The Idea of Commons and Communing
Introduction
Ideally, communization is the core pillar of both societal and national coherence. It promotes common interests and sense of mutual ownership of property among members of society. People’s culture is an essential ingredient of communization as it represents people’s ways of life and their attitudes toward life. Culture is crucial in comparing behavioral relationships and characters that constitute a society. Also, belonging to a particular cultural group is a warrant of systematic protection to individual’s existence in a community. Communization entails the cultural transformation in the sense that it brings everything in a community under joint ownership. It also enhances the heightening of the degree of sense of belonging and strengthens relationships among people dwelling in that community.
The commons are still fundamental to people’s survival as well as sources of happiness though people often regard them as old culture. The naturally acquired commons enhance living through sharing of natural life and supporting things such as air and water. In the cultural aspects of human existence, they promote human civilization and make people share a common language, stories, work of art, and knowledge. On the other hand, the existence of the commons in the social life promote living through tools of communication, people sharing educational institutions and development of engineering knowledge. The concept of precarity brings the understanding of living conditions by describing factors that influence human life. These factors affect both psychological and material welfare of people. This essay will consider sense, culture, and relationships as key elements of communization, and discuss their role in nurturing commons. It will also encompass the idea of precarity in the cultural and human social life.
Commons and their significance
Predominantly, the idea of commons presents the foundation of institutions in our communal and democratic systems as well as participatory citizenship. It also relates to our social, cultural, and economic life and virtually touches on all aspects of human life. Commons and precarity are usually found as tied concept since they mutually influence people’s culture and relationships. Mostly, commons entail the sharing of resources in a community because they constitute factors such as cultural activities that bring people together to share resources.
The core organizing principle in industries with advanced technology as well as peasant communities is the idea of commons. In countries with high social democracy like Europe, the law of commons provides that everybody should have access to basic needs such as healthcare, food, housing, and education. Additionally, other facilities like transport, free job training, and payment guaranteed vacations are entitled to every citizen. In America, the idea of commons has been in use since the establishment of the society. For example, a conference that involved the Continental Congress declared a section of land as a common property for use in supporting public schools.
In the analysis of commons, it is essential to differentiate their attributes in resource sharing and property rights. The shared resources constitute economic goods shared regardless of individual property rights. In joint property ownership, individuals have collective rights to use resources. However, as much as commons have significant benefits to human society, potential problems associated with them tends to hamper their full benefits to people.
In the modern life, challenges that exist concerning the idea of commons and sharing of resources pose threats both to the life of people and the natural environment. Some human characteristics and behavior have caused problems in the use, sustainability, and management of commons. Devastations such as pollution and disruption of global climate have impacted negatively on the natural environment. Free-riding behavior, competitions, and overharvesting also constitute serious threats to sustainability and governance of commons.
Another significant challenge to the governance of commons is that people believe their social security and welfare depend wholly on what one can own as an individual and not as a community. This problem complicates the communal ownership of property and consequently the process of communization. Many people are not aware of the benefits of communing. Therefore, they tend to concentrate on individual businesses in pursuit of social stability and economic prosperity.
How we sustain commons
People in the society need to learn new ways of sustaining commons. Other than mere exposure to ideas, they need a new understanding of the importance of commons as well as customs and structures that would help in maintaining commons. Cultivation of a sense of belonging and mutual ownership of a stake in the community helps in developing positive behavior towards strengthening cohesion among people.
Our current society is trending towards individualism and it is market-based. This constitutes a potential threat to the realization of full benefits of communization. Therefore, the predicted and already caused damages, as well as the resulting inequalities should be recognized and repaired. Additionally, anything that belongs to the community should be identified, claimed and accorded protection. Also, communal properties require defense and passage of knowledge to the next generations about their improvement and care.
People have full responsibility for the places they live under commons regime. As such, they should honor their duties to protect and maintain what their community owns and value all opportunities available for them to prosper instead of alienating themselves. A transition of commons to the next generation will depend on how the current generation perceives them. Therefore, people should collectively devote continuous efforts to ensure positive attitudes towards maintaining commons.
The process of making any decision should include the affected people. These people should be allowed to participate in the process because it will help in strengthening their confidence with community leaders. Everybody should have an opportunity to participate in the management, governance, creation, and ownership of valuable things to the community. The history of the community should be well articulated and recorded for use by the coming generations. People should set goals to be achieved and prevent the weakening of the foundations of commons because they are important in future.
Precarity
In essence, precarity describes conditions pertinent to human life and whose occurrence cannot be predicted. These conditions affect both material and psychological welfare of people. The existence of precarious situations prompts the government to design institutions to minimize their effects. Precarity is closely related to performativity. As quoted in Ampersand, performativity is an inherent value endowed to persons and is recognized through their actions.
In the modern society, institutions established to mitigate the impacts of precarity do not function efficiently. Some political directives and social systems only address core issues affecting the community, but many other problems remain unsolved. Thus, in some cases, precarity can be viewed as a representation of failure of public policy that is supposed to ensure the protection of every citizen against social violence or injury. Unprotected citizens stand a high risk of starvation, poverty as well as displacement while others suffer increased exposure to violence.
