自由、公平和生 | Silke Helfrich：激荡起扎根于现实的希望，来超越恐惧的蔓延

原创 Silke & David WorkFace柏林

收录于合集

作者：Silke Helfrich & David Bollier

翻译：周小媛

设计排版：邓琳洁

策划审校：方曼

以下内容节选自

《Free, Fair and Alive：The Insurgent Power of the Commons》

网址：https://www.freefairandalive.org/

About Free, Fair and Alive

关于自由、公平和生

Free, Fair & Alive is a foundational re-thinking of the commons, the self-organized social systems that human beings have used for millennia to meet their needs. From fisheries and forests to alternative currencies and open source everything, people are increasingly using “commoning” to emancipate themselves from a predatory market/state system and take charge of their lives.

Ambitious, sophisticated, and resolutely grounded in everyday realities, Free, Fair and Alive present a compelling vision of a future that can actually work. Written by two highly experienced commons activists, this book is at once a penetrating cultural critique, table-pounding political treatise, and practical playbook for building a new world of commoning. Jargon-free and full of colorful stories and diverse examples, this book will help readers recognize commoning as a vision that can help take us beyond the dead-end binaries of left-right, individual-collective, state-market, and Coke-Pepsi that has almost brought the world to its knees.

Free, Fair and Alive is also a work of social imagination and political hope. As humanity drifts into a dangerous new world of climate breakdown, Peak Oil, and political instability, this book dares to imagine how countless acts of commoning can build an insurgent new culture and political economy. It draws on the authors’ extensive travels in the world of commoning, from the community forests of India and urban commons of Italy, to platform cooperatives arising on the Internet and neighborhood nursing in the Netherlands.

Free, Fair and Alive offers a fresh, comprehensive, and non-academic synthesis of contemporary commons written for a popular, activist-minded audience. Unlike many previous books on this subject, Free, Fair & Alive does not see the commons as primarily about “rational actors” managing economic resources. Instead it regards the commons as a vibrant, creative social system, one that is alive with people’s everyday ingenuity, cooperative values, and traditions.

Because so many misconceptions about the commons are embedded in language itself, the book discusses the misleading premises of many familiar words (“development,” “leadership,” “scarcity”) and the need to embrace new terms that better describe the realities of commoning (“care-wealth,” the “Nested-I,” the “pluriverse”). Much of the book focuses on the internal dynamics of commoning, the need to adopt a shift in worldview, and the role of language in reorienting our perceptions and political strategies. By explaining commoning as a relational phenomenon of living systems – and not as a transactional behavior governing objects (as standard economics asserts) – Free, Fair and Alive opens up a new discussion about the inner and social dynamics of commoning: the commons as a verb, not a noun.

Introduction 简介

This book is dedicated to overcoming an epidemic of fear with a surge of reality-based hope. As long as we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by our fears, we will never find the solutions we need to help us build a new world. Of course, we have plenty of good reasons to be fearful — the loss of our jobs, authoritarian rule, corporate abuses, racial and ethnic hatred. Looming above all else is the warming of the Earth’s climate, an existential threat to civilization itself. We watch with amazement as space probes detect water on Mars while authorities struggle to find drinking water for people on Earth. Technologies may soon let people edit the genes of their unborn children like text on a computer, yet the means for taking care for the sick, old, and homeless remain elusive.

本书希望通过激荡起扎根于现实的希望，来超越恐惧的蔓延。如果我们任由自己被恐惧禁锢着，我们永远也找不到建立新秩序的方案。当然现在让我们感到恐惧的原因有很多：失业、严苛的政治环境、公司企业的权利滥用、种族和族裔间的敌意。还有最重要，全球气候变暖这个关乎着人类文明本身生死存亡的威胁。就在我们望向太空，惊奇着太空探测器在火星上发现了水的同时，一些地方的人们正在苦苦地在地球上寻找饮用水。虽然科技的发展可能很快就能让人们像在计算机上编辑文档一样编辑未出生孩子的基因，但如何照顾好病人、老人、和无家可归的人的切实方法还并不明确。

Fear and despair are fueled by our sense of powerlessness, the sense that we as individuals cannot possibly alter the current trajectories of history. But our powerlessness has a lot to do with how we conceive of our plight — as individuals, alone and separate. Fear, and our understandable search for individual safety, are crippling our search for collective, systemic solutions — the only solutions that will truly work. We need to reframe our dilemma as What can we do together? How can we do this outside of conventional institutions that are failing us?

