The first thing many people notice about a Rainbow Gathering is what is “missing”. There are no ticket booths, no commercial stages, no vendors selling branded experiences, no cash registers. Thousands of people gather in a forest to create temporary villages and cities to share food, build kitchens, make music, care for each other and then disappear again.
The absence of money can seem like a strange fantasy, but the deeper story is that it is not a just a rule, the refusal of commerce was the original idea, Rainbow was built around a simple but radical question – What happens if people try to organise life around sharing instead of buying? Not as theory, not as a manifesto, but as a lived practice.
The idea was the path – The Rainbow Family emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period where many people were questioning war, consumerism, hierarchy and the social structures around them. There were many competing ideas and paths about how change should happen, some believed confrontation and disruption were necessary, others believed a different approach was needed – Instead of only fighting the existing system, create something outside it, create a living example as a base from growth, temporary spaces, flows, where people could experience that another way of organising was possible.
The point was not simply to protest capitalism, the point was to demonstrate that cooperation was possible. The free festival model became the foundation – Food shared freely, skills offered freely, music created freely. People contributing because they wanted to, not because they were being paid. Noncommercial was not separate from the message, it was the message – it was real working emporary commons.
The Rainbow Gathering became a working flowing commons for the last 50 years in meany different country’s. A place where the normal, “common sense” rules of the market were excluded. The basic needs of the community were organised through collective effort – Kitchens, water, medical care, childcare, information sharing, conflict resolution. The important part was not that everything was perfect, it was that people attempted to create the working infrastructure of a different culture.
This is the part often misunderstood, a commons is not the absence of organisation, a commons is a different kind of organisation. It requires participation, responsibility, people to care. Freedom without responsibility does not create a commons, it creates a tragedy.
So why did getting rid of money matter? The rejection of money was both symbolic and practical, money does more than exchange goods, it creates relationships between buyers and sellers, it introduces ownership, competition and hierarchy what the Rainbow crew called, in there folksy, spiritual way Babylon.
Why? Because if someone can buy influence, buy comfort or buy power, the social relationships begin to change. The Rainbow idea was, remove the market inside the space and see what grows instead. The “Magic Hat” became one solution, the gathering still existed in a world where food, supplies and transport required money, the difference was that money was moved into the background as a part of the wider gift economy.
With the magic hat people contributed anonymously, resources become collective, the camp itself remained based on sharing. It was not pretending the outside world did not exist, it created a different relationship, the value was about belonging. This path treated humans as creators – a culture where nobody was just a consumer, nobody was only a customer, nobody was reduced to economic value, everyone had something to contribute to belong.
This is why Rainbow connects with wider commons movements, the same question appears in many places – Can people build systems based on cooperation instead of extraction? Can communities create value without everything becoming a product? Online this is also the question at the heart of the #openweb.
The problems – every commons faces the same challenges, that people are messy. The same openness that pushes participation also pushes problems. Rainbow developed its own language for this “Drainbow.” The word describes people seen as taking more than they give, people who consume the resources of the gathering without contributing. At one level, this is a problem, as a community based on mutual aid depends on people participating, a commons dose need boundaries. But if those boundaries become a way of creating insiders and outsiders, the original path is weakened.
This is the ongoing Rainbow tension – How do you stay open without being overwhelmed? How do you protect the commons without creating hierarchy? It is a living contradiction, that demonstrates that people can cooperate on a huge scale for 50 years. It also demonstrates how difficult cooperation is. Consensus can be beautiful, but it can also be exhausting. Leaderlessness prevents domination, but it also creates confusion. Openness creates freedom, but it creates vulnerability.
These are the challenges of any attempt to build a different culture. There is also a modern lesson here – When we describe movements like Rainbow, there is a tendency to turn them into either mythology or failure. Either “Look at this perfect alternative society.” Or “Look at this chaotic disaster.” Both can miss the point, the important question is what did people learn by living this life?
Culture is not built by perfect systems, it is built through practice, through mistakes, through correction. Through people returning and trying again. Rainbow shows that the infrastructure matters – The kitchens mattered – The councils mattered – The shared practices mattered. The technology of the commons is social, the same is true for media were a new publishing system will not create a commons by itself.
The Rainbow story is not that humans can’t escape all conflict, humans bring conflict with them. The story is that conflict can happen inside a different framework, a framework based on: Trying, sharing, learning and repairing. That another way of organising is possible, that people are capable of creating temporary worlds outside the dominant logic.
That commons are fragile, but they matter, the path is not a finished destination. And like every commons, it survives only when people keep tending it.
#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #indymediaback #Oxfordboaters
