Tragedy of the Commons

Prior to capitalism the commons was well taken care of to the best knowledge of humans at the time.

It won't. We will need a strong centralized expert authority when it comes to sustainable resource usage. We had anarchy for the first 50,000 years or so of human migration out of Africa and we raped the natural world all the same then.

Tragedy of the commons is a lie, historically.

Not only is it a thought experiment, but it's a thought experiment that only applies to a mix of private and communal property, as people exploit the communal land for the sake of their private herds. Ergo there are two solutions, not one: privatization of land and communalization of herds. (Also a strong central authority regulating the commons.)

It can't.

Society will likely still need to be regulated, just regulated democratically.

no

no need to overuse land when we have production for use instead of exchange

The use of public resources needs to be regulated by a state.

The Commons functioned effectively for thousands of years and only started experiencing problems when the aristocracy and proto bourgeoisie began to enclose and privatize it.

If anything there is a tragedy of the privatised where we witness the relentless exploitation of private property to the detriment of literally everything else.

youtube.com/watch?v=P0BXCiKOsKY
Watch this fam

That would be a correct presumption

some sort of bookchin-esque socially progressive but family and community oriented confederate anarcho-communism with markets and syndicalist influences

No it didn't, you fucking idiot. Humanity has been overusing its surrounding resources to exhaustion since it speciated.

this is a porky lie

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00815903

True. But private property rights didn't solve this problem. The solution is cultural, not legal. We have to build a culture that understands and respects ecological systems, and our place in them/reliance on them.

You have to ask why. The noble savage myth is as stupid as the idea that humans have always been capitalist.

People back then necessarily had to use practices which were stable over thousands of years because humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. I'm sure some tribes did try destructive practices, but they would have quickly died out.

The difference is one of time scales. It has only been a couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. What separates us from all of those previous tribes who died off is the sheer scale of our civilization. We're taking a gamble with our entire species and planet rather than just our tribe's territory. Hopefully it will pay off.

rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1787/20133254

...

This

How about the tragedy of private property? People who violently enforce their "right" to exploit a given piece of land for their own selfish purposes instead of acting in harmony with nature leads to the massive destruction of habitat we're seeing.

No, the solution is to elect an oversight council of experts for global management rather than allow personal, communal, or regional interests to dominate (the "tragedy of the commons").

Nomads aren't savage. Native Americans weren't savage either. Google "Iroquois Confederacy". Its patronizing as fuck to think they didn't piss upstream because of river spirits and not simply because you can watch water flow downhill.

Nomadic cultures today play a key role in geopolitics specifically because they are sustainable and counter to Capitalism. See: Kurds. Are goat herders barbaric because they don't want an urban apartment, or do they know something you don't know?

Or are you trying to say that ancient Mesopotamia wasn't capitalist because they didn't have factories?

okay…

You dropped your flag

Honestly, as a biologist I have a hard time believing there is any real solution that would be lasting. We're going to kill ourselves eventually. The real answer to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent life wipes itself out through resource exhaustion before it can become interplanetary.

But I never use one. There's never been a red and green eco-socialist flag around here anyway.

...

wew

This whole concept is false and oversimplified. Animals only overgraze pasture if they are locked in to a specific area.

In the wild herd animals move from place to place when chased by predators or the most nutritious food becomes depleted, so they are constantly getting a new source of food, don't over-compact the soil, don't overgraze etc.

We literally domesticated dogs to simulate this predator movement with sheep and cows and it worked perfectly fine with shepherds defending their flocks from wolves with no fences for thousands of years.

Monoculture crop planting destroys soil ecology and was only invented after the whole conglomerate of sedentary agriculture in a patriarchal tribe based society that collects grain as a tax. It alone almost entirely accounts for the desertification in the middle east and africa.

If everyone "used" the commons with proper technique it would enhance it instead of degrade it.

This concept of resource depletion is a Capitalist-Scarcity mindset where our mistakes have to be repeated because there is no other option. This is completely false.

And I'm not saying everyone needs to become nomads. We have the technology to simulate migration remotely. The main problem is oil/chem/pharma is balls deep in reductive agriculture and encourages resource depletion because its profitable.

fee.org/articles/capitalism-and-the-zero/

isj.org.uk/the-rise-of-capitalism/

globalresearch.ca/ancient-syria-and-mesopotamia-cradle-of-civilization-from-ancient-to-modern-mashriq/5439371

answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100720155049AAKBCPd

Nomadic cultures do not provide a viable alternative to our current way of life. A small percentage of living humans could live as nomads, assuming all the other humans politely disposed of themselves, but we would be achieving stability at the expense of progress. If we choose primitivism then we're choosing to go extinct along with all other life in a few billion years.

Believing shit without any evidence is a good summary of our species.

Now this is a much more reasonable position and one that I agree with. We can learn from ancient agricultural techniques without going full retard and abandoning technology.

Sure, but the scientific movement is all about trying to overcome that natural tendency through disciplined experimentation/consideration and precise communication.

Just because humans HAVE been a certain way doesn't mean we WILL be a a certain way.

Humans will continue to evolve, both biologically and culturally/intellectually.

Regulations can be established at the state or municipal level.

Nothings stopping societies from establishing democratically the idea of protecting land while allowing workers to work on it with adherence to environmental standards.

Private ownership on the other hand, individuals participating in a competitive market while owning plots of land will be fundamentally detrimental to the environment given the market requires it or if their profits are stepped on by others.

How many organisms do you know of that are distributed neatly within state or municipal boundaries?

Can you rewrite this sentence. I don't know what you're saying.

Your beloved markets are currently managing the commons so poorly the environment is dying at a record pace, so it can hardly get worse.

The most organisms do not obey artificial government boundaries.

I don't know what you mean. My dog routinely does his taxes

thats a problem with artificial government boundaries

municipal levels would probably be outlined by geographic formations like mountains rivers or population density for efficiency

they could even overlap where regulations are voted on at striated levels of locality and use using geological and watershed maps based on soil and rock types

the cascadia bio region could be an example of a larger region and your local city could be a small one

what incentive would an individual have to make his or her sheep overgraze if this individual already receives the food they need from the society they live in? provided an individual's needs are satisfied through a system of distribution other than exchange, they will have no incentive to maximize the size of their own herd at the expense of others and will be willing to work according to a common plan with the other individuals who manage herds in order to find the maximum amount of sheep they can maintain in the long term. That is given the following two conditions

1. individual needs are reasonably satisfied and reasonably secure
2. the individual does not secure these goods which satisfy their needs through exchange

the antagonistic relationship between the interests of the individual property owner and the larger whole give way to common planning.

Hopefully that clears some issues up. If not, perhaps we should start with what you mean by "completely decentralized" and proceed from there. I've seen "decentralization" used too many times as a buzzword for ancaps trying to accuse communists of "authoritarianism" so I'm a bit suspicious of those who follow it as a principle. Perhaps you could explain what exactly you're hoping will be decentralized. property? in which case you'll never move beyond capitalism as the end of capitalism will necessarily involve the centralization of all private property in the hands of a single body (not necessarily a state but most will say centralization in a state). do you perhaps mean decentralization of power? in which case you'll have to define what you mean by "power" and why it's important that we decentralize it. You'll have to specify a bit more carefully here.

fug. this meme is persistent.

speaking of stale memes

I'd take it off but I'm too stubborn

Communication is not a magic cure all to game theory

Game theory doesn't apply if we decide we're all on the same team, comrade.

teams are a spook to individual actors with rational self interest, comrade

Cull the herd, starting with the people on Holla Forums, Holla Forums, and Reddit.

I'm curious what do you believe the individual's rational self-interest is here, comrade?