A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

mons) but which in actual fact is managed privately and has been “enclosed”,
behind a Commons there are commoners who give it life, that
is, there is a commoning activity which regulates and governs the use
and reproduction of the common resources. The process of collective
self-government and management of the Commons – as Ostrom’s studies
have shown - is nothing other than the capacity of the users to jointly
establish a series of agreed norms and rules. These systems of rules
are very different according to whether they deal with rivers or free software,
and the rules can be more or less formal and more or less restrictive.
Commons, since they require commoning, are therefore also a
system of governance, that is to say, a form of social relations for collectively
sharing and preserving all those natural resources and creations
of society which we inherit or produce together. A social form for reproducing
life and knowledge and to produce value and wealth which go
beyond the capitalist market, according to criteria of sharing, cooperation
and social justice.
Despite the extreme variety of Commons and forms of commoning, one
can always identify the fundamental elements of a social and economic
form which is alternative to the capitalistic one: cooperative rather than
competitive strategies; use-value rather than exchange value; meeting
the needs and rights of everyone rather than maximizing the profits of
the few; “caretaking”, use and access to the good rather than ownership
and “enclosure”; consensual self-government rather than relationships
of command; autonomy rather than heteronomy; devolution of
power and horizontal and polycentric forms of governance rather than
concentration of power (a concentration on which both capitalist markets
and the State are based); conservation and reproduction of the good
in the case of natural resources, rather than over-exploitation; open access
and multiplication of Commons in the case of inexhaustible nonmaterial
Commons rather than artificial production of scarcity; inalie nability
rather than alienability and commoditization.
The fact of inalienability is crucial: commoners are never “owners” of
the Commons, perhaps they are guardians. They are responsible for
passing them on to future generations in their entirety and they cannot
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