Vision: Fighting Privatization and Corporate Control By Taking Back the Commons

In an age of privatization in which a handful of large corporations are seeking to divvy up control over vast resources, a new "commons" is emerging with potential of generating a sharing revolution. From the worldwide web and scientific knowledge to public lands, parks, language, institutes and dot.orgs, the things that we share in common connect us with the broader community. The idea of returning to a commons-based approach is the subject of a new book, titled All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, edited by Jay Walljasper. How big is the commons revival? And what is its promise?

Maria Armoudian: All That We Share suggests on its cover that through an expanded commons, we can "save the economy, the environment, the Internet, democracy, our communities and everything else that belongs to all of us." That's a heck of a lot to promise.

Jay Walljasper: I know, but I truly do believe that the commons is a breakthrough idea. It offers us a new lens, a new way of looking at the world that suddenly can change what we see as possible and what we see as impossible.

MA: Although you say it's a revolutionary idea, almost as if it's new, in fact it's as old as civilization, going back to the Romans when it was one of three types of property. Why do you think it's a new concept?

JW: Obviously, it's as old as the hills, really, and in fact indigenous societies through the centuries lived by the commons, and so there is nothing new about it, but unfortunately we've lost sight of its importance and how it affects our lives since the Industrial Revolution and particularly over about the last 30 or 40 years.

MA: Backing up to the general broad strokes, when you say "the commons," what do you include and what do you exclude?

JW: My definition that actually tries to distill it is "all that we share," but it's also the ways that we share it. And really the "commons" is everywhere. If you look around, it's hard to think that you'd be anywhere where there wouldn't be some aspect of the commons visible, whether it's just the sky, the environment, the streets, where the Internet is going. The commons is also not just a set of things but a kind of spirit of cooperation that infuses most of human activity. Clearly there are things that aren't the commons too.

A bunch of us were sitting around in Germany trying to come up with a list of things that we would definitely not want to be commons. And we decided that at the top of the list was underwear and toothbrushes. So there is certainly a place for private property, and sometimes private property is the very best way to get something done. But in our western culture over the last three or four decades, we have come to believe that private property is the solution to almost any problem. That's just simply not the case. I think there's an awful lot of commons things that we depend upon every day. Do you really want to create your own water filtration system for tap water in your house? Or have your own energy sources, rather than having it come in through the power grid? There are a lot of things that just are more efficient, more equitable and just more commonsense if they're dealt with cooperatively rather than individually.

MA: In political science, we have a very famous piece that Bill McKibben noted in your introduction, called "The Tragedy of the Commons." The idea behind it is that many people take advantage of the commons by not contributing their share, so say a shared body of water that many think they can pollute or take from. So how do we deal with the tragedy of the commons?

JW: The tragedy of the commons exists. One of the biggest tragedies of the commons is the fisheries. Because anyone can fish at any time outside of 20-mile borders, stocks of fish are being depleted. It's amazing to our grandparents that cod, which was once seen as the most common fish in the world, is now an endangered species. But the tragedy of the commons is not universal, and the woman who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009 -- Eleanor Austin, who is also a political scientist -- her lifelong work has been to show how in culture after culture around the world, when given the chance, ordinary people figure out ways to ensure that the commons aren't destroyed.