commoners and commons create value.
As the idea of patterns of commoning suggests, commons are not objects, but actions.
