Common ownership

Common ownership refers to holding the assets of an organization, enterprise, or community indivisibly rather than in the names of the individual members or groups of members, as common property. Forms of common ownership exist in every economic system.

Common ownership of all of the means of production is advocated by communists and some forms of socialism. The principle of holding all means of production in common with free access to the output is the defining feature of a communist society. Advocates make a distinction between collective ownership and common property; the former refers to property owned jointly by agreement of a set of colleagues, such as producer cooperatives, whereas the latter refers to assets that are completely open for access, such as a public park freely available to everyone (that is, the commons).

Many primitive societies held property in common through tradition. Thus, common ownership of land is an example of customary land ownership in tribal societies which pre-dates the arrangement of colonised alienated land. Marxist theory describes this primitive communism as based on common ownership on a subsistence level. Another term for this arrangement is a "gift economy" or communalism.

The principle was adopted by the “new wave” workers’ co-operative movement during the 1970s, and continues into the present day, although it is less common. In 1976, the British Parliament passed the Industrial Common Ownership Act (“ICO Act”), which gave £100,000 of "seed" funding to the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) and £50,000 to the Scottish Co-operative Development Committee (SCDC), respectively. ICOM was fueled by three strands of thought–Christian socialism, workers’ control and “rice and sandals” alternativism–and successfully promoted the creation of over 2,000 worker’s co-operatives, before merging in 2001 with the Co-operative Union to form Co-operatives UK, thus reuniting the worker co-operative and consumer co-operative sectors.

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