A street-sweeping vehicle bears down on a cluster of Notre Dame students as it readies the piazza for another day in the city renowned for la dolce vita, the sweet life. The noisy machine swerves away at the last second as Professor David Mayernik, standing his ground, narrates the architectural history of the piazza — which he interweaves with tales of Rome’s piety and peccadilloes.

The square’s oval shape testifies to its origins as a stadium for chariot races and jousting tournaments. Pope Innocent X, who enlisted Baroque master Francesco Borromini to design the Saint Agnes church overlooking the piazza, had plans to move the Vatican residence next door — which, according to gossip, was the wish of his widowed sister-in-law, who seemed to wield more power around the papal court than he did.

“More than a nice spot for a stroll,” Mayernik tells his architecture students, “Piazza Navona is a theater, a world in miniature that represents creation, salvation and exploration — a dream of what the world could be.

“People immediately are drawn to it, ” he continues, “even if they don’t know why. Americans instinctively know what to do in a piazza like this, though it’s not part of our culture.”

This would imply that a sense of the commons is intrinsic to all human beings, that we are naturally attracted to public spaces where everyone gathers to become part of the broader whole. While the streetlife of Italy fosters the particularly rich form of commoning that goes on day and night in Rome’s piazzas, all of us long for something similar in our own hometowns.

In his book Timeless Cities, Mayernik, an associate professor at Notre Dame’s School of Architecture as well as an architect and painter, muses about what might happen if the thousands of Americans visiting Rome each month returned home fired up about improving their own communities. “How much better it would be if these urban tourists came home and went about lobbying for better neighborhoods, accessible and beautiful public space or some kind of limit to sprawl?”

An Eternal Sense of Place

But many wonder what a 3,000-year-old city possibly teach us about life in a modern nation like the U.S. or Canada? Well, if we can’t learn anything from Rome, where can we? It is, after all, the Eternal City — an Imperial capital of 1 million at the time of Christ, which dwindled to a village in the Middle Ages and then bounced back to become an epicenter of religion, culture, food, glamour and tourism today.

What is it about the place that seizes our imagination — that renders it holy or unforgettable to so many people? That question slips into the mind of most visitors, even non-Catholics going back as far as the German philosopher Goethe, who declared, “In Rome I first found myself,” and the English poet Lord Byron, who called it “the city of my soul.”

The answer lies in the exhilarating sense of the past that surrounds you, layer upon layer all jumbled together. You can watch people lay flowers at the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated, stare up at the balcony where Mussolini delivered blustery speeches, admire Michelangelo’s Christ the Redeemer sculpture in the Santa Maria sopra Minerva basilica, tour a Roman temple consecrated 1,400 years ago as a Christian church (the Pantheon), stroll lanes trod by centuries of pilgrims and then indulge in café society on Via Veneto just like Fellini’s characters in the 1960s film La Dolce Vita. All this history can be experienced on foot, without breaking a sweat, between a lunch in the Jewish Ghetto and cocktail hour at the Caffé Greco — where you can then raise a glass to toast the lingering ghosts of Keats, Shelley, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Mark Twain and Buffalo Bill.

“Romans understand the idea of ‘spirit of place’ very literally,” says Professor Steven Semes, academic director of Notre Dame University’s Rome architecture program, “and I must say that in the evening around 6 p.m., when all the church bells start to chime, you’d have to be pretty hard-crusted not to agree with them. At that moment it seems that all the people who ever lived here are still here now. That’s why they call it the Eternal City.”

The Teachings of Rome

Rome offers many lessons not just for good architecture but for a good life. The importance of family, friendship and food in daily affairs. A deep sense that sacred and secular naturally coexist with no dividing lines. The belief that all of life should be approached as a work of art, not simply as tasks to rush through on the way to the next thing. And the whole-hearted embrace of complexity, which is what makes this city alluring, holy and pleasurable.

All these ideas come gloriously to life in Rome’s piazzas — the Italian word for “square,” but which carries greater depths of meaning. In a city so densely populated, piazzas serve as the front yard, back yard, playground, community center, market and town common all rolled into one. Some are world-famous landmarks, such as Piazza Navona and the Spanish Steps, while others are simply wide spots in the street where neighbors gather.

Historian and Notre Dame Professor Ingrid Rowland, a longtime Rome resident, says, “The history of Rome is really just the story of meeting places like these. In my neighborhood everybody in the piazza knows the names of each others’ pets. People are still that close, although I worry about the effects of increasing traffic and the privatizing influence of iPods.”

Saint Angela Merici, founder of the Ursuline religious order, counseled her followers to “be like a piazza.” For Tracey Lind, dean of the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, that means being “open, gracious, hospitable, playful, restful and engaged in the world.”

Saint Angela’s teachings motivated Lind to launch a project called Trinity Commons — the most ambitious new development for her neighborhood in decades — that brought a coffee shop, independent bookstore, Ten Thousand Villages fair trade store, art gallery, labyrinth and public square to the grounds of Trinity Cathedral, which itself welcomes anyone inside to pray, reflect or relax.

“Last year we had 80,000 people visit for public events,” she enthuses. “Like Italian piazzas, we are a place for conversation, commerce, worship and celebration.”

A Piazza in Every Neighborhood

Mark Lakeman, an architect in Portland, Oregon, returned home from Italy excited about the idea that every community needs its own piazza. But how could that happen in his own largely blue-collar neighborhood without tearing down someone’s house or radically redesigning existing streets?

Lakeman and some neighbors put their heads together, coming up with an innovative plan for the corner of Southeast 9th Avenue and Sherritt Street. They began by setting up a portable teahouse, which drew many dozens of people out of their homes on Monday nights to mingle. The next step was to paint the pavement in vivid colors, sending a clear message to passing motorists that this was not your ordinary intersection. As social activity began to move out into the street, drivers and pedestrians instinctively learned to share the space, thus its name: Share-It Square.

But what did the neighbors think? Challenging the dominance of automobiles on American streets is a brazen act, especially to older people who came of age in the car-crazy 1950s. Lakeman worried about angry opposition arising to quash the experiment, until talking to Brian Shaw, who lived right at the corner.

“Brian said that his father had fought in Italy during World War II and would tell stories about how, when they liberated a village, everyone would automatically gather in the piazzas to celebrate,” Lakeman recalls. “He said his dad always used to sing an Italian song with lyrics saying, ‘if you don’t hear voices in the piazza when you wake up in the morning, then you know something is wrong.’

“Something is wrong with too many places in America today,” Lakeman says.

Projects similar to Share-It Square have now popped up at 19 other Portland intersections, with at least a dozen more in the works. Lakeman and his collaborators went on to found City Repair, a nonprofit organization promoting a whole host of initiatives to help communities create new public spaces. And these ideas are spreading across the continent with new “piazzas” sprouting in at least 15 cities from Rochester, Minnesota, to San Diego to Toronto.

Finding the Spirit of Rome in My Own Backyard

Yet even with the traffic, I was thoroughly captivated by the spirit of Rome, especially its piazzas. In a week of wandering through the city, I again and again found a rare sort of peace and contentment in these squares. They offered not just refuge from the chaos and noise for which Rome is notorious, they opened an entrance to someplace special inside me. Watching water spout in a fountain, looking up at an eye-pleasing church, relaxing at a café, soaking up the human pageant unfolding all around, I felt intensely linked to the flow of life.

Back home in Minneapolis, a city quite unlike Rome with uniformly straight streets and great expanses of green space, I claimed my own sacred spot — a hilltop in a nearby park that on warm or sunny days attracts a lively cross-section of humanity. Sitting there beneath a towering cottonwood tree — watching the lovers stroll by, hearing children shout, running into friends — I feel connected to all of heaven and earth.

This is adapted from an article in Notre Dame magazine (Autumn 2009).

Jay Walljasper is co-editor of OnTheCommons.org and author of the forthcoming book What We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons (New Press). He is also a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces. www.JayWalljasper.com

It could be the moment when citizens say “enough is enough” and rally to save essential public services from the chopping block, even if it means paying higher local taxes.

Or it could be time when deep gashes in funding for parks, libraries, education, public safety, transit, health and other cornerstones of the commons good bring many communities to their knees, ushering in age of reckless privatization and steep decline in quality of life as local governments are unable to provide for the basic needs of their citizens.

John Gurda, a history columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, paints a frightening picture of where continuing cuts in public services will lead us “The day may come when librarians have to leave a key under the doormat at each neighborhood branch, when homicides are reported to a call center in Bangalore, when every household is expected to bury its own garbage and to keep its own fire bucket at the front door.”

He sees his hometown heading “down the road to municipal suicide” as it staggers under huge budget deficits. This fate shared by many, if not most, American communities right now—suburbs and small towns as well as inner cities. Indeed, Gurda notes the budget crisis of Milwaukee County, which delivers essential services to the suburbs as well, is equal to that of the city.

Why is this happening now, months after the stock market hit rock bottom? Because local governments are funded in large part by property taxes, and the rampant devaluation of real estate coming out of the burst bubble of 2008 is now hitting home at city halls. Local officials are dealing with dramatically reduced tax revenues. And they can’t look to state government for help, because the states have budget crises of their own due to sharp drops in sales tax and income tax revenues.

Reflexive anti-tax sentiments, compounded by many people’s shrinking incomes, means that politicians feel little choice but to whack away at crucial public services at precisely the time when citizens’ need for help is spiraling upward. (For more about this, see The economic crisis through the looking glass)

Gurda, author of the definitive history The Making of Milwaukee, notes that while this heavily blue-collar city has never been rich, its citizens did enjoy excellent public services through most of the 20th Century. That was largely the legacy of progressive Socialist Party mayors, who held office for 38 years from 1910 to 1960. Mayor Dan Hoan—whose political vision was “a better, bigger, and brighter Milwaukee” fostered by “the best government possible, and, though not necessarily at a low tax rate, at the lowest cost that can be paid“— understood that taxes could be a burden on working-class citizens, and therefore saw it as his mission to make sure taxpayers got first-rate parks, schools, public services and other healthy returns on their investments.

Unfortunately taxes are rarely discussed today as part of the common good. Right-wingers scream bloody murder any time a tax increase is even mentioned, stirring up talk radio mobs that equate any form of government action as folly or tyranny, while liberals largely duck the issue out of fear.

