---
Title: Tragedy of the commons
Description: Neo-Malthusian argument used to argue the supposedly unsustainable character of communal property and, more generally, of the non-market organization of production.
Author: School of Marxism
URL: https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Tragedy%20of%20the%20commons
---


> Neo-Malthusian argument used to argue the supposedly unsustainable character of communal property and, more generally, of the non-market organization of production.

The "tragedy of the commons", more correctly "tragedy of the commonland" or "of communal goods", is an argument developed by Garrett Hardin, one of the most influential neo-Malthusians of the second half of the 20th century. He was not an economist but an ecologist, and it was from this discipline and his deep love for Malthus that he published the famous article "The Tragedy of the Commons" in the journal Science:

> The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. […] Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
>
> As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. […] The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited.
>
> ["The Tragedy of the Commons"](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/162/3859/1243.full.pdf), Garrett Hardin, 1968

It is one of the arguments most used by [environmentalism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Environmentalism) today. Following pure "economic rationality", human beings would be incapable of exploiting the planet's resources in common without acting like a predatory species that wipes everything out like a plague of locusts. The tragedy of the commons appears in countless ecology books and has influenced many economic and political discussions but, as was to be expected, a mere review of the historical and social record of humanity is enough to reject such claims.

That was the criticism that earned Elinor Ostrom a Nobel Prize in 2009. However, although the historical falsehood of the supposed dilemma was clearly demonstrable, the solutions proposed did not go beyond the capitalist horizon by a long way. In order to square the circle of a traditional management of communal goods without going beyond the very capitalist economy that had destroyed them, Ostrom and her school could only suggest heavy [bureaucratic apparatuses](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Bureaucracy). All of it served with a sauce of commercial exchanges with pollution clauses, as well as various tax and financial mechanisms against climate change.

## The reality of communal goods

In agrarian societies all over the world, local mechanisms have existed for centuries and even millennia to prevent over-exploitation and to share out common lands and resources among the collectivity. The peasant world was always extremely variable in terms of property and mechanisms, even between neighboring provinces. In lands that were recently conquered en bloc, one generally finds large estates and settlers, whether in southern Europe, South America or East Africa.

However, on lands cultivated in a stable way for centuries (even taking migrations into account) all over the world, one generally finds a very similar local mechanism: cultivation of the land by the community with cyclical redistribution of the arable plots. The model can be found in 19th-century India:

> The areas to be cultivated were distributed by lot […] If the land to be distributed was variable in quality, the clan authorities would prepare a number of circles or series, consisting of good, middling or bad lands, or lands distinguishable in some other way. The groups of cultivators then had to take their lands evenly from each quality group. […] But in any case, even taking the classification of the soil into account, inequality in holdings could not be excluded, so a periodic system of exchange or redistribution was practised over a long period.

The principle of lands worked in common combined with plots allotted at random and cyclically redistributed among the different members of the community could also be found in 19th-century Scotland and in much of Europe before the great enclosures of fields:

> Instead of each tenant having a house on a separate farm, a group of small huts is crowded together in a Township, as in a rustic village. In it live tenants and small peasants. The land around the village belongs to all of them in common. The meadows are the common field where all their cows graze. The arable land is sometimes cultivated and harvested in common too, the produce of the harvest being divided among them.
>
> This is one of the most ancient customs of our country. It is a relic of the pastoral age, or feudal system. But it is ruinous to the interest of the landlord, the tenant and the public, according to the enlightened agriculture of our day. Where lands are not the property of Townships, they are generally held in Run-rigs.
>
> This mode of occupying land originated from the same source. It is the natural outgrowth of the Township, and was no doubt devised as an improvement on the earlier plan. Instead of the arable land being held, cultivated and harvested in common, each individual has a plot assigned to him. Sometimes, instead of one, he has two or more, especially if the arable land is of unequal quality. In this case the tenants have one plot in the best part and another in the worst.
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> In the feudal age, this kind of tenure prevailed over Britain and perhaps over the whole of Europe. Caesar mentions that it was the traditional practice among the Gauls.
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> "General report of the agricultural state of Scotland", Sir John Sinclair, 1816

The nineteenth-century examples might give the impression that these systems disappeared through some inexorable "force", but this kind of redistribution system not only persists unless it is actively destroyed, it reappears in the countryside when state domination weakens or disappears. This is what happened in 18th-century Japan, when the weakening of central power allowed the reappearance of the Iriaichi (入会地), common lands whose use was assigned by lot and regularly reassigned. Something similar happens today in southern India, where the weakness of the state allows the existence of villages with elected councils that decide the periodic redistribution of land and the common maintenance of irrigation works.

