July 27, 2023
Troy D. Smith
“Dispossessing the Poor, Part 8- The Commons Are Not
Tragic”
I started this 9-week series by mentioning “The Tragedy of
the Commons” by Garrett Hardin. I am going to wind up with it, as well.
As a reminder, that term describes land that was set aside
for the use of everyone in the village in the Middle Ages. Peasants were
therefore able to supplement their farm-grown food by fishing and hunting in
the forests of the commons, or foraging their livestock on the pastures of it.
In the 1500s, nobles started fencing off the commons, reserving them for their
own use (to make money) and denying them to the peasants, who were plunged into
disaster -with those who survived forced to “learn to work harder” (from the
nobles’ perspective).
Now, to me, the “tragedy” is that the commons were fenced
off and the peasants were shafted… but that is not what Hardin was getting at
in 1968. To him, the tragedy was that the commons were always destined to fail,
in any culture, because they are unsustainable. He explained it like this:
let’s say several villagers owned sheep, and they all grazed them on the
commons. The commons can only support so many sheep, so it is in the best
interests of the whole village for the number of sheep to be limited. But any
individual herdsman is going to do the calculations in his head: too many sheep
will ruin the pasture, yes, but if I get
just one more sheep, to benefit myself, THAT won’t do it. Okay, maybe two
sheep. Or three. The danger is that EVERY herdsman is going to think that way,
and they will all be doomed. Better that they each have their own private
acreage, because they will be much more likely to maintain it properly.
On the surface, that sounds like a very reasonable argument.
I teach U.S. environmental history, and that argument is the very crux of the
whole thing. Americans are virtually incapable of thinking in terms of the
long-term good of the whole community, when there is profit to be had in the
short term. This actually helped lead to the Civil War -cotton planters KNEW
that they should rest their fields or they would become barren, but no one wanted
to lose a potential year’s profit by doing so. Thus their fields became
depleted, and they NEEDED to gain new lands, where of course they wanted to
have slave labor, leading to the arguments about the spread of slavery.
But Hardin’s logic has a flaw. His argument only works with
cultures that value the individual over the group, AND that place heavy value
on profit. There have been cultures, in fact, where the concept of the commons
worked quite well.
This includes most indigenous cultures of North America, the
vast majority of whom were agricultural rather than nomadic. Each town would
have a common cornfield, in which everyone would work together. At
harvest-time, each family was given what it was approximated would hold them
through winter. Of the remainder, part of it was sacrificed and part was put
into a communal storehouse where anyone who fell short could draw from as
needed. No one took more- because they had a strong sense of communal
responsibility. No one accumulated extra- which prevented the development of
capitalism. At the same time, it was not quite communist -there was no state
that would enforce everyone’s conformity, because (ironically) Natives were
both communal AND individualistic. NO ONE could order anyone else to do
anything. Leaders had to PERSUADE.
Many indigenous people still have similar attitudes. They
are less than 2% of the U.S. population, but they show up in huge numbers at
any environmental protest. They do so with UNITY. For every action, they
consider the repercussions seven generations from now.
I don’t subscribe to Adam Smith OR Karl Marx… but to Black
Elk and Luther Standing Bear. I think we all should.
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
