The Commons, Prefigurative Imagination and Political Transformations—with David Bollier

David Bollier is an American activist, writer, thinker and author whose work focuses on the commons as a paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. He is a director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and is co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group. In this conversation, Anna and David have a wide-ranging, invigorating discussion of commons and related subjects.

You can find his free audiobook Think Like a Commoner (2nd ed) at www.thinklikeacommoner.com/audiobook. There is also a free readable version just below the audiobook.

To find out more, visit https://www.youtube.com/@BodyGuru-AGx

Transcript

Speaker 1:02

So everyone, I'm delighted to have with me today a friend and colleague, David Bollier, who I haven't seen for many a good year. And David does wonderful work around the commons, and we're going to have a free-flowing conversational exploration as usual, but around the theme of commoning and maybe bioregionalism, which I know is a particular passion of yours at the moment, David. So for those who don't understand what commons-based thinking, activism, and community engagement is, could you introduce us to the wonder of the commons?

Speaker 1 1:34

Sure. Well, the commons, in the simple put simply, are social systems by which people come together to share and collaborate to create things of value for each other and then distribute the results fairly among themselves. And one can think of a lot of examples, such as, well, in the digital world, we think about open source software and Wikipedia and a lot of online collaborations, but it also extends to things like land, which has been kind of the default way that humans have organized themselves for farming and as communities, of coming together to manage the landscape, the water, the wild game, the forests, the fisheries. And it in other words, it's not been a market-driven affair. It's not been a nation-state-driven affair. It's kind of the primordial way that humans, by default, have organized themselves for shared benefit. And I would just add that this is kind of increasingly seen as a social paradigm that's very distinct from the state and market in a way to try to get beyond the pathologies of modern capitalism.

Speaker 2:47

Right. And so the the commons is both an old idea, and perhaps we can talk about early commons scholarship and you know the early forms of thinking around the commons, and particularly the need to push back on that whole argument around the tragedy of the commons. Um then contrast it with like more contemporary commons as a kind of anti-neoliberalization of nature type movement, which is far more radical. Um, so yeah, I'd love to I'd love to hear what you've got to say about all that.

Speaker 1 3:18

Well, English history, of course, is at least for the for the Western uh person, is kind of the uh primordial text on this, because it goes back to the Magna Carta when the king was taking for himself all of the forest lands and depriving access to essentially the resources that were essential to survival, uh the trees, the the fuel, the peat, the acorns for the pigs, and many other things, taking it for himself. So these original enclosures of the commons were a source of great civil strife, and they eventually resulted in this legal armistice known as the Magna Carta, but one element of that was the now mostly forgotten Charter of the Forest, where the king guaranteed certain rights of commoning to the commoners so that they could survive. And this was a major breakthrough in Western civilization. Well, the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest are now seen as quaint oddities of the past, but the whole paradigm of the aristocrats, the wealthy, in current form, corporations in closing what is shared, meaning privatizing it, commoditizing it, uh taking it for themselves, uh is very much a current phenomenon. Uh, if anything, with you know, on steroids, because capitalism has so many more tools and concentrated capital to affect these enclosures. So the talking about the commons is implicitly about uh withdrawing from the circuits of the nation-state system to create one's own protected space of sharing and mutual support and collaboration and fairness, because we can't look to the liberal polity or capitalism to do that. And uh so there's currently a quite an international movement that I often refer to as the commons verse, which takes many diverse forms uh in different theaters of action, in which, you know, people who are trying to farmers trying to share seeds and prevent Monsanto and GMO seeds are very much akin to those who want to share software code and prevent Microsoft and big tech from controlling it all, which are very similar to you can name a dozen other arenas in which the market state system is enclosing our shared wealth for its own benefits. Copyright law, trade secret law, patents. Um, you know, one could talk, and I do often along, long and hard about these topics. And uh so I find this a way to start to reconceptualize contemporary politics and economics.

