Commons

George Caffentzis

After centuries of marginalization, the term “commons” is now at the center of a wide-ranging political dialogue among radical scholars and activists, including urban gardeners, hackers, ecologists, anarchists, feminists, and Marxists. This discussion ranges from a shack dwellers’ organization in South Africa (Abahlali baseMjondolo, whose stated aim is to “recreate the commons”) to the protesters in Istanbul’s Gezi Park (who carried signs bearing the slogan “Reclaim the commons!” when the government threatened to convert the park into a shopping mall) and to the activists of the Great Lakes Commons in the United States, who call on those who dwell near the Great Lakes to regulate the use of this watery wealth according to commons principles. In fact, the discussion is so wide-ranging that some—like David Bollier (2014)—argue that we are now witnessing the emergence of a “commons movement” that is bringing together the defense of “natural resource commons” with “digital commons” like free software.

When it first appeared in medieval-era English property law, the term “commons” referred to a set of legally recognized “assets”—including meadows, fisheries, forests, and peat bogs—that a community used but did not own. Most of the land the commoners used was royal territory or belonged to a manor’s owner or to the Church. Although commoners did not “own” these resources, they had customary and collectively managed usage of them. This “usufruct” was generally the result of prolonged struggles between commoners and landlords. When landlords had the upper hand, they abrogated the “customs” by violence or through parliamentary legislation. These were the usual means of “enclosure,” which had both legal and physical dimensions; they consisted both of acts of Parliament and the encirclement of formerly common resources with bushes or fences to prevent access to them. As Marx observed through his analysis of primitive accumulation (1976), such separation of the peasantry from its “means of production” was one of the main conditions for the rise of capitalism.

While enclosure in the sixteenth century was carried out by “ex-lege” (extrajudicial) force, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a legislative strategy was more often employed. In both cases, however, enclosure caused a dramatic drop in the percentage of land held in common in England. According to conservative ­estimates, up to 26 percent of the land in sixteenth-century England was held in common, whereas barely 3 percent can be considered communal today—and even this modest stretch is threatened by privatization.

In the twentieth century, as communal land became privatized worldwide, commons became conceptually invisible as well. They were either romanticized (with the trappings of “merrie old England”) or demonized, as in ecologist and population theorist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons.” According to Hardin, since human nature is driven by self-interest, commons were a path to self-destruction. In this model, a rational herder would maximize advantage by placing as many of his cattle on the common land as possible. However, since every other rational herder would do likewise, the pasture would quickly be “tragically” overgrazed and thus become useless to all herders.

Hardin’s thought experiment had a profound effect on a scholarly world seeking easy retorts to the call for more communal forms of social reproduction that arose with the anticapitalist movements of 1960s. By the late-1970s, however, the argument’s power began to fade as anthropologists, political scientists, and social researchers pointed out that the “open-access” situation Hardin assumed had rarely occurred in reality. The empirical work of political economist Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues at the US-based International Association for the Study of the Commons was crucial in amassing evidence to counter Hardin’s thesis. Looking at property as “a bundle of rights,” Ostrom showed that, in both common-property and common-pool resource systems, commoners have always set rules limiting access to the resources they shared due to their awareness that their long-term livelihood depended on self-imposed limitations. Since the Middle Ages, for instance, herders in Switzerland have brought their cows to graze on communally held Alpine meadows. They have also collectively determined rules and created surveillance networks to sanction those who violate them.

Ostrom’s 1990 critique of Hardin was a crucial counterpoint to neoliberalism’s sweeping privatization of public and communal property. These “New Enclosures” (as Midnight Notes labeled them in 1990) were especially devastating in the formerly colonized world where, in the name of a highly engineered “debt crisis,” the World Bank and International Monetary Fund went to war against the remaining communal regimes. Since the 1980s, whether through “structural adjustment programs,” free trade agreements, or intellectual property rights and patenting regulations, customary regulations have been declared extinct. In the “developed” world, privatization has extended to include not solely land, public spaces, and services, but life forms as well.

In the context of widespread struggles to defend against neoliberal assault, radical interest in “the commons” revived. On New Year’s Eve 1993, the Zapatistas sparked an international solidarity movement when they re-appropriated and communized thousands of acres of land in Chiapas, Mexico. Their call for land and freedom and a world beyond state and market resonated far beyond the region, heightening consciousness of the commons and providing new principles for anticapitalist organizing.

However, the concept of the commons that has taken shape in radical discourse since the 1990s is quite different from the concept that appeared under English property law. The older notion was geographically tied to England’s territory, was ontologically rooted in the use of lands, forests, waters, and the subsoil, and originated historically and politically in the class struggle on the medieval manor. In contrast, the present notion has a wider geographical and historical application. Radicals now realize that commons exist on every continent and have been the dominant form of economic production and reproduction for most of humanity’s existence, including most pre-Columbian indigenous societies on the American continent. Ontologically, our present concept includes seeds, genes, urban spaces, electromagnetic waves and software programs, languages and cultural works, and many other social realities. Commons are conceived as a product both of struggle and of new forms of cooperation. In this way, they are brought into existence every day. Politically, commons are the way in which anticapitalist and antistate movements increasingly express their demands and identity.

