State power will back off. Desperation for public legitimacy and support fueled by social protests has left politicians open to concede market failures.

Revamping State Power to Support Commoning We have outlined a general stance towards the state in moving forward, but we have not burrowed into the deeper questions: In what specific ways can state power itself be altered to support commoning? What openings in law and bureaucratic behavior, or in politics and local action, might be exploited to secure stable beachheads for commoning? The first priority is to convince state institutions to back off. Recall Elinor Ostrom’s wisdom in her seventh design principle for successful commons. She asserted that state authorities must recognize the right of commoners to govern themselves.42 External governmental authorities must not challenge the right of the users of common resources (or “appropriators,” in Ostrom’s language) to devise their own rules and governance regimes. This is our starting point and a minimal requirement. We could derive a principle of noninterference from it. The state must get out of the way so that commoners can engage in the value-generating activities that only they can do. Given the realities, however, commons may find that they need legal recognition to grow and flourish. In instances where state institutions regard sharing as a crime — e.g., seed sharing, software collaborations, information sharing — commoning must be decriminalized. This is part of normalizing commons and acknowledging that the moral and political legitimacy of commoning exists prior to and independent of modern states.43 Consider how state power has been used to let investors form corporations and limit their liability, ostensibly because such organizational forms serve the public good. Monarchs and, later, legislatures saw corporations as a way to encourage activities that the state itself could not or did not want to undertake. Early ventures such as the investor-owned British East India Company, for example, developed colonial trade regimes, extracted natural resources, exploited cheap labor, and built railroads and waterways. Why shouldn’t state power also recognize the immense value generated by commoners by granting their institutions legal standing? Such recognition will not come easily, of course. Political leaders and bureaucrats who bow down before the standard economic narrative have trouble seeing other modes of value. Moreover, some state institutions themselves are designed to depend on market revenues. For example, the European Patent Office — an interstate governance body that grants patents under the European Patent Convention — is designed to finance most of its one billion euro budget by collecting fees from patent applicants. Since the more patents it grants, the more money it collects, the Patent Office has a strong incentive to make more scientific and technical knowledge proprietary. While it is understandable to charge patent holders for services provided — and not, say, the general taxpayer — this mechanism is a disincentive to support a world in which we Share Knowledge Generously. Such a societal ideal tends to be regarded as aberrant, if not faintly ridiculous. So are any ambitions to achieve social harmony and intergenerational continuity and protect cultural heritage. As for the potential contributions that subsistence communities and nomadic tribes make to eco-sensitive choices, many moderns continue to depict them as primitive, uncivilized, and hopelessly backward.44 Thus, we are imprisoned within a progress narrative validated and reproduced by state institutions. We are told the economy must grow (to fulfill targets contrived by corporations) so that we can compete successfully on the global market. World leaders urge us not to fall behind. Being outpaced in technological innovation is considered by the business and political communities to be the worst fate of all. One innovation after another — driverless cars, synthetic biology, nanotechnology — is pushed through regulatory procedures, at times with too little time to consider the full societal costs and benefits. All this makes it difficult for people to embrace a shift to the commons. Moreover, guardians of state power understandably think: why should the state cede any authority to nonmarket, decentralized activities or provide funding support to things that have no market value? It would only enrage elites and disrupt internal political arrangements. In addition, letting people withdraw from the circuitry of the market/state system will only embolden the yearning for self-determination, goes the thinking … and that could be dangerous. It would only encourage unregulated activity, amateur experimentation, and perhaps demands for greater autonomy. The guardians of state power may understandably fear that if people decommodify their everyday lives and wean themselves away from dependencies on market/state systems, it will reduce the state’s moral standing, political authority, and tax revenues. Thus the challenge: if the commons is going to evolve as an alternative matrix of governance and provisioning, it must somehow overcome a deep-seated skepticism about commoning among many bureaucrats, politicians, and governments. This does not mean that no workarounds are possible. As stated earlier, the state is not a monolithic institution. State decision makers, despite their zeal in defending their authority, could find it advantageous to authorize and support commoning under the right circumstances. At the local level, this means: allocating land for community gardens and co-housing; facilitating the formation of community land banks and trusts; encouraging local agriculture and food systems; using open source software in public administration; providing free community Wi-Fi everywhere; using open educational resources (OER) in classrooms; providing space and support for timebanks, repair cafés, hackerspaces, and much more. This is not a quixotic agenda. Those who wield state power are mindful of the need for public support and legitimacy. Many politicians, feeling the heat from fierce social protests against extractivism and the international trade regime, are looking for credible ways to escape the iron cage of neoliberal capitalism. Some political leaders are willing to concede the failures of the market/progress narrative to address climate breakdown, inequality, poverty, and hunger; but on the other hand, they are also fearful of breaking from dogmas about free markets and national identity. Around the world, many authoritarians have seized upon the many failures of the market/state system to promote various forms of nationalism. Although a complicated and varied process, much of this political trend is fueled by a search for meaning, purpose, and belonging that the market/state is incapable of fulfilling. The political left and center, meanwhile, cling to conventional vehicles for change: new laws, policies, programs, and procedural reform. While sometimes significant, these approaches generally are carried out in distant state venues (courts, legislatures, government agencies) and fail to engage people personally. In the end, many liberals and social democrats remain tethered to the dominant narrative of progress and show little interest in bottom-up empowerment or social transformation. The cultural dimensions of commons-based initiatives such as agroecology, community land trusts, platform cooperatives, and cosmo-local production, are generally ignored or seen as too small and inconsequential to be taken seriously. Businesses, for their part, generally see them as threats to their market share and profits.