Whose Common Future

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By clicking on the title above you can read the whole of Whose Common Future....its essential, please take the time....


I wanted to flag up Whose Common Future for a couple of reasons. First, there is a distinct body of ecosocialist literature with I think very important ideas, simply being against injustice or for the environment is not enough. WCF is a good look at what is wrong with both the market and the state, suggesting an economic alternative to both....a lot of literature from progressives tends to look to small scale markets, or reject the WAshington consensus for Keynesian reforms or speak for a bit more state intervention....we need instead to defend, extend and deepen the commons.

Second, while WCF has to my mind the essentials of ecosocialism, it is pretty user friendly for getting these ideas over to non socialists and of course, for getting non green socialist thinking.

Third, I am trying to respond to Lawrie's request for holiday reading! We should be trying to get good stuff into libraries (I have an interest here as an author!)


WCF is a green response to the Rio conference, suggesting decentralised commons as the solution to ecological ills, it pulls together justice, self management, equality, etc.

It was originally a special issue of the Ecologist vol.22, no.4 July/August 1992 and was republished by Earthscan....it is sophisticated but easy to read, fairly short and has lots of nice photos....a good introduction to ideas.

Incidentally I was turned on to ecosocialism (in 1981) by Andre Gorz 'Ecology as Politics', Rudolf Bahro 'Socialism and Survival'....although both are a bit suspect Bahro moved into mysticism and the Bagwam Shree Rajsneesh (the guy with 30 rolls royces) and Gorz famously wrote 'Farewell to the Working Class' which I still see as a bit premature.

There was a lot of very good literature produced by SERA the socialist environment and resources association before they got captured by new labour, (incidentally Nick Hildyard of Cornerhouse who edited WCF split with the Ecologist over Teddy Goldsmiths right wing Malthusian views)

I especially remember 'Ecology and Socialism' by the great literary critic and academic Raymond Williams.....

Bookchin, although on a personal level a very sectarian and grumpy guy, has written a lot of essential stuff. He doesn't like socialists, Green Parties (who contest elections above the muncipal level), pagans....or as far as I can see non Bookchinites

Here is my stuff from Babylon on commons

Defend, extend, deepen the commons
However, while state provision can be humanised and markets tamed by the social, the more fundamental task requires that both the state and the market are rolled back. The commons provides an important alternative to both. The anti-capitalist slogan above all others should be ‘defend, extend, and deepen the commons’.
The commons is important because it provides a way of regulating activity without the state or the market. The market, despite the assumptions of some anti-capitalists like David Korten, is icenine with a tendency to constantly expand. It is built on enclosure. The state, even at its best, tends to separate society from self-government. The commons has throughout history been the dominant form of regulation providing an alternative almost universally ignored by economists who are reluctant to admit that substitutes to the market and the state even exist. Within the commons, scarcity, if it exists, is usually managed and resources conserved through stinting systems arranged by users.
The commons works best by consensus and does not, unlike market based exchange systems, depend upon constant growth. It provides shared access to important resources so that human needs can be met with potential equity. Anti-capitalist globalisation could be labelled, positively as the movement for the commons. Where anti-capitalists lose, the neo-liberals will constantly advance. Their demands are unlimited because capitalism to survive needs constant commodification. Capitalism seeks to extend commodification, the movement resists by conserving the commons. In South America and South Africa grassroots protest seeks to prevent water being privatised. In cyberspace downloaders, hackers and open source designers seek to maintain free access. Greens and subsistence ecofeminists preserve communal land from private corporations.
Yesterday’s satire will describe tomorrow’s struggle:
Say we wake up one morning and discover we’ll be getting a new bill each month for air. The Bush administration has decided to privatize the air; corporations will now own it and charge for its use.

Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economics advisor, hails the move as a ‘potent stimulus’ and a big boost for the GDP. Alan Greenspan offers assurances than any inflationary effects will be minor. The rest of us, meanwhile, would feel stunned, and violated in a way that would be hard to express. Pay for air? What gives them the right to do that? The air is ours, isn’t it? But what exactly would we mean by that?

