Introduction
In the last several decades, as capitalist-colonialism continues to degrade social wellbeing and ecological health worldwide, there has been rapid growth in interest in traditions of collective resource use and land relations outside of capitalist private property regimes. This interest is expressed by individuals and organizations from a variety of political persuasions including anarchist and anticapitalist activists, ecologically-minded philosophers, liberal natural resource policy theorists, neoliberal capitalists, and libertarians. Indigenous and peasant communities also express interest in commons and commoning, often framed as reclaiming traditional lifeways practiced before the invasion of capitalism and colonialism. Yet while reviving and re-inventing commons, commoning, and collective property regimes in modern or capitalist-colonial nation-states have overlapping interests with Indigenous reclaiming of commoning traditions, important criticism has revealed that the approaches of these various parties can come into conflict and even reinforce capitalist-colonial logics, continuing to oppress Indigenous and subaltern communities. As sociologist Craig Fortier contemplates in Unsettling the Commons, “Just as the historian on the commons, Allan Greer, talked about early settler commons being in competition with Indigenous commons for space and how we relate to land, social movements today must acknowledge and recognize that our struggles for the commons aren’t inherently liberatory in a settler colonial context. Settler colonialism both structures and drives the relationships that non-Indigenous people have to place, even when we are contesting the power of the state and the capitalist elite” (2017:105). Recognizing enclosure as a continuous process rather than an historical event (An Architektur 2010), certain commoning projects in settler states such as Occupy Wall Street have failed to acknowledge the ways in which certain proposals for a “reclaiming” of commons in settler-colonial states can be in opposition to goals of Indigenous sovereignty. By ignoring this contradiction “the idea of the commons in settler states… evades the question of ongoing settler complicity in the project of genocide, land theft, assimilation, and occupation. In this respect, omissions of settler colonial history in campaigns to reclaim the commons are not unique to Occupy” (Fortier 2017:30).
At the same time, there are undeniable similarities between European or settler commons projects and Indigenous commoning or decolonization movements, and ample opportunity for these two sides to come into solidarity for transformation of societies beyond capitalist-colonialism. While the wide diversity of Indigenous and peasant commoning practices should not be flattened in order to conflate them with European commoning traditions, there are enough similarities that to refuse the comparison would be a wasted opportunity for building anticapitalist and anticolonial solidarity. Furthermore, the language of the commons has been used by Indigenous sovereignty and environmental movements, such as the 2016 fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (Hegeman 2019), and by many other Indigenous and peasant communities around the world (in their respective languages) (Wily 2001; Federici 2019; Parlee 2006; Hegeman 2019; Escobar 2018; Nightingale 2019; Bresnihan 2015; Kimmerer 2013; Esteva 2014; Bremner 2006; Ashenafi 2005). Furthermore, it is problematic to portray European or settler approaches to the commons as monolithic or inherently incompatible with Indigenous sovereignty, as Fortier and other decolonial thinkers may risk doing.
In this paper, I attempt to show how in contemporary discourse on the commons there are several schools of thought, some of which may be more compatible with Indigenous commoning projects and decolonization. First, I describe the two prevailing approaches to the commons in scholarly literature: institutionalism and alterglobalizationism. Next, I introduce a recategorization of contemporary commons perspectives in order to reflect ontological divergence within the alterglobalizationist camp, and to include perspectives not fully represented by either camp, namely, those of cultures rooted in traditional socionatural ontologies. In addition, I discuss how these three perspectives and their underlying ontological assumptions influence their land relations and property regimes as well as their practices of exclusion. To conclude, I contemplate what it would take to “unsettle” our visions of a postcapitalist world re-rooted in the commons. How might we build solidarity between efforts to revive and reinvent commons traditions in settler states with movements to reclaim Indigenous and peasant commons, protect Indigenous sovereignty, and return stolen lands?
Conflicts Between Euro-American and Indigenous Commons
Early Colonial North America
In the early colonial period, commoning was the norm in both settler and Indigenous communities. Most European settlements in the mid-Atlantic, New England, and Quebec initially began as regimes of common property and even communistic sharing of wealth (Greer 2012; Biss 2022), which in subsequent generations transitioned to regimes of individual private property. At the time, in both European and Native American forms of commoning there was a differentiation between inner commons and outer commons. Inner commons immediately surrounded residential areas and were typified by tenured agricultural or horticultural land, and in the case of European settlers, shared livestock grazing areas (Greer 2012:369). Outer commons were further away from settlements and corresponded to the European notion of “wastelands” customarily used for gathering firewood, gathering or hunting, and perhaps for grazing herds further afield. For the Algonquian and Iroquois who cultivated maize, the inner commons consisted of tilled fields largely controlled and tenured by women, where harvests were distributed in a collectivist manner. Outer Indigenous commons were for hunting and gathering in schema of usufruct rights rather than the familial tenure regimes of the inner commons (p.370).