我们觉得自己作为个体，难以改变当下的历史轨迹，而这种无能为力的感觉加剧了恐惧和绝望。这种无能为力感与我们应对困境的方式有着很大的关系---我们只作为个体、以分离的状态、各自为战地去应对。恐惧，以及我们对个人安全感的追求是可以理解的，但它也会削弱我们对集体的、系统性解决方案进行探求的努力---而这正是唯一真正有效的解决方案。我们需要问几个问题，以便对当前的困境架构进行重新构建:

“我们可以一起做些什么？”

“在让我们失望的传统机构的体系之外，

我们可以做些什么以及如何做？”

The good news is that countless seeds of collective transformation are already sprouting. Green shoots of hope can be seen in the agroecology farms of Cuba and community forests of India, in community Wi-Fi systems in Catalonia and neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands. They are emerging in dozens of alternative local currencies, new types of web platforms for cooperation, and campaigns to reclaim cities for ordinary people. The beauty of such initiatives is that they meet needs in direct, empowering ways. People are stepping up to invent new systems that function outside of the capitalist mindset, for mutual benefit, with respect for the Earth, and with a commitment to the long term.

好消息是，已经有无数的集体转型种子已经开始萌芽。在古巴的农业生态农场和印度的社区森林，加泰罗尼亚的社区Wi-Fi系统以及荷兰的社区护理团队中，都可以看到这个希望的新芽。它们以数十种替代性的本地货币、新型的合作网络平台、以及为普通百姓重归城市开拓运动的形式涌现。这些创新举措的优点在于，它们以直接、并赋能的方式满足了需求。人们正积极行动着，致力于创造能在资本主义理念体系之外发挥作用的新系统，这些新系统旨在实现互惠互利、尊重地球、并着眼于长期发展。

In 2009, a frustrated group of friends in Helsinki were watching another international climate change summit fail. They wondered what they could do themselves to change the economy. The result, after much planning, was a neighborhood “credit exchange” in which participants agree to exchange services with each other, from language translations and swimming lessons to gardening and editing. Give an hour of your expertise to a neighbor; get an hour of someone else’s talents. The Helsinki Timebank, as it was later called, has grown into a robust parallel economy of more than 3,000 members. With exchanges of tens of thousands of hours of services, it has become a socially convivial alternative to the market economy, and part of a large international network of timebanks.

2009年，一群沮丧的赫尔辛基的朋友看着又一场国际气候变化峰会面临失败。他们想看看靠他们自己做些什么来改变当时的经济。经过大量规划后，一个邻里“信用交换”计划出炉了，参与者们的共识是同意彼此直接交换服务，从语言翻译、游泳课程到园艺和编辑服务。给他人提供一个小时的你的专业知识，会交换到一个小时的别人专长的服务。后来这个项目被称为“赫尔辛基时间银行”，现已发展成为拥有3,000多个成员的强健的并行经济体。通过累计数万小时的服务交换，它已经成为具有积极社会活力的市场经济替代方案，并且是全球时间银行大型国际网络的一部分。

赫尔辛基时间银行：Members of Helsinki Timebank exchange a diversity of services against time. The main guiding principle for each exchange is that everyone’s time, work and needs are of equal worth. In Helsinki Timebank one Tovi equals one hour of work.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Helsinki_Timebank

In Bologna, Italy, an elderly woman wanted a simple bench in the neighborhood’s favorite gathering spot. When residents asked the city government if they could install a bench themselves, a perplexed city bureaucracy replied that there were no procedures for doing so. This triggered a long journey to create a formal system for coordinating citizen collaborations with the Bologna government. The city eventually created the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons to organize hundreds of citizen/government “pacts of collaboration” — to rehabilitate abandoned buildings, manage kindergartens, take care of urban green spaces. The effort has since spurred a Co-City movement in Italy that orchestrates similar collaborations in dozens of cities.