Speaker 6:19

It's brilliant. And one of the things I think is really interesting is how few people, when you go out in the world, have actually heard of commons and commoning. And there's a sense in which it's very hard for people to imagine an otherwise to capitalism, to neoliberalism, to the water they swim in that they take for granted. So I'd love you to kind of give an idea, just an overview of how successful, how widespread is this, because I see it as a kind of governance structure that's emergent and in waiting, and it's worked through a lot of stuff. It holds immense promise, it's very well established in human history, and it's just there, but not fully appreciated in public discourse.

Speaker 1 7:06

Well, I think that its invisibility, its lack of cultural legibility is not an accident. Uh, the mandarins of capitalism and economics, you know, don't want us to remember collective action as an antidote or a way to meet our needs. It wants to make us all individuals who are subordinate and dependent on capital, corporations, and so forth. So part of my self-appointed mission in life has been to try to make the commons more visible. And uh a few years ago, I did a book called The Commoners Catalog for Changemaking, based on the whole earth catalog of the 1970s, in which there were little modules of dozens and dozens of different types of commons out there, in which you have cooperatives, you have all sorts of care collaborative collaborations, you have alternative forms of money, you have uh urban commons, where people are, whether through information systems or uh taking over buildings or public spaces, are engaged in commoning. There's a whole movement of relocalization and trying to reimagine food systems that get out of the global circuits of commodity food and try to relocalize food and food traditions and more self-reliance of food through community-supported agriculture or community land trusts or the slow food movement or permaculture or agroecology. So I I see that there's a lot of commons out there that maybe don't even use the name and vocabulary, but I think there's strategic value in starting to talk that way because you start to situate yourself against capitalism or as an alternative, and you start to find uh along a horizontal plane kindred spirits who they might be involved in a different kind of resource, but they're commoners or they're commoning. So um that's sort of I I've done 10 or 11 books on the commons from different perspectives. Most recently I did uh Think Like a Commoner second edition. I had done one, this introduction to the Commons in 2014, but last year my publisher asked me to uh do an updated revision and it's significantly uh updated and revised. And I wrote it in a way that without dumbing it down, a way my mother could understand it, or a newcomer. And the point is, it's not some academic conceit or something that's hard to understand. It's really as basic as caring and sharing in some respects. In other ways, institutionally, legally, financially, it does get complicated because we're all embedded in this capitalist monster, and we need to find creative ways to protect those commons from being captured and enclosed. So that's what I try to think about a lot.

Speaker 10:17

So would you say then that commons are intrinsically anti-capitalist, or is there a risk as well, as so often is the case, that capitalism captures its critique and represents it as a mode of representing capitalism?

Speaker 1 10:32

Well, that's that's an excellent question. I think that commons are uh, I think they're pre-political. They're based on things people love and cherish and want to protect. Now, that becomes political when it comes into collision with capitalism. And indeed, as you say, capitalism does try to capture and control and change the language. And that there's all sorts of attempts to commons wash uh by claiming it, you know, try claiming egalitarian street cred, oh yeah, we're a commons, when in fact it's just a hierarchical centralized organization. And so, yes, that's going to happen, but my response to the co-optation of the language is seeing commons as commoning a verb. Are you engaged in commoning? Do you work with other people? Not it's not as if you're all of one mind. You have to work hard to bring yourselves into alignment and to coordinate and to resolve conflicts. But that's the process, not just claiming the word performatively by saying, Oh yeah, I common. Um, and so that's the challenge that the commons presents, but the rewards are a more stable, protected system of meeting your needs. Uh, and this is a long-term proposition. It's not going to be easy, it's not just electing the right person. Um, you know, it's not just participating with your political party, all of which I think are clueless or eager to co-opt a populist language. Uh so I see there's the Commons ultimately wants to have a longer, bigger conversation about the nation-state itself as a system of power, because a lot of this backs up to the nation-state and its deep alliance with capital. And uh being, you know, the the state takes care of governance and law, and capitalism takes care of production and money making, and they're joined at the hip in that enterprise. So, how can we reconfigure state power to serve and protect the commons and not just the investor class?

Speaker 12:50

So that reconfiguration possibility implies that the nation-state isn't necessarily intrinsically problematic. It's really the fusion of the nation-state with capitalist formations. Uh I don't want to go further, couldn't we?

