Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (In Common) - Softcover

De Angelis, Professor Massimo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783600624 ISBN 13: 9781783600625

Verlag: Zed Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

This book reveals the potential for radical transformation contained in a conceptualisation of the commons as a set of social systems, rather than just common goods.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Massimo de Angelis is Emeritus Professor at the University of East London, UK. He is the founding Editor of the web journal The Commoner (Thecommoner.org) and author of I numerous articles on commons and their role in the transformation of capitalism. His books include The Beginning of History (2007) and Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Post Capitalism (2017).

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Omnia Sunt Communia

On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism

By Massimo De Angelis

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Massimo De Angelis
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78360-062-5

Contents

Tables, figures and boxes, 
Acknowledgements, 
Introduction: Omnia Sunt Communia, 
PART ONE Commons as systems, 
1 Common goods, 
2 Systems, 
3 Elements, 
PART TWO From Elinor Ostrom to Karl Marx, 
4 Commons governance, 
5 The money nexus and the commons formula, 
PART THREE Commoning: the source of grassroots power, 
6 Mobilising social labour for commoning, 
7 The production of autonomy, boundaries and sense, 
PART FOUR Social change, 
8 Boundary commoning, 
9 Commons and capital/state, 
10 Towards postcapitalism, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Common goods

The twofold character of common goods

The wealth of postcapitalist society as it peeps on the horizon of the many heterogeneous practices of communities, associations, peer-to-peer networks and social movements appears in the first instance as a collection of common goods, a commonwealth. We need therefore to enquire about this elementary form of postcapitalist wealth.

Common goods have a twofold character, revealed in the first place by their own name, which combines a substantive (good) with an adjective (common). They are 'goods' in the sense of being social objects of value, use values, objects (whether tangible or not) that satisfy given socially determined needs, desires and aspirations. They are common goods, in the sense that they are use value to a plurality. Thus, in the first instance, common goods are use value for a plurality.

However, this is not sufficient to define common goods in the postcapitalist sense. An airport lounge is a use value to a plurality, as is any public space, a city, a train, a park, a school or a street. Also, any mass-produced commodity is a use value to a plurality in the sense that it serves the necessary or acquired needs of a subset of a population, although this cup, this computer, this car is a use value to me. What is common to all these cases is that the plurality is largely silent; it is only a passiveuser or consumer of these goods. To make it a common good, the plurality needs to come alive as a plurality of commoners, by claiming ownership of that good. To claim ownership is not simply a question of defining property rights in the legal sense. A plurality that claims ownership of one or more use values is one that, in different forms, given situations and contexts, not only uses or accesses that use value, but that also governs its production and reproduction, its sustainability and development. In thus doing, the plurality shapes a relationship to that good and to the environment within which it is produced, while the subjects of that plurality govern the relations with one another. This plurality therefore also creates other values besides the use value of the common goods. It creates relational values, by measuring, assessing and giving particular sense to the models of social relations through which the common goods are (re)produced and their use value is distributed among the commoners. In thus doing, and to the extent that the plurality sustains that claim of ownership, the common good is turned into an element of a common system or, briefly, a commons: this built space is an element of the self-organised social centre in Milan; these pipes are an element of the water associations in Cochabamba, Bolivia; these garden tools are an element of my community garden in the Modena Apennines; this knowledge and know-how are elements of a peer-to-peer network in cyberspace.

The twofold character of a common good, therefore, is this: on the one hand it is a use value for a plurality; on the other it requires a plurality claiming and sustaining the ownership of the common good, and this can be done only through the creation of relational values, that is, values that select the 'goods and bads' of social action while at the same time sustaining and (re)producing one another, social relations, social practice and the ecology in which social practice is embedded. Thus the initial sentence of this chapter stands now to be corrected. The wealth of postcapitalist society also includes this normative and relational wealth.

