hydrarchist writes:

In the autumn there was considerable discussion of two articles on the subject of sharing and its broader social consequences. This essay brings us back to similar themes in the context of a proposition for the construction of communities in relation to commons as an alternative to trite forms of political activity and representation. The essay is in two sections. All footnotes can be found at the end of the second installment.

"Commons, Communities and Movements:

Inside, Outside and Against Capital"

Olivier De Marcellus

Three proverbs:

One for all of us: "Leave your village, but never let it leave you!" (Afghanistan)

One for Mr. Bush and friends: "He who has no enclosures around his field, has no enemies." (Burundi)

And one for my generation: "Experience is the comb that Nature offers us as we grow bald." (Belgium)

I would like to make seven points, some of which I will develop in the other sections:

1) Commons and communities are central to the "anti-globalisation" movement, in particular to its anti-capitalist wing, although the term "commons" is not very current (1).

This is evident in the South, where the struggles of indigenous and peasant communities to preserve common lands and other commons still "outside" direct command of capital, are the cornerstone of the movement. In the North too, some of our leading movements, inherited from the post 1968 struggles (ie. feminist, ecological and urban struggles, squats and the "alternative" movement in general), are also "outside" in that they are not workplace struggles directly subjected to capitalist forms of command. They have organised various sorts of commons, material, social or political.

2) But of course, capital is everywhere and being "outside" or "inside" capital is always a matter of degree. Forms of capitalist command and domination always affect and infiltrate our communities to some degree, be they traditional indigenous communities, communities of struggle or "alternatives". Maintaining, or re-defining, real commons and real community anywhere is thus a constant struggle, including against our own "colonised" personalities and conceptions of social relations.

3) On the other hand, (as the ethnological studies of Godbout(2) and the MAUSS school have shown) despite two centuries of capitalist rule and the infiltration of commodification into all spheres of social life, essential areas of the "social factory" only continue to function thanks to another logic, the logic of community, free gifts and solidarity. (At first sight, the exchange of gifts and "commons" may seem different, but as we shall see later, in the extreme case of gift exchange, "mutual positive debt", the partners stop keeping accounts and thus de facto create a commons(3).) However, this reality is largely unrecognised because, like the unpaid work of women for example, it is "invisibilised" by the ideological domination of capitalist categories.

Godbout makes us realise that we wouldn't need to create a revolutionarily "New Man" in order to function outside of the profit motive and commodity exchange. We all function outside them every day, and even go to great effort to create such spheres of activity when we are without them. In fact, the most essential social relations reside in them -- outside both market and State.

4) Communities also play a vital role in the productive activity of private enterprises and public services, where communities of work and struggle constantly recreate commons despite -- in the teeth of -- hierarchical chains of command and the forms of work organisation that they impose. In France, the field studies of Christophe Dejours and others in the "psychodynamics of work" demonstrate that these forms of organisation from below are actually vital even to capital, since it is in fact impossible to organise the essence of real work in a hierarchical manner, from above. Real work is always social and always implies more than just doing what you are told. In fact, only doing what you are told to do is the definition of a classic form of sabotage on the job : the slowdown.

Dejours details empirically what Marx meant about capital depending upon living labour to reproduce itself. It doesn't just depend on our obedient muscles, but on cooperation and social creativity resolving the problems of production and organisation day in and day out. People imagine that workers couldn't do without the bosses to organise them, whereas its the contrary which is the case! In fact, Dejours shows that the essential aspects of work must remain hidden from the boss!

There are evident parallels with Holloway : "Exploitation is not just the exploitation of labour but the simultaneous transformation of doing into labour, the simultaneous de-subjectification of the subject, the dehumanisation of humanity." The capitalist form (labour) is the mode of existence of doing/creativity/subjectivity/humanity, but that mode of existence is contradictory. To say that doing exists as labour means that is exists also as anti-labour. To say that humanity exists as subordination means that it also exists as insubordination "Exploitation is the suppression (-and-reproduction) of insubordinate creativity."(4)

So if points 1) and 2) tell us something of who we are, where we come from and what we are defending against capitalist attack, 3) and 4) propose new visions of our real, unconscious, collective strength, of how to go on the offensive against the strongholds of capital. We may often be much more organised than we think! Maybe not in a party or a union, but in the informal, horizontal, tentacular networks of collective complicity and solidarity that can become truly subversive if the quality of human relations and community are taken seriously.

