Commons-Based Capabilities

Discussion

Diego Lanzi:

"Throughout his long career, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has worked on poverty, inequality, social justice, and human development issues. Economic inequality and its consequences, as well as the lack of freedom that undermines human flourishing, have been the focus of his research.

Sen himself has publicly acknowledged his debt to Marx's ideas, notably:

- for teaching us that the most terrible inequalities may be hidden behind an illusion of normality and justice. (Sen, 2006: 81)

Therefore, it is not surprising that many of his contributions to economics, social sciences or development studies have different roots in classic Marxian works.

Firstly, it is true that Marx did not use the term capabilities, and did not interpret individual capacities as freedoms, but he was a strong believer that human flourishing needs capacity development and freedom, exactly what Sen suggests. Sen himself quotes, as a basic reference, Marx at the very beginning of his seminal book, ‘Commodities and capabilities’ (1985). Both Sen and Marx place human well-being at the core of their reasonings, and interpret human empowerment as the main force of liberation against inequality, poverty and under-development.

Secondly, Marx and Sen have repeatedly emphasized that commodities accumulation must not be the pillar of economic and social development. They have widely argued against ‘commodity fetishism’ and stressed that some value elements cannot be commodified like, for example, human dignity and freedom, or the right to creatively organize productive and re-productive activities.

Finally, Marx and Sen are two important thinkers of the egalitarian tradition of social and political thought. They have largely discussed existing tensions between economic incentives and social justice, and emphasized market institutions' inabilities to solve them.

Nevertheless, Sen believes that public action can correct social inequalities and eliminate deprivations of capabilities. He did not advocate transcending capitalism and market institutions for achieving social justice, as Marx did, and he did not invoke social struggles for ending domination, exploitation, and capitalism. For this reason, Sen has in mind a ‘diluted Marx’ (Fraser, 2016): the politically-correct social thinker appropriated by the analytical Marxism tradition.

In a radical perspective, more drastic measures are required to combat capitalism's injustices and failures than those admitted by Sen and others. This does not mean, however, that Sen's Capability Approach cannot offer interesting conceptual tools and categories for investigating which capabilities collectivities, communities and groups need to organize the circuit of the common. According to commonism, for instance, Marx's thought suggests to value commodities in terms of their immaterial value for abstract labor, i.e., the production of ideas. Such an assessment, inter alia, requires that individuals can control means of intellectual production, can share and feed living, social knowledge, and exercise autonomous institutionality. Indeed, these are collective capabilities. Thereby, a relevant issue for commonism is whether communities, collectivities, groups and the like, have developed capabilities for managing, evolving and preserving commons. Exactly those capacities emphasized in Marx's quote cited in the second Section of this essay (Marx and Engels, 1970: 92).

Furthermore, for self-governing the circuit of the common, social production, open education, collective ownership, self-valorization, shared-knowledge and autonomous institutions are all needed, and Sen's approach can tell us how to identify and assess capabilities for self-governance. For this sake, as we shall argue in the next Section, capabilities development must be designed consistently with Ostrom's principles for long-enduring, self-governance institutions for the common.

Capabilities and commons

For self-governing the circuit of the common, collectivities need, inter alia, education, trust, cohesion, full consciousness, complex skills and public reasoning. Hence, from a Capability Approach's perspective, we have to reason in terms of both individual and collective capabilities. Furthermore, we need to specify how capabilities for commons can be developed consistently with self-governance principles.

Our discussion in this Section is thus organized as follows: first, a simple taxonomy of capabilities to function is briefly outlined to deal with common resources governance issues; second, some domains for capabilities development are proposed based on Ostrom's work.

Some definitions

In Sen's Capability Approach, the capability set is the set of all feasible functionings vectors an individual can achieve (and choose among) in order to realize his/her well-being. Capabilities are freedoms, or causal powers (Martens, 2006), and they have both individual and collective dimensions.

Furthermore, capabilities are fuzzy entities. They refer, above all, to a person’s abilities, concrete skills and knowledge (S-caps). Individuals who lack these capabilities face shortfalls in their ability to exploit legal rights, public policies, or external and social conditions to achieve their goals. Moreover, S-caps are affected by attained functionings, i.e., doing routine jobs might reduce cognitive skills or learning abilities as well as achieving self-esteem could make effective abilities closer to potential ones.