It’s high time to reframe the debate about taxes, before the infrastructure and social fabric of our communities starts to deteriorate right before our eyes. Taxes should be viewed as a commons—a cooperative effort to take care and improve the things that belong to all of us. If you add up the huge contribution that good schools, police protection, parks, public health measures, libraries etc. make in our lives, it’s easy to see that the money we pay in taxes is the best bargain in town.

I hope many more people come to realize this wisdom over the next year, and take action to preserve public services and protect the future of their communities. If not, they may learn this lesson the hard way, as they scramble to find the money for private schools, private security guards, private recreational facilities, doctors’ fees, and private information sources to replace all the services once paid for by their tax dollars.

As John Gurda puts it, “Until ordinary citizens wake up to the reality of their own interests, until public officials find the courage to stop committing civic suicide, we’ll get precisely the government we pay for.”

Postscript: John Gurda reports that, “I’m told by friends on the Common [City] Council that the column was instrumental in rolling back some of the most severe cuts to the library system.”

Commoning is a new word to describe the ways we embrace the spirit of the commons in our everyday lives, seeking opportunities to share with one another and shift a bit from “me” to “we”.

It’s interesting to note that this familiar nuclear family has been the organizing principle of Western society only since the Industrial Revolution, and that in many parts of the world today a broader network of extended family and fellow villagers are still the primary social glue. I remember a Brazilian friend, who grew up middle-class in cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, telling me that he was a teenager before he was completely sure which people living in his house were blood relatives.

Margaret Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th Century, once commented that, “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.”

The evolution of society into these smaller family units offers a freedom and flexibility unknown to our ancestors. Few of us today would want the details of our lives (from the time we awake in the morning to the person we marry) to be managed by a chief, priest or patriarch. Even the extended families that dominated the world of our grandparents or great-grandparents would seem stultifying.

Yet, if we looked deeply into our souls, many of us today might admit there is also something attractive about being an intimate part of a wider tribe. Even with our cherished freedom, there is something a bit lonely about our modern existence of tight little families living isolated in their privatized homes. Few of us know our neighbors in any meaningful way, and the rest of our family usually lives far away. When we encounter problems or simply are in a mood to celebrate, there are surprisingly few people to turn to.

Huge industries have arisen to meet the needs once take care of by grandma or the “uncle” next door who was not really related but you’d known him your entire life. This is classic case of commodification, making a product for sale out of a need that was once met by the commons. Many people today worry that this institutionalization of many basic human activities, from raising kids and caring for the sick to baking birthday cakes, carry a heavy price. This dependence on professional, for-profit services cuts us off from the rich web of personal relationships that have long sustained human culture. Indeed, it can be argued that as a species we have been shaped through evolution to live as part of these sort of emotional ecosystems, and that the atomized patterns of modern society is one cause of today’s unprecedented levels of mental illness and senseless crime.

Few of us, however, are in any position to move back in with our grandparents. But a growing number of social pioneers are looking for other ways to enjoy both the stimulating possibilities of the modern world and the comfort of our communal heritage. This can be something as simple as neighbors sharing a potluck meal and an in-depth conversation on a weekly or monthly basis. Many groups, such as single-parent or gay and lesbian families or home-schoolers, are banding together in new kinds of family networks, sharing time and tasks on a regular basis, and being there for one another in a way that goes beyond the usual parameters of friendship. But there’s no reason that other families can do the same.

Co-housing communities , an updating of the commune movement of the 1960s, represents an even bigger step in forging a new kind of extended family not based on blood. Well-established in Northern Europe and now taking roots in North America, these are communities of people who have chosen to live together and share some elements of their daily lives, recreating in a conscious way what happens naturally in traditional villages as means of survival. There are more than 100 co-housing developments built or under development in 34 states and three Canadian provinces, part of a growing world-wide phenomenon in Europe, England, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

There’s great latitude in how communal these communities want to be, with some that share meals every evening while others that simply have a common space like a clubhouse where neighbors can interact both spontaneously and in regularly scheduled events that offer a satisfying sense of belonging.

All these experiments in creating a new kind of family are important steps toward restoring the commons and bringing a greater sense of “we” into modern life. And given the stormy economic forecast, they are also very important for helping people remain healthy, happy and hopeful in the days ahead.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the metrics used to determine the health of this self-serving mechanism. Foremost is the Gross Domestic Product or GDP, which is really just a tally of the expenditure of money. When the GDP goes up the media cheers. Economists assume that more expenditure means a better life. This does not speak well for the perceptual capacities of that profession.

We spend a great deal of money when we have cancer, or a car wreck, or go through a bitter divorce, or rack up credit card debt. These all make the GDP rise. They mean life is getting better? Sheeesh.

Perhaps the biggest systemic blind spot of such indicators is the commons. The commons is a kind of parallel economy that does not operate through money. Thus it does not register on the mental radar screens through which most economists view the world. We don’t have to pay to swim in the oceans or breathe the air (not yet anyway), or speak the English language or sit on a park bench. So such activities and resources become invisible.

The GDP ignores them, and other indicators do as well. That which is called “productivity” for example takes no account of the productivity of the parks in producing health, or of the libraries in producing knowledge. Only when such things are destroyed, and commoditized substitutes take their place, do the official meters spring to life and economists herald the nation’s “growth.”

Pollute the lake, force local residents to join a swim club, or burn gas to drive to a more distant swimming spot. And the “economy” has received another boost. Sheeeesh again.

We who care about the commons have to find ways to build it into the official economic feedback loops. Until then, its destruction will be laundered statistically into the “economy’s” gain.

One reason that the nation has not made more progress toward an economic “recovery” is that the people in charge really don’t know what one would look like. The top economists in Washington don’t appear to have asked the obvious question, “Recovery of what—and for what?” Instead they have followed the old drill, tried to rekindle the old flame, and remained wedded to the old guideposts that leave them looking at yesterday and trying to see tomorrow.

Just recently, the president of France realized the stupidity. He has decided that his nation’s measures of economic health need to change to account for today’s challenges instead of yesterday’s. As Washington gears up to spend billions in more “stimulus,” it would help to ask exactly what it is trying to stimulate—and most importantly, exactly what would constitute success.

Economic indicators are our national psyche’s main gauges, the mirror into which we look to see how things are going. In a market culture—which is to say, a money culture—the prospects for money become the prospects for ourselves. Such metrics as the Gross Domestic Product have an oracular status; reporters watch them obsessively, policy experts steer by them, and politicians march to their command.

Yet for the most part the indicators are a crock and testimony to the grip of yesterday upon the expert economic mind. The prime example is the GDP, the anachronism of which is a secret, it seems, only within the media and policy establishments that invoke it constantly. Any measure that portrays an increase in car crashes, cancer, marital breakdown, kinky mortgages, oil use, and gambling as evidence of advance—as the GDP does—simply because they occasion the expenditure of money has a tenuous claim to being reality-based discourse.

Metrics are silent rulers, in both senses of the word. In defining the task, they also define the steps we must take to carry it out.

Yet whenever a policy expert or news analyst intones about the need for “growth,” more GDP is what they mean. The two are the same. Is it really surprising that most of these experts didn’t see the crash coming, when they were steering largely by a compass that portrays rising debt payments as additions to the GDP—and therefore as beneficial growth?

Another example is “productivity,” which, if anything, is even more totemic. An increase in output per hour worked—which is the reigning definition—is deemed the stairway to economic heaven, and the goal most devoutly to be sought, no further questions asked. Thus the excitement recently when the Commerce Department reported that productivity had increased at an annual rate of 9.5 percent during the third quarter of 2009.

But exactly why is this such good news? “Generally, when U.S. workers are more productive that’s a really good thing for the economy,” observed a writer on The Atlantic’s website. “It means a higher GDP will result.” The statement is standard issue, and remarkable only in its circularity (and that the ratio of fallacy to sentence is one to one).

Take first the part about the “higher GDP” that rising productivity betokens. To say it’s a good thing for “the economy” is redundant. The GDP is the economy, as economists define it. It is the part of life that operates through the transaction of money. The question is whether a rising GDP is necessarily a good thing for the people who comprise the economy, and for whom it is supposed to exist.

The Atlantic ought to know the answer. Back in the 90s, I co-authored an article for that magazine called “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?” which laid out the fallacies of that indicator in all their perverse splendor. We showed in detail why, increasingly, a rising GDP suggests that lives are getting worse, not better. If interest on your credit card debt doubles this year, it’s a boost for the GDP. Is it a boost for you? Likewise, sickness and the consequent medical treatment is good for the GDP. Health is not. (Another take is here.)

Yet now that same magazine was repeating the very fallacy that it itself had debunked. This is common. No matter how many articles appear on the imbecility of the GDP as a gauge of well-being—the New York Times alone has run at least a couple over the past year or so—those same publications are back to reciting the GDP mantra the very next day. (Sometimes it’s the same day.)

It is as though in economics, evidence doesn’t matter where underlying assumptions are concerned. Belief trumps actuality. As Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, once put it, in economics, “all doctrines persist.” In real sciences, theories change constantly to accommodate new information. In economics, the basic model hasn’t changed in more than 200 years. Which suggests that economics isn’t really science, but rather religion in mathematical disguise.

But back to productivity. The Atlantic post also asserts that rising productivity figures mean that “workers are being more productive.” This, too, is rote formulation: We Americans are working harder and smarter and therefore are turning out more stuff per hour. The thought appeals to our sense of virtue, but is it really what is going on?

Let’s leave aside technical issues, such as the way the data attributes parts made cheaply abroad to the productivity of American workers who assemble those parts into finished products here in the U.S. Leave aside too the obvious conundrum—doesn’t the quest to eliminate work eventually lead to less work to go around? (Economists say it bestirs more work, not less. We’ll see.)

Let’s leave aside as well the way the benefits of increased productivity have been going to executives and shareholders in recent years, rather than to workers in the form of higher wages or more time off.

The question here is more specific—namely, is productivity really what the term suggests? Or is it another case of language that sounds technical and scientific, but that is disconnected from reality? Consider the computer, which was hyped as the ultimate productivity machine. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman, was practically rhapsodic on the subject. Yet the impact of computers in the workplace has been somewhat ambiguous. Increases in output have been canceled to varying degrees by the overhead the things entail: burgeoning IT departments, crashes and lost data, constant security measures, and a fortune in software updates and printer cartridges.

