Public assets, private profits: reclaiming the American commons in an age of market enclosure

While the commons can be a physical resource owned jointly by all citizens or members of a community, it can also be seen as a social regime for managing common assets. One type of commons, the gift economy, is a powerful mode of collaboration and sharing that can be tremendously productive, creative and socially robust.

The Internet is a fertile incubator of innovation precisely because it relies heavily upon gift-exchange. Scientific communities, too, are highly inventive and stable because they are rooted in an open, collaborative ethic.

In some gift economies, the value of the collective output is greater as the number of participants grows — "the more, the merrier." The result has been called a "comedy of the commons," a windfall of surplus value that over the long term can actually make the commons more productive —and socially and personally satisfying —than conventional private markets.

3. The Commons: Another Kind of Property.

If Economics 101 teaches the basic lessons about supply and demand curves, what might Commons 101 teach? There is not likely to be a unified-field theory of the commons any time soon. Each commons bears the distinctive imprint of its own resource domain, culture, history, legal system and scale of operation. That said, some of the general principles that tend to prevail in successful American commons include: openness and feedback, shared decision making, diversity of perspectives, social equity among members of the commons, environmental sustainability, and community vitality.

4. When Markets Enclose the Commons.

Markets have a tendency to extend property boundaries and market exchange to areas of life that are inappropriate, or at least debatable. When markets convert shared common assets into commodified market inputs, a market enclosure has occurred. Besides privatizing shared wealth without fair compensation to the public, market enclosures can also erode gift economies that sustain social and moral relationships within a community. Frequently, they coercively put price tags on resources that are "not for sale "—one’s health, public institutions, public lands, and cultural traditions. Market enclosure is a useful term because it describes the pervasive imperialism of market values in American life today, and points to the need for reviving our traditions of civic republicanism.

PART II: Varieties of Market Enclosure

Part II examines five major sets of commons and the distressing enclosures that are now laying siege to them.

5. The Colonization of Frontier Commons.

For centuries, many parts of nature have been considered the "common heritage of mankind "—resources to be shared by all, parts of a divine creation that sustain life. Now market forces, armed with incredible new technologies, are transforming many "frontier commons "into new feedstock for global markets. These frontier commons include wildlife and local ecosystems threatened by the property-rights movement; global water supplies that are being commodified for transport across vast distances; and the genetic structures of life itself. The growing colonization of frontier commons threatens to usher in profound, unpredictable disruptions of nature.

6. The Abuse of the Public’s Natural Resources.

Not many Americans realize that they collectively own one-third of the nation ’s surface area and billions of acres along the outer continental shelf. These public lands —richly endowed with minerals, oil, forests, grasslands and more — constitute one of the largest collections of commons for the American people, held in trust by the U.S. Government. The sad truth is that the government’s stewardship of these resources represents one of the great scandals of the 20th Century. While the details vary from one domain to another, the general history is one of antiquated laws, poor enforcement, slipshod administration, environmental indifference and failure to ensure the public receives a fair rate of return on commercial uses of common assets.