在意大利博洛尼亚，一位年长的女性希望能在社区里最受欢迎的聚会地点安放一个简单的长椅。当居民们询问市政府，他们是否可以自己安装长椅时，困惑的城市官僚机构回答说：没有相关的处理程序。这推动了一场漫长的程序建立之旅，首先需要建立正式的体系以协调居民和博洛尼亚政府之间的合作，最终《博洛尼亚城市公共空间的保护和重建条例》制定了。将数百名公民和政府在“合作协议”下组织起来，共同修复废弃建筑物、管理幼儿园、维护城市绿地。这项努力触发了意大利“城市协作”运动的开展，数十个城市组织了类似的合作。

But in the face of climate change and economic inequality, aren’t these efforts painfully small and local? This belief is the mistake traditionalists make. They are so focused on the institutions of power that have failed us, and so fixated on the global canvas, that they fail to recognize that real forces for transformational change originate in small places, with small groups of people, beneath the gaze of power. Skeptics of “the small” would scoff at farmers sowing grains of rice, corn, and beans: “You’re going to feed humanity with… seeds?!” Small gambits with adaptive capacities are in fact powerful vehicles for system change.

与面对气候变化和经济不平等这些大挑战相比，这些努力仅仅是小规模的并且只是局部的---这种观念是传统主义者犯的错误。他们如此重视那些已经让我们失望的权利机构的作用，并且固守在高大上的总体画布之上，以至于不能认识到促成变革的真正力量源自于权力目光凝视之处下方的一些小地方、一些小群体。对“小”持怀疑态度的人会嘲笑那些播种稻谷、玉米和豆类的农民：“你要用...种子...来喂养人类？！” 而实际上，具有适应能力的那些小的开始正是进行系统化变革的的有力载体。

Right now, a huge universe of bottom-up social initiatives — familiar and novel, in all realms of life, in industrialized and rural settings — are successfully addressing needs that the market economy and state power are unable to meet. Most of these initiatives remain unseen or unidentified with a larger pattern. In the public mind they are patronized, ignored, or seen as aberrational and marginal. After all, they exist outside the prevailing systems of power — the state, capital, markets. Conventional minds always rely on proven things and have no courage for experiments even though the supposedly winning formulas of economic growth, market fundamentalism, and national bureaucracies have become blatantly dysfunctional. The question is not whether an idea or initiative is big or small, but whether its premises contain the germ of change for the whole.

目前，不计其数的自下而上的社会创新，正在成功地满足着市场经济和国家力量无法满足的需求，这些变革既熟悉又新颖，发生在生活的各个领域、在工业产业中、以及农村环境里。而这些创新中的很大一部分，仍是不被看见的或未被识别的。在公众心目中，它们被看做是非主流或是边缘的，仅偶尔被关注一下然后就被忽略了。毕竟，它们存在于国家、资本、市场等这些主流权力体系之外。尽管那些有关经济增长、市场经济原教旨主义、和国家级官僚政治的曾被认可的成功公式已经明显失灵了，传统思想还是要依赖那些已经经过证明的东西，而没有勇气进行实验。问题并不在于想法或倡议是大还是小，而是其前提是否包含了可以促成整体变化的潜力。

To prevent any misunderstanding: the commons is not just about small-scale projects for improving everyday life. It is a germinal vision for reimagining our future together and reinventing social organization, economics, infrastructure, politics, and state power itself. The commons is a social form that enables people to enjoy freedom without repressing others, enact fairness without bureaucratic control, foster togetherness without compulsion, and assert sovereignty without nationalism. Columnist George Monbiot has summed up the virtues of the commons nicely: “A commons… gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It provides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a politics of belonging.”

