Category: Theory
The Transformation of Istanbul’s Urban Commons
*Beykent University **Yeditepe University
Commons and Class Struggle
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.”
• Special issue of borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012: Commons, Class Struggle and the World. Editors: Manuel Yang & Jeffrey D. Howison.
The social property in Yugoslavia
“Društvena svojina” are the croatian words for “social property. After the defeat of the nazis in the big war, extremely devastating for the balcan population, what Yugoslavia was and experiment and self managed socialism. Yugoslavian experiment
Context
Faced with the economic stagnation, after the resolution of Inforbiro, due to the blockade imposed by the Warsaw Pact countries, the growing discontent of the people and realizing that the Soviet system of economic management is not effective, the Yugoslav leaders, have returned to the roots of Marxism – Marx’s writings. They were looking for a way to increase the efficiency of companies and enterprises, motivate employees to work more and more responsible and turn them from objects (that are conducted) in subjects who themselves decide on their existence, Yugoslav communists used the original ideas of Marxism – the workers’ councils as a method of direct democracy, formally set up on top of the ladder.
In those years, the Yugoslav communists fiercely examined their own ideology, and at the end of those turmoil they laid the foundations for a new economic mechanism which they called – socialist (workers’) self-management.
The first workers’ councils were formed by the then state-owned companies – in 1949, it was legalized by legislative act, which the Federal Assembly voted in 1950. and 1951. in order to have the new system fully implemented. [2] With these laws state ownership of the means of production legally becomes “social property” (drustveno vlasnistvo) entrusted to the management of workers in enterprises.
The Creation of the Urban Commons, by David Harvey
CHAPTER THREE of Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
The city is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if per petually changing and transitory life. The commonality of that life has long been a matter of commentary by urbanists of all stripes, and the compelling subject of a wide range of evocative writings and represen tations {in novels, films, painting, videos, and the like) that attempt to pin down the character of that life (or the particular character of life in a particular city in a given place and time) and its deeper meanings. And in the long history of urban utopianism, we have a record of all manner of human aspirations to make the city in a different image, more “after our heart’s desire” as Park would put it. The recent revival of emphasis upon the supposed loss of urban commonalities reflects the seemingly profound impacts of the recent wave of privatizations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing, and surveillance upon the quali ties of urban life in general, and in particular upon the potentiality to build or inhibit new forms of social relations (a new commons) within an urban process influenced if not dominated by capitalist class inter ests. When Hardt and Negri, for example, argue that we should view “the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common,” they suggest this as an entry point for anti-capitalist critique and political activism. Like the right to the city, the idea sounds catchy and intriguing, but what could it possibly mean? And how does this relate to the long history of arguments and debates concerning the creation and utilization of common property resources?
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Monopoly was stolen from socialist land-reformers and perverted
The Landlord’s Game, 1906. Image courtesy of Thomas E. Forsyth. Special thanks to Forsyth (landlordsgame.info) for his assistance with board images.
The official history of Monopoly, as told by Hasbro, which owns the brand, states that the board game was invented in 1933 by an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow. Darrow had dreamed up what he described as a real estate trading game whose property names were taken from Atlantic City, the resort town where he’d summered as a child. Patented in 1935 by Darrow and the corporate game maker Parker Brothers, Monopoly sold just over 2 million copies in its first two years of production, making Darrow a rich man and likely saving Parker Brothers from bankruptcy. It would go on to become the world’s best-selling proprietary board game. At least 1 billion people in 111 countries speaking forty-three languages have played it, with an estimated 6 billion little green houses manufactured to date. Monopoly boards have been created using the streets of almost every major American city; they’ve been branded around financiers (Berkshire Hathaway Monopoly), sports teams (Chicago Bears Monopoly), television shows (The Simpsons Monopoly), automobiles (Corvette Monopoly), and farm equipment (John Deere Monopoly).
