A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

COMMONS: SOCIAL JUSTICE BY SHARING
TOMMASO FATTORI
1 Social bond, decommodification, democracy
The horizon of the Commons brings together extremely diverse experiences
and social groups, such as the indios of Amazonia, digital communities,
small farmers defending seeds and biodiversity, the water
movements which win referenda against the privatization of water services
in Uruguay or in Italy. There is a common thread running through
concepts which have emerged in areas of the world, cultures and periods
so distant from one another, such as the res communes omnium of
Roman law, the Commons of the British legal tradition, the “Pachamama
vision” of the Aymara from Bolivia who, when you thank them for
quenching your thirst, answer that you must not thank them, because
the water does not belong to them, but to Mother Earth. An Earth which
does not belong to us because the opposite is true: we living creatures
belong to her, in a network of systemic relations, as the science of complexity
has also abundantly proved. From the Earth, or food, to free software,
a growing number of social groups find in the Commons a
paradigm and a shared horizon of sense which can lend weight to the
struggles and social experiences of each movement.
We come from years in which the “common good” and the search for a
“common wealth” (for example, a clean sea to swim in or a good school
for our children) have been brushed aside by particularisms and individual
interests, understood as unlimited accumulation of private wealth.
Nowadays the idea of common good and cooperative social bonds is
enjoying a renaissance and is taking a plural shape, both in theory and
in practice: the shape of Commons. Commons, in their diversity, have
one defining characteristic: sharing. That is, Commons are based on
sharing and social bonds and, in their turn, they produce social bonds.
Among the various conditions which Elinor Ostrom identified as important
for attaining successful communal resource management (including
the preference for resources with definable boundaries or resources that
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