Date: 11.08.2022.
The so-called “Tragedy of the Commons” is one of capitalism’s “just-so stories”, in the words of Kevin Carson. As he wrote in 2016:
Every system of class domination relies on a collection of myths — “just-so stories” — to present itself as natural and inevitable to those living under it, and to defend the wealth and power of the ruling classes as the result of merit. And they usually involve justifying the wealth of the ruling oligarchy as really being good for ordinary laboring folks.
Kevin Carson: Capitalism’s Just-So Stories. Center for a Stateless Society, August 13, 2016.
As Matto Mildenberger explained on the Scientific American blog, not only was Hardin’s argument wrong and ahistorical, he himself was a racist, eugenicist, nativist/xenophobe and Islamophobe: he’s cited not only across academia (his 1968 essay is one of the most cited papers in economics, political science and ecology/environmental studies), but also by neo-nazis in the U.S. to justify racial/white supremacist violence.
Below I have selected some notes and readings/quotes/links arguing against this nonsensical and reactionary myth.
@HeavenlyPossum (August 8, 2022):
The Tragedy of the Commons was first proposed by William Forster Lloyd, who had no experience with commons management, in 1833. He *imagined* people would overuse common property, which was well received because British aristocrats were busy stealing commons at the time. The idea was really popularized by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Hardin, a radical environmentalist and white supremacist who lobbied for population control to protect the environment, likewise imagined people would overuse common property and advocated for total privatization. Then Elinor Ostrom came along in 1990 with her work “Governing the Commons.” Unlike all the proponents of the Tragedy of the Commons, Ostrom actually learned about commons and rediscovered what people have known for thousands of years: there is no tragedy. [Ostrom] not only demonstrated how commons could function theoretically, in game theory terms; she also found extant commons, some of which have been in sustained use for centuries. Hardin never fully recanted, though he did acknowledge that he meant only *ungoverned commons,* commons with no owners. We should all be on the same page: common property is not intrinsically unstable or prone to over-exploitation. Common property is merely a detente that people in nonstate societies tend to establish to reduce conflict while maximizing individual freedom. Common property is an agreement that individuals will not interfere with each other’s self-sustenance. Individual owners of common property give up the ability to aggrandize themselves at each other’s expense and consequently lose the ability to coerce their labor by controlling their access to self-sustenance. But, in exchange, they too can’t be controlled or immiserated. Cooperation and coordination are hard, but people do it, incentivized by pure self-interest. But people still resist this idea, because the Myth of the Tragedy is so useful to ideologically justify privatization and capitalism. Ostrom had to coin a rule: if it works in reality, it also works in theory. Sustainable commons are not a myth. They exist in the world! They work! It doesn’t matter how well you think you’ve intuited your way to the Tragedy: it’s still a myth.
@HeavenlyPossum (December 3, 2022):
There is no such thing as the tragedy of the commons: a thread. The oldest published reference to the idea is in a lecture by an early political economist at Oxford, William Foster Lloyd, in 1832 titled “On the Checks to Population.” Lloyd first articulated the argument that many of us have been taught as an inevitable and immutable fact of economic life: that any resource owned in common will be exploited to the point of ruin. “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so hare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures? No inequality, in respect of natural or acquired fertility, will account for the phenomenon.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972412 It’s not clear what, if any, empirical research Lloyd made into the status of England’s remaining commons at the time of his writing, and he doesn’t seem to have accounted for the fact that English landlords had been privatizing the commons for centuries, leaving increasingly marginal land for the commons. Lloyd’s idea was championed by ecologist Garrett Hardin who, in 1968, published an essay in the journal Science titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In it, Hardin framed Lloyd’s argument in the context of global overpopulation, arguing that common property inevitably and inexorably led to resource exhaustion and advocating for total privatization of all resources as a remedy. “[T]he rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Hardin, casually and without evidence, dismisses the existence of commons that did not fall victim to this ostensibly inevitable tragedy: “Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast below the carrying capacity of the land.” Hardin’s solution? “The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion…” Hardin believed that privatization, with its attendant exclusionary violence, was the only solution to the tragedy. pages.mtu.edu/~asmayer/rural_s… This story has been taught to countless students in countless economics and other classes. It is taken for granted and repeated endlessly. It has been gleefully embraced by the propertied class, because it works to ideologically justify their ownership of the world’s resources as necessary for the common good. It is rarely presented with any evidence, because it is