The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land. In his book Progress and Poverty (1879), George called private land ownership an “erroneous and destructive principle” and argued that land should be held in common, with members of society acting collectively as “the general landlord.”
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The Commons as a Transformative Vision
Introduction to the book “The Wealth of the Commons- A world beyond market & state” edited by David Bollier & Silke Helfrich
It has become increasingly clear that we are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by an archaic order of centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, presided over by a state committed to planet-destroying economic growth, people around the world are searching for alternatives. That is the message of various social conflicts all over the world – of the Spanish Indignados and the Occupy movement, and of countless social innovators on the Internet. People want to emancipate themselves not just from poverty and shrinking opportunities, but from governance systems that do not allow them meaningful voice and responsibility. This book is about how we can find the new paths to navigate this transition. It is about our future.
But since there is no path forward, we must make the path. This book therefore is about some of the most promising new paths now being developed. Its seventy-three essays describe the enormous potential of the commons in conceptualizing and building a better future. The pieces, written by authors from thirty countries, fall into three general categories – those that offer a penetrating critique of the existing, increasingly dysfunctional market/state partnership; those that enlarge our theoretical understandings of the commons as a way to change the world; and those that describe innovative working projects that are demonstrating the feasibility and appeal of the commons.
Michael Hardt on commonwealth
Michael Hardt talked about his book Commonwealth (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; October 1, 2009). It is the third book of a trilogy Michael Hardt with the books Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire that he wrote with Antonio Negri. He presented his thoughts on what he deems an alternative model of political and social organization where the “public” and the “private” are superseded by the “common.” He presented this as part of a solution for a broken economic system.
Conceptual maps and diagrams on the commons / communisms
Beyond the “tragedy of the commons”: conflict a production of subjetivity in contemporary capitalism
PhD Thesis by Alexandre Mendes from UERJ and Universidade Nomada
This thesis investigates the dimensions of historical, philosophical and political concept of the common, from a problematization influenced by heterodox Marxist studies and the thought of Michel Foucault.The theoretical approach begins with an analysis of the hypothesis of the “tragedy of commons”, represented by Garrett Hardin in a famous article in Science Magazine in 1968. The further development seeks to understand such a formulation from the foucauldian analysis on the art of liberal and neoliberal governing, with emphasis on the concept of biopolitical production of subjectivity. This terrain of analysis is supplemented by studies of an economic approach called “bio-economy”, which seeks to weave biopolitics with an understanding of current forms of capitalist accumulation and it crisis. From a research which is directed to the terrain defined as “heterodox marxism,” on seeks to study the relationship between the common and new forms of primitive accumulation, seeing how the former has increasingly appeard in this branch of critical studies. In this field, on emphasizes the concept of “primitive social and subjectivity accumulation”, based on studies of Karl Marx (Grundrisse), Antonio Negri and Jason Read. The last chapter is devoted to the concept of “production of common”, taking as its starting point the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and especially the investigations of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The common appears as a central concept for understanding the biopolitical production of social wealth in contemporary capitalism, and also its expropriation by new modes of accumulation. On the other hand, the common also emerges as antagonism to capital and public-private dichotomy, pointing to new ways of understanding communism.
Keywords: Tragedy of the common. Michel Foucault. Production of subjectivity. Biopolitics. Marx. Antonio Negri. Production of the common. Capitalism. Communism.
On biopower and biopolitics
Twelve thesis on biopolitics and the commons for architects and cartographers [without demonstrations]
plus a political program,
both mostly after Hardt and Negri, 2009, Commonwealth
[1]
We use “biopower” [in the sense defined by Foucault, and later detailed by Deleuze, Hardt and Negri] to describe the form of power in contemporary networked society.
Biopower, as any kind of power, has to be understood as a strategy and as a relation; it is deployed through technics or technologies.
Biopower is not aimed at prohibiting and punishing, but it rather deals with the production of the real; it aims to produce the totality of social life.
