Could this be the herald of another political economy based on abundance, not scarcity and greed? We can help nature to restore itself, cut down emissions, our consumption of mass manufactured and designed-to-break-down crap. We can radically curtail speculative ventures and fictitious commodities. Slash inequality from the bottom up, spend our time away from bullshit jobs to reimagine the world. Use this free time to reconnect, cherish our aliveness, break out of containment, care for each other, grieve what we’ve lost and celebrate what we still have.
We do have the frameworks, we have been creating this capacity for quite a while. Here I refer to the Commons. Simply put, the Commons are living systems to meet shared needs. As old as humanity itself and as new as the latest trends in decentralized technology, the Commons are best understood as a verb, not a noun; more action than static. A commons needs three elements:
1. A resource (natural or human-made)
2. A community to steward it
3. The community-determined rules to care for it
Examples include cooperatively managed forests, water distribution irrigation systems, social currencies, Free/Libre and Open-Source Software, self organized urban spaces, distributed manufacturing networks and so much more. As George Monbiot describes, the most inspiring and effective reactions to the Covid-19 crisis are not coming from markets or states, but from the Commons. Often invisibilized, the practices of the commons offer fairer economic and human frameworks to meet our needs, especially in challenging times.
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