Commons and Enclosure

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The commons is perhaps the oldest-known model of social organisation. It is about co-operation to ensure long-term stability for communities in and with the living world.

In these times, when conceptions of the world tend to be prescribed by notions of individualism and private property, it’s no surprise that the commons is often misunderstood as a thing – a field, or the atmosphere; some chimerical, mystical form of property that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one. But the commons is much more than that. An ancient concept, imbued with deep understandings of connection – to each other and to the natural world we are part of – the commons is better understood as a system than a form of property. It is a system by which communities agree to manage resources, equitably and sustainably. As commons theorist David Bollier describes in Think Like a Commoner (New Society Publishers, 2014), it is ‘a resource + a community + a set of social protocols’.

The commons isn’t the field where the people graze their cattle. It is the field, and the people, and the way in which the people agree to share the field, keep it healthy, share the benefits and prevent freeloaders.

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Commons practices have existed for millennia, and many indigenous peoples still implement them in the present day – where they are able. More than a system for managing individual resources, the commons presents a model for a new (old) way of organising society, a new politics. It’s a radical path: neither capitalism nor socialism, but a truly ecological political system.

The commons as a form of governance has always faced many challenges. Human psychology and society are complex, and selfishness – the desire for wealth and power over others – sometimes outweighs care, compassion and co-operation. Commons are designed with this in mind, with cultural norms and quasi-legal structures in place to balance our impulses. But throughout history, there are numerous examples of commons culture being replaced or overruled, usually locally or temporarily. Over time, they have been gradually whittled away, to remain mostly at the margins.

Then, along came the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern capitalism. Where previous systemic challenges, like imperialism, still included some form of internal balance – a religious imperative, or a feudal system of devolved mutual responsibility – capitalism threw that out. As Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), where all previous social organising principles saw markets, land and money as ‘embedded’ within social relationships, capitalism ‘disembedded’ them, removing any social, religious or moral constraints from the operation of the market. Capitalism became the first social organising principle based on selfishness, the first system to make greed, competition and non co-operation its credo. Commons were systematically enclosed and people were booted off land that was now a resource to be used instead of shared and protected.

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(https://griffithreview.com/articles/commons-and-commonwealth-enclosure-rebirth-tim-hollo/)

Private narrow/short-term interests have a profit-extraction motivation to enclose wide/long-term interested commons. Commons are part of the Solidarity Economy. CES is mean to be a cognitive/psychological commons.