90 Threats to the commons

There are no shortage of vested interests vying to turn things that we all share in common, into personal and private gain. But capitalism has also always exploited less obvious forms of altruism, gifting, and social investment because these allow market economies to be run at low cost, maximising profit. Slavery and indentured labour work this way. But so does the gendered division of labour.

Silvia Federici’s work has been particularly important here, drawing a direct link between feminism and the theft of the commons ^[1][2][3][4]. Her work;

’begins with the realization that, as the primary subjects of reproductive work, historically and in our time, women have depended on access to communal natural resources more than men and have been most penalized by their privatization and most committed to their defence’ ^[5].

As she wrote in her book Caliban and the witch ^[6];

‘in the first phase of capitalist development, women were at the forefront of the struggle against land enclosures both in England and in the “New World” and they were the staunchest defenders of the communal cultures that European colonization attempted to destroy’ (ibid).

Federici argues that it is women’s bodies that are always the first to be exploited by capitalism, and so any model of social organisation must be tested against the degree to which it addresses women’s ongoing subordination ^[7]. She argues that, we must be very careful, ‘not to craft the discourse of the commons in such a way as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself, posturing, for instance, as the environmental guardian of the planet’ ^[8].

Nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s work also concerns threats to the commons, but examines instead the question of people’s greed. When the idea of a return to the commons first began to gain credence in the 1960s, Garrett Hardin wrote a now famous paper titled The tragedy of the commons ^[9], which argued that ‘Left to collective ownership… individuals would abuse the system and wreck the commons’ ^[10]. Hardin argued that it was human nature to exploit something that was free, and look to gain personal benefit from it. Hardin believed this meant that state regulation, legislation, and private markets were inevitable. But what Ostrom and her husband, Vincent, showed was that Indigenous peoples all over the world had successfully managed common resources for thousands of years without the need for government oversight, democratic control, or private enterprise ^{[11][12][13][14]}. Elinor Ostrom’s work, Silvia Federici argued, showed that ‘the world contained a large body of common sense’ ^[15];

’People, left to themselves would sort out rational ways of surviving and getting along. Although the world’s arable land, forests, fresh water and fisheries were all finite, it was possible to share them without depleting them and to care for them without fighting. While others wrote gloomily of the tragedy of the commons, seeing only over-fishing and over-farming in a free-for-all of greed, Mrs Ostrom, with her loud laugh and louder tops, cut a cheery and contrarian figure’ (ibid).