It can be said that 2011 was the year (also) of common goods. This is an expression that, until recently, was absent from public discussion, lacking interest for politics, even if the 2009 Nobel prize for economics had been awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her very studies on this subject. Then, almost out of the blue, Italy has started to be taken over by what Franco Cassano has called “reasonable madness of common goods.” And this has happened because the situation has inevitably imposed a change in the political agenda with the referendum on water as a “common good”. From that moment on, there was a succession of concrete initiatives and theoretical observations that have led to the discovery of a new world and to the extension of these references to the most diverse of cases. We speak about common goods when we mention water and knowledge, when we refer to Rai television and to the occupied Valle Theatre, when we speak about enterprises, and so on. A few months ago, the peremptory title “Poets are a common good” stood out on the cultural pages of a daily newspaper. Inflation is clearly not only a danger in economic matters. Therefore, the need for a distinction and a clarification is necessary, to prevent an inflationary usage of this expression from weakening the expression itself. If the category of common goods remains nebulous, and it is filled with everything and the opposite of everything, if that category is assigned a sort of social palingenesis, then it might well transpire that the category loses its capacity to properly identify those situations in which the “common” characteristic of a good can unleash its whole strength. However, it is a good thing that this constant germination of hypotheses keeps interest alive in a question on which a shift to a new era rests. Roberto Esposito rightly underlines how this is a possible way to escape the tyranny of what Walter Benjamin called “economic theology”. In fact, we are talking about a new relationship between the world of people and the world of goods, which has been entrusted, for quite a while, to the logic of the market, and therefore to the mediation of property, whether private or public. Now the accent is no longer on the proprietor subject, but on the function that a good needs to have in society. From this premise, a first definition of common goods has been arrived at: they are those goods that are functional to the exercise of fundamental rights and to the free development of the personality, and that need to be safeguarded, subtracting them from the destructive logic of the short term, projecting their protection to the farthest world, the one inhabited by future generations. The connection to fundamental rights is essential, and it takes us beyond a generic reference to the person. In a beautiful essay, Luca Nivarra has highlighted how the prospect of common goods is the one that allows us to oppose a market logic that wants to “appropriate goods destined to the satisfaction of widespread primary needs, to collective enjoyment”. It’s the very collective dimension that undermines the public/private dichotomy, around which the proprietary dimension has been organized in modernity. A different dimension appears that takes us beyond possessive individualism and the traditional public management of goods. So, it is not another form of property, but the “opposite of property”, as has been graphically affirmed in the United States since 2003. There is a trace of this prospect in our constitution that, in Article 43, foresees the possibility of awarding the management of essential services, energy resources, monopoly situations, not only to public bodies, but also to a “community of workers or users”. Consequently, the key point is not the “ownership” of goods, but their management that must guarantee access to the good and see the participation of interested subjects. Common goods have a “diffuse ownership”, they belong to everyone and no one, in the sense that everyone should be able to have access to them but nobody can demand exclusive vantage over them. They need to be administered according to the principle of solidarity. Unavailable to the market, common goods thus appear as essential tools in order for the rights of citizens (that belong to everyone as people) to actually be exercised. At the same time, though, the construal of common goods as an autonomous category, distinct from the historical visions of property, demands an analysis that starts from the connection between specific goods and specific rights, identifying the means by which that “common patrimony” is articulated and internally differentiated. For instance, if we consider knowledge on the Net, one of the central themes in the discussion, we are immediately aware of its specificity. Luciano Gallino rightly spoke of it as of a global common good. But it’s this very globality that makes a management institutional pattern whose leader is a community of users problematic, or inadmissible; something that is necessary and possible in other cases. How can this community be selected from the billions of individuals that belong to the internet population? Once again, a challenge for habitual categories. Protection of the knowledge on the Net doesn’t happen through the identification of an administrator, but through the definition of the conditions for the use of the good, which needs to be directly accessible by all the interested parties, despite the minimal compromises which are necessary because of all the different ways the knowledge is produced. So, here we don’t have the participatory model, and at the same time, the possibility of enjoying the good doesn’t demand redistributive policies for resources in order for people to be able to use it. It’s the way the good is “constructed” that makes it accessible to everyone interested. The case of the corporation, which is also much discussed, is completely different. There is a great risk of confusion here. We’ve known for a very long time that the corporation is a “constellation of interests” and that institutional models were created to give a voice to everyone. But participation, even in the most intense forms of co-management, doesn’t place all subjects on the same level, nor does it eliminate the fact that the starting point is constituted by conflicts, and not by a convergence of interests. To speak of the common good is misleading. The operation of distinction, definition, construction of institutional models that are diverse even if united by their ends, is only the beginning. But it doesn’t remain in the clouds of theory. Observation of Italy today offers examples of the way in which the logic of common goods is starting to produce institutional effects. The city of Naples has instituted a councillorship for common goods; the region of Puglia approved a law, if a very controversial one, about public water; the region of Piedmont approved a law on open data, on access to personal information; in the Senate two bills were presented about common goods and there are regional proposals, like in Sicily. A network of local administrations is being built and a wide social coalition is working on a European Charter. What unites these initiatives is their origin in the action of groups and movements able to attract citizens and give continuity to their presence. A political development that the parties suffer, or try to hinder, being still unaware of the fact that we are not facing a marginal or sectorial matter, but that we are dealing with a different idea of politics and its forms, able to not only give voice to the people, but also to build political subjectivities, to redistribute powers. It’s a “constitutional” question, at least for all those who, turning their eyes to the world, realise and understand the increasing unsustainability of the structures blindly entrusted to the “natural” law of the markets.
STEFANO RODOTÀ
Professor of Civil law at La Sapienza University of Rome. He was a deputy of the Italian Parliament (1979-1994) and at the European Parliament (1989). Member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the European Council (1983-1994). On 2007 he headed the Italian Commission for the reform of the civil code on public goods.