Commons

What are the commons, and why so many names?

The commons can mean the natural and cultural resources available to all members of a society, such as air, water and a habitable earth, or the resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage together for individual and collective benefit. The second sense matters more in current research: the commons is also a social practice of governing a resource not through the state or the market but through institutions created by the community of its users. That is why a commons differs from an open-access resource that anyone may use as they like. A commons has a defined set of users, and they set the rules of access and use.

The English word “commons” was originally a traditional legal term for common land, the land villagers used together. In European intellectual history it referred to shared fields, pastures and forests that were enclosed and turned into private property over several centuries. Further back, Roman law distinguished res communis, things common to all to be used and enjoyed by everyone, from res publica, public property managed by the government; this is why the commons should not be confused with public goods or state property.

Korean has no settled equivalent. Gongyuji (“common land”) is used for land, gongyujae or gongyujawon for resources, and economists usually render “common-pool resources” as gongyujawon, as in the subtitle of the Korean edition of Elinor Ostrom’s book. Social movements and the humanities widely use the transliteration keomeonjeu. The Korean edition of Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World uses gongtongjang in its subtitle, and Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth appeared as Gongtongche. This dictionary uses gongyujae, current in both economics and the movements, as its Korean headword, with keomeonjeu alongside. The Italian bene comune (“common good”), meanwhile, is an ethical and political concept of the interest of society as a whole and differs from beni comuni, the commons.

What did enclosure take from the common land?

The commons became a Marxist concern above all through the process of losing them. In his account of primitive accumulation in Capital, volume 1, Karl Marx noted that fifteenth-century English agricultural wage-labourers shared with the peasants proper the use of the common land, on which they grazed their cattle and which gave them fuel, wood and turf. In the conversion of this common land into sheep runs and private estates, enclosure, Marx stressed the change of the eighteenth century: what individuals had done by force was now pushed through by Parliament by law. “The progress of the eighteenth century,” he wrote, “shows itself in this, that the law itself now becomes the instrument of the theft of the people’s land.” The enclosure process as a whole, and the way it created a class of wage-labourers, is covered under primitive accumulation.

Marx first met the question of the commons in 1842, twenty-five years before Capital. In five instalments of the Rheinische Zeitung, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”, he attacked the Rhine Province Diet’s bill to punish even the gathering of fallen dead wood as theft. Cutting a living tree and picking up branches that had already fallen from it were wholly different acts, he argued, yet the Diet lumped them together as “theft” in the interest of forest owners. Siding with the poor, he claimed “customary right for the poor, a customary right that is not local but the customary right of the poor in all countries”. The way a customary right to gather firewood became a crime under the logic of private property is the prototype of what later theorists of the commons call the “new enclosures”.

What did “the tragedy of the commons” claim?

The word “commons” became a central academic term thanks to the ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science; according to Ostrom and a colleague, titles containing “the commons”, “common pool resources” or “common property” had been very rare in the academic literature before it. Hardin borrowed his example from an 1833 pamphlet by the English economist William Forster Lloyd. On a pasture where anyone may graze cattle, each herder gains the whole benefit of adding one more animal while the damage to the pasture is shared by all, so the more rationally everyone acts the more surely the pasture is ruined. Hardin’s conclusion: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

The article’s main concern was in fact not pastures but overpopulation. Hardin argued that the principle that every family has the right to choose the number of its children had to be replaced by “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”, and on the same grounds advocated a “lifeboat ethics” under which rich countries would end aid to the poor and stop migration from poor countries. His views on population have been criticised as simplistic eugenics and racism. The solutions he offered for the commons were private property or state coercion. Because his use of “commons” was so often misunderstood, he later said he should have titled the essay “The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons”.

How have historians reread the common land?