5) These perspectives, that start from the communities that already and necessarily exist within capitalist society, seem particularly timely, because the new wave of capital?s expansion has thrown them into crisis.

The increased pressure on society in general is evident. Communities are torn apart by unemployment, forced mobility, urban restructuring, austerity, delinquency and its repression, the intensified commodification of culture and freetime, etc., etc. The simplest and most basic things -- like good parties in our neighborhoods -- have become rare goods.

On the job, the new forms of work organisation imposed by the pressure of globalised competition has wreaked havoc communities of production world over, substituting competition, harassment, suspicion and individualistic misery for cooperation, trust and solidarity. This has precipitated a veritable epidemic of work related pathologies (officially plus 75% in Switzerland in the last ten years, for example, despite the fact that many kinds aren?t recognised) that is just the tip of a huge iceberg of "normal" misery and suffering at work.

Communities, humans with their stubborn need to have halfway decent relations with one another, have more than ever their backs to the wall.

6) But both Dejours and Godbout have much more to offer than consciousness of our hidden strengths. They also offer sobering warnings. Gift exchange can develop into the finest and freest of human relations. It can also lead to domination. Marx was also right when he saw the market as freeing men (and even more women!) from often tyrannical community obligations. Similarly, the study of workplaces reveals that communities of workers in dangerous or frightening conditions develop anti-social practices and norms, in particular "virile collective defense mecanisms", which serve to deny suffering and danger, for example on construction sites and other jobs with security hasards.

Under the conditions of competition, precarisation and fear instituted by neoliberal globalisation, many workplaces have become what might better be called "anti-communities", caracterised by individualism, silence, betrayal and harassment of colleagues. In these situations, the virile collective defense mecanism can take an openly cynical and cruel form, for instance that of the "job-killers" and other "collaborators" (5) of middle-level management. Below them are all those who silently accept the psychological destruction of colleagues because they accept that in "economic war" there must necessarily be "winners" and "losers". Here, Dejours' analysis rejoins feminist critiques of the violence of patriarchy. Yes, "economic" war is very like real war, and normally decent men (and even women) can be made to condone -- and commit -- incredible violences, if such violence on others has been instituted as a form of virile "courage" by the group. (Dejours draws an analogy with the mass rapes organised in Bosnia or the huge majority of German soldiers who accepted to slaughter the jews of Eastern Europe "because no one likes to appear a coward".(6)

Dejours also points out that over the last twenty-five years this "defensive ideology of economic realism" has seriously blunted sensitivity to human suffering in society at large, by presenting it not as injustice but as a kind of natural fatality. In the 1970s, even right-wing governments considered an unemployment rate of 6% to be politically intolerable. Today, masses of unemployed, homeless and working poor have become part of the scenery through a gradual "banalisation of social injustice" (the subtitle of Dejours' most well-known book) (7). His analysis of how normally decent people can be transformed into accomplices of social injustice and violence owes much to Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarian mecanisms and the Eichmann case in particular. The parallel with the more subtle and gradual brutalization of our societies by neoliberal policies is as compelling as disquieting.

As Morin (8) and Holloway have shown, its time we all grew up. There is no God or historical necessity or scientific socialism or working-class virtue that can guarantee us a happy end. And communities aren't automatically wise or democratic either! They are just the basic bricks of society and close enough to control, to be responsible for and critical of. The zapatistas, for example, also criticise their communities: they want equal rights for women -- and washing machines. Communities aren't the new revolutionary panacea, but they are a basic, organic level of social organisation which activism has tended to neglect.

Perhaps most importantly for activists, both perspectives should lead us not only to a renewed criticism of capitalist organisation, but first of all to a deep questionning of the dramatically similar way WE organise our own communities of struggle. Of the amazingly little "common" space we manage to create for collective discussion of how we do our "work" of political subversion, simply because our own communities remain hierarchical and repressive for most (people are afraid to "say something silly"). Of the way we constantly neglected personal fulfillment, subjectivity, suffering and the "celebration of life" for the sake of activist productivity. Of the astonishing ease with which we avoid serious engagement in our diverse professional work situations, in favor of abstract, militant activity "outside" practically everything.

