[Reader-list] The Commoner Number 11 Re(in)fusing the Commons

[Stevphen Shukaitis]

The Commoner N. 11. Spring/Summer 2006
http://www.thecommoner.org
Re(in)fusing the Commons

Angela Mitropoulos, Autonomy, Recognition, Movement

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Species-Being and the New Commonism

Precarias a la Deriva, A Very Careful Strike - Four hypotheses

P.M., The golden globes of the planetary commons

George Ciccariello-Maher, Working-Class One-Sidedness from Sorel to Tronti

Silvia Federici, The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United
States in the 1970s

Ida Dominijanni, Heiresses at Twilight. The End of Politics and the
Politics of Difference

After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing
format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the
practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are
slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two
guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an
edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the
problematic of commoning.

Commoning, a term encountered by Peter Linebaugh in one of his frequent
travels in the living history of commoners’ struggles, is about the
(re)production of commons. To turn a noun into a verb is not a little step
and requires some daring. Especially if in doing so we do not want to
obscure the importance of the noun, but simply ground it on what is, after
all, life flow: there are no commons without incessant activities of
commoning, of (re)producing in common. But it is through (re)production in
common that communities of producers decide for themselves the norms,
values and measures of things. Let us put the “tragedy of the commons” to
rest then, the basis of neoliberal argument for the privatisation: there
is no commons without commoning, there are no commons without communities
of producers and particular flows and modes of relations, an insight we
have focused on in issue 6 of this journal, entitled “What Alternatives?
Commons and Communities, Dignity and Freedom.” Hence, what lies behind the
“tragedy of the commons” is really the tragedy of the destruction of
commoning through all sorts of structural adjustments, whether militarised
or not.

As the guest editors of this issue rightly point out, the question of
commoning is linked to the question of “refusal of work,” that magic
expression used in the 1970s to highlight the frontline clash of value
practices. The term, however, is not meant as a refusal of doing, of
commoning, of (re)producing in common, but on the contrary is an
affirmation of all this in the only way possible when in the presence of a
social force, capital, that aspires to couple its preservation to that of
the commoners through the imposition of its measures of things. In these
conditions, “refusal of work” as refusal of capital’s measures, and
commoning as affirmation of other measures are the two sides of the same
struggle. How can we refuse capital’s measure without participating in the
constitution of other common measures?  And how can we participate in this
commonality without at the same time setting a limit, refusing capital’s
measure? The setting of a limit to the beast and the constitution of an
“outside” are two inescapable coordinates of struggle. It is through the
problematic of this polarity that we could read the very diverse
contributions of this issue of The Commoner.

Massimo De Angelis
___

In June 2005, at the centenary celebration of the Industrial Workers of
the World, historian and Midnight Notes Collective member Peter Linebaugh
made a provocative remark in a talk about the commons. He said the World
Bank also talks about commons.  An important difference in how we think
about the commons, he suggested, should be that we pay attention to
practices of commoning, as human activities. In light of this remark, we
would like to suggest a gloss on the title of this journal. Commoner, not
only as someone who dwells within and relies upon the commons, but also as
someone who commons. To common: to produce and hold in common. Just as
capitalist production has as its fundamental product social relations in
the form of the capital relation, commoning produces social relations in
the form of commons, freely associated humanity. It is in this sense that
we want to link the commons with the work of Mario Tronti, linking
commoning with the refusal of work.

What is the relationship between refusal of work and commons? Well, first,
what do we mean by refusal of work? It has been noted before that 'refusal
of work' is not simply 'refusal to work,’ but it is refusal of the work
relationship. Work has at least two moments: the purchase by the
capitalist of our bodies and time in the form of the commodity labor
power, and the capitalist attempt to make use of our bodies and time after
the purchase is made. Refusal of work spans both moments: the attempt to
break out of the need to sell oneself as a commodity, and the attempt to
resist or completely refuse being made use of if one has sold oneself.