Sickness and the consequent medical treatment is good for the GDP. Health is not.
But in another way computers have been an unambiguous success, because they have enabled corporations to shift a substantial portion of their workload onto their customers. If you ever have made an airline reservation online, or tried to get your credit score, or filled out an application for insurance, you have spent many minutes and even hours doing data entry that company employees used to do. If you have sought help with a computer problem, you likely have been directed to an online forum in which you must rely on other customers, rather than company employees. (I rarely get a good answer; usually I can’t even find my question. Plus it can take hours—on my clock, not theirs.)

Seen through the euphemistic lens of the productivity metrics, this is a minor miracle. The corporation is spending less on labor than it was before, but is making more money. But that’s not because its employees are working harder or smarter. It is because they’ve been laid off and we customers are doing the work they once did. The cause of corporate production has been boosted by an unpaid labor force—namely ourselves. The same thing happens offline at self-service gas pumps and big box stores where few employees walk the floor so that we have to search the aisles on our own.

Yet the metrics portray the resulting hours of unpaid labor as an advance in productivity. And that’s just one disconnect between the word and the reality. Take the tricky question of services and the productivity of those that provide them. How exactly to determine the productivity of a mortgage banker—by the dollar value of the subprime mortgages he or she churns out? Or how about a teacher? A while back, a prominent economist at Harvard proposed that the productivity of education be determined by the incomes of those who receive it. (The money fixation of the economic mind can lead it to strange shifts.)

By that standard, Bernard Madoff’s teachers were many times more productive than yours or mine. Look at how much more money he made, at least while the game lasted. But then, much of what is called productivity has little to do with work effort to begin with. As oil wells and mines get tapped out, for example, it takes more effort to pull out what remains. “Productivity” declines, but not from a lack of industry among the workers. Rather, the extractive machinery has run up against a geological fact.

As with the GDP, however, the basic problem is the underlying premise. Where the GDP assumes that more expenditure of money equals a better quality of life, so the productivity dogma assumes that more output is always better than less—that work is always bad and stuff always good. That assumption might have seemed valid centuries ago, when stuff was scarce, toil grueling, and human needs could seem as infinite as the resources available to meet them were presumed to be.

But yesterday is not forever. Can we really say in 2009 that it is necessarily better to produce, say, more cigarettes with less labor? Or violent video games? Or subprime mortgages? Or gas-gorging Hummers? Might we not be better off with less such stuff and more of the work that goes into it—or even better, into something else? At the very least, don’t we have to say, “It depends?” If that’s the case, the iron syllogisms that underlie the GDP and “productivity” go out the window.

Then there’s the question of work itself. The syllogism assumes that work is a “disutility,” a nasty and distasteful thing, engaged in only for the consumption it makes possible. Yet today, many people get more satisfaction from their work than they would from the next item that they might buy with the remuneration from that work.

Work can provide meaning, dignity, and self-respect. (It is odd that our friends on the free-market right preach the importance of work, and then embrace an economic theology that applauds the continual elimination of that work.)

Some people are actually paying to work—on archeological digs, for example. They pay hefty fees at “health clubs” to make the kind of physical exertion that productivity-enhancing machinery has rid from daily life. People burn gas to drive to the club and then burn electricity to exert on an elliptical trainer or treadmill. Through the alchemy of the corporate market, production has become consumption, and something that was free has become something that we have to pay for. The market creates a scarcity of physical exertion, and then sells us commoditized substitutes for money.

The assumption on which the GDP is based—that more expenditure of money always betokens an advance—is an egregious “value judgment” in itself.

If metrics are to guide us to solutions, then they have to start from an awareness of the problems. Today, for most Americans, the problem is not a lack of stuff, but rather a lack of well-being. It is not an excess of reliance upon human work—if it were, unemployment would not be over 10 percent. Rather, the problem is an excess of reliance upon fossil fuels, land, and other finite resources, along with the waste of capital in arcane financial schemes.

So, why do we still obsess over the productivity of labor, and let energy resources, raw materials, capital, and land loaf on the job? Should we not track—and then prod—the productivity of those, especially when the result could be more of the human employment that we need? Conserving energy provides more work than does wasting it; intensive use of urban land provides more work than does the sprawling wasteful use of it; and so on down the line.

Imagine what would happen if next week, the major news outlets relegated the GDP figures to a News In Brief box, and focused instead on the health and well being that this expenditure betokened—or didn’t. What if the policy establishment worried less about the productivity of labor, which is abundant, and more about the productivity of resources that are scarce? (It would be good, too, if workers got a fair share of the return from increases in their own productivity, in the form of higher pay or more time off.)

The effect would be galvanic. Metrics are silent rulers, in both senses of the word. In defining the task, they also define the steps we must take to carry it out. If we Americans heard about the nation’s lagging energy productivity every day, public pressure would grow to do something about it. As with the gas mileage gauge on a Prius, feedback prompts concern and action.

So again, why don’t we hear about it? Entrenched interest is part of the answer. It is not accidental that a corporate economy would embrace metrics that assume that more stuff is always better, and that workers are to be flogged continually while land and resources can be wasted. That script is tailored for those who do the selling, flogging, and wasting.

Living Large in a Tiny House

Dee Williams found freedom when she sold her three-bedroom home and moved into 84 square feet.

There is not much reason, within the existing framework of economic belief, that economists could not shift emphasis from the productivity of labor to that of energy and land. The GDP is a tougher nut. The crude quantitative thinking it embodies is the basis of the profession’s claim to science. Once you acknowledge the need to make distinctions—that is, once you realize that not all “goods” are good and not all “services” actually serve, and that price and value are not always the same—you are beyond the focal plane of the profession’s cognitive capacities, and of its ability to turn experience into forbidding math.

Instead, you are in the realm of what economists typically dismiss as “value judgment”. That’s as though there is any other kind of judgment, and as though the assumption on which the GDP is based—that more expenditure of money always betokens an advance—is not an egregious “value judgment” in itself.

Not for the first time, those who claim the mantle of science are hung up on an outdated version of it. I do feel for these folks. They have large amounts of intellectual capital sunk in the old faith, and prestige tied up in high positions and awards. But then, they’ve been scolding the rest of us for decades on the need to adjust to new realities. If steel workers have to be retrained as computer technicians, then why shouldn’t the economics establishment take a dose of its own medicine?

At least a few could see it coming. In the past, the likes of Thorsten Veblen, Kenneth Boulding, and John Kenneth Galbraith have challenged the assumptions of their field. (Galbraith’s name still can evoke sneers at meetings of the American Economics Association.) Just recently, a couple of American Nobel winners—Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen—advised the French government to update its national metrics to take more account of economic reality, as opposed to the hoary model embedded in the GDP. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has embraced their report.

The wheels have started to turn. If Old Europe can get out of the rut, then shouldn’t the U.S. be able to do it too? There is no reason to wait for the experts. We can create new measures that include dimensions of life that the conventional ones leave out. We can track well-being instead of just monetary transactions, and the efficiency of our use of land and energy—rather than just that of work.

It doesn’t take a PhD to do this, just clear eyes. The experts will catch up eventually.

Much of this essay originally appeared in Yes! magazine,, and is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike).

It’s too late for anyone to pretend that the U.S. government, whether under President Barack Obama or anyone else, can divert our nation from long-term economic decline. The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been to print Treasury bonds both for the financial system bailouts and the sputtering Keynesian stimulus that so far has gone substantially into military infrastructure. This bond bubble is what I have referred to as “Obama’s Last Picture Show.”

Government debt is fundamentally inflationary. For a generation, the U.S. dollar has been inflating at an increasing rate, with the economy being kept in a growth posture by selling our debt instruments abroad or allowing foreigners holding dollars to purchase property and other assets on our own soil. The website EconomyinCrisis.org reports that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, “foreign entities spent $267.8 billion to acquire or establish U.S. businesses.”

Foreigners are spending their dollars as fast as possible, because they are now plummeting in value. It’s increasingly clear that sooner rather than later, the dollar will be dumped by foreign purchasers of bonds, particularly China, and possibly even the oil-producing nations.

These nations know full well that bonds denominated in dollars can never be completely repaid, even if the bonds can be rolled over into fresh debt. It’s this dynamic that is dragging the U.S. economy to the cliff, because real economic growth stopped long ago when our manufacturing jobs were exported. This is because most of the growth since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 has been only on paper through financial bubbles. This included the dot.com bubble of the Clinton years that blew up in 2000-2001.

Now, after the Treasury bond bubble of 2009, there is nothing left in America to inflate. With so many jobs gone, the American family home was the last thing of value we owned.

So the air is going out of the tires. Americans who are struggling to work for a living are passive spectators as their jobs, savings, health insurance, pensions, and homes continue to erode in value or even disappear. Last Sunday the Washington Post reported a massive crisis in state and local government pensions. Reporter David Cho wrote, “The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.”

So what, if anything, can be done about it?

Well, the first thing an intelligent physician does is diagnose the disease. Thomas Greco, in his new book The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Chelsea Green: 2009) , outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done. His style is precise and sometimes academic. Behind it, though, is a passion for truth and the type of rock-solid integrity that refuses to sugar-coat a very bitter pill.

More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe.

But unlike most commentators, what Greco offers is not another phony prescription for what the financiers and government should do for us, whether through “restarting” lending or another round of stimulus spending. Rather it’s what we should do for ourselves, and could do much better, if we understood what to do and if big banking and big government just got out of the way.

As I said, at the root is the monetary system, whose failure cannot be understood without a history lesson. So Greco writes about the struggle between banking and democracy that took place in the 1790s when the ink on our new national constitution was barely dry.

It was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, who compromised the new nation, through what he admitted was “corruption,” by giving the wealthy speculators in Revolutionary War bonds the benefit of federally-sponsored redemption and then by establishing the First Bank of the United States. This early drift toward elitist rule was opposed by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others who figured in the creation of what later became the Democratic Party.

Greco writes: “While Jefferson favored a stronger union than that which emerged under the Articles of Confederation, he was vehemently opposed to the reconstruction of monarchic government on the American continent.” Hamilton had said frankly that the British monarchy was the best system of government known to man. Part of the monarchic system was the Bank of England, which Hamilton copied when setting up the First Bank.

But Jefferson, who repudiated Hamilton’s elitist platform, was elected president in what was then called “The Revolution of 1800.” Congress refused to renew the Bank’s charter by a single vote when it was up for renewal in 1811.

But the Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 due to the government debt left behind from the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Thus was set up what became known as the “Bank War.”

It was President Andrew Jackson who dethroned the bankers from power by pulling government funds out of the Second Bank in 1833. Greco writes that in Jackson’s view: “The ‘Bank War’ was a contest for rulership—would the United States be governed by the people through their elected president and representatives, or by an unelected financial elite through their central bank instrument?”

