Tribune. The democratic, ecological and social challenges that our society must meet in the decades to come are colossal. The elections, the highlight of our political life, should be the occasion for a boiling of exciting proposals to respond to them.
However, most of the candidates offer us technocratic or backward-looking solutions that go too slowly at best, at worst in the wrong direction, without creating any real enthusiasm. For more than thirty years, public debate has been looping around the same themes – tax cuts, reductions in public spending, insecurity, immigration – without trying to broaden the horizon of possibilities.
What collective imagination is today capable of responding to major ecological and social challenges? What profound transformations of our institutions should be envisaged in order to support citizen initiatives of collective interest, such as those which have emerged to self-produce masks during the health crisis? What political narrative is able to reconnect public institutions with the vitality of actors engaged in the field?
We are convinced that the society of the commons offers a new narrative and a foundation
programmatic that the French left must seize. The society of the commons is structured around open communities of citizens who work together to produce and care for the resources, goods and services that contribute to their development. Far from being yet another political theory, the society of the commons constitutes a living social project, claimed by many social movements and materialized by alternative practices that are developing all over the world.
Transparent forms of self-government
In France, the Enercoop cooperative develops renewable energies by bringing together tens of thousands of producer and consumer members. The Terre de liens movement buys thousands of hectares of agricultural land which it pools to preserve it from land speculation and facilitate access to it for farmers for sustainable agriculture.
Internationally, Wikipedia contributors produce the largest freely accessible encyclopedia ever written by mankind. Researchers and companies engaged in Open Source Drug Discovery collaborate to produce free-to-use drugs to fight tropical diseases that affect millions of people.
In the society of the commons, those who produce and take care of these common resources, goods and services do not commit themselves to meet the needs of capital, but contribute voluntarily in a logic of sharing. Decisions are not made by opaque hierarchical organizations, but by transparent forms of self-government. The rights of access to the resources essential to fulfillment and emancipation are not determined by a single owner (private or public), but are guaranteed to all, in a logic of social and ecological justice.
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