Early colonial land conflicts therefore came about not as a result of European enclosure of Indigenous commons via regimes of individual private property, but by the encroachment of European commons upon Indigenous commons, specifically in the overlap between settler and native outer commons (p.366). At the same time, John Locke asserted that private property, the state, and systems of law were hallmarks of civilization, and supported land enclosure in both Europe and the New World. He conflated Indigenous land use with the English commons, yet because the commons in England were regulated by law, and he saw Native Americans as having no state nor legal system, Locke falsely assumed that Indigenous outer commons were what we could call today “open access” lands, that is, lacking any formal management system for their use (p.368).
Furthermore, Locke supposed that Native Americans had no concept of property at all (Hegeman 2019:136). This supposition was also false, for although the Algonquian and Iroquois did not have concepts of individual private property, they did have concepts of exclusive rights to land use according to family lineage and clan, as many Indigenous and peasant communities also do[1]. Locke’s misconceptions contributed to the idea that settlers need not negotiate with natives for use of these “wastelands” which looked to them as if they were not being used. Of course, these outer commons were extensively cared for, burned seasonally to improve soil fertility and biodiversity, and carefully tended to optimize the health of wild plants and animals. This stewardship was largely invisible to settlers, who assumed it to be uninhabited and unutilized land which they could appropriate for their own benefit. In reality, North America was a vast network of overlapping Indigenous commons; there were essentially no areas of “open access” as Locke had assumed (Greer:372).
In other words, it was not the capitalist concept of private property which enclosed Indigenous commons, but the settler commons itself. This is an important phenomenon to take stock of, for it has implications for how to propose new commons in a settler states. As Greer points out, “Many writers on the left are just as inclined to subscribe to Locke’s view of colonization-as-enclosure, though in this case the valences of commons and enclosure are reversed. The association of ‘commons’ with the poor in England and the Indians in America, not to mention its overtones of sharing and cooperation, can lead to a romantic view that emphasizes the collective aspects of commoning to the neglect of the exclusive nature of most commons known to history” (pp.385-6). Therefore, those of us on the Left hoping to revive commoning as part of a postcapitalist future must be very careful in how we advance this revival, acknowledging that commoning is not inherently liberatory in regards to either its historical entanglement with colonialism, or its practices of exclusion, which I discuss in a later section.
Contemporary Conflicts in Settler States
More recent political actions utilizing the language of the commons have repeated this historical conflict between settler and Indigenous commons. Fortier describes how the activists of Occupy Wall Street used the language of occupation reminiscent of historical colonial occupations and theft of Indigenous lands. OWS’s rhetoric alluding to reclaiming the commons and creating a new radical society was challenged by John Paul Montano, a Nishnaabeg writer and language instructor, who wrote an open letter to OWS stating:
I had hoped that you would acknowledge that, since you are settlers on indigenous land, you need and want our indigenous consent to your building anything on our land—never mind an entire society… I know that this whole genocide and colonization thing causes all of us lots of confusion sometimes. It just seems to me that you’re unknowingly doing the same thing to us that all the colonizers before you have done: you want to do stuff on our land without asking our permission. (quoted in Fortier 2017:22)
Although in several locations Indigenous thinkers and activists attempted to educate and re-envision Occupy through a decolonial politics, such collaborations were often unsuccessful. Most Occupy camps either resisted the reframing or failed to deepen their investigations of decolonial politics beyond a superficial level: “Occupy movements struggled to imagine liberation in a way that addresses really important questions about relationships to Indigenous peoples, the territories on which the movements took place, and a reckoning of the histories that structure the context in which we struggle today” (p.23). In other words, Occupy “didn’t actually push for liberation outside of the context of settlement” (p.25). And yet, “despite these contradictions, there remains significant affinity between some of the core values and principles emerging out of movements such as OWS and Indigenous sovereignty struggles” (p.24). Fortier’s overarching argument is that “a politics of unsettling and decolonizing are not only different from other forms of liberatory struggles in settler colonial states but are foundational to their success” (p.17). Creating true solidarity between movements to establish new commons in settler states and to fight for Indigenous sovereignty will not only ensure that the future of commoning is truly radical and liberatory for all, but it will also strengthen our alliances against the powerful global forces of capitalist-colonial enclosure.