6) Commons and community offer a new way to conceive of "alternatives" to capital and State. To defend public services, for example, is not to defend the State as such. Public services are a form of commons (albeit a bureaucratised one). And indeed, hospitals or schools, for example, can only be defended and improved by the struggles of communities of nurses or teachers, preferably linked with the communities they serve. If these communities whither, services become more and more bureaucratic and unsatisfactory, because commons cannot subsist without the communities that organise and defend them. Especially today, when the upper reaches of the bureaucracy are usually actively sabotaging services in the interests of privatisers. Today public services must clearly be defended against the State !

More generally, communities are usually already aware of the alternatives to capitalist development that we are supposedly lacking. Not the universalist technocratic, utopian or revolutionary master plans which are not only unnecessary, but which have also proved to be tyrannical and disastrous from Stalin to IMF and WB. Just the first, most urgent, evident steps in the right direction (preguntando caminamos, asking we walk, as the Zapatistas say) : water or a road or a seedbank for a village; shorter hours or less hierarchy for a community of producers; etc., etc. There's never been a lack of ideas concerning alternatives. Communities worldover generally have clear ideas about what they need or want. Its just that for several centuries there have always been policemen or soldiers or gunboats or financial warfare to stop people from acting on their ideas!

7) Objections.

Of course one can ask, what's new about the ideas of commons and communities with respect to the good old discourse of autonomy, self-organisation, soviets, etc.? Probably not much with respect to the best experiences, and obviously community implies struggle for autonomy, self-organisation, etc., but a community is a more organic, intuitive, lived-in concept. "Autonomy," in my experience, often refered to people (mostly men) organising in assemblies, voting on decisions after often over-polarised debates -- relatively abstract kinds of organisation that still resemble traditional organisations in many ways. In contrast, communities are typically people who work or live or know each other already. Their political aspect incorporates and takes seriously shared tastes, knowledge of their environment, sensitivity to each other (women will surely one day make us understand the importance of this), implicit ways of doing things, practices -- like how one talks back to the boss, stealing in supermarkets or sharing without counting.

There is also a problem to communities as alternatives. Communities are typically defined as small and local, so how for instance could the railways be in the hands of a community? Good question. One could decide that communities can be bigger, translocal, on Internet, etc., but to avoid pulling the concept completely out of shape, it might be better to speak of federations or networks of communities discussing, negotiating and coordinating.

Well, those were my seven basic points ! Now I would like just to develop some of them for those who aren't convinced or who are interested enough to want some details. At the risk of appearing trivial, I will try to talk as much as possible from my own personal experience of various sorts of communities, since rooting one's political activity in community means precisely starting more from one?s personal social experience rather than from general political discourses. Or at least having much more interplay between the two.

Commons and communities as central to the movement.

Who have been the initiators and strongest forces in the counterattack against globalising capital? In the South, indigenous and peasant communities. In the North, the radicalised youth of the alternative movement whose central figure is often the squatter, reclaiming free, common space in cities. Or more generally, people who have tried to organise new communities and physical, social or political spaces (commons) outside commodity and wage relations.

The media only noticed us in Seattle, but the birth of this movement was undoubtedly the meeting between the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas and the alternative youth from across Europe who all met each other at the first two Intergalactic Encuentros (Chiapas '96 and Spain '97) and who created a new activist international, the first on Internet. Then, the idea of Peoples' Global Action (PGA), an international network of organisations proposing to scrap WTO, global governance and "free" trade, was launched at the second Encuentro. Here, the Gandhian farmers' movements of India brought a new, essential element to the movement. Direct action and civil disobedience to physically block summits, destroy GMOs, etc., said to the world: this is a vital matter and we are determined. PGA's immediate objective was to delegitimise global governance summits by simultaneous, decentralised action worldwide and, whenever possible, by physically blocking the summits themselves. In May 1998, the first International Day of Action (against the 2nd summit of the WTO in Geneva) already involved some 65 demos all around the world. In many cities they were organised by squatters and people of Zapatista support groups, and the groups who would later organise the events of June 18th (1999) in London, Seattle, Melbourne, Davos, Quebec, Prague, etc. were already "reclaiming their streets" in May ?98.

In the South, the communal nature of the movement is evident. It was the revoking of Article 26, garanteeing the Mexican commons (ejidios) that provoked the Zapatista rebellion. In the PGA network, other indigenous movements for whom the commons are the cornerstone of organisation, culture and identity have been leading figures : the Kuna of Panama, Maori of "New Zealand," the Quechua and Aymara communities organised by the cocaleros, the CONAIE and the CONFEUNASSC of Ecuador, the network of afro-american communities, etc. In India, apart from the obviously communal adhivasi, peasant movements such as the KRRS, although holding lands in extended families, have extremely strong community links and the Gandhian ideal of the "village republic."

