[Commons-Law] Commoner 11

[Achal Prabhala]

*http://www.commoner.org.uk/*
**
*Reinfusing the Commons*

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] <http://www.commoner.org.uk/#_edn1> 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
40thanniversary 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] <http://www.commoner.org.uk/#_edn2> 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] <http://www.commoner.org.uk/#_ednref1> 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] <http://www.commoner.org.uk/#_ednref2> 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).
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