Hardin’s metaphor departs from history. English common land was not open to everybody. Every parcel had a legal owner, the lord of the manor, and the right to graze it belonged only to particular local people called commoners. Their grazing rights were restricted by law precisely to prevent overgrazing, and each manor’s manorial court fined commoners, and the lord too, for breaches of customary law. The legal scholar Christopher Rodgers concluded that Hardin’s thesis had no application to common land in England and Wales and rested on a false premise; Susan Jane Buck Cox described the history instead as a “triumph of the commons”, the successful common use of land for many centuries. It has also been pointed out that Lloyd’s pamphlet was itself written after enclosure had largely eliminated the common-field system.

The Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh rewrote this history as a history of class struggle. A student of E. P. Thompson, in The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (2008) he read the Great Charter of 1215 together with its scarcely known companion, the Charter of the Forest, made to protect the subsistence rights of the poor. Federici wrote that from this book she had learned that the commons have been the thread connecting the history of class struggle to our own time. The Many-Headed Hydra, which Linebaugh wrote with Marcus Rediker, recounts the hidden history of resistance by sailors, slaves and commoners across the revolutionary Atlantic.

What did Ostrom refute?

The political scientist Elinor Ostrom answered Hardin with fieldwork in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), drawing on irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Nova Scotia and Indonesia. She concluded that the users of common-pool resources can create durable rules themselves without relying solely on privatisation or centralised state control. One common pasture in the Swiss Alps has been run by a farmers’ collective since 1517.

Ostrom distilled the principles that recur in long-enduring commons institutions: clearly defined boundaries; rules of appropriation and provision that fit local conditions; collective-choice arrangements; monitoring; graduated sanctions; conflict-resolution mechanisms; minimal recognition of the right to organise; and, within larger systems, nested enterprises. She warned against “panaceas”, single remedies for every problem, and favoured a polycentric approach in which decisions are made as close as possible to the scene of events and the actors involved, rather than a single global authority.

Ostrom was not a Marxist; her work belongs to the New Institutional Economics and a distinct strand of public choice theory. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver Williamson for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons, and became the first woman to receive it; coming right after the 2008 financial crisis, the award struck some as a fitting response to the failures of free markets. Ostrom’s concern was to identify the conditions under which commons institutions endure, not to promote the commons as a political project beyond capitalism, and this is where she parts company with Marxist theories of the commons. Within commons research itself a recurring tension appears between treating the commons as an alternative to capitalism and acknowledging their co-optation by it.

How did Marxist feminism read the commons?

Silvia Federici carried the concerns of the Wages for Housework campaign and of Caliban and the Witch (2004) into the theory of the commons. In “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons” she dates the concept’s rise in the movements to the Zapatistas’ occupation of the main square of San Cristóbal de las Casas on 31 December 1993, in protest against legislation dissolving Mexico’s ejidal lands. The collapse of the statist model of revolution, she argues, and struggles against “old and new enclosures” made visible a world of communal properties and relations that many had thought extinct.

She first sounded two warnings. Since the early 1990s the World Bank and similar institutions had appropriated the language of the commons and put it to work for privatisation: in the name of biodiversity and the “global commons” they turned rainforests into ecological reserves, expelled the people who had lived from them for centuries and opened them to those who could pay. The discourse of the commons, she argued, must not be crafted so as to let a crisis-ridden capitalist class revive itself by posing as the environmental guardian of the planet. And there was still no answer to the question of how the many commons being defended and built could be joined into the foundation of a new mode of production.

This is where a feminist perspective matters. As the primary subjects of reproductive work, Federici argues, women have historically and today depended on access to communal natural resources more than men, have been most penalised by their privatisation and have been most committed to their defence. In capitalism’s first phase women were at the forefront of the struggle against enclosure in England and the “New World”; today they plant maize and cassava on public land in African cities, replant degraded forests and lead revolts against water privatisation. She calls women’s self-managed credit associations such as the tontines of Africa “money commons” and contrasts them with World Bank microcredit, which runs on mutual policing and shame. The common cooking pots that women in Chile and Peru set up in the 1980s amid soaring inflation are another example.