The modern takeover began in earnest during the Civil War when Congress passed the National Banking Acts in 1863-64 which mandated use of government bonds as bank lending reserves, thereby creating a direct linkage between bank profits and the debt the government was starting to load on the shoulders of taxpayers.

The nation’s fate was sealed with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The deal was that the bankers would control the currency, and thereby the nation’s economy, while the government would be provided with an unlimited amount of inflated dollars to fight its wars.

The bookkeeper’s trick of creating money out of thin air, charging interest for its use, then forcing it down the throats of weaker nations by threat of violence, is what has allowed the Anglo-American empire, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1696, gradually to conquer the world. Though President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, he saw what that action meant. Greco cites Wilson as writing: “There has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration in the control of business in the country….The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits.”

Among other ill effects, the system has ruined the value of the currency. The inflation caused by large issues of bank-created loans is seized upon by the government which goes along because inflation reduces the cost of its deficits. Investors buy Treasury bonds denominated in Federal Reserve Notes then watch their value evaporate over time. In fact Federal Reserve Notes have lost over 95 percent of their value since they were first introduced.

Moreover, it’s additional inflation caused by bank-generated interest that drives up the costs of goods and services, forcing everyone in the economy to try to defend themselves by raising their prices to the max. Greco spells this out too, which almost every economist in the world, with the exception perhaps of Australia’s James Cumes, overlooks.

Bank interest has other tragic effects. It was high interest rates, for instance, that destroyed the Idaho potato industry. A farmer from that region told me at a conference a few years ago that when interest rates skyrocketed in the early 1980s, he asked the president of one of the Federal Reserve Banks why they did it. The answer was they were “ordered” to raise interest rates by the international banking system.

Make no mistake, it’s the banking system, facilitated by the Fed, not unwary borrowers, who brought on the collapse of 2008.

Now, in 2009, the bankers, mainly those in the U.S., have so shattered the world economy by debt mounted on debt that there may be no reprieve except the creation of a slave society based on rule by the rich over the masses of whatever peons should happen to survive the downturn and its tragic effects on employment, health, the food and water supply, and even our ability to cope with climate change.
The political establishment, expressing itself in pronouncements by organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, see a future, not of economic democracy or increased financial pluralism, but consolidation of world currencies into a small number overseen at the top by the world’s financial oligarchy.

Citing the writings of Benn Steil, the CFR’s Director of International Economics, Greco writes: “The ostensible plan is to reduce global exchange media to three—one each for Europe, the Americas, and Asia. One might reasonably suppose that at a later stage, those three would be combined into one currency also under the control of the global banking elite.”

Greco concludes: “The New World Order is upon us.”

With ample justification, he even goes apocalyptic, citing The Book of Revelation in demonstrating the import on a spiritual plane of the elitist takeover: And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 13: 16-17)

But is it really the end, or is there a new world waiting to be born? Greco thinks so. He speaks of the end of an era when unlimited economic growth fed by massive influxes of debt-based money is no longer sustainable. He writes: “That our global civilization cannot continue on its current path seems evident….But I think our collective consciousness is beginning to change. We are becoming aware of limits and are reaching that part of our evolutionary program that says, ‘Stop!’”

Part of the awareness of how to stop must focus on the institutions responsible for the crisis. Greco praises Ron Paul for calling out the Federal Reserve in the 2008 presidential campaign. He cites a statement Paul made to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 2004 hearing where Paul told Greenspan that the power of the Fed “challenges the whole concept of freedom and liberty and sound money.” Thus Paul and other monetary reformers, though largely ignored by the mainstream media and political establishment, have made it clear that change must start with what really lies at the bottom of elite control: how money is made and who makes it.

Unfortunately, few progressive economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich, comprehend the monetary causes of today’s disasters. Instead of demanding reforms that would make money the proper servant of a sustainable economy, most call for more stimulus spending; i.e., more government debt, along with “reform” of a financial system that is corrupt down to its very DNA.

So do we really need the bankers’ fake currency, today backed by nothing but a federal deficit of $12 trillion and growing by the day?

Greco says we don’t, and this is what his book about. But it’s not about doing without the necessities of life, or heading for the hills with a gun and backpack. Nor is it about important efforts at macro-level monetary reform like those of the American Monetary Institute, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, or advocates for a basic income guarantee. Rather it’s about individuals, groups, and communities taking control of the monetary system at the grassroots level and creating an entirely new basis for trade than bank-owed debt.

Greco writes about “a new paradigm approach to the exchange function.” The solution, he says, “is to provide interest-free credit to producers within the process of mutual credit clearing. That is the process of offsetting purchases against sales within an association of merchants, manufacturers, and workers. It will eventually include everyone who buys and sells, or makes and receives disbursements of any kind.”
Greco is one of the world’s leading experts in describing alternative or complementary currencies. These are self-regulating systems that facilitate “reciprocal exchange,” not using government legal tender but which are still allowed under the currency laws so long as taxes are not evaded.

Greco discusses the large and growing worldwide “LETS” movement—Local Exchange Trading Systems, like the Ithaca HOURS system in Ithaca, New York. He describes the Swiss WIR Bank, the longest-running credit clearing system in the world, with over 70,000 members. He writes about the national and international barter exchanges that involve over 400,000 businesses trading at an annual level of $10 billion.

Greco also describes the world-famous Mondragon Cooperatives from the Basque region of Northern Spain. Started by a Roman Catholic priest in 1941, the Mondragon system, he says, is “the hub of what is probably the most successful and progressive social cooperative economy in modern history.”

He also tells the inspiring story of the Argentine trading clubs—the trueques—which, when used with “provincial bonds” issued by regional governments, rescued that country during the 2001 economic collapse brought on by the collusion between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund.

Credit clearing is not new. Greco traces it to the medieval European fairs. These exchanges are like banking clearing houses. The world’s largest is the automated clearing house—ACH—operated by the Federal Reserve.

But as Greco points out: “The clearing process need not be restricted to banks; it can be applied directly to transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. The LETS systems that have proliferated in communities around the world use the credit clearing process, as do commercial trade exchanges. Credit clearing systems are, in essence, clearing houses—but their members are businesses and individuals instead of banks.”

Alternative currency and trading systems, says Greco, are the wave of the future. Even though most only mount up to partial local successes, they show what can be done. Greco likens these efforts to the Wright Brothers’ first flight that covered 120 feet. They show, he says, that the potential exists for local, regional, then national and international money-free exchanges that eventually could be joined by a single web-based trading platform. This could eventually get rid of the corruption of debt-money altogether.

Chapter 16 of the book is about “A Regional Economic Development Plan Based on Credit Clearing” that shows the potential. Greco writes, “The credit clearing exchange is the key element that enables a community to develop a sustainable economy under local control and to maintain a high standard of living and quality of life.”

This would be a real revolution. What can governments do to help? Perhaps only by removing, as Greco recommends, the privileged position of bank debt-money as legal tender. Instead, let bank money compete with market-based alternative currencies and credit exchanges, if it can.

Greco’s book is a how-to-do-it manual that updates and expands on his previous books, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, New Money for Healthy Communities, and Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. Greco also operates a website that offers advice and support to worthwhile community initiatives.

My own view is that no one should wait to see who takes the lead in creating the monetary and credit-clearing systems of the future. The time is now. There is no more reason to delay. If the people of the world do not join together in this kind of action, they can likely kiss their economic future and perhaps their livelihoods good-bye. The controllers of the world, those with the big money, the ones who run the banking systems, who own the global corporations, and who finance politicians like Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons, are now poised in their blindness to extinguish the light of democracy on the planet for good.

Greco is implying that the power of the elite is not only dated but illusory. Thus the way to proceed is not just to oppose them. If they are opposed, they’ll do what they always do, which is to roll out the SWAT teams, the military in the streets, the tear gas, the sound cannon, the concentration camps, the Patriot Acts, the torture chambers, because that is all they know, and it’s what they do best.

The money monopoly translates into a monopoly on violence on an ascending scale. We know that the U.S. sells more weapons abroad than any other nation, and we know that it is war above all that makes the bankers rich.

So let them have their weapons and wars. With all due respect to those brave enough to protest, it’s time for people simply to walk away and set up their own economic and monetary systems as a prelude to a rebirth of humanity as ethical beings in sustainable communities of choice.

The keys, says Greco, are simple: “Promote the establishment of private complementary exchange systems—and use them. Buy from your friends and neighbors wherever possible. Contribute your time, energy, and money to whatever moves things in the right direction.”

Greco also recommends that the unit of exchange for alternative currencies be based on the value of commodities—not necessarily gold or silver, which bankers and governments manipulate, but those commodities readily available within a trading system. State and local governments should do everything possible to protect, encourage, nourish, and participate in these systems.

The irony is that what may appear on the surface to be technical changes in how the exchange of goods and services takes place can have such profound effects. The answer is that systems of exchange reflect entirely different perceptions of the world. Bank-money exchange reflects and creates a system of elite control and human slavery. Reciprocal credit exchange reflects and creates a democratic system on a level monetary playing field.

The difference points to the fact that such reform is, above all, a spiritual endeavor. Thomas Greco has devoted decades to this quest and is one of its foremost visionaries. In an Epilogue he writes: “We will either learn to put aside sectarian differences, to recognize all life as one life, to cooperate in sharing earth’s bounty, and yield control to a higher power—or we will find ourselves embroiled in ever-more destructive conflicts that will leave the planet in ruins and avail only the meanest form of existence for the few, if any, who survive.”

It’s a vision we can all strive to embrace.

The Kerry-Lieberman-Graham framework is based on the Waxman-Markey bill that narrowly passed the House. It would create a complex and opaque cap-and-trade system riddled with favors for utilities and Wall Street. Roughly 85 percent of the initial carbon permits would be handed free to utilities and other entities, which could sell them for cash. In theory, utilities would return much of this cash to their customers, but exactly how they would do this, along with all the monitoring and enforcement, is left to the 50 states.

Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also create a worldwide trading system for carbon “offsets” and other carbon-based securities. Offsets are different from government-issued permits or allowances. They are assertions by private parties, often in foreign lands, that they will sequester or avoid emitting a quantity of carbon dioxide that otherwise would wind up in the atmosphere. Such claims are conjectural at best and potentially fraudulent at worst. They played no part whatsoever in the successful cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, and are just as unnecessary for carbon dioxide. Indeed, they would seriously weaken a carbon cap by allowing polluters to continue polluting despite the cap—just pay someone, somewhere, not to cut down trees, and you can burn carbon as in the good old days. For that reason offsets are avidly sought by polluters, who want to buy them, and by Wall Street firms, who see a large market for selling them. Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would create a copious supply of offsets (up to 2 billion tons a year), along with complex rules for regulating them.

