We began our class as we always do, introducing Radical Sunday School and how we like to manage our sessions, as well as with a brief check-in. With that out of the way, we left the floor for our facilitator to speak.
The facilitator started off with the disclaimer that they realised during the preparation of the session that there are two main topics:
- access to nature/land and the disconnection from it (specifically the decline of commons and rise of privatisation in our neo-liberal world)
- communal management of ressources and how to succeed in it
They offered to the group to would bring in elements from both topics but leave it up to everyone in which direction the session is going.
They further mentioned it was their first time to facilitate a session, that they are curious how it will go and expressed the intention to spend the first half talking about more theoretical bits (by asking questions) and focusing more on applications and uses in the second half.
The first question the facilitator offered to the group was:
Think about your last time in nature. Have you recently walked in a natural place that wasn’t visibly built or owned by someone? How did that make you feel?
We had a number of responses to this question, ranging from people’s experiences participating in forest occupations (particularly a recent one in Ghent), to taking vacations in the mountains, to one person who spoke of their involvement in the 2015 occupation of the Maagdenhuis building nominally “owned” by the University of Amsterdam. As this person understood their involvement, the entire occupation was an exercise in finding new ways to treat space as a commons – this occupied/liberated building was itself a space that the entire community needed to decide what to do with, rather than something owned by any individual or institution.
Our facilitator then reflected on the strange emotions of guilt and stress that they would often find themselves feeling when they were out in nature and suddenly came upon a NO TRESPASSING sign. Particularly, the irrational weight of the fear of doing something wrong in a context with no obvious reason for it stood out here and is an example of how detached and irrationally disconnected we are from nature and rational/practical thought regarding it.
This reflection encouraged a number of others to speak up about their own experiences. We heard from someone from the UK, who explained that it’s not uncommon to see people who are “trespassing” getting attacked by local farmers. Worse still, this kind of violence is usually ignored by local authorities, creating a system of vigilantism that ends up enforcing property rights.
The facilitator then told us about a UK initiative called “Right to Roam” and recommended reading “The Book of Trespass“, written by one of the main people involved in the “Right to Roam” movement. It highlights the English struggle regarding land ownership from many different perspectives and across types of nature and across centuries. According to statistics mentioned in the “Book of Tresspass”, approximately 60% of the forests in the European Union are privately owned. In England, you only have a right of access to 8% of the land, and uncontested rights to 3% of the rivers. The facilitator mentioned to not know about the situation in the Netherlands and was approached by someone in the break who had checked that and found out that there is no “public” land in the Netherlands, it either belongs to private people or the state/crown.
Another participant was reminded of how in the Dutch province of Tilburg, they’d seen signs telling them they could only walk across a certain patch of land from sunrise to sunset. Another pointed out that sometimes, these kinds of regulations surrounding times when you can access land are related to laws about conserving nature. As the facilitator pointed out, however, there’s a question of who is involved in writing those laws.
All these questions lead another person to ask a more philosophical question: Where can you draw the line between public and private ownership? Is that 8% of EU land referring to land owned by a state, rather than an individual? What about conservancy foundations? If they buy up land to keep it free of people, is that still owned land?
According to the facilitator, yes: In these statistics, land owned by nature foundations like these is considered “owned”, and therefore not part of the 8%. They then turned the question back to us: even if we agree that protecting nature from pollution, human disturbance (especially also in the case of wildlife migration), and these sorts of things is important, are big signs with “no trespassing” on them the right way to manage land? As an alternative, they asked, what about trying to communicate with communities and visitors about the reasons that we would want certain restrictions in place? As they pointed out, part of commons management, according to Ostrom, is having a feeling of shared responsibility. If we don’t communicate about our values, and instead just put up signs and fences, aren’t we undermining that feeling?
This talk of putting up fences reminded one visitor about the story of a commonly used bike path in Soest (also in the Netherlands). For years, they explained, people coming through the area would use a particular bike path that ran through privately owned land. Indeed, according to Dutch law, it’s not legal to restrict access to these paths if they’ve been commonly used for some number of years. Despite this, the landowner decided one day to put up a fence and prevent people riding their bikes through. After many years of people jumping the fence, or tearing it down, or other kinds of vandalism, the landowner was brought to court and lost! And yet still, the Gemeente hasn’t enforced the court ruling, and the fence stays up. [citation still needed]
The second question offered by the facilitator was the following:
Who of you has ever heard the narrative before that humans are inherently selfish and that self-organised systems are bound to fail – how did that make you feel?
