Commons and the Market

Discussion

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."

(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"