In the Ilocos region of the northern Philippines, the typhoons come every year. Ilocos is north of where my family is from.
They come from the Pacific, tracking west across the warm water, and when they make landfall they bring winds and rain that overwhelm everything built to resist them. The rivers flood. The bamboo-and-stone dams that the farming cooperatives called zanjera have built across the swift-flowing rivers wash out — teepee-shaped structures called palomares, weighted with heavy stones, held against the current by lines of bamboo. Every year. The typhoon comes, and the dam goes, and in the morning there is no water for the fields.
And in the morning, the community gathers to rebuild it.
The rebuilding is heavy communal labor: cutting bamboo, hauling stone, placing the structure against the current, checking the lines. Everyone with an atar — a share of water — is required to show up. More water means more labor, sometimes with multiple households contributing to a share. Meanwhile, a designated officer feeds everyone working.
The officer's official title is simply cocinero — the cook.
The cook is not an informal arrangement. The cook is written into the governance structure of the zanjera — into the same documents that specify water allocation, labor obligation, dispute resolution, and the election of officers. The community does not feed each other while rebuilding the dam because someone thought it would be nice. The governance requires it — because the people who built these institutions understood, across the generations, that rebuilding is not separable from the relationship that makes rebuilding possible. That relationship must be fed.
This form has outlasted the Spanish colonial government that first required it be documented — over 400 years ago.
You know this is right.
Something in you recognizes this as familiar. The hard weather expected, the community rebuilding, improvised materials — and someone cooking through it. It feels right that someone wrote down "this is how we do things here." While I can say for sure, as a Filipino, that there are endless arguments, I'm equally certain this wasn't designed from a theory. You have been in rooms like this — a neighborhood cleanup that turned into a potluck, a block party that saved a business, a toolshed where the only rule ever needed was "leave things better than you found them." You know what it feels like.
So why does it feel so far away?
Why does the zanjera feel like it belongs to another world — ancient, tropical, prelapsarian — rather than like a description of something you could build, or rebuild, or participate in next Tuesday? Why does the cook written into law feel like whimsy rather than common sense?
Not because someone told you. The assumption that it's impossible is baked into the policy of every institution you've ever interacted with — it surrounds you. You haven't seen the graphs, but you've heard the arguments that come from them.
It starts in 1968, with the publication of one of the few scientific papers whose title is a household name: "The Tragedy of the Commons." It is one of the most cited papers in the history of environmental and economic policy. It is taught, still, in introductory economics and environmental studies courses as established fact.
It described a situation that does not exist.
Its author, Garrett Hardin, was a director of the American Eugenics Society and a white nationalist. He co-founded anti-immigrant organizations and sat on the boards of population control groups. He would go on to write "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor," arguing that the correct response to famine in the Global South is to just let people die.
The argument runs like this: imagine a pasture open to all. Each herder benefits fully from adding one more animal. The cost of overgrazing is shared. So each herder, acting rationally, adds animals until the pasture is destroyed. The commons cannot govern itself. Privatize or control.
He was not describing any actual commons that had ever existed. He was describing what a commons would look like if you removed everything that makes it work — the communication, the shared norms, the history of relationship, the governance structure, the cook. He described a collection of anonymous strangers with no connection to each other or the land, called it a commons, and concluded it was inherently unstable.
He had never visited Ilocos. He had never spoken to anyone who had built a palomar.
Elinor Ostrom would. Political science turned out to be the correct discipline for what she was trying to understand — not how markets optimize resource allocation in theory, but how humans govern shared resources in practice.
In 1973, Ostrom and her husband Vincent founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. They called it a workshop because they wanted to emphasize political science as practice and build knowledge from real cases rather than from thought experiments and dogma. The cases accumulated across decades. Irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines. Mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan. Fisheries in Maine and Turkey and Indonesia. Groundwater basins in California. She interviewed lobstermen herself, quizzing them about the informal rules that governed their fishery — rules with no legal standing that every lobsterman understood and followed. She used satellite imagery to observe how different management regimes affected forests from above. She played irrigation allocation games with her students and found that when they were allowed to discuss strategy before playing, their collective outcomes more than doubled.
