A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

is nowadays making certain resources, which are potentially abundant
and therefore have a low degree of rivalry, ever scarcer, and hence introducing
a high degree of rivalry. For example, water has always been
scarce in the Sahara, but never so in the Andes, whereas nowadays climate
change (caused by our production-consumption system) is reducing
the glaciers and consequently the flow of major rivers in the area.
Just as serious acts of pollution of natural resources are putting whole
communities of ecosystem-people (communities whose livelihoods are
dependent on direct access to the natural resources) at risk, creating a
scarcity of fundamental Commons. Even clearer is the case of excludability,
that is, of the possibility of excluding someone from the enjoyment
of a good: exclusion is a question of political choices, of costs to
be borne for the exclusion, but also of technology. Technological pro -
gress now makes it extremely easy to exclude those who cannot afford
to pay from accessing fundamental Commons. Nowadays, access to
goods which once were non-excludable can be made excludable. Ever
more sophisticated systems for excluding those who cannot pay have
been invented to cut out the poorest groups of people from access to
goods which are essential to life, such as water: the system of prepaid
meters, for example, allows water to be distributed only to families who
have paid the price of the goods in advance to the private company
which runs the water service. Capitalism, pollution and technological
progress are increasing both the scarcity (and the degree of rivalry) and
the excludability of fundamental resources, both natural and non-material:
consider the artificial creation of scarcity through intellectual property
mechanisms. The poorest remain excluded from access to fundamental
goods and services and lose the rivalry challenge. In short, the predatory
and contaminating development model transforms natural resources
which are theoretically abundant into scarce ones; technological
progress offers the possibility of raising new barriers to limit access to
those who are in a position to pay for it.
In the list of possible sub-divisions, I deliberately avoided mentioning
the controversial distinction between regulated and unregulated Commons.
Roman law distinguished between res privatae (private goods),
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