Common - The Awakening

Historically speaking, the term common refers to at least three semantic fields.

The first one is related to the constitutive property of a thing or an element (of material or immaterial nature); the physical property is considered common when several things or elements share one or several characteristics called common. Atoms share a common identity, i.e. they have a common set of characteristics, just as the notion of family groups together a set of general principles.

The property is said to be specific or particular when one or more characteristics are unique to a thing or an element. The hydrogen atom is distinct from other atoms, just as the family of Pierre is distinct from that of Catalina.

A second meaning of common is the attribution given to a thing, which is considered common when it is usable by the constituents of a whole, like the air we breathe. A form of advanced codification of this direction is present in the Roman right : under the designation of the things which belong to the common res, like the air, the running water, the sea, the shores.

The attribution is said to be specific or private when the usus of a thing (a bow) or of an element (a habitat for example) is reserved or exclusive to a person or to a group of persons.

A third sense allows to qualify morally the utility of a thing : it is said to be common if it deserts the common good, i.e., when its utility is for the benefit of everyone. This common utility is generally free from any form of control — the air we breathe freely, for example — or it is the result of a human action subject to community control (a community trust, for example).

Utility is private (an oxygen mask) or public (a municipal park) from the moment when the governance of the modalities of production of a thing is private or public and when the benefits provided by the thing are reserved for a person or a group of persons.

The semantic field of the term common testifies, first of all, to the relation that is established by human representation between elements of reality. The hydrogen atom, in itself, does not consider itself in a common situation with the oxygen atom, it is the human effort of representation that makes them belong to a “common” notional family. The idea of common allows then to constitute units of meaning serving to designate components of reality : plants, animals, matter, family, State…

To this first representation is grafted a second one, no longer linked to the physical constituent nature, where the semantic field makes it possible to distinguish what belongs by right to a physical or moral person and what belongs to an entire community or collectivity. The term common then allows to establish a link of ownership. The idea of the commons then makes it possible to divide the world into components that are free from appropriation — the air, for example — and components that are socially attributed to a person or a community of persons.

Finally, the third component of the idea of the common is based on two elements :

the moral or political purpose of what is designated as the common ;

the communal mode of governance of what is considered common.

Physical property, attribution and utility combine to generate a fourth representation, which we describe as integrating the three previous semantic fields. We deduce this fourth representation from recent work by Italian jurists.

For Antonio Vercellone¹. In this paper, we argue that what qualifies a commons is not so much the status of public or private property as the fact that it is claimed by a community of reference as a good that produces utilities indispensable to the satisfaction of its own rights and social cohesion, and that, as a consequence of this claim, it has been subjected to a model of governance with specific characteristics. The latter must guarantee the perpetual eviction of the good from the logic of the market and its submission to a democratic and participatory regime of governance, in accordance with the principle of intergenerational preservation of utilities. It is therefore clear that this is a management modality based on access and not on exclusion.

This fourth representation integrates the ideas of constitutive property (material or immaterial), legal property and social utility, while at the same time wrapping them in an ethical operational framework that responds to social (fundamental rights) and environmental (ecological justice) criteria that must be operated by a community of reference using a democratic and participatory mode of governance.

The exemplary scope of the commons is thus to present, alongside extractive property, forms of generative property² going beyond the obsolete dichotomy between private (market) ownership and public (collective) intervention, describe land models directly oriented towards redistribution and, above all, towards the satisfaction of fundamental rights, which privilege access over exclusion, use value over exchange value, and this in the interest of future generations³.

This fourth perspective opens the way to a recomposition of the economic and political matrix of the functioning of modern societies where the logics of private property, of use value and the extractivist relationship to Nature are downgraded in favor of logics based on communal property, fundamental rights, use value and a viable relationship with natural ecosystems.

The “common”, in this sense, is part of a re-foundation of the civilizational order of globalized modernity. In this sense, according to Christian Dardot and Pierre Laval (2014):

“the good news is precisely that by making the demand for the common emerge, social movements of resistance and democratic insurgencies have for more than ten years taken a first step in the formation of an alternative rationality : the common constitutes the new political reason that must be substituted for the neoliberal reason⁴.

Notes

1
Vercellone A. (2022). The Experience of the Commons in Italy. Urban spaces, private property, fundamental rights, Sens [public], p. 14, https://sens-public.org/static/git-articles/SP1628/SP1628.pdf.
2
On the notion of generative property, see the work of Marjorie Kelly (2012). Owning Our Future. The Emerging Ownership Revolution, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
3
Ibid., p. 38.
4
Dardot, C. and P. Laval (2014). Common. Essai sur la révolution au XXe siècle, Paris, La Découverte, p. 572.