Commoning in the new society

Gustavo Esteva
*
Abstract This article provides a meta-level framework which radically critiques
the routine terms of reference with which we operate in a TINA (there
is no alternative) society. Refusing the terms of reference for both the
articulation of the problems of contemporary society, and their possible
resolutions, this article challenges core ideas about the nature of history,
the individual, progress and development itself. It posits a convivial life as a
realistic lifeworld for fully autonomous people in a commons-based society.
Introduction
Twenty-ve years ago Ivan Illich invited some of his friends to talk about
After development, what? It was the time in which the idea of post-
development became fashionable, the years of structural adjustment and
the lost decade for development inLatinAmerica, the years inwhichwedis-
covered the nature of the beast: development was a world experiment that in
the experience of most people on Earth failed miserably.
To share our reections after three years of conversations, we producedThe
Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. For us, development
was at the centre of a powerful but fragile semantic constellation; the time
had come to dip into the archaeology of the key concepts constituting it and
to call attention to its ethnocentric and violent nature. In the introduction
Wolfgang Sachs, the editor of the book, wrote: At a time when development
has evidentlyfailedas asocioeconomic endeavor, it has becomeof paramount
importance toliberate ourselves fromits dominionover our minds. This book
is aninvitationto reviewthe developmental model of realityandtorecognize
that we all wear not merely tinted, but tainted, glasses if we take part in the
prevailing development discourse (Sachs, 2010, p. xix).
Intheentryondevelopment, mycontributiontothe book, after anattempt
to unveil the secret of development and see it in all its conceptual starkness,
*Address for correspondence: Gustavo Esteva; email: gustavoesteva@gmail.com
&Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2014
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
doi:10.1093/cdj/bsu016
i144 Community Development Journal Vol 49 No S1 January 2014 pp. i144i159

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convinced that fromthe unburied corpse of development every kind of pest
had started to spread, I described my experience beyond development with
the ideaof commoning. Myessayendedinaninvitationtocelebrate andacall
for political action. I celebrated the appearance of new commons, creatively
opened . . . after the failure of the developers strategies to transform trad-
itional people intoeconomic men. The essaywas alsoa plea for political con-
trols to protect those new commons and to offer common folks a more
favorable social context for their activities and innovations (Sachs, 2010,
p. 1920). Today, I would formulate the invitation and the plea in a different
way but the agenda remains.
The fashion today is not so much post-development but post-modernity
and post-modernism. Post-modernity, not as what is after modernity, but as
a disillusioned moment of the modern condition, a state of mind of those
painfully dissociating themselves from the great truths of modernity its
social paradigm unable to nd for themselves a newunitary system of ref-
erence. This means a simple loss of values and orientation, anomie, or the
insight of pluralism. Postmodernismwould be a scholarly method to elabor-
ate newconcepts for the interpretationof social reality, a newsocial paradigm
(Dietrich et al., 2011).
Today, furthermore, thereis universal consensus that weare at the endof an
historical period, but the identicationof the corpse what is what ended is
highly controversial. In short hand, for the purposes of this essay, the list of
candidates would include development, neoliberalism, the American
empire, capitalism, the economic society, and modernity.
1
Today, nally, the mood has really changed. In what soon will become a
bible for those interested in the commons movement, Bollier and Helfrich
(2012, p. xii) write that it has become increasingly clear that we are poised
between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be
1 Development: Three Sachs may symbolize the current situation about the development enterprise.
Goldman Sachs, savage capitalism, may represent the dominant attitude in the elite, in governments and
international institutions. Jeffrey Sachs, philanthropic capitalism, represents attempts to take care directly
of modernized misery, malaria, aids, civil war victims and other evils of capitalism and democratic
despotism . . . to protect them and the development enterprise. Wolfgang Sachs, beyond development,
symbolizes the attitude of an increasing number of people, all over the world, resisting all forms of
development, defending their ways of life and government and taking new postdevelopment initiatives.
Neoliberalism: while deregulation, privatization, and other policies of the Washington Consensus
continue, we have everywhere forms of state capitalism, the expression used to describe the Soviet
tradition and now transformed into a general practice, as a substitute for the neoliberal illusion of a
market ruled economy;
American empire: the weakened hegemonic power of the United States can no longer rule the world;
Capitalism: dead, at least as we know it. A combination of Wallerstein exploration of the terminal phase
as a consequence of structural contradictions and Soros warnings about market fundamentalism;
Economic society: in both capitalist and socialist forms, as economic activities are being reembedded into
society and culture and bring back ethics and politics to the center of social life;
Modernity: the emerging pluralistic system of reference is not compatible with the modern paradigm.
Commoning in the new society i145

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born. Surrounded by an archaic order of centralized hierarchies on the one
handandpredatory markets onthe other, presidedover bya state committed
to planet-destroying economic growth, people around the world are search-
ing for alternatives. The book is about the most promising paths to navigate
this transition. Its seventy-three essays describe the enormous potential of
the commons in conceptualizing and building a better future. Some of them
criticize the increasingly dysfunctional market/state partnership; others
enlarge our theoretical understandings of the commons as a way to change
the world, and still others describe innovative projects . . . demonstrating
the feasibility and appeal of the commons.
In the late 1980s, Elinor Ostrom (1985, 1986) was increasingly interested in
studying what she called, following the fashion of the time, common-pool
resources, in order to formulate a theory for their effective governance and
management. But the main interest in commoning was not academic. The
Earth Summit, in 1992, represented the universal adoption of the Bruntland
catechismandthe beginning of its end: the oxymoronic nature of sustainable
development became evident. But other initiatives were also present in Rio.
The team of the British journal The Ecologist travelled the world for a closer
identication and exploration of those initiatives and discovered that their
common denominator was the regeneration of the commons. They thus
attempted to offer an historical framework for the experience and described
the enclosure of the commons as the mechanism through which all forms of
predatory colonialism have been practiced to create the industrial society.
Inrediscoveringthis historical fact, the teamevidencedhowcurrent econom-
ic forces still follow such pattern: the same logic is the key to understand the
destruction of cultures and environments in operation. The team also
revealed why peoples initiatives are resisting the new enclosures or
attempt to reclaim and regenerate their commons and create new ones. The
Ecologists (1993) book, with the conclusions of its team, describes the histor-
ical process explaining the current situation and documents how the people
react to reclaim control of their lives.
The mood is different today but the terminological debate of these years is
still open. Should we continue using the word commons, which, for
example, does not have equivalent in Spanish and other languages? It is
nowevident that the terminvites us to engage in a complex historical explor-
ation, to study and compare community forms in different places and
periods. Commons is a generic term for a variety of social forms existing in
Europe, particularlyinEngland, beforecapitalist or socialist industrialization
transmogriedtheminto resources. Similarly, community is a generic termfor
very diverse social organizations. For example: the Spanish ejido
2
is similar
2 Ejido comes from the Latin exitus, exit. It was the land at the exit of the villages, where individual
peasants used in common.
i146 Gustavo Esteva

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but not identical to the English commons, to the very diverse Indigenous
regimes the Spaniards calledejidos, or to the modern Mexicanejidos, invented
in the 1917 Constitution, after the Mexican Revolution, implemented in the
1930s and reformulated or destroyed with the North American Free Trade
Agreement after 1992. We cannot accommodate into the conventional
notion of commons or community some contemporary novelties which are
currently called new commons. We need to make evident the similarities and
differences of a thousand different forms of social existence which are
beyond the private threshold but are not public spaces, and in which the
free encounter of forms of doing things, speaking them and living them
art, techne expresses a culture and the opportunity of cultural creation.
Such exploration should give special consideration to at least three pertinent
hypothesis: that gender dened the shape of those forms in the past and it is
probablybrokenbut not deadinmanyof its contemporaryheirs (Illich, 1982);
that the individual was created in the model of the text in the XII century
(Illich, 1993); and that friendship is the basic stuff constituting many of the
contemporary urban commons. We also need to explore the limits and con-
tours of all the social forms we call commons, and also its strings attached,
its oppressions, its straitjackets. Such historical and anthropological explor-
ation may enrich our perception of the present, revealing what has been
hidden by modernity and dis-covering the options opened, as urgent chal-
lenges, in the time of the death of development.
All this should be explored if we seriously assume, as I am doing in this
essay, that commons, at least certain kinds of commons, is already the cell
of the new society. As usual, such new society is emerging in the womb of
the old one and is often hidden and distorted by the mentality of the latter.
One of the most important and urgent challenges we face today is to clean
our gaze, in order to be able to clearly identify the novelty of this sociological
creation of ordinary folks, who all over the planet are forging the newsociety
through a new kind of revolution, a silent and almost invisible revolution.
Is it the economy, stupid?
Ms Elinor Ostromwas a verysweet anddedicatedlady. But she was prettyig-
norant. She lackedhistorical perspectiveandempirical informationabout her
theme, thecommons, as well as enoughdepthinher economic lenses. Shewas
na ve inher arguments, witha clear administrative focus: she was looking for
efciency in resource management, while trying to introduce some rene-
ments in the theory of collective action (Ostrom, 1990, Poteete, Janssen and
Ostrom, 2010). When she invited me to her seminar, in 2010, she rmly
insisted in such focus and refused to open the eld to other considerations.
Stuck in Hardins tragedy of the commons (1968), she was not aware that,
as Hardin himself later acknowledged, he did not describe a commons
Commoning in the new society i147

