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the commons
The Commons Are an Opportunity, Not a Tragedy
European peasants devised them as a means of surviving within structures of domination, but we could use commons not merely to survive domination but replace it.
Aug 19, 2023
A thousand people gather on the Green, sharing umbrellas and straining to hear the valedictorian above the thunderstorm. She’s talking about the Green, a 16-acre park at the center of town where townspeople get together for concerts, picnics, and the annual high school graduation. The speaker does not mention that we are sitting over bodies interred in the 17th century, for the Green has served other purposes: At various times it’s been a burial ground, a marching ground, a grazing ground, and even a campground for townsfolk who lived too far from church to make it to town and home in the same day.
Today, the Green is a park owned by the town and overseen by a committee, but for at least the first two centuries of its existence, it served as an economically productive space, governed by the townsfolk themselves. It was, in other words, a commons.
As recently as the 19th century, North America included many examples of commons customs. Indigenous nations hunted and gardened in spaces reserved for all their members, often extending rights to other communities by diplomacy and hospitality. White agrarians shared meadow and wetlands in Massachusetts, cooperated in management of lobster fisheries in Maine, and communicated over the “law of the woods” in the Adirondacks. But, as private property and state ownership pushed out every other form of possession, practices of collective ownership fell into neglect and are poorly understood today.
At base, a commons is a social relationship of the useable Earth that is neither private nor state property but owned and governed by its constituents to meet their specific needs.
In the 20th century, anti-communist ideologues attacked the entire idea. A single essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” written in 1968 by the biologist Garret Hardin, did more damage to our understanding than anything written by an English lord circa 1668. Hardin’s parable of greedy shepherds deploying their livestock to nibble up every last blade of grass in a universalized common meadow assumes that the commoners couldn’t get together to make decisions about how best to use the space. Lacking history, anthropology, or any evidence, Hardin’s essay amounts to little more than his own dismal view of human nature. Thinkers on the left, meanwhile, have tended to project their own assumptions onto commons customs without understanding how or why they came to be.
A commons is not a tragedy of resource depletion, not a collective farm, not a relic of a savage past, and not proof of ancient communism. As a form of land, it is neither res nullis (owned by no one, like wild animals or schools of fish) nor res communis (owned by everyone, like Antarctica or the Moon). “The word ‘common’ means ‘together with others,’” wrote the 13th-century legal scholar Henry de Bracton. In his world, a commons was an agricultural village in which each household tended its own fields and pasture and made collective decisions about the whole settlement, but commons have taken many other forms as well. At base, it’s a social relationship of the useable Earth that is neither private nor state property but owned and governed by its constituents to meet their specific needs.
This relationship originated in specific circumstances. After the implosion of the Western Roman Empire around A.D. 500, peasants in Europe enjoyed great freedom from centralized authority. By about the year 900, however, the thuggish war lords who developed political power in the vacuum began attacking them, capturing them on little kingdoms called manors. These new lords demanded from peasants the various products of their labor, like flour, butter, beer, and lambs, which meant the peasants all had the same problem: how to endure lordly appropriation while thriving themselves. As a way of smoothing out conflict and building efficiency, village councils began to decide where cattle should graze, where wheat should be planted, and which fields should lie fallow.
By around the 12th or 13th century, peasants throughout western Europe found that commonly managing fields and pasture saved them a little labor, resulting in marginal benefits. A family possessed their own fields and livestock, but they allowed the village to make decisions about production in an overall setting that no one really owned but that the peasants claimed as their proprietary realm.
This went on for hundreds of years, through famine and pandemic, but in England by the 17th century something had changed. Lords sought to extinguish commons customs by law, evict peasants from farms and villages, and claim all the land as their own in a process known as enclosure. Capitalism is literally founded on this dispossession of collective rights, which immediately provoked commoners to vehemently defend those rights. In this ongoing conflict, advocates of peasants and opponents of capitalism uphold the commons as an alternative.
Commons evokes feelings of morality and justice when set against enclosure and the poverty and suffering it still causes. But it is not inherently just.
