Commons and Class Struggle

• Special issue of borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012: Commons, Class Struggle and the World. Editors: Manuel Yang & Jeffrey D. Howison.

URL = http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol11no2.html

Description

From the introduction:

“The ‘commons’ has become one of the keywords in the global class struggle against neoliberal capitalism. The term shares etymological kinship with word such as ‘community’, ‘communism’, and ‘communal’—all of which have been variously expropriated by enclosing powers from above and re-appropriated by movements from below. It invokes the language and customs of pre-capitalist social formations, implicitly negating the stadial concept of history. However, just as the ‘commons’ historically did not mean a singular, static practice but was redefined constantly by what commoners did in their subsistence economy, the future of ‘commons’ will be determined by the content and vector of our struggles, as we define who and what kind of class we will constitute, as the forces arrayed against us will attempt to do the same for their own ends. This collection aims to expand and diversify the discussion around the ongoing historical process of the ‘commons’, provoking new ways of looking at this age-old non-capitalist practice of sharing, subsistence, survival.” (http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/yanghowison_commons.htm)

Contents

Access to all articles via http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol11no2.html

• Introduction by Manuel Yang & Jeffrey D. Howison, Commons, Class Struggle and the World, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/yanghowison_commons.pdf

• Peter Linebaugh, The Horizon of the Commons

• Sabu Kohso, Radiation and Revolution

• Massimo de Angelis, Crises, Movements and Commons

• George Caffentzis, A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the crisis of neoliberalism and question of the commons

• Bariş Ünlü , İsmail Beşikçi as a Discomforting Intellectual

• Irmak Ertuna-Howison & Jeffrey D. Howison , The Transformation of Istanbul’s Urban Commons

• Jason Hribal, Animals are Part of the Working Class Reviewed

• Manuel Yang, Specter of the Commons: Karl Marx,, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Nineteenth-Century European Stadialism