What is the Future of the Commons in an Increasingly Centralized and Privatized World?
Source: Glenn Halog
The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.
- Mahatma Gandhi
The areas of life that need reform and reimagination include money, energy, food, healthcare, education, and governance. All of these areas are complex systems that are vital to quality human living and a sustainable world, yet only when they are in right relationship with the unique needs of the environment, people, and contexts that they operate in. Different people have different health needs. Different lands produce different crops and livestock. We see this very clearly with the absolute disaster that chemical-based monoculture farming has brought to farmers and countries all over the world, under the auspices of elite “philanthropic” agendas of fixing food insecurity.
Yet perhaps the most important aspect of a world that serves life is that centralized power and other governance structures only scale to certain levels. The public commons are protected, where the people play an authentic role in the design of community and government to meet the needs of complex problems. Cultural and natural resources are shared with everyone, and not necessary owned by any one entity or person.
Shareable, one of my favorite media platforms, regularly writes about the importance of the Commons and the gift, sharing economy:
Commons are often associated with natural resources like the oceans and forests — areas that belong to everyone. But commons are not just resources. They are not simply Wikipedia pages or the city grounds used for urban gardening. They comprise of a resource, a community, and a set of social protocols. Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system — any resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work. The commons offer a powerful way to re-conceptualize governments, economics, and global policies at a time when the existing order is incapable of reforming itself. The most urgent task is to expand the conversation about the commons and to ground it in actual practice. The more that people have personal, lived experiences with commoning of any sort, the greater the public understanding will be.
Although I consider myself to be new to the world of deep political shadows facing humanity today, here’s what I’m learning. Currently, we are moving further and further away from protecting the Commons, or at least creating spaces where people can get a taste of what the Commons looks like. Neoliberal agendas of globalization are wreaking havoc all over the world, exploiting people and natural resources for profit. Our currency system is centralized by corporate banks who inflate our money systems, cheapening our labor and maximizing shareholder profits over the people (and quite literally the peace within and between countries, thanks to the major role that central banking plays in how wars are created). Our information sphere and digital commons are diminishing rapidly, with ongoing censorship of alternative voices and corporate ownership of media systems. Investors and national governments are snapping up land that people have used for generations. All over the world, what was once the Commons are now being monetized with the expansion of private property rights over water, seeds, public infrastructures, public spaces, and even the human genome.
Something relatively new in my political awareness is how the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) use debt to force developing world countries to adopt policies that benefit the elites running these institutions. This was made explicit in a leaked US Army document written in 2008, which states that these institutions are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war” and as “weapons” in terms of influencing “the policies and cooperation of state governments.” For example, Argentina has had an annual inflation rate of 192% since 1944 and has taken out 21 loans from the IMF since 1956. Despite the IMF failing to steer Argentina in the right direction, it’s equally devastating that Argentinean senators recently approved a $45 billion bailout deal earlier this year with the IMF, where they are forcing the Argentine government to actively discourage the use of alternative currencies like bitcoin in order to “safeguard financial stability." As we transition further into the Digital Age, forcing the Argentine people into even more debt while actively preventing them from accessing alternative decentralized currencies to escape inflation is absolutely tragic, and clearly not in service to the actual needs of the Argentine people.
The UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
Of increasing concern to the future of the Commons is the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 different SDGs that encompass every facet of our life: energy usage, healthcare, travel, food, and more.
This will be accomplished by enforcing “policy coordination and policy coherence” constructed from the “knowledge” of “public-private and civil society partnerships.” These “partnerships” will deliver the SDGs. Even more worrisome is that these policies are created and controlled by the very bankers and think-tanks that infiltrated the environmental movement decades ago.
Whitney Webb and Iain Davis are two of the few journalists talking about these SDGs in their new investigative series Sustainable Debt Slavery and UHC2030: The United Nations’ Global Public-Private Partnership For Healthcare:
Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power. This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.
Furthermore, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”
Instead of a movement that leans on the Commons to address the local and global issues of our times, we are seeing the increasing centralization of power through the merging of the private-public sector. Multinational corporations and banks lead policy agenda, and governments enact and enable these policies under the guise of “sustainability” and “climate change.” Webb adds:
Governments will tax their populations, increasing deficits and national debt where necessary, to create financial slush funds that private multinational corporations, philanthropic foundations and NGOs can access in order to distribute their SDG compliance-based products, services and policy agendas. The new SDG markets will be protected by government sustainability legislation, which is designed by the same “partners” who profit from and control the new global SDG-based economy.