Another point of contention is that some advocates for the establishment of new commons in settler states subsume the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty within the framework of multiculturalism administered by a settler polity. Such a vision does not challenge the supremacy of the settler state and may serve to legitimize existing enclosures of Indigenous land, or even expand them. This reconceptualization transforms the movement for Indigenous sovereignty into a “struggle for a new multiracial or multicultural society that includes Indigenous peoples as part of a re-imagined commons…”. It “frames settlers as those who are doing the including and Indigenous peoples as those who are in need of inclusion. In this sense, movements are attempting to create a ‘post settler’ society without actually dealing with the questions of land, sovereignty, and genocide that put settlers in the position to ‘include’ Indigenous peoples in their visions of the future in the first place” (p.45-6). While this is a serious concern for liberal or socialist approaches to the commons that think through the logic of the state, anarchism, which envisions decentralized societies beyond the state, may have greater affinity to decolonized commoning and Indigenous sovereignty.
Differing Perspectives on the Commons
In scholarly discussions of the commons, two schools of thought have dominated the literature. The approach which focuses more heavily on a common’s management of natural resources can be called “institutionalist”, while the approach focusing more on political concerns can be called “alterglobalizationist” (Huron 2018:4-5). Elinor Ostrom, the foremost thinker in the institutionalist camp, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her work defining eight core principles of managing what she called “common pool resources”. While the expressed aim of defining these principles was to show how sustainable management of natural resources can occur without resorting to individualized private property regimes or state regulation (Wilson 2016), the institutionalist approach is not opposed to integrating commons management with markets, state governance, or capitalist-colonial regimes of property (McKean and Ostrom, 1995). The second approach, that of the alterglobalizationists, is grounded in an ethos of egalitarianism, social justice, and environmental justice which aligns them more explicitly against past, present, and future enclosures of the commons by capitalism. They “are concerned with larger-scale, systemic questions, and make an explicit critique of capitalism, but they tend not to examine the nitty-gritty details of everyday commoning” or resource management (Huron 2018:5). Unlike institutionalists who consider the primary cause of the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) to be inadequate social regulation of resource use, alterglobalizationists tend to view capital’s enclosure and commodification of land and resources for the market as the root cause of the degradation of commons. While some alterglobalizationists are involved in anticolonial struggles, and many at least nominally affirm the rights of Indigenous sovereignty or Land Back, not all engage in meaningful action for solidarity, as in the Occupy Wall Street example given above.
While the categories of institutionalist and alterglobalizationist are sufficient to describe most scholarly analyses of the commons, especially with regards to what is published in the Global North, there are many more perspectives than just these two. Furthermore, there is diversity within each of these schools of thought. I offer that a recategorization of perspectives on the commons may enable us to better articulate the contradictions in the alterglobalizationist approach mentioned above, and to make visible commoning perspectives poorly represented by the scholarship of theorists in Europe and settler states. Here I will describe three perspectives I call the sustainability perspective, the socialist perspective, and the socionatural perspective. I will distinguish between these three by focusing on the differences in their social, economic, and ecological priorities and goals.
The sustainability perspective prioritizes, first and foremost, management of natural resource stocks in alignment with ecological principles, aiming to enable continuous use of these resources in status quo socioeconomic regimes, including capitalism. This perspective overlaps quite neatly with institutionalism. Institutionalist literature often articulates its goals with terms such as “conservation”, “sustainable resource management” (McKean and Ostrom 1995), and “carrying capacity”. To qualify activities as “sustainable” is most often related to management practices which facilitate the continuation of an existing process or institution. “Sustainable economic growth”, for instance, would advocate for putting in place certain procedures, regulations, and limitations on financial transactions, production, or consumption in order to maintain sustained levels of economic growth, whether or not that growth was doing harm to societies, ecologies, or other parts of the economy. Probing beneath the surface of sustainability rhetoric calling for the conservation of such “global commons” as the climate, we may find that its underlying justification for climate action is the maintenance of continued capitalist relations [2]. Rarely do institutionalists offer solutions to ecological or social crises that challenge the logic of the modern nation-state, liberal republicanism, or the market. In other words, the institutionalist perspective is enclosed within the modern capitalist paradigm. The sustainability perspective of the commons generally neglects to consider whether alternative socioeconomic systems might better promote social and ecological health. It is primarily concerned with minimizing harm within the existing system via technocratic solutions. Sustainability-focused commons management will thus prioritize economic or natural resource sustainability above all other priorities including social justice concerns, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecological health when it conflicts with the wellbeing of economic elites or the state.
