“Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor.”[1]
“Commons are not just a “third way” beyond state and market failures; they are a vehicle for claiming ownership in the conditions needed for life and its reproduction.”[2]

For generations, rural and urban communities in Southeast and South Asia have been creating and using commons, although they do not use this term. Commons scholarship is of course very important, but at the same time, we need to be mindful that as we seek to understand real, lived experiences of people in diverse contexts, we do not appropriate their realities to fit our analytical frameworks.

The conditions needed for life and its reproduction that De Angelis talks of, have become extremely precarious for the majority of the world’s peoples with the advance of global capitalism. The enclosures that Polanyi referred to, are the theft of these conditions, easing the concentration of all forms of wealth in the hands of a small minority. Enclosures have accelerated and intensified through myriad ways; today, even the concept of the commons is being enclosed to serve market purposes.

The increasing dominance of market forces in all aspects of our lives systematically denies people the necessary conditions, capacities, opportunities and agency by which we can live well today, and in the future.

The commons offer us strategies to claim and sustain collective ownership of these conditions. Commons have immense potential to resist global capitalism and market domination, and co-create just, equitable, sustainable, non-extractivist social and economic systems.

What are commons?

In the broadest sense, I see the commons as different kinds of wealth, spaces, resources, values, social relations, systems, processes and activities that “belong to” groups or collectives , which must be actively claimed, created, restored and protected for collective good and purpose for present and future generations.

“Belonging” implies ownership, but ownership in this context is not proprietary. Rather, these are relationships that entail shared responsibility and shared beneficiary relationships; some call them stewardship, some call them care-taking, and even management.

Commons are not only the resources/wealth/spaces/terrains themselves. Equally important are the relationships between those involved in the commons. These relationships are expressed as rules, social conventions, norms, customs and customary or vernacular laws, and behavioral patterns.

Commons evolve in practice: Peter Linebaugh, the eminent historian and commons scholar talks about “commoning,” i.e., dynamic processes and actions that allow commons to be created, adapted and strengthened to last over generations and serve varying needs. These could be indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands, women’s health collectives, urban community gardens, workers’ cooperatives, online knowledge platforms, watershed protection areas, etc.

The commons demand conscious, deliberate participation and involve rights as well as responsibilities/obligations. People agree to be part of a commons, to enter into the system of rules (however informal or customary) of a commons. Commons governance entail a delicate balance of rules of access and use, boundaries, limits, inclusions and exclusions, that are developed by commons users, and recognized/respected by broader society.

It makes sense to see the commons as a paradigm that includes: tangible and intangible resources/wealth; people, communities acting collectively; and norms, rules and practices that manifest crucial values of equality, equity, dignity, respect and sustainability.

Agency in commons thinking is collective and autonomous from state and market institutions. At the same time, commons do not exist in isolation. Rather, they are nested within existing social, economic, environmental and political systems, or in the intersection of these systems. Commoners have to negotiate with these systems to create and protect commons. This is important to note when we talk about social protection as commons.

The best-known examples of commons are in nature: air, water, land, forests, biodiversity, eco-systems, climate, territories/domains. But commons are also social (health, education, safety), intellectual and cultural (knowledge, technology, the internet, literature, music) and institutional (self-help groups, mutual support associations). With the resurgence of extreme authoritarianism, intolerance, and criminalization of dissent, we need to bring commons thinking into the political realm as well: human rights, justice, democracy and security.

Despite categories, each commons contains natural, social, economic and political dimensions, whether a traditional irrigation system, urban vegetable garden, food collective, community forest, seed saving-sharing system, online knowledge portal, workers’ cooperative or a local savings group.

Public spaces that are accessible to all, the assurance of physical security, and relevant information/knowledge, are all essential for people to be able to gather, build voice, engage in social and political dialogues, participate in policy processes, articulate and defend rights, and build popular democracy. Struggles of rural communities in India, Cambodia or Laos, to protect forests, lands, seeds and water, are connected with the struggles of migrant workers in factories, domestic services or the construction industry.

