The threat posed by global warming and environmental degradation are the most pressing examples of what has become known over the past several decades as the ‘tragedy of the commons’. In this book, Derek Wall explores the work of the late Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom, on how humans can overcome this problem, and sustain the commons over the long term. Chris Shaw finds that this book is an accessible presentation of Ostrom’s ideas.

The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft. Derek Wall. Routledge. 2014.

Derek Wall has been an important figure in the Green Party for a number of years and also works as Associate Tutor in the Department of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written extensively on the subject of green politics and green economics. In The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft, he examines what the idea of the commons can contribute to the building of an ecologically sustainable future. He approaches this analysis through an overview of the work of the late Elinor Ostrom (who died in 2012), the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

Ostrom’s principal interest was in how institutions worked or failed to sustain collective resource use. Ostrom noted that self-governing entities exist at a variety of scales and can be found in both the public and private sphere. The key question for Ostrom was: ‘How can fallible human beings achieve and sustain self-governing ways of life and self-governing entities as well as sustaining ecological systems at multiple scales?’

Ostrom’s answers to these questions were influenced by a range of classical liberal economists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, with whom she shared a scepticism about governing through centralised state power. Her scepticism stemmed from the belief that state actors do not have perfect knowledge of the issues being faced by communities geographically and culturally distant from policy elites. But Ostrom also recognised that local knowledge on its own is insufficient because it is not always correct.

After sketching out the highlights of Ostrom’s career and the thinkers who influenced her, Wall then devotes considerable space to exploring the methodological individualism Ostrom employed to understand how commons might be sustained over the long term. Ostrom defined institutions as a set of rules; organisations are players, institutions the rules they play by. She developed an Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to understand these rules. The IAD framework is drawn from game theory, which assumes people are rational maximisers who will try to predict how others are going to act in order to gauge their own best move.

The prisoner’s dilemma, however, shows that this can often lead to sub-optimal behaviour. If the police hold two suspects in separate cells, but do not have enough evidence to convict either of them, the police might promise each suspect shorter sentences if they each confess. Both prisoners may separately calculate that it is best if they confess. Given that they would have both walked free if neither had confessed this is a sub-optimal outcome. Whilst the prisoner’s dilemma is often used to illustrate the kind of social relations that lead to the tragedy of the commons, Ostrom’s experiments and research showed that in real life there are often high levels of co-operation, communication and information sharing. This co-operative set of social relations allows people to work collectively to achieve long term optimal outcomes for the resource users.

Following this overview Wall devotes a chapter to critiquing Ostrom’s methodological individualism. Wall sees Ostrom’s individualism as a position which poses questions about the usefulness of her work. Rather than a micro analysis of interactions between individuals Wall suggests what is needed in the study of the commons is macro analysis of powerful actors taking what belongs to others.

Wall compares Ostrom’s analysis with autonomist Marxism, which recognises the ability of the working class to organise themselves against capital rather than relying on centralised state apparatus to achieve this. Whilst Wall argues methodological individualism does not give sufficient attention to structuralist explanations, he believes Ostrom’s approach does at least recognise our ability as individuals to make decisions and deepen democratic control, and thus help overcome practical governance dilemmas.

Wall’s overview of Ostrom’s life and work offers a welcome extension of a debate that too easily accepts that the fate of all commons, including the atmosphere, is tragedy. Humanity has survived and thrived for so long in no small part because of the ability of communities to successfully govern commons. Despite introducing too much unnecessary complexity into commons scholarship, Ostrom’s work provides a valuable framework for understanding how the commons can support the building of a sustainable future.

Derek Wall, in presenting an accessible account of Ostrom’s ideas, and placing them within the context of the economics thinkers who influenced her, provides a useful and productive insight into how a reconsideration of the historic and present manner in which people have governed commons can provide valuable ideas about what role the commons can play in building a sustainable future.

Christopher Shaw is a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil from the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex. His thesis was entitled ‘Choosing a Dangerous Limit for Climate Change; How the Decision Making Process is Constructed in Public Discourses’ (Oct 2006-April 2011). He is currently working on a book due for publication by Routledge in March 2015, examining public representations of dangerous climate change and the implications of these representations for building climate citizenship. Read more reviews by Chris.

Photo by Jayne ~ Twiggy & Opal

The post Book Review: The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft by Derek Wall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Aaron Vansintjan: At some point during the Quebec student strike of 2012, I found myself in an enormous protest in downtown Montreal. We took up the street as far as the eye could see. All of a sudden, a mass of people dressed in black stormed down the other half of the road. The anarchist contingent, going the wrong way.

The effect was incredible: here we were, in the thousands, all walking together in one direction to demand tuition subsidized by the state, and simultaneously, thousands of others were calling for an end to the state, walking the other way. I climbed onto the concrete divider in the center of the street separating the two lanes, unsure of which side I should join.

One protest, two directions: a neat metaphor for the tension in the Left today. We are trying to choose between supporting welfare programs and rejecting the top-down nature of the state itself. Just as education, health insurance, and welfare need to be protected, the state plays a key role in environmental destruction, securitization and policing, and international wars. How can we resolve this tension?

