When I’ve had conversations about the commons with right-leaning people (and sometimes cynical people on the left too), a typical response might be something along the lines of: ‘don’t waste your time trying to build a more democratic, sustainable or peaceful society. It won’t work, because humans are inherently selfish, greedy and competitive’. This Darwinian approach is echoed by mainstream economics – humans are independent, self-interested creatures, but billions of small, selfish acts actually produce the most productive economy and wealthiest society in the long-run.

I admit that I was partly convinced by that argument. I know that young children will snatch toys from each other, until they’re trained by adults to share. But I also know that humans evolved to be social animals that have to be able to collaborate for harmony within the tribe, and I’ve seen the massive responses to appeals for help after famines, tsunamis, and various other humanitarian crises. Empathy and kindness are widespread too.

Early hierarchical settlements

I could see that collaboration, lack of hierarchy and relative equality was likely in hunter-gatherer extended family bands, and this was backed up by palaeoarchaeological research, as well as observing some of the few hunter-gatherer tribal societies that are left. But I assumed that the transition from ‘Eden’ to agriculture and large settlements changed all that. I’m fascinated by ancient societies, and have read about them for many years – and this is a summary of what I believed:

As the first city-states started to form in ancient Mesopotamia, fed by a patchwork of farms across the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, grain was stored in large siloes (in case of future shortages), and a surplus was generated for the first time, that was accumulated and controlled by a warrior class drawn from Mafia-like, oligarchic families, assisted by a priesthood that kept records and legitimised their rule via a mandate from the heavens. Since then, human history has been a story of despotism, empire and colonialism, with ultimate power in the hands of a tiny minority of the population – the most ruthless and ambitious.

When farmers brought their grain to be stored, they were issued with receipts (on clay tablets – the very earliest examples of writing that we know of) that circulated as a type of currency, which soon accumulated in the hands of the powerful (rather than the grain itself), and were lent out at interest, bringing large swathes of the population into debt servitude that concentrated the wealth and power of the ruling class even more. It was control of the means of exchange, rather than the means of production, that concentrated power.

Money as power

This basic pattern was repeated in every subsequent empire, until the Greek rulers minted coins with their heads on, and paid conscripted soldiers with them. Local people were told that they had to pay their taxes in those coins, and that the way to get them was to provide whatever it was that their soldiers needed – food, weapons, clothes, armour, horses, prostitutes, alcohol etc. (or direct services to the rulers, like building their ships and castles) in return for the coins. Armies were then able to conquer more lands and send newly-captured slaved down mines to get the silver for the coins, and so on. Again, it was control of the means of exchange that was important in maintaining power.

This debt-slavery-military scam has kept power and wealth concentrated in an elite ever since, and all this was probably inevitable because of inherent human greed and ambition for power, which led Hobbes to produce his Leviathan, advocating a rigid hierarchy with a powerful monarch at the top, to stop us all killing each other, like the savages we are.

I was aware that large-ish human settlements existed before even the ancient Sumerian city-states, but I assumed that they were a smaller version / warm-up act for the coming age of empires. But new information has emerged over the last few years that seems to indicate that this story may not be true.

Even earlier non-hierarchical settlements

In The Dawn of Everything (2021), Davids Graeber and Wengrow explain (among many other things) how after the Agricultural Revolution, at least 4000 years passed before the first hierarchical urban developments. During this period, early farming communities developed technologically (e.g. metallurgy, leavened bread, basic mathematics, sailing, the potter’s wheel), but without kings, centralised control, hierarchy or bureaucracy. Archaeological evidence from what is now Kurdistan and central Turkey shows large settlements with no centre, and in which all houses were more-or-less the same size (and of high-quality), and no special burial sites containing lots of treasure.

This pattern was repeated in places as far apart as China and Peru. There were, for example, large, non-hierarchical settlements of people in Peru, 4000 years before the Incas; and in the Indus Valley and Ukraine, the very first cities show no evidence of monarchs or rulers.

The BBC repeated this message in its Ascent of Woman series. The first episode looked at Çatalhöyük, in what is now central Turkey. Inhabited by 5-8,000 people from around nine-and-a-half thousand years ago, excavations have revealed a society without gender inequality, but also without much inequality of any kind. ‘Aggressive egalitarianism’ they called it – no-one was allowed to lord it over anyone else, and all houses were of a similar size. They buried their dead underneath their houses, and incredibly, DNA testing found that bodies in ‘family’ graves were often not blood relatives. It seems that they shared their children around! Mum and dad weren’t necessarily biological parents. The ‘family’ was the entire community.

Is selfishness inherent, or hierarchy inevitable?

Maybe this 4000-year period isn’t significant – it could just have been lag time before hierarchy inevitably kicked in. But maybe it wasn’t inevitable, and human history could have taken a very different trajectory if we’d managed to prevent concentration of wealth and power. But even if it were inevitable that some of the first attempts to seize power would be successful, and would only lead to more wealth and power making it to the centre – even if that were true, it still shows that humans can live together in large settlements without hierarchy, and therefore that selfishness, greed and competitiveness are no more inherent than empathy, sufficiency and collaboration.

This has huge implications for attempts to build a commons world, including economy, governance and society. Those non-hierarchical societies must have had ways to make decisions, to produce what they needed, and to distribute it reasonably fairly – otherwise there would have been chaos. We don’t know exactly what those processes were, but today, we have plenty of ideas, plus the technology to make it happen.

Perhaps there’s a part of our nature that is hierarchical – watching a documentary about chimpanzee society recently brought that home. But we’re not chimps, we’re humans, and a couple of hundred thousand years of using co-operation to build successful extended family and tribal bands will have developed a very important collaborative part of our ancestors’ nature too. There’s no reason to allow the hierarchical part to dominate. I do think though, that although hierarchy can be maintained with absentee moneylenders, landlords, shareholders and politicians, collaborative organising requires face-to-face contact. Which is, again, where the commons comes in, growing from face-to-face contact in every town.

The main takeaway for me from all of this is that when we’re presented with arguments that humans are inherently selfish and competitive, which means that any attempt to build a commons / co-operative / mutualist society is doomed to failure, we can respond that without a shadow of doubt, that isn’t true, and selfishness and competitiveness are only dominant today because we live in a system that rewards those attributes. Humans have been and are still very resourceful and imaginative when it comes to working out how to live together in peace, democracy and abundance. I believe that commons ideas can deliver those things.