Capitalism and the Commons

Just Commons in the Era of Multiple Crises

Andreas Exner, Sarah Kumnig, Stephan Hochleithner, Andreas Exner, Sarah Kumnig, Stephan Hochleithner

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000337143
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Business General

Capitalism and the Commons focuses on the political and social perspectives that commons offer, how they are appropriated or suppressed by capital and state, and how social initiatives and movements contest these dynamics or build their struggles on commoning.

The volume comprises theoretical and empirical approaches that engage with three main themes: conceptualizing the commons, analyzing practices of commoning, and exploring commons politics. In their contributions, the authors focus on the development of anti-capitalist commons and explore the issue of practice and politics through case studies from Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Africa more broadly, Austria, Germany and South Korea, ranging from peri-urban and rural agriculture to urban commons and how they manifest in the Global South as well as in the Global North. The book engages with different discourses on the commons in regard to their relevance for social change and thereby reinvigorates the political meaning of the commons. It provides an original and important approach to the topic in terms of conceptualization, detailing diverse empirical realities, and analyzing potential perspectives. In so doing, the book transcends narrow disciplinary boundaries and expands the focus to the global.

Providing a fresh perspective on the commons as a decisive component of alternatives, this title will be relevant to scholars and students of resource management, social movements, and sustainable development more broadly.

Part I
Fundaments

1 Expanding the scope
The commons within and beyond capitalism in crises

Andreas Exner, Stephan Hochleithner, and Sarah Kumnig

The age of crises

The era, in which we write this book, is one of multiple crises. Capitalist society has become riddled with increasing challenges stoked by a series of long-term cumulative and interconnected crises. They involve ecological relations, capitalist production, social reproduction, political stability, and the substance of liberal democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and parliamentarism. Yet, these crises are fundamentally about structural global inequalities and stratification. In the years following the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2007/2008, a surge in climate activism began, the phenomenon of land grabbing was discussed in the media—by activists and scholars—and alternatives to capitalism-as-usual raised some interest in public debates. Widespread protests, reaching from the occupy movement to the so-called “Arab” Spring, shook the confidence of capitalist classes and political elites who had to realize that decades of rampant social inequality, insecurity, and exploitation finally brought neoliberal capitalism to question on a broader front. In many countries, ruling classes met massive bankruptcies and looming further capital destruction with brutal austerity programs. Global recession brought the commodity price rally that had benefited many governments in the Global South to a halt. The drop in export incomes fueled widespread discontent and pushed the pink tide in Latin America back into neoliberal waters.

The “summer of migration” 2015 was met with aggravated nativism and right-wing populism. Austerity took new forms, as spending previously directed to social policy was channeled to support transnational corporations and banks. The movement of refugees heading towards the EU in 2015 was used by the right wing to solidify or increase popular support, paving the way for further rounds of cuts in states’ social spending. While the EU impeded their homemade “migration crisis” by reckless border policing and increasing attacks on human rights, the issue of climate change came again to the fore. A new generation of climate activists threatened the established consensus of neoliberal environmentalism centered on ecological modernization informing a green economy approach. But the gilets jaunes protests in France, which emerged in 2018, suggested that the capitalist state can only attempt to tackle the increasing contradictions between capital and ecology by opening up new battlefields of social upheaval and discontent; consequently, the French government encountered the protests by employing a mix of repression and concessions. These dynamics were again at work in Chile in autumn 2019, where an attempted increase in fuel costs triggered a popular revolt, which testified to continued resistance in the very country where the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s originated. At this time, the signs of a next great recession could already be read on the horizon of a debt-based recovery of capitalist production. For a society under pressure, this meant treading a path that had been prepared by the quick fixes to the economic crises of the years following 2008, leading towards even deeper convulsions.

In December 2019, eventually, the crisis triggered by the virus SARS-CoV-2 began to unfold, intensifying existing structural inequalities, between countries and regions, but also within: racism, othering, and patriarchy surged, access to health care, housing, and jobs became even more precarious for the already marginalized. In an unprecedented reaction, states all over the world stopped large parts of capitalist production and traffic, plunging economies into a recession that could turn out to be worse than the recession after the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. The massive biopolitical response by many states in both the Global South and North included implementing lockdowns that shut down public life for extended periods of time and enhanced surveillance of people’s movements. The latter also allowed for contact tracing that critical observers were quick to point out as possibly paving the way for a new round of increasing control of whole population groups and further strengthening authoritarian politics.

