Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good by Menzies Heather

Author:Menzies, Heather [Menzies, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550925586
Publisher: New Society Publishers

Part III

Reclaiming the Commons – A Manifesto

18

An Historical Frame for Current Activism

MY WORK HERE IS ESSENTIALLY DONE. I’ve dug into the past to find a way of living and a way of organizing society that might be conducive to environmental balance, socially and ecologically. I’ve identified traditional commons practices, ways of perceiving and knowing, of doing and organizing things that might help enact this model of society. In a sense, I’ve also modeled what I think is the most important element, namely the commoning process itself: a process of personal reconnection and, with this, becoming implicated in the larger institutional and governmental initiatives that are needed to reclaim the commons, our shared habitats, locally and beyond.

I hope that what I’ve written will inspire others to embark on their own journeys, figuring out how to involve themselves in effecting changes that are necessary. In fact, I see lots of inspiring actions going on now. In this final part of Reclaiming the Commons I want to name some of them, particularly as I see them fitting this larger agenda. With my tongue firmly in my cheek, I’m calling this Part a manifesto, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A public declaration or proclamation … of public importance …”1 about what has to change.

Changes are already afoot. For much of the past 50 years, activism in North America was focused on appeals for the government to act, to defend the common good, to protect the social and the natural environment. More recently there’s been a shift: grassroots movements are getting on with the necessary alternatives, taking initiatives locally and networking globally about them. Moreover, they’re also often combining the personal-is-political of the women’s movement, personal growth and identity politics with the more organizational and political stuff of community building and social movements. One result is that more people are consciously trying to model the alternative they’re pursuing through their activism. Or, as Ghandi famously put it, they’re trying to” be the change we wish to see in the world.” Reclaiming the commons requires this kind of personal as well as institutional and political transformation, because reclaiming the commons also requires people becoming implicated participants inside it. This is key.

The commons is a way of doing and organizing things as implicated participants, not observers, consultants, consumers, job holders or portfolio managers. It’s also a way of doing knowledge differently. Common knowledge is knowing and learning that emerges from within situations, knowing through being tuned in to working relationships and, by extension, the larger matrix of living relationships in which all life (including social and economic life) is immersed. And commoning is a way of governing and regulating society from the smallest scale to the largest in ways that are accountable to the well-being of these interrelationships and the habitats where they unfold, including of course the larger habitat of Earth. To me, these commoning practices are critical, because when I applied what I learned about them to what I’ve learned over my career in

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