David Bollier

In an eye-opening collection of real-life stories, Aiming Higher profiles courageous CEOs, managers, and employees who view social challenges not as burdens but as opportunities - to create new markets, build motivated work forces, and attract loyal customers. They are aiming higher. Who are these business heroes and heroines? Each year, The Business Enterprise Trust - founded by television writer and producer Norman Lear - honors five companies or individuals who have. shown breakthrough leadership in combining sound business management with social conscience. Aiming Higher presents the stories of 25 of these honorees. These inspiring narratives illuminate the complicated, gritty management challenges being met and overcome by public-spirited businesspeople. The stories are about all kinds and sizes of businesses, ranging from Xerox to Vermont National Bank to the White Dog Cafe. These compelling profile include a local school bus. company that has become a powerful engine for personal growth, new jobs, and economic revitalization in a troubled inner-city neighborhood; a small travel agency that has grown to be the third-largest agency in the world by making employee satisfaction a top priority; a stock photography agency that has become a pacesetter by promoting the use of non-stereotyped, "real-life" images of women, minorities, and people with disabilities; and a bank that initiated a lending. program for low-income customers. Thousands of people can now own homes - and the bank has become one of the most profitable savings and loans in the country.

Commoning is often seen as a way to challenge an oppressive, extractive neoliberal order by developing more humane and ecological ways of meeting needs. It offers many promising, practical solutions to the problems of our time – economic growth, inequality, precarious work, migration, climate change, the failures of representative democracy, bureaucracy. However, as various commons grow and become more consequential, their problematic status with respect to the state is becoming a serious issue. Stated baldly, the very idea of the nation-state seems to conflict with the concept of the commons. Commons-based solutions are often criminalized or marginalized because they implicitly challenge the prevailing terms of national sovereignty and western legal norms, not to mention neoliberal capitalism as a system of power. To address these and other related questions, the Commons Strategies Group in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation convened a diverse group of twenty commons-oriented activists, academics, policy experts and project leaders for three days in Lehnin, Germany, outside of Berlin, from February 28 to March 1, 2016. The goal was to host an open, exploratory discussion about re-imagining the state in a commons-centric world – and, if possible, to come up with creative action initiatives to advance a new vision. Participants addressed such questions as: Can commons and the state fruitfully co-exist – and if so, how? Can commoners re-imagine “the state” from a commons perspective so that its powers could be used to affirmatively support commoning and a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance? Can “seeing like a state,” as famously described by political scientist James C. Scott, be combined with “seeing like a commoner” and its ways of knowing, living and being? What might such a hybrid look like?

"In Silent Theft, David Bollier argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we collectively own - publicly funded medical breakthroughs, software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative works, and even the DNA of plants, animals, and humans. Too often, however, our government turns a blind eye - or sometimes helps give away our assets.". "Amazingly, the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed because we have lost our ability to see the commons. Spooling out one outrageous story after another, Bollier skillfully weaves together debates about the Internet, the environment, biotechnology, and the communications revolution. His fresh and compelling critique illuminates a rarely explored landscape in our political and cultural life."--BOOK JACKET.

"Free, Fair, and Alive is a penetrating cultural critique, table-pounding political treatise, and practical playbook for "commoning" -- free, self-organizing systems ranging from alternative currencies to open-source everything. It presents a bold and compelling alternative to the dead-end, predatory market-state system."--

La mayor "tragedia de los comunes" es la falacia de que los comunes son reliquias y fracasos de otra época que han sido sentenciados como innecesarios por el Mercado y el Estado. Pensar desde los comunes disipa tales prejuicios en su explicación de la rica historia y el futuro prometedor de los comunes, un paradigma de cooperación y equidad que remedia nuestro mundo. Con una prosa elegante y decenas de historias apasionantes, David Bollier describe la silenciosa revolución que es pionera en las prácticas de autogobierno. La elección es nuestra: podemos ignorar los comunes y sufrir el constante expolio corporativo de nuestra riqueza común o bien podemos Pensar desde los comunes y aprender cómo reconstruir nuestra sociedad y reclamar nuestra herencia compartida. Esta exhaustiva pero abordable introducción al procomún te sorprenderá, te aclarará las ideas y te motivará para pasar a la acción.

Presents a collection of essays introducing readers to more than fifty notable commons from around the world and exploring the inner dynamics of commoning with sensitivity. Contributors from twenty countries explain how commoning is empowering people to challenge the deep pathologies of contemporary capitalism and invent participatory alternatives. A special series of essays explores the inner dynamics of commoning--its ethics, social practices and worldview--to explain why the building of new worlds starts from within. --Adapted from publisher description.