The notion of the commons does not negate individual agency and responsibility; protecting and managing collective resources requires a collectivity of individual actors working together towards shared goals.

Communities in many rural areas in Asia share labour, produce and income to maintain food reserves. Many villages have community forests, common water sources, and common lands for fishing, grazing, foraging/gathering and farming. In urban gardens, people farm individual plots but manage the garden collectively.

Threats to the Commons

Not surprisingly, the commons are spaces where the fiercest and most enduring resistances to capitalism, neoliberalism, corporate control and economic growth are being waged.
Threats to the commons are threats to all of us, our communities, societies, rights and lives. These include:

• Privatisation and private capture of natural, social, economic and knowledge wealth and resources through private property regimes (enclosures).
• Commodification of land, water, seeds, labour, knowledge, etc.; with carbon markets, offset schemes and the Green Economy, the environment, climate and life itself have been commodified.
• Extractivism: exploitation of natural and social wealth, and expropriation into global value chains to create wealth elsewhere.
• Financialisation: financial markets are penetrating deeper and deeper into the “real economy” of actual production of goods, services, infrastructure;
  New financial assets and markets are being created to trade these constructed commodities.
  Again, if we look at climate change: new commodities and markets are being created from scratch to satisfy the demands by financial markets for new, high-return investments, for e.g. carbon credits, carbon trading rights, and other derivative contracts.
• Free trade and investment agreements.
• Globalisation of production and global value chains: they destroy the abilities of workers to form unions, political communities, undermine their abilities to organize, negotiate, build economies, etc.; no social wages and social protections are possible in such a production system.
• Bio-piracy and theft of knowledge: appropriation of the wealth and knowledge of peoples and societies into proprietary goods to generate monetary profits through intellectual property rights (IPR) rules; these capture seeds, biodiversity, traditional knowledge, medicines, etc.
• Militarisation and “securitization” of territories.
• Repression, criminalization of dissent, authoritarianism, dictatorship

Many governments are complicit and often proactive in enabling these threats through laws, policies and international agreements. In fact, the state can enable or disable commoning through the exercise of its authority. This is especially pertinent to the articulation of public interest.

Public goods and services, i.e., those under the authority of the state, are generally not considered commons. But these goods and services–water systems, food programmes, public procurement, health systems, infrastructure, educational establishments, etc.–are extremely important to ensure equitable access to the conditions necessary for “life and its reproduction” that De Angelis referred to.

Taking the example of water, appropriate laws are needed to protect water in its free state, and prevent its commodification and privatization. At the same time, to ensure that all people in a society have equitable access to water, water needs to be channeled as a public good/service with equity oriented regulation that states must enforce.

The governance of water—in its free state and as a public good—does not have to fall into a bipolar trap of private or state ownership/management. Water can and should be governed as a commons through community councils, rural and urban water boards, water user committees, etc., with the necessary rules and regulations for inclusion, equity, justice, exclusion and accountability that are recognized and respected by state.

Social protection and social commons are inter-dependent on public goods, services, infrastructure, knowledge and institutions, that have been built with public resources (money, labour, capacities, knowledge, natural resources), many of which have been nurtured through commoning. These are the “assets” that corporations most want.

Enclosures of knowledge and knowledge production through privatization of educational and research centres, patents, copy rights and corporate supported IPR laws, have serious implications for social protection and the public interest. Corporations and private institutions that hold patents and copyrights can dictate what knowledge would be produced and released, and when, as well as suppress research and knowledge critical to public and environmental health and safety.

Conclusion

The commons are not free of contradictions. Commons are non-commodified systems of production, but what is produced in some commons are sold as commodities, for example, grains, livestock and other foods. Commons are about collectivity and non-proprietary “ownership,” but to be sustained, they cannot be open to everyone without rules and exclusions. Commons foster equality and equity, but they are not free from class, caste, race and gender discrimination. Women are critical actors in all commons, but commons themselves have not necessarily been emancipatory spaces for gender identity and equality.