Gender norms often relate with precarious situations. It is apparent that people with little intelligence in life stand a high risk of gender violence and to some extent sexual harassment. The appearance of gender norms in the public space indicates the use of power by the leaders. The power tends to reproduce itself, and if not properly used, it triggers the effects of risks subjected to those under the rules.
A representative example of a country with rampant precarity is Europe where precarious conditions are experienced since the beginning of the year 2000. Notably, citizens engage themselves in political struggles to resist poor living conditions. For example, the research conducted in Kunstverein Munich showed that a high number of residents were struggling with insecure jobs and poor working conditions.
Precarization frequently affects low and middle-income social groups. However, the middle class is affected to a lesser extent because people in this group have more secure positions and greater capacities to improve their social status. In Europe, precarization led to the breakdown of the social security system. Also, it resulted in a drastic decline in permanent employment opportunities and an increase in temporary contracts. Thus, it can be seen as a governance instrument in neoliberal societies. In these societies, the government provides minimum social security and working conditions.
Under the precarious regime, the solidarity of the ruled is put to a shocking jeopardy. The poor are victimized and denied capacity to air their political views and to take any political actions. People under siege of precarity usually form associations of collaboration to fight for their plights. They tend to have a common interest which is to have their grievances addressed. Addressing precarity would entail looking at the resultant effects it has on people. People want favorable wages, employment, and social security. If precarious conditions only exist to strengthen the solidarity of the affected, then those who get in power will perpetuate the situation instead of adopting mitigation measures.
Culture, society, and relationships
Quite often, culture goes hand in hand with society. Culture is a product of relationships of people in society. Thus, it gives meaning to the society. The description of human culture in most analysis rarely contains the presence of cultural activities. The assumption that most of the activities that define a culture are traditional events is one of the major hindrances to the appreciation of the role of culture in human existence. The transformative actions that tend to fade human culture have been projected into modern life, resulting in the conversion of relationships and institutions that form human society.
The cultural transformations in the modern contemporary life have led to new social and personal experiences of the culture that are entirely different from the past. The modern society discerns culture as old ways and the social forms as human made. There is need to develop new terms to define the present structure of the society that will appreciate relationships and societal formations.
People’s ways of thinking have also changed in the modern society. Most people hold different forms of thoughts and feelings that debar social forms and admit them for the sake, since they feel that traditional cultural activities are irrelevant and insignificant. Thus, they prevent human imaginations in their minds and develop new social classification of persons in the society. According to Butler, articulation of social forms makes them more evident and recognizable. He argued that most of the social forms are deliberately fixed and are identified only in the lives of people when they are in active relationships.
The language used by different generations also indicates the process of cultural transformation. Despite the continuity in grammar, two continuous generations have never spoken the same language. Changes in language occur as a result of additions of vocabularies, deletions, as well as modifications of language. However, the preceding language is not exhausted. Usually, change of language occurs in the form of styles of communication over time. This change cannot be predicted with any level of certainty since it is not a deliberate choice but occurs in a general way.
The sexual relationship is one of the factors that promote unity in society. Heterosexual culture is deemed righteous in most part for the world since it promotes continuity of human existence. Heterosexuality is highly prevalent in the modern United States though it is not the only sexual culture. However, the government of the United States allows and promotes heteronormativity, which encourages heterosexual marriage in society. Heteronormative temporality, which is a subset of heteronormativity, upholds heterosexuality as the only admissible form of sexuality in the United States. The concept of heteronormativity is well developed in the Queer Theory, and it argues for heterosexuality as the only norm and standard sexual culture. Therefore, other forms of sexuality are pushed out of public space since they are considered wrong. Thus, they only operate in private and cannot identify themselves with commons, which lowers the degree of cohesiveness within a community.
Familialism and high intimacy that heterosexual culture cultivates in minds of people promote their sense of belonging to the society in a profound way. The realization of the concept of commons is through intimacy as well as kinship. Thus, sexual culture, communization, and sense of belonging are inculcated in the lives of people by modifying their feelings as properties of the community. The modern heterosexuality involves relations and identification of individuals with others, and it promotes a sense of social belonging to the community.
Cultural transformations through intimacy relate to the present talk of sexuality as an important component of human capacity development. Sexuality in the context of communization entails formation and strengthening of relationships that contributes to mutual interests on the communal properties among members. The social cohesion inculcated among individuals through cultural transformations guarantees them psychological welfare protection. Also, it cultivates in them a sense of social belonging.
Conclusion
Practicing commons is helpful in solving life problems in areas like economic inequalities, degradation of the environment, and social stratifications that encourage discrimination. Thus, people should positively embrace the idea of commons and pass it over to new generations because it can help them deal with many problems that crowd on them. Social as well as political battles should not be allowed to cause segregations but should aim at achieving the common interests of people.
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