superficial individuality. Beyond that, though, ‘the commons’ becomes a slippery concept. But such elusiveness is a symptom of its vitality in human existence; knowing what the commons is and crucially how to enliven it is as deep a human trait as can be thought of. We are social creatures, we all descend from the same primordial soup, and we live in and share the commonwealth that this planet affords us.
Fundamentally, the commons is that which we build by being together. More than a natural resource – a forest, a lake, a field – the commons is the community that builds up around and beyond it, the society it creates and the continual act of democratizing access and sharing the gifts of that resource to those who need it most. Building on the work of anthropologist Stephen Gudeman and geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham, the commons can be thought of less as a unitary or singular protected ‘natural’ resource (such as a rainforest, a pasture or an irrigation system, which are traditionally thought of as ‘common’ resources in institutional narratives) and more as a dialogical creation between a resource and the community it brings into existence. In other words, to realize its emancipatory potential from capitalism’s enclosure, the ontology of the commons requires a deeper understanding of its ‘lived’ component – something that comes from an interaction between the place and the community that relates to it. This conceptualization of the commons therefore differentiates it from those seen in more institutional and global forms, namely the Bretton Woods institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank (but also including national-level interests such as foreign aid departments). These tend to see the commons as a static piece of land or natural resource that falls outside the jurisdiction of national governments or private interests; something to be guarded, with access limited to a deserving few.
Gudeman and Gibson-Graham argue against this. For them the commons is not a physical resource that abides by some regulatory framework that is imposed from above. They argue against this ‘top-down’ institutional view of the commons. They do acknowledge the importance of safeguarding the material wealth of the commons, but without theorizing the resources as being of the community, the commons will continue to be threatened with capitalist enclosure. This is because the commons will still be beholden to the same global political-economic logics that dictate the global institutions and national governments, that is, market interests ultimately trumping those of the indigenous communities. It’s just for the supra-national institutions these logics have agreed to collaborate via regulation to administer the scarcity of the resource. It is of course laudable to protect a resource from overuse (and indeed has helped protect rainforests around the world from deforestation, oceans from overfishing and pastures from overgrazing) but it is not a functional mode of diffusing the commons throughout society so as to resist and replace capitalism, because it is ultimately beholden to market logics, however steeped in social responsibility they may be at the time. Indeed, the institutions that govern them will often restrict local indigenous communities from accessing the common resource, designating it instead as a protected area and assuming a stewardship role, dividing up the resource as the institutions see fit, rather than collaborating with local knowledge; it is a form of colonial commons.
This is not a concept of the commons that we need today. Instead, any commons does not exist until a resource is overlaid with a community of people (and things) that freely access it. Gudeman argues that ‘taking away the commons destroys community, and destroying a complex of relationships demolishes a commons’.7 Seeing the commons in this way redefines both the commons and community. As the feminist scholar and researcher of the commons Silvia Federici argues:
‘Community’ has to be intended not as a gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests separating them from others, as with communities formed on the basis of religion or ethnicity, but rather 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.8
An example of this conceptualization of the commons often cited is the Van Panchayats in India, an indigenous community-based forest management system that came about through protests in the 1920s against what the community saw as the mismanagement of the forests by British Imperial rule. The community broke away from the state-led ‘Joint Forest Management’ system, which they saw as ineffective in stopping deforestation and the decline in local biodiversity. For a century, and at much lower cost than this national scheme, the local communities have continued to live in and off the forest as an integral part of their daily activities, all the while maintaining biodiversity levels and managing de- and reforestation themselves.9
Another example that extends this idea into the socio-political realm is that of Cherán in Mexico, a town that was ravaged by illegal loggers and with a corrupt local government that turned a blind eye. The locals ran them both out of town and have never let them back in. That was in 2011, and today, the town does not take part in local or presidential elections, has its own community-led security force – ronda – and governs via a group randomly selected every three years.
There are many other examples that will be alluded to throughout this book that point towards how the commons is more than a specific natural resource. It is important to note, however, that this conceptualization of the commons is not entirely new. If we delve into the etymological history, there are glimpses of this kind of planetary commons evident throughout its long and complicated epistemological construction. It has spiritual, material, political, economic and cultural underpinnings that, if teased out, can help us to affirm the kind of commons that a planetary reading of it entails. So a brief and potted history of the commons is worth outlining.
A history of the commons
As mentioned previously, the commons is a nebulous concept, and so pinning down a history is a perilous task. History itself is a hegemonic project of enclosure, with those events, theories, ideologies and philosophies that were recorded given credence over those that were not. As such, analysing a history of the commons with the material available will inevitably err, because it relies on that which is written down (and accessible to me as an English-speaking, lowly academic researcher). So it is vital to recognize from the outset that various articulations of the commons – from a spiritual, philosophical and natural standpoint – have existed as long as humans have. From theories of property laws in Mesopotamia,10 the ancient Egyptians’ belief in the unifying force of Ma’at, the Andean goddess Pachamama, Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China and the Druids in ancient Britain, to animism among indigenous peoples, there are ancient and non-Western narratives of the physical and spiritual commons that still exist, and thrive, today. However, to grasp how the commons has developed into an ideology that exists alongside, but with the potential to resist, contemporary forms of capitalism, it is pertinent to start a history of the commons, for this researcher at any rate, at the genesis of that capitalism, namely in ancient Greece.
Heraclitus (who died c. 475 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher, and insisted that we as humans, in order to become civilized and progress as a species, must ‘follow the common’ – the common of the logos. The logos, for Heraclitus, was a philosophical concept. It was not pure order, logic or reason (as is sometimes inferred from the etymological lineage); he used it far more esoterically to denote the cosmic ‘existence’ beyond our understanding. In some of his quotes it is ‘the mind of God’ but in others not a supernatural force at all; instead it is the ‘language of nature’. The logos was for Heraclitus a common experience for everyone. In his quoted sayings, he insisted on the metaphor that for those who are awake, there is only one world in common, but those who sleep withdraw into a private, self-interested world. We must therefore not act and speak as though we are asleep, but adhere to the common logos, forgoing private lives.
Moreover, the logos is unifying because it incorporates paradoxes and opposites, such as the ‘ways upwards and downwards are one and the same’, and ‘the beginning and the end are common’. Moreover, Heraclitus’ most famous quote is ‘you can never step into the same river twice’. In saying