This is why many on the left tend to think of the colonization of North America, and elsewhere along the frontiers of the British Empire, as a conflict between capital and commons. But it’s not that simple. The English peasants who founded New England—uninvited by the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Lenape, Menunkatuck, Pequot, and other Algonquin peoples—had themselves fled enclosure. They didn’t arrive as profit-maximizing individuals, but as communities seeking their own survival. The Guilford Covenant of 1639 puts it clearly: “We will, the Lord assisting us, sit down and join ourselves together in one entire plantation and to be helpful each to other in any common work, according to every man’s ability and as need shall require.” You’d be forgiven for thinking that Karl Marx had written for them; but the point is that, at least at first, Indigenous North American societies with their own customs of collective use came into conflict with European societies strikingly similar to them. Colonizers had no reason or inclination to carve up the landscape into real estate. That idea was not well developed even in England, and it was a century before it took hold in the colonies. The point is cautionary: Commons evokes feelings of morality and justice when set against enclosure and the poverty and suffering it still causes. But it is not inherently just.
Despite the onslaught of private property, common property still exists all over the world. In India, common rights exist over forests, grazing land, and bodies of water. By one estimate, three-quarters of Africa is owned and governed by communities and 90% of rural Africans farm and hunt on this community land. In the United States, the Agrarian Trust buys farmland and places it in a community-centered, tax-exempt trust. The group then provides affordable leases to farmers so they can grow food for communities without the burden of paying down a mortgage. It’s not a commons in the sense of collective governance but in the anti-capitalist tradition: It aims to remove land from the market, permanently.
We could do the same thing on a larger scale by creating commons communities on federal land or by eminent domain, creating spaces for farming, hunting, and wood cutting where the people who use the space would make all decisions but could not sell it. Not everyone wants to live this way, but there is no reason the same principles couldn’t work in suburbs and cities. Dozens of community gardens all over Los Angeles County, for example, are governed by the gardeners themselves.
European peasants devised the commons as a means of surviving within structures of domination, but we could use commons not merely to survive domination but replace it with a different species of citizenship, one that enjoins land and democracy. We could begin to reclaim our lives from the capitalist market by moving the commons from the margins of society to the center of our communities, exactly where they began.
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The Commodification of the Commons Is Killing Us All
Whether it's oil barons, giant utilities, private schools, drug companies, insurance predators, or greedy ranchers who want to use public lands to graze their cows without paying a public fee that would help maintain and restore those lands, the commons are under continuous low-level assault by greed and the neoliberalism that celebrates it.
Apr 14, 2023
Americans used to understand the difference between private and public, between what government should regulate or even administer, and what is appropriately left in the private marketplace.
Ever since the Reagan Revolution, however — as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America — even our very lives have become fodder for the buzzsaw of unrestrained raw capitalism controlled by the morbidly rich.
Last week, the nation learned that it’s become a routine practice in the assisted living industry to drain elderly people of their entire life’s savings and then, when Medicaid kicks in at a slightly lower payment level to cover their costs, evict them onto the street.
Old people are, from that industry’s point of view, apparently just another commodity, a thing that can be converted into cash when convenient and disposed of when no longer useful.
Housing prices are exploding across the nation, the result of hedge funds and foreign investors jumping into the single-family residence market to the tune of billions every year.
In 2018, for example, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America and converted them to high-priced rentals: the number has gone up significantly since then.
Housing, an essential for a decent life, is now just another commodity and the commodification of housing and its exploitation as a source of revenue for billionaires and other investors has led to an explosion of homelessness.
The price of food, also essential to human life, is sliding out of the reach of many Americans.
CNN reports that Cal-Maine Foods company, which controls about 20% of the entire United States egg market, has radically increased the price of a dozen eggs from $1.61 to $3.30 over the past year. The result? Revenues and profits have gone up by 109 percent. They claim it’s inflation, but it’s actually price gouging.
Large companies are able to pull this off because of their monopoly power in the marketplace, a situation resulting from Ronald Reagan’s 1983 order to the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing our nation’s antitrust laws.
The result is massive price gouging across dozens of industries because these huge companies no longer face competitive market pricing pressures, although it became a humanitarian crisis when price-gouging moved from consumer products and airfares to food and housing.