By contrast, Cantwell and Collins would establish a simple, transparent cap-and-dividend system that returns higher carbon prices directly to consumers and allows only minimal carbon trading. It would cap fossil fuel suppliers like Exxon-Mobil and Peabody Coal, rather than emitters like utilities and steel plants, because it’s much easier to catch carbon when it enters our economy than when it leaves. It would auction all carbon permits and avoid giveaways, market distortions and offsets. And it would put a ‘collar’ on the price of carbon permits in order to limit market volatility.

Revenue from Cantwell and Collins’ auctions would be split two ways: 75 percent would be returned to the American people to compensate for higher energy prices, and 25 percent would be used for transition assistance and public investments, subject to annual appropriations.

Merits

The arguments for and against each framework can be divided into two categories: merits and politics.

On the merits, the nod goes to Cantwell-Collins by a comfortable margin. Its foremost advantage is simplicity: it’s less than 50 pages long (compared to about 1,500 for Kerry-Lieberman-Graham), it’s much easier than Kerry-Lieberman-Graham to understand, and would be far simpler to administer. For example, it requires no monitoring of smokestacks or verification of offsets in distant lands.

Another virtue of Cantwell-Collins is its transparency. Its permit auctions are competitive and open, and the public can readily see where all the revenue goes: 75 percent to everyone equally and 25 percent to climate-related programs. Moreover, because offsets are not allowed, financial shell games are virtually impossible. By contrast, it’s virtually impossible to tell where the money will go under Kerry-Lieberman-Graham, and financial shell games are as certain as oversized Wall Street bonuses.

A third advantage of Cantwell-Collins is its dividends. These guarantee that middle class families won’t be screwed. Indeed, a majority of households in all states will come out ahead because their dividends will exceed their higher carbon costs. This will sustain consumer spending and spur our ailing economy. It will also retain popular support for a declining cap as carbon prices rise over time.

Kerry-Lieberman-Graham does promise to return some money to consumers through savings on utility bills, but such returns will vary widely from utility to utility and will be largely unnoticed by ratepayers. Moreover, the returns won’t cover higher prices at the gas pump or the indirect costs of carbon in food and other products. And, since the returns will come in the form of lower energy bills, they’ll defeat the whole point of putting a price on carbon—to spur energy users to conserve.

Politics

Merits notwithstanding, getting 60 votes is what counts in Washington these days, and Kerry-Lieberman-Graham backers are quick to dismiss Cantwell-Collins as a political non-starter. I’m not so sure.

There are 40+ solid votes for carbon capping in almost any form; the remaining votes needed for passage must come from about a dozen centrist Democrats (most of whom represent coal-dependent states) and half a dozen moderate Republicans. Kerry, Lieberman and Graham seek to win these votes by adding to the Waxman-Markey giveaways further incentives for nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, and so-called clean coal. That certainly is one way to go, but not the only way. It also risks losing environmental support if it goes too far.

Cantwell and Collins’ appeal to moderates is based first of all on their bill’s merits. Believe it or not, there are Senators on both sides of the aisle who prefer policies that can be explained to constituents in a few sentences to Rube Goldberg schemes that can’t be explained at all. There also are Senators who would rather not help Wall Street concoct another financial bubble.

Then there are the dividends. Conservatives have derided cap-and-trade as a middle class tax hike—which, effectively, it is. But dividends flip that around—they turn an erstwhile tax into a recurring and highly visible benefit to average families that is potentially as popular as Social Security. With elections coming in 2010, that’s not a bad political move.

The strongest political argument against Cantwell-Collins is that it favors coastal states, which generate more of their electricity from hydro, nuclear, and natural gas, over Midwestern states, which rely more on coal. Those disparities exist, but are much smaller than alleged: a majority of families in all states come out ahead under Cantwell-Collins. In addition, regional disparities can be tempered with money from the 25 percent public investment pot.

The wild card in all this is President Obama. Up till now, he’s been supportive of Waxman-Markey and its offshoot because that has been the only game in town. But now that there’s a bipartisan alternative, a post-Copenhagen Obama could play a different role. Cantwell-Collins is essentially the policy Obama campaigned on—it auctions 100 percent of pollution permits and protects middle class families by returning higher carbon prices directly to them. If health care reform passes and Obama gets his mojo back, he just might push climate policy in the right direction.

And a key topic under discussion during the deliberations in Copenhagen— environmental service payment programs— will be important to the people living in the closest connection to a commons-based way of life: indigenous people and rural communities in the developing world. . What’s the fair way to compensate indigenous and rural communities for their important role in stabilizing the climate?

Colonialism and its more modern forms haven’t been kind to rural communities and their ecosystems. Globalization and its trade agreements have tended to steamroll rural enterprises by flinging borders open to imports and making it cheap and easy to extract natural resources. With their land and water gobbled up by energy, mineral and crop exports, communities’ forests and soils have been transformed into things like hydroelectric power, gold and baby carrots.

Insult to injury, this style of extractive economic development is half-justified by scapegoating communities for being lousy stewards of their natural resources, recklessly planting cornfields on steep hillsides or burning too much wood for cooking fuel. The logic has been something like: Instead of (unsustainably) growing food for family consumption, why don’t small farmers and foresters cash in on their comparative advantage and grow melons for export or lease land to transnational timber companies?

Yet, consensus is building that the gains for poor countries following this development advice have been few or negative. Now along comes another idea to help them.

The global market in climate change mitigation is still taking shape through environmental service payment instruments like carbon sequestration credits and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). Rural communities are on the cusp of being injected with a volume of foreign investment the likes of which may even surpass centuries of coffee plantations and gold mines. These new products not only offset the carbon footprint of unsustainable economic growth but will purportedly chip away at rural poverty. Many hurting communities – bleeding from failed farms, broken ecosystems and their youth migrating away to find work – are happy to take the man’s dollars to plant his eucalyptus trees on their farmland.

As with the Native Americans going to work at casinos, however, communities may have to exchange traditional livelihoods – which had put feeding the family and the nation first – for something different, say working for a wage at a biofuel or carbon sequestration plantation. Impulses towards autonomy and food sovereignty may dissipate as communities become integrated into this new economy.

It’s ugly out there at the climate change trough. On the opening day of the Copenhagen talks, a $10 billion mitigation fund was described on BBC by a developing country representative as only “enough to buy our children coffins” In preparation for the rain of resources, some countries are legislating how monies will flow – from environmental ministry to forest agency to landowners. Intra-governmental agency competition for the monies is shaping up to be fierce. Corruption antennae are perking up to detect misuse of funds as has been alleged in Mexico’s Pro Arbol reforestation program, in which up to 90% of planted trees have died and politically connected landowners received large cash payments.

International environmental NGOs are presenting their programs at the same time that corporate interests draw up their plans. It seems likely that farm and forest organizations will be secondary beneficiaries after governmental, business and non-governmental intermediaries decide what activities and which actors qualify for the funding. Grassroots associations and their federations of producers may get scraps – but not before the big boys get fat.

With power relations so askew, it’s not hard to spin pessimistic scenarios. Is there a winning scenario for rural communities and the planet?

Conservation research is showing that rural communities that live in and around them in forests are the best stewards for protecting them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we can provide rural communities with the technical and financial tools they need to better preserve both their livelihoods and ecosystems.

The Holy Grail of climate payments would be for communities to be compensated for what they do and know already – more or less. More or less because technological improvements are clearly essential – ones that many farm and forest organizations would be eager to make if they had the support.

And there’s no reason to count only on the forest sector for its contribution, even as environmental payment programs tend to be singularly focused there. Greening the food system through agroecology can make a substantial contribution to mitigating climate change – advances that land reform networks like the Via Campesina seek to make the norm. Inter-mixing annual crops with trees, reforesting watersheds, supporting local markets, reducing tillage and backing off of petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers all diminish agriculture’s substantial contribution to global warming. It is now widely believed that the same technologies that are good for climate stabilization are good for the soil.

Likewise, managing our water as a permanent commons and public trust will have a profoundly stabilizing impact on the climate. Global justice advocate Maude Barlow proposes declaring not only water, but watersheds themselves, as a commons.

These more thoughtful resource management systems and sustainable technologies might have been standard if the green revolution, water privatization and U.S. agriculture policies hadn’t provided such perverse incentives and turned things so topsy-turvy. The repair will be costly – a perfect use of climate stabilization monies. Importantly, ensuring stable land tenure, including collective titles, is part of the repair. Implementing land reform programs, often discarded as failed and anachronistic, is a friend to climate stabilization.

This then is one scenario in which climate change monies could help rural producers and the environment – without pushing farming families off the land or turning them into forest rangers for a transnational plantation.

Are the chances good that climate change mitigation programs will play out this way? Despite the long odds, I’ll roll the dice, hoping against hope that rural communities can negotiate a fair deal here. It’s the winning ticket for rural communities and the planet.

Lipietz’s speech was in French, but Jean-Pierre Laisne, a French free/libre/open source advocate and coordinator of 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, whom I recently met, graciously translated it into English. The effort, below, was well worthwhile. Lipietz offers some wonderfully insightful reflections on the nature of the commons.

I was especially excited by etymology of the word “commons.” Lipietz corrects the popoular misunderstanding that the word “commons” is Anglo-Saxon in origin; he traces it to the Norman word commun, which itself has its roots in the Latin word munus, which artfully combines two meanings: “gift” and “duty.”

Lipietz’s remarks were prompted in part by his reading of an anthology of essays about the commons (in Spanish), Genos, bytes y emisiones: bienes comunes y ciudanidad, which was edited by my good friend Silke Helfrich and published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in 2008. (For an English-language version of the essays, see Who Owns the World?.)

Lipietz’s remarks follow:

The book edited by Silke Helfrich is absolutely remarkable. Not only by the depth of theoretical syntheses, but also by the variety of examples, case studies of the commons: genetic, lakes, forests, electromagnetic spectrum, indigenous knowledge, atmosphere, computing technologies … We clearly see that this book is the result of the work of a network set up by Silke in her activity for the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Latin America. Although this network is not strictly speaking born in the Forum Social Mondial, it is a typical illustration and an example of what the FSM can achieve.

