How about a nice Communist revolution then ?

At least I can only assume that's what the author is advocating. Much of the piece appears to be wholly against the notion of private property but without every spelling out what it is he's in favour of. So straw man or no, the obvious inference is that he wants full-blown Communism, in which trenchcoat-wearing officials go around knocking on people's doors and stealing their shoes for the glory of the state.

I'm not saying this is what the author really believes, of course. I'm just saying that this is quite a natural conclusion, and he really should have tried to say if this is what he's getting at or not. As it is, he doesn't really specify any concrete changes at all (except for some token platitudes at the end), just some vague ideals. There's much I agree with in this essay, and much I don't. I'll concentrate on the stuff I support but there are a few points I can't let go.

The real tragedy, however, lies not in the commons, but in the private. It is the private that produces violence, destruction and exclusion. Standing on its head thousands of years of cultural wisdom, the idea of the private variously separates, exploits and exhausts those living under its cold operating logic.

Nowhere does he specify what he means by "the private". By keeping things so absurdly vague, this gives the distinct impression that he means any and all forms of private ownership. Sure, we could try abolishing that, but oh wait, we already did... it really, really didn't end well.

In the midst of a global depression, the US president Franklin D Roosevelt evoked an ‘industrial covenant’ – a commitment to living wages and a right to work for all. During the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr gave voice to the broader idea when he said that no one is free until we are all free. Cultures that fundamentally departed from this awareness usually did not, in the long run, fare well, from the Roman Empire to Nazism or Stalinism.

I'm thoroughly in favour of the general sentiment here - we should seek improvement of the whole, not just the individual - but, seriously, the Roman Empire ? It lasted two thousand years ! And undermining the point even more, it only fell because of rival imperial powers. It wasn't replaced by anything better or out-competed by more collectivist societies (feudalistic hierarchies weren't exactly an improvement, and certainly didn't prioritise the welfare of the common man). See recent post for a review of the different ancient systems of government and the individualist/collectivist tendencies of different societies. There is, sadly, a big difference between the questions, "is it nice ?" and "will it survive ?".

Where would we be without the work and care of others? Without the food from the farmer? Without the electricity and housing and roads and healthcare and education and access to information and hundreds of other things provided to us, day in and day out, often for free, and routinely without us knowing what went into their existence? Seeing ourselves as seemingly free-floating individuals, it’s both easy and convenient to indulge in the delusion that ‘I built it. I worked for it. I earned it.’

The painful flipside are the billions of those who, through no fault of their own, drew the short end of the stick. Those who were born in the wrong country, to the wrong parents, in the wrong school district – ‘wrong’ for no other reason than that their skin colour or religion or talents didn’t happen to be favoured. The limited focus on the individual can here be seen as nakedly serving power: if those who have privilege and wealth presumably earned it, so must those who have pain and hardship deserve it.

Discussed at length here. While I strongly agree with the general sentiment, I don't think we need absolute equality (as the author - at many times - appears to imply). Someone who's worked harder or longer deserves a greater reward. We greatly underestimate the role played by luck and, more importantly, the indirect role of other people, in our own success, but it doesn't follow that the most desirable state is total equality. Nor is that to say that poverty is inevitable - it isn't.

Most definitions of mainstream economics are based on some version of Lionel Robbin’s 1932 definition as the ‘efficient allocation of scarce resources’. The answer to scarcity coupled with people’s presumed desire for more is, of course: keep producing stuff. Not surprisingly, the guiding star for success, of both policymakers and economists around the world, is a crude, if convenient metric – GDP – that does nothing but indiscriminately count final output (more stuff), independent of whether it’s good or bad, whether it creates wellbeing or harm, and notwithstanding that its ongoing growth is unsustainable. It’s circular logic: (1) scarcity makes people have endless needs, so the economy needs to grow; (2) for the economy to grow, people need to have ever more needs.

Here too I'm in strong agreement. We need a better, more holistic measurement of economic success, crucially including sustainability. I just wish the author would suggest something practical beyond stating the (important) ideological points. To repeat : we tried Communism already, and it was an awesome failure. By all means propose an alternative that learns from its mistakes, but don't just re-iterate the problems of unregulated capitalism.

When large corporations, run by people who preach the gospel of the market and private gain, need the public to bail them out, few in power raise the most obvious question: why do you need public money to bail you out if you are supposed to be pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? A deeper question might be: why should wealth and privilege – largely built on the free work of nature and the cheap work of labourers – be rescued, when in trouble, by the very people otherwise deemed ‘disposable’?

By any available measure, capitalism (based on private interest) has generated unprecedented wealth and knowledge. This explosive creation of wealth, however, came, and continues to come, with a steep and exponentially rising price. Powered by fossil fuels, it is both depleting and burning up the planet. Perhaps it’s finally time to recognise the carnage that created the wealth.

We live in a different world now. Whatever might have been justified in the past to overcome poverty and scarcity no longer holds sway. Today, we face an entirely different challenge. Not too little, but too much. Not scarcity, but abundance. We no longer need more, but rather better and more fairly distributed, in order to provide prosperity for all. Collectively, we produce and grow enough for every child, woman and man to have a good and dignified life wherever they live.

And yet, our dominant economic systems continue to follow colonial extraction and brutal exclusion, in the process creating two organically related, existential problems: the perpetuation (and in some cases intensification) of poverty, and the violation of the biophysical limits of our planet. 

Yes ! But at this point I'd like to hear some hard-nosed economics to back this up. The guy's an economic historian so he ought to be able to do this. I agree with the ideology, but that's exactly why it's so necessary to challenge it with data. I might give Ferguson's Civilization a go at some point - he writes from a different perspective in a way I can respect, whereas the present author is writing from my existing perspective but in a way that doesn't add anything new. So this is just reinforcing confirmation bias, which isn't a good thing. Show me some hard data as to the conditions when things work and when they fail.

Instead, we should ask, what do we really value? And how do we measure it? When authors write about economies for the common good, or for the wellbeing of all, they highlight a very different set of values than those, based on private property and private gain, that dominate modern economies today – not efficiency but health and resilience; not the bottom line but collective wellbeing. 

Most civilisational traditions agree that everyone brought into this world should have an equal claim to thrive. If we follow those traditions, we must conclude that cultures ‘already parcelled out’ into private property and wealth are morally bankrupt. They value the private over people.

But, look man, what is it you're actually advocating ? Burning everyone's house down ? Stealing their cars ? You need to explicitly deny this, otherwise you sound like you're longing for a second season of Russia : The Soviet Years. "Let's all be more collectivist" is a fine sentiment, but I see no inherent conflict in being individuals with private property who want to contribute to the common good. Self-improvement requires a measure of self-interest and even selfishness.

The challenge of reclaiming the commons from capitalism - Dirk Philipsen | Aeon Essays

I've witnessed massive swarms of fireflies grace my garden like never before, drawn to the air cleansed of our arrogant greed, their glow a flashback to the time before us, omen of Earth without us, a reminder we're never immune to nature.