Global Movement Cycles and Commoning Movements (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
The Crisis of Development and the Alternatives: Politics of the Commons and the Potentials
In response to the economic and ecological crises which are becoming more and more frequent, more serious questions have emerged about hegemonic notions of development, which are based on the assumption that economic growth, namely the increase in commodity production, may continue forever. The discontent with the hegemonic development approach and the economic policies implemented in line with that approach has become all the more apparent following the global economic crisis which began in the USA in 2008 and has continued up to this date. On the other hand, we see that the fundamental problem of the social oppositions which emerged in many regions ranging from the Occupy Street movement in the USA to the social movements in Latin America, from the revolts in the Arab regions to the demonstrations against the austerity policies in Europe and the resistance at Gezi Parkı in Turkey is related to how to turn that social energy into a transformative capacity and to unite these movements around an alternative program. Within this context, it has become all the more important to leave the hegemonic development approach and to discuss alternative policies that aim at surpassing the capitalist social relations, which are the basis for this hegemonic approach.
Commons Movements: Old and New Trends in Rural and Urban Contexts
Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2021
Over the past few years, studies in political ecology and environmental justice have been increasingly connecting the commons and social movements empirically, giving shape to a new, distinctive body of research on commons movements. In our review, we first organize and synthesize empirical lessons from this body of literature. We then highlight recent theoretical efforts made by scholars to both bridge and transcend the gap between the theory of the commons and social movement theory. As we illustrate, movements can help create and strengthen commons institutions and discourses, as well as rescale them horizontally and vertically. This is particularly evident in the context of rural community-rights movements in the global South, as well as in new water and food commons movements and community energy movements in both the global South and North. Commons institutions, in turn, can serve as the basis of social mobilization and become a key frame for social movements, as shown in the ...
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...
What are the Commons? On Natural, Urban, Social Commons and Their Effects on Urban Social Movements
The Politics of the Commons: from Theory to Struggle, 2018
Bülent Duru, “What are the Commons? On Natural, Urban, Social Commons and Their Effects on Urban Social Movements”, The Politics of the Commons: from Theory to Struggle, Eds. Erkin Erdoğan, Nuran Yüce, Özdeş Özbay, Sivil ve Ekolojik Haklar Derneği (Civil and Ecological Rights Association) December 2018, İstanbul.
Commons: A Social Outcome of the movement of the squares
This paper examines the evolvement of the "movement of the squares" following the end of the more visible cycles of mobilization of the square occupation. We argue that a crucial aspect of this evolution lies in the creation of a social infrastructure of alternative (re)productive projects in the form of commons. We call this type of outcomes "social" in order to distinguish them from the cultural, political and biographical outcomes underlined in typologies on the consequences of social movements. Bridging social movement studies with the literature on the commons, we build a conceptual framework of their relationship. Through a comparative analysis of the movements in Athens and Barcelona, we show how the commoning practices of the square encampments gave rise to more durable commons disseminated across cities´ social fabrics. We identify both direct and indirect mechanisms of movements´ transmutation into commons, and distinguish the former into transplantation, ideation, and breeding processes. Our second aim is to scrutinize the political dimension of these commons in relation to what has been framed as the "post-political condition". We maintain that the post-square commons constitute political and politicizing actions for activists and users for their effects on everyday life, for their capacity to link their practices with broader, structural dynamics of injustice, inequality and exclusion, and for their selective engagement with counter-austerity politics.
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...
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.