David Bollier

I am fascinated to watch the constructive ferment about the commons in Italy.  The most stunning sign of this trend (as mentioned in a previous blog post) was the voter referendum on water in June 2011 when Italians overwhelmingly rejected the privatization of their municipal water systems.  The vote was a stinging defeat for political elites and the media, and a surprising confirmation that the commons can be a template for shuffling the ideological deck.  Some 94% of voters, including the center/right, said that water should be controlled by the people, not profit-maximizing corporations.

This signal was apparently heard in Italian political culture.  Luigi de Magistris, a former prosecutor and member of the European Parliament,was elected mayor of Naples in May 2011 on a law and order platform.  He has now become a big-time champion of the commons.  As Anthony Quattrone of the Naples Politics blog puts it, Naples is now a hothouse of “participatory democracy, bottom-up initiatives, and social innovation.” 

De Magistris was an outsider to Neapolitan politics when he won the support of two minor parties for his quest for the mayoralty.  With support from both the far left and conservatives, he improbably defeated the businessman supported Prime Minister Berlusconi.  “Many citizens in Naples feel that the election of Luigi de Magistris is a last-ditch bid to save whatever is left of the glorious capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,” Quattrone wrote.  “Neapolitan disenchantment with politics and total distrust of politicians started with the unification of Italy and has basically persisted to this day.”

The commons as a path forward?  De Magistris thinks so.  He has appointed an “Assessor of Commons” to reclaim public management of the city’s water services.  The Assessor is also charged with identifying new commons-based ways of providing services.  The Mayor has national political ambitions, and talks frankly of the commons as a framework for managing the people’s wealth.

While a great many commons seek to develop alternatives to conventional businesses – and even to bypass markets altogether – the struggle to democratize capital should not be lost in the shuffle. Popular ownership of capital assets and business enterprises is still a great strategy for building the commons and advancing the public good. Fortunately, there's a growing enthusiasm for this approach.

One of the most eloquent advocates for socially friendly forms of capital ownership – the French call it the “social economy” – is Gar Alperovitz, a historian and political economist at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative.  Alperovitz's 2005 book, America Beyond Capitalism, was recently re-issued, presumably because it speaks to the political moment. How can we make economic progress when banks and large corporations are simply looking out for themselves? How can we reduce wealth inequality when government is captured by corporations and the affluent?

Alperovitz showcases the history and great potential of co-ops, worker-owned companies, and urban land trusts. He notes the constructive role that is played by municipal utilities, state-owned banks and state-chartered trusts such as the Alaska Permanent Fund. There are also dozens of cases in which states use their investment dollars to help communities, use government procurement to help worker-owned businesses, and provide venture capital to startups.

I propose that the New York Times start a new feature called “Enclosure Watch.” After all, they report on one form of enclosure after another nearly every day. It's the story of our times.  Why not consolidate the effort and give the topic some real focus and depth -- to name it as enclosure?  This idea occurred to me after reading two opeds on consecutive days, each on the same place on the page, detailing two old, familiar enclosures.  

The first involves the mining industry's massive plunder of the public's mineral wealth in the West. The second involves a proposed lockup of taxpayer-funded scientific and medical research. Both are brazen ripoffs of the public by a “free market” system that dares not live up to its own ideological creed.  And both are achieved through gross imbalances of political power.

The Mining Act governing the extraction of gold, silver, copper, uranium and other metals from public lands in the West was enacted in 1872, when Ulyssess S. Grant was president. Yes, that's right: a law passed 140 years ago remains in force.  It privileges the mining of hard-rock mining over all other uses of federal lands. The law authorizes private mining on public lands for $5 an acre, with no royalties for what is actually extracted, and little concern for the environmental consequences.

If only the rest of the world could emulate the Government of Rajasthan in India in adopting public policies to promote the commons! As the Times of India reports, “Rajasthan has become the first state in the country to have drafted a policy underlining the importance and the need to preserve and secure common land (commons) in rural areas.”  There may be other such government policies around the world, but they are few and far between.  The Rajasthan policies are a real breakthrough.

The Rajasthan government is in the process of identifying which grazing lands, common ponds and their catchment areas, playgrounds and other resources shall be treated as commons. Its new policies aim to decentralize governance, encourage conservation and proper ecological stewardship, assure fair access to and use of the lands, and facilitate public participation in all aspects of managing commons.