Many commentators on the Left expected the Great Lockdown to inhibit street protests in particular and political activism more broadly. But they were disproved by massive Black Lives Matter protests in the US following the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis by a white police officer. The circumstances of Floyd’s death unleashed a global debate on the colonial legacies and structural racism of slavery that neoliberalism and neocolonialism systematically carried on against Black people in particular and minorities in general. The events also fueled protests in further countries all around the world, which are still ongoing at the time of writing this text. The accompanying protests against police violence have been answered violently in many instances. Increasing police violence has already been criticized in course of protests emerging after 2007/2008 and seems to have even intensified. As a result, Black Lives Matter activists in the US now put defunding the police among the items at the top of their political agenda. These protests also seem to have gained momentum from the accelerating impoverishment of ever greater parts of societies, who are now pushed over the edge by lockdowns and failing health systems.

The crises tendencies that have aggravated since 2007/2008 were further exacerbated by right-wing policies that gained force because of these tendencies: as some of the new right-wing leaders fail in balancing interests of various factions of capital and civil society actors—especially in the US, but also in other countries such as the UK and Italy—a negative spiral of growing turmoil and ineffective state actions seems to have set in. The deeper tendencies underlying the current multiple crises are long term and cumulative. Their outward expression in recent times is rooted in the first great crisis of the capitalist world-system after World War II that unfolded in the 1970s. Their interrelations, however, were only recognized by a broader public following the triple crisis of food, fuel, and finance that emerged in 2007/2008. Clearly, these interrelations have by now become even more complex and their possible repercussions more dangerous since then. We have finally entered the age of crises, it seems, as apparent solutions to a single problem always trigger new crises that tend to supersede the problem that the solution was initially meant to address. The lack of predictability concerning the consequences of certain political actions is worrisome, as is the disorientation that has emerged due to the unprecedented and chaotic developments connected with SARS-CoV-2. A chaotic phase of the world-system seems especially likely due to the retreat of the incumbent US world hegemon, adding to the demise that was already foreshadowed at the end of the 1970s—while China, the aspiring new hegemon, seems far from being able to take over this task.

Movements in the age of crises

Against this background, this book looks at some of the deeper currents in the wakes of those who are most likely to be able to offer a perspective out of the increasing misery and turmoil. These currents have been developing since long and seem to follow a logic of their own. Learning from experiences in social movements, initiating actions, creating organizations and alliances, attempting to fight back state repression, and strengthening the flame of hope, movements find their ways into various sorts of relations with all the elements of the unfolding crises—the ideologies, the fears, the violence, the narrow-mindedness, and fatigue—in order to use these relations to propel a vision of change.

Eruptions of protest and onslaughts through state repression are only one phenomenon of a global political, economic, ecological, and social landscape infiltrated by neoliberal ideology and colonized by capitalist expansion, and further unsettling by ever more violent disruptions, breakdowns, and tectonic shifts. These perturbations do neither only nor always operate in the glaring light of public gaze. Nor do they necessarily fit to simplified models of protest cycles. The changing surface of popular mobilizations rather seems to be subject to deeper processes of reorganization of the Left. Debates and initiatives that have developed alongside increasing critique of neoliberal ideology, state restructuring, and capitalist expansion refer to an ongoing engagement with several issues at the core of asking how to build up alternatives to capitalist production and social exclusion. The routes and directions taken towards answering this question include forming alliances between disenfranchised groups in the Global South and movements in the North and developing strategies to tackle the gap between left-alternative movements and underprivileged working classes in the Global North. The ideology of unlimited economic growth is increasingly put into question and the related critique of extractivism—most brutally pursued in the Global South—is strengthening. The relation between movements, political parties, and the state is being reassessed while drawing attention to the urban scale as a field of struggle and the city as a potential site of counterhegemonic projects. And, most notably, practical initiatives focus on creating and (re)strengthening solidarity economies and the commons in multiple contexts.

Since the 2000s, the “spirit of Porto Alegre”—a term coined by Immanuel Wallerstein (Curty, 2017), embodying the aim of a more egalitarian world and condensing in a series of World Social Forums (WSF) first organized in Porto Alegre—has continuously been proliferating in many different localities connected with global debates and initiatives in diverse regions across the world. As Wallerstein suggested, this spirit has been fraught with tensions between horizontalists, putting grassroots movements in the center, and verticalists, arguing for utilizing state power in order to protect movements and open up space for maneuver. While horizontalists conceive of alternatives as the outcome of multiple movements without any organizing center, verticalists stress the importance of ideological and organizational unity. Wallerstein’s distinction brings some strategic clarity into the confusing array of ideas, terminologies, movements, and political currents of the Left that gathered in the context of the WSF and plausibly explains some of the contentious debates that the “spirit of Porto Alegre” has been informing over the last 20 or so years. It may, however, be questioned whether this distinction still holds true. As it seems, horizontalists are finally superseding verticalist approaches, sometimes seeking new syntheses by connecting commons struggles and progressive political parties aiming at securing (local) state power. The question of how far such syntheses (can) go is still open, considering the frustration generated by Syriza in Greece, Podemos or Barcelona en Comú in Spain, the breakdown of the Bolivarian Revolution after the death of Hugo Chávez, or the discontent with governments attracting Leftist aspirations in many other Latin American countries. But self-organization across enduring heterogeneity, strategic alliances despite persistent diversity, and effective grassroots action without homogenizing organizational and ideological structures is now widely considered to be an essential part of strategies of the Left all over the world. This becomes especially clear when horizontalism is the driving force of emancipation that carries on the fire when attempts to assume state power result in backlashes or degeneration of parties-in-power.

