A key reason that so many social and ecological pathologies persist, despite strenuous efforts to solve them, is that the narrow frame for solving them. Our political culture sees capitalist markets and growth as the only serious vehicles for progressive change. When private property, corporate profitmaking, and the commodification of nature are seen as sacrosanct, the scope of transformational change is rather limited.

So if we are to address the problems of our time—the problems of climate change, inequality, and social insecurity, among others—our first challenge is to expand our very definition of what “the economy” is. Is the market the only serious vehicle for wealth-creation and value, as investors and economists claim? Or are there other forms of value that need to be systematically and rigorously recognized?

I argue that this is precisely the problem: economics cannot recognize other forms of value and state power has largely adopted neoliberal economic priorities. No wonder our sense of possibility are so constricted!

As an antidote, I believe that we need to learn how the commons can help us re-imagine our mind-map of the economy. The point is not merely to add a few neglected values into the standard economic framework. It is to challenge some core premises of “the economy” as conventionally understood, by naming the many forms of non-market value that are essential to life.

That’s what the commons does. It is a robust sector of non-market stewardship that honors different types of value – ecological, social, ethical, spiritual. More: it is a way to nourish and protect important forms of meaning and cultural identity, as seen in the collective stewardship of forests, fisheries, farmland, and water in many permutations around the world. The commons is at work in agroecology, permaculture, community land trusts, community supported agriculture, and relocalized food systems. The commons is seen in countless open source software projects, platform cooperatives, mutual aid networks, arts and culture projects, and alternative currencies.

The problem is that many actual commons are not seen as commons and therefore as wealth-creating. They exist outside of the market worldview, and so they aren’t considered so valuable or consequential. Mainstream economics, politics, law, and culture mostly ignores them, or worse, considers them a failed management regime, the “tragedy of the commons.”

The great challenge, then, is to learn how to see, name, and reclaim the commons as significant forces in life – a powerful social phenomenon that is not just at play in the Global South, but everywhere. Some of the most significant systems of commons-based value include:

• the care work performed by families, especially women;
• the eco-stewardship of Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, community land trusts, and CSA farms;
• socially committed cooperatives;
• artistic and academic gift economies;
• alternative local and regional currencies; and
• online communities that revolves around shared software, wikis, scholarly research, scientific knowledge, datasets, and much else.

What most distinguishes these general classes of commons from capitalist businesses and markets, is the social mutualism that animates them and the sharing of their wealth. Commons are living, relational systems for meeting personal needs and collective well-being that mostly function outside of markets and state power. The interpersonal, social dynamics of these commons are the forces that generate value: the care work within families, the affective commitments of forest-stewards, the sharing ethic of digital commoners, the social commitment of water protectors.

Standard economics tends to ignore these genres of wealth-creation because the value generated is not easily monetized or traded in markets. The value is created without money necessarily changing hands. The value is socially embedded and localized. It arises through the pooling of commitments.

As I describe in my book Think Like a Commoner, just released in a significantly revised Second Edition, commons arise as ordinary people decide for themselves how to identify and meet shared needs. It’s a way to manage common wealth in fair and inclusive ways. This is the process of commoning — the process by which people negotiate, devise, and enact situation-specific systems of provisioning and peer governance. Commoning is not just an economic process; it’s a process that summons forth our deeper, larger humanity, our intersubjective selves in an unfolding field of cooperation.

It helps to see commons as complex life-forms—living processes.  They aren’t like impersonal markets driven by money, rationality and material desire. They are social systems through which people come together to create effective ways of meeting needs and peer-governing themselves. If the neoclassical, capitalist mindset declares that provisioning (“the economy”) must be separate from governance (the state), commons blend these two. The social practices of provisioning, governance, rules-enforcement, and culture are all integrated into one system.

The general aim of any commons is to mutualize the benefits of shared wealth. People often decide to become commoners because they realize that conventional business requires extractivist strategies: the exploitation of workers and consumers, ecological destruction, unfair practices, and social disruptions. Commoners realize that the notional Invisible Hand of the market won’t serve the common good. Nor will nation-states, thanks to their deep political alliances with investors and corporations.

That’s where the commons steps in. Commoners are pioneering new social logics for provisioning and governance at the cellular level of society. They’re meeting their own needs while enhancing the social bonds and shared purpose that the common good requires.

A key virtue of this process is that we can choose and make them ourselves, right now. We don’t need to rely on legislatures or courts. The state may offer support to commons, and businesses may engage in limited forms of exchange with them. But outsider control or interference is resisted because commoners prize their social and political autonomy. They want the individual freedom to enter into community agreements, to assume responsibilities, and to reap the benefit of their hard work and cooperation.

At a time when the market/state system claims dominion over so much of the earth and everyday, imposing its own ideas of social order and value, the commons offers a refreshing alternative. They offer a space in which people can assert significant autonomy and self-determination. They need not rely on formal, legalistic terms dictated by bureaucracies or large corporations. People can innovate by their own lights, to meet their needs in their particular circumstances. They need not submit to the conventional capitalist modes of “development” and “progress,” which so often prove to be unfair, unsustainable, and anti-democratic.

A British money designer and commoner, Dil Green, once made an astute observation about the special role that commons play. He said:

“Commons are ‘meso-scope’ social institutions. Not micro/individual or macro/collective, but meso. Right libertarians prioritize agency at the micro level. Statist lefties at the macro. But it’s in the middle where life takes place, where we all live. The missing middle is key. Build commons!”

This insight helps explain both why commons are so vital. They can build a new type of economy through new types of meso institutions. They help us get beyond the private/public binary (corporate/state order) that otherwise controls our sense of the possible. Commons open up new zones for action and creativity.

So let’s modify our mental maps about “the economy”!  We need to shed many of the roles ordained by capitalist economics – consumer, worker, business owner, investor – by creating spaces that let people develop their own solutions based on their own situated needs, knowledge, and wisdom. That’s what the commons does. It steps outside market/state orthodoxy to declare new terms of aspiration. It offers fresh, forward-looking archetypes for meeting people’s needs. It lets us develop new type of social practices for meeting needs, new forms of more democratic governance, and effective strategies for protecting shared wealth.

We can begin by making existing commons more culturally legible and known, and then work to consolidate and expand these commons. Going forward, we must develop new infrastructures to make commoning easier and more normal, and types of finance, legal hacks, and partnerships with the state. While this may seem an ambitious agenda, a robust Commonsverse already exists, poised to liberate us from a market/state system that otherwise limits the scope of possible change.