Good health has become a commodity that’s exploited by giant corporations and the morbidly rich. A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick.
The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero. Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.
Electricity has become a necessity for a decent life in modern America, and many other countries see it as part of the commons. Around the world, roughly 71 percent of utilities are owned by “the people” rather than by private, investor-owned for-profit corporations.
In the US, though, the shift to neoliberal “free market” policies that accompanied Reagan’s abandonment of FDR’s Keynesian New Deal policies led, in the 1980s and 1990s, to a massive consolidation of electric generating capacity in the hands of for-profit companies.
Today over half of the electric utilities in America are run as for-profit corporations that put investor returns first before serving their communities (as Texans learned in 2021). Electricity is now just another commodity to make wealthy investors even richer.
Pharmaceuticals have become so effective over the past century that they’re now literally keeping millions of Americans healthy and alive.
But that very necessary nature of them has attracted the hyenas of Wall Street and the investor class, turning pharmaceuticals into just another commodity that can be manipulated to increase profits and the wealth of the investor class.
Drugs like Molnupiravir, the new anti-Covid drug, are developed as part of the commons with taxpayer dollars (a $10 million grant from the Department of Defense and $19 million from the National Institutes of Health) and then turned into a commodity with ever-increasing prices.
Manufacturing cost for Molnupiravir, according to a report from researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health, is around $17.74 for a 5-day course of treatment. Nonetheless, Merck just signed a contract with the federal government to sell 1.7 million treatment courses for the government to distribute to infected people for … wait for it … $712.00 each.
Water is essential to human life, but three years ago it became a commodity traded by CME, the world’s largest futures exchange.
Like with electricity, about half of all public water supplies in America are held by for-profit operations. Prices go up for consumers as profits rise for investors.
Without education it’s difficult to function in society, which is why virtually every other developed nation in the world has free public schools from kindergarten all the way up through PhD level university courses.
But in America, education has become a commodity with private academies and charter schools wiping out public education, and college education is out of the reach of more than half of America’s young people. While teachers and students struggle, student-loan bankers and investors in private schools and colleges are getting richer by the day.
Every one of these items are rightfully part of the commons, the stuff essential to life that’s either administered or heavily regulated by government to protect average citizens.
And while Democrats want to expand the commons, Republicans want to steal and monetize it. It’s really that simple.
It’s why Democrats want to expand infrastructure (part of the commons) and Republicans don’t — the GOP want the commons of things like schools, rail lines, the Post Office, and energy systems entirely billionaire- or corporate-owned.
Some, like libertarian Rand Paul, even think privatizing our fire departments and public roads — turning them all into fee-for-private-service and toll-roads — is the way to go, along with privatizing Medicare and Social Security.
“We the People” should, in their minds, control nothing but the Army and the cops; everything else should be owned by and run for the profit of the elite class that funds them and their political campaigns.
It’s almost entirely absent from our political dialogue, but the issue of who owns the commons and how they’re to be used (and by whom) is at the core of almost all the major debates between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, and even those advocating democracy versus those trying to expand the American oligarchy.
The commons is the stuff we all use or is necessary to life: the air and water, the public roads and schools, the police and fire departments, the airways that our planes fly over and through which we send radio and TV signals, outer space, and our oceans.
The commons, in aggregate, are one of the major stores of the wealth of a nation.
One of the main reasons people throughout history have established governments is to protect and regulate the commons.
Which explains why wealthy people and corporations are in a constant battle with government, launching massive propaganda campaigns to say the government should be “smaller” and thus less able to protect the commons.
Whether it’s oil barons, giant utilities, private schools, drug companies, insurance predators, or greedy ranchers who want to use public lands to graze their cows without paying a public fee that would help maintain and restore those lands, the commons are under continuous low-level assault by greed and the neoliberalism that celebrates it.
Similarly, polluters from mining companies to frackers to industrial operations increase their profits by dumping their poison into our commons — our air, soil and water — rather than paying the cost of cleaning up their own waste.
