I don't know what it would take to bring back a sense of The Commons to the U.S.

The idea and practice of The Commons is many centuries old, having originated (iirc - I'm not an historian) sometime in what is now known as the Medieval period in England.

Loosely speaking, it consisted of an area of undeveloped land set aside for the use of anyone who needed land on which to graze their livestock. No one "owned" it, it was open to all.

Obviously, this sort of open arrangement was also open to abuse -- see The Tragedy of the Commons for an analysis of the abuse -- however, the IDEA of a Commons endured and was ultimately refined in our country as the establishment of National and State parks.

This idea of The Commons was also reflected in the sensibilities of the citizenry during much of the last century in a political sense, the concept that all of us were involved together in the Great Democratic Experiment in promoting the formation of an Ideal State of common rights and Rule of Law.

For the Working Class, this meant that the formation of Unions was the best expression of the collective sense that fighting for the rights of some was explicitly a fight for the rights of all.

Since the Reagan years in particular, that idea of commonality among the citizenry has been under deliberate and sustained attack. It began in stages in the early 70s as right wing Foundations and Think Tanks worked ceaselessly to find ways to drive wedges into our sense of commonality and create emotionally fraught divisions in order to weaken our defenses against the Owner Class -- who wanted nothing less than a complete takeover of The Commons in the name of Profit.

So, here we are in the 21st Century, with worker pitted against worker, with a clueless, ignorant citizenry co-opted into servicing the aims of the Owner Class, and the fading memory of the once ubiquitous sense of The Commons but a ragged whisp of what once was a largely accepted norm.

The question of how we turn that around is THE crucial question of our times, imho.

sw

"Tragedy...." was a very important book for me.

There should be no commons. In the conservative worldview it's every man for himself. George Lakoff explains this really well here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x462972

The idea of the individual as supreme is one of the basic principles of conservative thought. The individual controls his own destiny, and to take from an individual and give to someone else (as through taxation) is essentially theft. Conservatives don't want a commons. They don't want a society where people share with each other. And they want us divided.

interests tied to its survival, is more easily subject to control by the sociopathic elites.

sw

:)

:hug:

Divide and conquer. Many teabaggers and other ordinary Republicans aren't rich, but they've been convinced that the "others" (public employees, union members, liberals, minorities) are stealing "their" money. So instead of working with these "others" (whose interests are actually the same) to stop the abuses of the very wealthy -- the hedge fund managers and the banksters -- rank-and-file conservatives try to prevent any furtherance of a concept of a "commons." They want to crush unions and reduce taxes on the wealthy, even though this will end up hurting them as much as anyone else.

You have to understand the conservative mentality. Many of them don't mind living with a dirt floor and an outhouse as long as the people they don't like are suffering even more. That's what authoritarians play upon. As long as they have it better than those they see as "wrong", they are okay with it.

Some people are most comfortable being subservient to masters, and as long as they have it better than someone else, and can be authoritarian over them, they are willing to tolerate anything.

We all share the air, whether we like it or not. They might find a way to control and monetize water, but air? Climate? can't be done. But that of course, is why they do everything they can to obscure the importance of air and our inability to control it or divide it up.

If the "right to life" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence means anything, this is it.

Have been working on it for quite a while. The key is to stop the abuses.

how do we bring back the IDEA of The Commons in such a way that the citizenry is willing to fight for it?

People are more easily duped into supporting policies that injure their interests in the long run when they have no sense of COMMON interests.

sw

If you look closely, you'll notice that the land they're whining about doesn't even belong to them. It could be Association turf or it could be easement which isn't even included in their deed.

The concept -- in western society -- goes back to the ancient Rome's "Code of Justinian." It has a basis in law that groups, even more so than individuals, should be using the federal court system to strengthen.

I also appreciate your making the "western society" distinction.

What I left unsaid in my OP is what we both know about pre-Columbian societies in this country -- and indeed, in tribal societies throughout the world -- is that the concept of resources (hunting and foraging lands) being held in common comprised the heart of their societal organization.

Thanks also for the recommend,
sw

The idea that we only "get together with family" on holidays speaks to some fundamental withdrawal from relationship and society that is troubling. As if extended family were an excess and not a resource.

By no coincidence, these are closely related dynamics in the American experience. When we think of extended family units, other than in Indian society, the classic example is the family farming community. It's not community in the sense of a town, or even village, but rather, the cross-roads communities that in the mid-1800s often had a family name, such as "Smithville," or "Ives' Settlement." The central homes, which had additions put on, housed multi-generational units. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and "great- ____" lived just down the road.

During the industrial era, and specifically post-Civil War, the railroads changed the nature of farming from self-sufficient family farms to the larger dairy farms (and just as old farm houses show the additions for generations, the barn structures changed significantly at this time). Fewer people were employed on the dairy farm, and so a growing number of the younger generation began to seek the opportunities found in distant towns and cities.