为了防止任何可能的误解：‘公共领域’(?)的尝试不仅仅是些关于改善日常生活的小型项目。这是一个原初的共同愿景，致力于重新共同构想我们的未来，并重塑社会组织、经济、基础设施、政治、和国家权力本身。‘公共领域’是一种社会形式，它使人们能够享受自由而不压制他人、实现公平正义而不依靠官僚机构控制、促进团结但不强迫、主张主权但不宣扬民族主义。专栏作家乔治·蒙比尔特（George Monbiot）很好地总结了‘公有领域’的优点：“公有领域… 它为社区生活提供明确的中心。它依仗最真实形式的民主。它破除不平等。它为保护现实世界的生活提供动力。总之，它创造了一种归属政治。”

(TheCommons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons )

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society,including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. Theseresources are held in common, not owned privately. Commons can also beunderstood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, usergroups) manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, thisinvolves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed fora governance mechanism. Commons can be also defined as a social practiceof governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users thatself-governs the resource through institutions that it creates .

公地是社会所有成员可利用的文化和自然资源，包括空气，水和可居住的地球等自然材料。这些资源是共有的，而不是私有的。公地也可以理解为自然资源，由人们（社区，用户群体）为个人和集体利益而管理。从特征上讲，这涉及用于治理机制的各种非正式规范和价值观（社会实践）。公地也可以被定义为一种社会实践，它不是通过国家或市场来管理资源，而是通过通过其创建的机构来自我管理资源的用户社区。

This is reflected in our title, which describes the foundation, structure, and vision of the commons: Free, Fair and Alive. Any emancipation from the existing system must honor freedom in the widest human sense, not just libertarian economic freedom of the isolated individual. It must put fairness, mutually agreed upon, at the center of any system of provisioning and governance. And it must recognize our existence as living beings on an Earth that is itself alive. Transformation cannot occur without actualizing all of these goals simultaneously. This is the agenda of the commons — to combine the grand priorities of our political culture that are regularly played off against each other — freedom, fairness, and life itself.

这也反映在了我们的标题里，我们的标题描述了公有领域的根基、架构、和愿景：自由、公平，有活力的生存。任何对现有体制的解放都必须尊重人类最广泛意义上的自由，而不仅仅是一个个孤立个体的自由主义的经济自由。它必须在共同认可的前提下，把公平性放在任何供给和治理体系的中心位置。它必须承认我们是地球上活生生的存在，而地球本身也是有生命的。如果不同时实现所有这些目标，真正的转化不可能发生。这就是公有领域的议程：将我们政治文化中这些经常互相竞争的重大优先事项结合起来 --- 自由、公平、和生命本身。

Far more than a messaging strategy, the commons is an insurgent worldview. That is precisely why it represents a new form of power. When people come together to pursue shared ends and constitute themselves as a commons, a new surge of coherent social power is created. When enough of these pockets of bottom-up energy converge, a new political power manifests.

‘公有领域’远远不仅是一种信息传递策略，更是一种颠覆性的世界观。也正因如此，它代表了一种新的权力形式。当人们走到一起，追求共同的目标，并形成一个有共识的共同群体，就会产生一股新的、协调一致的社会力量。当足够多的自下而上的能源汇聚在一起，新的政治力量就会显现。

And because commoners are committed to a broad set of philosophically integrated values, their power is less vulnerable to co-optation. The market/state has developed a rich repertoire of divide-and-conquer strategies for neutralizing social movements seeking change. It partially satisfies one set of demands, for example, but only by imposing new costs on someone else. Yes to greater racial and gender equality in law, but only within the grossly inequitable system of capitalism and weak enforcement. Or, yes to greater environmental protection, but only by charging higher prices or by ransacking the Global South for its natural resources. Or, yes to greater healthcare and family-friendly work policies, but only under rigid schemes that preserve corporate profits. Freedom is played against fairness, or vice-versa, and each in turn is played off against the needs of Mother Earth. And so the citadel of capitalism again and again thwarts demands for system change.

