The commons are not immune to issues of power
Those who love the commons and reciprocity rightly highlight the risks entailed by their necessary relationships with politics and the State, with money and the market. This caution should not lead them to isolate the commons from the rest of the world, however, or from the reign of the State and market. State and market are not cadavers which can be nailed into a coffin and thrown into the sea. For a very, very long time, they will continue to contaminate or threaten the reciprocal relationships that lie at the heart of the commons, with their cold logic. We can only try to reduce their importance. We must hope that reciprocal relationships will grow in importance with respect to relationships of exchange and of authority.
The above quote is from a lecture/article by Alain Lipietz on January 27, 2009, translated on On the Commons.
The remarks were inspired by reading the book:
- Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong? Ed. by Silke Helfrich. Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2009
Alain Lipietz:
“A second difficulty with this book is that it implicitly opposes or seeks to isolate the commons from the state and the market. That, unfortunately, is impossible in the complex whole that is any society. As we have just seen it, the common lands of the Middle Ages, managed as commons, were subordinated to an external political power, that of the lord. The same dynamic applies to a Saharan oasis managed as a commons; it, too, is embedded in the political power of a State, which itself may be dominated by a caste of warriors or merchant-caravans, etc.
More importantly, the regulation of a commons is often delegated to a “local state” such as a shaman, a cacique, a council of elders, a municipality, etc. The political powers governing the commons can be themselves extremely hierarchical. For example, the most basic and oldest community, the family, has probably always been organized by patriarchal social relations: the pater familias holds power over women and children, the older women hold power over young stepdaughters, etc..
The inclusion of a commons in a larger society, under the authority of a political power of a larger scope, raises the obvious question, What belongs to the common good? In this book, the Amazon is implicitly considered a commons that belongs, in part, to indigenous peoples, who use its resources and biodiversity, and secondly, to all mankind, which uses the Amazon as a planetary commons that stabilizes the climate and provides a global pool of freshwater. And what of Brazil’s claims to the Amazon?
When, on the eve of the “Earth Summit” in Rio (1992), I gave some lectures in Porto Alegre, I saw graffiti on the walls that read, “Amazona e nossa. Yankee for a !” (“The Amazon is ours, Yankee go home!”). The slogan was aimed at Hollywood stars who came to support indigenous peoples and saw the Amazon as a common good of humanity. I was indeed shocked that people of Rio Grande do Sul, mostly settled by Italian and German immigrants, claimed ownership over the Amazon, thousands of miles north! However, I do not agree with the settlers of the place called “Half Moon,” in the Amazonian foothills of Bolivia, claim to own the rich hydrocarbon resources of the subsoil, and do not want to share revenues from it with the rest of Bolivia — even though these same settlers had exploited the ores of the Sierras — another common asset — only fifty years earlier.
At most one could say that the basement of the Half Moon belongs to the Guarani under Convention 169, but neither it, nor Articles 15 and 8-d of the Convention on Biodiversity, authorize exclusive access and use to them. The state is the gatekeeper and custodian, and is obliged to obtain the prior informed consent of the local community, if granted access, while sharing the profits with this community. Today this is called a “regime of ABS” (Access & Benefit Sharing). From the moment the state apparatus is created as a mechanism for redistribution, it is expected that revenues from the operation of a locally shared resource will be redistributed nationally. Similarly, moreover, it is normal that the state and the international community should take responsibility for part of the burden for maintaining a local commons of global interest.”