ABSTRACT
Economists since Adam Smith have proposed conceptions of public goods that are essentially bound up with a market society and the institutional underpinnings of such a society. This chapter argues for an alternative conception of public goods, one that does not presuppose either a market society or private property understood as entailing the right to exclude others. It proposes instead the notion of public goods as commonstock and suggests that the concept of commonstock provides a basis for the critical evaluation of the privatization, commodification, and the increasingly exclusive control of nature, communicative space, the social order, the political order, and the economic order that is characteristic of our time. The United States remains at the center of the international system. It is the preeminent global military, economic and political power. Militarily, the US Navy controls the world's oceans more completely than any empire in history.