In contrast, the socialist perspective of the commons tends to prioritize first human-centered political goals such as equality, solidarity, worker empowerment, direct democracy and horizontal decision-making, cultural diversity, and refusal of social hierarchies and authoritarianism. This perspective aligns well with a large cohort of the alterglobalizationists, especially those who are active within the cooperative movement or align with the goals of state-socialism [3]. While ecological concerns are of great import to many socialists, human dignity and labor rights usually take precedent, especially for those adhering to orthodox Marxism’s humanist or industrial-socialist vision. Many socialist persuasions still subscribe, at least in part, to modernity’s humanist anthropocentrism which it shares with institutionalists and other liberal schools of thought. The developmentalism of certain socialist ideologies—especially Marxist socialism with its roots in Hegelian Eurocentric teleology (Tomba 2019:14, 175)—may aim for “sustainable development”, as institutionalists do, but through socialist rather than capitalist mechanisms. So while both the sustainability and socialist perspectives value ecological health and conservation, both perspectives are rooted in humanism and anthropocentrism which differentiate society from nature, setting the wellbeing of the former above the latter. Socialists may justify their practice of commoning (or communism) primarily in terms of protecting the rights and livelihoods of marginalized identities, workers, and the poor.
The third perspective, the socionatural, explicitly aligns itself with Indigenous and peasant ontologies rejecting the separation of humanity and nature, redefining commoning not as a relationship between a human community and a resource pool which it appropriates, but as “socionatural relations that extend subjectivities into more-than-human collectives” (Nightingale 2019:21), which, when implemented, is no less than an “’insurrection’ at the ontological level” (Velicu and García-López 2018:13). This paradigmatic shift towards the “more-than-human commons” (Bresnihan 2015) expands and recharacterizes the commons as multi-species communities of interdependence and reciprocity. This shift requires a rejection of the neoclassical notion of “natural resources” objectified and exploited for the benefit of humanity, bounded and allocated via schema of use-rights. Plants, animals, mountains, and rivers are themselves subjects with desires and destinies of their own, and must be interacted with through reciprocal relationality. Gustavo Esteva writes that “resource is the opposite of commons, that the transformation of commons into resources dissolves them, that you cannot treat commons as ‘common-pool resources’… Ms Ostrom used some modern connotations of the word ‘resources’, which imply the ‘desacralization of nature and the destruction of the commons’” (Esteva 2014: 148). The peasant perspective, as articulated by Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, is aligned with many Indigenous ontologies in its practice of more-than-human commoning. They write,
The peasant economy is guided by a different world-view from that of growth economics: it recognises the finite basis of economic activity in land, water, forest, plants and animals, and the need to operate with corresponding care and restraint. In principle, then, if not in every detail, the farm economy is also an ecological economy. The landscapes we love so much —heaths, meadows, fields with boundary hedges or ditches—are products of farm culture and not of the untouched nature that a naive conservationist mentality imagines… An awareness of the limits of the world and of material goods entails knowledge that people are related to one another, and that everyone is entitled to have a place, as I have one myself. ‘Live and let live’ used to be the motto also in German villages, despite the (always only relative) differentiation into big and small peasants. People helped one another and came to agreements about things, conscious of the community as a living force.” (2000:86)
Therefore, it is not only Indigenous communities that have this holistic socionatural understanding of the commons and economy, but in essentially every pre- or non-modern culture this mentality was, and is, the norm. Esteva asserts that we are in the midst of a kind of renaissance of these older ecological commoning paradigms: “As subcomandante Marcos timely observed, we are in a peculiar historical moment in which to explore the future we are forced to explore the past. For many… they find in it inspiration to reclaim or regenerate old commons and to resist policies and actions destroying both nature and society at a planetary scale. Many others are engaged in the celebration of their own non-western traditions to reinvent their paths” (2014:151). It is essential that as we reclaim and reinvent the commons in every culture and place, we look to our precapitalist heritage for guidance [4].
Of the three perspectives named here, the socionatural may be the most capable of engaging with decolonizing or “unsettling” the commons. The socionatural perspective prioritizes the protection of Indigenous and peasant commons as well as reclaiming traditional commoning lifeways. While the socialist perspective challenges capitalist logics, the socionatural goes further in interrogating the logic of the state, industrialism, colonialism, and modernity at large. In the Global North, the socionatural perspective often aligns itself with anticolonial and decolonial movements, seeing Indigenous sovereignty as critical for protecting the world’s biodiversity and ecological health, and intends to rediscover or re-invent its own more-than-human commoning traditions (Linebaugh 2008; Federici 2019:110; Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 2000).
Ontological Influences on the Commons
Within these three perspectives on the commons there are two foundational ontological positions: the anthropocentric [5] and the socionatural [6]. The sustainability and socialist perspectives are founded in an anthropocentric ontology, while a socionatural ontology informs Indigenous commons, peasant commons, and the cohort of alterglobalizationists who center the more-than-human commons. These two divergent ontologies influence their praxes of commoning in a myriad of ways, but here I will touch on two: their relationships to land and property regimes, and their practices of exclusion.
Land Relations and Property Regimes
Anthropocentrism places human society and nature into oppositional ontological categories, assumed to have competing interests. With its origins in Abrahamic religions, anthropocentrism undergirds the scientific materialism and humanism practiced by institutionalists and many socialist theorists of the commons. Though ecological health may be viewed as valuable, it is not typically considered an end in itself. The end is perpetual human use of resource stocks for production; not for non-commodified human subsistence nor for the enrichment of more-than-human beings. Arturo Escobar describes a related plantation mentality which “emerges from a dualist ontology of human dominance over so-called ‘nature’ understood as ‘inert space’ or ‘resources’ to be had, and can thus be said to be the most effective means for the ontological occupation and ultimate erasure of the local relational world”. Anthropocentrism is a principle of the One-World World (OWW) “that wishes to organize everything in terms of individuals, private property, markets, profits, and a single notion of the Real. OWW seeks to banish nature and the sacred from the domain of an exclusively human-driven life” and “reduces all other worlds to nonexistence or noncredible alternatives to what exist” (Escobar 2018).
Though Escobar asserts that commoners generally reject this anthropocentric One-World World, this was clearly not the case in the early North American colonies. Though perhaps some settlers still retained older socionatural attitudes towards land relationality rooted in the more-than-human commoning of European peasant traditions, there was also a clash between Indigenous socionatural and capitalist-colonial anthropocentric ontologies: “Given that the Dutch settlers saw the land as a resource to be exploited for their common benefit, their practices were in conflict with those of the Lenape who understood their relationship to the land as being one of interdependence, with a responsibility for maintaining a diverse ecosystem” (Fortier:28). Their most obvious point of departure was the colonial practice of commodifying land for sale or private individual ownership. The capitalist notion of private property may trace its origins, in part, to Roman law which frames private property as a legal relationship between a master and a slave, an owner and an object, whereby the former has the freedom to do almost anything to the latter within the confines of his own home, including to destroy (Graeber 2011:203-4). Thus private property, in the capitalist-modern sense, is a relationship of domination, not one of care or reciprocity.
Institutionalists like Elinor Ostrom are not opposed to the integration of common property regimes with markets, state governance, or the capitalist-colonial system of property. In fact, Ostrom has explicitly stated that common property is a form of private property, albeit one that recognizes shared ownership of land or resources by multiple individuals, and should be “considered alongside business partnerships, joint-stock corporations and cooperatives” which grant property rights that are exclusive, legally supported, and fully alienable (McKean and Ostrom, 1995). In other words, in the institutionalist approach, a commons can be seen as a form of collective private property.
Most alterglobalizationists would contest this assertion. However, the near-total enclosure of the globe by modern capitalist nation-states adds sociopolitical complications not experienced before the advent of capitalism. These days, many commons function quite similarly to regimes of private property, even alterglobalizationist commons, especially those with strict practices of membership exclusion or boundaries (either geographic or social) recognized and legitimized by the state. Examples of these may include worker or housing cooperatives that produce for the market or that interface with capitalist real estate markets.
In contrast, socionatural or relational ontologies do not objectify land for they create “worlds without objects” where “living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence… These worlds do not require the divide between nature and culture in order to exist – in fact, they exist as such only because they are enacted by practices that do not rely on such divide. In a relational ontology, ‘beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to their ever-evolving weave’… Commons exist in these relational worlds, not in worlds that are imagined as inert and waiting to be occupied” (Tim Ingold quoted in Escobar 2018). Land is not an object or commodity, but a complex relationship between species and communities. Land or territory must be defended, but as a function of defending life itself: “Within relational worlds, the defense of territory, life and the commons are one and the same. This is the ontological dimension of commoning” (Escobar 2018).
Similarly, Indigenous African relations to property, land, and nature are typified by socionatural ontologies which give shape to traditional African commons. Tafira (2022) writes,
…land is a natural endowment that can neither be bought nor sold. African land tenure is not based on ownership but on use and access. Since Africans have common rights to land, communal rights override individual rights, which are subsumed to the overall communal good. Tenure rights are built through reciprocal obligations and mutuality. Land belongs to the living, the dead and the unborn, making it inalienable… Land is understood as embracing the ecological, cultural, cosmological, social and the spiritual… Depriving one of land means robbing them of their personhood, being and identity – in other words their full humanity.
In Africa, this socionatural identification with the (non-commodifiable) land has been disrupted in both colonial and postcolonial nation-states. Even after independence from European colonialism, African nations have continued to implement European regimes of private property and institute policies to enclose commons and transform traditional systems of collective land tenure into private property, encouraged by neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. However, the majority of the geographic area in Africa is still held in traditional commons, and since the late 1990s commoners have pushed back against these enclosure attempts. Innovative solutions have been established in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, and several other countries granting legal protections for customary tenure systems and allowing for decentralized governance of the commons (Wily 2001:87-92). These instances of re-commoning both within and against modern nation-states may serve as helpful models from which the world can learn, especially in Uganda, Mozambique, and Tanzania where new tenure laws emphatically protect the rights of women, children, and the disabled (p.92).
In general, we see that socionatural ontologies and their commons emphasize land relations according to usufruct rather than exclusive ownership, however, in the context of enclosure within the global scheme of modern nation-states, commons often manifest in hybrid forms of these two. Socionatural ontologies also reject the One-World World and its Eurocentric anthropocentrism, instead defending ontological diversity, cultural and political sovereignty, and decentralized governance. Escobar calls this the “pluriverse”. The Zapatistas call this the “world in which many worlds fit” (Escobar 2018).
Exclusion
Left discourse on the commons tends to emphasize commoning’s ethos of inclusivity and community, yet any commons with staying power must also practice exclusion in one form or another. Exclusion is used to determine who is allowed to become a member of the commons, how many members, and what rights and obligations members hold. While institutionalists explicitly state the need for strict exclusivity and social homogeneity in the establishment of commons (Poteete and Ostrom 2004:441), alterglobalizationists have inconsistent views on the subject. Some believe the commons must be open, inclusive, and diverse, while others acknowledge the need for explicit boundaries and restricted membership (Huron 2018:34). Feminist, Indigenous, and autonomous Marxist thinkers have criticized these more exclusive varieties of commons as reinforcing capitalist-colonial notions of land as property, non-human beings as “resources”, enclosure of Indigenous lands, and vulnerability to discrimination based on race, class, or culture (Fortier 2017; Caffentzis and Federici 2014).
Exclusion in commons occurs on a spectrum between two poles of open or “expanding” commoning/commons, and closed or “enclosed” commoning/commons (Stavrides 2015). Open commoning is more closely aligned with the Left’s ethos of inclusivity, where membership is open to all and relatively flexible. It “invent[s] forms of collaboration based not on homogenisation but on multiplicity. Instead of maintaining or creating distances between different subjects and practices (within a rigid taxonomy), institutions of this kind encourage differences to meet, to mutually expose themselves, and to create grounds of mutual awareness” (Stavrides 2015:14). Stavrides clearly favors open commoning when he asserts that “For commoning practices to become important pre-figurations of an emancipated society, commoning has to remain a collective struggle to re-appropriate and transform a society’s common wealth by continually expanding the network of sharing and collaboration” (p.13). He sees open commoning as directly defying capitalist enclosures in which sharing across social boundaries is a core practice and “Emerging subjects of commoning actions transform themselves by always being open to ‘newcomers’ and by becoming newcomers themselves” (p.17). Stavrides does not give examples of how this is practiced in actually-existing commons, yet if successfully implemented, it would contradict the institutionalist assertion that social homogeneity is a requirement for the efficient management of a commons (Poteete and Ostrom 2004:441).
In contrast, closed commoning is more concerned with managing scarcity, especially when interfacing with capitalism, producing for markets, attempting to win legal rights from the state (by, for example, gaining property rights via the purchase of land), or protecting vulnerable ecologies, housing stock, natural resources, or disadvantaged communities from capitalist-colonial exploitation. In these cases, membership is often limited, buy-in requirements are higher, and obligations to community collaboration are more significant. Much of this is a necessity when cooperatives operate within the context of capitalist states, which are constantly imposing scarcity upon communities in the form of onerous regulations, gentrification and rising land prices, increasing economic competition due to globalization, rising cost of living, and so on.
And yet every commons, no matter how open, must include some aspect of exclusion in order to protect the continued viability of common resources and maintain caring, reciprocal relationships between its members: “Commoning is exclusive inasmuch as it requires participation. It must be entered into” (Linebaugh 2014:14). Without these obligations, a commons may too easily disintegrate into an area of “open access” and subsequently annexed into the system of private property. However, the stricter a common’s exclusivity, especially when based on identity or wealth, the more closely it can mimic the effects of capitalist enclosure. It may be that the more extensively a commons interfaces with markets or the more significantly a commons is impacted by scarcity, the more exclusive their membership practices become.