She would have recognized what happens every Thursday at noon outside the Door of the Apostles at Valencia Cathedral. Eight men in the loose black blouses of Valencian farmers sit in a semicircle on seventeenth-century wooden chairs, set out on the cobblestones of the plaza. The Micalet tower strikes noon. A bailiff calls for cases. The Tribunal de las Aguas — the Water Tribunal of Valencia — convenes.
It has been convening, in this form, in this place, since at least the tenth century. Its origins are Moorish. When James I of Aragon conquered Valencia in the thirteenth century, he formalized the tribunal rather than replacing it, because it worked. Every political regime since has left it in place, for the same reason. The tribunal governs the distribution of water from the Turia River among eight irrigation channels serving 17,000 hectares of farmland. It has no written legal code. Its proceedings are in Valencian. Its fines are assessed in lluires, a currency that has not existed since the medieval period. It has never needed the formal Spanish legal system to enforce a decision. Its authority is grounded not in state power but in the recognition of its members as people who know the water, the land, the community, and can be trusted to judge fairly.
Ostrom would have recognized the cook.
From hundreds of cases like these, she distilled eight design principles — not prescriptions, but findings. What the sustainable commons actually share, absent from the ones that failed. Clearly defined boundaries. Rules that fit local conditions rather than imported from outside. Collective choice — the people affected by the rules help make them. Monitoring by people accountable to the community. Graduated sanctions. Fast, local conflict resolution. Recognition by external authorities of the community's right to self-govern. And for larger systems, nested layers of governance coordinating upward from the local.
In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. In her acceptance lecture, she walked the audience through Hardin's pasture — prisoners trapped in their isolation, unable to speak to one another. "The users of a common-pool resource," she said, "are not so limited."
So if Hardin is wrong — comprehensively, empirically, repeatedly wrong — why is he still in the textbooks? Why were the collectively managed grazing lands of East Africa still being broken up and transferred to extractive industries decades after Ostrom had demonstrated that communities were governing them sustainably? Why are fishing communities still being told that privatization is the only alternative to collapse?
Because the paper was not received as fact for being true. It was received as fact for being useful. The 1970s and 1980s were the period of greatest global expansion of privatization and enclosure — of fisheries, of forests, of water rights, of commonly held land on every continent. Hardin's paper provided the intellectual cover. If the commons inevitably self-destructs, then enclosure is not an imposition. It is a rescue.
Gramsci called this hegemony: the process by which the ideas of the powerful become the common sense of everyone. Not through force — force is expensive and visible — but through the slow sedimentation of assumptions into the background, until the arrangements that serve the powerful feel like nature, like gravity, like the way things simply are. Hardin's paper is hegemony with footnotes. It took the prior conviction — that poor communities cannot govern themselves — dressed it in equations, published it in Science, and let it sediment into curriculum.
By the time Ostrom was winning the Nobel Prize, the damage had been done on five continents. The work she won it for had been published in 1990.
I didn't have the language for this when I was running the restaurant in Norfolk.
I had the fragments. A bootleg PDF of Simulacra and Simulation in high school because I saw it in a film. A bootleg HTML of A Thousand Plateaus on my breaks at a software job, absorbing the form before the argument. I knew in my body — the way you know things you can't yet say — that something was being produced in that room that didn't show up in the numbers.
The commons wasn't the room. It was the stable distribution of responsibility — across staff and regulars and growers, across years — both for creating and upholding the uniqueness of that space. The trust between regulars and staff built over years. The knowledge of what people needed before they asked. The wine described in terms of the soil and the watershed and the farmer who had decided to make it honestly, planting a different relationship to the living world in whoever was willing to receive it. A place where people could just be, and that would give them space to become.
That is what we lost when we closed.
Michel Foucault, working in Paris in the 1970s, identified something Gramsci had named but not fully anatomized. Power, he argued, had undergone a transformation. Classical sovereign power — the power of the king — was the right to take life or let live. Modern power is something different. It doesn't primarily kill; it domesticates. A wolf is not hunted into a dog — it is bred into one, generation by generation, its development bent toward tameness until the docility looks like its own nature. Neoteny is the mechanism: the domesticated animal keeps its juvenile traits for life, the dependence and the pliancy that the wild adult would have outgrown, because those are the traits that serve the keeper. This is what biopower does to a population. It does not take your life; it administers it. It manages, regulates, optimizes — bends the body's development toward usefulness until the usefulness feels like character. The prison, the hospital, the school, the factory: not just places where bodies are controlled but where the definition of normal and deviant, productive and useless, is manufactured and maintained.
