[Twelfth-century peasants developed commons practices to survive
domination. We could use them to reclaim our lives from capitalism. ]
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THE TRAGEDY OF MISUNDERSTANDING THE COMMONS  
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Stephen Stoll
August 16, 2023
In These Times - Rural
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_ Twelfth-century peasants developed commons practices to survive
domination. We could use them to reclaim our lives from capitalism. _

Pieter Brueghel the Younger painted "Summer: The Harvesters" in 1623,
one of many of his works depicting peasant life. , Wikimedia Commons

 

GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT — A thousand people gather on the Green,
sharing umbrellas and straining to hear the valedictorian above the
thunderstorm. She’s talking about the Green, a sixteen-acre park at
the center of town where townspeople get together for concerts,
picnics and the annual high school graduation. The speaker does not
mention that we are sitting over bodies interred in the seventeenth
century, for the Green has served other purposes: At various times
it’s been a burial ground, a marching ground, a grazing ground
and even a campground for townsfolk who lived too far from church to
make it to town and home in the same day.

Today, the Green is a park owned by the town and overseen by
a committee, but for at least the first two centuries of its
existence, it served as an economically productive space, governed by
the townsfolk themselves. It was, in other words, a commons. 

As recently as the nineteenth century, North America included many
examples of commons customs. Indigenous nations hunted and gardened in
spaces reserved for all their members, often extending rights to other
communities by diplomacy and hospitality. White agrarians shared
meadow and wetlands in Massachusetts, cooperated in management of
lobster fisheries in Maine, and communicated over the ​“law of the
woods” in the Adirondacks. But, as private property and state
ownership pushed out every other form of possession, practices of
collective ownership fell into neglect and are poorly
understood today.

In the twentieth century, anti-communist ideologues attacked the
entire idea. A single essay, ​“The Tragedy of the Commons,”
written in 1968 by the biologist Garret Hardin, did more damage to our
understanding than anything written by an English lord circa 1668.
Hardin’s parable of greedy shepherds deploying their livestock to
nibble up every last blade of grass in a universalized common meadow
assumes that the commoners couldn’t get together to make decisions
about how best to use the space. Lacking history, anthropology, or any
evidence, Hardin’s essay amounts to little more than his own dismal
view of human nature. Thinkers on the Left, meanwhile, have tended to
project their own assumptions onto commons customs without
understanding how or why they came to be.

A commons is not a tragedy of resource depletion, not a collective
farm, not a relic of a savage past, and not proof of ancient
communism. As a form of land, it is neither _res nullis_ (owned by no
one, like wild animals or schools of fish) nor _res communis_ (owned
by everyone, like Antarctica or the Moon). ​“The word
​‘common’ means ​‘together with others,’” wrote the
thirteenth-century legal scholar Henry de Bracton. In his world,
a commons was an agricultural village in which each household tended
its own fields and pasture and made collective decisions about the
whole settlement, but commons have taken many other forms as well. At
base, it’s a social relationship of the useable Earth that is
neither private nor state property but owned and governed by its
constituents to meet their specific needs.

This relationship originated in specific circumstances. After the
implosion of the Western Roman Empire around A.D. 500, peasants in
Europe enjoyed great freedom from centralized authority. By about the
year 900, however, the thuggish war lords who developed political
power in the vacuum began attacking them, capturing them on little
kingdoms called manors. These new lords demanded from peasants the
various products of their labor, like flour, butter, beer and lambs,
which meant the peasants all had the same problem: how to endure
lordly appropriation while thriving themselves. As a way of smoothing
out conflict and building efficiency, village councils began to decide
where cattle should graze, where wheat should be planted, and which
fields should lie fallow. 

By around the 12th or 13th century, peasants throughout western Europe
found that commonly managing fields and pasture saved them a little
labor, resulting in marginal benefits. A family possessed their own
fields and livestock, but they allowed the village to make decisions
about production in an overall setting that no one really owned but
that the peasants claimed as their proprietary realm. 

This went on for hundreds of years, through famine and pandemic, but
in England by the 17th century something had changed. Lords sought to
extinguish commons customs by law, evict peasants from farms and
villages, and claim all the land as their own in a process known as
enclosure. Capitalism is literally founded on this dispossession of
collective rights, which immediately provoked commoners to vehemently
defend those rights. In this ongoing conflict, advocates of peasants
and opponents of capitalism uphold the commons as an alternative. 

This is why many on the Left tend to think of the colonization of
North America, and elsewhere along the frontiers of the British
Empire, as a conflict between capital and commons. But it’s not
that simple. The English peasants who founded New
England — uninvited by the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Lenape,
Menunkatuck, Pequot and other Algonquin peoples — had themselves
fled enclosure. They didn’t arrive as profit-maximizing individuals,
but as communities seeking their own survival. The Guilford Covenant
of 1639 puts it clearly: _​“W__e_ will, the Lord assisting us, sit
down and join ourselves together in one entire plantation and to be
helpful each to other in any common work, according to every man’s
ability and as need shall require.” You’d be forgiven for thinking
that Karl Marx had written for them; but the point is that, at least
at first, Indigenous North American societies with their own customs
of collective use came into conflict with European societies
strikingly similar to them. Colonizers had no reason or inclination to
carve up the landscape into real estate. That idea was not well
developed even in England, and it was a century before it took hold
in the colonies. The point is cautionary: _Commons_ evokes feelings of
morality and justice when set against enclosure and the poverty and
suffering it still causes. But it is not inherently just.

Despite the onslaught of private property, common property still
exists all over the world. In India, common rights exist over forests,
grazing land, and bodies of water. By one estimate, three-quarters of
Africa is owned and governed by communities and 90% of rural Africans
farm and hunt on this community land. In the United States, the
Agrarian Trust buys farmland and places it in a community-centered,
tax-exempt trust. The group then provides affordable leases to farmers
so they can grow food for communities without the burden of paying
down a mortgage. It’s not a commons in the sense of collective
governance but in the anti-capitalist tradition: It aims to remove
land from the market, permanently.

We could do the same thing on a larger scale by creating commons
communities on federal land or by eminent domain, creating spaces for
farming, hunting, and wood cutting where the people who use the space
would make all decisions but could not sell it. Not everyone wants to
live this way, but there is no reason the same principles couldn’t
work in suburbs and cities. Dozens of community gardens all over Los
Angeles County, for example, are governed by the
gardeners themselves. 

European peasants devised the commons as a means of surviving within
structures of domination, but we could use commons not merely to
survive domination but replace it with a different species of
citizenship, one that enjoins land and democracy. We could begin to
reclaim our lives from the capitalist market by moving the commons
from the margins of society to the center of our communities, exactly
where they began.

Steven Stoll [[link removed]] is
Professor of History at Fordham University. He is writing a history
of land.

* The Commons; Land Usage; Community; Democracy;
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