Looking for examples of common resource management, one person brought up the difficulties of living with roommates: often, when a common room like a kitchen gets dirty, there is a kind of reaction to throw up your hands and say “ugh, it’s the tragedy of the commons, it’s impossible to live together without this kind of thing!”
Another scholar who’d lived in Norway brought up that in that country, there are a number of common sense rules of thumb that people follow regarding how many mushrooms they can harvest in the wild per season: roughly, you’re allowed to take about as many mushrooms as you can hold in two hands. Apparently, in Italy by contrast, there are much more concrete laws restricting the mushroom harvest. Often times, people will say that the reason for this is that Norway is a large, sparsely populated country, and if there were more people, they’d need more laws like in Italy, or else people would over-harvest mushrooms.
The facilitator then took the time to introduce the theoretical assumption of the “Tragedy of the Commons” and the work of Eleanor Ostrom.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a concept/narrative made famous by Garrett Hardin in 1968. He used the following example: “A pasture is used jointly by shepherds, everyone is allowed to keep as many cattle on the pasture as they want. Logically, each shepherd will now drive as many animals as possible to the pasture to sell them afterwards. But if everyone acts in this way, the pasture will be quickly grazed and destroyed in the long term – and no longer usable for any of the shepherds.” According to Hardin, this means that if ressources are commonly organised, this leads necessarily to chaos and inequality. Humans are inherently selfish and this trend can only be prevented if ressources are managed from above by one expert leader. This ideology goes of course very well in line with the neoliberal practices that started becoming stronger in the 1960s. BUT here is a small detail: this is only a theory and was never proven to be right. In fact, Elinor Ostrom made it her life’s work to show that the tragedy of the commons is merely made up and that humans, when organizing themselves in communities who make common use of ressources, find many different and creative ways of managing the group and its goods. She and her research group identified eight core principles, that guarantee smooth communal ressource management. Amongst those are transparency, a stable community, clear rules (no rules, mind you – even though that is an intriguing thought my itself). Most of all, it is important to point out that custom-made solutions are the key to well-functioning systems according to Ostrom.
As a third question, the facilitator asked:
Can you think of examples of common resource management in your life? What worked well there, what didn’t?
A number of examples of self-/community-organized spaces immediately came to mind: the squatted social center where we were holding the class was brought up by someone in the room. The place only operates due to the broader community taking responsibility to keep the building clean, the schedule full of social events, and the donation jar full.
In a more personal example, someone else brought up the example of their housing situation: they live in a dormitory-style living arrangement, and all of the residents on the floor share the responsibility of keeping the floor clean. One day, they received an email from the company that owns the property telling them that they’d soon be appointed a “floor manager” to organize cleaning. They refused, and for a short while were able to manage the floor themselves. Even still, they noticed that in the absence of a formal “manager”, the people on their floor would unconsciously reproduce a hierarchy: some of them took on more responsibility for cleaning, or telling others to clean, and whenever one of these “pseudo-managers” left for a vacation, the floor would quickly become a mess again. As a few others pointed out, this is precisely what anarchists say happens in all our spaces: when you’re socialized in a hierarchical society, you need to put in quite a lot of work to “unlearn” those habits.
As another participant pointed out, however, there’s no reason to focus exclusively on spaces that call themselves “anarchist”: Ostrom’s initial research was about all sorts of social arrangements trying to manage common resources. She looked into, for example, how water companies in California would make deals with each other about how to share coverage in an area. These weren’t self-aware anarchists trying to limit hierarchy, they were capitalist firms who chose to cooperate, rather than compete. She also studied how taxi drivers in Mombasa developed a system of negotiations between each other in order to share the number of riders they’d take on, so that everyone got a roughly fair amount of business.
This example of taxi drivers reminded another participant of a massive strike that took place in the 1990s in Hungary. When the government began to liberalize the price of gasoline, this caused a huge amount of anguish for average people. There were strikes all over the country, but the biggest actions came from the taxi unions, who were already practiced at coordinating together, just like the cabbies in Mumbasa. Without too much initial planning, they were able to coordinate their cars together to shut down streets across the country in support of other striking workers.