Indeed, individual opportunities to attain well-being are not simply determined by individual skills or abilities. Public policies, economic entitlements, informal household rules and civic institutions and organizations also shape individual opportunities. Hence, given some S-caps, the set of attainable life-paths is heavily influenced by external factors and rules which are often beyond the individual's control (Nussbaum, 2000). These external capabilities (E-caps) are shaped by formal rights, or rules, as well as by informal norms of behavior or ascribed social roles, and they may change according to race, gender or social condition. In addition, E-caps can be radically influenced by achieved functionings and by S-caps because better education and widespread knowledge can lead to cultural changes, or better awareness of (and proactive adaptation to) social norms and inequalities (such as sex discrimination).

Finally, E-caps may directly determine S-caps if knowledge and skill acquisition are tacit processes based on multilateral information sharing. Taken together, external and innate capabilities describe individual options in terms of functioning achievements (the so-called option capabilities, or O-caps). E-caps are also social capabilities in both possible meanings of the expression, that are: collective capabilities, i.e., capabilities which can only be exploited by individuals as parts of groups, teams or collectivities; and socially-dependent capabilities, i.e., capabilities which are embedded in social structures and can only be exploited through social interaction.

Nevertheless, as stressed by Gasper (2002), human freedom is not simply defined by what a person does or could do, but also by how much what he/she does is consistent with what he/she believes is right and worth doing. Individuals define and debate which values and goals are relevant and valuable to them through discussion and dialogue about what capabilities are essential. In order to do this, agents need moral capabilities (M-caps) which enable them to interact, to form purposes and identities, to internalize ethical principles and to rate different life-paths. Additionally, M-caps are crucial for discussing social modes of production, reproduction, and common resource management, and for generating new kinds of behavior or models of development (social change). Finally, without well-nourished M-caps, skills could be wrongly oriented, larger option sets could cause confusion and weaknesses of will, and social norms and constraints could be automatically internalized with no criticisms or reactions. Some of these M-caps depend on individual traits, beliefs and attitudes; some others are genuinely social. Moreover, Begon (2017) emphasizes that if M-caps are taken seriously, capabilities won't just be only the possibility of achieving a particular functioning, but the substantive freedom to do so in any domain we find meaningful (capabilities to control).

Various types of capabilities do not necessarily have clear boundaries. They interact with each other and with respect to their achieved functionings: it is a matter of local politics to describe how. Indeed, such a fuzziness is explained by socially-embedded conversion processes of resources, entitlements and rights into freedom or well-being. Individuals belong to different local communities with diverse norms of behavior and group loyalties, and they assume, within collectivities or groups, different social roles. Individuals and communities are required to develop multi-fold capabilities at any stage of the circuit of the common in order to appropriate productive forces.

Let us discuss why.

First of all, communities, social groups and collectivities must have the freedom to form associations for creatively managing and preserving commons but, for doing this, they need open education, sufficient resources and time for public debate and public reasoning. Furthermore, legal rights and institutional rules should foster bottom-up, self-governance organizations based on collective ownership and democratic decision making. These emergent associations of individuals and communities would engage an open, informed and multi-disciplinary discussion about how to organize shared resources into productive/re-productive units and, in doing this, they would be entitled to introduce innovative goods, services or technologies with viral and non-proprietary licenses.

Secondly, once collective organizations and institutions for managing commons are designed and established, members of collectivities need proper skills and entitlements for exploiting common-pool resources, moral awareness on preservation and/or expansion needs and relational abilities for managing conflicts and disputes.

Thirdly, if sharing a common-pool resource generates new production possibilities in terms of derived goods or services, democratic and not-profit-oriented production units (like cooperatives) would be free to operate in a clear, and reliable, normative framework trough which to organize social production and peer-to-peer exchanges without markets or hierarchies.

Finally, to organize rules that specify rights and duties of social producers and to invest in new modes of production and usage creates a second-order common good that supports the birth of new forms of association for sharing more resources.

But, thence, if internal, external, collective, moral capabilities are all necessary for self-governing the common, how can we restrict our reasoning and identify some relevant capabilities from which to start from?

Capabilities for commons

In her scientific contributions, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has extensively investigated how to design long-lasting institutions that manage common resources, and the conditions under which self-governance organizations can successfully manage common resources.