This implies that the common good coincides with a force field that, if the commons are produced in a contest of capitalist domination, will often be oriented by goals that run opposite to capitalist production. Indeed, the twofold character of the common good is distinctively different from the twofold character of the commodity in a social system dominated by capital, as discussed by Marx (1976) in the first chapter of Capital. The commodity is a use value and an exchange value. However the latter is not the result of a plurality taking ownership of the good produced in common (in a factory, an office, through a diffused network of producers held together through competitive markets, etc.), but the result of an individualised plurality divided in wage and wealth hierarchy and set to compete for livelihood against one another and for which their common condition of production is a matter of insignificance, an unproblematised given, a fact of life one does not even try to question or govern in some way, and therefore an alien force. In capitalist commodity production, value presents itself as exchange value, neither good nor bad but a ratio: pounds per carton of milk; euros per smart phone; dollars per hamburger. Values here induce force only within a systemic integration with other capitalist producers who take these ratios as a benchmark to meet or beat in order to reach their own goals of profit. The values of conviviality, social justice and ecological balance as well as the goal of livelihood get squeezed out by this incessant competitive struggle, which instead shows what such a systemic integration really values: growth for growth's sake. This value, this inducement to a social force field that ultimately produces increasingly social injustice, accelerates global warming and establishes the horror of Capitalocene, occurs within capital systemic loops that impose measures, assessments and sense production that are heteronymous to (outside) the producers themselves, thus giving rise to exploitation, widening power hierarchies and environmental catastrophe. This is possible to the extent that social conflict – in the form of class and community conflict – has insufficient direction and force in constituting a balancing feedback mechanism for the definition of commodities' exchange values, and the constitution of the what, the how, the how much, the who and the why of production.

The twofold character of common goods is at the basis of our understanding of commons as specific social systems, very different from capital, which if they develop into a strong enough social force can contrast with and replace capital production. The twofold character of the common good contains two basic elements – one objective (the 'common goods') and one subjective (an ownership claiming a plurality of subjects) – that give us an entry point to understand commons as social systems. The potential dynamism and movement of these commons social systems emerges from two interconnected processes.

One is internal to the commons itself, and defines the modes in which a plurality of subjects establishes their ownership to the common goods and the forms of the social relations they set in place, negotiate or even contest. For example, in Zapatistas-held areas of Mexico, the indigenous communities together hold the territories and the land as commons, but women thereinconstitute social movements to question women's subordinate position in the communities. Here commons are also centred on social conflict, but a conflict that is reconciled with itself in the sense that it is not concealed, marginalised and brushed aside as 'deviance' but instead acknowledged as the key expression of democratic vigour.

The other element that give commons dynamism and movement is external to the commons, and given by the way in which the commons in question are articulated or structurally coupled to other commons or capitalist circuits of praxis, together with the degree in which they are exposed to destructive social forces such as the enclosing or co-opting force of capital. The nature and effective transformational force of these endogenous and exogenous processes is key to understanding, and they problematise the development of commons systems as a social force that is transformative of the real. Hence it is impossible to understand commons without understanding capital. Even when we deal with the commons in very general and abstract terms to highlight their properties, the commons we deal with are never romantic outsides, but situated outsides, social systems that must negotiate their way in an environment in which predator capitalist systems are ready to enclose or subordinate commons. For this reason, I centre this investigation with the question of the relation between commons and capital systems, a relation that has always been crucial, but particularly so in moment of crises, as today. This question will be a constant preoccupation throughout the book, and is acknowledged in the very definition of commons as social systems, having as their environment also other systems such as capital systems. I will deal with this in subsequent chapters.

We need thus to keep an analytical distinction between common goods and commons, as the former defines for us only some systems elements, but not the types of relations and correspondent systemic processes of the latter. At this stage, we can simply refer to these structural elements as, on one hand, a use value for a plurality and, on the other, a plurality claiming and sustaining ownership of the common good, or, commons resources and commoners' communities. It will also become clear in later chapters that there is a third, central element of the commons, its driving force, constituted by the doing in common of the commoners, or commoning.

On common goods

Common goods (as use value for a plurality) and commons (as social systems) are often conflated in the contemporary literature on commons. Even when the rule-setting role of a plurality, or community, is acknowledged in defining the modality of access and governance of common goods, commons often become just another name for what is shared. Thus, since what is shared goes down in history and cuts across contemporary cultures with several variations, it is necessary to start looking at typologies of common goods.

If one types the term 'commons' into a search engine, apart for links to games, websites, the House of Commons and journals, what is found is a series of links to definitions of commons, and the vast majority of these define them as some sort of resources, as things, as common goods. In other words, much of the conventional wisdom on commons defines them as goods – resources – that are shared among a plurality. Our exploratory journey must therefore begin from this very basic general level, which is also relayed in more academic treatments of the commons. Here I explore some contradictions, limitations and strengths of approaching commons as goods when we seek to weave them into a narrative of emancipation.