Fisher and Nading compare two examples of cooperatives with differing exclusionary practices, both in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua (Fisher and Nading 2021). The first example they highlight is of a closed commons called The Fair Trade Zone, a women’s sewing collective producing handicrafts for Fair Trade stores in the U.S. It was established by a small and tight-knit group of members who invested enormous amounts of time and unpaid labor. As the business grew, they closed membership and hired non-voting contract workers, for the women believed that new members would never be able to contribute enough equity to match their own. The second example is a cooperative of independent trash pickers and recyclers, typifying an open commons. It has open membership with a low buy-in fee, relaxed worker duties, and flexible management practices. Members do not have the level of kinship and reciprocal relationality that the women’s sewing cooperative has, but there is nonetheless a cooperative spirit. While both coops substantially integrate with markets, I estimate that the women’s coop is more closed because it has a stronger sense of scarcity, specifically of the time, labor, and “equity” which was required to create the business. In contrast, the abundance of recycling stocks in this urban environment enabled a greater number of members to join and exploit this resource. However, even the recycling coop practiced some level of exclusion, for it required a (small) buy-in fee and was governed by rules of conduct, even if those rules were flexible and somewhat relaxed.
In addition to market integration and experience of scarcity, another factor influencing a common’s practices of exclusivity may be its ontological foundation. In socionatural ontologies immersed in more-than-human commons, a commons is reconceived as a complex network of interdependent individuals and communities relating across difference. Rejecting the logic of commodity and property, a common’s practice of exclusivity and boundedness may shift or soften. In comparing the notion of sovereignty in the modern nation-state versus Indigenous sovereignty, Craig Fortier states that “boundaries that establish the dominion and authority over territory based on Western conceptions of sovereignty differ greatly from ‘boundaries’ in an Indigenous sense, which Simpson says are more accurately understood as relationships” (2017:79). In many Indigenous worldviews, because nature is ever-shifting and never static, sovereignty cannot be founded upon unchanging borders, but instead follows the fluid movement of nature across these boundaries, which are constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated. Thus, the boundaries of a given territory (or commons) are actually thresholds of fluid relationality. One can remain sovereign (i.e. self-determined and free from authoritarian control) and at the same time be in reciprocal relationship across a boundary. Stavrides calls this the “threshold experience”, which when applied to urban commoning, manifests as the opposite of the urban enclave typified by strict exclusion according to identity or class. He writes:
Thresholds may appear to be mere boundaries that separate an inside from an outside, as in a door’s threshold, but this act of separation is always and simultaneously an act of connection. Thresholds create the conditions of entrance and exit; thresholds prolong, manipulate and give meaning to an act of passage… Societies construct thresholds as spatial artifices that regulate, symbolically and actually, practices of crossing, practices of bridging different worlds. And these practices may be socially beneficial or harmful… People on the threshold experience the potentiality of change because during the period of their stay on the threshold a peculiar experience occurs, the experience of ‘communitas’.” (Stavrides 2015:12)
Here, trust or care is the primary currency of commoning relationships both inside the commons and at the threshold of the commons and the uncommons. From that threshold, the commons expands outward, and here I refer again to Stavrides’ insistence that “commoning has to remain a collective struggle to re-appropriate and transform a society’s common wealth by continually expanding the network of sharing and collaboration” (2015:13). Only from this expansive approach can we hope to significantly transform and re-envision society beyond capitalist-colonialism. What this means in a practical sense in the creation and management of cooperatives and commons is not yet clear, but by honoring an ethos of diversity, such a transformation will inevitably have multiple manifestations and models of varying success. Stavrides gives a concrete suggestion for how to common in such an expansive way, that is, to practice egalitarian sharing in order to “support a continually expanding network of exchanges that is open to newcomers” (p.16). The emphasis here is on the word egalitarian, for not all gifting traditions are mutually beneficial (Mauss 2002) and can “enforce (or euphemise) asymmetries of power” (Stavrides:16). He suggests this sharing should be a regular occurrence rather than ritualized, and should emphasize giving more than receiving so as to balance out any inequalities that develop.
Socionatural commons may have an easier time practicing this sharing than anthropocentric ones. For example, though precolonial North American Indigenous commons were not “open access” and, as previously mentioned, did practice some form of exclusion, in early encounters with European settlers Native Americans were willing to share their commons with the newcomers, to some degree. On the other hand, European settlers, largely operating within an anthropocentric ontology, excluded Natives from their own commons (Greer 2012:375). Contemporary Teetl’it Gwich’in in Northern Canada practice exclusion in wild berry commons based on family lineage, as instituted by women. Yet berry harvests are shared between families and within the community to varying degrees, determined by several factors including changes in berry yields, seasonality/weather, social status/physical ability, and occurrence of communal celebrations (Parlee 2006). Thus, as we revive commoning traditions and create new commons against the capitalist-colonial One-World World, it may be necessary to reground our commons in socionatural ontologies.
