Commons Quotes

“Because life is robust,
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,
Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,
O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,
Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,
Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140

“For when people do not keep watch over the commons, it is destroyed. It results, then, that they fall into civil faction, compelling one another by force and not wishing to do what is just themselves.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“It wasn’t until nearly 400 years later [since capitalist privatizations at home in Britain, i.e. the Enclosures starting in 1500s] that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise. […] It happened slightly later in the rest of Europe, while in the colonised world longevity didn’t begin to improve until the early 1900s [decolonization]. So if [capitalist economic] growth itself does not have an automatic relationship with life expectancy and human welfare, what could possibly explain this trend?

Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention […]: [public] sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property [note: the Enclosures required state violence to privatize land], and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.

The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“There is a story recorded about Geradas, a Spartiate of really ancient times, who when asked by a foreigner what their punishment for adulterers was, said: "There is no adulterer among us, stranger." When the latter replied: "But what if there should be one?", Geradas' answer was: "His fine would be a great bull which bends over Mount Taygetus to Drink from the Eurotas." The foreigner was amazed at this and said: "But how could there be a bull of such size?" At which Geradas laughed and said: "But how could there be an adulterer at Sparta?" This, then, concludes my investigation of their marriages.”
― Plutarch, On Sparta

“Google and Apple offer the image of a pseudo-commons to Internet users. That image recalls Nick Dyer-Whiteford's claim that, in light of the structural failures of neoliberal policies, capital could "turn to a 'Plan B', in which limited versions of commons, pollution trading schemes, community development and open-source and file-sharing practices are introduced as subordinate aspects of a capitalist economy, where voluntary cooperation subsidizes profit. One can think here of how Web 2.0 re-appropriates many of the innovations of radical digital activists, and converts them into a source of rent." Indeed, with the rise of the trademarked Digital Commons software platform and with the proliferation of university-based digital and media commons (which are typically limited to fee-paying and/or employed university community members), the very concept of the digital commons appears to be one of these reappropriations. But if, as part of what James Boyle describes as the "Second Closure Movement," this very rhetorical move signals the temporary defeats of the after-globalization and radical hacker movements that claimed the language of the commons, perhaps the advocacy for ownership of digital wares (or at least a form of unalienable, absolute possession, whether individual or communal) would provide a strategic ballast against the proprietary control of large swathes of information by apparently benevolent corporations and institutions. While still dangling in mid-air, the information commodity's consumption might thereby be placed more solidly on common ground.”
― Sumanth Gopinath, The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form

“I commons sono stati definiti "la terra indivisa appartenente ai membri di una comunità locale come
insieme". I commons sono il contratto che un popolo fa con il proprio sistema naturale locale. La parola
ha una storia interessante: è formata da ko, insieme, e dal greco moin, tenuto in comune. Ma la radice
indoeuropea mei significa comunemente spostarsi, andare, cambiare. Questo aveva un significato arcaico
particolare di scambio di beni e servizi in una società ordinata da regole e leggi. Penso che potrebbe
richiamare i principi su cui si basavano le economie del dono, "il dono deve sempre spostarsi". In latino la
radice munus significa servizio offerto alla comunità, da cui municipio.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“A volte sembra improbabile che una società nel suo insieme possa fare scelte di saggezza. Eppure non c'è
altra chance che chiedere il recupero dei commons e questo in un mondo moderno che non si rende conto
di ciò che ha perduto. Riprenderci quel che tutti condividiamo quello che è il nostro essere più grande.
Non ci sarà una tragedia dei commons più grande di questa: se non ripristiniamo i commons e ritroveremo
un coinvolgimento diretto personale, locale, comunitario, popolare nel condividere (nell'essere) la rete del
mondo selvatico, quel mondo continuerà a sfuggire.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“To say it's the poor quality of the paint under socialism is correct, but it is not enough. To say it's soft-coal exploitation and air pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars, or lack of money - that again would be correct. But not the whole story. All these reasons (and probably many more) are not enough to explain the decrepitude. I think the reason is in us. The cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, by our conviction that somebody else - the government, the party, those 'above' - is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

“In externalising the social and environmental cost of shipping to the high seas, the shipping industry mirrors the collective action problem that is the climate change to which it contributes. Every country wants to connect its economy across the oceans, but few feel responsible for the social and environmental impacts of shipping, or indeed climate change.”
― Christiaan De Beukelaer, Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping

“The claimed legitimizing devices of political consent or personal labour served only to obscure the unjustifiable seizure of land from the common by the powerful. Other commoners at the time of those seizures had not consented to them, and even if they had done so, their consent could not bind later generations.”
― Peter Vallentyne, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings

“We were never meant to live in a world where everything is owned and nothing is shared.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“When public spaces are privatized, loneliness and isolation grow.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Cooperation—not competition—can be a foundation for thriving communities.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness—beginning in the commons.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction