Politics of the Commons
= concept and article
The Concept
Typology
"“The Commons” can be usefully employed as a catchall term that names the shared substrates of human community and ecological life. It begins from a simple recognition: we all depend together on things that none of us created alone and none of us can preserve alone.
There are at least three levels to this politics of the commons.
The first is the biospheric commons. This includes the atmosphere, oceans, soil, watersheds, forests, and biodiversity; that is, the living systems that precede political institutions and make them possible. They are not resources to be allocated but conditions of existence, and their degradation is not a market failure but a civilizational one. They force us to think of humanity as a collective steward of planetary life.
The second is the non-appropriable commons. This includes outer space, the deep seabed, the Antarctic, and the electromagnetic spectrum, all the domains that international law has affirmatively placed outside sovereign or private ownership.
The third is the institutional commons: community land trusts, cooperatives, municipal infrastructures, local energy systems, urban collaborative pacts, and the dense middle layer of institutions that stand between isolated individuals and centralized administration."
(https://post-liberalism.org/p/what-if-postliberalism-were-on-the?)
The Article
* Article: The Politics of the Commons: Reform or Revolt? By Vangelis Papadimitropoulos. tripleC 15(2): 563-581, 2017
"In this paper I present a critical overview of the contemporary political theories of the Commons, classified in three main categories: 1) the liberal 2) the reformist and 3) the anti-capitalist. Advocates of the liberal theory of the Commons take a stand in favour of thecoexistence of the Commons with the state and the market. The reformists argue for thegradual adjustment of capitalism to the Commons with the aid of a partner state, while theanti-capitalists contrast both the liberals and the reformists by supporting the development of the commons against and beyond capitalism. I make the case that both the liberal and theanti-capitalist theorists miss the likelihood of technology rendering redundant large-scale production in the future, and forcing thus capitalism to adjust to the Commons in the long run.The prospect, therefore, of an open cooperativism, introduced by the reformist theory, holds significant potential with respect to the future development of the Commons. For the Commons to expand and flourish, however, a global institutional reform, based on a number of trans-local and transnational principles, is sine qua non. Hence, transparency ofinformation, distribution of value, solidarity and bottom-up self-management are the core variables of individual and collective autonomy inasmuch as they permit a community or group to formulate its values in relation to the needs and skills of its members."
Contents
By Vangelis Papadimitropoulos:
"In the first section, I present the theses of the three main contemporary theories ofthe Commons: the liberal, the reformist and the anti-capitalist. The criterion by whichI make this classification is the position in which these theories place the Commonswith respect to the relation of the latter to the state and market operation. Whereasthe liberal theory places the Commons between the state and the market, thereformist theory argues for the reforms necessary that could force capitalism toadjust to the Commons in the long run. In contrast to both the liberal and thereformist, the anti-capitalist theory supports the development of the Commons against and beyond capitalism. In the second section, I develop a critical stance to allthree theories with the aim to provide with a constructive synthesis of the politics ofthe Commons."