The climate crisis is, in a sense, the ultimate crisis of capitalism: there is no easy exit from this endgame; we have to change how we live, produce, consume; we can no longer try to convert ecological limits to barriers that can be overcome through techno fixes; we cannot use modern science to recreate nature—all that has been tried (at great cost) and has failed.

Commoning practices have been getting increasing visibility over the past decade because they offer creative survival options in difficult times, and allow people to effectively resist extractive development, economic growth and capitalist expansion, while rebuilding their own agency and capabilities. By expanding commons, we expand spaces that capital is unable to occupy.

Because of their creative power and resistance potential, they are also open to ideological capture and co-optation—which has become another terrain of struggle.

The relationships between the commons, state and market are complex, and must be carefully negotiated as we build social commons. Particularly important here are issues of ownership, governance, scale and agency. We cannot allow commons to be used as ways to subsidize the state and market. We must not forget how the care work of women has been exploited through austerity and privatization programmes. Social commons should not become de facto ‘safety nets’ for goods, services and infrastructure that must remain in the public realm and be governed democratically.

Building social commons must be supported by policies and laws at multiple levels to enable commoning, for example: collective, non-proprietary “property” rights; de-privatisation; equality and equity across gender, class, caste, race, culture; synergy with public goods regimes; dismantling the threats to the commons; networking different kinds of commons; etc. Experience in how to do this exists among women, workers, social movements, food producers, indigenous peoples, hackers, scholars and rights activists across the world. We need to learn from them, and build communities of learning across gender, class, race, culture and geography.

Shalmali Guttal is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South (Focus), based in Bangkok, Thailand. She has been researching and writing about economic development, trade-investment, food, land, ecological and social justice issues in Asia – especially the Mekong region and India – for over 25 years.

Focus is a regional policy research organization headquartered in the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute in Bangkok, Thailand.

[1] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 1944. (p. 35)

[1] Massimo De Angelis. Crises, Capital and Co-optation: does capital need a commons fix? http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/crises-capital-and-co-optation-does-capital-need-commons-fix

Nepal is the newest entrant into the federal systems of democratic governance. So, it is facing multidimensional risks and vulnerabilities in the overall development processes. The country is trying to enforce principles of fundamental civil, political, economic, social, cultural and development rights of the citizens in accordance with the newly promulgated constitution. In the meantime, it has also embarked on crafting policies, plans and programs to materialize for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with goal-wise synchronized efforts.

However, there remain many challenges in addressing environmental and climate risks and vulnerabilities, cross-border migration, crime, and trafficking in person not only within the national boundary but also in the South Asia region.

The Government of Nepal is party to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various other international human right instruments (including ICCPR, ICESCR, CEDAW, and CRC), SDG, SAARC Development Goals and many other declarations. Directive Principles of the current Constitution of Nepal 2015 as well as different national and sectoral policies and plans have expressed commitments to effective service delivery and expanded the social protection base. Traditionally, the government has been financing mainly public sector workers’ social security benefits, and some other schemes to cover the most vulnerable sections of society. Since the 1990s the government has introduced several measures of social protection targeting most vulnerable segments of the population by extending monthly allowances to the elderly, widows, handicapped, people facing severe health problems, etc.

Thus, social protection is recognized as an effective alternative approach to address the problems and vulnerability of the historically marginalized. There is realization that benefits of market driven neo-liberal economic growth models do not automatically trickle down to the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population. In fact, poverty has multiple facets that reinforce hunger, malnutrition, ill health, illiteracy, voicelessness and powerlessness. The systematic forms of exclusion and violence, unemployment and underemployment, and livelihood risks and vulnerabilities have remained at the centre of creating and perpetuating poverty and injustice. Social protection epitomizes the human security approach and tries to offer a broader, practical and effective ways to reduce chronic vulnerability, poverty and inequality. Income centric measurement of poverty does not capture the multiple deprivations and vulnerabilities facing the majority of people.

