Peer2Politics

“Throughout the globe there is a blossoming of interest in the old idea of ‘the commons’. For many, it offers a radical escape from the all-too-apparent devastations of capitalism and the impoverishments of a world possessed by the idea of possession. For these commoners, the commons were not all lost with the European land enclosures of the sixteenth century, but continue to be produced, enclosed, and reclaimed today. For them, commoning implies an abandonment of the rule of ‘the economy’ that reduces us to hyper-individualised consumers, and more and more of the natural world to resources that can be bought and sold. It carries promises of more convivial, communal and enspirited relationships and transformations in the material quality of people’s lives. Defiantly utopian, as a first step, these commoners call on us to ‘clean our gaze’ so we can see existing commons and, more importantly, see the quiet revolution that is underway in actual movements of the common people.

Work on developing Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or CBRLs, for short) continues apace here at the P2P Foundation. When speaking of the types of licenses, we often find it hard to explain how they fill a niche in the alt. license spectrum, falling somewhere between the straight up copyleft and the popular Creative Commons Non-Commercial License.

Time is running short for a paradigm shift. When it comes to our individual and collective engagement in making the world a better place, we often talk about uniting in diversity: uniting in harmony to multiply outcomes and uniting in diversity for multiple focus and resilience. But how can this concretely be achieved? We all acknowledge the critical need for systemic change and for collective intelligence, but we all have different opinions about the challenges our world is facing and the ways to address these challenges. We each try to convince others that we hold the best solutions and methodologies, which often prevents us from coordinating or communing in effective ways. But is this possible? What type of unity or communion are we talking about?

Occupy’s public discussions on “diversity of tactics” have often lacked historical perspective; discussions, at least online, have tended to degenerate to “Ghandi!” “No, ANC!” Now, however, Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below the fold are slides summarizing the results of her study of 323 non-violent and violent campaigns from 1900-2006. (There are twenty slides, so anybody with a slow connection may prefer to download a zipped file of the original PDF). Here’s one key slide: