Introduction
The commons have been described as a drama, even – most famously – a ‘tragedy’. Their fate, their future, has never seemed more parlous, with climate change, population growth, and competition for scarce resources seemingly threatening our greatest common property, the planet itself. Enclosure – once seen as the very end of the commons – is touted by some as the only practicable way to protect precious environments subject to the existential threat of encroachment. At the same time, undergirded by a general anxiety that the natural, social, and political commons are at risk from capitalism’s bloating expansion, from hyper-consumption, and from corporatist politics, critics of enclosure grasp at a new narrative, proposing a new global commons as the only solution to our pressing global problems. Far from moribund, then, and affronting attempts to reduce their purchase to the mere status of ‘public goods’, the commons remain central to the material struggles and imaginaries of collective well-being, now and into the near future. The commons is dead: long live the commons!
Yet how should we understand these contemporary conjugations of the commons, if by this term we understand a process, a contest of force, a reconstitution, a site of convening practices? Our justification for this volume is that there is a pressing need to reconceive the ‘commons’, to think of the commons as more than a tug of war between use value and exchange value, between common use and commodification, between communities and corporations, in which the odds are always and everywhere stacked against the continuing existence and vitality of the commons. Without ignoring the facts of the systematic encroachment on life, resources, and spaces once held in common, at the same time we envisage the opening up of new spaces of cooperation and collective action, such as the digital commons, new practices simply of ‘being in common’, community economies and solidarity networks. We see the contemporary commons as both being lost in old shapes and recovered in new forms, as, in brief, a contested and dynamic domain of collective existence, with the balance delicately poised between the rapacious demands of political economy and the promise of social innovation.
This play of forces, at a moment of collective crisis, is one focus of this book, which remains open to diverse meanings of the commons, ranging from rules of collective return to new practices of association, precisely in order to nurture and expand the politics of possibility in our seemingly hyper-privatised age. The contributions to this collection remain soberly aware of the problems posed to public and collective ownership, but at the same time potentially adjustable through new practices of shoring and stewardship. They explore the shifts that are inherent in any ‘being in common’, seeing old institutions such as law and citizenship compromised as sites of universal inclusion, but noting also the rise of new spaces supporting both secessionist and collectivist ambitions, as well as micro-worlds of social being born out of the ruins of neoliberal abandonment. They find, notably, a vibrant counter-culture of non-utilitarian living and associating, surviving and even flourishing amid the detailed disciplinary calculations of market society, and often couched in the language of protecting the shrinking commons.
To recover the commons, then, may be a matter of discursive framing as well as or as much as a political event. Thought of as a rule or possession, the future of the commons for sure seems bleak. Things once held free or at least public are becoming ever more securely privatised and commoditised, typically against any reasonable measure of the long-term general interest, for all that the states, corporations, and elites of global capitalist society protest otherwise. The world over, the natural world, the global reservoir of pooled resources, human labour in all its forms, mutually-beneficial commerce, law, public policy, culture, and knowledge, the body and the bodily realm, and even life itself, are up for grabs, violently opened up to neoliberalism’s rigged markets and closed down as the spaces and means of collective stewardship. The language of government in the public interest has itself begun to sound anachronistic and implausible, however necessary its revival, as several chapters in this book argue. The commons no longer seems to be part of the common sense of political economy, reduced rather to a faint echo of the moral economy of the world we have lost. In contrast, however, if we think of the commons as a practice or process, the future looks less dismal, as is also increasingly recognised. Experiments the world over in land cultivation and conservation, micro-enterprise and labour, ethical trade and responsible consumption, community orientation and social networking, and participatory and democratic politics, provide ample evidence of the continuing social interest in collaboration, collective orientation, and future stewardship. Discrete and diverse as are these examples of the lively lived spaces of actually existing commons (Eizenberg 2012), they intimate the possibility of an expanded politics of the commons, one that can build on practice to lever a change in the rules and principles of possession.
Thus, to those who would still object that the commons is a lost cause, and that the use of any such language is a gesture of romantic fancy, we would argue that by thinking the commons anew, all the time recognising their inherent ambiguities and latent complexities, a persuasive politics for nature and a truly shared society can be mounted. This book is neither a commonist manifesto nor a call-to-arms, though we share the same concerns of those that already exist.1 We aim, rather, at a collective, cooperative audit of transformations, driving forces, and commoning experiments, pressing towards outlining the new possibilities for the commons. Our contributors and collaborators share the animus of those who have sought to pit the promise of commoning against the forces of commodification, and of those who reject the blandishments of a global political and economic order that has enclosed the commons in the politics of nostalgia or fantasy. We are all keenly aware of the critical damage that privatisation and the careering of a rampant exchange value has done and is doing, to an increasingly vulnerable world. As far as the commodity form goes, a seemingly ever more entrenched neoliberalism has cast aside all that cannot be privately owned or tended as anachronistic and anomalous. And how characteristic is it that the coordinated attacks on the sustainability of even modest lives, widely understood to be the hallmarked product of corporatist capitalism, are met with ever more rounds of deregulation, privatisation, and dispossession.
There are grounds enough for anger and indignation, as shown by many of this book’s contributors: the artful practices of ‘offshoring’ that threaten to undermine national responsibility (John Urry), the coalitions of law, language, government, and elitism making deep inroads into access to land and livelihoods (Nick Blomley, Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, Renu Desai, and Sarah Radcliffe), to autonomy and an effective democracy, and indeed in response to the comprehensive erosion of all things held in common (Natalie Fenton, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy). The mass production of misery and insecurity unleashed by these expulsions, as Saskia Sassen (2014) calls them – of nature from itself, land from future or common use, people from employment, housing and welfare, money from the productive economy, growth from its spatial and political communities, citizens from the polity, and states from their peoples – are rampant and unrelenting. They persist virtually unopposed in an age of political as well as economic austerity, justified by the apologists of neoliberalism as necessary steps towards a better future.
If there is for us a single icon of these shrinking commons, it is the darkening of the Arctic ice cap as anthropogenic global warming has led to the retreat of the summer sea ice – a process that nevertheless reveals new opportunities for global capitalism and its masters (Anderson 2009). The fate of the Arctic speaks of a future of physical, material spaces no longer safe anywhere in the world from the shadow of the commodity and corporate enclosure. And yet it remains true that in spite or because of these encroachments, the consciousness of a collective common life endures, of the planetary precarity that affects us all, and all forms of life. The commons thus spring back as an inevitable co-product of the forces that beset the world, their survival – in desire and in practice (Williams 2005) – an ineradicable condition of our necessarily collective existence. This is echoed in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recognition of what they call ‘the common’ rather than the commons (2006: xv) in a world that no longer has an ‘outside’: ‘In the era of globalization, issues of the maintenance, production, and distribution of the common in both these senses and in both ecological and socioeconomic frameworks become increasingly central’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: viii). Others, who are rather less convinced by claims regarding the ontological necessity of ‘the common’, or the pre-eminence of biopolitical labour and the mass ‘cognitivisation’ of knowledge capitalism, still readily accept that ‘new enclosures have demonstrated that not only has the common not vanished, but that new forms of social cooperation are constantly being produced’ (Federici 2010: 284). Of course we should not overplay this hope-filled, affirmative stance, let alone fall into complacency at the ineradicability and impressive fecundity of ‘the common’, but if such commentators are right, it might be premature to write-off the commons, and their value and necessity. The question, then, becomes one of how the commons should be spoken of, and, just as importantly, how they may be made politically resonant. Is it the noun or the verb in the commons that provides the opportunity? Should a politics of the commons focus on things held in reserve or in public, on collaboration among humans and with nature, on the terms and terrains on which decisions about the collective future are made?
