A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

more or less porous, of this reference community? One thing is the
whole human community (or maybe the community of the living, thus
recognising the rights of nature and moving away, as far as the right to
access natural Commons is concerned, from a purely anthropocentric
view), another is the specific community which draws sustenance from
a specific river, stream or forest.
Another fundamental distinction is that between natural-material Commons
and non-material-digital Commons, because of the intrinsic element
of “non-rivalry” which is a characteristic of goods such as knowledge, information
and communications. If a good is non-rival, it means that the
use of that good by one person does not limit the use of it by others, nor
does it decrease the overall amount of the good available: if there are two
of us in front of just one glass of water (rival good), we can drink half a
glass per head, whereas if we are taught Pythagoras’ theorem (non-rival
good), we will both be richer; it is not that we will only know half of it
each. The same thing is true, for example, for freeloading in file sharing,
given that a digital file can be replicated an infinite number of times: or
rather, the more a file is downloaded and made available to other Internet
users as well, the more the common resource available to everyone increases.
On the other hand, natural Commons – such as the classic “common
pool resources”- are rival goods, since they are finite resources
(although not necessarily and “naturally” scarce).
For this reason too, one must be careful not to confuse the arena of
Commons with that of public goods and with the classic economic categorizations.
In 1954, the economist Paul Samuelson defined ‘pure’ public
goods on the basis of their nature of non-rivalry and non-excludability,
as opposed to private goods (rival and excludable) and separate both
from “club” goods (excludable but not rival) and from “common pool
resources”, that is, Commons (understood as rival but non-excludable
goods). We have already seen what is meant by non-rivalry, whereas
non-excludability means that it is technically, politically or economically
impossible to exclude an individual from consuming the good in question.
Characteristics such as rivalry and excludability are not always absolute
and devoid of historical context: the capitalist development model
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