This kind of traffic-related commons management reminded another participant of the gilets jaunes or Yellow vest protesters in France, who would use roundabouts (nominally unowned parts of public infrastructure) as social centres from which to organize their protests.
As a final point before taking a break, the facilitator pointed out the emotional or affective side of commoning: much of the process of commoning relies on the shared feelings of connection or responsibility that communities feel for a space (or any other common resource). One of the participants, who went to an art university in Canada, remembered the constant war between students and administrators surrounding graffiti on the walls – as they saw it, the students felt a strong sense for expressing themselves on the walls of an institution they identified with.
Coming at the question of emotions from an entirely different angle, another student brought up the concept of “Cruel optimism” (first written about by Lauren Berlant ). In the postwar era, the governments of Europe invested heavily in social welfare (to prevent the social conflicts that might lead to another world war). Across the Atlantic, the United States was in the process of building up the myth of The American Dream: if you work hard enough, you can secure a prosperous for yourself and your loved ones. In the current era, social welfare is in serious decline (consider the recent pension reforms in France), and the American Dream is dead. Nonetheless, most of us still dream of the good life, even as we rationally understand that the prosperity of the 1950s (and it was only really available to some white, male-bodied people back then anyway). This paradoxical thinking is “Cruel Optimism”. This student suggests that perhaps a change of mindset, towards one of common ownership, and dreaming of common, prosperous futures for everyone is our best way forward. It was at this point that another student pointed out our “Two Minute Rule” and the first speaker wrapped up their point (common resource management in action!).
We then took a 15 min break. We milled about the social center, talked about our cats, and generally chilled. (One of the RSS members had a fascinating conversation with a visitor about how activist spaces in the city were overwhelmingly white and Anglophone, and how this seems to be in contradiction to the diversity we say we believe in. Breaks are always a time for all sorts of learning, even on topics outside the schedule for that day!)
The facilitator welcomed us back from the break with a brief summary of what we’d discussed in the first half, and then asked the group for their ideas on how we can bring those thoughts and insights about nature, land ownership, and communing mentioned in the first half to practice.
To inspire the group, they asked:
What can we do to reclaim our right of access to land in a way that values and protects nature?
First, one participant pointed out that in a way, every session of Radical Sunday School is a kind of experiment in commoning, as we have to share a limited amount of time and space, and we try to do so without too many hierarchies.
The facilitator then gave a few of their own examples of commons in action:
- They were part of a cooking team that had planned to cook a voku (from the German Volksküche or “people’s kitchen”) in the social center, but plans changed. Rather than chaos, another group simply volunteered to cook instead.(haha it was more complicated than that but sure, fine enough to get the point across)
- The facilitator is a part of community garden collective, in which a group of farmers grows vegetables in a community-supported agriculture system. They rely on the workforce of volunteers, who join happily and in numbers.
- The facilitator works in an office where people would buy coffee for themselves rather than for everyone. So everyone has their little box of coffee pads on their desk rather than sharing one and also sharing the responsibility of buying a new one if it’s empty. This is NOT a good example for commoning.
One of the students in the room pointed out that in most shared living situations, people maintain a commonly owned spice rack and use common pots and pans, rather than every roommate buying all their own things.
Another speaker responded by pointing out that there seemed to be a bit of a tension between rules and commons managment: in the example of pans or spices, how could a group manage sharing the costs? The app Splitwise is commonly used to split household expenses, but that doesn’t seem feasible with something as divisible as spices (let alone the amount of wear and tear pots and pans develop over time!). As a direct reply from the spice-sharer, they expressed that in their own experience, the act of sharing common resources often comes from an initial act of sharing: they would just fill the fridge with vegetables they’d rescued from being thrown out, and made it clear that anyone could eat them, as long as some were left over for them to eat.
The facilitator followed up on this point by explaining that a large part of Ostrom’s work revolves around the importance of making clear rules as a community, enforcing those rules justly, and things like that, so there really isn’t a tension between commons and rules: commoning IS rulemaking.