The economist

A way to start to map commons as types of goods (commons goods) is to use the typology of 'goods' of neoclassical economics. Before briefly reviewing this, we must remind ourselves that when economists speak, they speak assuming big things, very big things. Their first assumption, of course, is their methodological individualism, which see people through the eyes of that social force we call capital, a force that has always driven towards the individualisation and atomisation of people, forging the chains that keep people separated from others. Therefore, for the economists, there cannot be commons in the sense discussed in the previous section, of systems brought about by a plurality. The economists' second assumption is that desires, dreams, needs – or, in short and using the abruptness of economic speech, preferences – could be 'aggregated' through a mathematical function, a social welfare function, ranking social states as less desirable, 'allowing governments to choose alternative complete descriptions of the society' to be ranked in such terms as 'less desirable, more desirable, or indifference for every possible pair of social states. The inputs in such a function include any variables considered to affect the economic welfare of a society'. Clearly, each of these variables is weighted according to particular algorithms and worldviews of powerful elites or raging commoners, since 'there are infinitively many ways to choose the weight[,] [s]o the resulting social preferencerelation is arbitrary, in so far as the particular weights are arbitrary' (Feldman 1980: 194).

Social welfare functions have been used to represent prospective patterns of collective choice between alternative social states, and in a sense this is precisely what the economist Paul Samuelson wanted to do when he introduced the distinction between private and collective goods. He was seeking to represent that social choice as being between capitalism and socialism – or a definite optimal mixture between the two. Like many of his colleagues in that pre-neoliberal era, he believed that societies could find an 'optimum' welfare in the distribution between collective and private goods, thus providing a historic compromise, a deal among the two regimes of property and management. Politically, that would have been like finding the optimal 'coupling' between capitalism and socialism, an urgent preoccupation of post-World War Two Western governments, since after the cycle of working-class struggles that had followed the Soviet revolution in 1917, elites had to think through how to provide health, education, roads, pensions, in short welfare and public goods (collective goods) to the masses, plus recognise trade unions and increases of wages for core sections of working class and at the same time allow profits for capital accumulation, for growth. While at the aggregate level the coupling of capitalism and socialism was operationalised through governments' Keynesian macroeconomc policies (De Angelis 2000), the economic theory of these policies lacked micro-foundations. This implies that Keynesian theory applied to the aggregate macroeconomy, and it formally required to be linked to basic microeconomic conceptions of choice. Samuelson's classification of goods was part of this enterprise. Thus he introduced the distinction between private consumption goods and collective consumption goods in terms of whether these goods can be parcelled out among individuals, or whether their consumption can be done collectively 'in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtraction from any other individual's consumption of that good' (Samuelson 1954: 386). Samuelson therefore introduced the question of rivalry in the use of goods. Goods are rival, if the use by one person subtracts from the total available to others. If it does not, then they are non-rival. For example, a physical formula, a software code, etc., are non-rival goods, as are the law, national security and the safety net. A few years later, taking the same line of enquiry, Musgrave (1959) introduces a different distinction among goods: not so much whether their use subtracts from the uses of others, but whether it is feasible to exclude people from the consumption of goods or not. The contributions of Samuelson and Musgrave have formed the basis for the 2-by-2 matrix in which economic goods are still classified today. Table 1.1 reports a milder and more recent version of this matrix, that introduced by commons scholar Elinor Ostrom (2000) which substitutes binaries with gradients, and rivalry with subtraction. Here exclusion and subtractabilities are not binaries, unlike the categories of Samuelson and Musgrave, but define gradient scales.

A few words are needed here to explain better what subtractability (or rivalry) and exclusion means for the economists. In economic theory, rivalry or a high degree of subtractability is a characteristic of a good, not of the capitalist social relations through which a good is produced. A rival (subtractable) good is a good whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers. I am eating this sandwich, not you. On the other hand, it is non-rival (non-subtractable) if the cost of providing it to an additional individual is zero (marginal cost equal to zero). Knowledge is one example, or Internet services, although few goods can be said truly non-subtractable in all conditions. Let us take the Internet: it is non-rival (low subtractability) to the extent that there is enough mainframe and cable capacity to carry sufficient users. Up to this point, everybody can dance in cyberspace. But there is a point of congestion after which an extra user reduces the speed of all: in order to continue to have non-subtractability, more capacity needs to be added. This implies that more energy usage, more materials extraction needs to be considered. As I will argue, this problem is an important aspect of my criticism of cyber-communism, which regards the peer-to-peer exchanges creating free software or downloading music as an example of the future.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zed Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783600624
• ISBN 13: 9781783600625
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 458
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar