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 individual private property regimes. This interest is expressed by individuals and organizations from a variety of political persuasions including anarchist and anticapitalist activists, eco-social 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 reviving and re-inventing commons, commoning, and collective property regimes in the context of the near-total enclosure of the globe by modern capitalist nation-states adds sociopolitical complications not experienced before the advent of capitalism. While many approach the commons through ethics of equality, democracy, and solidarity, constant pressure from capitalist-colonialism and state logics can cause commons projects to compromise their ideals to protect themselves against resource scarcity, environmental degradation, erosion of workers’ rights, or community disintegration.
One particular point of contention relates to the role of exclusion in the establishment of commons and commoning practices. While liberal institutionalist theorists on the commons explicitly state the need for exclusivity and social homogeneity in the establishment of commons (Poteete and Ostrom 2004:441), theorists on the Left 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). In this paper, I compare two broad approaches to the issue of exclusion in commoning which Stavros Stavrides terms “open commons” versus “enclosed commons” (2014:14), and highlight two examples of cooperatives in Nicaragua to display the differences in open versus enclosed commoning in existence today. I also discuss the ways in which interfacing with capitalist nation-states may lead to gradual cooptation of commons projects and power dynamics contradictory to their egalitarian and liberatory ethics. Next, I contrast the priorities of three presiding perspectives on the commons—those of the “institutionalists”, “alterglobalizationists” (Huron 2018), and Indigenous communities—and how these perspectives influence their practices of exclusion. Lastly, as the Left revives and reinvents its commoning traditions, I suggest the need for a more coherent way of articulating the diverse practices of exclusivity in the commons, especially if we wish to stay true to our ethos of inclusivity and diversity in the face of continuous capitalist enclosure.
Theorizing the Commons
The word “commons” means different things to different political persuasions, yet Vandana Shiva gives a short definition upon which many schools of thought might agree: she states that the commons “implies a resource that is vital to our collective well-being and sustenance that is owned, managed and used by the community. A commons embodies social relations based on democratic participation, interdependence and cooperation” (quoted in Huron 2018:28). This short definition is helpful in that it mentions the two foci of a commons, which are emphasized more or less depending on one’s approach: 1) a commons considers collective resource use, and 2) it involves some level of communal cooperation and democratic participation. In contemporary discussions of the commons, 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).
Institutionalists advocate for integrating governance of “common pool resources” within state, corporate, or international policy. Common pool resources refer to the physical natural resources managed through common property regimes (CPRs) arranging share rights and duties towards a resource (McKean and Ostrom, 1995). Elinor Ostrom, the foremost thinker in the institutionalist camp, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her work defining the core principles of governing common pool resources. The aim of defining these principles was to describe 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 the integration of CPRs with markets, state governance, or capitalist-colonial regimes 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 addition, Ostrom and Poteete praise the advantages of managing commons in homogeneous social groups in order to minimize potential conflict and increase management efficiency (2004:441).
Many alterglobalizationists would contest several of the institutionalists’ above assertions. The alterglobalizationist ethos of egalitarianism, social justice, and environmental justice aligns them against past, present, and future enclosures of the commons by capitalism. Many are critical, in theory, of the institution of private property and might reject the assertion that a commons is a collective form of private property, though within modern capitalist states most commons function as such. While institutionalists focus their theorizing on minute operational details of how to create and govern CPRs within or alongside the capitalist-colonial system as it exists today, they offer no significant critiques of capitalism or the modern nation-state. On the other hand, alterglobalizationists “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” (Huron 2018:5).
The alterglobalizationist approach wishes to address the root cause of the “tragedy of the commons” which the institutionalists ignore – that is, capital’s enclosure and commodification of land and resources for the market, and the intrinsically exploitative nature of capitalism which robs subaltern communities of their sovereignty, livelihood, and dignity. Peter Linebaugh, an alterglobalizationist, uses Silvia Federici to define the commons as having four principle characteristics: “1) all wealth should be shared, 2) commons requires obligation as well as entitlement, 3) commons of care are also communities of resistance that oppose all social hierarchies, and 4) commons are the ‘other’ of the state form. Indeed, the discourse of the commons is rooted in the crisis of the state, which now perverts the term to its own ends” (Linebaugh’s foreword to Federici 2018:xvi). Not all organizations that claim to be commons adhere to these four principles. In a later section, I examine this discrepancy further in the context of worker and housing cooperatives.
