The commons are resources governed collectively by the communities that use them. They are not private property (owned by an individual or corporation), not state property (owned by the government), but commonly held — managed through shared agreements, reciprocal obligation, seasonal rotation, and direct participation by the people who depend on them. Pastureland, fisheries, forests, waterways, seed stocks, knowledge, and care networks have all been organized as commons across human history.
The enclosure of the commons
The destruction of the commons is the historical origin of capitalism. In England between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, common lands — where communities had grazed animals, gathered fuel, foraged food, and organized collective life for centuries — were systematically enclosed: fenced off, privatized, and converted into the property of individual landowners. The people who had depended on the commons were expelled. With no land to sustain themselves, they were forced into cities and into wage labor — selling their time and effort to factory owners because the alternative, after enclosure, was starvation.
This process — the violent conversion of commonly held resources into private property — was not incidental to capitalism. It was constitutive. Capitalism requires a class of people who own nothing but their labor power and must sell it to survive. Enclosure created that class. Without the destruction of the commons, there would have been no proletariat, because people who can feed themselves from common land do not need wages.
The same process occurred through colonialism on a global scale. Indigenous lands governed through collective stewardship were enclosed through colonial property law — divided into parcels, assigned to individual owners (settlers), and defended by colonial states. Indigenous peoples were dispossessed not only of land but of the governance systems that managed it. The commons were not merely taken; the capacity to hold things in common was destroyed.
Commoning as practice
The commons are not only a historical institution but an ongoing practice — what some theorists call “commoning.” Commoning is the active, collective governance of shared resources through direct participation: deciding together how much to harvest, when to rest the land, how to distribute what is produced, and how to respond when someone takes more than their share.
This governance does not require the state. For millennia, communities managed commons through customary law, social pressure, collective labor, and rotating responsibilities. Elinor Ostrom documented this empirically in Governing the Commons (1990), demonstrating that communities around the world successfully manage shared resources without either privatization or state regulation — contradicting the “tragedy of the commons” narrative that claims collective governance inevitably fails.
Contemporary commoning includes community gardens, tool libraries, seed exchanges, open-source software, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, and cooperative housing. These are not throwbacks to a pre-capitalist past but active constructions of non-capitalist social relations in the present — dual power at the level of resource governance.
The tragedy narrative
Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” (1968) — the argument that shared resources are inevitably overexploited because individuals will always take more than their share — is one of the most influential ideological justifications for privatization. It is also empirically wrong. Hardin described not the commons but an open-access resource with no governance — no agreements, no community, no mutual obligation. Actual commons, as Ostrom and others have documented extensively, are governed by elaborate systems of rules, monitoring, and collective enforcement that prevent overexploitation.
The “tragedy” narrative functions ideologically: by treating the destruction of the commons as natural and inevitable, it justifies the enclosure that destroyed them. The argument is circular — we must privatize because commons fail, but the evidence for failure is drawn from situations where commons were already destroyed or never existed. From an anarchist perspective, this is legitimacy production: the naturalization of property as the only possible form of resource governance.
Related
- property — the institution that replaced the commons through enclosure
- capitalism — the system enclosure made possible
- colonialism — the global enclosure of Indigenous commons
- expropriation — the reclamation of enclosed resources
- mutual aid — the cooperative practice commoning embodies
- dual power — contemporary commoning as alternative infrastructure
- self-organization — the governance capacity commons demonstrate
- legitimacy — the “tragedy” narrative as ideological justification for enclosure