Social Innovation Network » The „Great Transformation“ to „Great Cooperation“. Commons, Market, Capital and the State

in his much cited article, Hardin did not treat commons, but open access-resources, whose use is not regulated at all. In doing this, he ignored – which is often referred to in the debate – that commons can never be treated in isolation from a specific community which is related to them. The use of commons is always regulated, members of corresponding communities never act according to the utility maximizing homo oeconomicus of neoclassical economic theory. // In fact, commons are in a contradictory relation to capital. While on the one hand, the enclosure of the commons, primarily of open fields, is a historical precondition of the capital relation, i.e. wage labor (Marx, „Capital“, Vol. 1), capital on the other hand equally depends on the reproduction of the resources on which its production is based in the form of commons and forms of commoning that do not function according to the logic of capital and its valorisation.

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