The state of the commons: commoners, populists, and communards

Abstract

ABSTRACT “Commons” has been a concept crucial to movements opposing twenty-first century capitalism, and nowhere more so than in the field of communication, where it has underpinned critique of the commodification of digital networks. Yet the ideas about commons articulated at the turn of the millennium by anti-capitalist movements today show signs of exhaustion and disintegration. One reason is their failure to adequately reckon with the power of the modern state and its role as an organizational hub of contemporary capitalism. Starting with a recent exchange on this topic between peer-to-peer computing theorists Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos and political economist Graham Murdock, this paper looks back at the alter-globalist movement in which contemporary “commonism” incubated and at why such analysis often circumvented the issue of the state. The shortfall in that position is demonstrated by an examination of how deeply state power was involved in the collapse of alter-globalism, and in the rise of the platform capitalism that appropriated many of its experiments in digital commoning. The role the digital pseudo-commons created by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other platform capitalists played in both the immediate successes and longer-term failure of occupy movements, and in the subsequent rise of neofascism and right wing populism, is reviewed. The paper then discusses how, in the aftermath of these setbacks, contending models of left populism and communizing riots mutate or repudiate earlier notions of commons. It concludes by reviewing the possibilities, positive and negative, for the relation of commonists, populists, and communards.