Garret Hardin wrote about the Tragedy Of The Commons, although he later stated that a more apt title would be the Tragedy Of Unregulated Commons so I'm taking his desired title as the correct one.
According to this mental hypothesis a field grazed by two herds of sheep belonging to two different owners, too small to provide enough grass for both, will create a Tragedy Of The Unregulated commons. It becomes basically a free-for-all where it's within each herd owner's individual interest to get their own herd to graze as much as possible, otherwise they will graze less than they need.
Socialist Allan Engler says that "When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it."
That seems fishy to me. Didn't nobles (and churches) used to own all the lands in the past and the peasants were just caretakers? That right there is privatization, if only as a loose term. There was an authority hanging above the sheepherders, regulating their moves. Also the technology wasn't there for taking too much advantage of lands and other limited resources, nowadays overpopulation and industrial machinery have rendered that point moot.
As far as I know.
Just to be sure, were there any examples throughout history of limited resources (grazing land, fruit trees, rich soil for crops etc) where tribes, clans and/or villages set aside their differences and settled amicably on the equal distribution without first attempting a free-for-all, along with violence against anyone who tried to thwart them?
The strongest academic challenge to Hardin is from Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize for work in this area.
Have a look at Governing the Commons.
And a summary of her thoughts on managing the commons.
While I don't think she is undeserving of her accolades in this debate, her theories are very vulnerable when scaled up to the global level. She doesn't deny this, but it goes shockingly unsaid by many of her acolytes and those who overstate the claim that she has entirely refuted Hardin's extrapolated model.
In the managing the commons link, you'll see that the very first principle is defining clear boundaries. This form of exclusion is much easier at a small scale where an anarchist enclave can create a cooperative institution. The problem of stopping CO2 emissions by a foreign sovereign country, due to the difficulty of defining an exclusionary boundary, deeply strains Ostrom's solutions.
To return to your question about smaller scale cooperation, yes it is possible to avoid the tragedy of the commons but only through the creation of exclusionary boundaries.
Ostrom provides numerous examples of non-violent/cooperative distribution.
I think we need to be careful of what we think forms "regulation". Just because there isn't a "law" backed with a "sword/gun" doesn't mean there is a lack of regulation. Social regulation is very real, and often far better equipped to do the job.
For example in the history of my city, Boston Commons was socially regulated by the families that lived around it. They were able to live and use the commons without destroying them. Years later as wealthier families moved towards the commons, they brought too many animals to graze. Then laws were needed to enforce how many animals could grave without destroying the commons.
The agreed upon social behavior and norms was able to regulate the commons, until people who felt they didn't need/want/desire to conform to the social rules of the common arrived. It seems the very notion of inequality/"some people being more equal" created this problem.
"When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it."
What does this even mean? Did these societies have no theft or other property crime? If so, who was "damaging" the common property system, and how were they doing so? If these societies did have crime, but simply acted together to deal with and create consequences for crime, then in what way were these past societies an improvement upon property-holding ones?
I think this socialist guy is just trying to keep his description of the past vague so that he can better argue that the past suits his theory. That would also explain why he doesn't back up his claims with historical sources- then we'd have to know what his claims actually were!
Though I liked Hardin's book a lot, I thought the simple example he used glossed over some important aspects of the commons- that it also required investment, and that it did not just serve as a place to raise sheep. It needed mowing, to keep sheep-inedible weeds from taking over. It needed a fence, to keep the animals from straying, and that fence had to be maintained, as well; repaired, the weeds burned off around it. It was also valuable simply as a space to hold the family milk-cow, which would have to be milked twice a day and, if it was close to the house, was much easier to get to than out in a far field- it might not matter so much if the grazing there was poor, the cow would be fed in the shed regardless. So, it was not just a simple question of how many sheep everyone would put out, it was really a question of who had built the fence, who should paint it this year, who's turn it was to mow....more of an accounting problem that was hard to figure out, and so the place was just badly managed because, in their own minds, everyone had done more than their share of the work and so felt themselves entitled to put more livestock out.
It resembles perhaps some of the difficulties of the present negotiations over carbon emissions. The climate seems like a simple Commons problem: with everyone just taking more than their fair share, it seems it should be possible to simply divide the pie into fair shares. But some of the worst offenders are also ones coming very late to the game, who can point to Western nations as having dumped more than their shares of carbon in the previous century, so assigning a fair share is actually quite complex.