Speaker 1 13:04

I don't want to get too doctrinaire about that, but I think that the nation-state, as a system of power, has appropriated culture, religion, identity, and declared it uh an artifact of national power. And that's where it gets so problematic because I believe that humanity has larger allegiances and aspirations than that with the nation state provides.

Speaker 13:30

Yeah, and possibly more variegated and situated alliances, right? Because, you know, you I kind of always think the paradigm case is kind of Africa, and I've got a very naive understanding of it. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that tribal regions were divided by Eurocentric linearities that caused all sorts of problems because there was no sensitivity to ethnic situatedness and pre-existing relational political structures in the broad sense of political. Um, and that's problematic. And let's face it, nation-state boundaries are artifices, they're constructions.

Speaker 1 14:10

Absolutely.

Speaker 14:11

You know, and so there is um there is a need perhaps to question the state per se whether or not we see it as intrinsically entangled with capitalist formations.

Speaker 1 14:20

Particularly, though, the state has been the partner in capitalist goal to declare the world as one world of a uniform grid for markets. And therefore, that's kind of a force that is kind of denying the inherent diversity of humankind. Uh, it wants to fit everybody into a market regime, a prop private property regime, fungible exchanges of money and value, and so forth. And so trying to declare that value and tradition and identity are inherently pluriversal, is the term, multiple multiple in diverse ways, is kind of the implicit cultural agenda of the commons to reclaim that we have different geographic identities uh because based on the landscape and the water and the traditions of that place, uh, all of which capitalism is about eradicating because it wants to just put it into one massive investment grid and global products.

Speaker 15:26

Uh yeah, and intrinsically linked, I think, to the flattening of colonialism itself, right, in the early days and the kind of there's some, even though you know it's obviously more diverse now, there's an intrinsic Eurocentrism under a lot of those structures. I mean, the corporation you can argue is the white man of property writ large.

Speaker 1 15:48

Absolutely.

Speaker 15:49

And you could argue the same about the nation-state, actually, the modern nation-state. Um, and I'm very struck by this pluriversalism, which really allows for diversity and relationality with the more than human, which is one of my passions, right? Because you've just mentioned topology, geography, locatedness, and the ways in which those inevitably have influences on how we imagine ourselves as communities, as individuals, and you know, our tribes, our families, and our gatherings of various kinds, which I'm guessing feeds a bit into bioregionalism.

Speaker 1 16:28

It does. I mean, I think that I've recently, in recent years, gotten more involved in the bioregional framing of a lot of change, because unless we can become biophysically rooted in places and be committed to them, as opposed to being cosmopolitan capitalists uh searching for market gains wherever we can, and being essentially disdainful or contemptuous of what is unique about different places in the world, we're going to be lost. And we're not, and I think one reason we have such serious ecological problems from climate on change to dozens of other uh such crises, is because we have been treating the earth as a thing, uh, not as a living entity of which we're a part. And so bioregionalism helps us get into this what I call auto shift, an ontological shift, to understand that we are relational beings, not sovereign, autonomous individuals. And once we start to get out of our modern capitalist conceit that we're sovereign individuals, self-made, and so forth, that we can begin to reconnect with each other, with past and future generations, with other living beings, uh, animals, plants, and beyond. Gaia. Um, and so that's kind of the challenge that I see the commons feeding into. But bioregionalism as a frame helps give it some operational focus. And there are, in fact, dozens of different, you know, embryonic movements around the world trying to revive the bioregional movement that started in the 1970s and 80s, which sort of has been latent, dormant for the past 40 years, thanks to the surge and now vulnerability of neoliberalism. Neoliberal capitalism from Reagan Thatcher on up to uh well, I'd say the the end of Trump, uh the first Trump administration, it's now we're start people are starting to say, yeah, neoliberal capitalism is the problem, and starting to open up a space for a broader political discussion than we've had in decades.

Speaker 18:50

So is really exciting um and necessary, actually. Beyond exciting, it's it's vital.

Speaker 1 18:58

Yes.

