The theme of this conference is utopian and proudly so. Let us remember that U-topia does not mean "impossible" but no-place. Or perhaps no place yet. The topics above introduce it and will be discussed by the opening round table in which I've been kindly asked to participate.

Which of the terms it puts forward are now "Common Goods"? Let us look first at the state of play, then what might be done to change it.

WATER? No, water is certainly not a common good, although more and more communities are "Reclaiming public water" as the title of a recent TNI book puts it. Riccardo Petrella will surely develop this theme. I will simply note that privatisation of whatever previously public service has almost always resulted in higher prices to consumers - this is normal in a capitalist system, because one has to leave room for profits and payments to shareholders over and above normal reinvestment in the service itself. So unless the surcharge for profits is compensated by greater efficiency, prices will be higher - this is also because shareholders demand larger and larger rewards. But privatisation does not result in greater efficiency - the new owners often neglect necessary investments and upkeep. They will also be anxious to reduce cost by downsizing the workforce and thus lose precious savoir-faire. Nearly always, the outcome of privatisation is higher prices, less work available, lower efficiency and quality, less availability in poorer neighbourhoods, and, of course, lack of democratic control over the service concerned.

PEACE? We have just had a summer of the most abominable carnage in Lebanon while at the same time the Iraq war continues as does the occupation of Afghanistan. We can identify those who most frequently violate peace and refuse to recognise reality The United States is of course the first among violators and many signs show that the aggressive attitude of the imperial power is not going to be tamed any time soon. Seymour Hersh's recent article in the New Yorker, as well as his previous work on the subject, points to bombing of Iran in the coming months. Some say that Israel's bombing in Lebanon was a trial run for Iran, particularly through using deep penetration bombs designed to destroy the underground facilities of the Hezbollah. Certainly many bodies of civilians are now being found - ordinary people who were trapped in cellars - but it does not seem to have had much effect on the "dug-in" positions of the Hezbollah. We cannot be sure. After the mid-term elections in November, the Bush administration is likely to launch another aggressive campaign - against Iran, against Chavez - who knows? The so-called "War against Terrorism" has opened a whole new avenue for imperialism. A war against so vague a concept as "terrorism" can, by definition, never be won and it was chosen in order to legitimise endless war. I would also argue that globalisation exacerbates conflicts worldwide by encouraging and increasing competition rather than cooperation at every level.

KNOWLEDGE? Here we have a better candidate for a common good. Scientists are still, for the most part sharing their results and publishing in non-commercial journals, although much science now goes on in private labs and is never published at all but is proprietary. This is the case for a great deal of genetic research, not to mention research carried out by the military However, the internet has put enormous amounts of knowledge at our fingertips: instruments like Wikipedia, but also the fact that most institutions where power is concentrated, have also gone online. For example, I've recently been researching certain aspects of trade law cases decided by the Dispute Resolution Body of the World Trade Organisation. Everything I need is on the site. Doing such research even ten years ago would have required a trip to a specialised library somewhere - probably to Geneva and the seat of the organisation itself. The template of the internet should certainly be a clue to how other aspects of the world economy might be organised in future. Furthermore, the behaviour of most people online is exemplary - there is a desire to cooperate, to share, to make knowledge and expertise free. Some people use if only for making money, but on the whole, there is a spirit of commonality.

WORK? Some have argued that because of the increasing number of "knowledge workers", or immaterial rather than industrial work, workers have more control over their lives than they did a century ago. Certainly social legislation still affords some protection in some places. But globalisation increases precariousness, not just for the poor or the underclass but for people who previously felt quite secure in their jobs, including engineers, software designers, architects, and anyone who works from a keyboard or whose work can be digitised. Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, in "Multitude", think that "immaterial work" will be the key to self-governance, without oppressive intermediaries like the State, political representation [they do not care much for the democratic notion of "representation"] or even, apparently, capital. The new class doing this immaterial work is for them the new subject of history and able for the first time in history to escape the domination of capital. Personally I think this is nonsense. All the statistics show that in the past one hundred years, capital has never appropriated such a high proportion of value added in the economy as today. The forms of its oppression of workers may show up in different ways [e.g. more through stress than physical fatigue] but this does not fundamentally change the nature of work in our society. Furthermore, globalisation is a gift to capital now able to put people from all over the world in competition with each other - to the point where the notion of the "reserve army" of labour, which used to be purely national, no longer has any meaning.

