David Bollier David Bollier is an American activist, scholar, and blogger who is focused on the commons as a new paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. He pursues this work as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics [www.centerforneweconomics.org] (Massachusetts, US), and as Cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, [www.commonsstrategies.org] an international advocacy project. Bollier is the author of many books, including Think Like a Commoner [www.thinklikeacommoner.com] (2014); Patterns of Commoning (2015) [www.patternsofcommoningorg] and The Wealth of the Commons (2012), [www.wealthofthecommons.org] both with co-editor Silke Helfrich; and the forthcoming Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, co-authored with Helfrich. Bollier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Tags: Commons / Cooperation / Enclosure / fashion / Internet / Market capitalism Link: http://apria.artez.nl/re-imagining-fashion-as-an-ecosystem-of-commons/ Re-imagining Fashion as an Ecosystem of Commons1 Many players in the global fashion world are increasingly concerned about problematic industry norms and practices—from energy-intensive supply chains and abusive labour practices to transgressive marketing and elitist sensibilities. Is it possible to imagine a more humane and eco- responsible fashion system? This paper describes how diverse commoners around the world are pioneering creative, post-capitalist forms of provisioning, peer governance, and social practice. The principles of commoning—autonomous ‘world-making’ of provisioning and peer governance from within market/state polities—may hold some answers in helping to imagine a new ecosystem of commons for fashion design, provisioning, and distribution. The Commons as a Social System, Not Unowned Resources One general way to understand the commons is as everything that we inherit or create together, which we must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. Our common wealth consists of countless resources that we share such as public lands, state-funded research, the atmosphere, the oceans, the airwaves used by broadcasters. Historically, the state has been the self-styled trustee of such resources—a task it has not performed very conscientiously or faithfully. In truth, the commons is not simply a collection of shared resources. It must be understood as a social and political system for managing that shared wealth, with an emphasis on self-governance, fairness, and sustainability. The commons consists of resources plus the social system for managing them plus the specific rules, social practices, institutions, and traditions used to manage the resources. The commons is an integrated social system for provisioning and peer governance—one that focuses on inclusiveness, fairness, basic needs, and stewardship of shared wealth. If you mention ‘the commons’ to someone today, the first idea that usually comes to mind is ‘the tragedy of the commons’. That idea was launched by biologist Garrett Hardin in the journal Science in a now-famous essay published in 1968. Hardin asked readers to imagine a pasture in which no individual farmer has a rational incentive to hold back his use of it. He declared that each individual farmer would put as many sheep on the pasture as possible because no individual has a rational 1 This essay is derived from remarks made by David Bollier, Director of the Reinventing the Commons Project, at Schumacher Center for a New Economics, to the Fashion Colloquium: Searching for the New Luxury, a conference held in Arnhem, Netherlands, on 31 May and 1 June 2018. 60 incentive to hold back. By this logic, Hardin declared, the pasture will inevitably be destroyed through over-exploitation: the tragedy of the commons. Over the past two generations, economists and conservative ideologues embraced the ‘tragedy parable’ as a powerful way to denigrate the collective management of resources, especially by government. Hardin’s narrative also proved useful as a way to champion private property rights, so-called free markets, and deregulation. Even though the term ‘the commons’ became widely associated with the idea of the word ‘tragedy’, the irony is that Hardin was not really describing a commons. He was describing an open-access regime in which there are no rules for managing a resource, no boundaries around it, and, indeed, no community. The scenario he was describing—in which free riders can appropriate or damage resources at will—is more accurately a description of unfettered markets in which everyone does whatever s/he wants. You might say Hardin was describing the tragedy of the market. The late Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University powerfully rebutted the whole ‘tragedy of the commons’ fable in her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. This book and hundreds of case studies by Ostrom and her colleagues showed that it is entirely possible for communities to manage forests, fisheries, farmland, irrigation water, wild game, and other natural resources as commons, without over-exploiting them. Her research and that of many scholars that she assembled into the International Association for the Study of Commons2 demonstrated this through hundreds of empirical studies. One might ask, how, then, is the over-exploitation of resources avoided? The short answer is, people talk to each other. They negotiate rules for working out their differences. People who live near each other or work together have strong incentives to cooperate. They are entirely capable of self-organizing systems that can identify and punish free riders, develop a shared community ethic and norms, and in other ways protect their shared wealth. This is not always easy and it is certainly not automatic, but it is an historic tradition in the human species. An estimated two billion people around the world depend on natural resources managed as commons for their everyday survival. Most economists ignore this reality, however, because their very language and terms of analysis privilege the market economy—the world of exchange-value, not use-value. Adam Smith’s writings about markets are most notable for providing a moral justification for market activity, sanitizing the vices of greed and envy as ‘self-interest’ that ultimately benefits the public good via the Invisible Hand. He redefined the very idea of ‘the economy’ by ignoring self-provisioning that takes place outside of conventional circles of money and market exchange. Ostrom’s great achievement was in demonstrating how much value and stable management actually occurs through commons. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009—the first woman to win the award—by documenting and theorizing about cooperation, sharing, trust, and other nonmarket behaviours that most conventional economists neglect as ‘exogenous variables’. Its epistemological model quite literally can’t make sense of such social behaviours because, by the terms of the model, they are ‘irrational’. For economists, market transactions are the main event, and anything that cannot be priced is not taken very seriously. No wonder the commons and its social behaviours are culturally invisible! Market Enclosure as a Scourge of our Time One of the reasons that the commons discourse is being resurrected today is to make the commons more visible—but also to highlight the idea of ‘enclosure’. Enclosure consists of the privatization and 2 Originally, the International Association for the Study of Common Property. 61 commodification of shared wealth by corporations, often in collusion with governments. It can be seen in countless attempts by market players to appropriate for themselves such shared resources as land, water, seeds, genetic information, cultural works, information, public spaces, and much else. Across the world, timber companies are seizing great swaths of forests and wilderness that belong to the people, many of whom have tended the forests for generations. Big Pharma is privately patenting valuable drug research for which taxpayers have paid billions of dollars. Enclosure can be seen in corporate ‘partnerships’ with universities that privatize research funded by the public. Most recently, we have seen fierce attempts by telecom and cable companies to seize control over access to the Internet in order to convert that great commons into a closed marketplace. Enclosures amount to a massive theft and dispossession of common wealth for private gain. It is typically portrayed as ‘progress’—the idea that private investment and marketization will improve societies. But in fact, the relentless expansion of market activity is often a profound dispossession of people’s shared wealth. It is not just a taking of resources but the destruction of community identities and cultures based on sharing. It is an erasure from memory that certain traditions and ways of life are possible. People who have been victimized by investors, corporations, and market growth are increasingly fighting back, however. They seek to reclaim what is theirs and re-establish the communities of commoning that once flourished. For example, indigenous peoples are trying to preserve their ethnobotanical knowledge from the biopiracy of big pharmaceutical and ag-biotech companies. Subsistence farmers are trying to protect their right to share seeds. Fishers are trying to protect their livelihoods from industrial harvesting. Many Latin Americans are fighting the neo-extractivist agenda of multinational