Excerpt from "Commons, #Libraries & #Degrowth" by Andrewism

"How has the potent alternative present in the commons been so wiped from our collective memory?

"It goes back to the feudal concept of land ownership, the age of European #colonialism, and of course, the rise of #IndustrialCapitalism. The king of England, for example, owned all the land in feudal England but bestowed titles for pledges of loyalty to powerful members of the nobility that allowed them to rule over large estates. These lords leased the land they were given to aristocrats, who also leased parts of their land as payment, for military aid, or for rent. This rigidly hierarchical system of obligation between landed lords and their tenants or vassals reinforced the monarchy’s ability to stake a claim on the land in their kingdom. However, at the bottom of this system were the peasants, who did all the actual work on the common land on the lord’s estate. Many were generationally serfs; legally prohibited from leaving the land they cultivated without their lord’s permission. Lords may have come and gone, but their bondage to the land was basically forever.

"After the #MagnaCarta, the #BlackDeath, the #Crusades, and all the other dramas that brought #feudalism into decline, the nobility initiated a process of #privatisation that laid the groundwork for early #capitalism through acquisitions, settlement, and enclosure of the commons. But even though revolutions and reforms came and went and most of us have gotten rid of our inbred kings and queens and their right to rule, the concept of sovereignty over private parcels of land and the feudal relationship of landlord and tenant has endured to this day, exported globally through #EuropeanColonialism.

"Despite this violent and antisocial theft of our access to even the means of subsistence, some commons have survived and thrived, though they operate within the constraints of the State and the #GlobalCapitalist status quo. Still, there is a lot we can learn from them when it comes to how to manage the commons.

"Why have they succeeded where others have failed in maintaining their commons? All efforts to organise collective action, including the commons, must address a common set of problems: how to supply new institutions, how to solve commitment issues, and how to maintain stability. It’s not easy. And yet some individuals have created institutions, committed themselves to following the rules they’ve come up with together, and assessed their own and others’ conformance to the rules in order to maintain the stability of their shared commons. Again, why have they succeeded where others have failed? External factors seem to play a significant role. Some have more autonomy than others to change their own institutions while others have change happen too rapidly for them to respond and adjust. Regardless, people try their best to solve the problems they face, despite their limitations. What factors help or hinder them in these efforts is a matter of careful study if we wish to succeed in organising and running our own commons.

"But first, we need to clarify some definitions.

"The commons are based on a common-pool resource or CPR, which is a natural or man-made resource system that benefits a group of people, but provides diminished benefits to everyone if each individual pursues their own self-interest. We must draw a further distinction between the resource system and the resource units produced by the system. Resource systems include #forests, #groundwater basins, irrigation canals, #lakes, #fisheries, #pastures, and even #infrastructure like windmills and the internet, while resource units consist of whatever users appropriate from those resource systems, such as cubic metres of lumber harvested and water withdrawn, tons of fish harvested and fodder grazed, kilowatts generated and network bandwidth used. It’s also important to maintain the #renewability of a resource system by ensuring that the average rate of withdrawal does not exceed the average rate of #replenishment.

"The term ‘appropriators’ refers to those who withdraw resource units from a resource system, like a fisher or farmer. Appropriators may use the resource units they withdraw, like residents powering their homes or farmers watering their crops, or they may transfer the resource units for others to use, such as a logger sending lumber to a hardware store for sale. Those who arrange for the provision of a CPR through financing or design are providers, while producers are those who actually construct, repair, and sustain the resource system itself. Providers, producers, and appropriators are often all the same people.

"Appropriators who share a CPR are deeply intertwined in a tapestry of interdependence. Acting selfishly and independently will usually obtain less benefit than they could have had they collectively organised in some way. The process of organising enables us to coordinate and change our shared situations to obtain higher shared benefits and reduce shared harm.

"Some of the commons institutions that endure today are as old as over a thousand years, while others are a few hundred at most. They exist alongside the personal property of the appropriators involved, such as their crops and livestock, but have remained at the core of these communities’ economies for generations. They have survived #droughts, #floods, #wars, #pestilences, and many major economic and political changes. From the alpine meadows of Torbel, Switzerland to the 3 million hectares of Japanese forest to the irrigation systems of Spain and the Philippines, these projects have evolved over time in response to experience and circumstance. None of them are perfect demonstrations of anarchy or anything, nor are they necessarily the most ‘optimal’ by some metrics. But they are successful in establishing a level of #autonomy and #resilience in the people involved in them, and they’ve managed to carefully maintain the ecology of the regions they inhabit.

"These institutions exist in different settings and have different histories, yet they simultaneously share fundamental similarities. Unpredictable and complex environments combined with engineering and farming skills combined with a predictable population over an extended period of time. These fairly egalitarian communities have developed extensive norms that define proper behaviour, involving honesty and reliability, allowing them to live without excessive conflict in a deeply interdependent environment. The perseverance of these institutions is due to the seven, and in some cases eight, key principles that Elinor Ostrom outlines in Governing the Commons..."

Read more:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andrewism-commons-libraries-degrowth
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