SEAS? Overfishing, oil spills, the sea as a dumping-ground for pollution and run-offs of all kinds are the reality today. Again, the domination of capital over work and over local communities has never been so flagrant. Look at the destruction of mangrove swamps in South-East Asia, carried out in order to set up fish-farms or tourist complexes. This destruction demonstrably increased the devastation of the tsunami so that not only are people robbed of their previous coastal resources for their daily livelihoods - by tourism, fish-farms, construction of luxury housing - but when disaster strikes, it hits the coastal people hardest.

ENERGY? Again, no, energy is perhaps further from actually becoming a Common Good than any of the other hoped-for or potentially Common Goods on the Sbilanciamoci list. Energy is highly centralised and largely controlled by some of the world's largest transnational corporations. Hugo Chavez is making an effort to make petroleum a common good. For example, it was Chavez and not the United States government that sent aid in the form of free heating oil to a poor community suffering from the cold in Pennsylvania - but such an exception serves in this case to prove the rule. Decentralised energy should be the paradigm of tomorrow, but is very far from going in that direction today and the transnationals can be counted on to do everything they can against it. The question of energy related directly to that of war.

TERRITORY? I'm not sure what this means or why it figures on the list, in the sense that land has been privatised virtually everywhere. Indigenous peoples with no conception of private property and ownership of territory are everywhere having their traditional lands snatched away from them. The notion of the Commons is still valid, and still works, whether in South or North, but for a Commons to work, the people [the community] managing it must be in control of who can be a member and they must be able to set their own rules of management. If the "Commons" is open and anyone can demand to be part of the group, the community will lose control over setting the rules. Then the famous law Garrett Hardin described vividly in "The Tragedy of the Commons" [first published in 1968] comes into play. Every cattle-raiser [or fisherman or whoever] will try to put one more cow on the land because he will be concerned only with his self-interest. As everyone attempts to do the same, the territorial base soon collapses from ecological stress. Communal ownership is hard to maintain and to protect. This is not a reason not to try - several dozen factories in Argentina which had been abandoned by their owners are now being communally operated by their workers. The largest has about 400 employees. Hernan de Soto's programme for giving legal property title to slum-dwellers is in many ways a a useful idea, but of course does not challenge the reigning paradigm. I tend to think, as a homeowner, that people mostly want to own something which is theirs, which they can improve as they see fit, decorate, come home to. The very first Declaration of Human Rights [the French Declaration of the rights of man and the citizen-1789] recognise the right to own property. How much property is a different question.

From these mostly negative examples of goods which are definitely not common, we have some indications of where we should try to go, but I would also like to warn against a conference in which most people stop at saying "should" and "must". Clearly the programme does not encourage this, whether in Italy or in the world and this is a good thing. Nor am I saying that no change is possible - of course it is, and there are hopeful examples coming from many quarters, from all over the world in fact. But one first needs to be aware of the constraints and the obstacles in order to try to reduce or overcome them.

The first of these constraints is mental or psychological: people who want to change society must recognise that it is not because an idea is a good one and would be beneficial to virtually everybody that it will be accepted and put into practice, particularly if it gives people more control over any resource. This is why every change implies struggle. Sometimes, although rarely, the obstacle is merely bureaucratic inertia, which is bad enough, but more often the proposed changes are going to challenge interests which will fight hard to retain them. This is why the water-wars are so significant and such a good learning experience. They give us examples of successful popular struggles and surely Riccardo will tell us about them.

These water struggles may eventually win, however, mostly because they are essentially local in character - a town or city or at most a region is concerned, rather than an entire country, much less an international space. Thanks to two-hundred years of democratic practice and the struggles and resistance of those who came before us, there is a framework at these levels - local or regional - which allow people to organise, to publicise their cause and to impose change in the form of legally binding texts or contracts.

