The real “Tragedy of the Commons” is that it’s a myth made up by Capitalists
There’s nothing mythical about short-termist thinking among independent actors. People routinely overfarm and overfish, dump their trash and pollute their groundwater, stack up negative externalities as high as the sky, and then walk away with the profits before the consequences can catch up with them.
Capitalism is evidence of the Tragedy at work, as the demand for a growing profit margin outruns the supply of frontier resources to exploit.
The Commons were generally well managed for hundreds of years by convention and local communities.
No it wasn’t. The Holocene Extinction has been going on for 12,000 years. Humans have been an invasive species that annihilates ecologies going back to the Ice Age. What humans lacked up until the last century or two was the accumulated scientific record to witness our own destructive impacts. This academic recognition of our behaviors created the social imperative to change our behaviors.
We exist at an inflection point not merely because of the Industrial Revolution but the Information Age. Otherwise, we’d be one more alpha predator that outpaced its food supply and asphyxiated itself.
If you don’t have a state, or local proto-capitalists, with the violence to take possession of the commons, they remain well shared and not over-exploitated.
But you always do. Either as an internal force expanding outward or as an external force pressing inward. Capitalism, as a reproducible social phenomena, does not magically go away. Humans need to find a new and superior behavioral strategy, organize around that strategy, and propagate it more successfully than their capitalist peers. Bureaucracy is necessary for organization and social reproduction. And creating/perpetuating a bureaucracy means collecting some kind of surplus from the industrial workers to sustain it. And there you go. That’s your state.
If you’re using “Tragedy of the Commons” as a synonym of Holocene Extinction, and are not talking about the way common land (i.e. The Commons) in Medieval and Early Modern Europe was managed, then sure I’ll concede the point.
But that was pre-Captialist, and similar things can be seen when we look and the surviving indigenous societies in the world. It would, indeed, be harder in areas that have been living under capitalism for the last five to six hundred years.
You seem to be analysing from a fairly traditional Marxist-Leninist lens, albiet with a novel definition of state. No bad thing, but there are other Left wing frameworks that bring interesting, alternate understandings.
There’s nothing mythical about short-termist thinking among independent actors. People routinely overfarm and overfish, dump their trash and pollute their groundwater, stack up negative externalities as high as the sky, and then walk away with the profits before the consequences can catch up with them.
Capitalism is evidence of the Tragedy at work, as the demand for a growing profit margin outruns the supply of frontier resources to exploit.
No it wasn’t. The Holocene Extinction has been going on for 12,000 years. Humans have been an invasive species that annihilates ecologies going back to the Ice Age. What humans lacked up until the last century or two was the accumulated scientific record to witness our own destructive impacts. This academic recognition of our behaviors created the social imperative to change our behaviors.
We exist at an inflection point not merely because of the Industrial Revolution but the Information Age. Otherwise, we’d be one more alpha predator that outpaced its food supply and asphyxiated itself.
But you always do. Either as an internal force expanding outward or as an external force pressing inward. Capitalism, as a reproducible social phenomena, does not magically go away. Humans need to find a new and superior behavioral strategy, organize around that strategy, and propagate it more successfully than their capitalist peers. Bureaucracy is necessary for organization and social reproduction. And creating/perpetuating a bureaucracy means collecting some kind of surplus from the industrial workers to sustain it. And there you go. That’s your state.
If you’re using “Tragedy of the Commons” as a synonym of Holocene Extinction, and are not talking about the way common land (i.e. The Commons) in Medieval and Early Modern Europe was managed, then sure I’ll concede the point.
But that was pre-Captialist, and similar things can be seen when we look and the surviving indigenous societies in the world. It would, indeed, be harder in areas that have been living under capitalism for the last five to six hundred years.
You seem to be analysing from a fairly traditional Marxist-Leninist lens, albiet with a novel definition of state. No bad thing, but there are other Left wing frameworks that bring interesting, alternate understandings.