On my side, I organized a seminar in the European Parliament around the same subject, starting with the question: “Why are we fighting for free, non patent-ability of elements of algorithm in software, as we seek to defend the indigenous peoples against bio-piracy, pillage without compensation for their knowledge about biodiversity?” This book brilliantly illuminates this debate.

Let me start by saying all the good I think about it, then I will formulate few critics which I want to be constructive.

I. The commons, goods or social relationship.

What lessons are to be learned from the many contributions to this book? Fundamentally, two lessons.

First, the commons are not things, but social relations. Or more accurately, the things to which the commons relate — whether material or immaterial, grazing areas or knowledge domains — are only very rarely res nullius, that is, goods that belong to nobody and therefore goods that are likely to be over-exploited and destroyed. Those commons that we know about, and which actually are not destroyed, have always been regulated – access and usage — by social relations: forms of property, forms of authority, customary rules. The article by the ecologist Garrett Hardin published in Science in 1968, which made the commons famous, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” is largely beside the point. What it describes — overgrazing of communal pastures — could happen, but certainly not because of a lack of usage rules. This does not preclude the possibility that some common resources could be exhausted because they are not regulated — like fisheries or the atmosphere’s ability to recycle greenhouse gas emissions. But in general, society’s awareness of this over-use bring about some form of regulation.

Second, these modes of regulation of commons are extremely diverse, primarily because they apply to very different resources (from most material goods to the most intangible) and because each resource can be managed in different ways. The commons are a realm of great diversity. Case studies and many chapters in “Genos, bytes y emisione” illustrate this diversity. Let us add that the authors, whose sympathy for the commons is obvious, do not hide that this mode of management of a resource is not under any circumstance, the best or most efficient, including compared to private property. Or at least they admit that commons-based regulation of a resource may require serious improvements.

II. The deeper etymology of “commons”

But I am not here to advertise this book, though I consider him a real “textbook” for activists and students alike. I am here to make critical observations, i.e., to highlight weaknesses in order to move forward.

My first comment, my first annoyance, is the insistence, in most of the articles, that the commons is a word of English or Anglo-Saxon origins altogether! It is not English, but French — and more precisely, Norman. That is doubly important. When the Normans of William the Conqueror conquered England in 1066, they imposed an existing form of feudalism. They spoke in French of course, i.e. in a mixture of words of Latin origin and secondarily Germanic. In feudalism, the public goods or goods for public usage have two names, according to their owner: commun, which is the communal property of the peasants, and banal, which is the Lord’s property — mainly the mill, bread oven and forests. Commun is therefore a legal term of feudalism, and a term of Latin origin. [Editor’s note: All italicized words here are the original French.]

First, a word about its feudal character. If the peasants, whether serfs or free, own land in common — besides the soil on which they are attached and the lord’s land on which they must perform chores — such possession does not prevent them from having to share the fruit of their work with their lord, in the form of tax (the taille). The social relationship of commun is structured, determined and dominated by the feudal relationship. Feudalism, like capitalism, is a social organization, and as such, can never be reduced to one relationship. It is an articulation of many social relationships. Some of them may seem to us more “progressive” than others, yet they remain ancillary to a societal form of domination.

But the commun is certainly one of the most permanent, and potentially the most progressive, of all forms of social organization. Here we must invoke the Latin origin of the word. Commun comes from munus, which means both “gift” and “duty.” To receive a gift — a munus — is to be obliged to respond with a “counter-gift.” Munus is the nodal expression of what the great anthropologist Karl Polanyi called “reciprocity.”

According to Polanyi, there are three ways to socialize the work of human individuals: trade (I give to you for you to give to me); redistribution (the state collects from every one to give to everybody); and reciprocity: I give because I trust that when I need it, the society will give to me. From the word munus is evidently derived “com mun“ ( “co” meaning “together”). This is the system of donations and duties that governs what the com mun auté (“com mun ity “) has in common. This community has usually a system of political leadership of its own: the mun icipalité (“municipality”). Cipal comes from the Latin word “caput,” meaning “chief” or “head.” This chief must act with “_mun_ ificence,” offering gifts for community assistance, festivals and monuments.

Karl Marx called com mun ism a mode of production, superior to socialism (“to each according to his work”), because it is governed by the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” From socialism to communism, we go essentially from redistribution to reciprocity. Marx was well aware that reciprocity was much older than the commercial exchange and the State (which indeed appear only after several millennium of the Neolithic revolution, in Sumer and on the Nile). He spoke about a primitive communism and dreamed of communism in abundance. We, we’re dealing with commons which as we have seen above, most often exist in a subordinated position and in articulation with political power e.g. feudal power, and with the market.

There was indeed a “tragedy of the commons,” but it was the opposite of Hardin’s story. Communal lands were extended by a clearing of European forests through the early fourteenth century. When the Black Plague occurred, Europe had no more reserve of land to exploit this way and latent famine was everywhere. The plague spread by feudal wars, destroying two-thirds of the European population. It took Europe two centuries to recover, and in this process, the forms of managing land changed. The agrarian revolution, the triennial rotation and fertilization of soils could not be satisfied with the customary rules of management that forbade de facto that a peasant may improve his field for future crops. It required very different management rules. In fact, it required property rights, or at least private ownership of lands. The richest farmers initiated the Enclosure Movement for their own benefit.

III. Political power and commons

A second difficulty with this book is that it implicitly opposes or seeks to isolate the commons from the state and the market. That, unfortunately, is impossible in the complex whole that is any society. As we have just seen it, the common lands of the Middle Ages, managed as commons, were subordinated to an external political power, that of the lord. The same dynamic applies to a Saharan oasis managed as a commons; it, too, is embedded in the political power of a State, which itself may be dominated by a caste of warriors or merchant-caravans, etc.

More importantly, the regulation of a commons is often delegated to a “local state” such as a shaman, a cacique, a council of elders, a municipality, etc. The political powers governing the commons can be themselves extremely hierarchical. For example, the most basic and oldest community, the family, has probably always been organized by patriarchal social relations: the pater familias holds power over women and children, the older women hold power over young stepdaughters, etc..

The inclusion of a commons in a larger society, under the authority of a political power of a larger scope, raises the obvious question, What belongs to the common good? In this book, the Amazon is implicitly considered a commons that belongs, in part, to indigenous peoples, who use its resources and biodiversity, and secondly, to all mankind, which uses the Amazon as a planetary commons that stabilizes the climate and provides a global pool of freshwater. And what of Brazil’s claims to the Amazon?

When, on the eve of the “Earth Summit” in Rio (1992), I gave some lectures in Porto Alegre, I saw graffiti on the walls that read, “Amazona e nossa. Yankee for a !” (“The Amazon is ours, Yankee go home!”). The slogan was aimed at Hollywood stars who came to support indigenous peoples and saw the Amazon as a common good of humanity. I was indeed shocked that people of Rio Grande do Sul, mostly settled by Italian and German immigrants, claimed ownership over the Amazon, thousands of miles north! However, I do not agree with the settlers of the place called “Half Moon,” in the Amazonian foothills of Bolivia, claim to own the rich hydrocarbon resources of the subsoil, and do not want to share revenues from it with the rest of Bolivia — even though these same settlers had exploited the ores of the Sierras — another common asset — only fifty years earlier.

At most one could say that the basement of the Half Moon belongs to the Guarani under Convention 169, but neither it, nor Articles 15 and 8-d of the Convention on Biodiversity, authorize exclusive access and use to them. The state is the gatekeeper and custodian, and is obliged to obtain the prior informed consent of the local community, if granted access, while sharing the profits with this community. Today this is called a “regime of ABS” (Access & Benefit Sharing). From the moment the state apparatus is created as a mechanism for redistribution, it is expected that revenues from the operation of a locally shared resource will be redistributed nationally. Similarly, moreover, it is normal that the state and the international community should take responsibility for part of the burden for maintaining a local commons of global interest.

IV. Commons and market relations

We have just seen that the rules of access, and the share of benefits and burdens that come with managing a common resource, may represent a “stack” of various community interests. The conflicts that may arise in allocating the respective benefits and burdens, will likely become more and more important in the 21st century. One way to describe this division of responsibilities is as revenue sharing, a way of articulating the management of the commons as a set of monetary relationships, and thus, implicitly, with trade relationships. But things are more complex.

First, monetary relationships are not necessarily the same as merchant exchange. A fine imposed for improper parking in a common urban space is not a business relationship! Nor is the “dot” on a son or daughter’s forehead, as a matrimonial promise, a sale of a child or the buying of a husband or wife. (Yes, Jacob had to work a long time for Laban before he could marry his daughter Rachel, but this work reflects patriarchal relationships in that society, not merchant relationships.)

Reciprocity has a word for a monetary grant which rewards a duty ( munus ), which is expressed in the word re- mun -eration. Such payment is not a wage or a price, even if it looks like it.

Take, for example, the most directly political and bureaucratic management of the commons — the allocation of emissions quotas for greenhouse gas emissions, as part of our attempt to manage the atmosphere and its ability to recycle the greenhouse gases. In the EU, governments allocate these quotas to various industries. It can be done for free or quotas can be bought at auction, or at a flat rate that amounts to “eco-taxes.” Then quotas can be traded, and those who made a particular effort to reduce their pollution, may sell any excess emissions quotas to those who have not made that effort. Would we say that giving quotas based on actual, historic pollution levels — often known as the “grandfathering” of quotas — is more “community oriented” than the auctioning of quotas, which seems to commodify the atmosphere? On the contrary, the Green Members of the European Parliament consider the “grandfathering” of the pollution quotas as a true enclosure of commons. They fight against the right-wing ideologues and production-obsessed governments for an increasing proportion of quotas to be auctioned. In this case, the purchase of quotas should be regarded as a fine for pollution, and the resale of quotas by those who have reduced their emissions, must be regarded as remuneration. [Editor’s note: This distinction, for example, has led Ecuador and Costa Rica to consider the carbon-absorbing functions of their forests as something deserving remuneration from western nations.]

Conclusion

Those who love the commons and reciprocity rightly highlight the risks entailed by their necessary relationships with politics and the State, with money and the market. This caution should not lead them to isolate the commons from the rest of the world, however, or from the reign of the State and market. State and market are not cadavers which can be nailed into a coffin and thrown into the sea. For a very, very long time, they will continue to contaminate or threaten the reciprocal relationships that lie at the heart of the commons, with their cold logic. We can only try to reduce their importance. We must hope that reciprocal relationships will grow in importance with respect to relationships of exchange and of authority.

