Why Economics Matters

I have been educated as a sociologist, with post graduate studies in the history and philosophy of science, with a focus on the sociology of innovation. Alongside this, I have also pursued a long learning-practitioner journey in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

I am, therefore, not equipped to articulate what an economics of enlivenment might look like. And yet, if we are to articulate how to action a paradigm shift from the extractivist logic of the Enlightenment’s progress and prosperity project of modernity, to the relationist logic of the Enlivenment Worldview, we must indeed grapple with the domain of economic thought and practice.

The most substantial body of work undertaken to advance new economic thinking that aligns with the Enlivenment Worldview has been undertaken by the Commons Strategy Group. In their Patterns of Commoning, they map out a rich variety of ways in which groups in different parts of the world have undertaken the work of putting ‘commoning’ into practice.

It is no accident that economists are the priesthood of political thought. And that the nightly news devotes considerable time to finance, with a focus on the stock market, matched by our other national preoccupation, competitive sport, which in turn is intimately now linked to the gambling industry, another arm of economics. In fact, one could argue that the stock market is the genteel arm of the gambling industry. I think the last time I listened to Alan Kohler, he said there was six trillion dollars tied up in derivatives speculation. And the only light at the end of the tunnel of Trump 2.0 seems to be the prospect of a stock market crash, leading to a Trump-recession in the US, which might cause the business community to reign the Trump imperialist MAGA dreams back in.

The war on ‘woke’, depriving large numbers of US public servants their jobs and incomes, the trashing of the US international reputation with trusted allies, and the war on immigrants, carry no such political weight. Only money seems to talk.

It all traces back to the European Enlightenment inheritance. As Ugo Mattei reminds us, the idea of homo economicus originated in the work of John Stuart Mill and was brought into mainstream political economy in the 18^th century by Adam Smith (the ‘invisible hand’ in the ‘Wealth of Nations’) and David Ricardo (theory of comparative advantage), both of whom focused on individuals as maximisers of short-term utility (Ugo Mattei). With this came the shift towards narrow utilitarianism, and the ever diminishing importance of other relational values.

Therefore, following in the footsteps of Andreas Weber, I have turned my attention away from some of the new economic thinkers, such as Kate Raeworth’s Doughnut Economics, to the broader idea of ‘commoning’, as articulated in The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market & State, released by the Commons Strategy Group. In keeping with its commitment to sharing, this publication surveys this domain of thought across a rich contribution of chapters, divided into five parts, which are readily available to read as downloads.

• The Commons as a New Paradigm
• Capitalism, Enclosure and Resistance
• Commoning – a Social Innovation for Our Times
• Knowledge Commons for Social Change
• Envisioning a Commoning-based Policy & Production Framework

The Gridlock of Dualistic Logic in Economics

To understand what is at stake, we have to understand the logic that is baked into the structure of modern society through property laws and its dualistic framing of the public (the domain of government) and the private (the domain of the market of ‘individual’ actors, whether as private citizens or incorporated organisations). This gridlocked opposition is a product of the modernist tradition, still dominant today in law and economics.

As Ugo Mattei highlights, it hides the commons, and the process of commoning, from public vision. Mattei warns that because of this, understanding the idea of ‘the commons’ as commodities (natural, social, knowledge, cultural) blunts their revolutionary potential and ability to underpin an economics that facilitates a radical, egalitarian redistribution of resources and communal wealth. Instead we should shift our language from the ‘commons’ as a noun (subject/object) to ‘commoning’ as a verb (all-inclusive systems process). As Mattei notes: as with the enclosure laws of 19^th century Britain, the commons disappeared as a result of their structural incompatibility with the deepest aspects of Western ‘legality’, a legality that is founded on the universalising combination of individualism with the State/private property dichotomy.

By contrast, he asserts: a commons is not a mere resource (water, culture, the internet, land, education), but rather a shared conception of reality that radically challenges the seemingly unstoppable trend of enclosure and corporatisation that has transformed every culture in the path of European colonisation and neo-imperialism, intent on transforming them into the ‘modern nation state.’

The Commons Strategy group also became interested in the logic of the idea of ‘value.’ They posited, If modern political/economic conceptions of value are deficient, then what alternative theories of value might we propose? In cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation and anthropologist David Graeber, who has a keen interest in these themes, they report on how they brought together about 20 key thinkers and activists for a Deep Dive workshop in September 2016 to explore this very question. Helfrich proposes that the difference between the standard economic theory of value and a commons-based one is that the latter is a relational theory of value, Such a theory, she declared, means that the ‘labor’ of nonhumans – the Earth, other creatures, plants – can be regarded as a source of value, and not definitionally excluded.

It is now 2025, many years since these groundbreaking investigations held between 2010 and 2016. Years in which we have witnessed the impact of a global pandemic, and the increasing impact of climate change, with global warming now seemingly reaching 2 degrees warming before any hope of slowing it can be reached. Extreme weather events are now rewriting assumptions about the viability of a range of human habitats in coastal and arid zones around the world. We have seen Israel, aided and abetted by the military and political muscle of the US, become a mirror image of the Nazi regime that sought to wipe Jewish people out in the holocaust, in their war on the Palestinians, whose lands they appropriated after WWII. We have seen Russia’s war on Ukraine threatening the stability of the very idea of nation state sovereignty under the UN Charter, and now, under a determinedly transactional Trump 2.0, the complete upending of the international rules based order, which ensured the prosperity of the ‘West’ under US hegemony,

The search for an alternative economics of an Enlivenment Worldview has never been more urgent.

An Economics of Enlivenment

One articulation of Commoning, as an Economics of Enlivenment, can be found in the idea of El Bien Vivir, as explained by Gustavo Soto Santiesteban who sees it making visible and expressible aspects of reality that are ignored by the dominant paradigm. In common with the paradigm shift to an Enlivenment Worldview, it is a way of living engaged in dialogue with the complex system of relations that is Nature. Nature is conceived of as a living being and not as a thing of which to make other things, and so it demands great interpretive skills. The interpretations are transmitted through oral expression, everyday experience, the creativity of textiles, ceramics, musical instruments, festive ritual – in sum, through an integral technical/cultural system.

Contrasting Assumptions

Silke Helfrich, Founding member of Commons Strategies Group, sums up the paradigm shift between a commoning approach and a market approach in this table of contrasting assumptions:

Contrasting Social Relationships

She further articulates this into a set of contrasting assumptions in terms of social relationships:

Implications

Helfrich concludes that the implications of these contrasting assumptions is that while the commoning focus on resources is on shared conservation and regeneration, that of the market is on depletion and exploitation through proprietary enclosure. The implications for society, is that under commoning, the focus is on personal unfolding through convivial connections, while that of the market is on individual appropriation and exclusion. No greater example of this trend is in the current state of the housing market in advanced economies, where housing has changed from being a home, to becoming a financial and tradable asset: a process of appropriation by some and exclusion of others now pushed into the desperation of homelessness.

The Influence of Indigenous Knowledges

Our Enlivenment Worldview weaves together threads from ancient wisdoms, modern science and Indigenous knowledges. It is no accident that the economic vision of El Vien Vivir has been born in Ecuador and Bolivia, where the Indigenous Amerindian population is 35 percent and 62 percent of the total population respectively. This compares with Australia where the Indigenous population is but 4 per cent, Canada 5 percent and the US merely 2 percent. Helifrich is led to conclude that in the western world, in particular in Europe, we are in an unlucky position, because “we no longer have cultural memory of another way of being.”

This is not true for either Australia or Canada, where there is a lively and growing interest in learning from Indigenous knowledge systems, particularly in terms of our relationship with nature, and finding ways to heal the psychic trauma of patterns of non-Indigenous colonial settlement and governance. However this interest is precarious, as the failure of the Australian Referendum to enshrine a Voice to Parliament, as an advisory body in the Australian Constitution, was roundly defeated in a popular vote.

Equally, there is the very real danger that attempts by progressive-leaning non-Indigenous Australians to learn from Indigenous knowledge systems will be based on an unexamined extractivist logic, under what Tyson Yunkaporta calls, Enlightenment 2.0, rather than the new proposed relational paradigm of Enlivenment. The inherent tendency of well-meaning modern people to take (extract) bits and pieces of Indigenous knowledge and add it to their ‘bag of tricks’ in their making sense of things in their modern lifestyle, without really coming to terms with the deep, underlying logic of their taken for granted assumptions that underpin their worldview.

Unpicking the threads of this logic requires a great deal of unlearning, as much as new learning.

As my wisdom teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, advised: “The whole of spiritual practice is dedicated to directly reversing what I would call ignorance and so of de-creating, de-solidifying those interlinked and interdependent false perceptions that have led to our entrapment in the illusory reality of our own invention” Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p.285. This reference to illusory reality is not only about the dualistic solidification of ego-perception into a me/them relationship with the world, but to the very underlying dualistic logic of our modern knowledge system.

For what is the point of spiritual practice if it is not to develop the wisdom to see, understand and experientially realise the nature of reality, and to bring that wisdom into practice in how we live our lives, and into the political discourses of our times?

Commoning as Praxis

Can commoning, as an Economics of Enlivenment, enable us to bring such wisdom into praxis? Helfrich reminds us that commoning means being aware that plenty of the resources that we need to make a living, don’t belong to individuals, and need to be shared with other people. That need to share resources requires skills: of sharing; of knowing how to do it; of managing shared resources. So commoning is about taking responsibility for common stewardship of resources, processes, spaces and the time we have available together. She asserts that commoning is not a theory, but a practice, or we might say praxis. It’s talking about social practices that enable us to a free, fair and sustainable future.

Because if we have one political challenge ahead, it is basically coming up with proposals, and concrete social practices, that help us merge three core ideas of political traditions:

• Freedom: freedom in relatedness to others, because we are not isolated human beings in this world
• Equity: fair share in this world which at the same time a fair share is building a safer world
• Sustainability: how to live within bioregional sustainability.

Andreas Weber maintains that nature embodies the commons paradigm par excellence:

With that definition I do not only mean that man [sic] and other beings have been living together according to commons principles for an overwhelming majority of time. My argument is more complex: I am convinced that ecological relations within nature follow the rules of the commons. Therefore, nature can provide us with a powerful methodology of the commons as a natural and social ecology.