The more well-publicized aspects of the alterglobalizationist perspective have at least two pieces missing from its analysis. The first is the absence of a coherent critique of the role that exclusion ought to play in the commons. Some agree with the institutionalists in that a commons must be bounded and membership must be limited in order to protect the use rights of its members and the carrying capacities of ecosystems (Bresnihan 2015:100; Euler 2018:14). Others insist that commons membership should be open to all, but the practicality of this insistence is rarely discussed, often remaining at the level of idealistic proclamation. As Huron states, the insistence that a commons should be “open to all”, in alignment with the Left’s ethos of political inclusivity, “is a romanticization of the commons that shines through the alterglobalizationist literature, which, though it may be appealing, is not helpful in terms of actually figuring out how to live in opposition to capitalist practices” (2018:34). Similarly, Craig Fortier reflects the observations of historian Allen Greer in stating that the Left’s association of the 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” (2017:34). The second aspect of commoning often overlooked in alterglobalizationist analysis is that in capitalist-colonial states, establishment of new commons has the potential to perpetuate enclosure of Indigenous lands. Alterglobalizationists may falsely assume that anticapitalist commoning in settler colonial states like the U.S. is inevitably in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty and political empowerment (p.105)[1]. It is critically important to address these two gaps in the commoning literature if we are to envision and create egalitarian and liberatory worlds beyond capitalism.
Commons vs. Commoning
One way that the institutionalist and alterglobalizationist perspectives are differentiated in commons literature is in the use of the terms commons and commoning. Commons is most often used to describe a geographic place where collective land or resource use occurs. However, as Peter Linebaugh explains, “[t]o speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at worst, the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, rather than as a noun” (Linebaugh 2008:279). To signify the creation and maintenance of social relations as an ongoing cooperative activity, Linebaugh prefers the term commoning. A frequently used phrase of commons theorists on the Left is that there is “no commons without community”. Federici clarifies the meaning of community as ‘‘a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals” (quoted in Blaser 2017:186). In this paper I generally use the word commons to signify a place of collective ownership or as a synonym for “common pool resources”, while I use the word commoning to signify a relationship between a human community, its systems of collective decision making , and the more-than-human beings and processes with which it is in exchange.
Two Poles of Exclusivity: Open and Closed Commoning
Worker and housing cooperatives are popular forms of what some consider actually-existing commons. Cooperatives are well-studied in relation to their practices of exclusion. Cooperatives and other commons tend to fall within one of two categories of exclusivity described by Stavrides: open or “expanding” commoning/commons, and closed or “enclosed” commoning/commons. 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.
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. The coop was built upon the Mondragón model which has a steep membership fee, but because none of the women had enough personal wealth to buy-in with money, they decided to instead buy-in with sweat equity, working approximately 20 hours per week without pay for almost two years. While the women did not gain personal economic benefit from their work for this period of time, they became more politically empowered as leaders in their communities, shared household resources and reproductive labor with other members, and created close-knit friendships, calling each other “sisters”. Within the bounds of the coop, these women were undeniably commoning in a very intimate way, becoming kin. Kinship is “an expansive concept in Latin America, extending from the relationships that form the nuclear and extended families, into networks of compadrazgo (godparenthood), to concepts of la raza, and beyond” (p.9). However, because the buy-in price was so steep, and the women’s kinship became so intimate, as the business grew coop members decided to close membership because they believed no one else would ever be able to match the equity they paid in. Instead, they hired contract workers who did not have voting or decision-making rights as members. The coop received pushback from both the community and the Fair Trade NGO for this decision. In essence, the coop was an enclosed commons and excluded those who could not be considered kin. This coop was certainly practicing “commoning” in the sense that they were kin-making and building community, but it was also strictly exclusive, not by identity but by both the Latin American understanding of kin and the capitalist notion of equity. This begs the question of whether this coop would have become so exclusive if it was not extensively interfacing with capitalism by producing goods for the market.
The second example given by Fisher and Nading is of a recycling cooperative which exemplifies an open commons. This coop represented a collective of independent recyclers and trash-pickers proposed by the municipality to organize and assert control over the city’s recycling in what was previously a disorganized and politically-charged situation. Buy-in was small, around $20, and members could keep much of their own profits. Membership was completely open, member duties were relaxed, worker discipline was minimal, and although management was centralized it was flexible and adaptive, comparable to the complex adaptive systems of anthills (a term which members used to refer to their stashes of recyclables). Coop members did not have to invest a significant amount of time or money into the maintenance of the commons, and although they did not develop strong ties of kinship as in the Fair Trade Zone, “recyclers experience a kind of co-becoming in the sense that, through the cooperative, each develops a consciousness of the needs and the goals of the collective, even as each maintains a strong sense that they belong to that collective as individuals, if only they continue to act as such. That flexibility and fluidity was in part their strength because even as they strive to maintain their commons and to build a cooperative identity, their divergent practices may still activate larger and larger networks of labor and other resources” (p.16).
