Conflicts in common(s)? Radical democracy and the governance of the commons

Abstract

Prominent radical democrats have in recent times shown a vivid interest in the commons. Ever since the publication of Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom, the commons have been associated with a self-governing and self-sustaining scheme of production and burdened with the responsibility of carving out an autonomous social space independent from both the markets and the state. Since the commons prove on a small empirical scale that self-governance, far from being a utopian ideal, is and long has been a lived reality, a few authors have attempted to turn them into the conceptual matrix of their own account of radical democracy. Negri and Hardt, on one hand, Laval and Dardot, on the other, have jointly coined the term ‘the common’ (in the singular) to suggest that the self-governance quintessential to the commons could be turned into a general democratic principle. Though this is an attractive theoretical prospect, I will contend that it fails to account for an important contradiction between the two theoretical frameworks it connects. Whereas the governance of the commons depends on harmonious cooperation between all stakeholders which in turn relies on a strong sense of belonging to a shared community, radical democracy is highly suspicious of any attempt to build a totalizing community and constantly emphasizes the decisive role of internal agonistic conflicts in maintaining a vibrant pluralism. I will further contend that the short-sightedness of radical democrats on this issue may be partially explained by the strong emphasis in the commons literature on a related but distinct conflict, that which opposes the commoners to the movement of enclosures. I will argue, however, that this conflict is not of an agonistic nature and does little to preserve the dynamism and the constant self-criticism proper to the radical democrat regime.

An Operational Framework for an Online Community Based on the Commons, Dissensus and Shared Knowledge

“…For Dardot and Laval, it is this farreaching self-government practice of commoning that holds the promise to resuscitate democracy. When discussing the commons, Dardot and Laval and many others assume that self-governance happens in a harmonious and cooperative atmosphere (Deleixhe 2018). However, our experiences in this research acknowledge warnings raised by Deleixhe (2018) and others (Bodirsky 2018;Susser 2017aSusser , 2017b) that power inequalities and forms of oppression are present within the commons, but that they are too often ignored or hastily resolved, thus leading to a false feeling of harmony and democracy.…”

“…Building on the works of DeAngelis and Stravides (2010), Bodirsky (2018), Deleixhe (2018), Euler (2018), Susser (2017aSusser ( , 2017b we do not provide one unifying definition of 'the commons.' Instead, we discuss a framework that helps to understand the different elements that constitute this key concept.…”

“…The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action Ostrom (1990) stresses that the governance of the commons is crucial. She implicitly acknowledges that the notion of the commons goes beyond the material and is about organization and governance of access to materials or assets (Deleixhe 2018;Euler 2018).…”

Standing rock and the Indigenous commons

“…2 The Standing Rock Sioux mobilization also begs for a reexamination of the communications commons, including my own previous work (Kidd, 1998(Kidd, , 2015. Certainly, the Standing Rock encampments resembled other contemporary political projects of radical transformation informed by the critical commons (Turner & Brownhill, 2004;Linebaugh, 2008Linebaugh, , 2010Caffentzis & Federici, 2014;de Angelis, 2014;Deleixhe, 2018;Federici, 2019;García López, Velicu, & D'Alisa, 2017;Hollender, 2016;Singh, 2017;Velicu & García-López, 2018). Their practices were similarly based on an ethos of caring, and collective social transformation (Estes, 2019), echoing the cardinal idea of commoning first articulated by Peter Linebaugh (2010) and more recently taken up by a number of other scholars (Federici, 2019;Kanngeiser & Beuret, 2017).…”

A (non-)violent revolution? Strategies of civility for the politics of the common

“…There is, as Martin Deleixhe has argued, also an internal aspect to this assertion: that is, underlining the cooperative aspect of the politics of the common also distracts from the internal conflicts that either already exist or may arise. As a result, different forms of domination in commons (for example, women bearing the brunt of the labour in commons) disappear from view (Deleixhe, 2018). 11.…”