Reflecting upon the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Naomi Klein identified a “radical reclaiming of the commons” as the spirit linking different campaigns and movements (2001). Indeed, as worldwide privatizations, expropriations, and economic crises have become permanent features of everyday life, interest in the commons as a principle of self-government and of “non-commodified . . . social cooperation and production” (De Angelis 2009) has sharpened.

Nevertheless, the concept can be co-opted. According to Massimo de Angelis, “increasingly the idea of the commons seems to function less as an alternative to capitalist social relations and more like their saviour” (2009, 32). Citing discourse on climate change, he explains that neo-Keynesian economists use the phrase “global commons” to couple the contradictory goals of environmental sustainability and economic growth. The same concept has also been used by the World Bank to justify—in the name of protecting our natural wealth—the expulsion of various indigenous groups from their habitat in forested areas (Isla 2009). A further contribution to this distorted use of “the commons” has come from the United Nations’ classification of particular cities as part of the “heritage of humanity” and thus subject to specific international regulations. This policy has undermined residents’ control over the urban environment and opened the “heritage” cities to commercial exploitation (Lixinski 2011). The danger of co-optation is also evident in the proliferating use of “commons” in real estate jargon and in the labeling of public buildings (e.g., as when libraries become “information commons”). Even shopping malls are now frequently branded as “commons.”

Different interpretations of the concept have also emerged in leftist discourse. Followers of the Ostrom School (best exemplified by the work of David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, inspired also by the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi) do not view the commons as a road to an anticapitalist society. Instead, they argue that it constitutes a “third” social and legal space beyond state and market that can serve as a buffer against neoliberalism’s extremes. Through various conferences and publications—including Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner (2014) and Bollier and Helfrich’s The Wealth of the Commons (2012)—they have helped to make “the commons” a household phrase. Nevertheless, their assumption that commons are compatible with capitalist relations has led many radicals to reject this conception.

Consequently, many contemporary radicals tend to view commons as embryos of a developing non-capitalist society. In the 1990s, Midnight Notes described the creation of commons as the precondition for refusing exploitation (2001). For his part, historian Peter Linebaugh has described the struggle for the commons as the red thread joining centuries of class struggles (2008; 2014a; 2014b). For Massimo de Angelis (2009), commons are capitalism’s outside, which the class struggle constantly creates. Drawing from a political tradition shaped by the experience of indigenous peoples and especially the Zapatistas, Gustavo Esteva (2012) has argued that commons are not a utopia but—for populations marginalized by development plans—the organizational form of everyday reproduction.

Marxist autonomists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2009) proposed another radical conception by counterpoising the singular “common” to the “commons.” In this way they differentiate between cooperative forms of production (which they see as necessary and already underway) and “nature’s commons.” Convinced that the new phase of capitalist production requires more autonomous and cooperative forms of work, Negri and Hardt seek the production of the common in the interactive space of the Internet and the densely articulated world of the city.

This perspective stands in contrast to the one advanced by eco-feminist activists and writers like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, who have described the commons as a relation to the land, the basis of livelihood, and the expression of our “responsi­bility for the continuation of life” (Mies 1999, 153). According to Mies, the reclamation or reinvention of the commons begins with taking responsibility (a central concept in ecofeminist analysis) for waste, which she defines as a “negative common” (1999, 153; 155). Similarly, Vandana Shiva has argued that land, forest, water, and the systems of knowledge produced through their care have been rural India’s “survival basis,” as well as the “domain of the productivity of women” and the condition of communal self-reliance (1989, 83). Feminists are also increasingly interested in applying the principle of the commons to everyday life in an effort to break with the isolating conditions of reproductive work under capitalism (Federici 2012).

Despite the differences in conceptualization and emphasis described above, it is possible to deduce several areas of agreement concerning the commons as a political project. The first is that commons are not given but have to be produced. Secondly, commons are not things or “resources” (a term suggesting commercial use) but relations of cooperation and solidarity. Peter Linebaugh (2008) has suggested using the term “commoning” (a verb) instead of “commons” (a noun) to make this point. Finally, there can be no commons without “community.”

There is also some agreement that the politics of the commons pose problems when conceptualized as the basis for mass movements. Through their actions, the Zapatistas have demonstrated that tens of thousands of people, spread over more than a hundred miles in southern Mexico, can carry on a commons-based subsistence project together. Nevertheless, it remains analytically and strategically difficult to reconcile the scale of commons in the past (when communal forms of property had continental dimensions) with the smaller commons of today. In a more practical vein, how can we construct a world based on the commons when the very means that enable our cooperation—predominantly the Internet, which relies extensively on mineral extraction and water consumption—require their destruction?

We do not have complete answers to these questions. But if we view the commons not as a distant goal but as the movement that negates the present order of things (not as a given reality but as something evolving through our struggle), then the outline of a path emerges.

See also: Class; Community; Reproduction; Solidarity; Space; Utopia