These two examples in Ciudad Sandino may represent two poles on a spectrum of exclusivity in the context of cooperatives. While alterglobalizationists such as Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici, and George Caffentzis may not see either of these coops qualifying as traditional commons due to example one’s labor hierarchies and closed membership, example two’s weak reciprocal obligations, or the fact that both are dependent upon capitalist markets (Linebaugh’s foreword to Federici 2018:xvi; Caffentzis and Federici 2014:93-5), studying them can help us understand the practices of exclusivity in other commoning contexts such as housing cooperatives or land trusts. “Gated communities” such as condominiums or housing coops with steep memberships fees (excluding low-income members) would be examples of closed housing commons, if they qualify as commons at all, whereas urban squatting or activist encampments such as Occupy Wall Street could be considered open housing commons (Stavrides 2015). 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). The stronger the exclusivity and the more closed a common’s membership, the more closely it mimics 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. In the second example, urban waste may be considered a commons (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 2000:154) analogous to “wastelands” in rural commons, and because urban waste is an abundant resource in contemporary society, the element of scarcity may not have produced as much pressure on the recycling coop’s membership exclusivity compared to the perceived scarcity of time and sweat-equity which impacted the women’s sewing coop’s membership. In my estimation, the less a commons puts into practice a critique of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, or ethnocentricity the more likely it is to be a closed commons, aligning itself with institutionalists like Ostrom and neoliberal thinkers who support her common principles. This approach does less to address underlying causes of contemporary social and ecological hardship, and fails to offer any comprehensive alternative to capitalism as a socio-economic system: “In other words, one cannot expect transformation in the ‘managing’ of eco-systems without a radical transformation of global socio-ecological relations of inequalities… The efforts to enact a relational politics of commons require ‘re-commoning’ of global democracy… and the everyday of life itself” (Velicu and García-López 2018:12).
Cooptation and Contradictions of Power
Even cooperatives with radical critiques of capitalism risk cooptation when engaging with capitalist systems such as land or housing commodification, wage labor, and state bureaucracy. Thompson (2015) examines how community land trusts (CLTs) and mutual housing models such as housing cooperatives fill a hybrid niche at the intersection of capitalist enclosure and commons. Institutionalizing these commons both legitimizes them in the eyes of the capitalist state and grants them certain legal rights of protection, but this also increases the risk of their gradual cooptation by the logics of capitalism, especially if they aim to scale up in size or serve as replicable models. These kinds of coops very often depend on state or corporate funding to get started, which further endangers their autonomy and ideological integrity. Thompson states that “Whilst essential for growth, state support presents the danger of co-optation and dilution of the radical land reform potential and local autonomy of CLTs. The contradictions of institutionalisation, in becoming ‘state-like’, are reflected in the tensions between ‘scaling up’ and ‘going viral’ as alternate forms of replication… Institutionalisation is a delicate balancing act of giving legal and procedural structure to informal grassroots practices without losing the organic social energy and political vision motivating unique projects” (2015). This “invasion” of state or market logics can cause a commons project to fail. The invasion may come not only from state-induced formalization or commercialization, but also from the capitalist or individualist ideologies newcomers bring to the commons. This need to protect against corruption by anti-commoning logics may also impact a community’s practices of exclusion (Euler 2018:14), and membership may need to be limited to individuals having ideological or political compatibility with the project.