Several programs planned and implemented in Nepal in the sector of social protection, are far from adequate given the breadth of the inequality and dimensions of injustices. Some programs focus on immediate relief to conflict affected people, some on poverty reduction; others focus on public works through Food for Work programs, school meals, others on labor market reforms, social care as well as micro-finance and micro insurance initiatives. There has been substantial increase in social security allowance for senior citizens, single women, people with disabilities, endangered communities and many more, however, not enough to address the entire range of the society that are in need of meaningful social protection schemes. I believe that there is much scope to improve the various schemes and options of social protection interventions and experiences along with their funding and delivery mechanisms and its systematic framework that integrates with the existing plan and program based on the national context of Nepal.

It is evident however that there is significant potential for ‘social commons’ that encompass dimensions of social, environmental and economic resources in the region from the perspective of social and environmental justice and human rights vis a vis development rhetoric, poverty eradication, food security, health, education, democracy, trade, culture, gender and others. Finally, it is clear that countries can evolve common approaches for transformation of environmental, social and economic arenas while putting the people and communities in the centre of development.

Dinesh Devkota is Visiting Professor, Centre Department of Environmental Science (CDES), Tribhuvan University (TU), Nepal. Chairman, of Centre for Green Economy Development – Nepal (CGED- NEPAL) and also involved in many institutions in an advisory capacity. He is Former Hon. Vice Chairman and former Member (Jan 2009-Sept 2011) of the National Planning Commission (NPC), Government of Nepal.

We must build a shared understanding of what commons are. There are many interpretations, but I find these words of Ugo Mattei a useful starting point:

‘The commons are not concessions. They are resources that belong to the people as a matter of life necessity. Everybody has a right to an equal share of the commons and must be empowered by law to claim equal and direct access to it. Everybody has equal responsibility to the commons and shares a direct responsibility to transfer its wealth to future generations’.

What is distinctive about our vision of a new social commons?

• Forwards not backwards. We aim to reimagine and build on essential elements of the UK welfare system without being purely defensive. The process and content of building a new social commons are geared to the present and future, not the past.
• People in control. The idea of the social commons starts with the ambition of putting people in control, claiming what should be theirs by right, rather than simply receiving (or hoping to receive) public services and benefits.
• Promoting collective action. Our proposal gives priority to the collective ideal. This was embodied in the post-war settlement, but has weakened over time. We aim to strengthen our shared capacity for collective action to help and support each other.
• A common good, shared by all. The ‘social commons’ do not represent a safety net or a conditional privilege, but a common good in which everyone has a stake. The value rests on everyone sharing in the benefits, both directly when they need support, and indirectly because this helps to generate a flourishing society and prosperous economy.
• Shaped through democratic dialogue. People themselves will decide the purpose and content of the social commons: what it includes and why, and where resources should come from. They will do this through deliberative dialogue that includes local councillors and MPs, bringing together participatory and representative democracy.
• With the state, not instead of it. This is about transforming relations between people and the public realm. Public authorities, at national and local levels, have a crucial role to play in facilitating and supporting the social commons. We want to transform them, not side-step or replace them, so that they guarantee shared ownership and equal access, as well as setting standards and managing resources.
• Flexible and evolving. The social commons can embrace multiple forms of shared ownership and draw on a range of resources, from locally based voluntary action to national institutions such as the NHS. We envisage a dynamic process where people decide incrementally what they need, then issue declarations of intent, demonstrate what’s possible through practical experiment, identify what rights are required, and work out how best to develop and enforce them.
• Grounded in whole systems. This approach recognises that social, environmental and cultural resources are not separate but interdependent: they are – or should be – common goods, held in common, for the common good. They are subject to similar claims and expectations.

