Everything for Everyone

This is a collection of notes about various forms of commons-based self-organizing. It is an experiment in open-source journalism. If you would like to comment or critique, please contact the administrator, Nathan Schneider. These notes may be considered to be in the public domain.

• Beautiful Solutions
• Common Notions
• Commons Health
• Commons Strategies Group
• Commons Transition
• Grassroots Economic Organizing
• Illich, Ivan
• International Association for the Study of the Commons
• Midnight Notes Collective
• On the Commons
• P2P Foundation
• Re:Common
• The Rules - Campaign to “change the rules that create inequality and poverty”
• Sarapis - “Open solutions to local challenges”
• Shareable
• Sustainable Economies Law Center
• unMonastery

• c. 500-300 BCE: Leviticus
  • Gleaning
  • Jubilee
• c. First century CE: Acts 2 and 4
  • Both mentions are immediately preceded by references to “signs and wonders”
  • 4, Vulgate: “omnes etiam qui credebant erant pariter et habebant omnia communia”
• 535: the Institutes of Justinian recognized res communes: “the following things are by natural law common to all—the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the sea shore. No one therefore is forbidden access to the sea­shore, provided he abstains from injury to houses, monuments, and buildings generally; for these are not, like the sea itself, subject to the law of nations.”
• c. 1150: Gratian’s Decretum said, “for natural law all things are everyone’s” (“jure naturali omnia sunt communia omnibus”), while there are certainly provisions for property in church and secular law.
• Magna Carta / Charter of the Forest
• Thomas Aquinas on property: “In cases of need, all things are common property”
• 1525: The heretical confession of Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer while he was being tortured to death: omnia sunt communia — all things are in common
• The enclosure movement
• 1754: Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men: “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine,' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
• Common-school movement
• Italian autonomist movements
• Commoning a major subject of the work of the Midnight Notes Collective
• 1994: “Todo para todos” of the Zapatistas
• 2009: Participants in the World Social Forum circulated a Reclaim the Commons Manifesto
• 2001: Creative Commons
• 2011-2012: Occupy
  • 2012 in Occupy Wall Street: Making Worlds, Building the Commons in NYC
  • “Everything for Everyone” in Seattle: Used by the Free Association collective, of which Shon Meck is part. Shon says this slogan took hold in Occupy Seattle after the fall of the occupation there. By the Port Shutdown, it was the major slogan for the movement there: “Everything for Everyone / the Revolution Has Begun.” There was an Everything for Everyone Festival.
• May 2014: FLOK project and Buen Conocer summit in Ecaudor, the first national-scale commons-based transition plan
• October 2014: “Building the Collaborative Commons” conference at Omega Institute, largest conference on the commons in the United States (according to David Bollier) with 525 registered participants.
  • Schneider, Nathan. “The Commons Are Making a Comeback.” Al Jazeera America. November 2, 2014

• Acheson, James. The Lobster Gangs of Maine. Durham, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988.
• Barnes, Peter. Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006.
• Bollier, David. Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Bollier, David and Silke Helfrich. The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market & State. Levellers Press.
• Boyle, James. "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain." Law and Contemporary Problems 66, no. 33 (Winter/Spring 2003).
• Digital Library of the Commons
• The Digital Manifesto Archive.
• Donahue, Brian. Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. - On building commons infrastructure in the suburban U.S., anticipating a return to the suburbs and rural areas as people are priced out of cities, and the need to do suburbs differently using a commons framework.
• Eisenstein, Charles. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition. Evolver Editions, 2001.
• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.
• Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
• Helfrich, Silke (editor). Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong? Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2009.
• Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
• Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• International Journal of the Commons.
• Klein, Naomi. “Reclaiming the Commons.” New Left Review 9 (May-June 2001).
• Kleiner, Dmytri. The Telekommunist Manifesto.
• Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid.
• Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
• Linebaugh, Peter. “Jubilating; Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism with Some Success.” Midnight Notes 10 (1990).
• Linebaugh, Peter. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008.
• Linebaugh, Peter. Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
• Mattei, Ugo. Bienes comunes. Editorial Trotta, S.A.: 2013.
• Ugo Mattei. "The Commons Movement in Italy". South Atlantic Quarterly (2013).
• McCay, Bonnie J., and James M. Acheson. The Question of the Commons : The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1987.
• Noys, Benjamin (editor). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Autonomedia.
• Ostrom, Elinor. "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems." Nobel Prize lecture. December 8, 2009.
• Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Peluso, Nancy Lee. Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992.
• Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. 1944.
• Polletta, Francesca. Freedom Is An Endless Meeting: Democracy In American Social Movements. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Radin, Margaret Jane. Reinterpreting Property (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• Rose, Carol M. “The Comedy of the Commons: Commerce, Custom, and Inherently Public Property.” The University of Chicago Law Review 53, no. 3 (Summer 1986).
• Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Westview Press.
• Rowe, Jonathan. Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy That Makes Everything Else Work. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013.
• Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. 1973.
• Thompson, E.P. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. London: Merlin Press, 1991.
• Vannucci, Delfina and Richard Singer. Come Hell Or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
• Yu, Chih Hao. Co- (MFA thesis)