Antonio Negri built the answer to Foucault's unfinished question over decades. Arrested in Italy in 1979 on charges widely understood to be political, he wrote The Savage Anomaly from prison. He was elected to Parliament from his cell, and used parliamentary immunity to escape to France in 1983. From exile through the 1990s, he and Michael Hardt would write Empire. He died in Paris in December 2023, at ninety.
What Negri and Hardt built across Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth: if biopower is power operating through life, then biopolitical production is what capitalism now primarily depends on. Not the extraction of value from raw materials or repetitive factory labor, but from life itself — from language, from affect, from care, from knowledge, from the accumulated capacity of human beings to cooperate, communicate, and create. The call center worker selling warmth. The nurse managing pain and fear. The teacher producing the capacity to learn. The neighborhood whose longtime residents make it desirable enough for developers to gentrify. None of this produces a material good you can hold. All of it produces value that capital captures.
At the far end of domestication is the thing that does not breed its host but rewrites it. A fungus infects an ant, and the ant climbs — not where the ant was going, but where the fungus needs to fruit; it locks its jaws onto a leaf at the right height and dies there so the fungus can grow out of its head. The ant does the climbing. The ant feels, presumably, like it is doing what ants do. That is biopolitical production at its limit: not the body coerced, but the body's own striving turned to another's harvest, the worker selling warmth and calling it a career, the neighborhood making itself lovely for the developer who will price it out. The capacity is yours. The fruiting is someone else's.
And what is the substrate of all this production?
The common. Language — no one produced it, everyone uses it, it becomes richer the more it is shared. Affect — the capacity to care, to trust, to recognize each other as belonging to the same world. Knowledge embedded in practice, in community, in the way people in a place know how to do things together. The social fabric that makes a friendship endure, that makes a restaurant work, that makes a neighborhood function, that makes a market possible, that makes collective action coherent.
Capital is a social relation that allows formal ownership of assets — money, land, machinery, stock, patents — to override all other social forms and considerations. Capital didn't produce the common. It cannot produce the common. What capital can do — what it has always done — is enclose it.
The Valencia tribunal isn't only governing the Turia River. It is governing the accumulated relational intelligence of a community — the knowledge of the water, the trust between farmers, the norms built across ten centuries — that makes the river economically useful at all. The zanjera isn't only governing water allocation. It is governing the social fabric that makes collective rebuilding possible. These are biopolitical commons. The resource is real. But the resource isn't only the water.
Ostrom was in Indiana counting cases. Negri was in Paris completing Foucault. Neither knew the other existed. Both arrived, from opposite directions, at the same answer: the commons is prior to the market and prior to the state. It is what we are before either claims us. Enclosure doesn't create value. It captures value that communities have already produced, and then charges them to access what they made.
There is a cocinero in Ilocos who feeds his community while they rebuild what the storm destroyed. The governance structure that employs him has been running for centuries. There is a Filipino cook in Norfolk who ran a restaurant where the bar was nature education and the wine list was a political argument, and who is now writing a book about why what he was doing mattered and what destroyed it.
Same practice. Same commons. Different typhoon.
My Bluesky handle is 'Read Hardt and Negri.' I put it there because I believe it. Once you have the name, you can see it everywhere — in the neighborhood whose social fabric makes it valuable to developers who price out the people who built the value, in the open-source project whose contributors produce wealth a platform captures and monetizes, in the care work that sustains every economy on earth and appears in no GDP.
The commons isn't only where you go to get water. It's what you already are. What enclosure takes isn't just a resource. It's a piece of the world you built.
The loneliness was the spell. Not a feeling — a fence. You looked for your power in yourself, found little, and called that the size of the world. But it was never yours alone to hold. Power lives between us, in what we build and defend together. Being made alone feels like being made powerless. It is. You do not grow stronger alone. You act as if your strength is shared — and find, in the building, that it holds. You were never alone. You were always building with us. If we choose to, we can build together.