A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

it was impossible or very difficult to replace with other resources) is the
capacity of a community to establish its own rules for self-governing the
good and, even before that, of course, the presence of a community, in
the sense of a stable population with a strong social network and social
norms promoting conservation and reproduction of the good. However,
it seems to me that there is a biunivocal correspondence between community
and management of common resources: the more important a
condition the presence of a community is for appropriate management
of common resources, the more the common management builds up
and nourishes the community itself, strengthening social cohesion and
social bonding; vice versa, privatization of common goods breaks social
bonds and undermines social cohesion, contributing to the growth of atomized
societies of individual consumers competing with one another
for access to scarce resources and commodified services. In an individualized
world, the search for that which unites us and connects us to
others, the heart of our being part of and making a society, takes shape
around Commons. In an ever-more commercialized and privatised world,
where the rule of maximising profit and accumulating wealth reigns
supreme, a nucleus of extra-commercium is reconstructed around Commons,
in other words, an arena not regulated by the logic of profit, an
arena where the relationship between people and goods is structured
beyond the constant “mediation” – typical of modernity – of ownership
(be it public or private). The collective dimension goes beyond the public-private
dichotomy; beyond proprietary individualism but also beyond
the traditional and bureaucratic public management of goods, into a
space which could even be defined a new non-state public area. Basically,
two fundamental needs emerge in the Commons movement. The
first is access to and decommodification of both that which is essential
to life (in the social as well as the biological sense) and that which makes
the free development of a person possible – so, for example, the right
of everyone to drink clean water, to breathe unpolluted air, the right to
health but also to knowledge, to a sharing of information, knowledge
and culture. The second need concerns a radical form of democracy or
autonomy, that is, the need to self-govern the shared good, to adopt
rules and norms for its use, for sharing it and reproducing it.
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