If you try to figure out what role the state should have, you’ll inevitably be led to a list of great thinkers: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and, for a more contemporary twist, Thomas Piketty or Amartya Sen.

Rarely does Elinor Ostrom appear on that list—but she certainly deserves to be included. Ostrom spent much of her life trying to figure out how people solve problems of distribution amongst themselves, and why some communities are able to share resources while others are not. Her work sought to think political economy beyond both the state and the market—something that many of those giants of political theory had not, thus far, been able to do very well. In other words, she could think in two directions, at the same time.

I’ve always thought that, for people interested in social progress, engaging with Ostrom’s work is crucial. Unfortunately, she’s not very well known. It’s not that Elinor Ostrom’s work is hard to get hold of; her relative obscurity is probably more related to the fact that it’s not that easy to figure out the wider implications of her research. Her work can help us think about austerity, state welfare, the market, local democracy, and environmental issues. But how it would do so is rarely made explicit.

Luckily, this gap has now been rectified in the new book, Elinor Ostrom’s rules for radicals: Cooperative alternatives beyond markets and states, by Derek Wall and published by Pluto Press. Wall is a politician (as a Green Party candidate he stood against Theresa May in the 2017 General Elections) and activist who spends much of his time writing about radical politics, social movements, political theory, and left strategy.

As its title suggests, the book is directed at people on the left (‘radicals’). Wall describes this book as a bite-size take on his more serious and dry PhD-thesis-length tome, The Sustainable economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, contestation, and craft. There is little dryness here, though, as Wall peppers the book with little detours and passionate reflections on subjects as diverse as Occupy Wall Street, Rojava, and the TV show The Wire.

Throughout the book the main sense I got was a wholehearted excitement about and admiration for Elinor Ostrom’s work. Apart from its very necessary contribution to leftist strategy and thought, it is this enthusiasm that propels the book forward, making it an enjoyable and light read.

With a nod to Saul Alinsky, Wall starts the book with 13 very short ‘rules for radicals’, which include ‘be specific’, ‘collective ownership can work’, ‘map power’, and ‘no panaceas’. These may not make much sense at first, but as you read the book, they form the basic threads of his argument and help to create a coherent picture of Ostrom’s work and how it can inform the left.

I was able to attend the book launch in London this past November, and we had agreed that I could ask some questions after. During the talk, Wall—wearing a Kurdish scarf and expressing solidarity with his friend Mehmet Aksoy who has recently passed away—talked more about the stories he knew about Ostrom than the contents of his book itself. He referred to her as ‘Elinor’, as if talking about a dear friend, and the audience laughed along as he told us about her meeting with the political economist Garrett Hardin, and Wall’s own encounter with her shortly before she passed away.

Later, over drinks at the pub across the street, we huddled together to talk about Rojava, Marxism, ecosocialism, and today’s new social movements—not at all in the right state for a serious interview. So we decided to leave it to an email later. The following is the result of our email exchange, edited lightly for brevity and flow.

Aaron Vansintjan: Say I’m a socialist unfamiliar with Ostrom’s work. What’s your 1-minute pitch? Why should I care?

Derek Wall: Socialism, someone said, is about sharing.  Marxists argue that means of production need to be owned by the whole community.  Elinor gives us the tools to do the job, a hard-nosed, flexible approach to communal ownership based on science, research, and pragmatism.  Her insight that collective ownership is possible makes the apparently radical reasonable.

What kind of person was Elinor Ostrom? How do you think that shows in her work?

She was a fun open human being, she would talk to anybody, and was known to take care to answer questions that came in emails from across the planet. She was interested in practical problem solving and opposed any kind of dogma.  She was not that kind of elitist ivory tower academic but respected others and sought to learn from the grassroots.

In the beginning of the book you have a list of 13 rules for radicals. One of them is ‘pose social change as problem solving’? What do you mean by this?

In politics we tend to think in terms of conspiracies and slogans.  Politics is too often seen as replacing an elite with an alternative set of leaders. This is at best insufficient. I am not fundamentally against electoral politics in a liberal context but they are limited.  The Ostrom approach is about participation, creating a deeply democratic society instead of replacing ‘bad people’ with ‘good people’ at the top of a structure.

In turn, we too often have a kind of magical and ideological thinking where we are for ‘good things’ and against ‘bad things’, promoting broad slogans or writing manifestos with sets of demands.  Instead we need to view the good things we would like to achieve such as ecology, equality, and freedom as challenges to meet.  The history of the left shows that whether we are talking about reform or revolution, practical problems and entrenched power structures can transform good intentions into restoration of oppression.

Specifically, Elinor Ostrom looked at ‘commons’ as a matter of problem solving.  She didn’t believe that commons were either doomed to failure (the so-called tragedy of the commons) or a universal solution. Instead she noted that some things were inevitably held in common—for example, its difficult for an individual to own a river or the seas—and then looked at how to solve the problem of overuse.  I think this is a good approach!