History and contemporary studies show that when the commons are administered by the people who use them, particularly healthcare, water, and electric systems, they are better cared for and their benefits are provided to the people at a lower cost.
To stop this, however, the morbidly rich and America’s largest corporations have set out to interrupt that process of government protecting the commons for the people. They’ve done it by seizing government itself.
This is where we must push back, if American democracy is to survive and the American people are to have a quality of life even remotely comparable to other developed democratic nations.
Because one of the principal functions of government is to administer the commons, government itself — and, thus, our vote — is the single most important part of the commons.
Anybody who wants to exploit the commons for their own private profit has to go through government, or corrupt government, in order to make that happen.
This is one of the main reasons that we have laws against bribery of public officials: access to the commons for private exploitation is one of the most visible ways private interests corrupt government. Witness Donald Trump putting a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA and an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands running the Interior Department.
Privatizing public lands, public schools, prisons, and other obvious commons-related functions of government is a crime against Democracy.
A much bigger crime, however, is privatizing government itself, or “Shrinking it down to the size where you can drown it in the bathtub,” as K Street lobbyist Grover Norquist proposed some years ago on NPR.
In most developed countries, the healthcare system that is so essential to maintaining a robust and healthy populace is considered a core part of the commons. That notion is foundational to the proposal for Medicare For All here in America.
Depriving people access to the commons of the vote, the vehicle by which we choose government that administers all the rest of the commons, is another crime against both the commons and democracy.
There are currently over 400 pieces of Republican-sponsored legislation in various state legislatures that would make it more difficult for people to vote. An additional 300+ have passed in the past decade.
Almost exclusively, these bills would reduce the ability of young people, elderly people, city-dwellers, and racial minorities to vote, as the Republican Party sees these people as their political enemies.
Denying people access to the commons based on the color of their skin, in fact, is one of the oldest crimes against democracy that has been perpetrated throughout the history of America.
When we understand what the commons is, and have a collective consensus about what is and isn’t appropriately part of it, we can have an informed discussion about the proper role and size of government.
Until we frame our debates around the commons, they will continue to seem like most of our political debates are simply arguments about separate, discrete issues. In fact, most are about how the commons are controlled, protected, and used — and to whose benefit.
We used to teach Civics in America; that mandate pretty much ended when Ronald Reagan put the anti-public-school advocate, Bill Bennett, in charge of the Education Department.
If our republic is to be successful and Americans are to have decent lives, we must stop the commodification of America’s commons and turn power over life’s essentials to We The People.
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Stealing and Selling Nature: Why We Need to Reclaim "the Commons" in the Curriculum
Nov 15, 2012
In the wake of superstorm Sandy and a presidential election in which both candidates essentially ignored climate change, it's time that our schools began to play their part in creating climate literate citizens.
Hurricane Sandy, and the superstorms that will follow, are not just acts of nature--they are products of a massive theft of the atmospheric commons shared by all life on the planet. Every dollar of profit made by fossil fuel companies relies on polluting our shared atmosphere with harmful greenhouse gases, stealing what belongs to us all. But if we don't teach students the history of the commons, they'll have a hard time recognizing what--and who--is responsible for today's climate crisis.
If the commons is taught at all in history classes, it's likely as a passing reference to English enclosures--the process by which lands traditionally used in common by the poor for growing food, grazing animals, collecting firewood, and hunting game were fenced off and turned into private property. Some textbooks may mention the peasant riots that were a frequent response to enclosures, or specific groups like the Diggers that resisted enclosure by tearing down fences and reestablishing common areas. But they are buried in chapters that champion industrial capitalism's "progress" and "innovation."
Some texts, like McDougal Littell's widely used Modern World History, skip the peasants' resistance entirely, choosing instead to sing the praises of enterprising wealthy landowners:
In 1700, small farms covered England's landscape. Wealthy landowners, however, began buying up much of the land that village farmers had once worked. The large landowners dramatically improved farming methods. These innovations amounted to an agricultural revolution.
