The future looks bleak. We are living in a strange, disquieting, and worrisome moment, where nothing seems possible. But the cause of this despair is no mystery. It is not because of capitalism’s eternity, but rather arises from the fact that capital has yet to encounter sufficient counter-force. Capitalism continues to deploy its relentless logic despite the almost daily evidence of its profound inability to proffer even the slightest solution to the various crises and disasters it creates. Indeed, capital’s hold over society seems to strengthen the more its consequences and crises continue to unfold. Public bureaucracies, “representative democracy,” and experts of all sorts are increasingly constrained within theoretical frameworks and practical dispositifs from which they cannot escape. The collapse of what was once called the “socialist alternative” – which since the nineteenth century helped contain or correct the more destructive effects of capitalism – only deepens the feeling that effective political action is impotent or impossible. The failures of state communism, the neoliberal replica that no longer deserves the name “social democracy,” the sovereigntist turn across much of the Western left, the weakening of organized labor, the rise of xenophobic hatred and nationalism, it all makes one wonder whether or not there are still social forces, alternative models, modes of organization, or critical concepts that offer some hope for a life beyond capitalism.
The situation in which humanity finds itself is becoming increasingly intolerable. The true “spirit of capitalism” was never better rendered than by that famous expression attributed to Louis XV: “Après moi, le deluge.”1 By continually constructing the basis for its expansion on an ever-broadening scale, capitalism is destroying the conditions for life on the planet and threatening humanity’s self-destruction.2 After the Second World War, capitalism’s drive was more or less channeled by redistributive policies that were thought to obviate the return of the manifold social, political, and military disasters that befell the West since the turn of the nineteenth century. In the 1980s, however, neoliberal capitalism deployed an entire arsenal of public policies designed to lead us down a completely different path by disseminating the logic of competition throughout the whole of society.
The result has been a new system of norms that has transformed our working lives, behaviors, and even our thoughts. This new system transformed the social into a generalized field of competition wherein our relationships to ourselves and to others now function according to a logic of continual self-overcoming and unlimited performance. This competitive normativity did not arise spontaneously from within, as if it were a natural part of our psychology or biology, but is rather the predictable outcome of deliberate policy. It is with the support of a very active state that the unlimited accumulation of capital exhorts the transformation of our societies, social relations, and subjectivities in an increasingly imperative and intensifying manner. We live in an age of “cosmo-capitalism,” in which not only our working lives, but all our institutions, activities, and leisure time have been re-shaped and redirected by a general normative logic that is geared toward the goals and pace of capitalist accumulation. This new normative system is fuelling today’s generalized economic warfare, underpinning the powers of market financialization, creating increasing inequality and social vulnerability for a growing majority, and accelerating democracy’s obsolescence.3
This normative logic has also precipitated today’s ecological crisis. In the words of Joel Kovel, neoliberal capitalism turns everyone into an “enemy of nature.”4 For years, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have issued report after report describing climate change as the most important and urgent problem humanity has ever faced.5 While it is the world’s poorest peoples who will be the first to suffer the effects of climate change, every new generation born after the mid-twenty-first century will suffer the increasingly disastrous effects of climate disruption. In his lucidly argued Climate Wars, Harald Welzer argues “the impact of climate change on global inequalities and living conditions [will] vary enormously from country to country,” and he predicts the twenty-first century will witness “not only tensions over war and mining rights but also resource wars.”6
Yet it is not only the ecological crisis that threatens the futures of entire populations around the world. Indeed, there is a certain danger in thinking that only the climate crisis is worthy of mass mobilization, while corporations, dominant classes, and the state continue to compete for wealth, power, and prestige as usual, as if nothing dangerous is happening. But this crisis, more than others undoubtedly, is especially symptomatic of the impasses we are facing. For the world can no longer be saved by creating isolated sanctuaries for nature’s “common goods” (land, water, air, forests, etc.) that might “miraculously” protect these resources from the continuous and indefinite expansion of capitalism. Today, more than ever, every activity and every locale is interconnected: saving the world today it is not therefore so much a matter of isolating and protecting some natural “good” or “resource” considered fundamental to human survival, as it is a matter of profoundly transforming the economy and the society by overthrowing the system of norms that now directly threatens nature and humanity itself. In other words, effective political ecology can only come from a radical anti-capitalism.7 Yet how is it that a looming disaster, pronounced by the entire scientific community, does not arouse (outside of a small minority) the kind of mass movement we might have expected? The extremely grave diagnosis proffered by the UNDP, the IPCC, and numerous other institutions thus raises the difficult question about the underlying conditions for collective action sufficient to respond to the climate emergency. Neither the corporate sector nor the state offers anywhere near an adequate response to deal with the serious climatic processes already underway. The repeated failures of the various international summits on climate change only underscore the fact that our economic and political leaders remain ensnared within the logic of global economic competition. The idea that humanity now shares a common destiny has failed to take hold, and the paths toward indispensable cooperation remain blocked. We are living the tragedy of the non-common.