The Forum Social Mondial’s motto is “Another world is possible,” which is a phrase written by the French surrealist and communist poet Paul Eluard. Do not forget the rest of the verse: “Another world is possible / But it is within this one.”

Alain Lipietz, January 27, 2009.
Original article by Alain Lipietz in French can be found at http://lipietz.net/spip.php?article2344 This text is under “CopyLeft Attitude” license. http://artlibre.org/licence/lal

I am a veteran of the 1960’s New Left. I helped organize demonstrations in Minnesota against the Indochinese war and participated in small-scale efforts to build a new society from the ground up: communal living, free schools, community controlled neighborhood development.

Back in those days we had an unfortunate slogan, “Never trust anybody over thirty.” We were trying to construct a new world from scratch without realizing that in the not very distant past, there was an indigenous radical tradition flourishing right down the road. The discovery of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor movement and the cooperative commonwealth vision that animated it, gave me grounding and inspiration. Now that I think of it, Farmer-Laborites were commoning,1930’s style. Their story has direct relevance to our commons work today.

Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor movement created the most successful state-level third party in U.S. history. From its roots in 1918 as a coalition of populist farmers and an emerging labor movement, the Farmer-Labor movement became the state’s dominant political force from 1930 to 1938. Before its merger with with the Democratic party in 1944 to form the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, as it is still known in the state, the Farmer-Labor party gained three governors, four U.S. Senators, and eight members of U.S. House, and competed closely with the Republicans for majorities in the state legislature. Farmer-Labor administrations won hard-fought battles to halt farm foreclosures, aid the unemployed, regulate banking, conserve Minnesota’s lakes and forests, support cooperative enterprises and establish a progressive tax system.

The action was happening at the grass roots as well as in the halls of government. I was inspired to know that rural and urban Minnesotans by the thousands built political, economic and social institutions based on cooperative values and an enlarged vision of the common good. In turn, Minnesota’s Farmer-Laborites were drawing on a commons tradition rooted in the populist movements and early socialist experiments of the 1880’s and 90’s that extended far beyond Minnesota’s borders.

The discovery of that past made an alternative present—and future— seem possible. It still does.

Today there is a resurgence of interest in the commons. The word itself is suggestive without being prescriptive. It invites conversation. In neighborhoods and across national borders, people are creating commons-based approaches to preserving our air and water, building urban communities, rethinking economic relationships.

In his landmark book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, historian Peter Linebaugh reminds us that there is a rich commons history. That too ought to be part of the commons conversation. The story of the Cooperative Commonwealth as program, movement and metaphor is worth remembering for the insight it offers and questions it poses as we fashion our own commons history in the here and now.

The Minnesota Radical Tradition

On May 25th, 1934, Minnesota’s charismatic Farmer-Labor governor, Floyd Olson delivered a fiery speech to the delegates assembled at the Farmer-Labor Party’s state convention in St. Paul. Olson had reason to be fiery. After the high hope of FDR’s first 100 days, reform energy had subsided. Republican opposition to the New Deal and the more radical Farmer-Labor reform program at the state level was unabated. After some signs of recovery in 1933, the cold grip of the Depression tightened once again. Olson concluded his speech with fighting words that delighted his audience. “ I am what I want to be… I am a radical.”

The next day convention delegates endorsed a platform that expressed what they wanted to be. The Cooperative Commonwealth platform of 1934 deserves a place along side the 1898 Omaha Platform of the Populist Party as the clearest statement of indigenous American radicalism: an eclectic mixture of the prairie populist, democratic socialist, and progressive reform traditions. In a dramatic preamble, the platform’s drafters declared that only a “complete reorganization of our social structure in to a cooperative common wealth will bring economic security and prevent a prolonged period of further suffering among the people.”

We declare that capitalism has failed and that immediate steps must be taken by the people to abolish capitalism in a peaceful and lawful, manner and that a new sane and just society must be established, a system in which all the natural resources, machinery of production, transportation, and communications shall be owned by the government and operated democratically for the benefit of all the people, and not for the benefit of the few.

The platform went on to support, “public ownership of all mines, water power, transportation and communications systems, banks, packing plants, factories, and all public utilities.” It called for a state takeover of idle factories to employ “idle citizens and distribute the products to the needy.” It pledged state support for consumer cooperatives, a two-year extension of the mortgage moratorium on farm closures, social insurance programs run by the state and operated without profit, and a steep tax on large incomes and inheritances.

The 1934 platform was an expression of a rising social movement. The delegates who assembled in St. Paul were not simply ideologues, operating as isolated individuals. They were often members of labor unions, cooperatives, farm organizations, and year round active Farmer-Labor clubs. The programs they adopted represented both the expression of a deep popular radical tradition and the aspirations of thousands of Minnesotans laid low by the Depression.

The bold statement in the preamble, “Capitalism has failed,” was more then a visionary prognosis, it was a description of the obvious. Capitalism had failed hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans in towns and cities, in shops and farms across the state. It was time, the delegates felt, to get on with the reconstruction work.

Not all Minnesotans agreed. The adoption of the cooperative commonwealth platform set off a storm of media denunciation. Seeing visions of electoral redemption, leaders of Minnesota’s badly weakened Republican Party fanned the flames. Even Farmer-Labor officials began to wonder if the movement’s Magna Charta might prove to be the party’s last will and testament.

Soon after the convention, staffers at Farmer-Labor Party headquarters sequestered the original platform document and issued an “annotated version.” The public ownership planks were explained away as ultimate goals that in any case would require national action. State ownership of electric power would require a vote of the people; no need to worry about that either. The platform was a momentary indiscretion; an object warning of what happens when radical enthusiasm trumps political pragmatism.

Or, at least, that is the version most historians have presented. But a closer look reveals that Farmer-Laborites continued to campaign on cooperative commonwealth themes throughout the election of 1934 and promote the expansion of cooperatives and public ownership through 1938.

The Minnesota Leader, the official voice of the movement, published story after story illustrating the successful application of cooperative commonwealth principles. Its writers saw expression of the common wealth idea in Scandinavian social democracy, small-town cooperatives, municipally owned electric utilities, and CCC conservation programs. Not content to limit its scope to 1930’s or the Mid-West, the Leader featured mini-histories and cultural lessons, like the feature story headlined “Co-OP Commonwealth Reared Inca Culture 400 years earlier.”

If some party leaders were nervous about the reach of the 1934 platform’s embrace of public ownership, there was no retreat from the general principle. Week in and week out, The Leader’s masthead featured this quote form the FLP’s statement of principles: “The Farmer-Labor Party aims to establish a system of public ownership of monopolized industries.” And next to it: “The people can not effectively control something they do not own.”

What ever reservations Governor Olson had about some of the platform specifics, he applied his renowned oratorical skills in support of the cooperative commonwealth theme. In a major radio address later that summer, he described the cooperative commonwealth as an “ideal society” which would “bring about a more equitable distribution of the fruits of labor to all the people. He went on to explain basic principles of cooperative economics. “Under cooperative laws the dividends paid into surplus are limited, and instead of paying out profits in the form of dividends to the few, they would be paid out in the form of increased wages and lower consumer costs to the many.”

Olson, like many Farmer-Laborites were struck by the contrast between the vastness of the nation’s wealth and productive capability and the inability of economic system to deliver that wealth to the American people. The privatization of the economic system at the top, had left the farmer, the small business owner and the worker left out. The task, the governor asserted was to transform a system that rewarded the few to a system based on production for use; to in a phrase, harness wealth for the commonwealth.

Nor was the governor alone in invoking cooperative commonwealth language. In May, the Minnesota Leader hailed a national survey published by Literary Digest in which over 20,000 ministers, priests and rabbis endorsed a cooperative commonwealth system. When asked to choose between economic systems, 5 % of the survey respondents favored capitalism or “rugged individualism” and 88% were for a cooperative commonwealth. Of those favoring a cooperative commonwealth, 51 % said a drastically reformed capitalism would be the best means to achieve it, 28% were for socialism. The survey was not scientific. It demonstrated, however, the common use of the commonwealth metaphor and the flexibility in which progressives of the day employed it.

As a set of ideas the cooperative commonwealth is best understood as a world view, rather than a specific political program. But world view divorced from practice is a hollow thing—what we used to call in the 1960’s a “head trip.” It was the experience of commoning that grounded the world view and gave it social and political power. This included the wide-spread experience of rural (and some urban) Minnesotans with cooperatives.

Beginning with the populist movements of the late 1800’s farmers combined economic with political organizing. Most of the early attempts at building rural cooperatives failed, but by 1930 in Minnesota and the Upper Northwest, farmers had built strong and grain and dairy cooperatives to gain market-power for the products they produced. It was consumer cooperatives rather that came to dominate the cooperative movement. CENEX organized buying clubs for joint purchase of key farm supplies. Midland Cooperative Wholesale sold petroleum products and automotive supplies to cooperative oil associations. The Northern Cooperative League, rooted in the radical Finnish immigrant tradition, operated dozens of coop stores in Minnesota’s Iron Range and Lake Superior region. By 1935, Minnesota had 2,886 consumer coops with a combined membership of 531,180—the most in the nation.

In September, 1936, Lowell Gunderson, a visiting New York Times reporter, gave his readers an almost breathless description of Minnesota’s coop boom.

One buys apples at little country coops, fills his gas tank at cooperative service stations, wanders through huge cooperative medical and auditing talks over cooperative telephones, visits well furnished cooperative medical nd auditing offices, sleeps in a cooperative boarding house, eats in a cooperative café, reads tombstones in a cooperative cemetery. And one ends up a trifle amazed. On the surface these enterprises look like any other business, yet in method and principle they are in direct contrast.

Not all coop members saw themselves as building a cooperative common wealth. Members of the Republican orientated Farm Bureau s tended to see cooperatives as strictly a business proposition. Midland coop organizers, on the other hand, preached the gospel of consumer cooperation with an almost religious fervor.

Some cooperative organizations affiliated directly with the Farmer-Labor Association—the constituency-based organization that formed the base for the Party. They participated in state government efforts to expand the range of cooperative organizing, including an ambitious plan to organize rural electric cooperatives. Some shared the view of nation’s most influential coop advocate, Dr. J.P Warbasse. He saw consumer cooperation as an antidote to the “fading state,” where individuals acting collectively will administer the goods and services necessary to a modern economy.

