* dissertation / Book: Lukas Peter. Democracy, Markets and the Commons: : Towards a Reconciliation of Freedom and Ecology. Political Science | Volume 107, December 2021.

URL = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355677260_Democracy_Markets_and_the_Commons_Towards_a_Reconciliation_of_Freedom_and_Ecology

"This study was accepted as a dissertation by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Zurich in the fall semester 2017 ." (full-text version by transcript Verlag)

4.1 Collective action and “grim” social dilemmas ........................................ 52
4.2 The tragedy of monocentric orders ................................................. 54
4.3 The tragedy of privatization and the market......................................... 57
4.4 Overcoming tragedy through collective action ...................................... 70
4.5 Self-governing commons with the aid of eight design principles ..................... 75
4.6 Institutional diversity and polycentricity.............................................. 81
4.7 Interim conclusion.................................................................. 85

Chapter 5. An ecological understanding of the commons

5.1 Nature, language and social relations ............................................... 90
5.2 Concepts of nature and social reality................................................ 93
5.3 Autopoiesis and the interdependent co-creation of reality .......................... 100
5.4 Ecosystems, abundance and natural commons .................................... 106
5.5 Empathy, cooperation and a common(s) reality ..................................... 115
5.6 Ecological freedom, democracy and care............................................ 119
5.7 The civic tradition of ecological democracy and commoning ........................ 130

Chapter 6. Towards a commons theory of property

6.1 The normative language of goods ................................................. 144
6.2 Common needs, common resources and common property ......................... 148
6.3 Reinterpreting John Locke’s theory of property from a commons perspective ....... 155
6.4 Predistribution: commons in a property-owning democracy ........................ 180
6.5. Consumption goods: individual or common property? .............................. 194
6.6 Interim conclusion................................................................. 205

Chapter 7. The role of the state in a commons-creating society

7.1 Preliminary reflections on the state-commons relationship ........................ 207
7.1. Varieties of the state and the role of the commons .................................210
7.2 Public goods versus state-supported commons:...............................216
7.4 Creating commons in a non-ideal world – in and against the state .................. 239

Chapter 8. Commons and the market

8.1 The market in commons literature ................................................. 252
8.2 Enclosing commons and opening markets ......................................... 256
8.3 The market as a commons......................................................... 260
8.4 Responses to possible critiques of the market commons ........................... 274

Excerpts

The Commons and Property

Lukas Peters:

"The contrast of commons to individual private property:

"As the renowned commons scholar Yochai Benkler states in his book The Wealth of Networks, ‘Commons’ refers to a particular institutional form of structuring the rights to access, use, and control resources. It is the opposite of ‘property’ in the following sense: With property, law determines one particular person who has the authority to decide how the resource will be used. (Benkler 2006: 60)

Although, as I will later show, commons can be understood as property arrangements, Benkler’s juxtaposition remains significant: While individual private property is based on exclusion and dominion, commons are often structured according to the principles of (regulated) access and democratic (network) governance. The emphasis of commons theorists on inclusion and democratic regulation has, more generally, made commons a name for an alternative, emancipatory and emerging form of social organization. Here, economic activities are based on needs-oriented and non-hierarchical ‘peer-production’, which short-circuits the competitive market, the price mechanism and perpetual economic growth (Rifkin 2015; Mason 2015). In this sense, it can be said that commons are providing people with concrete examples of how to create a more inclusive, democratic and ecologically sustainable society within or beyond democratic capitalism.

To assess this possible solution to the diverse challenges contemporary societies face, I will examine whether – and if so, how – the concept of commons can strengthen democratic practices and institutions by limiting or even overcoming negative socio-economic, political and ecological effects of capitalist markets.

...

I will thus argue that ecological freedom is based on the principles of care for others and on the civic tradition of democracy, which enables us to understand commons not simply as a resource, but rather as a practice of commoning in, with and through nature. With this theoretical background, I then shift my focus and explore what a commons theory of property might look like. To do this, I contrast such an exemplary theory with John Locke’s classical labor theory of property and John Rawls’ more recent theory of a property-owning democracy. In my critique of Locke’s labor theory of property, we will discover that the pillars of a commons theory of property are guardianship, non-domination and needs satisfaction. In the following reinterpretation of John Rawls’ property-owning democracy, I argue that a more ecologically sound theory of (pre)distribution should not focus on productive monetary assets, but rather on the access to resources and their sustainable maintenance. In a final step, I emphasize that a commons theory of property must also include access to collective consumption goods, thereby increasing the freedom of individuals and the number of convivial social arrangements, while simultaneously decreasing humans’ detrimental ecological impact. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that commons property arrangements enable the creation of a relative abundance on a planet with limited resources."

The Commons and the State

Lukas Peter:

"After this development of a commons theory of property, I examine the relations between commons and the state and then between commons and the market.

In both cases, I argue that a commons-based or commons-creating society requires a significant democratization of both the state and the market. With reference to the Ostroms’ notion of coproduction, I maintain that a commons-creating society would not only imply that access to vital goods and resources should be provided by the state, but, more importantly, that state provision of public goods is transformed into a state support of commons and commoning. I illustrate this through the examples of housing, health care and education. Finally, in my analysis of the market-commons relationship, I contend that we should not simply condemn the market, but that we should, rather, transform the open and competitive market into what I call a market commons. While the former is supposedly self-regulating, the latter is democratically governed and regulated by those significantly affected by it. I explore this notion of the market commons with reference to the concepts and examples of associative and corporatist democracy, the social and solidarity economy and, finally, community-supported modes of production. In all these examples, antagonistic and thereby competitive relationships between isolated agents are mitigated through institutional arrangements of democratic negotiation and cooperation. Ultimately, I will argue that this democratic form of governance that lies at the heart of commons has the potential to solve the diverse and interrelated political, economic and ecological problems that we face today. That being said, it becomes clear that commons provide us with normatively robust and, simultaneously, practical alternatives to the tragedies of democratic capitalism. Yet as I will show, this alternative does not exist beyond markets and states, but lies, instead, in the democratic and ecological transformation of these institutions through commons and commoning."

Commons, Markets and Democracy

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