Concept of the Market in Commons Literature

Discussion

Lukas Peters:

"Generally speaking, there is no single understanding either of markets or the relationship between markets and commons within the literature on commons. After discussing the various interpretations in the literature, I nevertheless hope to develop a more general notion of the relationship in the analysis that follows.

As the reader will recall, the Ostroms make only marginal references to market arrangements. Elinor Ostrom rarely discusses the market, although in one passage she does describe the open and competitive market as a “straightjacket” that leads to “maximization strategies” (E. Ostrom 2003: 25). In contrast, Vincent Ostrom defends competitive market arrangements for a polycentric order (V. Ostrom 1991: 229-231), while elsewhere he advocates the notion of a “moral economy” and the democratic self-management of economic activities (V. Ostrom 1997: 106, 145). As we see, the Ostroms’ views on the market are mixed and rather vague.

From Capra and Mattei’s point of view, the legal system underlying the open and competitive market enables people to “exploit and plunder the web of life” (Capra/Mattei 2015: 29). Yet elsewhere, they also mention local farmer’s markets as examples of institutions that exist for the satisfaction of common needs (ibid.: 143). In relation to economic activities in general, they espouse a notion of economic democracy or “democratic oversight of the economy” (ibid.: 162). Here, it appears that they understand economic democracy as a type of commons. Furthermore, they clearly state that a commons “may be anything a community recognizes as capable of satisfying some real, fundamental need outside of market exchange” (ibid.: 150; emphasis added). So it can generally be said that their stance is highly critical of open and competitive markets or “global capitalism” (ibid.: 115-117) – and the legal institutions that uphold these – while defending local markets and the democratization of economic activities.

If we turn to other scholars who work on commons, a similar mixture of views and positions can be found. In his influential book The Wealth of Networks (2006), Yochai Benkler, for example, defines individual private property and commons arrangements as opposites (ibid.: 60). At the same time, he argues that open commons (i.e. information and material infrastructure such as roads and the internet) play an essential role for economic growth in market societies (Benkler 2013). Another influential commons activist and scholar, Peter Barnes, criticizes the detrimental ecological impacts of unregulated markets while maintaining that “private corporations and organized commons [should] enhance and constrain each other” (Barnes 2006: 77).

He understands this type of market as “capitalism 3.0” (also the title of his book), which enables trade within limits (ibid.). The public intellectual Jeremy Rifkin argues that inherent contradictions within capitalism will help the spread of commons lead to an “eclipse of capitalism” (Rifkin 2015: 3). In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Rifkin writes, “While the capitalist market is not likely to disappear, it will no longer exclusively define the economic agenda for civilization.” (ibid.: 27) Rifkin thinks that the realm of the commons will expand, yet exist sideby-side with the “capitalist market”. In their book Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (2013), Burns H. Weston and David Bollier are quite critical of the market and also develop the notion of the “tragedy of the market” (Weston/Bollier 2013: 6-15). Accordingly, they argue for democratic control over economic institutions within commons arrangements.

They explain:

- Commoners shall have collective control over the surplus value they create through the collective management of their shared wealth and resources. To this end, commons- and rights-based ecological governance shall not be cashdriven or market-mediated except with the explicit consent of commoners and clear rules for personal use and resource alienability. The freedom of commoners to limit or ban the monetization of their shared assets shall not be compromised. (Weston/Bollier 2013: 277; emphasis added)

According to Weston and Bollier, then, the question whether commons are to be monetized or market-mediated is left up to the commoners. Meanwhile, however, the role of the market outside of the commons remains undefined. Other scholars emphasize the antagonistic relationship between markets and commons and openly call for an end to capitalist market arrangements. As with other authors, commons are understood here as “beyond” or “outside” the market (De Angelis 2007: 240; Bollier et al. 2012). The emphasis is, however, on the idea that commons are interpreted as a new “cellular” mode of production that will eventually lead us beyond capitalist markets (Euler 2016). In line with this argument, Paul Mason titled his book on commons “Postcapitalism” (2015). Similarly, Nick DyerWitheford argues in his article “Commonism”, for example:

If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the common. A commodity is a good produced for sale, a common is a good produced, or conserved, to be shared. The notion of a commodity, a good produced for sale, presupposes private owners between whom this exchange occurs. The notion of the common presupposes collectivities – associations and assemblies – within which sharing is organized. If capitalism presents itself as an immense heap of commodities, ‘commonism’ is a multiplication of commons. The forces of the common and the commodity – of the movement and the market – are currently in collision across the three spheres we mentioned before: the ecological, the social and the networked. (Dryer-Witherford 2007: 82)

As we see, the literature seems to assume that there is a strict, categorial contradiction between markets and commons. The antitheses it presents oppose scarcity to abundance, exclusion to inclusion, subtraction to addition, the ‘commodity form’ to the ‘commons form’, atomism to relational systems, competition to cooperation, productivity to care, exchange to reciprocity, hierarchical market monopolies to decentralized peer-to-peer relationships, profit to needs orientation and many more (Euler 2016; Helfrich 2012b). In commons scholar and activist Stefan Meretz’s unequivocal formulation, “markets are not commons – and vice versa” (Meretz 2012).