This same era is known in politics as "the Gilded Age." In large part, this was due to politicians giving away a very large amount of what had been "the commons" to industry. In fact, the amount of land given to the railroad industry alone, between the end of the Civil War and 1900, is a larger sum than five mid-western states combined.

And, of course, when the industrialage began to give way to the high-tech age, and industry needed employees less connected to their families, the rates of divorce, etc, sky-rocketed. I could go on and on. Fascinating topic.

now, where so many homes are reverting to lenders. Makes me wonder how many communities are being killed off, how many neighborhoods fragmented -- if what people have in the suburbs can be called neighborhoods and not just tracts.

When we moved to ours in Sunnyvale, the tract wasn't even finished yet. There was construction all around us. It was sort of fun and wild because there were no yards marked off by fencing yet and the old fruit orchards were still all around us. In a funny way, we got a little taste of what "the commons" might have been, for about a year and a half. There were a lot of young families and us kids were taken care of by everyone. Our next door neighbor's toddler used to appear at our door in her pjs demanding breakfast.

Of course, that ended very soon and the tract became like all the others in the valley. Self contained family homes, no parks for years, no public transportation, either, very little sidewalk or lanes to encourage walking or biking. Everyone was shuttled around in their family car and neighbors stopped lending out small appliances or casually watching all the kids or even talking over the fence much because the redwood fences were too tall.

coming out with each gathering?

...I call myself a Commonist.

:D

i have no sense of "commons" with hundreds of millions of people, and since we are human beings, primates, rather than passenger pigeons, i do not think we can have any sense of "commonality" with a world of billions of people

quite simply, most people are not of "my" type and no amount of hype about it will make me believe that most people are of
"my" type

we as progressives do ourselves no favors when we ignore the basic facts of biology and human nature, conservatives and neo-nazi/racist types get many things wrong but they are NEVER shy to play to biological realities and to exaggerate natural biological weaknesses

our weakness as human beings/primates is that we were meant to be small families/tribal people and thus it is very easy to create class/race hatred and division

i don't know how we are going to fix this with words, i don't believe we can, this might sound science fiction but ultimately we need a change in the human genome that makes tolerance if not respect for others a natural inclination instead of something that has to be pounded in

barring that, we need to get more sophisticated about playing on human nature ourselves -- we allow the racists and the sellers of hate to band together, why aren't we better about playing on their hate and turning them against each other?

Yes, we are human beings, with all the ancient instincts and reptilian brain impulses that being human entails.

However, we are also consciously aware beings born into a country with a Constitution and a form of government based on the idea of "providing for the common welfare."

We also live in a particular geographic area filled with natural resources. As a citizen of this country, we also have a common history -- as fraught as it is.

If you are a member of the U.S.A. polity, there is ultimately no "other" -- we are all "us".

and interbreed until we are all the same shade of brown.

profess to care.

Homeless people have given up that anyone at all is listening.

Commons? You could start there.

And is not the lack of affordable housing due to the triumph of the profit motive and the elevation of the "rights" of the Owner Class over any considerations of common cause and class consciousness among the proletariat?

Homelessness is not a separate phenomenon, it is part of the whole imbalance.

That is precisely why I am posting about The Commons.

Sapphire Blue posted continually about that, but it is still being ignored.

Is there a particular reason why "progressives" find it so impossible to actually tackle this, rather than hiding it among other things and claiming that will solve it, when it hasn't all these years?

Why is this so difficult for "progressives" to grab?

I read you were ill. Hope all is well or at least on the way to being well.

What you say here is absolutely true. I empathize with your plight and the plight of other homeless in these times.

The poster a couple of posts above you also opined on the question of commons, but appeared pessimistic, already mind made up, and does not appear predisposed to problem solve or even think in those terms. Having been forced to consider others through family and professional duties, I can say without reserve, that the true love of others when giving is the most rewarding experience in life.

Pay it Forward as the movie of same name preached. Words to live by.

As far as when will the loss of sense of commons ever be rectified? I really think that only when there is some cataclysm, whether that be societal, environmental, political, or whatever, causes people to be reduced to depending on one another again, not competing with one another, will it ever change. There are too many forces arrayed 24/7 against it occurring on its own.

I read the recent Kingsolver book and one of the theories put forward by characters in it was that the loss of any sense of historical connection here in our country, serves to keep us divided and thinking there is no better alternative. Certainly serves the needs of those exploiting a consumer population, no?

This was offered in contrast to the ancient civilizations that operated on much different levels than we currently do. They had in common a sense of history of their land. Yes, I know things were smaller back then and society was largely agricultural, but we are not that far removed. We have only been conditioned to feel so.

The example set forth in one passage was that when a person is sitting in like a corn field here, they have no sense of the centuries, even eons of previous lives lived on that same corn field. They do not see the connection when they stumble across an arrowhead in the middle of Kansas. Even if we do acknowledge the arrowhead, we remove it and put it in a glass case as a curiosity, and the impact of that arrowheaad symbolizing prior fellow human beings using that same land and our connections to those people is lost. We only see a corn field and a museum piece.