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regimebut anopenaccess regime, inwhichauthorityrestsnowhere; inwhich
there is no property at all; in which production for an external market takes
social precedence over subsistence; inwhichproductionis not limitedbycon-
siderations of long-termlocal abundance; inwhichpeople donot seemtotalk
to one another; and in which prot for harvesters is the only operating social
value (The Ecologist, 1993, p. 13). This is not the tragedy of the commons but
the tragedy of the dominant regime, all over the world, particularly in what
today is wrongly called the global commons, the tragedy that inadvertently
Ms Ostrom want to bring to her beloved commons.
Ms Ostrom did not notice, for example, that resource is the opposite of
commons, that the transformation of commons into resources dissolves
them, that youcannot treat commons as common-pool resources. In The De-
velopment Dictionary Vandana Shiva claried this. Ms Ostrom used some
modern connotations of the word resources, which imply the desacraliza-
tion of nature and the destruction of the commons (Shiva, 2010, p. 233).
The enclosure movement, explainedShiva, was the watershedwhichtrans-
formedpeoples relationshipbothtonatureandtooneanother. It replacedthe
customary rights of people to use the remaining commons by laws of private
property. The Latinroot of the wordprivate, interestinglyenough, means to
deprive (Shiva, 2010, p. 234). Shemadeaveryimportant point for the current
discussion: A life support base can be shared; it cannot be owned as private
property or exploited for private prot (Shiva, 2010, p. 233). To speak of the
commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous
at worst, observes Peter Linnebaugh; the commons is anactivity and, if any-
thing, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable fromrelations
tonature. It might be better tokeepthe wordas a verb, rather thanas a noun, a
substantive (Linebaugh 2008. p. 279).
3
Derek Wall is not as na ve as Ms Ostrom, but he shares her economic men-
tality. He celebrates a commons based economy: peer to peer, social sharing,
collaborative consumption, commons, economic democracy are all terms
that cover economic activity that moves beyond the market and the state,
based on cooperation and harnessing human creativity. He assumes that
the commons economy moves us beyond commodication. He acknowl-
edges that Marx and Elinor Ostrom are polar opposites but sees them as
the two towering gures in the intellectual task to show that commons . . .
or democratic ownership of society by communities works. He thinks that
an economy beyond both capitalismand top down planning by central gov-
ernment is possible. He assumes that his task is to indicate that it is possible
tothinkoutside the boxes (capitalismor central planning) andtoprovide the
3 Linnebaug warns that this can also be a trap: Capitalists and the World Bank would like us to employ
commoning as a means to socialize poverty and hence privatize wealth (Linebaug 2008, p. 279).
i148 Gustavo Esteva

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germof a solution to the dilemma of sustainable development (Wall, 2012a).
For Wall, the concept of social sharing/commons, elaborated by Benkler,
4
provides a way of raising standards of living, in an economy marked by
static or negative growth in GDP (2012b).
The words DerekWall uses belongto the worldof the commons movement
and he uses them to argue for interesting causes. Like Ms Ostrom, however,
he cannot go far enough or deep enough. He cannot think out of the box
of the economic mentality or the development enterprise. Commoning, the
commons movement, is not an alternative economy but an alternative to
the economy. The idea is to radically abandon the law of scarcity construed
by the economists as the keystone for the theoretical construction in which
economics is based. The law denotes the technical assumption that mans
wants are great, not to sayinnite, whereas his means are limitedthroughim-
provable (Sahlins, 1974, p. 2). As I triedto explainin myentry development
for The Dictionary, such assumption implies choices over the allocation of
means (resources). This fact denes the economic problem par excellence,
whose solution is proposed by the economists through the market or the
plan. But this assumption is no longer tenable (Sachs, 2010, p. 19). Polanyi
evidenced that economic determinism was a nineteenth-century phenom-
enon, that the market system violently distorted our views of man and
society, andthat these distortedviews were provingone of the mainobstacles
to the solutions of the problems of our civilization(Polanyi, 1944, 1947). Louis
Dumont, onhis part, showedthat the inventionof economics was a process of
the social construction of ideas and concepts, and the economic laws were
but deductive inventions which became axioms to carry on a new political
project (Dumont, 1977). People all over the world, perceived in the margins
of the economic world, are in fact challenging the economic assumptions in
both theory and practice. Commoning implies for many of them a radical
escape fromthe intellectual prison of the dismal science and fromthe contin-
ual aggression and encroachment by economic forces to which they are
exposed. They can no longer accept to be ruled by the economy.
And democracy/participation?
Beware of participation, I wrote in 1985, as a warning against the increasing
use of popular participation. I arguedthat it was being proposedas a demo-
4 Benkler works on commons-based approaches to managing resources in networked environments.
His term, commons-based peer production, alludes to collaborative efforts based on sharing
information, like Wikipedia. His term networked information economy describes a system of
production, distribution, and consumption of information goods characterized by decentralized individual
action carried out through widely distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market
strategies (Benkler, 2012).
Commoning in the new society i149

