The Non-Tragedy of the Commons

Most of us have dutifully learned the Tragedy of the Commons, how unchecked individual interested overwhelms the group needs. The key word in that sentence is “unchecked.” In short, commoning approaches manage such systems to balance individual and group needs. Commoning is one of the newer concepts to me from the After Capitalism research. Massimo De Angelis’s Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism is an excellent addition to the “Sustainable Commons” visions. The book explains how a commoning approach might work as an alternative to capitalism. First a few definitions:

• Commons are a community sharing resources and governing them and their own relations and (re) production
• Commoning is the form of social labor managing common resources via participatory and non-hierarchical approaches.

Simple examples of commons are households, networks of supporting friends, managed workshops, community gardens, and peer-to-peer ( P2P ) networks for sharing music , codes , files, etc. The author provides several detailed examples of community commoning approaches in the book. His argument for commoning is that it is an alternative way to make decisions and act upon those decisions to shape the future of communities via a local and distributed approach that avoids “being locked into market competition and its anxieties, the blackmail of profit-driven companies, and state agencies.”

He is no shrinking violet: “I believe there is a social revolution in the making that, if recognized and able to attract more energies from people around the world, could give us a chance to embark on a process of transformation towards postcapitalist society.” He notes how the excesses of capitalism evolved: the process of enclosures, expropriations, looting, financial extraction and tax avoidance. In short predator capitalism has got us into such a mess that commoning becomes a viable alternative.

There are two ways that work gets done in commoning: communal and reciprocal labor.

• Communal labor is the social labor that a community of commoners pulls together for particular common objectives following convocation .
• Reciprocal labor is the form of social labor that is intertwined with perceptions of reciprocity , gift , or mutual aid ; it is the labor that subject A performs for subject B , B for C and C for A ( circular reciprocity ) or simply A for B ( where karmic feelgood is the reward ) .

A very difficult aspect of the move to commoning is the “current entanglement with capital and the state.” He admits that capitalism is crafty and reacts and adapts to challenges by developing new forms. Thus, he is pragmatic. It will be necessary to work within the capitalist framework as commoning develops: “the strategic horizon therefore is not to avoid making deals, but how to make a given deal.” At the same time, he doesn’t suggest that the commoning vision must be completely worked out before moving in that direction. I love this: “Systems are not implemented, their dominance emerges.”

It is no easy task. Scaling is a big challenge. He suggest a massive social movement would be necessary, and he notes the challenge is not just to overcome capitalism, “but also of overcoming the multifaceted real divisions that exist among commoners and commons movements.”  — Andy Hines