Things and practices
These options are not mutually exclusive, for the commons (to revisit its etymology) are notably commodious, in the sense of being both spacious and timely.2 They offer diverse opportunities and inspirations for political action, and in this collection we open a window onto their nature and the possibilities they offer for our time and our world. The political urgency of these questions is clear from any audit of this kind. It is clear from the encroachments revealed by our own contributors that (at the very least) we are back to having to make a strong case for the common or collective in the form of public ownership, shared goods and services, social equity, universal rights, protected nature, and shared cities, however much we may need to explore the necessary nuances.3 Readers will see that these encroachments are by no means unambiguous, involving as they do, unstable mixes of commodified and altruistic personhood, double-edged mobilisations of law, the hollowing out and restitution of nation and nature, forms of closure and openness in new communication spaces, and both elite capture and grass-root response. The spaces of encroachment are typically sites of struggle and imaginative commoning. There are signal examples in this book of new digital affordances, nature curated with care by communities, push-backs against privatisation and corporate encroachment, imaginative forms of urban improvisation, and social organisation based on reciprocity and empathy. These practices disturb the singularity of appropriation and expulsion, by making commoning a way of being in the world, as Rebecca Solnit (2001, 2006) would have it.
This is not to say that the battle between encroachment and commoning is a duel among equals. Far from it, and in fact there is no unambiguous sign yet of the contradictions of encroachment, such as the alienation of nature and society from itself, giving way to a new, collaborative order on the kind of scale that is clearly necessary. We have to be suspicious, as Gibson-Graham (1996) advises, of proclamations of the end of capitalism and the inevitable rise of the communal or common; waiting for the gravediggers of capitalism is always like waiting for Godot. If anything, the evidence from the stress fields across the world is not encouraging. There is no significant push back in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East against the causes and beneficiaries of climate change, neoliberal inequality, corporatism, financial speculation, capital flight, and oligarchy and elitism. Resistance is quickly swept aside, made fragile, relegated to a parallel margin. Democracy itself, at least as practised in the neoliberal heartlands, has been made complicit with the ballot skewed by public disengagement, collusion between the media, corporations and the state, and powerful status quo narratives preying on fear and anxiety. So, for instance, migration and the question of the free movement of labour, not to mention the rights of refugees and exiles, have become, at various levels, a source of grievances over entitlement to shrinking common-pool resources. The politics of the commons, in this respect, may be mobilised in the service of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This of course harks back to the narrative of the tragedy of the commons. But this complicity plays, furthermore, on the curiously shared etymology between commodity and commons.4 The commodity has a notable ‘double nature’: the propriety and convenience of its commodious use value, but at the same time its fungibility, its exchange value (Linebaugh 2008: 63). The commodity, just like the commons, may be deemed ‘appropriate’ in the adjectival sense of being proper and suitable in particular circumstances, for particular needs, but commodification also recognises appropriation as a verb, the taking of something that rightfully belongs to others. In a world where use value and exchange value are themselves increasingly difficult to distinguish, a conception of the commons simply pitched as the antithesis of commodification may be hard to sustain. In some situations, for instance, resolutely new forms of the commons may be considered both symbiotic with and antagonistic to the cultures of commodification – as we see often enough in the digital domain. Thinking particularly of internetporn and its ‘parasitism’ on the libidinal and affective energies that feature so heavily in accounts of biopolitical production, Matteo Pasquinelli (2008: 208, emphasis in original) notes that: ‘Accumulation still runs despite, or possibly thanks to digital commonism.’ There is, at the very least, nothing inherently progressive in the political use of the commons, and just as the phrase and the practices it names can be marshalled in a manner inconsistent with the political Left, so too may it be hijacked by pro-capitalist regimes that allow further and further exploitation. As Silvia Federici (2010: 285) puts it, ‘We must be very careful … not to craft the discourse on the commons in such a way as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself, posturing, for instance, as the environmental guardian of the planet.’ To take another pertinent example: Michael Goldman (1998), among others, has pointed in his critique of development discourse to the ways in which the commons metaphor has been mangled and misused by a generation of ‘commons professionals’, all in the service of ‘domination and imperialism in North–South relations’ (Goldman 1998: 22), thus restructuring the commons – which is to say, privatising them, at the behest of a crisis-ridden global capitalism (see also Radcliffe’s critique in Chapter 8).
In the most cynical mood, we might speculate that a rapacious capitalism laying waste to the commons ...