As early as 1990 our friends of Midnight Notes had accurately characterised this whole period as one of struggle against the "New Enclosures" (9), by which hundreds of millions of peasants were to be driven off their lands on all the continents by WB and IMF policies. The Plan Puebla Panama is perhaps the most explicit of these "development" Plans, since it specifically forsees driving all but 3% of the people of Central America off the land (compared to 75% on it now!). (10) Ending communal land and resource ownership and evicting forest dwellers is also a central goal of the WB in Africa, Asia, New Guinea, and many other places. The second colonisation is even more thorough than the first.

Many other struggles of the anti-globalisation movement are against other types of "New Enclosures": of water, forests, seeds, traditional knowledge, oil or DNA. Although some believe that these should be defended by evoking
"Global commons," this is a slightly suspect claim, for it avoids recognising that these commons actually belong to myriads of particular communities: Uwa or Afro-Americans of Colombia, Mayas of Guatemala, Totzil of Chiapas, "tribal" adhivasi of India, etc., etc.

And then of course there are all the struggles against privatisation of the "public service" forms of commons all over the world: communication, transport, health, education, etc.

In the North, commons as land or physical space is less present, apart from squatted social centers or lodgings and rural commune movements. However, since the sixties the strongest and most innovative movements (with the notable exception of Italy) have organised "outside" the capitalist workplace and wage relation, creating social, cultural or political commons.

These more "abstract" commons have actually often involved struggles for physical spaces which symbolise (perhaps sometimes fetishise) the real commons and community that we seek to build. I remember the first struggle in Geneva for a "Centre Autonome" (1970). We fought the police for a whole season, seizing buildings in which to develop our "alternative culture." When we finally got one, we mostly had totally boring political arguments. There was actually almost no counter-culture to put in it, at the time! Still today, the first thing squatters do when they occupy a building is to turn the basement into a common room and concert hall -- but now they have more things to do there! And when Reclaim the Streets started reclaiming common social spaces in British cities it was fun -- and people world-over wanted in.

Other significant details have changed over the years. In the first Genevan communes, people wasted hours calculating how much each of us had advanced for food, etc. That was gradually just forgotten. Today, the squats have a custom by which, one day a week, different squats take turns organising a common dinner for all the others. Normally there is a pot somewhere for financial contributions, but the last time I went to one (which was actually on a public square, and thus open to anyone), they had decided that they didn't want to mar the thing by having a money pot... As for concerts, the ones that make the most money are those that leave the entry fee up to the client. And in one of the old squats there is a bio food shop that has operated without paid staff for a dozen years.

Gratuity isn't the only value that seems to have seaped back up into this milieu. There is also an instinctive disregard for "cost accounting" logic. For example, in the first squats, we would generally wait to be sure of being able to stay before working a lot on the place. Some time in the late '80s I remember being astounded to see a brand new squat in my quarter where they were lavishing hours of work to recreate a "zinc" (the traditional, metal-covered Genevan bar). Their logic was different. They wanted a place like that. And even if they were evicted before it was finished, they would have worked toward their real goal (not towards a "realistic" one) and in the way they wanted. Finally, the place carried such conviction that it is still there. Squatters regularly surprise "reasonable" people with enterprises that make little or no "economic" sense, because the monetary aspect is secondary to them. It's the activity that is important. Of course, in a sense they are "exploiting" or even "over-exploiting" themselves, if you calculate their hourly wage. But if, subjectively, this work is actually free activity, or even play, then getting paid -- in fact being allowed to spend one's life like that at all -- is pretty amazing! (Quite logically, the people who operate the "zinc" in question closed the bar a couple of times when it started to become too fashionable. Serving too many yuppies was too much like alienated work.) There may be more than wisdom there. It might be a new, deeply anti-capitalist society trying to resurface.

It was also in the same quarter that I first noticed the increasing fascination of young squatters for the indigenous (mostly North American peoples at the time). They visited with the Hopi, Apache or Dakota, and quoted shamans or Chief Seattle. They also housed delegations of indigenous at the UN who couldn't afford Genevan hotels. Although I shared their interest, I must confess that at the time (long before the Zapatistas) it didn't seem to me "politically important." The squatters didn't bother with that question, since their criterion for involvement was "le feeling."