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cratic or revolutionary tool for those hitherto excluded from development
and economic and political power, but it was operating as a sociological
tool of manipulation, built as a myth to renew colonizing metaphors in
agony (Esteva, 1985, p. 77). When international institutions like the World
Bank and oppressive and corrupt governments asked community workers
to use popular participation to implement their policies, they both con-
rmed the very nature of the tool and posed a serious predicament for
those workers. Should they instead avoid participation? They were con-
frontedwiththe kindof problems brilliantly describedby Mae Shaw, as com-
munity workers seem always trapped between (top down) policy and
(bottom up) politics, between the possibilities for agency and the realities of
structure, between micro-experience and macro-analysis (Shaw, 2011,
p. 140). Within the neoliberal framework, such traditional tension has been
compounded with the puzzling, apparent convergence of the policies aban-
doning conventional roles of the state and dismantling social services and
the community struggle reclaiming autonomy.
As TINA(thereis noalternative) becamethehegemonicdiscourseandboth
roll-back androll-out became endemic inpublic policy, for the dismantling
of the welfare state, people reacted with TATA (there is a thousand alterna-
tives). Their democratic struggle, for alongtimecentredinmoreparticipation
for those excluded, took a different direction.
Many people are still involved in a struggle to improve formal, representa-
tive democracy, both to address the well-known vices of the electoral
processes and to improve the operation of the government. Other people
are struggling to introduce or strengthen participatory democracy, widening
the areas of peoples participation in the functions of government, through
popular initiative (for norms and laws), referendum and plebiscite, recall of
elected ofcers, participatory budgeting, transparency, accountability and
others. More and more people, however, are trying to place both formal
and participatory democracy at the service of radical democracy (Lummis,
1996). It has been practiced since time immemorial by communities all over
the world and is usually associated with autonomy. In a process that
implies reorganizing the society from the bottom-up, the idea is to extend
such a way of governing to the entire society, under the very basic and logic
assumption that democracy should be where the people are, not up-stairs,
andthe generalizedawareness that their representatives are not representing
them and they increasingly abandon their responsibilities and their formal
commitment with the public interest and the common good.
Ecological awareness, the conscience of the severity of the environmental
destruction, is combined today with political awareness, the conscience that
our dominant political institutions can no longer be trusted. Basta!
Enough! said the Zapatistas in 1994. Que se vayan todos! All of them
i150 Gustavo Esteva

