All Together Now!
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in October 2025.
Karl Marx’s description of the final stage of capitalism sounds pretty familiar: the emergence of monopolies, imperialism marked by geo-political conflict, exploitation of labour including off-shoring of production, increasing economic inequity, and a tendency to crisis as the unchecked concentration of wealth becomes unsustainable. He predicted that the next phase of social organization was communism. I prefer to explore the alternatives.
The thing about capitalism and communism is that they don’t value people except as a means to achieving its goal of untrammelled growth and profit. So an alternative, it seems to me, is something that values labourers as something more than the work they do. The recent emergence of work-life balance as a labour issue – the push-back to returning to offices, the right to unplug – suggests this might be on more minds than mine. Professionals in regulated businesses are concerned they must seek permission for activities in their private lives lest they tarnish the corporate brand: if everything about them belongs to the corporation, what are they but indentured slaves?
So what’s the way around or through all this? Traditionally, the answer has been social democracy, which I understand to be people working together to accomplish a shared goal. Of course a measure of organization is involved, but somehow we have been led to believe that the spectrum is between anarchy on one end – everyone enacting their own version of what ought to be done, no established leadership (the most recent iteration is probably the Occupation movement following the economic crash of 2008) – to totalitarian rule on the other (the most recent iteration is quite possibly unfolding to our south).
But before the Industrial Revolution introduced capitalism, there were other ways of taking collective action. In Anglo-Saxon history, it was the Commons. (I believe many Indigenous cultures were rooted in this approach, but I don’t know enough to go there.) This is how Wikipedia describes the Commons: “…a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.” The visible manifestation was The Commons, a space available for activities that were in the mutual interest (‘the common good’). When the Industrial Revolution needed to chase people into urban centres to work in factories, Enclosure happened: the Commons were made private property, which undermined the feasibility of the culture and the rural economy and did, indeed, transform people into workers, urban and rural, who fed the machine that made owners rich.
The construct has also become a verb, commoning, to preserve and accentuate that it is a process, not a product. When it becomes static, a way of doing things that ought not to be questioned, it loses its juice: it becomes something essentially different.
What has come to my recent attention as a current exercise in commoning is The Working Centre in Kitchener, via Joe and Stephanie Mancini’s book describing its five-decade history. (They are/were key-noters in the Housing Summit and their book is available through Master’s Book Store.)
The Working Centre is a dense and inter-connected bunch of projects and places that provide the services and facilities that are (or were – it’s a changing landscape) necessary to help people contribute to their community as workers. The reclaim the word by defining workers as all who contribute to daily life, with both paid, and perhaps more importantly, unpaid work. Which pretty much means everyone. In another time, we might have used the word citizens instead of workers, but that term has become sullied and exclusionary. At a time when The Economy is so in the forefront of discourse and concern, calling people workers gets our minds to the right place for re-wiring.
The Working Centre is managed by what might be called a flat hierarchy. (And yes, I feel your mind reeling at the oxymoron.) Leadership is what you do, not what you are. A person becomes a leader, not because someone made them the boss, but because they were able to collect a group of people/followers who wanted to work with them to accomplish something that moves the community toward what they agree it should be. That is, something that serves the Common Good. Food. Employment. Recycling. Repairing. Housing. Tools…more. As of 2018, when the book was published, The Working Centre owned 18 properties in downtown Kitchener.
But most importantly, the activities provide connection, a recognition that we are all in this together, and a shared intent to do what can be done with the resources available (or acquirable) to make the shared world the best it can be. Small and big at the same time. Broad and deep. Separate and connected. Individual and collective. Present-serving and future-looking.
Many Canadians can remember when commoning was how things happened – shared harvesting, barn-raising, the village school, bartering. It may be time to revisit that wisdom.
