Keywords for Radicals:

Commons
by
George Caffentzis
(Published as Commons, in Kelly Fritsch et al. (eds.) Keywords for
Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, Chico, CA: AK
Press, 2016, pp. 93-101.

0. The return of the commons

Commons is a term that has had a remarkable resurrection
ever since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1990. After
centuries of marginalization, it is now at the center of a wide-
ranging political dialogue among activists--including urban
gardeners, hackers, ecologists, anarchists, feminists and Marxists
as well as World Bank officials. Indeed, commons is
becoming an indispensible word in 21st century radical politics,
playing a role similar to that which socialism and communism
played in the 20th century political discourse. However, its sense is
far from settled. In fact, commons today is a contested concept
pointing both to a radical rejection of private property and the state
as well as to a third social form coexisting with the capital and
the state.
Commons, though it began as a precise legal concept, is
now certainly a keyword, according to Raymond Williams
definition: i.e., it is a socially pertinent but vague term, often used
in a conflicting and contradictory manner. In this article I chart the
words conceptual and political developments from medieval times
to the present and explain the reasons behind its contemporary
variety of meaning.

1. Origins in English Property Law.

For our purposes, the use of the term commons appeared
first in English Property Law referring to a set of legally
recognized customary usages that a community had of

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environmental assets - meadows, fisheries, forests, peat bogs - it
did not own. The land the commoners used was either property of
the manors owner, a royal territory or the property of the Church.
Though commoners did not own the soil, the waters, the peat or
fish, they had customary use of them, which often amounted to the
same thing. Common land thus referred not to collective land
ownership, but to a legally recognized, customary usage of the
land (or usufruct) regulated by assemblies of commoners. They
generally were the product of a prolonged struggle with landlords.
Whenever they had the upper hand, the landlords abrogated these
customs often by violent means or by abolishing them through
Parliamentary legislation. This is how commons were enclosed.
Enclosure being the technical term describing the processes the
landlords used to expel the commoners from the land. Enclosure,
then, had both legal and physical dimensions. It consisted of the
enactment of an Act of Parliament and/or the encirclement of the
commons with bushes or fences preventing the former commoners
from using the land, and making it clear to all that such land
would, for example, no longer be a place where grazing of
livestock could be practiced by the community. As Marx taught us,
such separation of the workers from their means of production
was one of the conditions for the rise of capitalism. For once the
commoners were driven out of the common land, it could be
bought and sold or devoted, for example, to pastures for sheep
whosewoolwastosupplythegrowingtextileindustry.
While in the 16th century enclosures were usually carried out
by force, in the 18th and 19th century a legislative strategy was more
often employed. But legal or illegal, enclosures resulted in a
dramatic drop in the percentage of English land held in common.
According to conservative estimates up to 26% of the land in 16th
century England was held in common, while today barely 3% of it
can be considered common land.

2. On the tragedy of the commons

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 As communally held access to land was gradually privatized,
conceptually the commons was also slowly made invisible. It
was romanticized (with the trappings of merrie old England) or
demonized, as in Garrett Hardins 1968 article, The Tragedy of
the Commons, that marked the nadir of the scholarly appraisal of
commons. An ecologist and population theorist, Hardin argued
that commoners are of necessity bent on self-destruction. For
human nature being driven by self-interest, if there was a common
pasture open to all, a rational herder would place as many animals
on the commons to graze as possible to maximize his earnings. But
within a short time he would be joined by other herders putting
their animals on it and the soil would soon be overgrazed, useful to
no herder. The only way to avoid this tragedy without being at
the mercy of a corrupt state, according to Hardin, is to privatize the
land and enclose it. In his parable he refers not only to English
commons, but to any form of common control and usage of land.
Hardins essay had a profound effect on the view of the
commons, and, for a number of years it became a standard retort to
the 1960s anti-capitalist movements call for more communal
forms of social reproduction. By the late 70s, however, Hardins
theoretical parable was losing its hypnotic power, as
anthropologists, political scientists and social researchers began to
note that the open access regime Hardin had described in real life
did not exist. For commoners have historically devised rules
limiting and regulating the use of the commons wealth. Exemplary
are those rules that actual herders have introduced, through
collective decision making, in the Swiss Alps and in Africa.
Herders assemblies enabled huge alpine meadows to be grazed for
centuries by cows, protected by surveillance networks and
sanctions against those herders who violated the rules of the
commons.

3. Neo-liberalism, the declared hegemony of the market

Ironically, just as Hardins reasoning was being empirically
falsified in the 1980s, neoliberal doctrines lauding the privatization

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of public assets, spaces, and services became hegemonic. The
market was declared by the World Bank and IMF as the best
instrument for the organization of social reproduction in order to
justify a relentless drive to enclose all remaining commons. These
new enclosures were spread from the former colonized world to
the industrialized world, affecting not only land, forests, and
meadows, but increasingly all forms of common wealth and all
social relations. The World Bank, using Hardins argument,
engaged in a global campaign to replace the remaining land and
water commons in Africa and Latin America with individual
property titles that could be bought and sold. Along with physical
assets, knowledge and communications increasingly became
private property regulated by Intellectual Property regulations, so
that even life forms were patented. It appeared that nothing could
be saved from the grip of the market.

4. The referential range of the word commons expands

geographically, historically, ontologically and politically in in
the 1990s.
It was against this sweeping process of privatization that the
concept of the commons was revived in the 1990s, with a
meaning, however, that differed from the original term in
English property law. The older notion was rooted geographically
in England, it originated historically in the class struggle on the
medieval manor, it was tied ontologically to the use of land, forest,
waters and the sub-soil, and it was employed politically in the
struggles of rural workers.
The contemporary notion of the commons, however, applies
to a much wider geographical range. Commons are now found to
have existed on every continent, although in different forms. There
now exists a notion of a global commons that includes the
oceans, as well as the atmosphere and reaches literally to the stars
These have been transformed into the commons of humanity to
be regulated by the UN System of nation states (the IMF and
World Bank being prominent UN agencies). Common rights now

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apply to oceanic areas beyond the 200-mile territorial limit that are
regulated by the Law of the Seas, and to outer space, usually
defined as the space 100 km above the earths surface, that are
regulated by the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the
Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space,
including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.
Historically too contemporary uses of the notion of the
commons refer to practices that existed long before and long after
medieval times. We now recognize that commons were the
dominant form of economic production and reproduction for most
of humanitys existence before the rise of capitalism. But even
today commons exist and include most forms of social and
economic life not dominated by the state or by market exchange.
Ontologically, commons now refers to entities other than
the four elements: earth, wind, water and fire. The new ontology
includes the electromagnetic spectrum, knowledge of DNA
molecules, software programs, languages, urban spaces, texts and
many other items that are being newly baptized as common
property every day.
Finally, commons is used politically in struggles around the
planet. Commons is the flag used worldwide, for example, to
defend urban gardens, to reclaim privatized lands (as with the
Zapatistas in Chiapas), to control water supplies (as in the water
struggles in Cochabamba and Italy). Commons inspire the struggle
for net neutrality in San Francisco or for tuition-free university
education in Chile, they were used by the Occupy movement in
New York to defend their occupation and by the no copyright
movement in its rejection of copyright restrictions everywhere.
Commons is now an essential word in the language with which
non-statist anti-capitalist movements are expressing their demands,
their identity and vision of social change.
Significantly, however, as resistance to the privatization of
the commons grew, the language of the commons began to be
appropriated also by the arch enclosers like the World Bank, which
used this language precisely to promote privatization, increasingly

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defended under the guise of protecting the global commons. The
United Nations policy identifying cities as belonging to the
heritage of humanity subject to specific international regulations
intensified this trend.

5. A multitude of commons: harmony or discord?

In the 1990s the explosion of interest in the commons hid
important differences among its users that are now becoming
evident. The multitude of interpretations of the commons include
the important work of feminists like Silvia Federici, of autonomists
like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, of ecofeminist activists like
Vandana Shiva, of indigenous voices like Gustavo Estevas and
many others. Each of these perspectives on the commons bring out
another aspect of its meaning, while many aspects are
complementary, some are contradictory.
Thus, Federici points out that women have been more closely
identified with the commons in the transition to capitalism than
men because they provided the basis of subsistence. The
enclosures directly affected women because it led to the
devaluation of their reproductive work. She draws a direct
connection between the witch-hunt and the enclosures in Europe.
Hardt and Negri are anxious to differentiate the common
from the commons, where the former is the cooperation that is
characteristic of immaterial production, the most productive
force in contemporary global economy and society, according to
them, whereas the latter is the quaint local organization of
subsistence production that has not been able to resist the attacks
of capitalism.
Esteva points out that the most vital source of commons
thought and action today is in Latin America, especially in
Zapatista territory (i.e., the approximately 250,000 hectares they
recuperated in 1994 in the state of Chiapas).
Ecofeminists like Shiva are increasingly using the language
of the commons to justify the regulation of polluting and climate-

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changing industries by claiming that the atmosphere and the waters
being affected are our common property.
Perhaps the most influential academic reading of the
commons is the Ostrom schools, which is so named because its
leader was the late Elinor Ostrom, who was introduced above as
the challenger to Hardins tragedy of the common conclusions.
She made the revival of the notion of the commons her life
commitment and was crucial in transforming the University of
Indiana, her university home, into the center of commons studies
worldwide. Along the way, she helped to found the International
Association for the Study of Common Property (now called the
International Association for the Study of the Commons). Under
this academic umbrella social scientists compiled an enormous set
of actual studies of different commons around the world.
The political goal of the Ostrom school is to create a triune
society where state property, private property and common
property would get equal sectorial attention from legal, economic
and police powers. In order to do so, both the state and the market
must cede some territory in the social space to the realm of
common property. The members of the Ostrom school aim to
provide arguments in defense of such a development, including
ways to show that commons-organized forms of production and
reproduction are often more productive, more democratic and less
alienating than state or market solutions to social problems.
The first major text of the Ostrom school is Elinor Ostroms
Governing the Commons which was published in 1990. In that
same pivotal period a variety of publications serendipitously
emerged which had commons and enclosure as their theme. These
included The Ecologists Whose Common Future?: Reclaiming the
Commons and the Midnight Notes Collectives The New
Enclosures. The latter pointed to an anti-capitalist politics of the
commons. Instead of calling for a triune society that ultimately
preserves and even strengthens capitalism, the Midnight Notes
Collective (along with allied journals like The Commoner) focused
on the commons as the logical place where a necessary condition

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of capitalism--producers are separated from access to the means of
production and reproductioncan be negated. For if workers were
able to satisfy their basic needs in a collective, dignified and
democratic manner, there would be no motivation from them to
voluntarily be available to work for a capitalist class that
accumulates value from their exploitation. Such a situation would
in time mean the end of surplus value creation and hence the end
of capitalism.
Here we have the commons seen as the antithesis of
capitalism. This constitutes a basic difference with the Ostrom
school. For the MN view is that the acts of enclosure do not just
expand the concrete wealth of enclosers by dispossessing
commoners, as David Harvey argues, but they expand the most
important wealth capitalism desires: the pool of labor power
available for work. This is the original accumulation of capital that
is returned to whenever the working class substantially expands the
commons in any form. That is why both at the origin of capitalism
and at any period of profound crisis, capitalists had to attack and
enclose the commons. The struggle between commoners and
enclosers is a way of describing class struggle that is
complementary to the analysis focusing on the wage/profit
struggle.
From this perspective the triune society imagined by the
Ostrom school would inevitably be in mortal crisis the minute it
was born, for a successful commons sector would be antithetical to
its adjacent sectors because it would be the material foundation for
a working class living autonomously from capital and the state.

6. The future of the commons.

After a period of peaceful sharing of the semantic space by
supporters of the commons, the words users, as they increase,
face a crisis as it is now often employed with many meanings and
for conflicting political purposes. This crisis is sharpening, because
commons is inspiring not only theoretical discussions among
radicals, but new commons are increasingly being realized in

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political practice. A real conflict over the meaning and reference of
commons is now coming to the surface and its outcome will be
determined in the practice of the commons and will determine an
all-important question: will capitalism use the commons for its
survival or will the commons become its undoing?

Acknowledgements
I thank Steven Colatrella, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh,
Monty Neill, Hans Widmer, and John Wilshire-Carrera for their
comments and criticisms. They have made this article politically
sharper and empirically more accurate. However, this is not yet a
common product. So it is not a mere formality to remind the reader
that responsibility for this articles lapses is all mine. Send
comments and criticisms to me at caffentz@maine.edu.
Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I
am a founding member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

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