On the Commons and the Transformation to Post Capitalism

* Book: Massimo De Angelis. Omnia sunt Communia - On the Commons and the Transformation to Post Capitalism. Zed Books, 2017

Reviews

1. Excerpted from Pat Conaty:

"For a European example of food commons, Massimo provides a profile of the work of Campi Aperti that in Bologna since the late 1990s has developed a growing co-operative network of five regular community supported agriculture markets. For each market a monthly general assembly is held with consumer and farmer members to co-manage the food commons. Bimonthly general assemblies are held bringing members of all five markets together. Farmers are guaranteed a fair trade price set by members of each market. The assured quality of the local food, the treatment of the animals and the land is vetted and inspected by the consumer members.

Local and organic food produced includes fruit, vegetables, herbs, pasta, cheese, meat, flowers, oils, soap and detergents, seedlings and beverages. Today the system has expanded to an organic growing acreage approaching 250 hectares and equivalent to a food growing area close to Bologna of 300 large Premier league football pitches. Other northern Italian cities (including Milan and Venice) and regions (Val di Susa) have joined a national network called Genuino Clandestino that is replicating the commons. Campi Aperti has developed a solidarity economy partnership in Bologna and under the City’s radical new by-law (the Bologna regulation for ‘the commons’) the co-ops have negotiated a lower rate of 5 per cent of trade for market space which is half the city’s conventional charge.

De Angelis examines other commons including the Solidarity Clinics in Greece and he shows how the growing awareness of commons (including Wikipedia, GNU ‘free software’, Creative Commons Licensing, our cultural inheritance, public spaces, libraries, museums, car sharing, etc) is informing a new set of political alliances to overcome austerity. Bologna and Barcelona are in the forefront of innovative policies by local government to recognise, nurture and support the emergence and development of a co-operative commons economy. As De Angelis observes, not all co-operatives are commons. To be a commons, co-production by stakeholders, non-hierarchical practices and active democratic member involvement in planning, designing, developing and co-managing the commons is crucial. Most importantly commons need self-consciously and strategically to unite to co-develop a new integrated mode of production for people and planet.

Given the dominance of the state and market duopoly, political conflicts goes with the territory. The major difference De Angelis shows is between commons and capital. Capital is driven by a mission to develop shareholder value and expand capital. For commons money is a servant and not a master as its mission is to develop commonwealth not commodities. Historically the co-operative movement has pursued the development of co-operative commonwealth as its mission, but this vision and mission has been for too long neglected. De Angelis shows powerfully how to revive this radical mission for meeting a growing range of basic needs in the 21st century." (email, February 2018, from a draft prepared for the Journal of Cooperative Studies)

2. John Sinha, climate activist:

"Where De Angelis departs explicitly from Marx is in his understanding of two key theories developed in Capital: exploitation and primitive accumulation. De Angelis claims that Marx did not question what lies behind the ­reproduction of capital. Therefore he favours an approach based on social reproduction theory, where domestic labour is part of the production process, as developed by feminist scholars in the 1970s as an alternative to the theory of exploitation and primitive accumulation.

But cherry-picking bits of Marx and stitching the fragments back together does not provide the basis for developing a coherent theory of the political economy of the commons. For a start, it makes the new categories he develops to describe the commons very difficult to understand. Marxists have normally understood the commons as a historic form whose eradication, under a process of primitive accumulation, was the precondition for the development of wage labour under industrial capitalism. For De Angelis, enclosure and dispossession are the continuing processes—accentuated under neoliberalism—by which the expansion of the system is realised through the destruction of the commons. But extending the theory of primitive accumulation in this way is an area of controversy among Marxists. Silvia Federici developed the theory in order to sustain the notion of primitive accumulation occurring in the home, the reproduction of labour by this means being the precondition for wage labour. This is a departure from Marx because it ignores his key point: that the working class was created historically under capitalism. Extending the theory in this way robs it of its explanatory power. As Chris Harman pointed out in this journal, primitive accumulation: “permitted the development of a specifically capitalist way of expanding this wealth by creating a class of ‘free’ workers with no choice but to sell their labour power to those now in control of the means of production”.6

There are other problems with De Angelis’s book. He rejects what he terms the “classical narrative of Marxism” in which the working class abolishes capitalism through revolution and replaces it with socialism, “in which the state will direct all economic activity and regulate the market” and in which the “revolutionary workers would have some advantage in some aspect of social reproduction, but ultimately the elite would define the road to socialism” and the “old rebels would go back to work under the old discipline with ‘socialist spirit’” (p275). But this caricature of socialism weakens his analysis. In this way the working class is pushed to the back of the stage. The conflict between labour and capital is replaced by the conflict between capital and commoners.

De Angelis is well aware of the dangers of co-optation of the commons within capitalism and his claims are hedged with caveats. He is at pains to point out how co-optation can arise. But he is unable to resolve some of the problems he introduces when analysing social struggles through his conceptual prism. These problems become glaring when analysing public services, the “bureaucratic commons” as he terms it. Public libraries are an example of the intellectual commons analysed in this book. So the situation that arose in 2012, when Barnet Council in London announced the closure of a library with plans to sell the building, provides a concrete example of what’s at stake. The local community successfully occupied the building and now run it as a community library staffed mostly by volunteers, forcing the council to halt the sell-off. But when full-time professional library staff are substituted by volunteers, this is still austerity for the local community. Because he has nothing to say about working class agency, De Angelis’s theory cannot offer a convincing strategy to take this struggle forward.7

De Angelis does not claim the commons is emancipatory per se; it is only when it is harnessed to social movements and political struggle that it can achieve real gains and challenge the logic of capitalism. His best example of a commons struggle is the “water wars” that took place in Bolivia in the early 2000s. The government, under pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, announced the privatisation of Cochabamba’s water supply and the awarding of a contract to the giant US multinational Bechtel to control the water system. This is despite the fact that the water was not the government’s to sell. The water infrastructure in many parts of the system was built, owned and managed by the local community for use by the community—especially in the poorer parts of town. Following mass civil unrest, culminating in a general strike, the government was quickly forced to abandon its privatisation plans. This defeat was a signal point in the battle against neoliberalism not only in Bolivia, but across the whole of Latin America.

The problem here is that De Angelis’s lack of interest in class struggle in the workplace limits the scope of this work and causes him to overlook these important issues. This no mere academic question, but a vital question of anti-capitalist and revolutionary strategy. The Bolivian “water wars” are an example of this. He acknowledges that the resistance culminated in a general strike, which forced the government to change its plans, but he does not dwell on this fact, merely mentioning it in passing. But this is not a minor detail. Self-activity of workers is a crucial question for any serious strategy of resistance to capital.

I have focused in this review on the areas of the book that are problematic. However, there are interesting and useful insights, in particular the case studies. But I feel this book is a missed opportunity. There is no synthesis with the socialist tradition and the revolutionary approach to the commons. The author’s dismissal of revolution as the “classical narrative of Marxism” justifies his lack of interest in the historic experience of class struggle. Not only does he miss out the experience of the Russian Revolution but also the Spanish Civil War and their experiments with common ownership." (http://isj.org.uk/post-capitalism-in-commons/)