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should go! was said ten years later in Argentina. My dreams dont t into
your ballot box, said the indignados in Spain in 2011. We will not leave
until they leave! proclaimed the Greek that same year. For the rst time in
200 years millions of Americans, the people who invented the modern
model of democracy, found it dysfunctional: it is at the service of the
1 percent, not of the 99 percent, said the Occupy Wall Street movement in
2011. All these movements donot share a newpolitical designor have a ready-
made answer for their questions. But they are not paralysed or trapped in
anger, desperation or self-blame (Shaw, 2011, p. 143). They are involved in
a variety of initiatives, many of which are getting the name of localization as
analternative to both globalizationandlocalism. Theyare rooting andafrm-
ingthemselves morethanever intheirownphysical andcultural places, resist-
ing the mortal wave of global forces, but at the same time open their arms,
minds and hearts to others like them, to create wide coali-
tions of the discontented in a process that is transforming their resistance
into liberation.
The postindustrial, convivial path
There is increasingawareness that the current trends andthe prevailingstruc-
ture of our tools and institutions menace the survival of humankind. As Ivan
Illichwarnedus longtimeago, our institutions havebecome not onlyfrustrat-
ingandcounterproductive, but destructive of societyas awhole (Illich, 1973).
Reading today what Illich called his pamphlets of the early 1970s we cannot
avoidafeelingof sadness for a pathnot taken. But we cannolonger ignore his
warnings.
The Promethean ethos has noweclipsed hope. Survival of the human race
depends of its rediscovery as a social force, wrote Illich towards the end of
Deschooling Society (1971, p. 106). This is exactly what the Zapatistas did in
1994. In liberating hope fromits intellectual and political prison, the Zapatis-
tas createdthepossibilityof arenaissance, whichis nowemerginginthenet of
plural pathstheydiscoveredor is inventeddailybythe imaginationtheyawa-
kened. Winds of change currentlycross the Earth. As subcomandante Marcos
timely observed, we are in a peculiar historical moment in which to explore
the future we are forced to explore the past. For many, such exploration
offers a fresh reading of The Magna Carta (1215) (Linebaugh, 2008); they
nd in it inspiration to reclaim or regenerate old commons and to resist pol-
icies andactions destroyingbothnatureandsocietyat aplanetaryscale. Many
others are engaged in the celebration of their own non-western traditions to
reinvent their paths. These explorations seemtoconverge inthe active move-
ments of human commoning and the worldwide demands to share wealth
(Linebaugh, 2008, p. 280). Everywhere, millions of people, perhaps billions,
Commoning in the new society i151

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are regeneratingtheir ownworlds ina newkindof revolution, whose sense of
proportion is in radical contrast with most revolutionary traditions. This
revolution goes beyond development and globalization; marginalizes and
limits the economic sphere, re-establishing politics and ethics at the centre
of social life; reclaims comunalidad,
5
assumes new political horizons, beyond
humanrights andthe nation-state; adopts radical pluralism, tocreate a world
in which many worlds can be embraced; and uses representative and partici-
patory democracy as transitional forms towards radical democracy.
In his Cuernavaca pamphlets, Illich shared the Rome Clubs concern
about demographic and economic growth (Meadows 1972), but he took the
argument farther. For him, the expansion of services will produce more
damages in culture than the production of goods on the environment. His
radical critique of the school, the health system and transportation (Illich,
1971, 1974, 1975) illustrated what he called the counterproductivity of all
moderninstitutions: after some threshold, theybegintoproduce the opposite
of what theyintend. In1971 Illichproposedthe hypothesis that onlyadopting
a common roof (maximum limits) of certain technical dimensions in the
means of production a society has viability and political alternatives. He dis-
cussedthe hypothesis witha groupof Latin-Americans, inhis seminars at the
Centre for Intercultural Documentation, andthenpublishedTools for Convivi-
ality (1973), which starts with the following words: During the next several
years I intend to work on an epilogue to the industrial age. I want to trace
the changes in language, myth, ritual and law, which took place in the
current epochof packagingandschooling. I want to describe the fading mon-
opoly of the industrial mode of production and the vanishing of the industri-
ally generated professions this mode of production serves. Above all, I want
toshowthat two-thirds of mankindstill canavoidpassingthroughthe indus-
trial age, by choosing right nowa postindustrial balance intheir mode of pro-
duction which the hyper-industrial nations will be forced to adopt as an
alternative to chaos (Illich, 1973, p. xxi).
Again, this was a road not taken. The hyper-industrial nations are facing
chaos, and the others are in a foolish race to catch up with them. Twenty
years ago it was possible to think that China would be able to transform
itself without inviting the disaster: it moved in bicycle. Today Napoleons ex-
pression yellowthreat is heardagain: one hundredmillion cars limit the cir-
culation of 700 million bicycles. The current perspective opens unbearable
environmental risks not only for China but for the whole world.
5 Comunalidad is a neologism coined independently by two indigenous leaders of Oaxaca, Mexico, in
order to share with others their way of being and thinking, as an active we, a communal subject dening
the rst layer of personal identity. Commonality, mixing commons and polity, is not a proper translation
but gives an idea of the intention.
i152 Gustavo Esteva

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Illich formulated a radical critique of the industrial mode of production,
capitalist or socialist, formulated the conditions for the convivial reconstruc-
tion of society and anticipated both the struggle to produce the needed polit-
ical inversionandpeoples reactionsinthetimeof thecrisis thecurrent time.
His ideas are a useful guide to understand what is happening in the world.
Governments increasinglyoperate as mereadministrators of privatecorpora-
tions, whilecommonpeople, for reasons of strict survival or inthenameof old
ideals, are reacting withvigour andimagination. Their initiatives are increas-
inglywideandradical, andarecurrentlyshapingthe peaceful uprisingresist-
ing the mortal wave of global forces, destroying both nature and culture, and
beginningaconvivial reconstructionwhichfollowpaths verysimilar tothose
anticipated by Illich.
Illich took the word conviviality fromBrillat-Savarin, who coined it in 1825,
but gaveit anewmeaning. I havechosenconvivialasatechnical termtodes-
ignate a modern society of responsibly limited tools, a society in which the
people control the tools. The word designates a new mental framework, a
new kind of society. It denes personal freedom in a technically mature
society which can be called postindustrial. Illich calls convivial a society in
which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather
than managers. He applies the term to tools, rather than to people. He calls
austere the people who nd their joy and balance in the use of convivial
tools. Austerity does not exclude all enjoyments, but onlythose whichare dis-
tractingfromor destructive of personal relatedness . . . (It) is a complementary
part of a more embracingvirtue: friendshipor joyfulness. It is the fruit of anap-
prehensionthat things or tools coulddestroyrather thanenhance eutrapelia (or
graceful playfulness) in personal relations (Illich, 1973, pp. xxivxxv).
According to Illich, the present crisis of our major institutions ought to be
welcomed as a crisis of revolutionary liberation because our present institu-
tions abridge basic human freedom for the sake of providing people with
more institutional outputs. This world-wide crisis of world-wide institutions
can lead to a new consciousness about the nature of tools and to majority
action for their control. If tools are not controlled politically, they will be
managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity
will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his
tools (Illich, 1973, p. 12). That is the point. Today. Both points. The current en-
slavement. The current opportunity. Millions of people are reacting that way.
The nation-state has become so powerful that it cannot perform its stated
functions, wrote Illich. For him, the corporations and the professions can use
the lawandthe democratic systemtoestablishtheir empire. Americandemoc-
racy could survive a victory by Giap, but could not survive the victory of the
corporations. The total crisis makes obvious that the nation-state has grown
into the holding corporation for a multiplicity of tools, and the political
Commoning in the new society i153

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parties into an instrument to organize stockholders for the occasional election
of boardsandpresidents. . . . Theyareuseless at amoment of ageneral crash . . .
When this becomes clear for the people the opportunity for change emerges.
The same general crisis that could easily leadto one-man rule, expert govern-
ment, and ideological orthodoxy is also the great opportunity to reconstruct a
political process inwhichall participate (Illich, 1973, p. 109). For Illich, socialist
ideals could not be achieved without an inversion of our institutions and the
substitution of convivial for industrial tools . . . and the retooling of the
societycanonlybeachievedif thesocialist ideals areadopted. As analternative
to technocratic disaster, he proposed a convivial society which would be the
result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most
ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom
only in favor of another members equal freedom (Illich, 1973, p. 12).
Fortyyears after this formulation, this is what seems to be happening. Con-
viviality, observes Hanns-Albert Steger (1984), is denitelynolonger afutur-
istic utopia; it has become part of our present. People have started to react to
anepochal crisis andanepistemicrupture(Esteva, 2009). Beforegovernments
in panic, given peoples mobilization, and economic and political structures
willing to do anything to keep their position, peoples mobilization is taking
the form of an uprising (Esteva, 2012). They are still resisting, but go to dis-
obedience. They are protesting, but begin a radical rejection. Daily they chal-
lenge decisions, all the death, all the people in prison, all the environmental
destruction, and at the same time they challenge the legitimacy of the
system itself, not only its operators: they refuse to give to it their consent
and are no longer willing to accept that representation is the synthesis of
social consensus. They increasingly assume the moral and social obligation
of refusing to obey an apparatus basically anonymous and afrm their in-
dependence of that apparatus, to stop being slaves of the tool, subsystems
of the system. They acknowledge the decadence of the consumer society
and the welfare state, a monopolic and organizational capitalism mixed
with the state. They reject with increasing rmness the dominant demo-
cratic despotism, which becomes a mantel to simulate the political, eco-
nomic, and technical imperialism to which more and more people are
today subordinated, the system that transforms every electoral promise
into another link of the chain imprisoning everyone. They show time and
again that class domination is rst of all domination of peoples conscience
and of their condence in themselves extended when the idea of change
is reduced to the change in leadership. Step by step, they articulate the
terms of a social organization based in personal energy, that is, the
energyeverypersoncancontrol; inthe freedomregulatedby the principles
of customary law; in the re-articulation of the old triad: person, tool and
society; and all this supported in three classic pillars: friendship, hope
and surprise.
i154 Gustavo Esteva