Such tactics can also be successful in fights about territory. One of the most successful movements of modern history has been that of the Movimiento sim Terra of the Brazilian landless whose land occupations over more than a decade have resulted in land grants to tens of thousands of families and government recognition. Under Lula's government, there is even a ministry which deals with land redistribution. The latifundistas [large landowners] have not given up, and their hired thugs continue to kill MST farmers and representatives. But the MST has taken its concept from just land occupation to the construction of entire communities, with their own schools, clinics and other communal facilities. In Uruguay, many successful self-housing cooperatives have allowed working people to build [and own] their own houses in urban and rural settings. Uruguay is also the only country that has put the right to water in its Constitution and made privatisation of water illegal. But governments have to be supportive - or at least not always favour the upper, propertied classes - for these movements to win.

Beyond the local, or in the best of national cases like Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela, we are on the territory where no democracy exists and where few forces beyond the so-called "alter-globalisation" movement want it to exist. In my view, the problem of international democracy is the key issue - along with putting the environment first - for progressive activists. Let us take a concrete example. Much of the suffering in the South has been directly created by the World Bank and the IMF, working closely with the interests of private financial actors and with the US government and their policies of structural adjustment. The impact of structural adjustment policies is known, it is documented by any number of reliable sources, it has brought large protest movements into being and yet the problem remains. The debt of these poor countries has still not been cancelled despite every effort of progressives in civil society and their allies. One of the main reasons is that no democracy exists at the international level and every struggle has to begin all over again at zero - there is not even any accumulated harvest from the gains of previous actions.

A hopeful sign is the modest beginning of international taxation on airplane tickets whose proceeds will be used to combat HIV-AIDS and other diseases. This French initiative can be directly traced to movement actions and the willingness of a government to cooperate and to seek cooperation from other governments. However, international measures to curb the power of financial interests in even the smallest way have not yet been taken. The proposal of activist movements was to tax not airplane tickets but international foreign exchange markets at a very low level. The French government, with the Brazilian, Chilean and Spanish governments eventually put the proposal on the agenda of the United Nations in September 2004, where it was countersigned by over a hundred other governments. However, it has still not been officially sponsored. The air-ticket tax was put in the place of a currency transaction tax despite the hundred governments signing on for a CTT. Enabling legislation has also been passed in some countries, notably Belgium, and all the practical machinery is in place for international taxation to finally get off the ground.

International taxes would not go to the root of capitalism - after all, it has easily accommodated national taxes - but would show that we can establish a Commons beyond the nation-State level. Other international taxes - for example on transnational corporation profits or on energy use and pollution are technically feasible, economically rational and ecologically responsible. They would benefit virtually everyone and certainly the planet. But they are vehemently opposed by a great many powerful interests. The most important point in trying to launch a struggle for change is to draw up a strategy to oppose the opponents.

Any important change at the international, national or local level requires a conscious policy of broad alliance-building among social forces. The problems we need to tackle are too big and the time has passed when any single-issue movement can win - at least at the scale we need to address. In other words, no social group, whether ecologists, trade unionists, farmers, women, intellectuals, North-South debt-development activists, or any other group can hope to win by itself. We all need each other. This doesn't mean that people should stop their individual struggles and action which are all important, but that they should know how and when to come together in order to be visible and place pressure where it is needed.

A final word about an economy based on common goods. The market is not the problem. People have used markets and traded for at least 70.000 years, probably more. (1) The debate should be about what ought and ought not to be in the market. Or, in more modern terms, we should ask what is public rather than private property, a tradable rather than a non-tradable good. The goal of globalised neo-liberal capitalism is on the contrary to put everything in the market - I could have given another talk about, for example, public services or about the General Agreement on Trade in Services [GATS] or the intellectual property agreement [TRIPS] under the auspices of the WTO.

Personally I would look forward to a time when capitalism no longer rules, but for the moment this seems completely unrealistic and I certainly do not want a "command economy" along the lines of the former Soviet Union. Even if "actually existing socialism" had not included Stalinism and the goulag, it would still not work, simply because no group of bureaucrats - even the most brilliant and most numerous - is omniscient enough to know in detail what people want and need and when they want and need it. Only the market can supply this kind of information - but the future market could also be a kind of collective construction along the lines of the internet, based on cooperation and self-policing. Everyone knows about poverty lines, but nobody ever discusses wealth lines and limits to accumulation. We need to think much more about such a future and I'm sure this Sbilanciamoci conference will contribute greatly to our collective reflection. Thank you for asking me to be here.

References

1. For the scientific evidence, see Kate Douglas, "Born to Trade"; New Scientist, 18 November 2004