This tragedy does not arise from humanity’s ignorance of its looming future, but arises from the fact that humanity is currently dominated by economic groups, social classes, and political castes that refuse to yield their power and privilege, and are instead trying to prolong their domination by perpetuating forms of economic warfare, blackmailing the unemployed, stoking hatred of foreigners, etc. The impasse at which we find ourselves is thus a testament to our state of political disarmament. At the same time that we are forced to pay the price for capitalism’s refusal to accept limitation, our societies are in the midst of a considerable deterioration of “democracy” – inasmuch as this term designates the few means, however rare or limited, by which it is possible to contain the globe’s dominant economic logic, maintain life-worlds outside the market, support those institutions that operate according to principles other than sheer profit, channel or mitigate the effects of the “law of global competition,” etc. The “responsible politicians” who alternatively succeed each other in election after election have, by now, almost entirely forfeited their freedom to act and have instead submitted themselves to the economic forces they have encouraged and strengthened. The rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and all manner of paranoia about our “security” is a direct consequence of the decline of the democratic state, whose sole function today is merely to properly adapt society to the demands of the global market.
It is illusory to continue to wait for the nation-state to wake up and protect its population from financialization, outsourcing, or climate change. There is no doubt that many important social movements have, in recent decades, attempted to salvage what they could in terms of public services, social protections, and labor law. But it is clear that the nation-state framework, and the state lever as such, is insufficient and inadequate for coping with today’s social regressions and mounting environmental risks. We have seen firsthand how the state’s form and function have shifted along with the intensification of global capitalist competition: the state’s role is no longer to administer to the population and improve its well-being, but rather to impose the harsh law of neoliberal globalization. For if the concept of the common has indeed become a central political issue today, it is precisely because it brutally undermines belief in the progressive promise of the state. This criticism is obviously not meant to echo the neoliberal condemnation of various social, cultural, or educational state interventions, but is rather a call to recognize the state’s inherent bureaucratic limitations and thereby submit the state form to social activism and truly democratic political participation. In fact, it was paradoxically neoliberalism itself that turned political thought in the direction of the common by shattering the false, mirror-like alternative between the state and the market. Neoliberalism showed that it was now pointless to expect the state to re-anchor the capitalist economy in republican law, social justice, or even liberal democracy. Neoliberalism thus put an end to the idea that the state could function as society’s best recourse to the disastrous effects wrought by capitalism itself. From this perspective, Ugo Mattei is perfectly right to insist that the meaning of “privatization” – property that has been transferred from the state to private, oligarchic groups – can also be seen as the fruit of common work or property reserved for common use.8 Public ownership, in this sense, is not the protection of the common, but rather a form of “collective” private property reserved for the ruling class, which it can dispense where it sees fit, and deprive from the population according to its desires or interests. That so-called leftist governments around the world have been so zealous in this plunderous activity tells us much about why there is such massive disenchantment with electoral politics all over the world today.
Collective action, generally speaking, seems increasingly impractical wherever one looks. The administration of the social is characterized by overwhelming bureaucratic domination, and everyday life is saturated with mass consumerism, as either a form of psychological compensation or a semiotics of prestige. And this is in addition to the extreme individualization of contemporary labor-management policies, the objective – and effect – of which has been to destroy the collective character of labor. Becoming an “entrepreneur of the self,” to “take responsibility,” to “exceed one’s objectives” are all injunctions that do not predispose workers, who are already in a position of dependence and subordination, to adopt collective forms of resistance. Those who “win” know very well how to collectively defend their interests, while those who lose remain isolated within the generalized field of competition and are ultimately reduced to powerlessness. This rampant “decollectivization” – that most seriously affects low-skilled workers – is a major cause of the veritable social vacuum we all feel. It is a contemporary version of what Hannah Arendt called “desolation.”
In the face of such overwhelming odds, the most common response has been to simply deplore the lack of political alternatives, the ruin of collective ideals, and the weak echoes of concrete utopias. This is why it is especially important today to work toward producing new vistas on capitalism’s beyond, to theorize the conditions and possible forms of collective action, to formulate new principles that can guide our struggles, and to link dispersed actions in such a way that a new, generalized model of society can be rebuilt. While we do not want to overestimate the importance of this work – it will not be enough itself because, quite simply, there is no substitute for committed activism – we think such theoretical work nonetheless has an important role to play.9
The emergence of the “common” as a political rallying cry initially grew out of dispersed social and cultural struggles against the capitalist order and the entrepreneurial state. As the central term used to denote an alternative to neoliberalism, the common became the effective principle for struggles and movements that, over the past two decades, have resisted the dynamics of capital and given rise to original forms of activism and discourse. In other words, the common is far from a purely conceptual invention: the common is rather the concrete product of social movements and various schools of thought dedicated to opposing the dominant tendency of our era, namely the extension of private appropriation into every sphere of our societies, our cultures, and our very lives. In this sense, the term “common” does not so much refer to the resurgence of the eternal Communist Ideal, but rather designates the emergence of a new way of challenging capitalism and imagining its transcendence. In other words, it is a term that helps us turn our back on the strategy of state communism once and for all. By appropriating and operating the means of production in its entirety, the communist state methodically destroyed the prospects for real socialism, which “has always been conceived of as a deepening – not a rejection – of political democracy.”10 For those dissatisfied with the neoliberal version of “freedom,” the common is thus a means of opening up a new path. It is precisely this context that explains the thematic emergence of the common in the 1990s. It was a shared political demand that could be found in the most local and concrete struggles, as well as within the largest national and international political mobilizations.
The call for the common gained its initial prominence in the alter-globalization movement and the ecological movement. The older notion of the “commons” was chosen for its ability to oppose what these movements viewed as a “second wave of enclosures.” This expression – “enclosure” – refers to the centuries-old process of appropriating collectively used lands and the concomitant suppression of the customary rights of the European peasantry through the erection of various enclosures in the European countryside. The general spirit of the contemporary anti-enclosure movement is aptly summed up activists in the Cochabamba “water war”: “we own nothing, and yet we are victims of a great theft.”11 This conception of the commons, in its various guises, has since become the object of intense theoretical scrutiny. Numerous empirical analyses, many at the behest of Elinor Ostrom, have dealt with the institutional forms, functional rules, and legal instruments that allow communities to communally manage shared resources – both natural or material resources as well as immaterial “intellectual commons” – outside of the framework of the market or the state. The rapid expansion of the Internet into every dimension of our lives over the past two or three decades has also shed light on new opportunities for intellectual cooperation and reciprocal exchanges within digital networks, as well as the risks to intellectual freedom that are posed by the ongoing concentration of digital capitalism and the increasing police controls exercised by states. Analyses of the common by philosophers, legal theorists, and economists have multiplied over the past decades, and scholarship in what is now a veritable field of “commons studies” has grown increasingly rich. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for their part, provided the first systematic theory of the common. Their analysis of the common had the great historical merit of shifting discrete reflections on various concrete experiences of the commons (plural) toward a more abstract and politically ambitious concept of the common (singular).12 In short, we are living in a moment in which the “common” is a term that designates a regime of practices, struggles, institutions, and research all dedicated to realizing a non-capitalist future.
The purpose of this book is to contribute to this larger effort by re-casting the concept of the common in a more theoretically rigorous fashion. This re-conceptualization proceeds both by re-articulating contemporary practices that ground their meaning in the concept of the common, as well as through an examination of a series of Western categories and institutions (sometimes very old) that have periodically made the common a concept both valorized and cursed: valorized – and even sacralized – because the common maintains a great affinity with that which exceeds profane commerce, and cursed because the common is an idea that always threatens the legitimacy and enjoyment of private or state property. The analysis we offer here is thus an attempt to “get to the bottom of things,” all the way down to the genealogical roots of Western law and political economy. We interrogate the meanings of terms like “wealth,” “value,” “property,” and “thing” (res). We question the philosophical, juridical, and economic basis of capitalism, and we try to illuminate what this political edifice has repressed, and what it forbids us from thinking and instituting. The institution of individual private property, the control and exclusive enjoyment over a thing (res) – according to the ancient Roman figure of dominium – is the decisive piece of this whole edifice, and this despite its relative dismemberment and doctrinal crisis since the end of the nineteenth century. This institutional aspect of property, whose fundamental principle consists in removing some object or resource from common use, negates the underlying forms of cooperation that are the basis of all production, and it ignores the accumulated forms of communal wealth from which all new wealth finds its condition of possibility. But while this “proprietary fiction” extends its influence over a vast domain of culture, ideas, technology, life, etc., it also increasingly reveals its limitations and negative side effects. Far from constituting its opposite, state-owned property ownership is rather the public transposition and complement of property as such, especially insofar as the state has not merely internalized property’s norms but now takes the initiative on behalf of the latter to its own detriment: it was the state, in Brazil, that abandoned public transport to the private sector in its major cities; it was the state, in Istanbul, that privatized urban spaces in the interests of large real estate companies; and it was the state, in Ethiopia, that conceded sole land ownership to multinational corporations for ninety-nine year leases. The institution of private property was momentarily but badly shaken in the nineteenth century by the great socialist protest, and it struggled to justify its appropriation of the fruits of the workers’ labor. Today it is exposed to another critique, one that reveals how property is not merely a carefully designed apparatus for deriving enjoyment from the collective work of others, but that private property is now a general threat to the very conditions of all collective life itself.13 Herein lies the basis of a radical political reversal: whereas the common was hitherto conceived as a great threat to property, which was propagated as both the means and reason for living, it is this same institution of private property that has now become the most serious threat to the very possibility of life itself.
The aim of this book is to show the political principle of the common already at work across a range of contemporary political movements, struggles, and discourses that are opposing the hegemony of neoliberal rationality across the globe. Today’s struggles for “real democracy” – such as the movement of the occupation of squares (15M, Occupy, Gezi, etc.), the numerous regional “springs,” student struggles against the capitalist university, mobilizations for popular control of water distribution, etc. – are not random and chaotic events. They are not accidental and transitory eruptions, nor scattered and aimless revolts. These struggles are all based on the political rationality of the common. They are all collective experiments in new democratic forms.
This political dynamic is clearly manifest in the relationship between the “Commune” and the “commons” in the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul during the spring of 2013, one of a series of occupations in parks and squares around the world since 2011. The “Commune” was the name given to political form at work in Gezi Park (i.e., a highly localized form of self-government), while the “commons” was the name given to the various urban spaces that Erdogan’s neoliberal policies tried to confiscate for the profit of private interests. It is also the name of a group, “Our Commons,” formed in February 2013, that opposed “the loss of that which is common.”14 For ten days, from June 1 to 11, behind the barricades that read “Taksim Commune,” Taksim Square and Gezi Park were turned into a living environment (un espace de vie) where experiments in common practices and forms of action took place. It is in spaces like these that we find the essence of the common: while treated as “thugs” by state power, “the urban activists defended their living spaces, created a common wherever they were isolated by physical force, and took care of both the collective space and themselves.”15 Political commentary on the Commune desperately tried to pin down the proper political actor or subject of the Occupy Gezi movement, as if it were necessary, at all costs, to assign this resistance to a “someone” in particular, as if the irreplaceable political value of the event did not derive from the fact that the collective subjectivity at work shattered all prior identity categories or silos (Kemalist versus Islamist, privileged “White Turks” versus poor Turks from the provinces, etc.).16 It is precisely the aim of this book to explore the political significance of these types of contemporary collective struggle against neoliberalism.
Our introductory chapter (Chapter 1) specifies what we mean by the term “common”: if the “commune” is used to name a specific, local, self-governing polity, and the “commons” is the name given to a diverse array of objects or resources managed by the activities of individuals and collectives, “common” is more properly the name of the principle that both animates and guides this activity. The analytical fine-tuning of this term is especially important, we argue, given both the diverse theoretical contexts in which the term is used, and the high degree of philosophical, juridical, and religious overdetermination the concept has experienced over the course of its long discursive history. In the first section of the book, “The Emergence of the Common,” we re-construct the specific historical context that gave rise to the new principle of the common, and we critique, as far as is necessary, the limitations of the concept as it has been proposed by various economists, philosophers, legal theorists, and activists. In the second section, “Law and the Institution of the Common,” we will more directly re-shape the concept of the common by deliberately situating it within the discourse of law and institutions. For nothing could be worse than abandoning the law to those who profess to enact it. In our view, every system of norms is always a site of conflict, and the law is no different. Thus, in contrast to the misunderstanding that the concept of the common is new, our analysis does not start from scratch. Rather, we will build on a long history of institutional and juridical creativity that has defied bourgeois society and its proprietary logic, and we will draw from multiple contributions in the fields of history, legal theory, political philosophy, as well as the socialist tradition, that seek to formulate a new conception of the common, one that is capable of illuminating the meaning of contemporary struggles by more accurately determining their context and the specific challenges they face. And lastly, in the final part of the book, we sketch the broad outlines (as opposed to a detailed “program”) of what we call the “politics of the common.”