Third Places and the Commons

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Source

The article by Emmanuel Dupont is a reaction to:

Dupont's text was shared by email in September 2024.


Text

Emmanuel Dupont:

(as translated by ChatGPT)

"I read with interest the article by B. Coriat and C. Vercher-Chaptal, 'Defending Our Third Places': an interview with Antoine Burret and Yoann Duriaux. EnCommuns. Article published online on May 22, 2024.

The authors are particularly critical of the recent public policy concerning third places, especially represented by France Tiers Lieux.

Like many observers, I largely agree with their observations on the trivialization and depoliticization of third places in this context of 'massification'.

But what is interesting, and in many respects surprising, is the way the situation is presented.

In broad terms, the authors seem to suggest that third places are commons (or were).

This implicit assumption allows them to fiercely criticize France Tiers Lieux (FTL) and somewhat hold it responsible for the situation: as the state's operational arm, FTL would have prevented/prevents third places from fulfilling their potential as commons.

It seems to me that this shortcut, equating third places with commons, can be debated.


Indeed, I believe commons carry ideals that are not always, far from it, found in third places:

  • Serving as a convergence point (not a unification) for a diversity of social experiences;
  • Discussing and acting according to explicit democratic rules (clearly showing how decisions can be made/overturned/reversed);
  • Constantly working to open the community to as many people as possible;
  • Managing a good or service recognized as having significant and important social utility;
  • Promoting sharing by setting limits on ownership through usage (considered in their diversity), etc.


However, very often, third places emerge from projects conceived by peers, co-opting one another, aiming primarily to support the life of a micro-community rather than managing a good or service with real social scope/utility, often confusing community openness with public openness, failing to establish clear rules for deliberation and decision-making... Not to mention the deep ambiguity of dependence on public funding. From this perspective, the real question should be, in our opinion: how, and with what ambition, should third places be transformed into commons?"

"Commons, envisioned as a political dynamic, perhaps deserve better than this association with third places. Of course, this doesn’t mean that third places are structurally incapable or unfit to be or become commons; quite the opposite. But as things stand, it might be more reasonable to consider them as proto-commons.

This somewhat mechanical equivalence (between third places and commons) actually stems from a perspective on commons that often lacks examples, relying on references to micro-initiatives, justified mostly by the continual emergence (rather than consolidation) of fundamentally unitary, hyper-localized, and nearly powerless communities, resting more on personal engagement rather than the creation of rules and the mobilization of significant means of action (especially financial ones).

This approach idealizes personal commitment and emerging collectives, at the expense of seeking longevity and expansion. It tends to frame the commons as primarily an experience of activist socialization. Even more, it anchors their perception excessively in a here-and-now horizon of action, consistently favoring practice over principles—leading to a weakening of its assertive power in favor of its exemplarity. Viewed this way, the commons seem to update the (old) political history of all those experiential micro-communities, clearly assuming a marginal or interstitial status, claiming the (absolutely necessary) link between politics and utopias, ultimately having only a distant connection to the course of events. This imaginary of sociability and proximity leads to a kind of assignment of commons to the local; sometimes, under the guise of activism, it reactivates the ambivalence of the commons as a fantasy of unity (here repressed and rendered invisible, as it is apprehended in a distributed manner across the entire territory).

Political thought on the commons might benefit from somewhat emancipating itself from these logics (very widespread on the left) of overvaluing the inspiring example, the local experience, and the incessant creation of collectives. Are there not other levers for the diffusion or deployment of the commons?

This is the key issue, in our view, of a political project that takes the commons (and therefore the relationship to property, to uses, to labor, and to organizational democracy) as a source of inspiration. To grasp its scope, let us focus on one aspect of the article: the relationship with institutions (and even more with institutionalization). A very ambivalent relationship, since it mixes critical rejection with a call for cooperation or partnership."

"For my part, I believe that commons should adopt and be part of a strategy for the conquest and transformation of public institutions, going far beyond the simple question of their positioning, of finding the right balance between distancing and seeking cooperation. To do this, we must clearly acknowledge their constitutive dimension and even consider them as forming a political theory of institutions (this is, in my opinion, the major lesson from the intellectual trajectory of E. Ostrom). This is the key to taking at least a minimal distance from the idea (so widespread on the left) that institutionalization is inherently harmful and that we should favor networked organizational forms, more suited to the distributed, connectionist, and processual nature of our experiences; and thus better equipped to meet our desires for emancipation.

We need to move beyond a perception that is both too reductive (institutions are merely expressions of the past, they homogenize, never change, no longer need justification, turn into domination, serve the interests of a few, degenerate into bureaucracy, etc.) and too binary (civil society vs. the State), justified politically by the hypothetical/miraculous rebalancing of powers through the grace of a self-sustaining civil society ('citizen responses,' 'solidarity initiatives,' etc.).

Seeing commons only as civil society's capacity to pave its way alongside the State seems neither desirable nor realistic to me. This underestimates the asymmetries of the forces at play and completely ignores the fact that without institutions to carry forward their aspirations, civil society remains a divided and powerless multitude, without means (legal, financial, etc.). On the other side, there is hyper-financialized and globalized capitalism. And an urgent ecological crisis.

From this perspective, commons would do well to ask how not to repeat or extend the history of the associative movement or that of the social and solidarity economy (and, in doing so, to reassess some of their political intuitions about the local and civil society).

On the contrary, commons could position themselves in a combative relationship with institutions, borrowing neither from coexistence (cooperation) nor from simple critical distance (remoteness). But for this, there must be something to say and claim; we must still believe that institutions enhance our capacity for collective action and want to reclaim them.

This is where commons appear to us as potentially their most powerful and radical, as a doctrinal framework (to be strengthened/evolved) that goes far beyond experimental or experiential activist action, capable of regenerating left-wing thought that is short on ideas in two major areas: the containment/regulation of capitalism through politics; and the reorganization of the so-called public sector."

"This balance of power would not be one of subcontracting, asking for facilitation or contribution, nor even of commanding unchanged institutions that have not evolved.

Beyond their ability to support local projects, commons can offer a critical and assertive framework for interpreting existing institutions. In short, reclaim the theme of democratizing institutions (especially the state and local governments) and their role in the fight against capitalist dominance, revisiting their fundamental relationships to property, usage, and decision-making.

This strategy of collective reappropriation can only be part of a broader project of democratizing society as a whole, not just democratizing small groups of juxtaposed projects, prototyping (more or less durable) forms of subjectivation/emancipation, and expected to serve as examples or inspiration for the rest of the population.

Commons cannot escape the debate about institutions: they naturally reactivate the scope and stakes of this issue. But this debate must be clearly posed and accepted. Therefore, the left (to simplify) must better understand what it thinks—not just what it avoids—about institutions. Quickly reducing the philosophical and political matrix of commons to the local, informal, horizontal, emergent, autonomous, etc., for fear of seeing them institutionalized seems like a dead-end (just like wanting to fight capitalist expansion by creating third places). All of this should be debated and rise above a few clichés about civil society, verticality, direct democracy, territory, proximity, autonomy, initiatives, rhizome, fluidity, networked action, archipelagic organization, relationship to life, praxis, etc.

In the background is the whole question of models and scales for fighting/containing capitalism. This debate is as old as the left itself, putting its many models (of community, emancipation, relationship to power, etc.) in tension. Think, for example, of the highly divergent positions between F. Lordon, T. Negri, or G. Agamben, the works of E.O. Wright or G.A. Cohen, the renewed interest in J. Dewey, or very differently, in the anarchist theses of Bookchin, etc., to name just a few.

Commons echo these debates and are marked by deep divergences (even though, of course, these are not clearly stabilized positions formed into 'camps,' mainly due to the lack of space for debate). This is the entire ambiguity of the expression 'neither State nor Market' when it comes to characterizing commons. Very/too schematically, two readings are often made of it."

"For some, the expression implies the idea of a possible replacement of the State and the Market by the commons, based on a very strong equivalence drawn between the State and the Market. The fight against capitalism would also be a fight against the State, which appears to be of no real use in addressing the problem. This replacement can only be envisioned through the form of micro-political communities, emancipated from capitalism and operating under principles of direct democracy, possibly articulated or aggregated in a network or federation of commons. This approach can be roughly qualified as anarchist. In our view, it has little value other than theorizing micro-utopias, which should not be hastily labeled as democratic: indeed, they leave too many questions unanswered regarding what is meant by direct democracy, the relationship between communities, and the conditions for aggregation/federation. Nevertheless, the main interest of this approach is that, under the guise of commons, it facilitates the discussion and testing of 'radical' philosophical and political theses, which continue to fascinate certain parts of the left.

For others, commons are called to constitute a third way, between the State and the Market. A more reformist third way, expected to gain importance but not intended to rethink institutions beyond making room for these commons to exist: the State is asked to be a facilitator or contributor. The relationship with the State remains fundamentally unchanged, except to ask it to make some space and to transform into a benevolent interlocutor/partner for the commons. The questions of scale change remain unresolved. As mentioned previously, this logic has already been expressed through the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) or the associative movement, even though it more easily opens up to the question of public services.


This approach seems more interesting to us than the previous one but presents several flaws.

  • The first flaw lies in believing that such an alternative could develop solely through multiplying initiatives, without having to establish itself institutionally or claim institutional recognition to gain legitimacy and the legal and financial means for its development.
  • The second flaw is in wanting to justify their public funding and recognition by institutions through the mere evidence of their public interest and role as public services, that is, through de facto rather than legal means (blurring/loosening the notions of public interest and public service, standing in for redefinition), leading commons to position themselves as gaps or supplements to state-based public services (and not evolving?).
  • The third flaw, unless one imagines or awaits a maximal extension of this third way, is leaving unresolved the question of the particular role of public institutions in confronting capitalism.

Thus, this third way also ends up bypassing or disinvesting in the institutional question. The result is a kind of indifference toward public bodies responsible for fundamental issues that affect the commons (this can be summarized by pointing out the difference between creating a local forest commons and advocating for/implementing the communalization of the ONF (National Forestry Office) and state-owned or private forests)."

"We therefore have (very schematically) two approaches which, for almost opposite reasons, seem to agree that the commons do not prioritize or strategically consider the question of institutions. By combining, in the same gesture, criticism of the State, criticism of the national scale, and the relationship with institutions, they agree on a distributed and localized vision of collective action, more or less organized in a network-like manner. They share the same imaginary, making emergence, autonomy, and the initiative capacity of grassroots collectives the alpha and omega of political renewal, as if wanting to act from the top was impossible, useless, illegitimate, or corrupting.

Political action is then suspended in a sort of preliminary need to create social connection or sociability before anything else. Under the guise of autonomy, it ultimately speaks less of democracy than of sociality, as if it were always necessary to create it from scratch (and/or preventing oneself from thinking that it also results from the work of institutions) and only experiencing it through emergence, continuous mobilization—in short, a kind of radical vitalism (and the activist exhaustion that accompanies it). This helps explain why third places, these collectives in constant re-foundation, seem so appealing for thinking about the commons.

Here, we touch on an essential political and anthropological question: do we want to create commons because we fundamentally believe that none exist or no longer exist (and that society and its meta-institutions no longer exist/count: think, for example, of B. Latour, who explains that we must create commons precisely because they don’t exist), or do we accept to consider commons as a process of democratization/communalization of collectives, entities, systems, and institutions that are, to varying degrees, already in place?

It’s a bit about our imaginary relationship to the 'instituting': do we always want to start anew or rather continue (or 'finish')?"

"This is exactly the question, in the form of a challenge, that institutionalization poses to us.

Because the political question is this: can we be more than just a people multiplying interesting initiatives (and here it doesn't really matter whether they are from the Social and Solidarity Economy, third places, commons, etc.), sketching out alternatives, but then just as quickly abandoning the idea of institutionalizing them? Can we move beyond (at least a little) a sort of flat, network-like vitalism, as radical as it is harmless to a neoliberal power perfectly capable of accommodating it?

The debate deserves to be opened, otherwise we risk damaging confusion.

To conclude, I believe that this article should be brought into discussion to go beyond personal testimony and/or expressions of mood. The situation described by the authors—of depoliticization, banalization, etc., of third places—is undeniable. However, placing the main responsibility for this on France Tiers Lieux potentially reveals a double reasoning error:

What is ultimately anecdotal is brought to the forefront: the current situation of third places is as much the doing of its local actors as its national ones. FTL has benefited from and accompanied the trend of third places, just as the actors of third places—largely rooted (in practice) in the Social and Solidarity Economy, social innovation, local development, socio-cultural activities, etc.—have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by FTL by labeling their projects as third places. This does not absolve FTL, which, in my opinion, should be a collective and democratic structure, directly managing the policy for third places and its funding. In doing so, it could have maintained a nationally combative political dimension—something that most of its local beneficiaries didn’t really have. But the fact remains that the State firmly opposed this (by refusing to examine this possibility), taking advantage of the fact that actors in the commons and third places didn’t really demand it (failing to imagine it for the reasons we have tried to outline earlier). The hope for emancipation that third places could have brought was therefore not machiavellianly diverted by FTL. From my point of view, third places have largely become what they were: local projects devoid of transformative capacity—in terms of doctrine—which is why, in my view, it is a mistake to mention them or try to make them exist as fully realized commons.

More broadly, but more implicitly, the criticism of FTL reveals a kind of a-institutional, if not anti-institutional, political thinking, in that it seems to consider any institutionalization and thus any instituting capacity as negative (cf. the opposition highlighted by the authors between engagement, activism, the golden age, and institutional weakening/appropriation, as if, caricatured, there were no alternative but between activist burnout and subsidy requests).

But the question is this: what do commons have to say about local and national democracy, its institutions, public services, and administrations, that does not simply fall into coexistence, cohabitation, or task-sharing; nor into pseudo counter-powers (scattered, distant, informal, passive...)?

These are the positions into which commons necessarily fall when they claim an a-institutional thinking—always fundamentally in the shadow of existing institutions.

In the end, starting from third places or using them as a reference point, as the authors do, to pose such subjects may seem insufficient, if not minimalist (unless promoting a form of infinite micro-councilism, proposing to resolve questions of power, inequality, pluralism, sovereignty, capacity for action, etc., by making them "disappear"—never entirely, fortunately—in the tiny).

Democratization of democracy, containment of capitalism—commons have much to say. However, it is still necessary to truly consider the nature, size, and power of the adversaries to be fought, and perhaps question critical strategies when they rely excessively on the margins (and their constitution into networks). In some ways, for commons, the testimonies of Antoine Burret and Yoann Duriaux invite us to this re-evaluation, which sometimes takes the form of a self-examination for the left.

In short, there is still much to debate..."

Retrieved from "https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Third_Places_and_the_Commons&oldid=142819"