Conclusion
For those who envision a future beyond capitalism in which commoning becomes the foundation of our social, economic, and ecological relationships, aligning this vision with Indigenous sovereignty struggles is critical for the creation of a just and equitable world in which many worlds fit. This is especially important in settler states where “The struggle to reclaim the commons should thus give way to a process of decolonization that transforms settler relationships with the land, Indigenous peoples, and with each other” (Fortier:59). We cannot assume that reviving commoning is an inherently liberatory effort, for as I have discussed, creating new commons within the capitalist-colonial system can perpetuate certain social norms and processes that have contributed to enclosure of Indigenous commons. To critically analyze these contradictions within popular commons perspectives, especially the sustainability and socialist perspectives I named above, is to begin to decolonize the commons.
In decolonizing the commons “there must be a commitment to dismantling the state, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and imperialism by also divesting from the logics of settler colonialism. As Gardner and Giibwanisi suggest these new societies may ‘incorporate various degrees of traditional Indigenous governance and may have political forms that are parallel with some strands of communism and anarchism’” (Fortier:50-1). The portion of the alterglobalizationist approach to the commons that roots itself in the more-than-human commons and advocates for a dismantling of the state, aligns itself with the socionatural commoning of Indigenous and peasant communities.
Thus, to engage in decolonial commoning is not simply a pursuit of economic or sociopolitical alternatives to capitalism, it is an ontological insurrection which undermines capitalist-modernity at its very roots (Velicu and García-López 2018:13). As commoning begins to decolonize and immerse itself in socionatural ontologies, it will be important to address how this ontological transition will require a rethinking of land relations and regimes of property as well as our practices of exclusion within commons.
We can also look to communities in the Global South who are reinvigorating still-living commoning traditions or those lying dormant just beneath the surface of modernized society. In particular, we can learn from the examples of commoners in Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Swaziland, Rwanda, Mozambique, Malawi, and other African nations who are successfully fighting for the legal protection of their commons and the devolution of land tenure administration within the capitalist nation-state (Wily 2001:88-9). Though the defense of commoning in the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico is inspiring as well, for most subaltern communities in both the Global North and South, reviving or creating new commons outside the regime of the state is not achievable at the present time without revolutionary mobilization of large masses of people or armed conflict. While such a revolutionary option should not be taken off the table, the goal of total and complete autonomy from the state may be moved forward incrementally by creating semi-autonomous or devolved commons jurisdictions within the state itself. All actually-existing commons are hybrids of one sort or another and, when rooted in socionatural ontologies, are constantly in flux and reinventing themselves. In these socionatural commons, the interdependent worlds of human and more-than-human renegotiate the terms of their relations from moment to moment, resulting in innovative, ever-transforming societies.
Footnotes
[1] For example, the Teetl’it Gwich’in of Northern Canada have property schemes and resource rights to berry commons divided according to family lineage (Parlee 2006).
[2] Neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank and IMF are now using the rhetoric of the commons or conservation to steal land from Indigenous and peasant communities: “In the name of protecting the ‘global commons,’ for example, the World Bank has expelled from forests people who had lived there for generations, while giving access to those who can pay, arguing that the market (in the form of a game park or an ecotourism zone) is the best instrument of conservation” (Caffentzis and Federici 2014:90). Neoliberal economists are now using Ostrom’s articulation of the commons to support their political agendas (see: Ostrom et al. 2012).
[3] Some alterglobalizationists consider worker or housing cooperatives to be commons (Thompson 2015; Fisher and Nading 2021; Huron 2018), while others assert that cooperatives which substantially interface with the market, participate in resource or land commodification, or utilize labor hierarchies violate certain core commoning principles (Linebaugh in Federici 2019:xvi; Caffentzis and Federici 2014:93-95).
[4] This includes celebration of non-modern or non-capitalist “Western” traditions as well. See Bresnihan’s (2015) description of contemporary more-than-human commoning in Castletownbere, Ireland.
[5] Or what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “naturalism”, which asserts the dualistic opposition of nature and culture typical of so-called “Western” ontologies (de Castro 1998:473), or, more accurately, of Abrahamic ontologies and their derivatives including capitalist-modernity and scientific materialism.
[6] Which may also be called relational ontology (Escobar 2018).
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