Again, I don't know what it will take to restore these connections to each other, but I think it has to do somewhat with recognizing the reality of the past.



Just my dos centavos


robdogbucky

I have enough of that in my daily life to choke a friggin' horse, and it does NOTHING.

The problem is that people in this country have no HEARTS, and think their brain-power makes up for it. The sad result of that is all around us... people living on the streets, and DYING on the streets, being ignored and treated with disdain and disgust.

This video pretty much says it for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8txhtB2e5M

The Capitalist class and its political class minions seem to have successfully co-opted a sense of the commons with "isms." The Commun-ists are coming! The Terror-ists are coming! The British are coming! Oops that's an "ish."

Creating and then exploiting a common fear that someone will take away what you have. (Hmm, sounds like projection!!)

Interesting post

I was actually thinking about this just a few days ago. Group identities have either changed or broken down in the last few decades. There was a time when almost all of us could easily identify as workers who had a common interest in a great and ongoing struggle with the ruling classes. But that has largely disappeared in the last 40 years. In another age, the Wisconsin thing would have never taken place. A great majority of the citizenry would have found affinity with the government employees as fellow workers, but now days the identity of being consumers of government services is stronger than the worker identity. I live in a very conservative rural area in the mountains east of Tucson. There are two distinct groups in my area. The first group is made up old time ranchers. Most of them are not very well off, but they are land owners and identify that way. The second is a group of young retirees who did well with their 401Ks and decided to buy some land and play cowboy in their sunset years. They are not super rich but they are living a good life. Neither group sees itself as members of the proletariat.

Exactly!

In a country that completely lacks class consciousness...we have a hell of a lot of arbitrary class consciousness.

Welcome to DU!

It's on the way, I fear.

of starvation and preventable diseases because people couldn't afford food or health care. The kinds of things that existed in France and Russia and elsewhere before their revolutions.

When unemployment and job insecurity abound it is no doubt harder to get people to risk their income by standing up to the oligarchs.

I haven't noticed people dying in the streets yet. Hopefully it won't deteriorate to that point before people stand up. Maybe Wisconsin is the beginning. I just got an e-mail from my state Democratic Party that says this:

"Wisconsin is not the only state where working families are under attack. Across this nation, the lives and livelihoods of working families are being attacked systematically by right wing fanatics bent on crippling or destroying the trade union movement in America. Show your support for Wisconsin workers and all workers by standing with us at the State Capitol."

when referring to progressives not recognizing the plight of the homelessness. Not about any protestors dying in the streets.

Look at this as a kind of sub-thread, discussing "commons," as its loss applies to a big problem here, homelessness.

It is lethal:


Hidden in plain sight: dying and homelessness

This is one in a series of articles examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death, Gunpowder on the streets, and Will losing your home kill you?

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77908#ixzz1EWsKuh00

“…Here in San Francisco, a 2009 study of homeless AIDS patients showed that, of the 6,558 AIDS cases between 1996 and 2006, a whopping 9.8% were homeless at diagnosis. Only 67% of the people who were homeless survived five years, compared with 81% of those who were housed. But if you then housed a homeless person, their survival improved. "Homeless persons with AIDS who obtained supportive housing had a lower risk of death than those who did not (adjusted RH 0.20; 95% CL 0.05, 0.81)." It would appear that there is something that happens to you when you lose your home - when your life must revolve around trying to survive without a door to lock.

People are thrown into homelessness and some manage to stay aloft. Others don't do well, sometimes early, sometimes late, and those that plummet into severe disease and trauma and crisis are often easier to identify. Others get pulled into the vortex of survival and cannot seem to escape it. Whatever it is that keeps them aloft - moving, striving, struggling out an existence against all odds - that focus may also be what keeps them from escaping the pull and drag of homelessness itself. But that same ceaseless trajectory may also be the thing that kills them.

More and more studies show the marked disparities of health based on geographic location - the cumulative impact of exposures and environmental factors that influence health and behavior and survival, like the 16 years' difference in life purely from living in one East Bay zip code rather than another 12 miles away. But San Francisco, and other urban areas, are more likely to have micro-environments that telescope these extremes until they are side-by-side. There is no more extreme example of life and death disparities than that of dying three decades younger, based purely on whether you live inside, or outside, the same wall in San Francisco.

How does this happen? Does losing your home inevitably mean losing your health? And then, does losing your health when homeless inevitably mean death? Is there something about surviving on the street that changes you - and do those changes prevent you from getting help? What is it really like on the street? Tune in next Tuesday to meet Nathan, and see his photos - pictures he took of what he eats, how he lives, what gives him joy and what scares him…”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77908



Just my dos centavos


robdogbucky

No, still too easy to ignore.

Its. Right. In. Front. Of. You.

but I recommend checking it out when it goes live again regarding this subject.

K&R

I'll keep in mind to check out the site later.