Remaking the Commons (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: No Place for the Commons
The Minnesota Review, 2019
This article introduces the dossier "Is There a Place for the Commons?" by briefly explaining the concepts of the common (no s) and the commons (with an s) in terms of their philosophical, political, social, and historical trajectories. It examines the tension between the universalizing aspiration of the common as a political project and the particular social situations of the commons. It emphasizes the commons as praxis, that is, as a practice that takes place in the world without being reducible to place. In doing so, it also considers the vexed relationship between the commons and state sovereignty, the way in which the common functions as a placeholder for revolutionary subjectivity, the significance of ecology for the commons and vice versa, and the importance of queer, indigenous, feminist, and minoritarian commons for understanding what it means "to common" within and against capitalism.
Commons against and beyond capitalism
Community Development Journal, 2014
This essay contrasts the logic underlining the production of 'commons' with the logic of capitalist relations, and describes the conditions under which 'commons' become the seeds of a society beyond state and market. It also warns against the danger that 'commons' may be coopted to provide low-cost forms of reproduction, and discusses how this outcome can be prevented. 'Commons' is becoming a ubiquitous presence in the political, economic and even real estate language of our time. Left and Right, neo-liberals and neo-Keynesians, conservatives and anarchists use the concept in their political interventions. The World Bank has embraced it requiring, in April 2012, Zapatista women working in a common garden (photo by George Caffentzis)
We live in the midst of a social and economic crisis, one of the worst in capitalism's history; at the same time the environmental crisis, according to the predictions of the vast majority of scientists, is approaching catastrophe. Neither states nor markets seem able to offer solutions. On the contrary, many believe that they are the main sources of these crises. It is in this context that talks of – and social movements for – commons have become not only increasingly commonplace, but also increasingly relevant. In general terms, the commons are social systems in which resources are shared by a community of users/producers, who also defi ne the modes of use and production, distribution and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance. Such commons are not utopias, if nothing else because they exist and are produced vis-à-vis a social force – capital – that often demands their co-optation , if not enclosure. In this chapter we will examine various conceptualizations of commons, tracing a brief history of commons thinking in the process, before concluding that commons are essential to both capital and anti-capitalist social movements – and will therefore be a key focus of social antagonism over the next century.
The Politics of the Commons: from Teory to Struggle
2018
In this collected work, you will find articles that seek to analyze the politics of the commons. The unifying element of the articles is that they address the potentials of the commons not only as an academic field of study, but also by their inherent potentials and prevailing limitations as regards the anti-capitalist struggle. In addition, these articles chiefly seek to follow the traces of the politics of the commons throughout the social movements in Turkey. This book aims to fill a gap for activists, who not only want to understand the world but also to change it, by providing experiences of social movements and conceptual debates.
Social Revolution and the Commons
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2014
What does it mean to say no to a capitalist social system that has the power to put life to work for its own development and, in so doing, shapes subjectivities, horizons, architectures, urban and rural spaces, life rhythms, ecologies, and polities in its own image? This question arises with particular urgency in the midst of one of the deepest capitalist crises, with its catastrophic social and ecological consequences. This article argues that the answer to our question resides ultimately in a particular type of social power, one that recomposes the social practice of the commons to achieve autonomy from capital, especially and initially in matters of social reproduction (food, health, care, housing, knowledge, and education).
Commons Against Capitalism (2015)
The Politics of Ecosocialism - Transforming welfare, Edited by Kajsa Borgnäs, Teppo Eskelinen, Johanna Perkiö, Rikard Warlenius, 2015
In this chapter, I will first introduce the concept of commons as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. Then I will analyse the importance of the commons in Marx’s thinking on ecology, and the dynamic role that the commons has in the understanding of class struggle in capitalism. Third, I will analyse the possibilities of the process of commonification departing from the foundations of the Nordic welfare state model. In the two concluding sections, I will map the political possibilities for an eco-socialist transformation strategy through promotion of the commons.
2020
Chapter four critically reviews the anti-capitalist literature on the commons, comprising of various interpretations of Marx’s work, among others. The first section investigates the relation of the political and the common in a broad spectrum of continental political philosophy, including ‘post-hegemony’ notably Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and the autonomous Marxist tradition (Michael Hardt and Toni Negri) in the context of Alexandros Kioupkiolis’s critique who points to the crowding out of the self-instituting power of the people in several Marxist and post-Marxist interpretations of the common. The second section focuses on the work of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval who have reintroduced the self-instituting power of the people in political discourse as the essential concept of ‘the common’. The third section illustrates a more concrete version of the common, articulated in the Katharine Gibson and Julie Graham’s work, who sketch out the philosophical and empirical precon...
Global Discourse, 2018
Our main hypothesis in this paper is that in the current conjuncture, we are moving towards a ‘dominance’ of a ‘commons’ format for societal development. The commons format assumes a ‘third’ mode of development that indicates civil society and community as critical initiators and guardians of common value. The emerging commons model should be distinguished from both the regulation of capitalism by social-democracy, and state-centric Soviet types of socialism. Just as a full-fledged capitalist system could be seen as starting with the seed forms developed in the medieval city-states, so a future commons-centric society can be hypothesized from currently emerging commons-based seed forms. We believe that just as the revolutions bringing full-fledged capitalism were preceded by the development of capitalists and their seed forms, so a commons-based systemic change is necessarily the result of commoners developing their own seed forms. Therefore, the creation of a systemic ecology of th...