Embedded in these SDGs is the conversion of the Commons into natural assets, where the financialization of nature enables the natural world, with all of its abundant resources and ecosystems, to be seen as a service that can be licensed, bought, and sold for profit. So open strip mining and coal-fired power stations may impact conservation and sustainability, but if you can negotiate the license with whoever might be funding it, you can carry on with the destruction of the environment with a little bit of offsetting or modifying. This essentially sets up the stage for more massive land grabbing via the financialization of natural resources (including the world's oceans) using the guise of a climate crisis as a justification for their agendas.
Greenwashing at its finest.
Growing up, I was told that the UN was a heroic international coordination of leaders dedicated to maintaining peace and security around the world. However, upon learning that the UN was largely created by the private sector, including the Rockefeller family who donated the land on which the UN headquarters sits and is known for promoting policies that expand and entrench global governance, one must question the real motives behind these “philanthropic” elite efforts. With Bill Gates being the biggest private owner of farmland and the second largest donor to World Health Organization, we become more vulnerable to billionaires having increasing global authority and control over the people in the name of public health, food security, or basically whatever we want to hear that they claim they will address.
As Davis articulates, it doesn’t matter if you believe in the climate crisis or not. Much of the actual plans of the SDGs do very little to address the root causes of problems that are contributing to the destruction of our planet. Yet we may not notice this in our attachment to woke buzzwords that speak to a utopian world, like climate change, sustainability, and the “green” revolution. There’s also so much fear mongering about climate change that we become so easy to manipulate, instead of being critical thinkers about what’s behind these policies.
Is a global governance system going to serve the Commons? Absolutely not. Will it serve the bankers and billionaires of the world who are engineering their version of what a sustainable future looks like? Absolutely. Part of this engineering is creating and fueling circumstances that impact people’s lives so greatly that people will be so embroiled in trying to survive and put food on the table that it won’t be as important to question the deeper abuses at play.
Yet I’m committed to continue listening and discerning. Questioning authority. And never losing sight of the greater good in the face of absolute corruption. In an interesting reflection by Robert Malone, he suggests that the destruction of civilization from centralized governance systems could give birth to self-organizing, decentralized movements:
Seeking to look at this in the “big picture” sense, monopolistic or totalitarian practices create revolutions. Basically, under monopolies (corporate or political), there are strong incentives to eliminate competition in order to insure continuity - continuity of profit (cash cow), or continuity of concentrated political power (totalitarianism). The consequence is that, over time, the gap between the current solution (to whatever the core problem in question is) and the theoretical optimal solution (ergo the unmet need) grows larger and larger. In an open, decentralized organizational structure, typically multiple solutions are continually being brought forth and tested, and so the tension of that gap tends to get resolved before the gap gets too large. This creates an environment where the “disruptive events” or discontinuities get resolved more as a series of “evolutionary” bumps in the road rather than as revolutions. But if the forces of monopolistic or totalitarian controls are allowed free reign, then these discontinuities between current and optimal solutions grow larger and larger over time, and at some point the tension between the current solution and the unmet need get resolved abruptly, to which resolution (if the gap was large enough) we apply the term “revolution”. Technological revolution, business revolution, social revolution, or political revolution.
We can learn a lot from this history, and in particular we can learn from what came afterwards. Basically, after a fairly brief “dark age”, history records the rise of the Greek city-state organization exemplified by the pinnacle of Athens and the Athenian political system which is often considered the birthplace of much of what we define as “Democracy”. I suggest that what the Athenian system of yore really represented was a locally decentralized solution to political organization and management. Out of the destruction of civilization wrought by the catastrophic failure of global centralized totalitarian political governance systems emerged the decentralized, self-assembling system of the Athenian city-state.
We’ve been psychologically conditioned to wait for a political savior to fix everything; yet even if that one real savior did come, I would highly doubt that they would have the power to create change, especially since almost every government agency has been captured and bought out by special interests.
So what would a parallel system look like that honors the Commons and democratic organizing, and not global elite agendas that want to financialize and own everything? I sense that the system will be about educating the masses about what’s really going on, one conversation or blog post at a time, to help awaken our slumbering humanity. Finding ways to stop using systems that benefit centralized governance systems, and therefore disempower the Commons. Creating and transitioning to alternative currency systems like the gift economy or cryptocurrency. Investing in challenging dialogue across our differences that allows us to heal the manufactured social division being hoisted on us by the powers that be. Thinking about each other and creating grassroots networks of mutual aid efforts and cooperatives.
What comes up for you?