Of course, such an instinctive criterion can also be sloppy and self-serving, but it does knock the bottom out of a lot of the traditional, moralistic, boring and finally quite unrevolutionary forms of activism. If it, or its "leaders," are boring, these people just desert. They have become "unorganisable" in stable, traditional organisations. But they constitute an organic network of individuals, communities that are capable of amazing feats when they "feel" that a proposition is sound (like organising a large part of the first PGA conference -- board and lodging for 300 delegates -- for practically nothing, or occupying WTO headquarters before Seattle, or driving the World Economic Forum out of Davos.)

The "alternative" community has been putting down roots (and being generally scoffed at by its more "political" cousins) since '68. Maybe its time to take it seriously -- politically.

The feminist movement has also been trying to bring us new insights and practices for many years, although we have generally managed to ignore them. One of their uncomfortable insights was of course the fact that we were not only living under capitalism but also in communities -- grossly patriarchal ones! Communities in which one of the "commons" shared by men is their control over women, the fact that only men are free to wander anywhere at night, etc. They also brought to light the huge mass of unpaid labour done by women which sustains communities. However, they didn't only denounce the negative side of communities politically, they organised them differently: self-help, women's clinics, sharing childcare or housework so that everyone could participate in politics or exercise a profession. And more traditionally "political" struggles connected seamlessly to this community organising: like struggling for reproductive rights or "commons" of child care. Since leftist organisations were incapable of hearing their demands or changing their rather brutal style, they organised separately, in new, more horizontal ways, for instance using small groups that could better listen to all. And they were probably the first to organise worldwide in horizontal networks.

In today's movement, feminist organisations are less noticeable than feminist women (although some of the younger ones might not think of themselves as such) who struggle again to make mixed organisations listen. The southern part of PGA, for instance, regularly organises mixed gender seminars. The peasant, indigenous and other organisations generally recognise the need for change and the contribution that the gender perspective can offer. It remains to be seen too what extent the men, North and South, can really learn to listen. What seems sure is that since women are generally responsible for maintaining social relations in communities, we won't get far -- or learn much about how to organise communities better -- if we don't.

As for the ecological movement, of course, huge parts of it are specifically about defending commons: forests, land, natural ressources, water, air, fish, world temperature, biodiversity, DNA, etc., which capital would like to seize, destroy, pollute and squander without thought for the perenity of human communities locally or globally. More fundamental is the rediscovery (the indigenous never forgot this) that our natural "communities" include the other forms of life around us and that natural commons must necessarily also be for them -- or be destroyed.

The ecological movement has typically organised local communities against industries seeking to seize or destroy commons. Some threats are much larger than communities, like those of the nuclear industry, global warming or the pollution of life forms by GMOs. They certainly necessitate global struggle and organisation. However, so far the most effective resistance to them has been by networks of local struggles, fighting local nuclear threats, burning GMOs, etc. Whereas the attempts to administer "global commons" globally have generally been sinister farces (see for example the way the International Atomic Energy Association and WHO whitewash Chernobyl, "market solutions" to global warming or WWF's rather infamous role as accomplice to the World Bank in seizing indigenous peoples' commons and habitat with so-called "debt for nature swaps"). And things aren't getting better with Bush and Neskofi Annan.

The traditional marxist analysis saw the triumph of capital and the destruction of all older social forms, including commons, as a preparation for communism. In that linear logic, hardline marxist-leninists consider zapatistas as woolly headed romantics. The FARC of Colombia, and other "revolutionary organisations," continue to see themselves as the sole sources of (national, i.e., Statist) revolutionary projects. Consequently, they oppose (including by violence) autonomous indigenous, afro-american or other peasant communities? political perspectives and practices. As George Caffentzis points out, most revolutions and movements of national liberation of the 20th century were made by alliances of peasants and workers, the "sickle and the hammer," guided by revolutionary parties. However, invariably the interests of the "sickle" were finally sacrificed to those of the hammer (heavy industry, "national" priorities, etc.) that for the most part mimicked capitalist development (11).

In the North too, communist trade unionists considered anti-nuclear activists reactionary and even leftists first considered feminism or the black liberation movement as "dividing the working class." Starting from networks of existing communities, on whatever basis they constitute themselves (one person of course usually belonging to several different kinds), is a good insurance against being made to march in step towards new disasters with the next revolutionary subject or party.

An ethnological perspective on our society : Godbout and modern gift exchange (12)