Speaker 18:59

Um, and it for me it comes down as well to our nature as embodied beings, right? Because we are porous, like you know, the skin is more of a conversation than a wall. Um, and we have these relationships between even our gut microbiota and the biota of the world in which we move and live. Our local regional food is grown in soils that have certain microbes, and there's more and more evidence coming out all the time about the complexity of the intimacies between our embodied lives and the worlds in which we are embedded. And I think this is a really, really interesting and hopeful development. I'd really love you to open up bioregionalism a bit more for people who really don't understand the terminology or what it really drives at. What is it that you're really talking about here? What does it boil down to? And what are the central concerns?

Speaker 1 19:56

Well, there's uh a belief among a lot of ecologists that there are natural regions without bright uh dark, without I'm sorry, without strict bright lines defining them the way political jurisdictions are defined, but rough regions in which the watershed, the type of flora and fauna, and the types of livelihoods that can be earned there are based in a bioregional way. Now it's not as if we can utterly revert to a pre-global world, but to the extent that our commerce and our identities can start to grow into a bioregional frame, we're gonna be much better situated for being resilient to disruptions of our economy and nature. And we're gonna be much more uh, I'd say, socially stable because we will have affiliations with each other and cooperations with each other. Uh the chat the challenge is how, in the midst of the existing nation-state system and international treaty organizations, we can begin to grow into these alternatives. And I see it's a long relational process, but I see a fierce energy and creativity that's being applied to it. And I see dozens of different genres of commons uh attempting to do this. And I think we're gonna be experiencing some serious shocks as the global capitalist system uh can't adapt. And it's not gonna be a linear change. I think it's gonna be like a phase shift that happens rather rapidly, as people say our survival will depend on this. It's not gonna be merely discretionary. Uh so I mean that's sort of the the big picture scenario I see. But it it will take different flavors in different regions. Some areas like Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Are well uh advanced in thinking about this and more mobilized because they go back um 50 years in thinking about this. Others are doing it for the first time, others have been doing it without even having a vocabulary or thinking about it because they've been maybe more insulated from the global circuits of capitalism and have not been as corrupted by it. So that's where I see this all going. And admittedly, in today's climate, people sometimes say, bioregionalism, what's that? But I think it has enormous potential for getting beyond a lot of the sterile ideological debates and starting to get us into this relational mindset that you were referring to.

Speaker 22:44

Yeah, absolutely. And have you got some cool examples that people can find it relatable? People who are unfamiliar with this, have you got examples of bioregional projects or communities where you know specific things are happening?

Speaker 1 22:58

Well, there's a lot of energy going into reimagining food systems so that they're local and uh trying to get different players from farmers to distributors to processors to restaurants to the food consumers themselves to start to become mutually interdependent and look to each other and to become therefore become more self-reliant and not depend upon all this imported fruit and vegetable and meat from around the globe, which of course is part of the problem. Um, so that's an inspiring example. There's a whole set of examples that go under the heading of cosmolocal production, where open source design and knowledge is shared for how to make furniture, how to make modular houses, how to make motor vehicles, how to make um well, my favorite example is an automated insulin delivery pump and smartphone app that people with diabetes created to because the medical and device industry was not creating that. But so they shared this information and built it as an open source collaborative technology, but then you can produce it locally with your own cheaper modular components. So, what I'm saying is cosmolocalism is a form of production that could take care of a lot of these things in a way that doesn't depend on the global supply chains. And you know, there's other attempts to, you know, there's a bioregional festivals that are occurring as a way to try to get the arts and culture world and ordinary people to start to have uh cultural representations of their regional uh identities and feelings. And you know, in Oregon in the US, they have uh an image called salmon nation because the salmon are an important species there. And they talk about salmon nation, and it sort of gives a cultural framing for thinking about oh, yeah, we're we're really kind of dependent upon the salmon because of this, that, and the next thing. So there's these experiments. We don't have a typology, this is not a discipline yet, but there are a lot of really robust instructive examples.

Speaker 25:21

I kind of love the idea of dropping a yet and never making it a discipline.

Speaker 1 25:27

Well, making it a discipline is the first step for its control and corruption, you know.

Speaker 25:33

Yeah, because it's what strikes me is in a sense, what's happening is there's a whole set of imaginaries for worlds beyond the limits of the current dominant one world world imaginary, which we've all soaked in for, you know, for at least 40, 50 years and earlier, of course, but neoliberalism's done enormous damage, um, taking the ceiling off inequality, producing, you know, the fundamental discrepancy between unaccountable levels of wealth and the basic needs of ordinary people. And it's a huge, huge threat to democracy. I mean, I keep hearing people like um people in the states saying billionaires should pay their fair share. And I'm like, that's great, but it's missing the point because the the distributive inequality alone is inherently destructive to democracy. But what I'm hearing in everything you're saying is this isn't an imaginary of coming together, a kind of horizontality, a kind of relationship across rather than up and down. And it's and it's intrinsically situated, it's intrinsically embedded. Um, you know, there obviously there are less embedded forms like digital forms, but even those are relationally embedded by the sound of it. So it's it's just huge, this imaginary shift.

Speaker 1 27:03

It it implies a different idea of politics itself, and one that's based on greater authenticity and less on tactical or media manipulations, uh, which centralized systems are notorious for because you capture that centralized node and you capture a lot else. When this is all distributed and diversified, it's harder to capture and it has to be based on reality principles more than these systems that are so far removed from even the idea that we're part of an earthly biological system. Uh, we we don't even think we moderns don't even think that. So we do have you you sort of alluded to this, we need we have a big challenge in unlearning what we've been acculturated to over decades, and that is at least as much a problem. It's not as if we can simply, oh, be like an indigenous person, because we have to escape modernity itself uh to get to this place, yeah.

Speaker 28:06

But we and we can't do it by going pre-modern. No, no, like that's not the way. We can't just romanticize and imagine some pre-ro pre-modern, like almost Luddite return to a some pristine imagined before. You know, that would be extremely destructive, I think. We have to be adaptive and future-facing while being radically present and embedded in what's really happening, what's really materially real.

Speaker 1 28:33

And I think that what is important is that we bend the structural beams of modernity enough that we can make it fair, participatory, have bottom-up creative agency again, all of which have been denied by the existing market state system. And so it's that's why I take encouragement by these seemingly spontaneous movements that are precisely trying to honor that, whether they go under the rubric of the commons, or there's a lot of adjacent movements that you could cite from the transition town movement and cooperatives and donut economics and uh, you know, the well-being economy and so forth, all of which have a piece of the puzzle in trying to reimagine the shared shared wealth that we own ourselves, and therefore we can pre-distribute the wealth instead of trying to redistribute it later. In some ways, it's about having greater upfront mutual ownership of the resources we depend on and our own infrastructures to enable common aims so that it's not a heroic aberrational thing, but something that is more normal.

Speaker 29:48

Um and it reimagines wealth itself, doesn't it? Because it you know, it definancializes it, not entirely, because obviously money still matters, but there are multiple modes of well-being and celebration that are not monetary, that commons also attest to. I'm thinking of seed sharing cooperatives in India, for example. And you know, I think it was Vandanashiva who was talking about the radical nature, the radical political nature of being able to grow your own food, like how much sovereignty, you know, to borrow that term, that gives you as a human being. Um, and that's a non-monetary mode of power and wealth.

Speaker 1 30:30

In the US civil rights movement, this famous activist Fannie Lou Hamer created agricultural co-op farms because it was a defense against white supremacist action against them. Because once if you could grow your own food, you could have some degree of control and autonomy in your life against that kind of behaviors. So this is where I think the vision of a different world can come in and start to grow on a better foundation than um liberal, let's just call it liberal reformism. Which I don't want to make this an either-or proposition because there are people who are doing important work and trying to tame the barbarity of the current system, and I think that needs to be applauded. But I think we have to realize the limited affordances of some of that work because it's not necessarily leading to system change or structural change.