One of the concepts best expressing the rationality of horizontalism is the commons. At the bottom line, the commons refer to things, ideas, or spaces shared by groups of people who care for them. Regardless of the complexities of commons as a political question and an anthropological subject, which do not fit neatly and simply into bottom-up models, or pure resistance, they indeed are at the heart of self-organization, protest, and alternatives to capitalism. Drawing from common struggles in the age of crises, this book departs from this basic premise, confronting the ambivalences and exploring the potentials, analyzing the disruptions of and criticizing the predations on the commons, while arguing for their expansion in order to disengage capitalism.

Matching theory with struggle

As a political debate, the commons have emerged in the years around 2007/2008. The scope of this debate covered the parallel developments of social movements criticizing neoliberal capitalism on the one hand, and parts of academia that questioned dominant approaches to development and environmental policy-making on the other. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in economics to Elinor Ostrom in 2009 indicated an increased distancing of intellectual factions from neoclassical economics as the academic force of neoliberal ideology. Radical social movements, however, were seeking to open up new ways of thinking and doing economics beyond the “pensée unique” of neoliberal capitalism—although they did not start from theoretical criticism but from social struggles.

Since Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons” (1990), the concept of the commons has been attracting growing interest from various realms of scholarship and development practice. Moreover, it has emerged as one of the key ideas of social movements and activist scholars critically addressing variegated processes of enclosures, dispossessions, privatizations, and market-led approaches to socio-spatial organization. The Ostromian approach to the commons has therefore strongly influenced prominent understandings of the commons as collectively managed “common-pool resources”, where commons are quite narrowly conceived. Common-pool resources are defined through their physical materiality: their use diminishes the resource (subtractability) and joint appropriators are hard to exclude (excludability). Ostrom identifies eight design principles of social rules for the collective, sustainable management of such resources. The most important of these rules in Ostrom’s view are clearly defined boundaries. In addition, benefits and costs of the use of the resources must be proportionally equivalent, according to Ostrom, and many of the individuals affected by the commons arrangement must be able to modify the rules of use. Moreover, she argues, rule compliance must be monitored and graduated sanctions need to be available in combination with conflict-resolution mechanisms. The self-organization of resource use also requires minimal recognition of rights to organize, that is, noninterference of the state and long-term rights of tenure. Finally, in more complex systems, commons arrangements must be organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises, Ostrom states (Ostrom, 2005, p. 258ff.).

While Ostrom suggests a narrowly object-centered understanding of the commons referring to mainstream economic thinking, critical scholarship in geography, political science, anthropology, and further disciplines has argued for a broader take on the commons. In this way, for instance, David Harvey connects different notions of the commons through a definition by anything that a group of people holds in common or produces together—be it land or natural resources, culture, knowledge, collective labor, the ambience and attractiveness of a city, the city as a whole, abstract economic value and money, or definite social practices. For this reason, the commons in the sense of Harvey may or may not be bounded. Commons can thus be open access (Harvey, 2012, p. 72), contrary to Ostrom’s conception. However, Harvey strictly delimits commons from public space and public goods (e.g., Harvey, 2012, p. 74), which he identifies as being provided by either state or private means, explaining that although:

public spaces and public goods contribute mightily to the qualities of the commons, it takes political action on the part of citizens and the people to appropriate them or to make them so. Public education becomes a common when social forces appropriate, protect, and enhance it for mutual benefit.

(Harvey, 2012, p. 73)

Harvey does not follow Ostrom in grounding the commons in the idea that only certain types of resources, that is, common-pool resources, can (and ought to be) managed as commons.

The commons, as Harvey conceptualizes it, rather are “an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood” (Harvey, 2012, p. 73). This relation is produced through the social practice of commoning, which is collective and non-commodified, he emphasizes. On the one hand, the non-commodity character of the commons relation, according to Harvey, distinguishes the commons from a public good. “A community garden”, he gives an example, “can thus be viewed as a good thing in itself, no matter what food may be produced ther...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Fundaments
• Part II Boundaries
• Part III Openings
• Part IV Perspectives
• Part V Transgressions
• Index