[p2p-research] Fwd: [Commoning] what do we learn .from the water commons in ecuador . .

Wed Apr 7 11:17:14 CEST 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Massimo De Angelis <commoning at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 9:57 AM
Subject: Re: [Commoning] what do we learn . . .
To: Commoning List <commoning at lists.wissensallmende.de>

 Dear Rainer, dear all

with some delay, I want here to answer Rainer's question about “what can be
learned” from the water common story I posted on the commoner’ blog few days
ago. Sorry if I can’t directly relate to all the other interventions that
have appeared on the list since this question. I put the important question
of money on hold, while on the question of the “nature of a resource” I hope
to be able to write something about it soon, since I have the impression
that in this part of the world, in the communities I am visiting and the
people I am talking to, thinking about “resources” is to talk about
something more that things that can be rival or not, excludable or not.

Now, what can we (“in different cultural background”, i.e. in the West) can
learn from the water minga story? Here is a non complete list after I took
this simple but powerful question around with me on the roads of Cusco.

1. we learn that what we conventionally mean by commons in the political
discourse in the West is actually short of commoning, which include not only
the question of “public” ownership of a resource but also and crucially the
question of  power, of control over what use to make of a resource, of
autonomy and self-determination. Hence in our battles for commons here (such
as for health care, education or water), we need to go behind the simple
principled position against privatisation and recover a sense of power in
our political interventions. In our context, this may not imply that we
start directly managing water provisions, but it certainly imply the people
gain more power in defining what the current state, municipal or even
private managers can or cannot do. The example made by Brigitte about EU
legislation of “health and safety” being against commoning, i.e. favouring
the education of children as consumers, is a case in point .. .

2. we learn to measure our background to that of a people that in spite of
500 years of murders and genocides, in the last few decades is recovering
his dignity and history and is giving value to what the colonisers have
despised and de-valorised. In other words, the “Minga’s backgorund” as
Rainer calls it, exists in this tradition because of its defence and
re-valorisation -- also by the younger generations of indigenous
intellectuals who, like Carlos Perez who I have interviewed, manages pretty
well to defend the old while at the same time embracing the new. And when we
measure our background in this fashion, we discover that we also had
“Mingas” in our not so distant history, although we did not call it this
way. Why did we let them go in our political discourses, when they are still
there in many of our practices? We need to recover this history, because
otherwise we loose our selves. Thus, we learn that our relation to history
is damn important, not because we want to go back to the past, but because
we want to move forward with a sense that our roots are grounded on
commoning.  Recovering our history also implies that we make visible and
valorise, what is generally invisible and irrelevant because we see it with
the eyes of the coloniser in us (i.e. homo economicus).

Three personal examples, much rooted in my personal experience:

a)  My grandfather was a farmer, and up to 60 years ago, i.e. before he
migrated to the city, he routinely participated in harvests and construction
work together with others farmers in his community. Last June, it was enough
to recover this latent memory in the community where I live in the Italian
Appenines, to organise a “reclaim the park” day where few hundreds from
children to elderly came down in a spirit much similar to the one evoked by
Carlos in his description of Mingas, and in one day poolled all sort of
skills together, fixed the toys of the park, restructured the fountain and
humiliated the local council who proclaimed itself to be powerless to do
anything about our run down park (only to offer help and $$ after our action
. .. this is indeed the thing, local and not local authority are generally
quite scared of grassroots action that substitute for public services. Not
because they would not like to save money. They obviously would. But because
saving money in this way -- i.e. through grassroots commoning -- comes with
a political price tag, i.e the loss of control and of political legitimacy.
I have a similar experience about our local school . .but this is for
another time. Anyway, pics at
http://picasaweb.google.com/108207399781503580405/RiprendiamociIlParcoDiMonchio#

b) In my experience, other examples of Mingas occurs in social centers, in
political organising, in associations, in community work, etc. etc. Hence it
is not only a question of past-history of commons/commoning but also of the
present of commons/commoning. What we learn from the indigenous movement is
the necessity to link the two. For them, the history of enclosures and
struggles for commons is connected to the practices in the present that
survived as they were or in a modified form. And the important thing is that
they survived *in spite of the tremendous murderous and genocidal pressures
of enclosures during 500 years*. . .hence what we learn from the indigenous
struggles is precisely their inventive ability to connect the past to the
present, to the point that the latter gain value, political legitimacy and
dignity. We in the West have a lot of work to do to make this connection. We
often see and judge the political validity of our political organising and
associating in terms of the proclaimed ends, but not in terms of the
organisational means, when in fact  the organisational means are often forms
of commoning, i.e. ultimately the only processes that create alternatives .
. .

