Complicating the Commons

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Politically and intellectually, it seems like the idea of the commons is gaining traction – probably because the state and the market, its major rivals, have acquired something of an image problem in recent times. Politically, ‘the state’ has become associated with the unresponsive, centrally planned economies of communist regimes, and ‘the market’ with the flagrant inequalities and value-scouring short-termism of contemporary capitalism and/or neoliberalism.

Privatizing America’s Public Land

By William deBuys, Tom Dispatch

It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.

One Cheer for the Commons

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

A recent article on Resilience.org proclaimed that ‘the commons is the future’, so let me state my thesis plainly at the outset: no it isn’t...

Concepts for a Fenced-off World

By Brian Davey, Feasta

There is often a potential for sharing and mutual accommodation that is being ignored.

Post-Capitalism

By Charles Eisenstein, The new and ancient story

What is more relevant to me than the fiction of property is the precise nature of the social agreements that define and underlie property.

Joseph Sax’s Quest: Legal Protection for Collective Interests

By David Bollier, David Bollier blog

“How come there’s no public dimension to natural resource law, and the public who uses these areas and actually owns most of them doesn’t have a say in what goes on?”

Two notions of liberty revisited – or how to disentangle Liberty and Slavery

By David Graeber, Open Democracy

"Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes private property (dominium) of another, contrary to nature."'

A brief history of how we lost the commons

By Peter Barnes, On The Commons

As a Republican Alaska governor Walter Hickel said, “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” In the beginning, the commons was everywhere. Humans roamed through it, hunting and gathering to meet their needs. Like other species, we had territories but these were communal to the tribe, not private to the person.