Publish at March 27 2024 Updated March 27 2024
Historians of the future may call the last few years those of disillusionment. Many models seem on the verge of collapse. Neo-liberal capitalism shows that leaving everything to the market leads to the impoverishment of more and more citizens. States, for their part, can no longer be true allies, torn between letting capital do its thing and simplistic solutions that fail to take into account the subtleties of many issues. In short, populations find themselves caught between two behemoths that ignore them.
This can lead to two reactions. The first, which is particularly evident on social networks, is a surly distrust of everything. It's a self-explanatory attitude, but it doesn't do anything except idealize even more harmful models or brood without suggesting anything. The second is one that seeks to act locally on a range of issues. This constructive approach could well be a formula that develops over time.
"The commons" is what sociologists call those spaces or objects that are taken over by a gathering of community members to meet needs. In this way, people come together and respond to crises by pooling their strengths. An approach that seems to contradict the long-held belief that a group of people managing an open-access resource would lead to its destruction. However, over the past thirty years, the work of many economists and sociologists, including 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, has shown that, on the contrary, such shared governance is more effective than that entirely administered by the market or the state.
In the past, this notion was called the "common good", but this has changed with the vision of governance brought by thinkers like Ostrom. Indeed, what deeply marks this approach is the fact that not everyone works to accumulate capital, but to ensure that everyone has access to the various goods and services on offer.
Quebec was a breeding ground for the commons in the decades from 1960 to 1980, as the province emerged from the Catholic yoke to develop secular institutions offering services to the less well-off, including community clinics and kindergartens that helped integrate many women into the workforce. Today, these networks have become CLSCs (Centre local de services communautaires) and CPEs (Centre de la petite enfance), which are now state-run... and no longer meet the needs of a diversifying population.
The commons model is much closer to the movements of the state than to those of capitalism, which does not understand the idea of economic activity without seeking maximum profit. Nevertheless, as Sébastien Schulz, PhD in sociology and co-founder of the "Société des Communs" collective, explains, there is a real paradox and mistrust of the State among many of the players in the "commons".
Firstly, because in recent decades it has more often than not been the ally of capital, the enemy of the commons. In fact, it lies in the overall vision of public authorities. They generally want to centralize powers of action and apply the same recipe everywhere, adding uniform rules, bureaucracy and so on.
Yet this approach runs counter to the idea of the "commons", which develops from the real needs of a physical or virtual community. The same is true of the sharing economy, which ultimately turns out to be a disguised approach to mutualization, while keeping workers in a precarious situation and meeting financial objectives.
Yet, according to Schulz, the "commons" can impress the state by demonstrating working models that could be promoted by public bodies, or supported by pecuniary or legal partnerships. Rather than putting obstacles in the way and allowing itself to be influenced by certain lobbies, the State could choose to trust the commons, while accepting a certain flexibility of action on the part of each party.
Generally speaking, there are four main areas or issues at stake for the commons:
On this last aspect, among others, it's worth noting that the IT community has been working hard in this direction. The whole open-source software movement, collaborative knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia and free data are all part of this community movement, with the aim of making knowledge accessible to all and no longer hiding it behind a paywall.
This section, which is more digital than real, shows that the "commons" have also taken hold in education. High schools and self-managed schools also fall into the category of living environments that break away from the centralization of education and propose a model that meets the needs of the students who attend them.
This introduction by various means can be a path of reflection for a pedagogy that will pass on this model to the younger generations, demonstrating that there is a sociological third way rather than betting everything on the market or the state. For many sociologists, in any case, this would be a promising horizon that would give people the chance to emerge from the multiple crises of today, on a local and possibly global scale.
Photo: stillfx / DepositPhotos
References
Duquenne, Géraldine. "The commons, a governance ideal towards sustainability?" Etopia. Last updated: November 20, 2023. https://etopia.be/blog/2023/11/20/les-communs-ideal-de-gouvernance-vers-la-durabilite/.
Gauvreau, Claude. "The 'commons', another mode of social organization." Actualités UQAM. Last updated: June 8, 2023. https://actualites.uqam.ca/2023/les-communs-un-autre-mode-dorganisation-sociale/.
Lachapelle, Marc D., and Dan Furukawa Marques. "Communs et autogestion : redécouvrir les pratiques émancipatoires du Québec des années 1960-1980 - Recherches sociographiques." Érudit. Last updated June 15, 2023. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/rs/2023-v64-n1-rs08112/1100573ar/.
Le Dévédec, Nicolas, and Pierre-Marie David. "From the commons to the common: a new sociological horizon?" ResearchGate. Last updated October 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309311160_Des_communs_au_commun_un_nouvel_horizon_sociologique.
Leconte, Maxime. "The commons: a new category of public action under construction." DUMAS - Dépôt Universitaire De Mémoires Après Soutenance. Last updated: March 11, 2021. https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03166907/document.
"The "commons": an alternative to digital capitalism?" France Culture. Last updated: January 12, 2024. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-meilleur-des-mondes/les-communs-une-alternative-au-capitalisme-numerique-4242420.
"The Commons?" La Coop des Communs. Last updated: March 6, 2024. https://coopdescommuns.org/fr/les_communs/.
Zachariou, Renée. "Transforming the State through the Commons?" Ouishare. Last updated: January 23, 2024. https://www.ouishare.net/article/transformer-letat-par-les-communs.
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