He justifies this point in the following manner: “The fundamental principle of the commons is that the people who create the commons also create the rules for themselves.” (ibid.) While commons are institutions that can be democratically adapted by those affected by them, market arrangements are understood as institutions that are abstract and unalterable. As has become clear in my argument so far, I would generally agree with these ideal juxtapositions. Nevertheless, I ask myself whether these dichotomies can be upheld for all economic activities and, more generally, whether markets can be entirely replaced by commons.

Simply put, it seems unlikely to me that the existing problems of competition, inequality, exploitation and perpetual growth can be overcome by replacing all market relations with commons arrangements. I find this highly unlikely because, if we assume that life in commons is not entirely autarchic and self-sufficient, there must be interactions with other organizations or commons that produce other goods. It is then often argued with reference to people like Andre Gorz that the dependency on markets – and especially wage labor – could be minimized if people were provided with an unconditional basic income and people could participate in multiple forms of production (Gorz 1989: 2005). Obviously, the concept of a basic income is very attractive because it can balance the asymmetrical bargaining positions in wage-labor relationships or even free people from wage labor entirely (Van Parijs 2003; Widerquist 2013). For a commons-creating society, a basic income would be ideal because it would enable people to engage in volunteer care activities and commons-based peer production. While a basic income might lessen the dependency on hierarchical wage-labor relationships, it would not, however, free us entirely from (re)production processes and the exchange of goods and services.

The question also remains of who will produce the tools such as sewing machines, fishing boats, pasta machines, computers and cars for these (re)production processes. Here, some people argue that these “convivial tools” (Illich 1973) could be built with 3-D printers (Rifkin 2015) or open hardware (Siefkes 2008), ultimately making a market for such tools and machines superfluous. Although I support these aspirations and endeavors, I nevertheless believe social arrangements without any form of monetary exchange between people and groups to be somewhat unrealistic. The answers to this problem of necessary exchange could be time banks (Amanatidou et al. 2015), local exchange trading systems (also known by the initialism “LETS”) (Pacione 1997) or overarching “commons associations” that unite individual commons and largely replace money exchange with “contributions” (Siefkes et al. 2016). Again, I must repeat that my argument here is not against the development of these non-monetary exchange systems. The point I wish to make is simply that, despite all my criticism, I do actually believe money and the market to be quite useful instruments and institutions that enable people with different skills and goods to interact with each other without having to exist in compact social relations (Demsetz 2002). I must concede this much to market advocates such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. Yet, despite this concession, the question then arises of how to shape the social institutions of money and the market to satisfy people’s needs without leading to tragedy. Or, in other words, the question arises whether markets can be organized as commons and what this would imply.

Interestingly, it appears that this fundamental question is often grossly under-theorized and neglected in commons literature. I believe that this may have something to do with the actual predominance of market relations in our everyday lives. The neglect of the market in commons literature might be due to a desire to change the symbolic framework through which we see and constitute reality. As is well known, it is ‘the norm’ today to perceive reality not as a common, but rather through the prism of market relationships. We often interpret reality as scarce, hostile and competitive and value the world according to monetary costs-benefit analyses. The commons critique of this worldview is often expressed in pejorative terms such as privatization, commodification, exploitation, valorization, marketization and, more generally, economization. In opposition to these negatively connoted processes, the focus on commons is an attempt to enable us not only to “see the commons” (Mattei 2012b) but also to “think like a commoner” (Bollier 2014). More generally speaking, this focus is an attempt to bring about an epistemological revolution that constitutes a commons-oriented reality (Mattei 2013a: 17). Although I agree with all of these critical analyses and intellectual efforts, I nevertheless believe that if we disregard the question of the precise role and organization of markets in a commons-creating society, we might be disregarding the elephant in the room. I believe it necessary, therefore, to not only ‘reclaim the commons’, but also to ‘reclaim the market’. My point is that by understanding the market as a commons we can, in turn, justify the re-appropriation, democratization and transformation of this dominant social institution.

To understand this relationship between markets and commons and how markets could be interpreted as commons, I would like to back up a little and discuss the historical development of open-access competitive markets."

(https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf)

Source

* Book: Lukas Peter. Democracy, Markets and the Commons: Towards a Reconciliation of Freedom and Ecology. Transcript, 2021

URL = https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf

Originally, "a dissertation by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Zurich in the fall semester 2017"