assumed to be so logical, so self evidently true, that it does not need any. The logic is airtight. People are utility maximizing, rational machines. When presented with a shared resource, of course they will exploit it to exhaustion. Of course. Even if most people were angels, Hardin argued, all it would take is one defector to start the race to over-exploitation. In the face of even one over-exploiter, each individual would have a rational incentive to also begin over-exploiting for personal gain. Every actor knows this choice will lead to eventual ruin for all, but if any one actor waits, they risk being left without even the tiniest share. Of course. The first problem with Hardin’s tragedy is that it’s not true. The second problem, which helps explain the first, is that Hardin was a racist ecofascist who hated nonwhite people, blamed them for ruining the planet, and advocated strongly for their exclusion from western countries, what he called “lifeboat ethics.” There simply weren’t enough resources for everyone, he argued, so he wanted to prioritize white westerners. “Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all” is a line from his essay that people don’t like to teach when they push the myth of the tragedy. The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a profile on Hardin, who advocated for, among other things, segregation, eugenic forced sterilization, and ethnic cleansing. He likened nonwhite people having many children to a “passive” genocide of white people. He was, in short, a monster. We should understand his evidence-free arguments for a tragedy of the commons through this lens: Hardin was a racist and eugenicist who believed most people were too stupid not to over-exploit resources and had to be violently contained to ensure enough would be left over for the “right” people. This is not a work of ecological science or even economics, but rather white supremacist propaganda. Then along came Elinor “Lin” Ostrom and her 1990 work “Governing the Commons.” In it, Ostrom presented game theory approach to commonly owned resources, explaining how people as self-interested rational actors could avoid the logical trap of over exploitation. And then she did Hardin one better: she detailed the workings of actual extant commons which, according to Hardin and every neoliberal since, should not exist. Ostrom illustrated what anthropologists and people in stateless societies have known for generations: people are perfectly capable of working out rules to sustainably manage shared resources. In her book, Ostrom detailed one common pasture in Switzerland that has been in continuous use since the 1500s. She also described shared fishing rights in Turkey, shared agricultural and forest land in Japan, and shared irrigation systems in Spain. There is no tragedy. This is not to say that establishing and maintaining systems of shared property is trivially easy or inevitably successful. There will be times when these systems fail. There are probably some scales at which coordination becomes impossible, such as at the level of the atmosphere or the world’s oceans at a global scale. Commons management takes constant work and is often very hard. But over-exploitation is not logically and inexorably inevitable. There is no tragedy. Hardin eventually revised his argument, in light of Ostrom’s work, explaining that what he should have called it was the tragedy of “unmanaged” commons, which is to say, those resources with no absolutely no owners at all. The fact remains, though, that a major and widely believed idea in neoclassical economics is both wrong and the product of ecofascist propaganda. Ostrom faced so much opposition to her work from people who assume thetragedy is self-evidently true that she had to coin a rule: a resourcearrangement that works in practice can work in theory. The existence ofsustained and sustainable commons, both today and in the past, should beenough to relegate Hardin to the waste bin of failed ideas. But it continuesto persist because it’s so ideologically useful to our propertied elites. Iroutinely see people regurgitating the tragedy without evidence and reactingwith enormous hostility to the idea that equitably and sustainably sharingcommon resources could even be possible. Common property is not quite universal, but it’s a property mode that comes pretty close to universality among nonstate societies. Peoples in wildly diverse environments and circumstances, across time and vast geographical distances, have made use of common property. This makes a certain intuitive sense to me: people in nonstate societies, eager to access resources they need to survive but lacking the coercive means to exclude everyone else, would seem to naturally end up owning resources in common. That is, common property would seem to work as a détente between people, reducing the risk of conflict over access and exclusion to resources while maximizing individual freedom. People who cannot be excluded by their peers from the means of sustaining themselves tend to be pretty hard to control. Individual owners of common property give up the ability to aggrandize themselves at each other’s expense and consequently lose the ability to coerce their labor by controlling their access to self-sustenance. But, in exchange, they too can’t be controlled or immiserated. I’m reminded of this quote from Graeber and Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”: “[J]ust as we earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very different concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom.” Common property is surely one potential tool in our toolkit for building a society that guarantees all of us “the means to an autonomous life.”
