Characteristics of the commons

Commons were the prevailing form of social organisation in the European Middle Ages and are widespread even now in the South where village – often native – communities still exist. This is the case in most of Sub-Saharan African countries, in all the countries of Southeast Asia included China and India, and in the Andean countries of Latin America. The United Nations estimate that over two third of global population lives in the countryside and the nearby forests and survives thanks to the rural people direct access to subsistence resources.

The commons are jointly-used resources, administered and self-managed by local communities. They are not just resources in the sense of physical entities such as a piece of land to cultivate, a pasture, a pool of water, or a fishing area. The commons may also take the form of common rights to use the fruits of a given natural resource as in Anglo-Saxon common law, or that of “usi civici” as in the Italian legal tradition, or that of the “claims” still weighing on natural goods that allow communities to survive or to further their means of survival; or of genetic resources, considered in 2001 International FAO Treaty on the Natural Vegetable Resources of Food and Agriculture.

The commons are hard to define because they vary in time and space. Their strength lays in diversity and specificity, i.e. in the ability of communities to adjust to different situations. It is however possible to define their main characteristics, the first one being flexibility. Another is self-management by local communities, which indicates either a group of people using jointly a natural resource – e.g. a piece of agricultural land – or the village authority which allocates fertile lands among village families of the village, with the provision of cultivating such land for family consumption, not for commercial ends.

The community functions according to a logic entirely different from that of the capitalist market, meaning that exchange is based on interpersonal relationships, not the impersonal exchange of equivalent things. It is also for this reason that community is a controversial concept, often rejected by cultures prevailing in the North which identify community ties with blood and tribal boundaries; not with ties of proximity and solidarity. This is, in any case, pretending that problems specific to Northern societies are representative of all humanity.

Another element of the commons is the joint use of natural subsistence resources, whose property is held neither in private nor in public, in the sense of belonging to the State. This is something difficult even to perceive in the West, particularly in countries with no tradition of common law such as Italy. It has been pointed out however that private property has prevailed for a limited and recent period of human history while collective property is the original form of land tenure prevailing through the bulk of human history. ((Paolo Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property, Chicago, Chicago Press, 1981; Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common, New York, The New Press, 1993)). In Western culture Nature holds no rights, so as to avoid human rights over natural resources being rendered void by the withering of the physical base on which they rest, be it water, air, land, or fire/energy. (see recent Constitutions passed in Bolivia and Ecuador).

The Market-State dichotomy, a founding principle of the market economy under capitalism, is now under attack due to the ecological crisis induced by bad management of natural resources both by the State and by the Market. The Market-State dichotomy is also being questioned by scholars, who point out the role of modern Western States in privatising resources and reducing political democracy to parliamentary democracy. Citizens participation to public choices – scholars say – is not a price to pay, but a resource to utilise. ((Ugo Mattei, Laura Nader, Plunder: When the Rule of the Law is Illegal, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008)).

Whatever their geographical configuration and the historical period considered, the commons represent a system of social relations based on cooperation and reciprocity. They provide sustenance, security and independence, yet do not produce commodities. They express a productive and social order based on cooperation, not on competition. ((The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?, vol. 22, n. 4, July-August 1992))

The commons are an institution that has survived through time in spite of the enclosure to which they have been exposed over the past several centuries. They survive both because they are flexible and capable of adjustment and because they embody inalienable human rights, spaces of self-organising that satisfy the need of social relations embedded in human nature. In brief, they express a mode of social organisation alternative to that of homo oeconomicus as theorised in mainstream economics.

The commons cannot be alienated since communities are not the proprietor of the resources on which the commons subsist; and this holds even when products are exchanged between communities. When the question arises as to whom natural resources belong to, the answer is “nobody” since natural resources and the ecosystem services of Nature are a free gift to all beings, human an non human.

In Feudal Europe property of land and other natural resources on which communities made their living belonged to the “prince” (the aristocracy and the Church), who was also the judge sitting in courts to solve conflicts over the commons. In the countries of the South, instead, the property of those natural resources belonged traditionally to local communities, who were the village authorities. All changed with the national State and private property, competing to appropriate the commons.

Local communities fought back, and in some cases succeeded to keep their rights over the resources. But generally speaking the enclosure went on and made the remaining commons appear as an unwanted legacy of the past, something which is irrelevant and could be done away with. This holds for all kinds of commons – water, forests, fishing rights, jointly run agricultural fields. Natural catastrophes such as that of British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico in Spring 2010 or the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia show that it is wrong to consider the commons as something belonging to the past; but this seems not enough to stop prevailing trends.

The commons are also eco and cultural systems. They are the foundation of life since they supply essential goods such as water and food, shelter, fuel and medicines. These are goods that the capitalist market can supply only in part, and in any case only as commodities to buy on the market under prices and conditions that consumers are forced to accept, without any control over the allocation of natural resources nor over prices and the quality of the final products.

The distinction between local and global commons, often used in the literature, is not well founded since “the global is always a globalised local”: the global system that today governs the world is not universal in any epistemological way but the globalised version of a local tradition – usually of Western European origin – that has been able to impose itself violently on the rest of the world. “The construction of the global is responsible for the destruction of the environment, i.e. of resources with which local populations survive…., it is the political tool with which the dominant forces escape their responsibilities, letting them fall over local communities.” ((Vandana Shiva, The Greening of the Global Reach”, in W. Sachs, ed., Global Ecology, Zed Books, London 1993, p.150))

To conclude on this point, the commons are local systems, diverse in space even in the same historical period of time, and exactly for this reason they represent a realistic alternative (but not the only alternative) to the paradigm of the market. Their diversity and flexibility allow for the best resource use avoiding over-exploitation, deterioration and destruction which are inevitable in the capitalist system. Moreover they promote human creativity, intelligence and energy, which are the most scarce and mot important resources of a society that has to be ecologically and socially sustainable.