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In their autonomous centres for the production of knowledge, as an alter-
native to the institutional production of truth, people are reecting on a
new agenda. They are exploring, among other things, the following.
(1) Social commons are very diverse.
(a) The new autonomous units of comunalidad are ways of life and
governance for diverse human groups, mainly indigenous.
They reclaimed and are regenerating their traditional
commons and give them a contemporary form, beyond
modern individualization.
(b) The new commons are contemporary sociological creations of
westernor westernizedindividuals, operatingas dissident van-
guards in modern societies. They express their discontent with
the industrial mode of production and capitalism through the
adoption of practices inherited from traditional commons.
(c) Shared commons are social and natural areas, elds or spheres,
whose protection is required for the survival of specic
groups or humankind. Many people are currently struggling
to apply to them and to networked commons the traditional
rules of access dening the commons.
(2) Social commons are social relationships.
Acommons, any commons, denes social relationships establishing
norms of behaviour, mutual obligations (whichmay include derived
rights) and specic forms of social organization. They have a per-
imeter: the limits, the eld, within which the relations operate,
connected with specic material or immaterial elements.
(3) Social commons are not resources and are not dened by
ownership.
Boththe market andthe state are continually invading, attacking or
destroying the social commons. They transmogrify their rela-
tionships and transform material and immaterial elements
existing in them into waste or private or public resources or
commodities. Modern colonization economizes the
commons, that is, transmogries them into economic goods,
commodities, imposing on them a regime of public or private
property and the corresponding norms. The current struggle
attempts to protect them from such interventions, to avoid
their destruction or transmogrication. The idea is to ensure
equitable access to them for all commoners, a democratic and
transparent administrationandappropriate, equitable distribu-
tion of their benets. Resources and commons are opposed and
in fact conicting conditions. Economic society creates scarcity,
generates resources (scarce means) and economic value.
Commoning in the new society i155

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Shortages can exist in the commons, not scarcity. The commons
are not dened by property rights but by possession. The
Magna Carta, which in the Anglo-Saxon tradition created the
foundation for the protection of the commons, did not establish
rights or property, but norms of respect of the commons, den-
ing limits to the king and nobility. In the contemporary condi-
tions, the questions of ownership, rights and respect may
have different forms in different contexts and countries.
(4) Commoning is realistic.
The commons are back on the political agenda, everywhere. As an
economic issue, theyseempie-in-the-sky. Realismrequires us to
acknowledgethat weliveinacapitalistic societyanddemocrat-
ic nation-states. Toprotect nature or justice, we must accommo-
date ourselves to those conditions and to struggle within the
dominant framework. This is false realism. Both scholarly scru-
tinyandempirical experience are evidencing that the dominant
system cannot deal with the current crises. It lacks realism to
continue expecting that conventional paths will deliver what
we urgently need. As the Zapatistas say, to change the world
is very difcult, perhaps impossible; what seems feasible is to
create a whole new world. This is what the people are doing,
all over the world, through commoning.
The time has come to enclose the enclosers. Commoning, commonism,
reclaiming, and regenerating our commons and creating new commons,
beyond the dominant economic and political system, dene the limits of the
current era.
The ongoing revolution
In these times of global fear, writes Eduardo Galeano, some people are afraid
of hunger, the others of eating. Abillionpeople maygo to bedtonight withan
empty stomach and the rest are increasingly aware that what the market pro-
vides for their plates is junkor poison. We cannolonger wait for governments
andinstitutional institutions todosomething meaningful andeffective about
this urgent predicament, or that Monsanto or Wal-Mart will have a moral
epiphany and stop doing what they are doing.
People are taking the solutioninto their hands. V a Campesina is the biggest
organization in history: some say that it currently unites 800 million peasants
andfarmers in140 countries. They redenedfoodsovereignty: we must deter-
mine what we eat by ourselves . . . and produce it. And this is happening. The
maintool: commoning. It may start as an individual endeavour, as it startedin
Cuba during the special period or in the United States, when many people
started to transform their lawns into vegetable gardens or to organize deals
i156 Gustavo Esteva