The question is not fantasy. In recent decades, the market has been penetrating into realms previously thought off-limits. It is claiming every inch of physical and psychological space, from the outer reaches of the solar system to the most intimate interiors of daily experience. Billboards in the heavens, pharmaceutical manipulation of thoughts and moods - through genetic engineering, corporations even are claiming ownership to the genetic code of life itself. If life, then why not the air that sustains life. (Rowe 2002).
Some commons like demand little or no regulation, merely preservation from such corporate assaults, however there are numerous well documented accounts of commons regimes, where regulation occurs through local bargaining and shared use. In Canada the Ojibway Nation of Ontario still harvest wild rice from Wabigoon Lake using commons principles:
Violations of harvest allocations by machine harvesters are dealt with at community meetings: a recent case resulted in one machine harvester being denied harvest rights for the rest of one season. For each canoe harvest area, the community agrees upon ‘a field boss’ whose responsibilities are to regulate the harvest cycle according to custom, and to arbitrate in any disputes. Where harvesting rules are breached, the offender may be ‘grounded’, one person in a recent harvest being told to ‘relearn the Indian way by sitting on the shore and watching’. (Ecologist 1993: 127)
The Ecologist claims that while the commons has an old fashioned feel for many of us in Europe and North America it is a reality for the ‘vast majority of humanity’ (Ecologist 1992: 127). Ninety percent of inshore fisheries are regulated by commons. Depletion is a product of high tech hoovering by unregulated Japanese and European fleets keen to increase profit rather than more local abuse (Ecologist 1992: 127). In Maine, lobster fisheries have long been preserved by the commons, in Finland, many forests are communally regulated and in Switzerland, grazing is controlled by commoners to prevent ‘tragedy’ through over exploitation:
[in] Torbel in Switzerland, a village of some 600 people […] grazing lands, forests, ‘waste’ lands, irrigation systems and paths and roads connecting privately and communally owned property are all managed as commons. […] Under a regulation which dates back to 1517, which applies to many other Swiss mountain villages, no one can send more cows to the communal grazing areas than they can feed during the winter, a rule that is still enforced with a system of fines. (Ecologist 1992: 128)
The importance of the commons is noted, as we have seen by greens, autonomists, anarchists and many Marxists from Marx onwards. There is no space here to examine the encyclopaedic variety and success of commons regimes but work by scholars such as Ostrom (1991) can provide the basis for deepening the commons. The best anarchist experiments from the Spanish civil war to contemporary squatting are based on the reinvention of the commons. There has been a long war against the commons. The earliest poems of Robin Hood, long before the inclusion of Maid Marion and Friar Tuck, show a yeoman resisting enclosure. Where I live in the Windsor Forest, the British Royal Family privatised the land for hunting. E.P. Thompson in Whigs and Hunters recorded how ‘the blacks’ who darkened their faces before ‘poaching’ game and resisting the royals, fought gun battles in Winkfield and Wokingham parishes (Thompson 1977). A few miles away at St Georges Hill, the Diggers briefly established a communal farm in 1649 (Brockway 1980). Wherever you live there will, if you dig deep enough, have been a struggle between commoners and the monopolising state or market for control.
A review written with the late Walt Sheasby puts these struggles in context:
Communes formed more or less briefly under the maverick Wyclifite John Ball in Kent, England, in 1381-82; the Hussite Jan Zizka in Tabor, Bohemia, in 1420-24; the
Anabaptists Thomas Muenzer of Muelhausen, Thuringia, in 1524-25, Jacob Hutter in Moravia in 1526-36, Bernard Rothmann in Muenster in 1533-35; and the Quaker layman Gerard Winstanley of the Diggers in Surrey, England, in 1649. A recurrent theme in various European locales over hundreds of years was the attempt to reclaim the 'commons.'

The Taborite communism that sprang up briefly in Bohemia in the 1420s proclaimed: 'As in the city of Tabor there is no ‘mine’ and no ‘yours’ but all is in common, the like it shall be everywhere and nobody shall have a special property, and those who have such property commits a mortal sin.' The Hutterites likewise proclaimed, 'Private property is the enemy of love.' John Ball supposedly preached that 'Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until everything shall be in common' (Wall and Sheasby 2002: 160)
While we should be cautious about the balance between religious and political radicalism such accounts provide important evidence of an everlasting struggle. In the third millennium hackers and open source coders strive to conserve the cyber commons. From land reform to anti-privatisation campaigns, commons can be preserved or restored. Some of Naomi Klein’s best insights come from her identification of how corporations have invaded public space, for example, saturating the environment with bill boards and using schools to sell fast food.