FULL marks to Full Marx, for their demolition of the “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis in these pages on Monday. As the authors point out, in the original essay, published in 1968 by University of California professor Garrett Hardin in the journal Science, he sees all humans as selfish herders: we worry that our neighbours’ cattle will graze the best grass. 

So, we send more of our cows out to consume that grass first. We take it first, before someone else steals our share. This creates a vicious cycle of environmental degradation that Hardin described as the “tragedy of the commons.” 

It may seem ridiculous now but Hardin, a white supremacist, presented no evidence for this assertion. Yet is difficult to underestimate the impact this idea has had on the environment, the economy and our society. 

It has underpinned the case for privatisation of public assets, demutualisation of collectively owned assets, and the idea that the environment could only be saved by private ownership. 

Hardin not only made these assertions on paper but carried through his arguments. Hardin went to the lengths of lobbying US Congress against sending food aid to poor nations, because he believed their populations were threatening Earth’s “carrying capacity.”

His big idea was what he called “lifeboat ethics”: accepting Malthus’s thesis that global resources are finite; Hardin believed the rich should throw the poor out of the boat to stop it sinking. What this demonstrates however is Marx’s key idea in the German Ideology. 

“The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of their dominance.”

For the ruling class, Hardin’s ideas were very convenient. They gave some legitimacy to their pillaging of public assets and the natural world. 

However, the fact is his thesis is just not true. Hardin’s thesis can not only be rebutted theoretically, it can be rebutted in fact. 

The greatest work of rebuttal has been that undertaken over many years by Elinor Ostrom, for which eventually she became the first woman to receive the Nobel prize in economics. 

Unlike Hardin’s, Ostrom’s work was richly informed by fieldwork. Both her own and that of others — she went out and looked at how people actually managed shared resources. 

During her PhD at the University of California, she spent years studying the water wars and pumping races going on in the 1950s in her own dry backyard. She showed cases where humans were not trapped and helpless amid diminishing supplies. 

In her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge UK, 1990), she draws on studies of irrigation systems in Spain and Nepal, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Maine and Indonesia. 

It’s hard to overestimate the volume of her research — conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters in Maine and Indonesia, and forests in Nepal. 

She showed that when natural resources are jointly managed by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable. 

One of her great insights was that complexity was as important to social science as it was to ecology — unlike neoliberal capitalists who only see one way of skinning a cat. 

She saw that institutional diversity needed to be protected along with biological diversity. 

“I still get asked, ‘What is the way of doing something?’ 

“There are many, many ways of doing things that work in different environments,” she told an audience in Nepal in 2010. “We have got to get to the point that we can understand complexity, and harness it, and not reject it.”

This has led to what has been called Ostrom’s law. Coined by Lee Ann Fennell, it states: “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.”

The lesson from Ostrom is we can share the world’s resources in ways that are not only fair but sustainable. That is a message that needs to be heard loud and clear if we are to escape from what economic historian Adam Tooze calls the current “polycrisis.” 

It’s the complexity of this situation which Ostrom would understand. As Tooze says: “The key things for me are economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. And those four things, they don’t reduce to a single common denominator. They don't reduce to a single factor.”

In fact, each element in this situation feeds on the others and makes the whole situation worse. We need to deal with them all at once. One element that is missing in our way out of this labyrinth is a revival of the ideas of the commons and common ownership the missing key in helping us begin to escape this crisis. It’s the only way resources can be shared equitably and sustainably.