For "proof" that it's not possible, take the fact that they used to exist until they were legislated out of existance in order to force people to emigrate to the cities to work in factories for the industrial revolution.

You think Katrin has no experience and/or is full of ideals. Maybe she knows history.


guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

because I am old and full of experience

Forgive me, but I think I am probably no younger than you. Yet I have lived and worked (as a shepherd) with common pastures in the Pyrenees, and I know farmers today who use them. They are generally organized by local pastoral associations.

Not only that, but I live in a small hamlet (and I know others like it) where the buildings are individual property but the surrounding ground common. This is not in fact so different from people owning an apartment but not the stairs and hall, which are common, or owning a house in town but not the street in front, which is public. Common and public spaces are organized by different bodies and rules, and have existed for centuries.

There used to be more commons, but they were enclosed and privatised by the wealthy, to the detriment of the poor who could no longer use them. If this had been due to human "nature", it would surely have happened long before, yet it is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back over the last couple of centuries. The rise of capitalism transformed the old hierarchies (where power through rank came with corresponding obligations to subordinates) into power through concentration of wealth with no obligations to subordinates. The notion of individual freedom (of thought and speech, of romantic involvement, of political and economic action) was developed in the Enlightenment, and became the basis of economic theory alleging that the greatest good of the greatest number came about "naturally" as the result of the sum of the acts of individuals seeking their own material betterment. This economic theory, still the standard account today, explains why power through concentration of wealth does not need to come with corresponding obligations, rather conveniently for the concentrators.

Today individualism is on display everywhere in the developed world, with the insistence on the private house surrounded by its private garden, the private jamjar in which to seal oneself off as one travels public streets and roads, the portable entertainment channelled through earphones or the mobile phone obsession by which individuals behave privately when not sealed off in cars or private dwellings. The more wealth is concentrated in a small number of hands, the more the mass of people are convinced the individual life is what matters. The very idea of organising common goods, of sharing, becomes less and less conceivable. But this is the result of an historical shift in economic power and the narrative that is advanced to explain it. It's not human "nature", it's history.