- Length: 16:25 minutes (15.03 MB)
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Audio: The future of the commons
The idea of the commons has been documented for centuries. But in recent years we've seen a tremendous growth in what's often referred to as the 'free culture' movement. Is there a link between that movement and the resurgence of the commons? And is the idea of a commons still possible in this hyperconnected world?
In this interview David Bollier, the editor of on the commons.org and author of 'Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built A Digital Republic of Their Own', speaks to Radio National's Future Tense presenter Antony Funnell about the idea of the commons.
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20.07.09 — Andrew Davies
Hi Peter,
Thanks for those comments. Some really interesting points - specially in relation to banks and car factories. Hadn't thought about it in those terms before.
Andrew
18.07.09 — Peter Ravenscroft
America re-discovers socialism, whoopee!
An interesting shift in US thinking, to go with all those banks and car factories moving to the commons. .The USSA, as I think Philip Adams tagged it this week,.as opposed to capitalist Russia. And maybe, in a week or three, even capitalist China, when they stop trying to browbeat folk with hopelessly confusing economic loyalties. . .
I think the case of the commons on the net is well under control, with the commoners, us, winning hands down at present.
But the game, in the traditional sense of the commons, that is concerning land, is perhaps not going so well, just here. I think the hyperspace side of the debate, important as it is, should perhaps not be allowed to swamp the entire subject, without a bleat.
So here goes. This lot below is simply uninformed guesswork and half-baked personal opinion. I do not say it was so, just maybe it is so, in parts.
That land around Boston, I forget what they call it, is a country that was created on the back of the merchant adventurer company-phase of English history. And that in turn derived from the freebooter military companies that would sack whatever part of Europe someone paid them to sack. Or their seagoing descendants - pirates, privateers and the many derivative armed-occupation companies, such as that of the privateer/pirate Raleigh. Those last set up the warring settlements on the eastern seaboard of North America.
A very curious history, from a very short time period, that set the tone that US Americans now think is normal, A per the audio above. Their "free market" is perhaps better called the "freebooters market."
But here, for instance, the times having moved on, at settler square one, we did not have such armed-adventurer companies. You can make the case that Australia was in contrast a joint Colonial Office and Royal Navy project. Or simply an oversized Royal Navy shore station, run on much the same model as the one the Roman legions used in northern Europe, where some old city charters date back to licenses granted to demobbed legionnaires to trade;. Roman ticket-of-leave men.
Most of the land here in Oz, in contrast to the hinterland of Boston, is still not freehold. Once we had by force and farce pinched it from the aborigines the Colonial Office, in a half-hearted attempt to protect those same folk, went for leases on runs and stations. That is not something pastoralists like to remember, and is a game not played out yet, as aboriginal folk are getting some of their land rights back, very slowly. At the expense of the commons, all of us, them included. Aborignal land ownership curiously has more in common with merchant-adventurer company land ownership than with ownership in a national commons The first two exclude the common folk from all rights, when they can, then sell some back as privileges.
But, most of the seized land here still in reality belongs to the national commons, here for some odd reason still called the Crown. As do almost all the mineral rights here, a fact that mining companies and landowners, including aboriginal ones, again are not overly comfortable with. You do not own mines here, you lease them from the commons. The people, (dare one use that phrase?) own the mines and their minerals. The mine is not the machinery, that lot is simply the miner's shovel, no matter the size. The mine is the ore deposit. And that belong to the commons. Us.
We are currently selling off the water rights, a sort of mineral right if you like, from both leasehold and freehold farms, water that was previously more or less all in the commons, to private individuals and companies. That is something I think we will regret, when the asset-strippers have been and gone and we, the collective commoners, are left with farms with their old commons water rights lost. We will have to buy or seize those rights back, for those farms to be viable again, when the rains return. OK, we will do it, but it will be a nuisance, to have to do so. .