The next speaker reiterated that rules don’t always have to be oppressive, but can in some cases be prosocial. For example, when we have conversations, we more or less always follow unspoken rules about not talking over one another: while I’m speaking, people agree to stay quiet (at least until I’m done). This isn’t a game of one person silencing the other, and then taking turns as oppressor and oppressed, the speaker pointed out, but instead agreeing (usually without explicitly voting on anything) that so long as each person is willing to give space for others to speak at some time, and it doesn’t just become a monologue, the system works. They then paraphrased a youtube video (“What even IS hierarchy?” by the channel AnRel) in saying “it’s not oppression that some people are taller than others, but it becomes that way if we always put important things on the highest shelf in the house.”
Returning to practical examples of commoning, a speaker talked about their own experience of when commoning ISN’T applied: They lived in an apartment where many “generations” of tenants had bought all their own pots and pans, and then left them in the house when they later moved out. This meant that the house was full of useful things like pots, pans, furniture, and kitchen supplies that were all going to waste. This unfortunate situation also served as an opportunity for putting commoning concepts into practice, however! When this person had to empty the house on their landlord’s orders, they were able to “recommon” these items by donating them to squats in the area, once again making this “private property” into commonly held goods.
Someone else pointed out that in plenty of places, menstrual products are provided for free in bathrooms, and there isn’t really any worry of people “stealing” the commonly available products: if someone “steals” a menstrual product, it’s presumably because they need to use it, which is the whole reason the product was there in the first place!
At the same time, another person pointed out, commons systems only work with clear communication regarding what is for common use and what isn’t. They’ve heard stories from a friend living in a squat that people in the house would sometimes wear their roommates’ pants without asking. When someone complained, the pants thief would often reply “I thought this was a community!”
Another scholar had a different example of ideas of private property and commons getting mixed up: there was a controversy at their work at a publishing company where people would be uploading free books to online libraries like scihub and libgen . Management was upset about this, but after looking at the numbers, they discovered that in general, once a book is available online for free, this tends to increase sales of its printed version (citation still needed, of course). So if workers at the scholar’s company kept leaking books, this would in the long run increase the company’s profits. However, even after management admitted that this would be good for business, they still hunted down the leakers for “stealing private property”.
One of our participants told us they live in an intentional community (VrijCoop), where everyone together calculates their finances together. Unfortunately, as they tried to arrange these things, they would often run into the problem of some clashes between different ethical standards regarding money. As a solution, they tried out a system called the “Magic Hat” (apparently developed first in Germany): everyone would calculate how much money they would need for their expenses, and how much they could contribute, and write these numbers on a slip of paper. All the papers would be thrown in a hat, and at the end, if the revenue covered the costs, the community would be happy. In principle, this is because within this community, it’s not important that everyone is “doing their fair share”, as much as it is that everyone is getting what they need. The speaker was curious, though as to whether this could work in an “unintentional community”, that is, a group of strangers who just so happened to be sharing a space.
The facilitator pointed out that in their community garden project, they use a sliding payment system and they’ve asked themselves the same question: this seems to work, but everyone here has come in with a common goal. They also asked if people who can’t afford to pay much might also feel pressure to limit how much they ask the community for as well. Perhaps they’re saying to themselves “I don’t make much money, so I can’t ask the community to give me much either”.
Someone from the room had experienced this kind of thing before. They cook at vokus fairly often, where food is handed out for free, but there is a “suggested donation” of a few euro, and it’s always collected in cash. Sometimes, people come to the voku who can definitely afford to spend a few euro, but they aren’t carrying cash at the time. When the speaker would tell them that it’s fine to take the food without a donation, these people will often refuse to eat, feeling that it’s unfair to have the food without “paying for it”.
Another person told sort of the opposite story of mismatching costs and supplies: in their office, there was a system of serving hot meals made from rescued food, and not needing anyone to pay for it. They encouraged people to take as much as they liked, but after a while, the diners would take more food than they needed, and then end up throwing half their plates away anyway!
This story reminded another participant of a story they’d heard about the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s: apparently, in some areas, revolutionary committees of the CNT would ban the use of money, and instead insist on the free distribution of things like food and clothing directly to the people. This worked fine, up until they realized that peasants were feeding their pigs with some of the free bread they’d been given. Because bread takes a lot more work to produce than pig feed, the whole system ended up wasting quite a lot of the hard labor of farmers and bakers, and in the end, they had to change the rules to reintroduce money. (The story was mentioned in chapter 11 of Tom Wetzel’s Overcoming Capitalism, in the context of a libertarian ecosocialist revolution, but originally, it comes from the account of Macario Royo, which can be found in the section “Spring 1937” in Blood of Spain, by Richard Fraser)
The facilitator pointed out more of Ostrom’s findings: one is that communication is an essential aspect of good commons management, and another is that, as she stresses in her work, there isn’t One True System that works for all commons. The rules that we use to govern our common resources need to be specifically, locally relevant, and they need to be reviseable as the community demands them to be.