Take, for instance, the following list of design principles for long enduring, self-governance institutions (Ostrom, 1990):

• define clear group boundaries;

• match rules governing the use of commons to local needs and conditions;

• ensure that those affected by rules can participate in modifying the rules;

• make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities;

• develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members behavior;

• use graduated sanctions for rules violators;

• provide dispute resolution mechanisms that are accessible and low-cost;

• respect the right to organize of groups and communities;

• build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

Straightforwardly, individuals, households or collectivities need a large array of capabilities in order to organize and manage their common resources through self-governing institutions. Without being exhaustive, we mention: internal, individual, S-caps for being able to assess relevant group boundaries and their modifications with respect to time and usage; collective, S-caps for building a credible, long-enduring rights system based on well-specified criteria of local justice; collective O-caps that makes possible for any social group to have voice in the process of rights and entitlements creation; S-caps, both individualistically and collectively conceived, which support the development of socially-accountable, costs-benefits analysis frameworks; collective S-caps for settling collective decision agreements, and M-caps for granting that collectivities can understand the moral consequences of any collective choice rule. Socially-dependent capabilities are also necessary in collective monitoring activities, conflicts resolution and sanctions enforcement as well as multi-folded, democratic social interaction would ensure to all groups sufficient O-caps for being politically autonomous and not challenged by external governmental authorities.

As a final point, the above capabilities are specific to the type of common-pool resource we are dealing with, dynamic, and harder to develop in large, heterogeneous groups than in small, cohesive ones. Cultivating humanity for the common suffers, therefore, of both over-specification and under-specification problems. On the one hand, a general, exhaustive panel of capabilities for commons would contain as many entries as needed to empower individuals and groups in a post-capitalist order in which the common has subverted the capital. Surely, a very long list. On the other hand, many of these capabilities could be difficult to see before the circuit of the common is unfolded.

In order to deal with the circuit of the common, some capabilities must be developed; if they are not, we will have difficulty dealing with it.

Let's provide some examples.

First, a common always implies a community. There is no common without a community holding it as such, without a community creating the common and using it. Such a community is a complex social system in which individuals and groups must be able to work collaboratively and cooperatively (Fournier, 2013). Being able to cooperate and to think collectively will make it easier to define group boundaries, to find feasible conflict-resolution mechanisms or collective decision rules. These capabilities to act cooperatively are influenced by individual skills, cultural contexts and moral traits.

Second, commons can be intangible, like knowledge, language, or culture. In these cases, their use is not rival along the lines of ‘the more we share, the more we have.’ Consistently, new modes of co-production, ownership, exchange and benefits provision must be identified in a non-rival and non-competitive way. Being able to operate according to a non-profit, non-individualistic philosophy can ease the building of responsibility for governing common resources as well as the acknowledgment of multiple rights to organize new management solutions. These capabilities to think collectively will be crucial to avoid the curse of commodification.

Third, as Linebaugh (2007: 279) emphasizes:

- the common is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, an activity, rather than as a noun, a substantive.

Accordingly, the process through which commons are produced and maintained gives shape to the community, or ‘in-forms’ the community (Euler, 2018). Due to this, it can be difficult to comprehend which new social practices have to support the reproduction of the commons if we are not able to adopt a creative and open political approach to social change. Adequate capabilities to imagine social change will support the matching between rules governing the use of commons and local conditions, and will foster direct participation of those affected by these rules to their definition.

Fourth, the ‘commoning’ can be defined as an institutionalized, legal and infrastructural arrangement for a practice in which we collaboratively organize and take responsibility for the use, maintenance and production of common resources (Acksel et al., 2015). When a group engages in a commoning practice, it assumes some form of equality of participation, at least some sort of congruence between costs and benefits between its members. Hence, the exercise of commoning creates a sort of relational good based on identity, motivations and simultaneity, i.e., the good is co-produced and co-consumed, at the same time, by the actors involved (Gui and Sugden, 2005). Collectively being capable of developing notions of community, commons, and commoning is crucial along this creation process (Shariff, 2018). Without these capabilities to conceive the common, only private, market-oriented systems for governing common-pool resources will be possible.

Finally, any definition of the common must consider the diversity of uses of common resources (De Angelis and Harvie, 2013). The social meaning of a common is not fixed, but it changes according to how a society evolves. The diversity of legitimate uses reveals the cultural and political nature of commons. The collective meaning given to commons, from which legitimate uses are defined, is, therefore, a political statement that requires collectivities able to manage and exploit diversity. These capabilities to enhance diversity are both moral and option-oriented, and they are useful to establish proper uses and fair sanctions for malevolent behaviour."

(https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/commonism-and-capabilities)