A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

everything – not our bodies, for example – certainly a large part of things
surrounding us can be transformed into common goods.
4 Logic behind and structure of Commons
To sum up, but without the presumption of concluding anything, we
could say that the term Commons, in its broadest sense – which
reaches from water to bytes, from traditional Commons to new Commons
– generically means all the resources that we share and use in
common. Resources which belong equally to all human beings, in the
case of fundamental and primary Commons, or to the members of a
specific user community, in the case of local and traditional “common
pool resources”. Some Commons – air, water, knowledge - are fundamental,
primary and irreplaceable inasmuch as linked to life itself, both
individual and social, and linked to the full development of the person.
Commons are natural and rival (local and global) or social. They can be
material, as are the services of general interest and infrastructures of
collective interest (schools, universities, hospitals, transport networks,
public squares, etc.) but also non-material and non-rival (such as knowing
and knowledge or digital Commons) and hence abundant and inexhaustible,
even though they are often artificially made scarce by privatization
mechanisms (e.g. by patenting, copyright, imposition of intellectual
property rights). They can be gifts of nature but also social heritage, the
result of combining the creative and intellectual activity of each and
every one, as in the case of languages, of codes, of sciences: even new
“discoveries” or inventions always come about as the result of the modification
of a collective creative, cultural and scientific heritage which has
been passed on (as the “chain effect” mechanism of Creative Commons
shows in a transparent manner). Commons are goods which no
single person has produced (at least, not in their entirety) and hence noone
has the right to appropriate themselves of their use in an exclusive
manner: their use must be shared.
Apart from the cases where the term Commons is used to claim the
collective right to access and self-regulation of a resource which can be
considered “of itself” or morally a Commons (such as primary Com-
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