Why is it urgent now?

The case for claiming and building a social commons has never been more urgent. Far too many people feel dispossessed and betrayed by the established political order. That generates anger and desperation for change. Public institutions no longer inspire much confidence. The collective ideal – which for 60 years has been expressed in terms of public services, funded through taxation, ‘for each according to need’ – is so closely associated with the old order that it is in danger of being swept up in the general opprobrium. If people want to throw out the bathwater of established institutions, we must rescue the baby of shared risks, pooled resources, collective action and mutual aid. And we must make sure that ‘the baby’ can survive and thrive today and in future. This calls for a transformation of the ways in which social resources are defined, controlled, supported and secured.

Beyond this political imperative, there are four main reasons why it is urgent to build a new social commons. First, it is an expression of social solidarity and collective action. Secondly, it can support social justice and help to reduce inequalities. Thirdly, it can underpin the development of a secure and sustainable welfare system, which is capable of meeting the needs of future as well as present generations. Fourthly, it may serve to anchor progressive social policies against the shock of right-wing populism and the growing appetite for radical disruption.

Meeting needs

The central purpose of social protection or welfare systems is not to supply a productive workforce, but to ensure that people’s needs are met. This means everyone must have access to resources that are essential for survival and flourishing, for health, critical autonomy and participation in society. Care and meaningful relationships are just as important as land, water, air and energy.

Welfare states in the rich world are in crisis, people are dependent but distrustful. Austerity programmes have cut services and amenities drastically. Public policies are failing to prevent harm and adapt to change, which has led to rising demand for costly, curative services, widening inequalities and unmet needs. People feel increasingly powerless to influence decisions and actions that affect their daily lives. Finally, there are new campaigns for ‘basic income’ which threaten to replace collective services with cash hand-outs to individuals.

New politics

The commons are part of a new politics, which is based not on competition, consumerism and choice, but on caring for each other, pooling resources and sharing risks. Our new politics reasserts the collective ideal, seeks to shift control from markets and state towards people at local level, and values unpaid activities on which the formal economy depends. Our goals are best summed up as: social justice, environmental sustainability, more equal distribution of power.

In pursuit of these goals, people should have enforceable rights of access to resources that are essential to meet their basic needs. They should have power to determine how to meet their needs collectively and to design and deliver ways of meeting them. Paid and unpaid work should be understood and valued as mutually supportive. The role of the state must be to support this process, to ensure equal access, to guarantee standards and distribute resources. This calls for a new dynamic between top-down and bottom-up, between local and national politics.

How can this be achieved?

We can start to build commons by learning from existing practice, for example, from pioneering cities such as Barcelona, Ghent and Bologna, where municipal governments have made a commitment to support collaborative approaches to ownership and work in a variety of fields. Decisions about the nature and scope of the social commons are best shaped through a three-way dialogue: to bring together experimental wisdom, professional expertise and political negotiation. At the national level, we can envisage a declaration with accumulating force, whereby ‘soft’ law leads over time to enforceable measures. New models of shared ownership and control will be developed, with new transformative relationships between people, the commons and the public realm.

Unresolved questions

There are still many questions that have not been adequately addressed. For example, we shall have to determine – and reach broad agreement – on the following issues. What is included in the social commons and who decides on this? Who is eligible for access to the commons, citizens or residents? What is the best way to organize a three-way dialogue? How are legally enforceable rights to be made compatible with locally determined initiatives through which people are enabled to meet needs? How can we to transform public institutions so that they support the commons? And finally, which sectors, groups and organisations are likely to support the social commons? As the debate continues, more questions and challenges are bound to arise. But at least the debate has begun to find some resonance at a global level.