Every commons must grapple to some degree with the need to exclude potential commoners, and this exclusion inevitably involves inequalities of power. Nightingale asserts that “commons are contingent achievements, never free from the ambivalence and contradictions of power… Staying conscious and working with the ambivalences of power will help commoning efforts to avoid inadvertent exclusions and harm to both human and non-human others, exclusions which can undermine long term commoning goals” (2019:18). Failing to examine these power dynamics does not make them disappear, it may only invisibilize or naturalize the choices made by members of the commons, risking further compromise of the alterglobalizationist values of equality, inclusivity, and horizontal governance. We cannot take for granted that having egalitarian or liberatory politics automatically ensures their implementation in a commons project. “Being a commoner is not a state of being,” writes Nightingale, “but rather a performative set of relations wherein the exercise of power brings people and non-humans into life giving relations. The presence of strong communitarian relations does not necessarily lead to commoning for all, nor does it necessarily foster nurturing relations with non-humans. It can as easily lead to distrust and attempts to exclude members who are seen as ‘others’ or with less social power, or the prioritisation of some non-humans over others… Given political commitments to fostering better ways of living in the world, it is important to ensure that attempts at commoning do not simply produce better access and sharing of resources among a group of elites, or produce new forms of marginalised others” (p.22). In other words, commoners must always be on guard not to reproduce capitalist-colonial power dynamics within their communities, both in regards to human to human relations, and human to more-than-human relations. In a capitalist-colonial society, property regimes, whether individualist or collective, are always related to inequalities of power, and “The commons therefore emerge from the exercise of power and are simultaneously: i) relations of property-authority and sets of rights and rules that purport to regulate those relations, and ii) socionatural relations that extend subjectivities into more-than-human collectives” (p.21). In that essentially all actually-existing commons are enclosed more broadly by modern capitalist nation-states antagonistic to their aims, commoners cannot ignore the impact this struggle has on their embodied practices of commoning.
Priorities within the Commons
I now examine three perspectives on commons and commoning that result in different practices of exclusivity as a result of varying social, economic, and ecological priorities. The institutionalists prioritize, first and foremost, the continued sustainability of resource stocks for use in capitalist markets. Institutionalist literature often articulates its goals with terms such as “conservation”, “sustainable resource management” (McKean and Ostrom 1995), and “carrying capacity”. Institutionalists generally operate within the paradigm of neoclassical economics which places human society and nature in separate ontological categories, often assumed to have competing interests. Within this neoclassical or humanist framing, 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 market production; not for non-commodified human subsistence, nor for the enrichment of more-than-human beings. Probing beneath the surface of institutionalist rhetoric calling for the conservation of such “global commons” as the climate, we may find its justification in the need for climate stability to maintain continued capitalist relations. Rarely are institutionalist solutions to ecological or social crises offered 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. Practices of exclusion in commons management will thus prioritize economic sustainability above all other priorities including democratic governance, economic equality, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecological health when it conflicts with the wellbeing of economic elites or the state.
On the other hand, alterglobalizationists tend 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. While ecological concerns are often central to many on the Left, human dignity and labor rights usually take precedent, especially for those adhering to orthodox Marxism’s humanist or industrial-socialist vision. Many socialist and anticapitalist 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 Marxist socialism may aim for “sustainable development” just as institutionalists do, but not through capitalist mechanisms. So while both institutionalism and alterglobalizationism value ecological health and conservation, both perspectives are rooted in anthropocentrism and modern developmentalism that differentiate society from nature, and set the wellbeing of the former above the latter. This prioritization may lead many alterglobalizationists to justify their practices of exclusivity primarily in terms of protecting the rights and livelihoods of marginalized identities, workers, and the poor. In theory, exclusion based on class or income would thus be unacceptable, although in practice this still occurs in determining membership in housing commons or worker cooperatives (Thompson 2015; Nightingale 2019; Fisher and Nading 2021; Huron 2018). In theory, exclusion based on identity would also be objectionable, except perhaps if marginalized identities restricted admittance to individuals outside of the identity-group in attempts to protect against discrimination and violence. Furthermore, attempts to protect the management of commons in “traditional” or ethnocentric ways that perpetuate gender or class inequalities, citing “cultural relativity”, must also be interrogated[2]. Within the Left there is a diversity of opinion on whether these aspects of exclusion are legitimate or if they detract from efforts to build anticapitalist and anticolonial solidarity across difference.
A smaller cohort of alterglobalizationists explicitly align their commoning efforts 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 from which it draws, 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 in theorizing the commons uses the term the “more-than-human commons” (Bresnihan 2015). This shift requires that we reject the neoclassical notion of nature as “natural resources” to be 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. The idea of the commons is thus expanded and reconceptualized as a collective of multiple species and ecological communities, all of which must receive care and respect in order to protect the vibrant health and resilience of the commons. 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 ecological 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[1].
When a commons is reconceived as a complex network of interdependent individuals and communities relating across difference, rejecting the logic of commodity and property, the 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)
What, then, is this Indigenous, peasant, or more-than-human perspective of the commons prioritizing? Perhaps it prioritizes relationships of care between human individuals and communities as well as between human and more-than-human communities. Trust or care then becomes 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.
Commoning Beyond Reaction to “Tragedy”
The core of the institutionalist approach to managing commons is a response to Garrett Hardin’s so-called “tragedy of the commons”—the assertion that an unmanaged commons inevitably leads to depletion of resources and collapse of an ecosystem (Hardin 1968). Ostrom’s work does not question Hardin’s basic premise of the tragedy. Though Ostrom demonstrates that the tragedy can be avoided with proper management of common pool resources, her theories naturalize the tragedy and its origins in neoclassical rational choice theory. And yet critical commons scholars see this approach as simply a palliative response to a deeper, unaddressed problem: that capitalism encloses commons and displaced commoners (Velicu 2018:10). If we aim to address capitalist economic relations as the root cause of this so-called tragedy, institutionalizing commons will never be enough, will never stem the tide of metastasizing enclosures (some of which are now even occurring in the name of protecting the “global commons”[4]). Therefore, if we are to seriously address the tragedy’s root causes, we must aim to engage in commoning which focuses “on the social practices engaged in re-claiming and sustaining the collective re-production of commons” (Velicu and García-López 2018: 2). We must de-naturalize the tragedy by situating it within a particular time, place, and culture, and peer past it towards the various histories and futures of the commons. Challenging the logic of the tragedy of the commons may cause a radical shift in how we think about managing commons, not as finite resources in perpetual danger of depletion, but as more-than-human networks of caring, reciprocal relations.
How would this shift in perspective impact practices of exclusion in commons? In order to answer this question, we must first contemplate specific triggers of exclusion or “enclosed commoning” in actually-existing commons today. One factor is that in modern nation-states essentially all land is enclosed, by arbitrary borders, as public land (controlled by the state), or as private property (either individual or collective) defended by the violent legal apparatuses of the state. Access to enclosed land is strictly regulated, requiring immense political or financial capital to secure it, which in the era of late-capitalism is becoming more and more stratified. In order to establish new land or housing-based commons, communities must either purchase commodified land from the real estate market or receive permission from the state to access public lands. Securing land or resource access often has steep costs, and recouping those costs may require forming a strictly exclusive membership. Protecting already-existing commons from enclosure also requires significant capital, financial or political, and these commons may experience constant pressure by outside forces to commercialize or integrate into the capitalist system beyond its bounds. In capitalism, scarcity and competition are ever-present forces to be reckoned with and certainly impact a community’s practices of exclusion. Commons that choose to produce goods or services for sale on the market, as do most worker coops, will be forced to grapple more seriously with these forces of scarcity and competition than would commons that engage solely in production for subsistence. Ethnocentrism and classism are also triggers of exclusion, which in modern nation-states often arise secondary to capitalism’s artificial scarcity and competition for limited resources. Lastly, belief in the separation of humanity and the non-human world, a belief which capitalist modernity inherited from the Abrahamic religions, leads to the commodification of nature, and the exploitation of “natural resources” for human benefit. This excludes non-humans from social considerations, “othering” and objectifying them, justifying ecological violence.
Addressing the problem of exclusion requires us to investigate the deeper causes of the “tragedy of the commons” as it occurs in capitalist-colonial society, revealing broader contradictions between values and practices in both institutionalist and alterglobalizationist approaches. As the Left and subaltern communities revive and reinvent their commoning traditions, it may be necessary to address these contradictions by developing a more comprehensive theoretical, or perhaps ethical, framework for the role of exclusion in egalitarian and liberatory commoning projects. This framework need not be prescriptive, for as Fisher and Nading demonstrate, there are manifold forms of cooperatives and commons around the world using a wide range of exclusionary practices (2021). If we wish to create “a world in which many worlds fit”, as the Zapatista dictum declares, our commons will have multifarious manifestations. Yet if the term commoning is to have concrete meaning, and if commoning is to be revived as a radical lifeway against and beyond capitalist modernity, I propose that we need to have a more coherent articulation of the range of exclusionary practices that can occur within communities claiming to be commons or commoning. Such a framework may help commoners hold ourselves to higher ethical standards, and encourage us to put into practice our egalitarian and liberatory ideals.
Footnotes
[1] For example, as occurred in the Occupy Wall Street movement (Fortier, 2017).
[2] As occurs, for example, in the Nepalese forest commons described by Nightingale (2019) where upper caste women exclude lower caste women from becoming commons members.
[3] We may wish to celebrate non-modern or non-capitalist “Western” traditions as well. See Bresnihan’s (2015) description of contemporary more-than-human commoning in Castletownbere, Ireland.
[4] 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).
References
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Bresnihan, Patrick. “The more-than-human commons: From commons to commoning.” In Space, power and the commons, pp. 105-124. Routledge, 2015.
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