The Anarchist FAQ has a section addressing this myth (below is only an extract):
As Allan Engler points out, “[s]upporters of capitalism cite what they call the tragedy of the commons to explain the wanton plundering of forests, fish and waterways, but common property is not the problem. When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it. Under capitalism, there is no common property. (Public property is a form of private property, property owned by the government as a corporate person.) Capitalism recognises only private property and free-for-all property. Nobody is responsible for free-for-all property until someone claims it as his own. He then has a right to do as he pleases with it, a right that is uniquely capitalist. Unlike common or personal property, capitalist property is not valued for itself or for its utility. It is valued for the revenue it produces for its owner. If the capitalist owner can maximise his revenue by liquidating it, he has the right to do that.” [Apostles of Greed, pp. 58-59] (…) This confusion has, of course, been used to justify the stealing of communal property by the rich and the state. The continued acceptance of this “confusion” in political debate is due to the utility of the theory for the rich and powerful, who have a vested interest in undermining pre-capitalist social forms and stealing communal resources. Therefore, most examples used to justify the “tragedy of the commons” are false examples, based on situations in which the underlying social context is radically different from that involved in using true commons. In reality, the “tragedy of the commons” comes about only after wealth and private property, backed by the state, starts to eat into and destroy communal life. This is well indicated by the fact that commons existed for thousands of years and only disappeared after the rise of capitalism — and the powerful central state it requires — had eroded communal values and traditions. Without the influence of wealth concentrations and the state, people get together and come to agreements over how to use communal resources, and have been doing so for millennia. That was how the commons were managed, so “the tragedy of the commons” would be better called the “tragedy of private property.” Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger (and proto-anarchist), was only expressing a widespread popular sentiment when he complained that “in Parishes where Commons lie the rich Norman Freeholders, or the new (more covetous) Gentry overstock the Commons with sheep and cattle, so that the inferior Tenants and poor labourers can hardly keep a cow but half starve her.” [quoted by Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, p. 173] (…) As E.P. Thompson notes in an extensive investigation on this subject, the tragedy “argument [is] that since resources held in common are not owned and protected by anyone, there is an inexorable economic logic that dooms them to over-exploitation. . . . Despite its common sense air, what it overlooks is that commoners themselves were not without common sense. Over time and over space the users of commons have developed a rich variety of institutions and community sanctions which have effected restraints and stints upon use. . . . As the old . . . institutions lapsed, so they fed into a vacuum in which political influence, market forces, and popular assertion contested with each other without common rules.” [Op. Cit., p. 107] In practice, of course, both political influence and market forces are dominated by wealth — “There were two occasions that dictated absolute precision: a trial at law and a process of enclosure. And both occasions favoured those with power and purses against the little users.” Popular assertion means little when the state enforces property rights in the interests of the wealthy. Ultimately, “Parliament and law imposed capitalist definitions to exclusive property in land.” [E.P. Thompson, Op. Cit., p. 134 and p. 163] The working class is only “left alone” to starve. In practice, the privatisation of communal land has led to massive ecological destruction, while the possibilities of free discussion and agreement are destroyed in the name of “absolute” property rights and the power and authority which goes with them.
Anarchist FAQ: I.6 What about the “Tragedy of the Commons”? Surely communal ownership will lead to overuse and environmental destruction?
Lastly, Afro-Trinidadian Youtuber and anarchist Andrew Sage (@_saintdrew) recently made a video on this topic: