The Commoner first come to light on May Day 2001, at the dawn of the millennium, and marched questioningly for over a decade, until Winter 2012, when it went into hibernation. It returned in 2024, a mere twelve years later, with a series of open calls: Commoning and space | Commoning Ecologies | Liminal commons | Commoning and the convergence of struggles.
The commoning collective keeping it alive is called the stirring committee, originating from a spelling mistake we embraced. Rather than steering thing, we are stirring things, throwing things into the mix, keeping the commons alive as an idea, concept and practice. The magical soup of the future.
In the beginning there is the doing, the social flow of human interaction and creativity, and the doing is imprisoned by the deed, and the deed wants to dominate the doing and life, and the doing is turned into work, and people into things. In this crazy world revolts are practices of hope.
This journal is about living in a world in which the doing is separated from the deed, in which this separation extends in to an ever increasing number of life spheres, and a world in which revolts against this separation are ubiquitous.
Welcome to The Commoner.