Building the Commonsverse with David Bollier

Thursday May 29th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm

The urgent question of the moment is not just how to constrain a surging authoritarianism, but to figure out what compelling new vision for governance, provisioning, and social order we should pursue.

The “old normal” cannot be restored, and in any case, it has failed to deal with climate change, savage inequalities, predatory markets, democratic decline and social alienation. New types of social relations and institutional forms are desperately needed; the confusion and disarray in current politics provides the opportunity to create them.

Drawing on his just-published book "Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition", David Bollier, a long-time activist/scholar at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (US), will describe the wide variety of commons now flourishing outside the control of the corporate market/state. A globe-spanning Commonsverse – encompassing land, water, agriculture, food systems, energy, digital networks, mutual aid, alternative currencies, and much more – is opening up new vectors of democratic and economic possibility. It represents an unacknowledged “parallel polis,” as Czech visionary Vaclav Havel might have put it.

Since capitalist modernity remains a major impediment to change, David will also focus on several key challenges for expanding the Commonsverse: the re-configuration of state power to support commoning; the development of (noncapitalist) "relationalized finance”; creative legal hacks on Western jurisprudence; the mainstreaming of social cooperation as an institutional form; bioregionalism as an integrated ecological/economic vision; and new modes of collaboration between commoners in the Global South and North.

His talk will be followed by a one-pot vegan supper and discussion.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Talk and discussion starts at 7pm.

£8 Kairos Club Member, £15 Non-member, £10 Struggling financially, £20 Supporter, £8 Under 25. Food complimentary.

Before requesting a discounted ticket, please consider sincerely: Are you struggling to meet your basic needs? Would you have to make a genuine sacrifice to buy a full priced ticket? Do you have reduced earnings through a lifestyle choice or rather because you're dedicating your time to unpaid work relating to the climate and nature crises or as a result of structural inequality?

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