How does this relate to commons? We see it this way: another name for the
compulsion to sell labor power is 'enclosure.’ And it is only within the
enclosed spaces of workplaces (which, to be clear, for us include homes,
classrooms – potentially any moment of life) and by resort to the violent
mechanisms of enclosure that the capitalist can make use of us for surplus
value production. The commons, then, in these terms is two things. It is a
name for spaces, times, histories, memories, moments of life that are not
– or at least not fully – enclosed, ruled by and functional for capital.
It is the uses of our bodies and times that are different from and
antithetical to the capitalist use. We do not only mean this in an
abstract and utopian sense. The commons were constructed; the new commons
are being constructed. Commoning is a process of organization. In a sense
the commons are always already organized. They do not exist without
organization(s), sometimes formal but more often informal.

The simple fact of producing the commons is a moment of refusal of the
values of capitalism. Refusal of work is simultaneously an attempt to
produce new commons, new forms of commoning (we can all point to
relationships, memories, styles, images, and knowledges produced through
our involvements in strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of refusal),
an attempt to defend existing commons, and a use of existing commons to
attack – or defend ourselves against – capitalism. If we do not have a
type of commons in the social relationships with our comrades then our
efforts are less likely to succeed. Stan Weir recognized this when he
stressed the importance of informal work groups, and emphasized their
empirical existence within important struggles.

This issue of the Commoner was originally intended to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of the publication of Mario Tronti's Operai e Capitale, a text
which had an enormous impact on the Italian far left and whose influence
is most present today in the work of Antonio Negri. Part of the project
for we commoners is to analyze the facts and questions that Tronti posed:
“How is the working class made, from the inside, how does it function
inside capital, how does it work, how does it struggle, in what sense does
it accept the system, in what way does it strategically refuse it?”

Our goal for this issue is a modest one: to show the continuing relevance
of Tronti's work and to draw more attention to this neglected body of
Marxist thought.  We expect that we are largely preaching to the choir
when it comes to the readership of the Commoner. Some of the contributors
to this issue have decided to directly engage with and develop Tronti's
work at a theoretical level; others carry out inquiry into trends and
practices within the global movements of commoners and of capitalism.
While Angela Mitropoulos opens the issue by applying ideas from Tronti’s
writings to explore issues around immigration and autonomy, Ida
Dominijanni closes it by exploring the relation between Tronti’s thought
and the feminist politics of difference. As Nick Dyer-Witheford explores
connections between species-being and the specter of commonism, George
Ciccariello-Maher begins to draw together a line of thought based on the
logic of separation that connects thinkers such as Sorel, Tronti, Negri,
and Fanon.

In exploring the connection between refusing work and creating new commons
it is important to not give the impression that this is not a difficult or
in some cases even impossible task, especially for those who are engaged
in forms of caring and affective labor. For as argued by Alisa Del Re, to
build a conception of utopia upon refusing work that does not take into
account the labors of social reproduction most often carried about by
females is to base one’s notions of freedom on the continued exploitation
of female labor. This issue is taken up by Precarias a la Deriva in their
consideration of what form a strike from such constrained positions might
take as well as a previously published article by Silvia Federici from the
early 80s which elaborates on the revolt against housework that took place
during the 70s coming out of campaigns such as Wages for Housework.

What runs through all the contributions is the attempt to understand
refusal and commoning in order to practice both better. To us, commoning
and refusal are one and the same. Freely associated production of social
relations is precisely the real movement that abolishes the present state
of things. Refusal defends and produces the commons. Let us then,
following the whimsical suggestion of p.m., hang golden globes all over
marking points for the congealing of new planetary commons and revolt. The
commons nourish and produce refusal. In the words of the IWW constitution,
by the subversive practices of the global movement “we are forming the
structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

Nate Holdren + Stevphen Shukaitis


-- 
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://slash.interactivist.net

"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is
created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political
practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory
cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of
welcoming difference . . . Becoming autonomous is a political position for
it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of
resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these
depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration.
Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and
power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule."
-subRosa Collective