However, if anything characterizes the countryside it is its heterogeneity. The villages in India with elected councils are surrounded by villages of small private property, without rotation or commonland. The local scale of these institutions makes them disconnected and fragile in the face of attacks by a ruling class.

In France, although the feudal lords allowed the existence of more or less independent peasant "communities" and did not set about expropriating them until very late, things were different with the medieval bourgeoisie. The trading towns had a great effect on the surrounding countryside: merchants bought and expropriated the surrounding fields to graze livestock. This livestock served not only to feed the town; above all it served to supply local manufacture with wool for the main luxury industry of the Middle Ages, cloth-making. This brought the peasants into direct conflict with the burghers of the towns.

French peasants had an ingenious system for keeping their fields in common: the small plots (generally the rectangular stretch that could be ploughed in a day with an ox-drawn plough) that were redistributed among the peasants of the community were intermingled with one another and cultivated in common.

They were cultivated in the sequence summer wheat, winter wheat and fallow (uncultivated land), one stage per year, and were shared out so that there were fields at each stage in any given year. The fallow was kept to restore the nutrients of the soil through the work of weeds and the dung of the common herd. The common herd's access to any uncultivated field was not restricted, thereby fertilizing everyone's fields and ensuring that everyone's animals had enough food. Nobody had any incentive to increase the number of their animals and come into conflict with the rest of the community in order to sell on a market that did not exist far from the towns.

With the rise of cloth manufacture, the burghers began to buy and enclose the fields bordering the Norman towns from the 14th century onwards to graze ever larger flocks of sheep. The situation was much worse in Provence, where the great transhumant flocks took advantage of the peasants' open fields to graze (with the permission of the great lords) along their route. It was the ravages of transhumance that forced the Provençal peasants to enclose their fields to defend them from the onslaught of the sheep that drove the trade of the towns.

Neither the common meadows nor the fallow lands were safe. However, the immense majority of the population of France still lived in the countryside and kept fields and property in common, as texts from the time of Louis XIV show:

> Each holder of a plot included in a "quarter" of similarly oriented plots cultivates—and it cannot be otherwise—on the same dates as his neighbours, and practises the same rotation cycle. When the field was fallow or covered in stubble, it was opened—and it is still so today [1931]—to all the livestock of the village without distinction, as the jurist Laurière said under Louis XIV: "when the harvest has been gathered, the land, by a kind of right of the people, becomes common to all men, be they rich or poor".
>
> "Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française", Marc Bloch, 1931

The situation was much worse in Flanders, where the enclosure of fields around the trading towns was far more extensive and the peasants were often reduced to taking part in domestic textile industry to supply the towns. And it is from here, at the end of the 17th century, that one of the main sources of what would later develop into capitalist ideology would emerge.

## The Malthusian origin of the "tragedy of the commons"

It is no coincidence that Hardin took as his inspiration the essay of an English economist published in 1833, in the midst of an ideological campaign to finish driving the peasants off the land and to pass the new "Poor Laws", forcing the new British proletariat into manufacture.

After the economic shock caused by the inflow of enormous quantities of precious metals from America, price inflation caused a fall in the income of the nobility, because the rents to be paid by the peasantry were fixed by agreement and not by the market. Many aristocrats and not a few bourgeois began to devote themselves to agricultural improvement and the acquisition of land from the 17th century onwards.

The first agricultural treatises came out of the great trading cities, first Venice and then Flanders, and later spread from England to France. The lords started rental markets to increase the productivity of their tenants, and the discoveries of the new science were applied. It was possible to increase the productivity of the plots through rotations with clover (a nitrogen-fixing legume) and turnips, which could also be sold on the nascent market as fodder to obtain money.

The new crops broke the cycle of communal agriculture. There were no longer fallow fields; instead the fields had to be enclosed so that the communal herds would not eat the fodder in them. In the 18th century, the new movement of the physiocrats in France would proselytize to the utmost so that the priests of each rural parish would proclaim the virtues of agricultural improvement and enclosure. But the investments needed to acquire more hectares and employ farmhands did not come free, so the physiocrats pushed a large part of the countryside into debt. All this while physiocrats and English economists were trying to unify the national market in order to allow the circulation and accumulation of capital on a national scale.

However, there were still tenant peasants who defended and used the communal lands, as the text above on "run-rigs" in 1816 shows well. The final wave of expulsion from the land in Great Britain coincided, not by chance, with the definitive triumph of "Political economy" (= economic theory). In order to pay their debts and rents, much of the countryside had switched to wheat monoculture. Because of this, bad harvests and price volatility during the Napoleonic wars ruined millions of small producers, who were forced to sell their fields to the big landowners. Something similar would happen later in the south of France, when vineyard monoculture was devastated by phylloxera.

But the Malthusian economists had plans, big plans. They finally achieved the abolition of relief to the peasantry in 1834 in order, openly, to provide industry with a circulating labor force. All in the name of reducing friction and improving the functioning of the "great social machine":

> Pure theory instils into us the natural and necessary tendency towards a just adjustment [of prices], leaves out of the question the intermediate difficulties, like friction in a mechanical problem; and justly condemns the folly of attempting to rectify inequality by law. But laws, though they cannot rectify the problem, can make it worse. Those very frictions can be resolved with care and skill. […] Thus the labour of a manufacturing worker is a transferable commodity compared with that of a peasant. Competition informs the owner of its value, and it circulates freely through those districts where it is needed.
>
> Edward Copleston, 1819

Although the [bourgeoisie](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Bourgeoisie), after its victory, would go on to claim that the tendency towards privatization and over-exploitation was part of human nature, what was being naturalized was a crushing victory of the ruling class over the exploited.

## The tragedy of the commons, "human nature" and capitalism

What bourgeois morality pretentiously calls "Human nature" is nothing other than capitalist rationality. In reality, the problem for the bourgeoisie was not that herdsmen or farmers over-exploited the commonland and the whole system collapsed, but the opposite: the system was too stable to allow [commodification](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Commodification) to advance.

The peasants had neither the wish nor the need to become day laborers, farmhands or industrial workers. And without [absorbing their labor under the direction of capital](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Formal%20and%20real%20subsumption%20of%20labor%20under%20capital) it was impossible to redouble rural productivity by increasing [exploitation in absolute terms](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Absolute%20surplus%20value). Without cheap food, [turning the peasants themselves into industrial workers](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Proletarianization) would make the cost structure unviable for the new manufacture.

When the bourgeoisie manages to destroy the land communities on a scale sufficient to force this double movement of peasant over-exploitation and mass migration, it also needs to break the state protections against hunger... because even living on meagre public charity was more attractive than becoming an industrial proletarian. The bourgeoisie then needs to argue for a new morality asserting that the hunger and misery it was causing were in reality "incentives" for [progress](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Progress), while at the same time placing the responsibility on the shoulders of the worker. Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham would be the theorists of this new capitalist morality, which asserts a new kind of "rationality" and with it a new "Human nature".

When, almost a century and a half later, Hardin looks for arguments against communal property, he will only have to take for granted that "Human nature" has always been capitalist rationality in order to prove... that historical reality was "impossible". That is the whole trick underlying the "tragedy of the commons". And what is worse, it also underlies the criticism of Ostrom who, unable to think of the commonland within any other framework of social relations, tries to fit the historical institutions of communal production to the [capitalism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Capitalism) that destroyed them, by justifying [bureaucracies](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Bureaucracy), experts and complex systems that would require a specialized managerial layer.