Discussion

Jules Desgoutte:

"I take the liberty to react somewhat spontaneously to the idea of an "ordo-commonalism."

Ordo-liberalism is a state-market compromise where the state strives to normatively configure civil society to meet the demands of an ideal Market.

To do this, a power balance in favor of the market is required (as in West Germany after the Second World War, because the German state was Nazi and was discredited, but also because the Nazis weakened the German state, particularly through the policy of agencies, and finally because the liberating forces were liberal). Therefore, ordo-liberalism is a social constructivism driven by a Market ideal. From this perspective, what could ordo-commonalism be? Commons constitute anything but a collective subject comparable to economic power, capable of forcing the state into such a normative effort.

A hypothesis for constituting counter-powers or a political subject, certainly. But to constitute a norm of public action capable of commanding the state?

So, the two questions I have here are who and how:

What power is capable of putting the state at the service of the commons, as proposed here?

Are the commons capable of sustaining such a state-constructivist project?

That public actors might embrace the commons to transform public action - and at the very least to resist ongoing transformations, particularly the liquidation of the social state - why not.

An alliance in this regard is possible, especially in the now urgent perspective of forming a front (popular) against the far-right. But it seems necessary to me to first invoke the oppositional dimension of commons practices - and this seems remarkably absent from the text, in favor of an approach that could be described as "positive."

Moreover, in neglecting, in an "ordo-commonalist" hypothesis, the question of who is capable of substituting the market with the commons (and from what power balance), there is a risk of quickly ending up with a whitewashing operation where the market disguises itself as commons to become more acceptable (the recent enthusiasm for third places is largely permeated by this kind of phenomena - see the SOS group and Borello's doctrine of a so-called "general-interest capitalism"); or else with a pious wish, relying solely on everyone's goodwill (the two being compatible, see social entrepreneurship - after all, goodwill is the prerogative of the upper classes. It gives them a sense of freedom on which they base the belief in their superiority).

And indeed, "The belief in the virtues of the market is not completely unfounded," we read in the article. This is not reassuring when one thinks, on the contrary, that this belief is a madness precipitating our entire human species towards its downfall... (who doubts that the Anthropocene is a Capitalocene?)

Finally, the article mentions "social property" and "resource preservation" as major unifying principles of the commons: if the commons are a political subject (as argued by authors like Le Strat, Dardot, and Laval, Coriat...), these objects certainly deserve to be mentioned as major debates, but certainly not as "major principles" capable of unifying them. Indeed:

The notion of "resource" has been abundantly criticized since the effects of the ontological turn in anthropology on the commons movement. It appears characteristic of the juridico-political order of so-called "naturalist" societies (cf Descola). In these societies, the order of things rests on a division between nature and culture, which underpins a relationship of exploitation. This division translates at the legal level as a division between goods and persons, which underpins a relationship of appropriation (where the status of person is reserved for humans, individually or collectively). This division subjects things belonging to nature to the rank of exploitable goods by persons. The resource then refers to an extractivist model where Nature is rightfully subjected to Man's exploitation. This critique (cf Sarah Vanuxem) intersects with that raised by gender studies, showing that the supposed "neutral" human subject is male, while the female subject (implied and thus invisibilized by the so-called "neutrality" of the human subject) is naturalized in its properties (justifying its appropriation and exploitation). However, the commons widely recognize practices and realities that contest such a division, to the point that for many actors in the commons movement today, following the double questioning (in the field of social sciences, anthropology, gender studies, and post-colonial studies) of the "productive-extractivist" and "gendered" nature of naturalism, this notion of resources is no longer legitimate to defend a commons approach (cf Geneviève Pruvost, Quotidien politique); it has even often become antagonistic to it (although the problems raised by these objections are not entirely resolved theoretically).

The notion of property, even social property, is also at the heart of a fundamental debate. While it is often said that the commons are not antagonistic to property (nor to the State, nor to the Market, meaning they do not require their disappearance to exist), it is still unclear whether there exists a property regime that can accommodate the commons - whether the commons can "reform property law from within," or whether the commons inherently oppose property, are heteronomous to the fact of ownership, and only make sense politically insofar as they constitute a perspective from which to envision the horizon of its dismantling.

The first option argues for the right of use as a constitutive bundle of property rights. Indeed, free licenses like "creative commons" leverage the author's moral right as owner to open the right of use to everyone, even if they come into play against the patrimonial right that recognition of the title of property constitutes. This conception is formulated as an internal conflict within property as an institution, which to resolve, would need to be restructured, notably by removing the right of alienation that establishes the owner's sovereignty over their property in favor of the right of use and its shared management.

The Roman law definition of res communis as "a thing that belongs to no one and cannot be appropriated," which in its formulation denies appropriation twice, once in its actuality and once in its potentiality - nevertheless seems to indicate the second direction. On this subject, Agamben offers a philosophical - and even philological - illumination of the fact of ownership by linking the question of property to the question of the proper in philosophy and tracing this double legal and philosophical question back to its attachment to the Aristotelian conception of substance. The proper is what qualifies the substance of a thing, according to Aristotle. My sweater is black. Well, from this perspective, Agamben tells us, the common is precisely what is not proper. Thus, what my clothes have in common is not being this or that, being red or black, wool or cotton; it's only the use I have for them. And that is not nothing, but it is not a substance, and as such, it does not qualify any property.

I can therefore relate to my clothes in two very different ways: either from myself, as they belong to me properly, meaning they are my property; or from them, as they have in common having a relationship with my body, this body they dress because I use them. At that moment, the use is not an aspect of property. It is not a "right of use" requiring an adjustment of the internal relations of the rights constituting the order of property (in the name, for example, of the need to preserve the resource). It is not a right at all. It is the opposite of the law. It is an element heterogeneous to the order in question, as it pertains to the common, as opposed to the proper, and demands its autonomy. It would then have been captured by the order of the proper and would demand to be released to deploy its specific power. This power of uses, according to Agamben, is that of singularity whatever - a piece of clothing among others. It is then very different from the exceptional character that characterizes the appearance of a singularity in the order of the proper (as made visible in the aesthetic order presiding over the art world, where singularity is always exceptional and the exception justifies the rule, to the point of being enshrined in law under the guise of the originality criterion, definitive of intellectual property law).

Use then opposes the law as the law is the form that the logic of the proper imposes on the question of the Law. The law is the very expression of the proprietary fact in the language of the Law. The law is its proper, as the law tells me what I have the right to do. But then, if there is a proper of the law characterized by the law, is there not something like a common law? And what is the common of the Law? What is this "I cannot not do it" that will characterize the use? That will lead the micropolitics of uses into forms of action both illegal and yet legitimate? Squatting? Intervening in public space? This is ultimately the question Antigone poses to Creon. "It is common," she says, "to bury your brother. It's the use. And that I don't have the right to do it changes nothing." Here, there exists a Law that is not of the law and even opposes it absolutely, at every point. Which is its contrary. Like the slave is the contrary of the sovereign subject.

As for social property itself, as Robert Castel describes it, it seems to me that it results rather from an internal compromise to the property order, and even, I would say, from a past compromise that neoliberalism has broken.

It is the compromise by which workers managed to conquer social rights in exchange for the continuation of the subordination relationship. It is social security, it is retirement, it is unemployment, etc. Deferred salary, says Castel, is social property because it is a right conquered over property by workers, but without becoming owners.

But he also says it is a compromise.

Now, not only was it not the state that built this compromise, even if it inherited it in the form of the social state, but it is also the state that is liquidating it today - because the liquidation of the social state is a liquidation of the state by itself, precisely under the blow of neoliberal governmentality that has seized it, originating from German ordoliberalism. And what was best about this social property was its intention to realize itself by staying as far away as possible from the state - that is to say, precisely, one could say, attempting to think of itself in common.

So here are a series of problems.

Invoking the principle of social property to attempt to reverse neoliberal governmentality is to ignore the failure of the Fordist compromise under the blow of the neoliberal rearrangement of the relations between Market, State, and Society.

Reinstating an understanding of the commons based on resources is opening the commons' house to the productive-extractivist logic. Taking ordo-liberalism as a model in its constructivist conception of the social, to make the commons a public policy, is like wanting to make Esperanto the language of a people.

It is not understanding all that in the commons pertains to a nature naturing, not seeing "the inconstructible part of the commons" (to paraphrase Frédéric Neyrat), not understanding what in the common pertains to a "natureculture" ("Our existence depends on our ability to live together," says Donna Haraway). It is having missed the overcoming of the opposition between nature and culture in which the commons movement has decisively and irreversibly engaged. It is not seeing all that connects the commons to a thought of the living, from anthropology to botany, passing through the study of technical systems, a thought "of the continuation of the living by other means," of becoming, of the non-modelizable, a thought of immanent arrangement, of self-organization to councilism, passing through ecofeminism, etc.

And it is doing so without clearly stating the place of economic relations in ordo-commonalism, nor explaining which operator can construct the ordo-communal state, which is also very problematic, given the skill that the arché has shown in its ability to take advantage of all the spaces opened to grow.

I therefore see something like a profile of ordo-commonalism taking shape. And what worries me in this profile is that it resembles a kind of effort to adapt commons practices in a neoliberal context, rather than a firm opposition to neoliberalism, an opposition that seems to me the only one capable of guaranteeing the integrity of the commons as social practices and the robustness of the commons hypothesis as a political proposition; a firm opposition that is now made even more necessary by the rise of a far-right, whose direct consequence is the violence produced on our bodies and minds by this neoliberal governmentality that pretends to govern our bodies and our very lives as its own property."

(source, mailing list: via bienscommuns.org , June 2024; original french text translated by ChatGPT)

Ordo-Communalism

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