而且，由于平民们秉承的是非常广泛的综合哲学价值观，因此他们的力量不会轻易地被笼络。市场/国家体系为了压制各种寻求变革的社会运动，制定了丰富的、旨在中和、分而治之的策略。例如，它部分地满足某一方面的诉求，但是必须通过将成本强制性地转移给其他人来实行。是的，争取在法律上实现更广泛的种族和性别平等是可以的，但这却只能在资本主义极为不公平的制度和执法不力的框架内去寻求。或者，寻求加大环境保护力度是可以的，但只能通过提高价格、或者通过掠夺南半球的自然资源来实现。又或者，争取更好的医疗保险和家庭友好型工作政策是可以的，但前提是在确保企业利润不被触碰的严格规则下实行。自由作为公平的对立面来设置，反之亦然，而这两个被轮番地挑拨成与大地母亲的需要相抵触。因此，资本主义的堡垒得以一次又一次地阻挠制度变革的诉求。

The great ambition of the commons is to break this endless story of co-optation and beggar-thy-neighbor manipulation. Its aim is to develop an independent, parallel social economy, outside of the market/state system, that enacts a different logic and ethos. The Commonsverse does not pursue freedom, fairness, and eco-friendly provisioning as separate goals requiring tradeoffs among them. The commons seeks to integrate and unify these goals as coeval priorities. They constitute an indivisible agenda. Moreover, this agenda is not merely aspirational; it lies at the heart of commoning as an insurgent social practice.

公有领域的最大的追求，是去打破这个以“拉拢”和“以邻为壑”为手段的操控故事的无止境循环往复。其目的是在市场/国家体系之外，发展出一个独立的、并行的社会经济形态，从而实践出一种不同的逻辑和精神。公有领域的诗篇(?Commonsverse)并不追求对自由、公平和环保的管控，不会将它们当成分开的目标，来进行权衡取舍。公有领域力求将这些目标整合和统一成共享同期优先级的事项。它们组成了一个不可分割的议程。而且，这一议程不仅仅是一种梦寐以求的抱负；它更是一种有颠覆性勇气的社会实践，是公有领域化的核心。

Silke Helfrich

你说世界是多么辽阔

渺小的我们拥有什么

活动预告

2021年1月29日

星期五

柏林 16：00

北京 23：00

（含同声传译）

本站邀请到社会活动家

作家、学者

Silke Helfrich

和她的全世界朋友们

做客WorkFace柏林站

与大家开展云端对话

点击了解会议详情

口译团队

Jasmine

英国纽卡斯尔大学口译硕士

CLS源造翻译工坊语言服务培训总监

孟杰（Jenny）

上海对外经贸大学MTI英语笔译硕士研究生

CLS源造翻译工坊受训译员

王慧仪（Kris）

上海外国语大学德语专业

卓越学院高级翻译班毕业生

CLS源造翻译工坊受训译员

阿秋（Francis QM）

本名张立秋

上海对外经贸大学MTI英语口译硕士

“三创”校友导师团秘书长

SUIBE-MTI翻译实践基地企业导师

特别鸣谢全体翻译团队

2021 抢先知· 文化使者成长计划招募

导师团队

方曼博士

心理动力团体带领者

个人·组织成长顾问

Dr. Thomas Bruhn

物理学家

组织顾问及学科带头人

AMA项目负责人

Silke Helfrich

Silke Helfrich is an independent activist, author, scholar, and speaker. She cofounded the Commons Strategies Group and Commons-Institute, was former head of the regional office of Heinrich Böll Foundation for Central America, Cuba, and Mexico, and holds degrees in Romance languages/pedagogy and in social sciences. Helfrich is the editor and co-author of several books on the Commons, blogs at www.commons.blog, and lives in Neudenau, Germany.

David Bollier

an activist, scholar, and blogger who is focused on the commons as a new/old paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. He pursues his commons scholarship and activism as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and as cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project. Author of Think Like a Commoner and other books, he blogs at www.bollier.org, and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

成长计划目标