Federici’s lesson is that the “commoning” of the material means of reproduction is the primary mechanism by which a collective interest and mutual bonds are created. She therefore called for putting the communalisation of housework on the political agenda, reviving the tradition of nineteenth-century American “materialist feminists” who tried to socialise domestic work through communal kitchens and cooperative households. This does not mean naturalising housework as a female vocation, she insists, but refusing to erase the collective experience, knowledge and struggles that women have accumulated around reproductive work. A slogan she cites is “no commons without community”, where community means not a gated group bound by religion or ethnicity but a quality of relations, of responsibility to one another and to the earth, forests, seas and animals.

How did Harvey, and Hardt and Negri, politicise the commons?

The Marxist geographer David Harvey also criticised Hardin, asking why his metaphor focused on the pasture as a common rather than on the individual ownership of the cattle, and recalling that the dispossession of indigenous peoples in North America was justified on the ground that they did not produce value. In Rebel Cities (2012) Harvey distinguished public spaces from urban commons: public spaces and goods become a commons only when citizens take political action there, as in Syntagma Square in Athens, Tahrir Square in Cairo or Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona. Scholars such as Harvey use the verb “commoning” to stress the commons as a process and practice rather than a particular kind of thing. Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”, today’s expropriation through privatisation and financialisation, is covered under primitive accumulation.

Antonio Negri, who came out of operaismo, and Michael Hardt called in Commonwealth (2009), the last volume of their trilogy, for the reappropriation of “the common”; the Italian edition was titled Comune: oltre il privato e il pubblico (“The Common: Beyond the Private and the Public”). They put the common at the centre of politics as a third way, neither capitalist private property nor socialist state property, and, holding that intellectual and immaterial labour had become hegemonic in production, included in it not only natural resources but the intellectual and immaterial wealth people produce together. Digital commons such as Wikipedia and free software, and debates on commons-based peer production and digital communism, connect with this line of thought.

What did the Italian commons movement leave behind?

In Italy the commons became a matter of law and of the ballot box. A commission led by the jurist Stefano Rodotà, set up in 2007 to reform the Civil Code’s classification of property, proposed a new category of beni comuni: goods that are not public property in the strict sense, since they can belong to private persons as well as public bodies, but whose entitlement is widely diffused. They include rivers, lakes and other waters, the air, parks and forests, high mountains and glaciers, protected coastlines and wild fauna and flora. The bill was never debated in Parliament after the government fell, but a 2011 ruling of the joint civil chambers of the Court of Cassation held that goods serving the interests of the community and the realisation of the social state must be considered common regardless of title.

In the 2011 referendums the “Water is a Common Good” movement put forward questions abolishing rules on the privatisation of local public services and on including a return on invested capital in water tariffs; turnout cleared the majority quorum (about 54.8 per cent) and they passed. The campaign was led by the Italian Forum of Water Movements and supported from outside by parties of the radical left and the Greens.

Where do the positions part?

Positions on the commons fall into three broad groups. For Hardin the commons is a resource that collapses through overuse if left alone, and the remedy is privatisation or state coercion. For Ostrom it is a resource that its users’ community can sustain without market or state if it builds suitable institutions, and the task of research is to identify their conditions; but this view treats the commons as institutions complementing a market economy and does not question capitalism as such. For Marxists and feminists such as Federici, Linebaugh, Harvey, Hardt and Negri, the commons is a social relation through which people organise their reproduction together and a field of struggle against capital’s enclosures and privatisations, with the aim of laying the foundation of a new mode of production beyond capitalism.

To place a position, ask: does it see the commons as a thing (a resource) or as people’s relations and activity (commoning)? Who sets the rules of access and use: owners, the state or the community of users? Does the commons complement market and state, or offer an alternative outside them? And does it count reproductive work, feeding, caring and raising children, as a question of the commons? The political consequences differ as well. Hardin’s framework has been criticised for serving to justify privatisation and population control; Ostrom’s fed into policies of local self-government and institutional design; the Marxist and feminist framework feeds movements of land occupation, opposition to water privatisation, common kitchens and the communalisation of care. As Federici warned, vigilance against capital borrowing the language of the commons to revive itself is also part of the debate.