By 
Giovanna Ricoveri
In this paper I propose that the subsistence commons of the past can form the backbone of an alternative social order to capitalism, which has dominated the world for the last three centuries. This is because they are based on cooperation, not on competition; they are jointly used, neither private nor public property; they use natural resources sustainable, and they promote forms of direct democracy that integrate and reinforce representative democracy. In brief, they provide goods and services which do not become commodities to be exchanged on the capitalistic market.
I realize that my proposal may be perceived as unfair in the so-called less developed countries, engaged as they are striving to reach Western living standards. I answer this question in two ways: fist, my proposal addresses countries of the North, which use more than their share of natural resources at the expense of the South. Second, my proposal is paradigmatic, and it can therefore concern both the North and the South. Its purpose is to underline modes of production and ways of living that are ecologically sustainable and socially determined.
My proposal1 is not limited to scholars and activists discussions. It represents a historical necessity vis-à-vis the crisis of the capitalist system, aimed at stopping the plunder of Nature and the disintegration of society, which in the South translates into hunger and death from hunger for more than one thousand million people. Climate change, privatisation of natural resources and public spaces, new forms of poverty, unemployment of the young and women, social exclusion, food insecurity, new diseases caused by pollution of water, air and food chains are only some of the emerging features of capitalism in its present financial phase, producing “paper” wealth while destroying real wealth.
In support of prioritising subsistence commons, consider the following: first, evidence shows that at the beginning of the third millennium the profit frontier has moved into natural resources and public goods, to appropriate natural goods, infrastructures and services, which are both a gift of Nature and the result of human work and ingenuity by local populations and communities. It is a collective wealth that multinationals and financial capital try to appropriate by any mean necessary through wars of low and high intensity. It is therefore an imperative for local communities to resist this trend and reclaim the common wealth in order to survive.
Second, although nobody would deny that life depends on “subsistence” goods and services, in Western cultures – which have spread to large parts of the South – it is taken for granted that basic goods and services are supplied by the market. The market is nonetheless unable to “produce” air, water and land, the basic goods essential to the lives of poor and rich alike. The market is unable even to allocate natural resource in such a way as to grant everybody, rich and poor, their share of water, air and land. Nor is the market capable of avoiding the wastage of natural resources, in spite of efforts so far made to regulate the market: the water shortage is indeed created by the capitalist market. There is no water shortage when water is managed by water communities which still exist North and South, because they use techniques of rainwater collection, traditional ways of conservation and utilization, all of which exist thanks to the traditional knowledge coming from the work and inventiveness of all the present and previous members of the community.
Moreover, subsistence is socially and environmentally determined and therefore it changes over time and according to different places. Resources such as iron, on which depends industrial production mainly located in the West, could therefore be considered part of subsistence, now that iron ores are depleted and iron supply is insufficient to satisfy demand. On the other hand it is true that iron substitution is possible but only within certain limits, and it is also true that iron in not renewable relative to human life spans. If this outcome – formally advanced by several communities of the South – were to be followed, many of the environmental and social problems created by the capitalistic system would not exist because communities use natural resources without depleting them.
The claim that subsistence or material commons exist only in so-called less developed countries of the South and that non-material commons are mainly a problem of the industrialized countries of the North, is widely accepted in the West by scholars and activists. This belief is wrong as shown by the evidence of all empirical studies on the commons, in primis Elinor Ostrom’s work2. Moreover such a notion is dangerous because it reinforces a false dichotomy between the North and the South, thus favouring ideologies of exclusion and racism.
In brief, it is a powerful device through which the North keeps its privileges and legitimises the plunder of the South.
