Can “the commons” save us from ourselves?

To think about politics at the moment is to conjure a world under stress. It is not just that we confront a range of problems particular to our moment in the Anthropocene — everything from potentially catastrophic climate change to obscene levels of inequality — but that the institutions we have established to deal with such problems, including liberal democracy itself, seem incapable of responding in a meaningful way. There is a palpable sense that “we” have lost our way.

The stirrings of something better? School students
 at the #ClimateStrike rally at Sydney Town Hall in March.

But even as news headlines are dominated by the latest Trump outrage or the ongoing stupidity of the Brexit process — Trump and Brexit being emblematic of all the failures that confront us — I wonder if we can’t discern the stirrings of something better beginning to take shape.

They are apparent in the rising number of books, articles, documentaries and lectures that are invoking concepts such as “the commons”; that are urging us to rethink the place of work in our lives; that are offering alternative methods of distributing wealth, from cooperative ownership to a universal basic income; and that are theorising new approaches to politics, including concepts such as citizen juries and even the ambitious approaches embodied in the so-called Green New Deal.

Read the Inside Story book review by Tim Dunlop - “Can “the commons” save us from ourselves?”