[p2p-research] The Commons Abundance Debate

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Trent,

thank you so much and apologies for the delay, I've been travelling ...

I'm sharing your new text, with our mailng list members,

Michel



*Re: The Commons Abundance Debate*

* *

*Commons Colleagues, *

from Trent Schroyer  ( e-mail of 11/15/10)





As I read this discourse I had a sense there are many other overlapping and
converging views that were not discussed at the Berlin Commons conference
that could be cognitive resources for the commons movement- such as:



-*Henry George* , (1839-1897) argued that the economic rent on  land should
be shared by society and that land must be common property. Georgism has
been a constant alternative economics since that time and today has many
advocates such as the  Earthrights movement <http://www.earthrights.net/>
www.earthrights.net Consult Alanna Hartzok, Co-Director Earth Rights
Institute

Also called by Jeffery Smith ‘Geonomics’ see -
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/smith-jeff_geonomics-and-working-conditions.html



 -*Ward Morehouse *is an author, publisher, activist, and a co-founder of
POCLAD, an American anti-corporate research collective. He worked on the
Bhopal Gas accident in India and is the founder of the Council on
International and Public Affairs (CIPA) in 1954 and the Apex Press, a
book-publishing imprint, in 1990. He was also the founder of the
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), which focuses on
bringing victims to the attention of the public, and organizing tours of the
United Kingdom, Europe and United States, and has worked to keep the issue
from fading from the international stage.



Most relevant to the commons law project he is constantly talking about
'people's law' as a legal commons that can emerge where ever needed  to
indict corporate and state crimes. He  has created peoples tribunals at  the
U.N and others named in the following quote from a private e-mail :



  "The Permanent People's Tribunal should be part of the Commons debate. Its
origins go back to Bertrand Russell and the war crimes of the 1970s and
include the Algiers Declaration of the Rights of Peoples in 1976.  The
repository of more recent tribunals is the Lelio Baso Foundation in Rome and
the coordinator in Milan, G. Tognoni

Even more  relevant to the "Commons Debate" is the Charter on Industrial
Hazards and Human Rights which grew out of a series of tribunals (including
Bhopal) in the 1990s.  The text of the charter is given in Brigit Hanna,
Ward Morehouse, and Satyu Sarangi, The Bhopal Reader, 2004"

- quote from  ward morehouse  e-mail of 11/14/10





-      *Ivan Illich* talked about local self-reliant free spaces as a
‘vernacular domain' that has been undermined by the church and state’s ‘ war
against subsistence ‘ for the last 500 years. From his ‘Tools for a
Convivial Society’ (1973) , and in a series of later historical
reconstructions, he has argued public choices about the appropriate means of
production, the selection of forms of community, or regional forms of
intermediary structures,  are the trade -offs between growth and free
choices by non-experts.

-       Illich is a source of what academics call ‘post-development theory’
– see Wolfgang Sachs ( editor) ‘The Development Dictionary ‘ (1992)



 This is an argument for local autonomy and a source of Wolfgang Sachs
'cosmopolitan localism' notion  I used this a key notion in Trent Schroyer '
Beyond Western Economics' ( Routledge 2009- chapter 2 & 4) for a chapter on
Illich and Polanyi that argues the sustainability of small communities, in a
post-secular argumentation. Where ‘post-secular’ means engaging faith
communities narratives as a means of critically interpreting their
contemporary ethical and political claims. The commons movement has been- as
I have encountered it - too secular and fails to see the necessity of post
secular discourse.



- *Mahatma Gandhi's* notion of swaraj, or self rule, and swadeshi,
self-reliance, remains a source for reflection by the commons movement. I do
not think it has received the recognition it needs – even in India. These
are seminal ideals that both critics of small communities and defenders will
find challenging. I argue both sides of this case in 'Beyond Western
Economics' chapter 5



-      Finally the marxism really relevant to the commons movement are the
cultural marxists - especially *Jurgen Habermas* whose Universal Pragmatics
and Discourse Ethics constitute a unique argument for the commons of speech
acts, or ordinary language, that is intrinsically oriented toward
inter-subjective understanding. This view is the ultimate critique of
positivism, economic individualism and the politics of productivism. His
critical studies of the public domain have culminated in an advocacy for
German procedural constitutionalism as an unfinished fallible learning
process. He  has been wrongly labeled a liberal after publication of
'Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy'
( 1996.

-      The commons movements would be advanced, in my opinion, by absorbing
his philosophical , societal and legal  theory of communication.

-

Trent Schroyer




On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Trent Schroyer <tschroye at warwick.net>wrote:

> Dear Michel,
>
> here is a brief rewrite of the message i sent - as attachment
>
> trent schroyer
>
> >yes, I would really appreciate that, I will change the wiki entry,
>
>



-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20101121/aa46cdc7/attachment.html>