What do you think explains the paucity of awareness about Elinor Ostrom’s work?

Ostrom’s approach is difficult to place, she was often inspired by thinkers on the free market right like James Buchanan and Hayek but in doing so challenged market based notions of purely private property and the market.  Her uncanny ability to upset those who seek to summarise her ideas as simple slogans means her ideas can be challenging.  However interest in the left is growing, for example, the Indigenous leader and revolutionary Hugo Blanco cites her and her approach seems to describe much of what the Kurds and their allies are trying to achieve in Rojava.

How do you think Ostrom’s work relates to Marxism?

For a start, Marxism has stressed class struggle and macro change. Marxists have argued that revolution will transform society and provide a break from old oppressive structures with the introduction of communism.  Ostrom’s micro analysis about how you build practical institutional structures to promote more ecological, equal and diverse societies, can be rejected as irrelevant by the left.  Constructing these structures is a waste of time in capitalism because Marxists might argue capitalist systems will destroy them.  Indeed it is good to be critical of Ostrom from this perspective because she didn’t focus on the real tragedy of the commons, the fact that commons were enclosed and commoners expelled by the rich and powerful. However if you don’t think about the nuts and bolts of governance in a post capitalist society, revolution, in my opinion, will fail to produce institutions that genuinely promote liberation.

When we talked the other night you mentioned that the left often thinks in terms of revolution, but has little plan of how to set up resource management and governance systems afterwards. Could you explain what you mean by this? How do you think Ostrom’s work can be helpful in that regard?

Getting there by destroying repressive power structures is the task of revolutionaries and remains essential.  However revolutions can only be the start. Any post-revolutionary society is in danger of reproducing the previous ways of doing things. Therefore thinking carefully about institutional decisions to make sure that post-revolutionary structures work to promote participation and genuine democratic control is essential but too often forgotten.  Ostrom was fascinated by the practice of participation and looked in some detail at how to build alternative structures, in doing so she provides both radical inspiration and practical suggestions.  You can see how the best of the Latin American lefts thinkers, for example, Marta Harnecker, both advocate commons and a more nuanced understanding of institutional factors if we are to transform society in a direction which is sustainable (in both ecological and social terms).

You mention the Kurdish struggle in Rojava. How do you think Ostrom’s work can help us understand the situation there? Have you had any conversations with Kurdish activists about her work?

Yes many times. The Kurds and their allies in Rojava are putting forward the ideas of Ocalan and Bookchin, based on ecology, feminism, diversity, and self-management. Ostrom’s work fits with this and I often talked to Kurdish activists about her work. Sadly my friend Mehmet Aksoy was killed by ISIS in Raqqa in September, Mehmet was a journalist and filmmaker from North London.  His loss is huge to all who knew him.  He commissioned me to write an article about Elinor Ostrom and Rojava, you can find it here.

You seem excited about the new book you’re writing, a biography of the Indigenous leader, Hugo Blanco. Could you tell me a bit about it?

Hugo is perhaps the most important ecosocialist leader on the planet.  In 1962 he led an uprising for Indigenous land rights, when he was a member of the Fourth International in Peru. This was successful and brought land reform but he was imprisoned until 1970. Aged 83, he is still an active militant and publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena (Indigenous struggle). I am in the happy position of getting emails from him nearly every day. Elinor Ostrom was about cooperation rather than political militancy and revolution, and yet they are very similar individuals—committed to ecological matters and friends to Indigenous people.  He has lived through prison, exile, being a Senator, and is still very busy. In recent years he has been supporting communities opposing destructive mining projects in the North of Peru. The Zapatistas in Mexico have been a big influence on his thinking, which has shifted from more traditional Leninism to a more horizontal and anarchist approach. He is a very inspiring person and astute political thinker, so I want to spread both his words and wisdom and Elinor’s.

This is a question for the New Year. You’re a Marxist, a Green Party candidate, you ascribe to Zen Buddhism, and your work now is focusing on Hugo Blanco, Elinor Ostrom, and Louis Althusser. What are some common questions, concerns, ideas, or passions that will drive you in the next year?

Its sounds quite disparate when you put it like that.  My key focus is how to challenge the ecological crisis that threatens both humanity and other species.  This is a crisis of economic growth, we can’t produce, consume, and waste at increasing levels without challenging basic biological cycles on planet Earth.  So Marx’s analysis of Capitalism remains to me vital to understanding the cause of ecological crisis in terms of an entire social and economic system based on growth. Marx once noted, ‘Accumulate, accumulate is Moses and the Prophets’— the secular religion of capitalism puts economic expansion and profit at the centre of everything. Louis Althusser, a highly controversial figure, remains to my mind the most sophisticated reader of Marx. So, yes, I have a passion for thinking about green politics and acting to further green politics but I am keen to be flexible in what I do. While from Trump and climate change the outlook seems bleak, there is an upsurge of enthusiasm for radical politics, so in the coming year I hope to support and empower the emergence of political alternatives. I am not a believer in one political organisation being ‘correct’ to the exclusion of all others, so amongst other things I am excited, on the one hand, by efforts to green Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and on the other within the Green Party work of a new generation of activists, for example, Aimee Challenor in promoting LGBTIQ politics.

