A Politics of the Commons or Commoning the Political? Distinct Possibilities for Post-Capitalist Transformation

The Commons is celebrated for its role in linking anti-capitalist struggles across the world, as demonstrated by the myriad local and regional attempts to reclaim shared access and decision-making over collective resources, spaces, and knowledge. However, despite its success as a rallying point for diverse initiatives, the Commons faces critique from within the anti-capitalist Left. First, there is evidence that Commons initiatives are vulnerable to cooptation by capitalism's pervasive political forms and do not impede its continued expansion. Second, there is doubt as to whether the radical political principles and practices embraced by Commons movements, including open-endedness, pluriversality, and prefigurative politics are sufficient for spurring system change. Despite the soundness of these critiques, this paper argues that it is both possible and worthwhile to defend the Commons as one of many strategies for moving beyond capitalism. Doing so necessitates distinguishing between transformational and non-transformational variants of the Commons. The paper will delineate and contrast two ideal-typical variants of Commons approaches, thereby responding to critiques and emphasizing the Commons' potential. The first variant, a "politics of the commons," includes initiatives that bring people together to build collective forms for sharing resources, spaces, and knowledge, in response to situational threats to survival or well-being. This non-transformational variant faces temporal and geographical limitations and is vulnerable to cooptation because it does not confront structural, long- term, and systemic causes of enclosure and expropriation. In contrast, in the second variant, "commoning the political," what is held in common is the anti-capitalist political processes itself. This second approach goes beyond traditional state-based, Euro-centric, or universalistic Leftist models to allow for a pluriversal and long-term transformation by combining radical political processes with antagonistic strategies for confronting capitalist domination.