Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons

Activist and scholar David Bollier (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, US) will explain why the commons is a powerful paradigm for peer provisioning and democratic governance, largely outside of the market or state. Far from a “tragedy” as Garrett Hardin famously asserted, commons are highly generative. They enable freedom without the repression of others, fairness without bureaucratic control, togetherness without compulsion, and sovereignty without nationalism.

In this talk, Bollier will briefly review the scholarly history of the commons, the under-explored phenomena of the enclosure, and the promise of the commons as it plays out in countless areas of life, from land trusts and community-supported agriculture to open source software and Wikipedia to traditional forestry and alternative currencies. As the market/state system struggles to deal with many of our most urgent crises, many loose networks focused on the commons are demonstrating that self-organized communities can provide effective structural solutions.