Politics is endless struggle. Both Elinor Ostrom and Hugo Blanco have made me rethink how I do politics, making it more radical and practical, so spreading the word about their work will continue to be significant to me. And, yes, once I have finished writing the Hugo Blanco book, I will start writing Althusser for Revolutionaries.

Aaron Vansintjan is a PhD student researching food and cities, and a co-editor of Uneven Earth. He recently edited the book by Giorgos Kallis, In defense of degrowth, which is now available in print.

Elinor Ostrom’s rules for radicals: Cooperative alternatives beyond markets and states by Derek Wall is available from Pluto Press. 

Photo by NevilleNel

The post Why the left needs Elinor Ostrom appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve known Derek Wall for some time as a friend on Twitter, a fellow admirer of Elinor Ostrom, an Ostrom scholar, and an official in the Green Party of England and Wales. This is not my first introduction to him as a scholar; I read his The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014), which he was kind enough to share with me in proof.

As is customary (and unfortunately necessary) in any general treatment of Ostrom, Wall begins his introductory chapter by citing Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a jumping off point. I say it’s unfortunately necessary because Hardin’s ahistorical nonsense has gotten around the world many times while Ostrom’s truth about the governance of actual, historical commons was just getting its boots on. Never mind that Hardin himself later admitted that he knew little to nothing about the actual history of commons governance, and conceded that the title was unfortunate. He is still a perennial “authority” for neoliberal ideologues and right-libertarians (many of whom apparently know nothing of the commons beyond Hardin’s reference to them) who wish to “prove” that efficient commons governance is impossible.

Elinor Ostrom’s most famous work, Governing the Commons, was a broad survey of case studies of commons governance in history — including some commons which persist under their old governance rules to this day — and a set of eight principles of successful commons governance which she inferred from that history.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for ‘demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization’ (Nobel.org 2009). She argued that commons, including common land, forests or fisheries that were owned collectively, could be conserved. This was radical stuff; other economists argued, along with Garrett Hardin, that collective ownership would always fail because of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which led to over use and disaster….

According to Ostrom indigenous people and others have often maintained commons for hundreds or even thousands of years without destroying these environments. Ostrom argued that democratic control, rather than top-down management or simple privatisation, works to conserve nature.

After a brief biographical sketch — including a childhood where she picked up a frugal DIY ethos, and the possible influence of her husband Vincent on her interest in the commons — Wall goes on to finish up the introductory chapter with an argument for the general importance of Ostrom’s work.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as being on the Left, as Wall concedes, and could at least plausibly be accused of ignoring class conflict, her work is nevertheless of value to those of us on the Left who do use a class analysis. First, the commons — with the rules for successful governance she distilled from her historical studies — are an invaluable addition to the organizational toolkit for a postcapitalist society. Regardless of whether Ostrom herself paid adequate attention to the historic nature of the state as an instrument of class power, and in suppressing and enclosing the commons, those of us who are interested in resurrecting the commons as an organizing logic (e.g. the commons-based peer production model promoted by the P2P Foundation, the commons-based local economies promoted by the new municipalist movements, etc.) owe it to ourselves to take her seriously. And second, regardless of her arguable lack of historical class analysis, her findings are themselves a valuable weapon of class struggle.

She developed a body of research that can be used to defend the commons and commoners. Theory, including Ostrom’s, can have a material effect. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, collectively-owned resources have been stolen from communities with the simple justification that the commons was inevitably ‘tragic’. Left to collective ownership, it is often claimed, individuals would abuse the system and wreck the commons. Either privatisation or strong state control was needed to prevent catastrophe…. [Ostrom] found that commons could be made to work and were not automatically doomed because of an intrinsic flaw in human nature. Her careful research is a powerful weapon of self-defence for those who wish to protect a commons under threat.

“Equally radical and useful,” Wall continues, is Ostrom’s broader argument for political and economic organizational models “beyond the market and the state.” She demolishes, obviously, the neoliberal conception of corporate “privatization” as the only alternative to state ownership. But her work is more important still for the Left. In practice, the main currents of 20th century socialism adopted either some mix of market and state as their primary organizational model — the “market socialism” of Lange and Tito, or central planning that can only be distinguished from state control with heavy-duty squinting. With the commons, Ostrom offers the Left — and in particular Marxists — a way to recover Marx’s vision of a future society that is genuinely both post-capitalist and post-state.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as a Leftist, and the main influences on her work were fairly mainstream (e.g. institutional economics, public choice theory and game theory), she developed those influences in directions that were, intentionally or not, quite congenial to certain currents of the Left. Her approach to research, in itself, reflected considerable elements of what would later be called a P2P ethos; her work “was based on what she termed co-production,” acting as “part of a larger network,” with knowledge and theory “constructed with the active participation of the community.”

And her idea of democracy, which she saw as the key to commons management and the solution of many other problems, was far from the conventional notions being peddled in academia at that time.