Whatever the specific ideology of cooperative members, the cooperative experience itself offered rural Minnesotans the opportunity to develop democratic muscle. The local cooperative provided an alternative route to civic leadership without having to adopt the values of the small town Chamber of Commerce fraternity. In the case of Minnesota’s Farmer –Labor movement, cooperative organization also provided on the job training and social relationships for effective political leadership.

In the end, Governor Olson was elected to a third term in 1934 after the issuing of the radical platform. The workers of the Twin Cities and Iron Range voted more heavily Farmer-Labor then ever before. The populist grain farmers in the Red River Valley and West Central counties continued their support. The Farmer Labor party lost the small business vote and some of the more prosperous mixed-crop farmers in the South East of the state. Perhaps a less radical platform could have won more votes in 1934. Or perhaps the energetic and forthright presentation of a bold social vision energized a grass roots based looking for a way out of the Great Depression.

In any case, The Farmer-Labor party and the larger Farmer-Labor movement it represented , would continue to be a major force in Minnesota politics throughout the 1930’s. Nor was the impact of cooperative commonwealth thinking limited to Minnesota. Similar political groupings, though on a more modest level, were operating in throughout the Upper Midwest and Northwest. For a brief time, there was even talk of a national Cooperative Commonwealth Party to challenge FDR’s New Deal.

The most enduring political legacy however, occurred in Saskatchewan where the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, formed in the 1932, went on to dominate provincial government from 1944 until 1960, when it became the New Democratic Party. One legacy of the commonwealth tradition is Canada’s national health insurance systems, which was pioneered in Saskatchewan during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

What’s In a Memory?

Social movements develop in the space between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Movements are rooted in the present and stretch out to fashion an alternative future. But the present itself is deeply influenced by the past. In the 1930’s capitalism had failed. The Cooperative Commonwealth vision offered a view—though hardly a road map—to one version of that alternative future. The New Deal welfare state became that alternative future. In promoting the common wealth, Farmer-Laborites helped create something more modest; a state political culture which featured (in U.S. terms at least) an unusually strong emphasis on the common good.

Today we are facing another crises in the system. The neo-conservative drive to “enclose” just about everything has radically weakened public institutions, threatened our common natural resources and damaged our economy. The crisis is both structural and ideological. We need to think and act anew. The Farmer-Labor movement engaged thousands in re-thinking their social world and acting to create a new world. How did they do it? What can reflection on this—and many other social movements—teach us about the dynamics and patterns of movement building.

There are also more specific questions for today’s commoners:

*How were the cooperatives organized?

*Where do they fit in a broader commons framework?

*What does cooperative history suggest about the relationship between scale, social participation and economic efficiency?

*Where does public ownership fit in the contemporary commons vision?

*Are there dynamics in earlier experiments with municipal ownership that can be helpful to constructing a commons practice today?

*What public policies support or get in the way of building the commons?

*Are there lessons to learn in the fight over control of rural electrification for today’s efforts to construct locally controlled renewable energy technologies?

*Farmer-Laborites (and their populist forebears) struggled for public ownership of the banking system. Are there dynamics from that experience that might help us challenge the hyper commodification of money today?

Questions like these rarely yield direct answers. We can’t put past experience on a time machine, dust it off, and adopt it unchanged for today. But asking the questions can shine a light on persistent patterns and dynamics. Reflecting on them can provide insight to our common work today.

Finally, this history is important for what it suggests about language. The cooperative commonwealth was a powerfully evocative phrase. Like the commons itself, it was suggestive, but not definitive. The worldview it conjured was roomy—a big tent that could hold working class socialists, urban progressives, rural populists. Indeed the challenge of the 1934 platform was that it gave programmatic flesh to a warm and largely accepted metaphor. Too much detail, thank you.

The meanings words convey can connect a latent past with a changing present. The cooperative commonwealth lost its conjuring magic because the world changed. The world is changing again.

What does cooperation mean today? Where do we see it? What is wealth anyway? And what wealth is—or ought to be— common? Inviting reflection on these questions is itself a key part of commons work. As a writer for the Farmer-Labor Leader put it back in 1936, “Don’t envy the old timers who got their experience in building the foundations of the movement. Get in yourself for the building that is ahead.”

I was delighted to encounter just such a commons-friendly re-imagining of the world by James Bernard Quilligan, a long-time analyst and administrator in international development and a former advisor to such politicians as Pierre Trudeau, Francois Mitterand, Olof Palme, Willy Brandt, Jimmy Carter and HRH Prince El Hassan. Writing in the fall/winter issue of Kosmos journal, Quilligan describes the failures of postwar multilateral institutions, the enormous potential of the commons and a sweeping vision for a new commons-based system of governance at many levels.

Below, I summarize Quilligan’s visionary essay, People Sharing Resources: Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons. However, I encourage everyone to read the entire piece for a richer treatment of some provocative, thoughtful ideas.

Quilligan starts with a critique of the problem:

We have begun to see that the benefits of perpetual economic growth are not compensating for the vast damages and risks they create — from energy insecurity, global warming, ecological degradation and species loss to hunger, poverty, debt and financial meltdown. We’re also realizing that neither the private sphere of property and trade nor the public sphere of government provision and distribution — which created these problems to begin with — are capable of solving them.

The structures of nation-states and multilateral institutions have made it difficult for governments even to recognize the reality of global common goods, Quilligan writes. That’s because societies have a “pervasive commitment to free markets in driving global economic integration and sovereign reciprocity in making global decisions.”

As a result, all sorts of global commons — things that are neither private goods nor public goods — are not managed responsibly, fairly or sustainably. Fisheries, forests, ecosystems, genetic life forms and species, seeds, climate and atmosphere, not to mention the airwaves, Internet, cultural traditions, ethnobotanical knowledge, and much else — all of these resources have little standing in public policy because they are neither private property nor public goods. They are common goods, which are either gifts of nature or the creations of social communities.

Quilligan proposes new forms of property management for these commons through what he calls “co-governance” and “co-production.” Co-governance means that commoners at the lowest possible level of authority take over decision-making activities that historically have been performed by the state. Co-production brings together resource users and resource producers and providers through open social networks — not as “sellers” and “buyers,” but as co-producers. By establishing self-governing communities of co-production, the commons “formalizes the process of just governance and democratic oversight by closing the gap between resource users and resource managers, producers and providers.”

The process is highly appealing, and works well, because it is all about people “finding new identity and significance through sharing information, seeking consensus-based solutions, keeping value in their communities and distributing the benefits that arise form the use of commons resources.” Many of the dysfunctions of traditional government bureaucracies and governance can be avoided.

Quilligan sees commons-based governance, now occurring throughout the world in countless circumstances, as the basis for a new form of multilateralism: “The co-production of global common goods can now be facilitated through direct collaboration between local resource users and multilateral institutions.”

To facilitate this new order, governments must recognize commons rights for commoners. “Commons rights differ from human rights and civil rights,” writes Quilligan, “because they arise, not through the legislation of a state, but through a customary or emerging identification with an ecology, a cultural resource area, a social need or a form of collective labor.”

He also calls for the creation of social charters, or “commons trusts,” that establish specific legal authority for people to help each other manage and produce what each of them needs. By having legal control of commons resources, trust managers can “keep the value created through the commons within the commons,” and so check the harmful effects of state-supported capitalism that we now suffer from.

A system of commons trusts would benefit multiple parties, Quilligan writes: “Private industry flourishes from the surplus resources which are rented from commons trusts, the socially marginalized and vulnerable receive a subsistence income from the state, and the primary assets of the commons are preserved and regenerated.”

Under commons trusts, value would not be based on the financial value of common assets in the marketplace, but on the “preservation of commons resources and the resilience of the system that manages and produces them…..Hence long-term wealth arises, not through consumer demand, investment or capital accumulation, but in the enhancement of the carrying capacity of the global commons to support life and life systems, expressed through sustainable choice.”

Perhaps the most bracing idea that Quilligan proposes is a new sort of “commons reserve currency.”

Modern societies are locked into a permanent growth imperative — with disastrous consequences for the Earth — Quilligan argues, because of the current system of privatized credit. Banks and financial institutions are constantly pushing individuals and businesses to borrow money. But this debt and the interest on it cannot possibly be repaid except through relentless and perpetual economic growth. This is one reason that markets are constantly seeking to monetize (“extract value from”) non-market realms such as ecosystems, genes, nano-scale matter, social relationships, time, etc. New market enclosures are driven by the need to repay debt and increase returns to capital.

This structural imperative of modern economies can no longer be physically sustained, however The Earth is finite, and the approach of Peak Oil and the limited capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon, require us to find new approaches.

One way out of this quandary, Quilligan suggests, is to treat the money system and individual purchasing power as a social commons instead of a private profit center. He envisions the creation of a new international currency whose value is pegged to a “basket of global common goods as resource reserves.” These reserves for the currency would include natural resources such as air and water quality, ecosystem health and biological diversity, as well as cultural resources such as indigenous wisdom, household work and the arts. It would also include social resources such as economic output and income distribution.

This new currency would help stabilize and democratize the control of money. Instead of our current system of privately administered debt, which requires infinite, Earth-destroying growth, we could convert to an equity-backed system of currency that benefits all sectors of society and nature itself.

A new international currency based on global common assets as reserves “would generate a broad measure of common wealth and well-being that is not based on productivity, profit or interest, but on the perpetual vitality and continuous adaptation of local resources to support a good quality of life for all human beings….It would mean using our commons-based capital — cultural, social, intellectual, nature, genetic and material — as collateral for an equity-based global reserve system that issues credit underpinned by these resources.”

An ambitious scheme, obviously. But Quilligan helps us envision structural solutions that can work over the long term, rather than resorting to Band-Aids. Quilligan’s scenario has the unique virtue of being comprehensive in scope, analytically rigorous and conceptually coherent — with the commons as a philosophical centerpiece.

There is not only virtue, but necessity, in pursuing a holistic vision. Quilligan sets forth the inexorable logic:

We cannot end the financial crisis without a new monetary system.

We cannot create a new monetary system without creating long-term incentives for solving the ecological and energy crises.

We cannot create long-term incentives to solve the ecological and energy crises without a low-carbon system of production and trade.

We cannot create a low-carbon system of production and trade without a new multilateral system of governance.

We cannot create a new multilateralism without a total redefinition of wealth.

Now there’s something to ponder. Read the whole essay here.