The historical process of delegitimation of the commons

The underestimation of natural commons and the parallel overestimation of non-material commons prevailing in Western discourse is the consequence of a process that Carolyn Merchant has called the “death of Nature” ((The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1880)). With the English Industrial Revolution of the 16th and 17^th centuries, Nature ceased to be considered sacred and was deleted from the human horizon, to the point that people have lost even the perception of it. Slowly but progressively, Nature has been transformed into a deposit of lifeless resources, inputs for the industrial production at the disposal of corporations.

The organic metabolism between people and nature, which had made possible the sustainability of the past, was substituted by an industrial metabolism between people and industrial production.

In the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity the commons became a hindrance to change and “progress”, and were therefore dismantled. In England common lands were enclosed or privatised, both to provide the wool necessary as raw material to the emerging textile industry and to free the labour necessary to run the new manufactures in the cities. To carry out the Industrial Revolution, England conquered large part of the Americas (the colonies) and deported millions of Africans to employ them as slaves in the sugar plantations. And the same imperial formation conquered and used much of South Asia as the cash cow for investments necessary to develop technologies and techniques necessary to industrialization ((Marcello De Cecco, Money and Empire: The International Gold Standard, 1890-1914, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1974; Andre Gunder Frank, World Accumulation, 1492-1789, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978)).

The social consequences of these events have been analysed and criticised scholars such as Karl Marx (Capital) and Karl Polanyi. (The Great Transformation, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1944). Environmental consequences have emerged slowly and are still coming out as in the cases of climate changes, loss of biodiversity and new diseases due to pollution (among others, see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900, Cambridge University Press 2004). These processes have been reflected in ideological changes.

The formalisation of political economy as a science, at the end of the 17^th century, resulted from and contributed to the end of the social order preceding the Industrial Revolution. The theories of the founding fathers of political economy – Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill – justified the expansion of the capitalist market, which changed the course of history for the entire world. The invisible hand, the homo oeconomicus and the theory of comparative advantages and free competition opened a new phase in ideology, wiping out even the memory of the commons, at first largely among intellectuals and ruling classes of Western Europe. An imperative for vertical competition won over the necessity for horizontal competition.