The Tragedy of the Commons
A catchy phrase gets a life of its own; once it exists it is deemed to contain some truth
This catchy phrase, ‘the tragedy of the commons’ was first coined in 1968, and is much over-used by those who wish to argue that shared resources will inevitably be over-exploited as the result of human greed and short-sightedness. It is used by those who think that greed and self-interest best make the world go round, and who hate the idea that societies could be cooperative rather than competitive. It is a poisonous phrase, partly because it is as glib as a sugar coating, partly because the idea it conveys so glibly is completely baseless, and partly because it serves the purposes of those who argue for unbridled capitalism, the so-called neo-liberal economics. The sort of people who named that ferry that sank in the North Sea ‘The Spirit of Free Enterprise’.
The American Garrett Hardin coined the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ as the title of an article in ‘Science’ in 1968, where he suggested that sharing resources, such as commons, always failed because individuals took advantage of a supposed lack of regulation. Hardin didn’t actually know much about commons, which are often a very sustainable way for communities to safeguard and share resources; in the English countryside the commonage system worked well for many hundreds of years. It did not fail even in the UK and is still functioning across our upland grazings, where commoners nowadays communicate and co-operate using Facebook groups. But Hardin had no training in social or agricultural history. He was an advocate of eugenics and a vice president of the American Eugenics Society, which you might think would nowadays discredit him. The article in Science was concerned with overpopulation, and made a loopy connection between what Hardin saw as the disadvantages of both the commons and the welfare state. The welfare state, according to Hardin, was analogous to a common right in that it supported people to breed ‘as a fundamental human right’ and he argued that ‘freedom in a commons brings ruin to all’.
The communing system in the UK did not fail because the commoners were greedy. The system was dismantled (except in the uplands) because the common rights were stolen from our country forebears, who fought desperately to prevent the loss of their rights and were savagely repressed by our overweening aristocracy for doing so. The upland commons were largely left intact because at that time, before the fashion for grouse shooting, they were not thought worth stealing. The peasantry had been democratically managing their commons for generations. Villagers had ways of regulating how common resources were looked after so that they could be sustainably used in perpetuity. They employed officers to make sure the commons were not overgrazed, and they had mechanisms, for example, to make sure the cultivated open fields were well manured, and rewards for those planting clover, which they knew improved fertility. Peasants were allotted strips by lot so that they all had a fair share of the more fertile strips. The daily lives of many peasants and cottagers were much more genuinely democratic than the lives of the industrial and agricultural labourers that they were eventually forced to become. Hardin’s ideas about the commons were refuted by Elinor Ostrom in a work that earned her a Nobel Prize, but those who believe in unbridled competition and wish to denigrate any idea that we humans might live more cooperatively and more fairly repeat ‘the tragedy of the commons’ constantly enough for it to have the force almost of truth.
Elinor Ostrom disproved Hardin’s contention by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities around the world manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests. She showed that when natural resources are used collectively by communities rules are usually established for how these are to be cared for and they are generally used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable. In fact resources are much more likely to be overexploited by private enterprise than by commoners. Commoners cooperate and safeguard the resources of their own communities. Private enterprise competes to use up resources as fast as possible in order to provide ‘shareholder value’. But those who wish to argue against the sharing of resources and cooperative models of living continue to harp on about the ‘tragedy of the commons’ because it suits their purposes.
This is an example, then, of the power a glib and catchy phrase may be used by those wishing to mislead us. To those of us who are interested in the state of the countryside it is very relevant, because it misleads us about the nature of our rural history. When land-use was shared among the villagers of my, and your, village, there were complex democratic systems to ensure the shared resources of the village fields, pastures and common were conserved. Officers were elected to enforce ‘stints’, the limits set on how many animals could be grazed on the commons, for example, and the use of dung to fertilise the land was also controlled. This system continued for many hundreds of years, and the tragedy, when it finally came with the Enclosure Acts, was that the commoners were deprived of their common rights and reduced to becoming labourers at the mercy of employers, where they had previously been able to subsist on the production of the village fields and the resources of the commons.
The countryside we have today, where one or two people in every parish own almost all the land and functionally exclude the rest of us from most of our own villages is the result of the real tragedy of the deliberate destruction of the commons, not the tragedy dreamt up by the eugenicist Hardin. That land is now controlled by a tiny number of farmers who are free to exploit it for their own personal gain, and that the rest of us have little say in the way the surface of our planet is looked after, was not the inevitable result of some natural law as Hardin would have it. It was an historical injustice that has left us, the descendants of the commoners, no longer able to manage the planet for the benefit of all, but helplessly watching as landowners are free to reduce biodiversity and pollute once thriving rivers for their private profit. The tragedy was the destruction of the communities that managed the countryside for the good of all, and their replacement by a countryside managed for the benefit of a few rich men. Self-regulating peasant communities were replaced by a population of day labourers living at the mercy of their employers. The system of insecure tied-cottages left them vulnerable to becoming simultaneously homeless and unemployed if, for example, they tried to start a trade union, and if they left the land the slums in town were even worse. But history is written by the victors. That there was a prolonged resistance to the enclosures and to the loss of common rights has been almost written out of our history, and this massive injustice is not called the land grab that it was, but the harmless sounding ‘enclosures’. Some of us may even be naïve enough to be glad that it gave us the hedgerows that make our half-.dead countryside look pleasant.
The rural aristocracy we read about in the novels of Jane Austen often have sons in the West Indies, running the family’s sugar plantations, worked by slaves, or in the army and navy, involved in the colonisation of India. The reader may worry that the marriage plans of one of the heroines may be ruined if the young man catches some tropical fever, but the slaves dying on the ships and in the plantations are never mentioned. The landed gentry of Austen’s novels benefitted from the enclosures and created a new social order in the countryside, where the enclosing owners of country mansions and estates rented their stolen land to a new class of capitalist farmer, able to use the cheap labour of the country people who had lost their common rights and been turned into paupers. Many of those who built mansions and created landed estates all over the UK were known at the time as West Indians because that is where their money was made, out of the suffering of slaves on the sugar plantations. The physical and social structure of the countryside we have today grew out of the money made by the dispossession of the peasants who once worked the fields in common, the exploitation of slaves in the West Indies and the merciless exploitation of India at the hands of the East India Company. It is important that we who live in the countryside understand how it came to be the way it is, and that a countryside dominated by the heirs of the enclosers and the slavers, and the heirs of the capitalist farmers who supplanted the village peasant farmers, is not the only possibility.
Just to the north of the Scottish border the grouse moors of Langholm, put up for sale by the Duke of Buccleuch, have been bought by a local community project planning the development of opportunities to revitalise the village and the creation of a nature reserve on the former grouse moors. This is made possible because of legislation by a Scottish Parliament determined to rebalance Scotland’s iniquitous land ownership, giving communities first refusal when their local land comes up for sale, and creating a land bank to help finance the buy-out.
South of the border the vast Rothbury estate of the Duke of Northumberland has just come up for sale for a similar figure but since this is England there is no mechanism to support a community buy-out. If the Scottish government - by no stretch of the imagination a bunch of commies - can support the right to roam as well as community buy-outs, there is no good reason why we should not campaign for such changes to happen south of the border, so that communities can once again actively engage with their local landscapes instead of looking on from what few footpaths are available to them.
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Thanks for summarising that so well, we urgently need a rebalancing of so many areas of our lives. Sadly as we have no courageous enlightened leaders we need a groundswell of common voices.
Lovely stuff. Thank you for among other things making me feel less alone.
R