ABSTRACT
Capitalism has been increasingly privatising biological, and in fact all other, land and water resources. The privatisation has weakened and, for all practical purposes, destroyed the rural local community. The individual has thus to deal more and more directly with the centralising state and less and less with her/his neighbours. The state is so large compared to the local community that the individual's relationships with authority are getting more and more impersonal and based more and more strictly on blind laws rather than on understanding and compassion. This law recognises only individual rights and individual responsibilities. Whatever communal residue has remained from the old community days has, therefore, ended up without anyone with any recognised right to, or responsibility for, it. This means that there can be no one to be motivated, or to feel obliged, to care for it. Hence the aphorism: “The Tragedy of the Commons”. This tragedy, therefore, emanates from the private, not from the communal.1