Circling back for a final question, the facilitator asked about how we could go about recommoning nature:
How can we fight private ownership and implement collectively organised commons in our lives, particularly regarding nature?
First, someone suggested the idea of “Wild camping“: basically, you just camp where you’d like to. (Apparently, this is illegal in the Netherlands if they catch you.)
A visitor from Australia pointed out that Bank Australia uses some of its funds to rewild farmland across the country.
Another speaker brought up that Zuiderzeeweg is an intentionally created living area that tries to live comunally.
Yet another speaker brought up the NTKC, a camping association that works to reintroduce the idea of wild camping to the Netherlands
The facilitator brought up the concept of a Library of Things – a system, where tools that are not commonly used but very handy (and necessary) to have once in a while are stored and can be borrowed just like books in a library. Like this, you don’t contribute to the capitalist system by buying yet another thing that then lies around for most of the time, and it is a good example for common use of resources.
One speaker talked about “Buy nothing” facebook groups in Australia. These can be an easy way for regular people to practice sharing common resources within their community.
Another visitor talked about growing up in Israel, where camping isn’t as highly regulated as in Europe: there are a number of little signs scattered around the landscape that let you know there aren’t any restrictions on camping in the area, and so long as you follow those, you’re fine. When they moved to Europe, by contrast, they were shocked to discover you often have to pay to stay at campsites.
A speaker talked about how in Norway, the state funds a system of shops near camping sites where you can rent high quality camping equipment for free for a few days. Someone else asked if the state penalizes you for damaging camping gear, but this person hadn’t checked those rules yet.
This brought up the question of who would regulate such a “library of things”.
On visitor brought up that in their hometown, the local library operated a “library of things”, where anyone with a library card could come and rent out things they needed for free. At this library, people have access to anything from pots and pans, to electric drills and power saws, and even a metal detector! As the visitor explained, apparently the program started when a random person from the town just walked in and asked “do you have a library of things? Because I have things I can share, if you’ll keep track of the lending”. (The utopian leftist comedy podcast SRSLY WRONG explores this concept in their episode “Library Socialism & Usufruct” )
Another speaker expressed (through a translator, so we apologize for any confusion) that we are living in a transitional moment where the young generation are facing a situation in which both form & content are in crisis. Our future is completely undefined in a way it hasn’t been before, with new kinds of wars, pandemics, and the reality of climate catastrophe looming over us. We don’t have time to develop some kind of perfect analysis of the situation, we can only start to experiment together. For this, the speaker advised, we need to begin locally, with a small group sharing the same values, and spreading from there. We ask “who will regulate such a group?”, and the answer is, “the group itself, through face to face interactions, as Ostrom often argued for”. This speaker had had some experiences trying to form such a group, in their attempts to recommon the space of the university, but the attempts failed in the end. In particular, one of the group’s members, a colleague of this speaker, took some of the knowledge generated by the group in its experiments in commoning, and sold them to the highest bidder. They used this experience of collective learning to pick up research funding from the state, the very same state that later forced the burgeoning social movement out of its liberated spaces. (It sounds like Judas Iscariot was looking for tenure, am I right?)
The speaker called for more of these experiments, however. They say we need to establish our rules as a commons together, before conflicts arise, we need to recognize that groups are fluid, and that there really isn’t an in-group or out-group, because of the interrelatedness of our world. If I have any wisdom on this matter, the speaker concluded, it’s only because I have learned through my many failures. This is the way forward. The commons, in their experience, is about respecting boundaries and sharing some kind of common cause – without that, you’re not a commons or a collective, you’re just a collection of individuals working in the same location.
With this very insightful last words from a very knowledgeable scholar in the field of commoning, the facilitator thanked everyone for their valuable input and underlined to also have learned a lot this evening.
After that, the RSS people said their goodbyes and gave some more information on RSS and how to get involved further.