This is a disturbing narrative, as much for what it leaves out as for what it gets wrong. Students could fairly assume that enclosures involved a fair exchange between "wealthy landowners" and "village farmers," instead of the forced evictions that removed peasants from land that their families had worked for generations. Take the account of Betsy Mackay, 16, when the Duke of Sutherland evicted her family in late-18th-century Scotland:
Our family was very reluctant to leave and stayed for some time, but the burning party came round and set fire to our house at both ends, reducing to ashes whatever remained within the walls. The people had to escape for their lives, some of them losing all their clothes except what they had on their back. The people were told they could go where they liked, provided they did not encumber the land that was by rights their own. The people were driven away like dogs.
The McDougal Littell version of history silences the voices of the poor, who struggled for centuries to maintain their traditional rights to subsist from common lands--rights enshrined in 1217 in the Charter of the Forest, the often-overlooked sister document to the Magna Carta.
If we don't teach students the history of the commons, they'll have a hard time recognizing what--and who--is responsible for today's climate crisis.
Of course, this history is not limited to land enclosures during the British agricultural revolution. Around the world, European colonizers spent centuries violently "enclosing" indigenous peoples' land throughout the Americas, India, Asia, and Africa. The Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva explains why this process was a necessary aspect of colonialism:
The destruction of commons was essential for the industrial revolution, to provide a supply of natural resources for raw material to industry. A life-support system can be shared, it cannot be owned as private property or exploited for private profit. The commons, therefore, had to be privatized, and people's sustenance base in these commons had to be appropriated, to feed the engine of industrial progress and capital accumulation.
The enclosure of the commons has been called the revolution of the rich against the poor. . .
In the same way that world history curriculum passes over the social and ecological consequences of land enclosure, the current U.S. history curriculum contributes to a larger ecological illiteracy by glossing over the historical role of nature. And when we're not taught to understand the intimate and fundamental connections between people and the environment in our nation's history, it should come as no surprise that we struggle to make these same connections today.
One of the few places where nature shows up in the U.S. History curriculum is with discussions of how Native American and European concepts of land ownership differed. Textbooks could provide a valuable opportunity for students to analyze these differences. Instead, they usually dismiss Native American notions of property as quaint and in the end--just like the struggle of the Diggers--somewhat tragic in the grand scheme of things.
Every textbook I've seen presents the buying and selling of land as a normal--even inevitable--part of human history. What's missing from all accounts is the naked truth that land inhabited and used in common by English peasants and Native Americans had to first be stolen, before it could ever become the private property that can be bought and sold today.
Instead, we have thissection of Prentice Hall's America, titled "Conflict with Native Americans":
Although the Native Americans did help the English through the difficult times, tensions persisted. Incidents of violence occurred side by side with regular trade. Exchanges begun on both sides with good intentions could become angry confrontations in a matter of minutes through simple misunderstandings. Indeed, the failure of each group to understand the culture of the other prevented any permanent cooperation between the English and Native Americans.
This is history of the worst kind, in which a misguided attempt at "balance" results in a morally ambiguous explanation for the dispossession and murder of millions of Native Americans.
In fact, the growth of industrial capitalism has been predicated on the private enclosure of the natural world. And these enclosures have always met with resistance. Students need to learn this alternative narrative for at least two reasons. First, it encourages critical conversation about how "economic growth" has been used to justify the private seizure of the earth's resources for the profits of a few--while closing off those same resources, and decisions about how they should be used, to the rest of us. Even more importantly, this conversation about history can help us to see today's environmental crises--from the loss of global biodiversity to superstorm Sandy--for what they really are: the culmination of hundreds of years of privatizing and commodifying the natural world.
The private enclosure of nature continues today; it's just hard to see. Like the proverbial fish surrounded by the water of the "free market," it's easy to assume that fossil fuel companies have some god-given right to profit from polluting our atmospheric commons. How are young people to recognize this atmospheric grab when the school curriculum has erased all memory of our collective right to the natural commons?
Reclaiming these commons means fueling students' knowledge about a past that has conveniently disappeared. Educators did not create the climate crisis, but they have a key role to play in alerting students to its causes--and potential solutions.
This article originally appeared at GOOD magazine. A longer version of this article will appear in the winter 2012-13 issue of Rethinking Schools.
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