IMO at that level of generality those are almost useless distinctions. Within any community there exist a variety of people-places-things-relations-rules-results. This is true even in the most extreme cases of “all things held in common”. My version of the tragedy of the commons is when the philosophy or ideology of a group does not accurately describe the reality of its practice. Then the philosophy or ideology can become an obfuscating factor, and the real rules of behavior may be buried or forced into invisibility, with human nature acting as an invisible hand, often with tragic results.

For example, imagine a highly idealistic collective or commune (I have lived in a few). All property is supposed to be held entirely in common. There is not supposed to be any private property or any boss. But adults still tell children what to do or take certain things away from them– it is a necessity of physical reality. The same is true for a member who has dementia. These are obvious exceptions to the rule of equal sharing, but between the child, the adult, and the senior with dementia are many tiny degrees of variation. In fact, no two people are exactly the same, and the actual relations between people and property vary by degrees. Things also vary by degree. I share the hammer but not the pocket knife I sharpen a special way. I share my coat but not my toothbrush. Similar aspects of exclusivity apply to things like chainsaws, guns, medical instruments, etc.

“The word “redistribution” implies that there is a distribution that is default, and that we redistribute when we modify the distribution away from it. This, of course, is wrong. There is no default distribution. All distributions are the consequence of any number of institutional design choices, none of which are commanded by the fabric of the universe. In the United States, we have constructed and enforce institutions of private property ownership and contract enforcement. Those institutions generate very different end distributions than we would see if they did not exist. But they do not have to exist by logical necessity, nor do they constitute the default form of economic institutions.” (Matt Bruenig, “There is no such thing as redistribution”)

The people-places-things-relations-rules-results complex is unique for every actual instance, no matter what the big philosophy of the community may be. Does that mean that generalizations such as a community property philosophy are meaningless? No, generalizations and abstractions have their utility. But they also have their limitations, typically in oversimplification and lumping dissimilars together. No two commons are the same, and no two people or things within a single commons are the same. I’m not just referring to the tautology that nothing and nobody is physically equal in the physical world. Human equality is generally understood to mean civic/legal/moral equality, not equality in form or function. We are all physiologically, psychologically, and behaviorally different, and shared ideals and narratives often mask those differences, even from ourselves.

Commons ? commons, people ? people, and private ? private, so it is almost meaningless to say that common property ? private property. Similarly, because of the variation within types, capitalism ? capitalism and socialism ? socialism, so it is almost meaningless to say that capitalism ? socialism. In fact, in certain specific cases of capitalism and socialism, capitalism = socialism!

In a large enough sample, men are taller than women. But no one is surprised when a particular woman is taller than a particular man. Similarly, a particular item of private property might be shared or conserved more than a particular item of public property.

Another way in which property and ownership are relative is this: property may be shared in common among group A, but not shared with group B. If group A were flower children and group B were corpoRats, I’d be the first to cheer for such an enclosure.

Private and public are relative. Sharing and exclusion (or enclosure) are relative. Commons is relative. Community is relative.

The generalizations of private, public, community, and commons have utility for certain purposes, but that utility is relative. Public and private is not the same as apples and oranges. One person’s apple is not another person’s orange. Oranges and apples don’t vary by degrees over a spectrum. There is no point on the spectrum of apple variety that it is an orange or a banana. Not so with ownership and property. All forms of ownership and property lie on a common spectrum, so that from one perspective a thing may appear private and from the other side of the spectrum that same thing may appear public. Similarly, from inside a community may appear enlightened and egalitarian, and from outside it may look like a bunch of airheads or elitist assholes.

Analysis has levels. Too often we compare and contrast things at one level while some particulars at another level may be just the opposite. I’m not just saying that exceptions prove the rule. There’s more to it than that. At the level of particular instances, capitalism can equal socialism. So if we only contrast capitalism and socialism at the general level, we get no closer to the particulars where actual social engineering is possible. We need to continually oscillate between generalities, which provide ontological categories and hypotheses, and particular cases that provide empirical data.

Poor Richard