* 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"

- ‘Commons’ refers to a particular institutional form of structuring the rights to access, use, and control resources. It is the opposite of ‘property’ in the following sense: With property, law determines one particular person who has the authority to decide how the resource will be used. (Benkler 2006: 60)

Although, as I will later show, commons can be understood as property arrangements, Benkler’s juxtaposition remains significant: While individual private property is based on exclusion and dominion, commons are often structured according to the principles of (regulated) access and democratic (network) governance. The emphasis of commons theorists on inclusion and democratic regulation has, more generally, made commons a name for an alternative, emancipatory and emerging form of social organization. Here, economic activities are based on needs-oriented and non-hierarchical ‘peer-production’, which short-circuits the competitive market, the price mechanism and perpetual economic growth (Rifkin 2015; Mason 2015). In this sense, it can be said that commons are providing people with concrete examples of how to create a more inclusive, democratic and ecologically sustainable society within or beyond democratic capitalism.

To assess this possible solution to the diverse challenges contemporary societies face, I will examine whether – and if so, how – the concept of commons can strengthen democratic practices and institutions by limiting or even overcoming negative socio-economic, political and ecological effects of capitalist markets. I will begin my paper with a discussion of democracy to lay an important stepping-stone for subsequent arguments. Here, I will reflect on the diverse and conflicting definitions of democracy and conclude that democracy fundamentally implies the rights and capabilities of people to codetermine their shared social conditions. In a second step, I will turn to the justifications of competitive and self-regulating markets and analyze their relations to the (democratic) state. I will demonstrate that a belief in the self-regulating market undermines people’s ability to solve social, economic and ecological problems in collective and democratic ways. As an answer to this, I will turn to the concept of commons as a possible alternative to the market-state dichotomy that underlies democratic capitalism."

1. The concept of democracy

1.1 Democracy as a contested concept ..................................................19

1.2 Models of democracy ................................................................ 21

1.3 Foundational and surplus dimensions of the concept of democracy ............................. 23

2. The competitive market and the state

2.1 Hobbes: anarchy, leviathan and the competitive market ............................. 30

2.2 Justifying the market: social order, protection from arbitrary powers and unlimited wealth ......................................... 30

2.3 Self-regulation, limited politics and the open-access market......................... 34

2.4 Economist kings, authoritarian liberalism and structural constraints................. 38

3. Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the unregulated commons

3.1 The tragedy: maximization strategies and the double C–double P game ......................... 45

3.2 Social institutions against tragedy: privatism or socialism ........................... 48

4. Overcoming the tragedy with the Ostroms

4.1 Collective action and “grim” social dilemmas ........................................ 52

4.2 The tragedy of monocentric orders ................................................. 54

4.3 The tragedy of privatization and the market......................................... 57

4.4 Overcoming tragedy through collective action ...................................... 70

4.5 Self-governing commons with the aid of eight design principles ..................... 75

4.6 Institutional diversity and polycentricity.............................................. 81

4.7 Interim conclusion.................................................................. 85

5. An ecological understanding of the commons

5.1 Nature, language and social relations ............................................... 90

5.2 Concepts of nature and social reality................................................ 93

5.3 Autopoiesis and the interdependent co-creation of reality .......................... 100

5.4 Ecosystems, abundance and natural commons .................................... 106

5.5 Empathy, cooperation and a common(s) reality ..................................... 115

5.6 Ecological freedom, democracy and care............................................ 119

5.7 The civic tradition of ecological democracy and commoning ........................ 130

6. Towards a commons theory of property

6.1 The normative language of goods ................................................. 144

6.2 Common needs, common resources and common property ......................... 148

6.3 Reinterpreting John Locke’s theory of property from a commons perspective ....... 155

6.4 Predistribution: commons in a property-owning democracy ........................ 180

6.5. Consumption goods: individual or common property? .............................. 194

6.6 Interim conclusion................................................................. 205

7. The Role of the State in a Commons-Creating Society

7.1 Preliminary reflections on the state-commons relationship ........................ 207

7.2. Varieties of the state and the role of the commons .................................210

7.3 Public goods versus state-supported commons: housing, health care and education ....216

7.4 Creating commons in a non-ideal world – in and against the state .................. 239

8. Commons and the market

8.1 The market in commons literature ................................................. 252

8.2 Enclosing commons and opening markets ......................................... 256

8.3 The market as a commons......................................................... 260

8.4 Responses to possible critiques of the market commons ........................... 274

Excerpts

From Chapter 7: The Role of the State in a Commons-Creating Society:

Discussion

The Commons and the Market

Lukas Peters:

"Having discussed the relationship between commons and the state, let us now turn to a central question that has been touched upon repeatedly yet incompletely so far: the relationship between commons and the market.

Since I have already discussed both justifications of the open and competitive market and some of the problems it engenders, let me be brief in recapitulating the arguments. Most importantly, the open and competitive market has been justified as a way to bring peace and unleash productivity. It has been assumed that wealth is generated through the protection of individual negative rights in private property and through the selfregulation of supply and demand on the market. Yet, while this negative freedom has increased the freedom of individuals with direct access to property in external resources, other individuals have become increasingly dependent on hierarchical wage labor relationships to secure their existence. Furthermore, the competitive dynamic of the open market forces firms to perpetually grow in order to survive. This requires that ever more resources are extracted and appropriated from the store of common goods that other people depend on, ultimately reproducing the original discrepancy between haves and the have-nots and increasing the deterioration of peoples’ socio-ecological habitats. As we have seen, the priority of individual negative rights and the self-regulation of the market also undermine and severely limit people’s abilities and opportunities to collectively solve these problems and to democratically co-create and codetermine their shared living conditions.

Therefore, the questions that we face now are,

firstly, whether these problems are a result of the market per se or of the specific social arrangements of the open and competitive market.

Secondly, we must ask how the concept of commons can provide us with insights that enable us to transform our understanding and organization of markets. To answer these questions, I will begin by analyzing the role of the market in commons literature. After this, I will discuss the relationship between commons and the market from a historical perspective.

In a third step, I will develop the notion of a market commons that will, hopefully, provide us with an alternative and democratic concept of economic relationships."

The Concept of the Market in Commons Literature

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."

Democracy, Markets and the Commons

Contents