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in the form of CSAs: Community Supported Agriculture, arrangements
between urban consumers and farmers, a practice that apparently started in
Japan, got a new form in Germany and became an epidemic in the United
States and Canada. More than half of what Havanas inhabitants eat today is
produced there. In Detroit, the very example of industrial development disas-
ter, 900 community gardens are thriving. Sooner or later, individual initiatives
or those taken by a small group of friends become a commons.
Examples proliferate in every sphere of daily life. Nouns are replaced by
verbs. Instead of education, creating a radical dependence on public or
private institutions, more and more people are learning in their commons,
discovering that to study can be the leisurely activity of free people, beyond
the prison of the school. People are healing, in their commons, reducing
their dependence on increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health
systems. And so on and so forth. Despite living under exceptionally
adverse conditions, the people have not ceased reacting, on the one hand
resisting policies and the public and private actions that affect their lives
and territories, while on the other hand launching their own initiatives.
On 1 January 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement
became operative, a small groupof indigenous people calledthe ZapatistaNa-
tional Liberation Army (EZLN) launched their uprising, armed with nothing
but machetes and a few guns. Six days later the uprising of civil society, sup-
porting their causes but not their means, put an end to twelve days of armed
confrontation. Fromthis point on, the EZLNbecameapolitical forceof tremen-
dous importance and the champion of non-violence in the country: it has,
without a doubt, helped prevent the civil war in which Mexico is currently
engulfed, from spreading and deepening further.
6
The EZLN has been a
constant source of inspiration for the peaceful reorganization of society from
below, bythe people themselves, andfor the emergence of a vigorous indigen-
ous movement. They participated in two dialogues with the government, the
second of which led to the San Andres Accords, pledging reforms in the Con-
6 The way they practice non-violence is indeed impressive. In 1994, a group of Zapatista bases de
apoyo (support bases) began creating the village of San Francisco, in recently recuperated lands. They
started from scratch, cleaning the terrain, little by little, putting up their houses and creating their
livelihoods. During the last ve years, while they were in open consolidation of their livelihood, they
began to suffer the harassment of nearby villagers, outside of Zapatista territory and afliated to PRI.
When they opened a new school and children from the other village started to attend the classes, the
aggression intensied. They attempted, with all the means conceivable, to create a dialogue and
conciliation. But they were unsuccessful. The aggression continued. In August 2012, they took a decision:
they would abandon their village, leaving it to these neighbours, and head to another part of the
Zapatista territory, where they would found their new village, Comandante Abel, and begin to
re-construct their entire community with the help of other neighboring Zapatista bases de apoyo. Yet
even there, the group that had attacked them before arrived, now accompanied by well-armed
paramilitaries, shooting directly at them. They are now, still, refugees in the mountains. They are not our
enemies, said a distinguished member, They are our comrades that are confused and poorly guided. We
cannot hate them. This is merely our resistance and our decision to not fall into violence.
Commoning in the new society i157

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stitutionandinthe law, as well as a change in policies that relate to indigenous
communities. Following government administrations refused to honour the
agreements despite the fact that they received unprecedented public
support. After 17years, without anyformof government support, belowamili-
tarysiegeandexposuretocontinuous paramilitaryattacks, theZapatistas have
managed to create a new way of living and governing. A law enacted in 1995
through public pressure made it ofcially illegal for the government to inter-
vene in the Zapatista territories. (This is the reason why the government uses
paramilitaries to harass them). The zone they occupy is now the safest in the
country: no crimes have been committed by them, and they have never
responded with violence to those committed against them by paramilitaries.
In2010, throughcorrespondenceinitiallyaddressedtoonethemost prominent
and respected Mexican philosophers, the Zapatistas successfully organized a
public debate on the need to bring back ethics and politics to the centre of
social life, replacing the economy. . . as they have done in the territories they
control, where they practice radical democracy in a convivial, postindustrial
society, in which commoning denes a way of life.
No vanguards. No leaders. No parties. Horizontal grassroots organiza-
tions. Commotion instead of promotion. Ordinary folks doing extraordinary
things. Theyknowthat the times inwhichhelping still helpedare irrevocably
past (Groenemeyer in Sachs, 2010, p. 55). They needno helpers. Please do not
come if you want to help us, subcomandante Marcos once said. But if you
think that our struggle is also your struggle, please come. We have plenty of
things to talk about.
Gustavo Esteva is a Mexican activist, deprofessionalized intellectual and founder of the Univer-
sidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca in the Mexican city of Oaxaca. He works both independently and
in conjunction with a variety of Mexican NGOs and grassroots organizations and communities.
He has been a key gure in founding several Mexican, Latin American and International NGOs
and networks, and is a well-known advocate of Post-Development.
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