c) another name for Minga -- actually I sense it has a  slightly different
meaning, but I must investigate -- is Aijn. Ajin is a network of reciprocity
traditionally applying to the Ayllu, which is the basic commons unit of both
Andean and Amazonian indigenous life. I have seen *Ayllu* translated into
Spanish as “family” -- although clearly a far more extensive unit that
traditional nuclear families. But I have also seen *Ayllu* translated as
“community”, which include blood family members, but also acquired members
-- we would say “friends”, or perhaps “really good friends”. Indeed, there
are rituals embedded in both Andes and Amazonia’s  cultures  that allow the
acquisition of “hermano” or “hermana” inside a Ayllu (brothers and sisters)
without having to go through marriage. I am pointing this out because this
again resonates in my personal experience. I can reasonably conceive some of
my friends as part of a Aijn network, of networks of mutual aid. Where I now
live, I turned a storage room into a kitchen, with the help of a good friend
of mine, who also taught me some basic building work besides doing the work
as well. When I travel in Europe or the US, I often stay with friends that I
made through the years, or simply staying as a guest of someone I never met
before but is friend of friend within an “affinity” network. Perhaps the way
we enter these networks is different than the Andes or Amazonian indigenous
way, and perhaps the way we interact within these network is different.
These are culturally specific aspects, to the extent that it is through
actual commoning that we weave the values and meanings of our action. But as
a general form, I do not have difficulty to see Ajin (or Minga) as relevant
to the West as well. The question is how to valorise these forms politically
(as they are doing) and give them political expression (as they are doing).
And this is a political question.

3. Thus in this translation of the meanings of Minga and Aijn for us, we
also learn that the commons provide a context of social interaction, not a
model to be applied. In this context, justice is also something one fights
for, as for example the women inside the indigenous zapatistas communities
have taught us. So, we should not be carried away in our study of commons
and think we are discovering “the” model  of the perfect society that meets
all our ideals of justice. No, commons provide a context within which
negotiations and struggle for justice are nevertheless carried out, although
in a different way than the context represented by capitalist markets. This
because if we truly believe that commoning is the generative principle of
alternatives,  justice or injustice are not  ideals, but are waived into
social relations and actualised in struggles and forms of cooperation. . .

4. from the water minga story we also learn that “efficiency”, when used as
*the* bottom line measure of common action, is a dirty word, because it
excludes everything else, i.e. life, justice, solidarity, reciprocity and
hearth. It is up to us then to draw the implications for this in the many
contexts of our lives when we participate in common action with others and
we encounter “efficiency” (and the correspondent profit maximisation or cost
minimisation) as *the* dominant measure making our social co-operation
 (nothing escape some form of social cooperation) a sort of distorted
commoning.

5. we also learn that “victories” in defence of commons are never the end of
the menace to commons (in the case of the story, after the water commons
victory there is now the mining menace), at least until capital as a social
force is present.

6. and finally, we learn that if water is a “rival good”, it is not for the
commoners who administrate it through commoning (for whom it is instead a
common good, and the “rivalry” about who get what is solved in the very
moment common action is collectively defined and undertaken), but for those
who wants to take away this administration from them. . .we should rather
talk about rival powers and rival value practices instead of rival goods.

 . . .well, my list ends here at the moment, hope it address your question
Rainer . . .

best wishes

Massimo

 On 4 Apr 2010, at 10:41, Rainer Kuhlen wrote:

 Dear Massimo and you all
wonderful story - but as you said: rights, and justice in particular,
depend on their cultural background. Most countries and communities in
the world do not have this Minga background. So, what can be learned
from this story?
R

Massimo De Angelis schrieb:

Dear all

here is another post from Ecuador. . . .we are now in Peru absorbing

the vibes of the sacred Inca city, Cusco . . . the term "Minga" (or

"Minka" as it is referred in some areas) makes a lot of sense

throughout the Andes down to  Amazonia and is just a form of commoning.

Read water Minga at http://www.commoner.org.uk/blog/?p=240

best to all

Massimo

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