(This contribution is partially based on Coote, Anna, The New Social Commons. The People, the Commons and the Public Realm, New Economics Foundation, 2 May 2017)

*Anna Coote is Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (NEF). A leading analyst, writer and advocate in the field of social policy, social justice, sustainable development, working time, public health policy, and for democratic dialogue, gender and equality. She was Commissioner for Health with the UK Sustainable Development Commission (2000-9). Her recent publications include Building a New Social Commons, (2017) Local Early Action: how to make it happen (2015), People, Planet Power: Towards a New Social Settlement (2015) and Time on our Side: why we all need a shorter working week (2013).

Robert Morrea the president of Transform! Europe, makes the point that the dismantling of welfare policies that made the idea of Europe are being dismantled and this is leading to the decline of Europe as both a power and a social model for progress. This is a presentation from Our Common Social Future: Towards a Social Commons, Social Justice Cluster, Barcelona (June 2018).

What is happening to-day is that Europe is increasingly giving up its ambitions for all the people who live on the continent. What we are facing now is the transformation of our societies.

Globalisation has acted as if we all lived in the same country (same policies for all). We do indeed share with the Asian countries a lot of similar problems, because of globalisation. There are rich people that get richer and richer and there are poor people, everywhere.

In that sense we need to have a discussion on what the solution is. We have to ask ourselves if the European Union can be a solution. We have a long history with a unique political space. What is clear now is that the economic and political power also has a possibility to enlarge this space. Europe was in a sense a good example of capitalist expansion.

We built welfare states which served as a model for many countries outside Europe, and now what we are facing is the destruction of this social model. And at the same time companies are entering in spaces that we thought were our spaces, such as health care and other sectors. We now have to fight privatisations because we are losing our public services. They are made into profit sectors, with less concerns for people.

That is why in this global scenario we are also losing. The way we react in Europe is also showing that we as Western Europe, as such, are losing power. We are losing potential for transformation of the system.

My organisation, Transform! Europe, works with 32 organisations and foundations all over Europe, from 21 countries, in order to establish contacts among all the left parties in Europe and connect them into one single party. This is not easy, because we are very different in different countries. I come from a country in the South of Europe, with different systems of public services compared to what exists in Sweden or Denmark. Bringing together people and parties from different countries is a real challenge for us. That is why I think that what we share is that social justice is the core of our mission. I also think that the commons strategy can be a way to unify different perspectives. That is also why we have to open up and share with other countries and other people, social justice and commons strategies. This is the way we can put together our different perspectives. We have to try to give to the people the strength to change the rules. I think what we are trying to do at the European level, to unify people, we also have to try and do it on the global level.

*Robert Morea is an activist and president of Transform! Italy, the Italian node of the network transform! Europe, of which he is a member of the board. Facilitator of the ‘Common Goods working group’. Morea was a councillor for social services in the 1st municipality of Rome, promoter and part of the City of the other economy in Rome.

Today, everyone is speaking about commons and ‘commoning’, everyone wants to build commons. The World Bank has a group which is supposedly ‘protecting and improving the global commons’ and it reaches out to the private sector to ‘advance common goods’. You can find texts on commons on the website of the European Union, banks organize seminars on the commons. Transnational companies tell us they are building the commons, big magazines declare that Uber is commoning cars, and that the “sharing economy” is a form of commoning.

I think we have to be very clear about what the commons are. Or at least what they are structurally. It does not mean that we can define in every detail what the commons are or what they will be. The commons and the activity of commoning are nowadays brought forward by many social, political and even economic actors.

Mainstream research suggests that commons and capitalism can peacefully co-exist. It speaks about the absence of conflict and that the rights of the commoners to decide and manage their own commons are neither questioned nor challenged by external authorities, are at the centre of successful commoning.

But if we look at history it is important to remember one thing: The commons are not a gift. And even if many researchers tend to describe the commons as working best if there is harmony, there is this big desire for harmony in many alternative circles mentioning the commons, this is not the case. Commons are most likely to be achieved and/or to be preserved in time if we organize and are ready for constant conflict because the history of capitalism is a history of enclosure of the commons. The commons preceded private property and capitalism. Capital needs the commons for the ongoing accumulation by dispossession. A capitalist system will therefore always prey on the commons and at the same time destroy the fundaments for sustainable social practices and ultimately the fundaments of life itself.

