"The commons is perhaps the oldest-known model of social organisation. It is about co-operation to ensure long-term stability for communities in and with the living world.
In these times, when conceptions of the world tend to be prescribed by notions of individualism and private property, it’s no surprise that the commons is often misunderstood as a thing – a field, or the atmosphere; some chimerical, mystical form of property that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one. But the commons is much more than that. An ancient concept, imbued with deep understandings of connection – to each other and to the natural world we are part of – the commons is better understood as a system than a form of property. It is a system by which communities agree to manage resources, equitably and sustainably. As commons theorist David Bollier describes in Think Like a Commoner (New Society Publishers, 2014), it is ‘a resource + a community + a set of social protocols’.
The commons isn’t the field where the people graze their cattle. It is the field, and the people, and the way in which the people agree to share the field, keep it healthy, share the benefits and prevent freeloaders.
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Commons practices have existed for millennia, and many indigenous peoples still implement them in the present day – where they are able. More than a system for managing individual resources, the commons presents a model for a new (old) way of organising society, a new politics. It’s a radical path: neither capitalism nor socialism, but a truly ecological political system.
The commons as a form of governance has always faced many challenges. Human psychology and society are complex, and selfishness – the desire for wealth and power over others – sometimes outweighs care, compassion and co-operation. Commons are designed with this in mind, with cultural norms and quasi-legal structures in place to balance our impulses. But throughout history, there are numerous examples of commons culture being replaced or overruled, usually locally or temporarily. Over time, they have been gradually whittled away, to remain mostly at the margins.
Then, along came the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern capitalism. Where previous systemic challenges, like imperialism, still included some form of internal balance – a religious imperative, or a feudal system of devolved mutual responsibility – capitalism threw that out. As Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), where all previous social organising principles saw markets, land and money as ‘embedded’ within social relationships, capitalism ‘disembedded’ them, removing any social, religious or moral constraints from the operation of the market. Capitalism became the first social organising principle based on selfishness, the first system to make greed, competition and non co-operation its credo. Commons were systematically enclosed and people were booted off land that was now a resource to be used instead of shared and protected."
The commons is:
There is no master inventory of commons because a commons arised whenever a given communitiy decides it wished to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.
The commons is not a resource. It is resources plus a defined community and the protocols, values, norms devised by the community to manage needed resources. Many resources - such as the atmosphere, oceans, genetic knowledge and biodiversity - urgently need to be managed as commons.
There is no commons without commoning - the social practices and norms that help a community manage a resource for collective benefit. Forms of commoning naturally vary from one commons to another because humanity itself is so varied. And so there is no "standard template" for commons, just shared patterns and principles. The commons must be understand, then, as a verb as much as a noun. A commons must be animated by bottom-up participation, personal responsibility, transparency and self-policing accountability.
One of the great, unacknowledged problems of out time is the enclosure of the commons, the expropriation and commercialization of shared resources, usually for private market gain. Enclosure can be seen in the patenting of genes and life-forms, the over-extension of copyright law to lock up cretivity and culture, the privatization of water and land, and attempts to transform the open Internet into a closed proprietary marketplae, among many other enclosures.
Enclosure is about dispossession. It privatizes and commodifies resources that belong to a community or to everyone, and dismantles a commons-based culture (egalitarian coproduction and cogovernance) with a market order (money-based producer/consumer relationships and hierarchies). Markets tend to have thin commitments to localities, cultures and ways of life; for any commons, however, these are indispensable.
The classic commons are small and focused on natural resources; an estimated two billion people depend upon commons of forests, fisheries, water, wildlife and other natural resources for their everyday subsistence. But other types of commons exist in cities, at universities and as infrastructure and social traditions. One of the most robust classes of commons is based on the Internet and digital technologies, which enable commoners to create valuable bodies of shared knowledge and creative works.
The contemporary struggle of commoners is to find new structures of law, institutional form and social practice that can enable diverse sorts of commons to work at larger scales; to protect their resources from market enclosure; and to ensure the generative power of their commons.
New commons forms and practices are needed at all levels - local, regional, national and global - and there is a need for new types of federation among commoners and new linkages between different tiers of commons. Transnational commons are especially needed to help align governance with ecological realities and serve as a force for reconciliation across political boundaries. To actualize the commons and deter market enclosures, we need innovations in law, public policy, governance, social practice and culture. All of these endeavors will give rise to a very different worldview than the one that now prevails in established governance systems, particularly those of the State and Market.
... What is neglected is the simple insight that privatization and commodification fundamentally transform people’s relationships with each other and the world (e.g. paid sex versus unpaid sex between people), but that they also exclude people from vital resources for their life and liberty (i.e. water, land, housing etc.). For example, by enabling someone to appropriate and accumulate land without limit, other people will be excluded from the possibility to access land. I believe this to be the main, simple and general argument against privatization. The position that I defend in this work and that I will elaborate on in more detail later is that people require access to common resources as a prerequisite for life and liberty. While individual private property might be necessary for the fulfillment of certain personal needs, an access to democratically managed common property provides people with greater individual freedom in joint activities while simultaneously minimizing their ecological impact. Put somewhat differently, commons thus increase our autonomy, which we defined as the ability to co-determine our social conditions, and simultaneously provide us with a democratic means to create abundance through the fairer distribution of goods in a world of limited resources. In turn, I believe this to be the main argument for a commons-based society. ...
Democracy, Markets and the Commons. By Peters
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