[B]y democracy she meant not just traditional liberal democracy but popular involvement through direct participation, not top-down institutions. She and her husband Vincent spent a lifetime arguing that the more that people were involved in constructing the rules of governance, the better the rules would work…. She thought the exact form that such direct democracy might take was likely to differ from place to place.

In this regard she resembles thinkers from Kropotkin to Graeber, who see “democracy” not as some crowning achievement of dead white males in a handful of privileged times and places, but something that people have naturally been doing in face-to-face groups everywhere since the beginning of humanity, in settings from folkmotes to pirate utopias, when their efforts were not suppressed — often by formally “democratic” states.

But in the end, Wall dismisses the question of whether Ostrom was “really” on the Left as irrelevant compared to that of what uses her work can be put to by the Left.

I am not ultimately making any claim in this book that Elinor Ostrom was on the left, nor even trying with much precision to pigeonhole Ostrom politically…. [M]y main aim is to make her work accessible and to show how those on the left, especially the ecosocialist left, can make productive use of her diverse and provocative thinking…. The extent to which she was radical can be judged by the effects of her work…. Thus, this book, chapter by chapter, examines her work and shows how it can be of practical use.

(NOTE: Anyone who enjoys this book but would like some more detailed background on Ostrom’s early life and the specific formative influences on her work can find plenty of both in Wall’s earlier book The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom.)

Chapters Two through Four are an examination, at increasing levels of generality, of the lessons of Ostrom’s studies on the commons: on the subject matter of Governing the Commons itself in Chapter Two, on the broader lessons of her research on the commons for ecological issues in general in Chapter Three, and the implications of an organizational model “beyond market and state” for society as a whole.

Chapter Two begins with the original context of Ostrom’s research into the commons: Hardin’s unfortunate article (doubly unfortunate in its influence) on the subject, and summarizes the results (including the eight rules for effective governance she distilled from her historical investigations).

Hardin’s presumption comes across as even more egregious in Ostrom’s account of the lecture she attended: not only did he feel justified in saying, based entirely on an a priori analysis of his totally imaginary and ashistorical model of the “commons,” that they were doomed absent massive state intervention, but he went so far as to proclaim that the only solution was mandating universal sterilization after the first child.

Hardin saw the overconsumption of resources as the inevitable result of overpopulation and human incapacity for self-restraint. I would note the irony of this, considering that: 1) the actual overgrazing of the commons in England was the work of landed interests — the same people pushing for enclosure in the interest of “efficiency” — using their political influence to ignore the rules by which villagers had up until then governed their commons quite effectively and sustainably; 2) overconsumption of resources is the result, not of a do-nothing state, but of the state actively promoting the consumption of subsidized resource inputs by capitalist industry through the enclosure of land and resource commons and giving big business preferential access to them. The real villain, in the destruction of natural resources, is not ordinary villagers overgrazing their sheep in the want of proper government or corporate oversight; it is Nestle draining aquifers free of charge and California factory farms wasting subsidized irrigation water, with the active help and encouragement of the state.

It’s also worth noting that Hardin’s right-libertarian fans have no coherent criterion for distinguishing the “private” property they favor from the “collective” property they oppose, and no basis for explaining how the capitalist corporation qualifies as “private property” but the natural resource commons does not. The corporation is every bit as much an example of collective ownership as the commons. It is legally not the property of the shareholders, either collectively or severally, but of a corporate person; the “property” rights of the shareholders consist mostly in participating in the election of the Board of Directors (in most cases a self-perpetuating oligarchy of inside directors selected by cooptation, in actual practice), and to whatever dividends management sees fit to issue.

If anything it’s the corporation that’s subject to a real tragedy of the commons because its de facto property rights are vested in a managerial oligarchy whose material interests are diametrically opposed to those of the people who are in direct contact with the day-to-day situation, experience the effects of the policies made by management, and whose situational knowledge, social capital and effort are the actual source of value. On the other hand it is in the interest of management to strip the organization of human capital and gut its long-term productive capacities for the sake of boosting quarterly earnings (and with them their own bonuses and stock holdings).

Although Ostrom was not an anarchist and not opposed in principle (or even practice) to either the state or the large corporation, her findings in Governing the Commons were nearly the opposite of Hardin’s assumptions. If Hardin believed humans were incapable of self-governance and could be saved from themselves only by the intervention of higher authority, Ostrom had faith in the ability of people in face-to-face groups to work out solutions to the problems they faced if they were not prevented from doing so by interference from above. Some five or six of her eight principles of governance, based on her observation of successful commons, involve either vesting ownership and decision-making authority in those who use the resources, directly experience the effects of the governance rules, and are in day-to-day contact with the situation, or preventing interference from above by authoritarian institutions beyond the control of users.

