A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

es publicae and res universitatis (two types of public goods), res communes
omnium, that is, goods belonging to everyone and therefore
which could not be appropriated by anyone, and the res nullius, or things
belonging to no-one and therefore which could be appropriated by anyone.
An objection always made, quite rightly, to Garrett Hardin, author
of the famous essay on the tragedy of commons, is that he mixed up a
Commons (such as the grazing land he used as an example) with an
open access regime. He concluded that the inevitable outcome was
over-exploitation and destruction of the grazing land as a consequence
of the selfish behaviour of each herdsman (motivated to maximize his
individual interest), but he forgot that the Commons and collective property
arrangements are by no means things belonging to nobody, no
man’s land, or res nullius and that there are precise rules, norms and institutional
arrangements that commoners adopt, working together to
preserve the good, rather than competing destructively with one another
as homines oeconomici. And so it is not the parcelisation and privatization
of the common resource, nor the intervention of external state regulation
(heteronomy) which saves the Commons, but the rules which
the commoners themselves choose, and their capacity for self-government
(autonomy): this is commoning. And this brings us to conclude
that, in effect, Commons have always been regulated, even if the rule
consciously chosen by the commoners was that of “open access”, as
in the case of digital commons, unlimited and non-rival goods. This truth
– which originates from actual observation of the practices of commoning,
with which Hardin was not acquainted – lies well with the anti-essentialist
viewpoint, according to which Commons are indissolubly a
form of social relation, directed at sharing a resource. In other words,
one could maintain that there is nothing which is necessarily “of itself”
a Commons, that is, which can be morally claimed as a Commons more
than other things can: all around us we have only natural resources or
social creations which can be managed as public property, as private
property or as Commons. If there is no commoning and there are no
commoners, then Commons do not exist. It is all up to us. On the other
hand, it is also true, looking at the same problem from a different standpoint,
that in human history a vast number of things have been shared
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