Commoner 11 out

The Commoner 11 is online,

http://www.thecommoner.org

please circulate in your network . . .

The Commoner N. 11. Spring/Summer 2006

Re(in)fusing the Commons

Angela Mitropoulos, Autonomy, Recognition, Movement [.pdf]

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Species-Being and the New Commonism [.pdf]

Precarias a la Deriva, A Very Careful Strike - Four hypotheses [.pdf]

P.M., The golden globes of the planetary commons [.pdf]

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

Tronti [.pdf]

Silvia Federici, The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the

United States in the 1970s [.pdf]

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

Politics of Difference [.pdf]

Introduction

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.[i] 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.[ii] 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

[i] Peter Linebaugh, "Magna Charta and Practical Communism," talk

delivered at the centenary of the Industrial Workers of the World,

2005. Those interested can find the text and audio of a similar

presentation that he delivered to the "Contested Commons / Trespassing

Publics" conference at Sarai in New Delhi here:

http://www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/ip_conf.htm.

[ii] At the time of this writing, less than 1/3 of Tronti's first book

and no other work by Tronti have been translated. Interested readers

can consult the available passages online

(http://affinityproject.org/theories/tronti.html), and a recent

electronic discussion of Tronti

(http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/tronti).