The design rule that commons should be “nested” or federated within larger systems — particularly at the bioregional level — is also the main principle of her views on environmental policy (Chapter Three). It strikes me that in Ostrom’s vision of a polycentric system of governance with the commons as its core logic, the state plays a role similar to that of Cosma Orsi’s “Partner State,” as developed by Michel Bauwens:  i.e. a platform which enables or facilitates the work of the commons, and maintains a congenial environment for their operation. In this she is in the very broad tradition going back to Saint-Simon, developed by Proudhon and Marx among others, that envisons “governance of persons” being replaced by “the administration of things.”

In her work on the commons, Ostrom showed that humans were capable of cooperative behavior mediated neither by the cash nexus nor by state administration. The larger application of this principle to society as a whole is the subject of Chapter Four. Ostrom was no one-trick pony. “Beyond Markets and States” does not mean simply the commons as a “third alternative,” but a whole ecosystem of cooperative and democratic options. She saw modern institutions like the corporation as commons prone to dysfunctions from incentive problems, and saw the stakeholder cooperative as a way to align the incentives of those in direct contact with the situation and who created the value with the success of the corporation. She also endorsed Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) and supported the broader vision of a Solidarity Economy.

The knowledge and incentive principles that emerged from Ostrom’s study of the commons, and led her to support other Solidarity Economy institutions like the cooperative, also informed her general understanding of democracy — the subject of Chapter Five,”Deep Democracy.” All decision-making, she believed, is apt to be improved by involving those directly affected by it. And this vision of deep democracy is extremely relevant to libertarian strands of socialism. Although Ostrom shied away from the “socialist” label and tended to identify it with top-down state control, Wall notes, her concrete principles are quite compatible with socialist models like that of the autonomists Negri and Hardt. He also draws parellels between her thought and Bookchin’s confederalism (as well as Kurdish attempts to put this into practice in Rojava).

Given this preoccupation with empowering those affected by decisions, it only makes sense that Ostrom would have a broader interest in amplifying the voices of the unheard and powerless. This is the subject of the chapter on “Feminism and Intersectionality.” She was also heavily influenced by her own experience of discrimination, as a woman (about which you can read in more detail in the biographical material in Chapter One); for example, she was denied the opportunity to major in economics because she lacked adequate background in higher mathematics, but also was prevented from enrolling in a course of mathematical studies because faculty felt such studies would be wasted on a woman who would just get married anyway.

The chapter on “Trust and Cooperation” starts with the significant influence of game theory on Ostrom’s institutional analysis. As with most issues, Ostrom shied away from adopting general positions on “human nature,” whether they made cooperation or competition the more essential human characteristic. Rather, she focused on institutional designs and procedural rulesets to optimize for cooperative behavior.

Interestingly, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game — which influences many thinkers who are pessimistic about the potential for human cooperation — starts with the assumption that the subjects are isolated from direct communication with each other, and have all their contact with the world outside their cell filtered through authority figures. Ostrom’s approach to commons design and governance, on the other hand, assumes free and ongoing communication between those seeking to deal with their shared circumstances in an optimal manner. In other words, isolation and atomization tends to increase authoritarianism and betrayal, while communication produces the optimal result. Perhaps this is why authoritarians who promote the ugliest and most authoritarian pictures of “human nature” also have the biggest vested interest in turning groups of people against each other, and isolating them in the face of their rulers. People who are worried about nonsense like the threat to “traditional marriage,” or “illegal aliens,” or trans women in public restrooms, or “Sharia Law,” are a lot less likely to notice their areas of commonality and work together to promote their common interest against the billionaires who are actually screwing them over.

Ostrom found that, conversely, ongoing relationships with high levels of communication tend to build trust.

She found… that research suggested that cheap talk was useful. By cheap talk, she meant that if commoners or others were able to communicate directly with each other, trust was more likely to occur than if they did not meet and exchange views.

Given everything we’ve seen about Ostrom’s views so far, it would be reasonable to expect strong sympathies for a peer-to-peer approach to science. And as it turns out, that’s right on the mark (Chapter Eight, “Science for the People”). Science, she believed, was prone to dominance by elites whose paradigms became generational dogmas. She sought to empower dissidents and outsiders to challenge these dogmas. Ostrom’s approach to research, Wall writes, was similar to Paolo Freire’s: a co-learning process in which the community was involved, not a “Knowledge Bank.” It’s reflected in her approach to investigating the commons.

Her approach to this was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so to have good ideas about solving this problem than outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack.

She took a similarly Freirean attitude toward education as such, arguing that democracy, commons management, and other forms of self-governance would likely fail if public school pedagogy was passive rather than participatory.

Finally, she took the position that knowledge itself was a commons and put her P2P approach to research into practice in her workshops at Bloomington.

In her analysis of institutions (Chapter Nine, “Transforming Institutions”), Ostrom’s focus was on what people actually do, not on paper rules and tables of organization. Her mapping of institutions included actual power relationships within institutions, how powerful members could use formal rules and procedures to pursue their own interest, and how technical “legality” could serve as a cover for robbery.

At the same time, the form taken by institutional rules can affect the balance of power between different interests, and rules can be rewritten to make institutions more democratic and egalitarian. For example, the rules of corporate governance can be rewritten to empower internal and external stakeholders whose interests are currently ignored by self-aggrandizing management. But because of the law of unintended consequences, there must be a tentative and ad hoc nature to institutional design and rulemaking, and a willingness to frequently reassess policies in the face of ongoing experience. And obviously, based on previously examined considerations in Ostrom’s design philosophy, the best way to promote successful adaptation to circumstances is by empowering those directly involved to assess and respond to feedback from previous decisions.

The final chapter (“Conflict and Contestation”) is Wall’s overall assessment of Ostrom’s value for lessons. The biggest lesson he takes away is pluralism: a skepticism towards schematizers who want to build an entire society according to any one uniform blueprint, or any hegemonic organizational model. It’s this quality in Ostrom that made me include a C4SS study on her in my series on “Anarchists Without Adjectives” (I know she wasn’t an anarchist). Like Kropotkin and Ward, she had a fondness for the particularity and sense of place of all the different ad hoc experiments in cooperative organization that ordinary people have come up with in the nooks and crannies of history, and a faith and openness in whatever arrangements people happen to come up with when dealing with one another as equals.

At the same time, as a Marxist, Wall subjects her to some criticism. Ostrom failed to pay adequate attention — or much at all — to the class dimension in history. She treated issues like the workability of the commons as primarily a difference in ideas or understanding, a matter simply of showing where people like Hardin were mistaken and correcting his ideas, when in fact the driver of Enclosure historically has not been any disinterested concern for “efficiency” but rather naked power interest — with “thinkers” like Hardin serving, to borrow a phrase from Marx, as hired prize-fighters on behalf of the propertied classes. I noted this unfortunate tendency myself in researching my study of Ostrom: for example her dismissal as “conspiracy theories” of the suggestions that World Bank loans and other foreign aid served mainly the imperialist goals of integrating the Global South into the global system of corporate power.

Nevertheless, from Wall’s Marxist perspective and from other postcapitalist and anarchist perspectives, Ostrom’s functional analysis of commons and other institutions is of great value to those of us thinking about what kind of society we want to build in the future. Wall notes that Marx himself “in his later writings became more and more interested in the indigenous and actual working commons.” For example, he acknowledged late in life that open field systems like the Russian Mir might develop directly into components of a socialist society, without being amalgamated (on the later Soviet model) into state property under professional administrators.

Photo by derekbruff

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Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. Her theorising of the commons has been celebrated as groundbreaking and opening the way for non-capitalist economic alternatives, yet, many radicals know little about her. This book redresses this, revealing the indispensability of her work for green politics, left economics and radical democracy.

Ostrom has often been viewed as a conservative or managerial thinker; but Derek Wall’s analysis of her work reveals a how it is invaluable for developing a left political programme in the twenty-first century. Central to Ostrom’s work was the move ‘beyond panaceas’; transforming institutions to widen participation, promote diversity and favour cooperation over competition. She regularly challenged academia as individualist, narrow and elitist and promoted a radical take on education, based on participation. Her investigations into how we share finite resources has radical implications for the Green movement and her rubric for a functioning collective ownership is highly relevant in order in achieving radical social change.

As activists continue to reject traditional models of centralised power, Ostrom’s work will become even more vital, offering a guide to creating economics that exists beyond markets and states.

Author Biography

Derek Wall is the author of numerous books including Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals (Pluto, 2017), Economics After Capitalism(Pluto, 2015), The Rise of the Green Left (Pluto, 2010) and The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge, 2014). He teaches Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London and was International Co-ordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Endorsements

‘A fascinating insight into the only woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in alternatives to the neoliberal consensus’ – Caroline Lucas, Co-Leader of the Green Party

‘An astute interpretative overview of Ostrom’s far-ranging scholarship on the commons: inspiration and guidance for a new generation of commons thinkers and activists’ – David Bollier, author of Think Like a Commoner, and Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics

‘The UK’s vote to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US President are both signs that working people are rejecting the global economy. This makes the work of Elinor Ostrom, with its focus on common ownership and political empowerment, very timely’ – Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for South West England

Contents

Acknowledgments
Rules for Radicals
1. Elinor Ostrom’s Radical Life
2. The Commons: From Tragedy to Triumph
3. Climate Change, Ecology and Green Politics
4. Beyond Markets and States
5. Deep Democracy
6. Feminism and Intersectionality
7. Trust and Cooperation
8. Science for the People
9. Transforming Institutions
10. Conflict and Contestation
Bibliography
Resources for Change
Index

Photo by Susan of Mad In Pursuit

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Republished from Bright-Green.org, William Pinkney-Baird gives us an overview of Derek Wall’s Economics After Capitalism.

The commons works best by consensus and, unlike capitalism, does not depend on constant growth. It provides shared access to important resources so that human needs can be met with potential equity. Anti-capitalist globalisation could be labelled positively as the movement for the commons…. Capitalism seeks to extend commodification; the anti-capitalist movement resists by conserving the commons.

In his book Economics After Capitalism: A Guide to the Ruins and a Road to the Future (Pluto Press, 2015), Derek Wall (International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales) discusses various critiques of capitalism, and examines how we can create practical alternatives to capitalism and build a ‘democratic economy and a future free of rampant climate change, financial chaos, and the ravages of elite rule’.

Here, we outline the main arguments of his book:

As long as capitalism has existed, in whichever form, there have been a great many voices of dissent, movements and thinkers crying out and struggling against what they have seen as an unjust, exploitative and destructive system.

Indeed, as Derek Wall argues in Economics After Capitalism, such ‘anti-capitalist sentiments pre-date capitalism as an advanced industrial or post-industrial system based on profit and investment’.

Thus, Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple and the Buddha spoke out against attachment to materialistic possessions, peasants revolted against the enclosure of land, Karl Marx developed an analysis of capitalism as an exploitative system but key to the progression of human society, green movements have challenged the basis of capitalism on consumerism and economic growth, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico fought against the suffering created through free trade, and the Occupy protests have challenged an economic system in which the top 1% of the world’s population now have as much wealth as the bottom 99%.

Following an outline of the ideas contained within his book, Wall begins with those he terms ‘anti-capitalist capitalists’, those economists who have criticised neo-liberalism, globalisation, and the economics of austerity, whilst still maintaining the need for capitalism, albeit in a fairer and more stable form. However, such arguments, Wall contends, ‘act as a vaccine against the virus of anti-capitalist protest’ — particularly those more radical voices who ‘suggest that markets are innately undemocratic, that indefinite economic growth is ecologically unsustainable and that the market-based system is tyrannical because it reduces human life to a narrow pursuit of quantitative advantage’.

The remaining chapters of his book focus, for the most part, on those who have been more critical of capitalism, for a variety of reasons. In these chapters are found the ideas of an array of writers and theorists, including those who criticise capitalism through the lens of corporate power or the workings of global finance; those who focus on the drive for unsustainable economic growth or the cheapening of human existence as ‘all needs in a capitalist society are transformed into the needs for commodities’; those who turn their eyes to the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and imperialism or the gendered oppression inherent in capitalism.

But amid all of this discussion of capitalist as an exploitative and oppressive system, Wall provides a ray of hope through glimpses of an alternative, not only some of the solutions proposed by different thinkers and movements, but various movements that have actually put anti-capitalist ideas into practice. These range from anarchists during the Spanish Civil War building local economies based on anarchist principles and reorganising factory production through workers’ control; to local currencies throughout the world encouraging local economic activity as an alternative to capitalist globalisation; to organised networks of unemployed people in Argentina who self-organise their own economies.

Returning in his final chapter to the question laid out at the outset of the book (‘How can we create practical alternatives to capitalism that work to put food on the table, providing long-term material well-being not only for a minority but a whole planet?’), Wall sketches some thoughts on what he sees as the best alternative to capitalist economics–a system in which the commons takes centre stage. Drawing upon the works of both Karl Marx and Eleanor Ostrom in emphasising the importance of the commons, Wall argues that ‘the anti-capitalist slogan above all others should be “Defend, extend, and deepen the commons”‘:

The commons works best by consensus and, unlike capitalism, does not depend on constant growth. It provides shared access to important resources so that human needs can be met with potential equity. Anti-capitalist globalisation could be labelled positively as the movement for the commons…. Capitalism seeks to extend commodification; the anti-capitalist movement resists by conserving the commons.

This embrace of the commons encompasses a range of struggles and movements: from squatting in unused buildings, to the digital commons of such projects as Wikipedia; from the right of workers to buy up the companies that employ them to renewable community energy. In addition to such examples of struggles for the commons, Wall identifies various other practical examples of anti-capitalist economic proposals, from a basic income scheme to wealth taxes, which will help promote a transition to a different kind of economy.

However, Wall warns us that under capitalism, ‘all alternatives tend to get corrupted, destroyed, or used to strengthen the system’. Both political parties and mass media are dominated by neo-liberalism, the rich and the powerful act together to preserve their privilege. Wall argues for the need for ‘tenacity, flexibility, and persistently burrowing away’ in the face of this power of capitalism, and warns of two failed alternative strategies: ‘to say that we have a basically fair, but flawed system’ or ‘to say that no change is possible until everything changes’. The capitalist system must be utterly transformed, but this is a process that needs to begin now.

The final paragraph of the book is worth citing at length, setting out what needs to be done:

The political struggles to win power to create change and take on the powerful need to be discussed in detail. From class composition to political parties, there are many questions that need researching. The question of ideology, our imagined relationship to real world conditions, is also vitally important to discuss. There are many more books to write, but material political practice is of greater necessity. Let’s continue the intellectual task of understanding capitalism and alternatives to capitalism in necessary detail. Let’s challenge the 0.001%, who currently run the world, and let’s grow a new system. The future of capitalism is inequality, instability, ecocide and, even where it seems to work, it’s a system, invented by humans, that uses (and abuses) us as tools. We can do better. A democratic and ecologically sustainable future is necessary and possible, but we will have to fight for it. Let’s build it now.

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