Speaker 31:28

Exactly. It can just rehabilitate something by making it more bearable, which is the risk, right? Right. So you need you need, I think you need a multiplicity of approaches. And we talk about an onto shift. I suspect we need multiple onto shifts in the sense that we're looking for um epistemic multiplicity, many ways of knowing, many modes of truth telling that are not just kind of making crap up. So we're not talking about just chatting nonsense a la online influencers who talk about things they know nothing about, but we are talking about a multiplicity of perspectives that are embedded in long-lived experience, maybe from alternative rationalities of some either antiquity or worth, where there's some probity, there's some value, there's some weight, there's some resonance to them, um, rather than any one view. So if there is a one view, it's simply an invitation into a space of multiplicity. And, you know, it's like you said, you implied it's not necessarily easy. And I I'm always saying this, but I'm always struck by Donna Haraway's beautiful invitation to stay with the trouble, to stay with the frayings and the graspings and the weavings and the rubbings of birthing alternative ways of imagining alternative possible worlds or ways of worlding worlds, and and thinking about the ways in which it matters, which ideas have ideas, which thoughts think thoughts, which languages construct languages, going right down to those fundamental questions of power. Um, and it has to be, I think, fundamentally distributive, as you've said, you know, you know, kind of in a way it's ecological without wanting to romanticize ecology, in the sense that it's it's very much more like the way natural systems, particularly rhizomatic systems, work.

Speaker 1 33:37

And I agree with that, and the but that agenda is no longer going to be discretionary or nice. I think it's gonna be a survival mechanism because with the surging of AI, which is going to try to systematize everything through cognitive knowledge uh or purporatively cognitive knowledge, in some ways it's just language patterns that are plausibly uh not forms of knowledge, but nonetheless, trying to standardize our cultural knowledge base and cultural base, it's going to be a radical act to assert these alternative epistemologies and to stick with them as serious things. So um turbulence ahead.

Speaker 34:22

Absolutely, and it strikes me as well that AI is in itself potentially another mode of enclosure.

Speaker 1 34:29

Absolutely, it is.

Speaker 34:30

You know, we're already looking at you know commons like wiki being raided by AI to generate its outputs, which make a very few people very rich at the cost of the rest.

Speaker 1 34:45

It's like a a uh commercial simulacrum of reality, the way genetically modified seeds are kind of simulating ecologically uh originated seeds, but only because they can get their commercial proprietary hooks into them. And AI is sort of trying to be the overlord form of knowledge uh curation that you're gonna have to pay the piper every time you participate in that culture. It's like fiendishly uh ingenious and going to they aspire to be ubiquitous. Whether it can have enough stability to not be volatile and catastrophic, we still don't know.

Speaker 35:28

We don't know. And it would be interesting to see, wouldn't it, to imagine ways in which it could externalize its intern, you know, internalize its externalities. So at the moment, you data centers use of water. Is there a way of actually making them sustainably ecologically responsible? And then is there a way of actually AI itself being democratized or commonized in some future alternative configuration? Because one thing's for clear is for sure, it's not going anywhere. And so we have to kind of think about how then do we reimagine it? How then do we bring it into these other imaginaries and imagine different ways of relating to it as an emergent structure of social reality?

Speaker 1 36:14

Uh, to the extent that AI is kind of this distilled essence of the political economic reality of capitalism, that's it's a major task to get to that because it is. They own the property rights, they have the big database data sets that the rest of us don't, and shifting those so that are accessible and usable in a popular, diversified way, that's a tall order tantement to toppling capitalism.

Speaker 36:41

Yeah, it is. And I wonder if that's actually where we have to go in the end. You know, there I I mean, Thatcher was always famous for saying there is no alternative to neoliberalism. And I think we've got to the point where there is no alternative to actually overthrowing neoliber liberalism and actually capitalism itself, and moving into other forms of political formation that are much more commons-based or commons-like, you know, that such as the imagination of the human species that we don't actually know yet what alternative forms could emerge.

Speaker 1 37:15

Well, that's why I sort of think it's I feel very strongly of the need to develop a coherent. Well, there's two things that come to mind. Coherent islands of co islands of coherence is the phrase that the Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prijgoni uh asserted, that islands of coherence can change the dynamics of the entire system in ways that are not anticipated. And that's one. And two, Vaclav Havel, as a cultural dissident in the 70s, was asked, How do you deal with a totalizing system that you can't rationally persuade or have civic action against? And he said, you develop a parallel polis of horizontal relationships that prefigure the world you want, that allow you to speak the truth and wholesome values. And I see that as a kind of a rough metaphor for how we need to develop this parallel polis of diverse players of the sort I've mentioned in the past uh half hour to begin to identify with each other and coordinate with each other and to become a different moral center of gravity.

Speaker 38:24

Yeah, totally. And I I love the idea of there of the prefigurative, because then you're getting away from oppositionalism, which by definition keeps you stuck on the other side of a kind of binary and locked in a particular energy. None of which, of course, suggests that there isn't a need for critical awareness and critique, because there always is, including critique of our new formations. We have to always be able to have that reflexive capacity to look honestly at what we're doing and say, okay, how is power falling through this now? Is there, you know, even in a commons formation, we know there are subtle forms of domination that humans can operate, you know, against each other within even the most idealized community formation. So that critical reflexive kind of question of power never goes away. But the need to move into an imagination that is moves beyond oppositionalism, moves beyond the limits of the present imaginary to prefigure possible worlds otherwise. And this idea of horizontality. I just had a conversation with my friend Andreas Philippopoulos Mihelopoulos in this same series where he's written a book about hydro justice, and he's very move much moving towards a celebration of horizontality against verticality. He's not saying get rid of verticality entirely, but recognize its limits and really horizontality and water as a figuration, an onto figuration, we could say, for alternatives in a way is even more radical than rhizomatic thinking because rhizomes move along particular channels, water seeps, it just finds a way. Um, and it reminds me in this context, our conversation of William Connolly's idea of the politics of swarming. There's something about the need to overflow, to flow past the limits, right? To move beyond the banks of the present. Um, so I love that notion of a prefiguration.

Speaker 1 40:26

And I think it's going to have to sort itself out as the brittle, imploding existing hierarchical systems no longer function well enough. And people will say, Oh, we do need to swarm, we do need to comment, we knew, and I think there'll be a big uh testing out and of what will what can go the distance, what has the hardiness, what has the creative uh degree of empowerment, and so and so forth. But uh, you know, maybe that's a little further down the road when the uh unsustainability, the current systems become more obvious or acknowledged. I think people, especially and even in power, say, oh, we've got some problems here, but they're not willing to use uh Prime Minister Kearney's phrase, take the sign out of the window from the the Vakrov-Havel speech. Yes, in which they're still paying uh saying the shibboleth, still mouthing the empty phrases, as opposed to saying we need to get down and dirty and talk real about this.

Speaker 41:39

Yeah, which is where you I kind of keep hoping for this commons generativity to bubble up into political awareness, general political awareness. Because as I said, you know, when you when you talk to people, just ordinary people about politics, they don't see an alternative. And that's what generates a sense of hopelessness. Um having said that, I'm there's something very exciting happening in the United Kingdom at the moment with the rise of the Green Party, which is genuinely interested in alternatives and you know does engage with policy positions which are not business as usual.

Speaker 1 42:16

But that my question would be: can they make the Anto shift, or will they be like the German Green Party that got sucked into the standard system? Um can they find ways to reimagine state power and how it functions as an enabling force as opposed to a centralized controlling force?

Speaker 42:34

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I kind of hope that they can. I think the value system that they're generate generated by, they're the the value system that uplifts the energies, could move very much in that direction. It's um, I mean, Zach Polanski talks about eco-populism. It's I don't think it's socialism as usual. I think it is something more imaginative and certainly something more generative in the sense of moving towards the sensibilities of ordinary people. I mean, one of the latest developments was the election of a woman called Hannah Spencer. I don't know if you follow this, but she's a plumber and plasterer from Manchester, and she's kind of a very ordinary person. That's how she presents, and she's in parliament. And the basic message is we need more ordinary people in parliament. There's something incredibly refreshing about even the simplicity of that. But once you're in government, then you are constricted by all the pre-existing fabrics of this system, its institutional gravity, its intensifications of um habit, and all the kind of architectural memory of the system. So that becomes quite an interesting point of testing because it's so much easier to be a voice on the edge offering critique and prefiguration, even it's much harder to operationalize. Once you're within the structures that pre-exist, your capacity to change it.

