Tag Archives: ownership

There is no ‘tragedy of the Commons.’ But a tragedy of the absence of Commons-as organizations, let’s call it ‘the tragedy of uncommons’, does exist. Below, I will provide the example of the island of Ameland in the Northern Netherlands, in line with the historical examples of successful Commons mentioned by Elinor Ostrom (especially those for Switzerland).  Ownership is a multi-dimensional concept. Up to the 1795 revolution, the island of Ameland, north of Friesland, was not a part...

Marx of course supports collective ownership of the means of production. But by this he does not mean simply transferring ownership deeds from private to collective entities, but rather ensuring that the working class owns and controls the means of production. He makes this clear in writing, “When one speaks of private property, one is dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already...

Most theories of the firm within economics pick up the narrative with the existence of the corporation as a given. They then bend over backwards to retro-fit this highly centralized pseudo economy into the larger free market narrative preferred in all major textbooks. In so doing they blithely ignore Alfred Chandler’s famous explanation for the rise of modern business organization, which he argued became possible “only when the hand of management proved be more efficient than the invisible...