Especially in the global south, where we have much more traditional commons that have survived, or have been preserved over time, people have the experience how capital, transnational companies, etc. grab the commons and incorporate them whenever they need them. Even if there was some kind of official recognition of the commons earlier or if you had some kind of supposed harmony, it does not matter anymore once capital wants to appropriate the commons. And it will at some point, always. Because the law of capitalism is expansion, it has to expand. In a limited world expansion means to take away from others. The history of capitalism shows how it is incorporating, coopting, what is socially produced by the people. Capital is totally unable to develop anything for humanity. We see all these tales about the free floating creativity of capital making all the inventions possible. But this is not true. Capitalism is blocking progress, for example with patent rights and things like that, which make it for example, impossible to develop new cancer medicine because most of the elements are already patented by a different company, so it is not worth anymore for a company to develop a cancer medicine if they have to pay patent rights to other companies.

We can see that neither are the commons a result of any harmony between the state, the private and the people, nor can they be preserved any better if there is this supposed harmony. The commons, like everything else people have won over the course of the past hundreds of years, are a result of struggles of the people. Moreover, there is an important change over the past decades to take into account. Many got to believe that liberal democracy is granting rights. This is a big misunderstanding. Over a few decades liberal democracy was the frame in which rights could be expanded, always through struggles, there were no rights given for free… they were all won in struggles by huge movements, women’s movements, workers’ movements etc. They were a result of struggles. But this worked only as long as liberal democracy was the frame for modern industrial capitalism to develop. We have seen over the past 2-3 decades that liberal democracy is not anymore the political model corresponding to capital’s development today. That is why we experience the authoritarian tendencies all over. That is why in so many struggles we have been barely able to preserve the status quo, but not anymore to achieve any progress. The liberal democratic frame is not anymore a frame for expanding rights. It turned into a frame of reducing rights, of making them invisible, of creating structures in which people don’t have a say anymore even if people are told that they have. And we can see very well that people are not satisfied. All the “anti-representative” revolts of the past decade were a result of people feeling – in representative democracies as well as in authoritarian regimes felt that the proposed model of representation is not democratic. It does not represent them, they do not have a say, they cannot decide on their future. In an interview during my research on the 15-M movement a few years ago, an interview partner said: “It’s like a big storm is coming over you and you don’t have any means to influence the situation.”’

The hope that we will win because we have the better arguments, the better reason, is a lost hope. We have to organize struggles from the bottom up to preserve commons that exist, to achieve commons that do not exist, and to keep us as communities, as people, in a position where we decide, we take the decisions and are constantly involved in decisions that are made, if we do not achieve that, if we leave it to the state to preserve the commons, we will neither preserve them nor achieve them. Because the times the expansion of rights corresponded to the production model are over. The function is not anymore to preserve or to create any rights anymore.

When we are formulating the strategies to achieve commons it is also very important to look at what kind of commons we want to achieve and how we think about them. Because there are also commons that are functional for capitalism. I am, for example, totally in favour of having free internet access for all, but it is also something that is completely functional to capitalism. It is not the case that every commons is automatically an emancipatory idea.

We also have to think about – and it has been part of the past seminars we organized – reproduction. That is very central. The commons cannot be something that is, once again as other production models and especially Fordism, based on gendered labour and the reproduction of labour by women. The danger is always present, especially when times get more precarious, it is often easier to externalize certain amount of work and make it invisible. To achieve and preserve the commons we have the outer dimension of struggle, which is not based on harmony, and we have also an internal struggle to think and act differently regarding reproduction.

* Dario Azzelini is an academic and activist. His work focuses on democracy, workers’ and local self-management and social movements. He co-authored They Can’t Represent Us. Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy (Verso 2014)