Speaker 1 44:06

There's a fantastic book by a former um uh well, a Chilean former journalist who became a constitutional scholar. She wrote a book about towards an anti-oligarchal uh constitution, talking about uh the failure of constitutions to have sit have uh different structural vehicles for popular sentiment to be expressed as opposed to representative, uh means that the system is already entropic and not going to last because it needs to renew itself from that bottom-up participation by ordinary people. And so we need structural means, whether they're citizen assemblies or sortition uh in represent being represented in legislatures, to have ordinary people sentiments, she calls it plebeian constitutionalism, uh, represented. And I find that a fascinating and deep insight for the dilemma of contemporary capitalist democracies.

Speaker 45:12

Yeah, and it raises questions about what representation even means, you know, and and I mean, I'm always exercised there for as a former legal scholar. This always jumps into my mind is the the kind of need to move beyond the merely human when we start talking about representationalism, to start thinking about how do we, you know, obviously we can never escape our human perspective, but we do have means of understanding more than human realities through science, through a kind of prosthetic of different epistemological means. They're limited, but how do we start thinking beyond simply anthropocentrism?

Speaker 1 45:52

How do we begin to respect, let's just use the word personhood of other living beings and their own ontological aspirations and needs? Uh and that's not a fanciful question, that's an urgent question.

Speaker 46:10

Extremely urgent question, absolutely. And you know, not an odd question for lawyers, because after all, corporations are persons, the Taj Mahal is a legal person. I mean, you know, it's not an odd thing to generate persons of multiple kinds. Um, and we have been very bad, actually, at thinking about the kind of personhood of living lively more than human or non-human beings, as opposed to persons that we generate to control through property or capital.

Speaker 1 46:42

And the only kicker I would put to that is I've read a fascinating book called The Problem with Personhood, yeah, about how legal personhood is starting to essentially vampire-like, extract all these living persons into Western jurisprudential notions of a person. Yes, it does. In a way that degrades this experience of the presence of other living beings.

Speaker 47:07

Absolutely. And even the notion of personateness could be problematized.

Speaker 1 47:12

Yes, yes.

Speaker 47:14

What does its import?

Speaker 1 47:16

Well, I mean, to the extent that the microbiome makes up such a vast amount of ourselves. What is the self, after all?

Speaker 47:23

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1 47:26

In my mind from uh Francisco Varella, the dissident theoretical biologist, he said the self doesn't exist. We're part of a meshwork of selfless selves. Exactly. Very Buddhist idea.

Speaker 47:39

It is, exactly. And it and it really swings back to this whole question of you know, the whole prefigurative idea of commoning demands actually an evolution in the capacity of the human being to recognize that the things we take so seriously about a sense of self need to be released in order that we can be really comfortable with complexity, really comfortable with the more than human, the flux and the flow, the it in the eye, um, the multiplicity that we in fact are. Um and when we take that much, much more seriously, in my view, we tend to flourish because we're not rigid, we're not constricted, we're not locked down. And how I read the politics at the present day, the the major inflection point that we're at between so-called left and so-called right. There's a tendency, I think, between there's a tension between a kind of contraction into this is what we've always been, we have to go back, we've made a mistake, it's all got too crazy, you know, we've got to re-establish certain forms of power and cling on to them. And a movement towards, no, let's expand, let's change, let's become more fluid. And it's the fluidity that some people find so threatening at the moment.

Speaker 1 49:05

I I think that is a serious challenge because it's paradoxical. People do want and need security in their life, and surrendering to the flow is radically disorienting and troubling.

Speaker 49:20

Uh, and yet these and yet weirdly grounding.

Speaker 1 49:26

These rigid brittle structures we have are no longer properly grounded in let's just call it reality.

Speaker 49:31

Yeah.

Speaker 1 49:32

Meaning the reality of of living systems. So uh this is uh maybe that's kind of sort of a deep civilizational paradox. We have to is civilization compatible with living systems, yeah.

Speaker 49:44

Certainly civilization as it's being conceived as civilized.

Speaker 1 49:48

Exactly.

Speaker 49:49

Yeah, exactly. There's some, yeah, there's a huge invitation here. It's very exciting. Um, David, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed speaking to you. I always do.

Speaker 1 49:58

Well, I've enjoyed reconnecting with you and uh thank you for eliciting some ideas I didn't even know I had.

Speaker 50:06

Well, thank you for sharing them. I'm just gonna stop the recording.