The commons, the state and transformative politics.
| Author | Wainwright, Hilary |
| Position | Features |
The resistance to the G8 in Rostok in June this year had a particularly varied and energetic character. A massive international demonstration converging from all quarters of the town. Camps, communal kitchens and alternative forums. Clowns and samba bands. Confrontations with the police. A disciplined and imaginative non-violent disruption of the summit, which even the Financial Times judged to have been successful.
Amongst those taking part were a group of around thirty activist intellectuals from Europe, Latin America and North America who met Berlin in the spacious rooms of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation near some well-graffitied stumps of the Wall. It was the fourth seminar of the 'Networked Politics' series, an international inquiry into 'rethinking political organisation in an era of movements and networks'.
We had come together and formulated our common search mainly through the European and World Social Forums. A distinctive focus had been the influences of developments in information technology on different levels of transformative politics, practical and conceptual. In some ways these developments deepen the pre-web ways in which many of us were both rethinking political organisation (inspired by the non-hierarchical, networked practices of the women's movement) and reformulating common ownership (inspired by the creative trade unionism of groups like the shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace with their 'alternative plan for socially useful production'). At the same time, the impact of information technology is stimulating entirely new trains of thought.
The discussions in Berlin included an exploration of the implications of internet technology for the three major issues of our inquiry: the commons and the public; labour and social movements; political representation and democracy.
The commons and the public
Arturo di Corinto, a sharp and ebullient Italian media activist, writer and film-maker, set out a bold vision of free software as a common resource: 'Thanks to its characteristics, the free software is a distributed property that is capable of evolving into a common good', he declared. The characteristics of free software, he went on to argue, give it the character of a virtual commons: freely accessible, non-exclusive, something which everyone can make use of, even if they have not participated directly in its creation; bringing together producers and users; its quality is enhanced by its use; the community of open software developers is based on certain rules of self-organisation, leading to the emergence of a complex system.
He was interrogated by Glenn Jenkins, a puckish character whose insights have been honed by prolonged struggle on a neglected estate on the periphery of Luton to turn disused land and buildings into commons, and in turn use them as a base from which to reassert common control over local services. Glenn's arguments and experiences raise questions of how the commons relates to the state, notably state services and resources. The Exodus Collective squatted empty buildings and eventually won their demands for public money--unemployment and housing benefits--to go towards sustaining their cooperatively managed housing rather than into the pockets of private landlords. They went on to work with an alliance of community groups in setting up the Marsh Farm Community Trust to invest [pounds sterling]50 million New Deal for Community money over ten years to regenerate an estate all but abandoned by government and local authority alike.
As he told his story, the question became: can state services ever be transformed into a commons? The idea of the commons refers to how shared resources are managed, implying open access, collaborate self-management by those who use a resource and those who provide it. A state service can be very inaccessible and its forms of management exceedingly distant and alienated from both users and providers. Many of those who first thought up the idea of the welfare state imagined they were creating common goods. But the framework of representative democracy has been too far removed from those who used and provided the services day to day. As Glenn and other residents of Marsh Farm found fifty years after their public estate was built, a state resource was not in reality a common resource; its 'public' facilities managed by the public officials in the name of the people but several steps removed from the actual community whose interests state resources should have served.
Can ideas, both inspirational metaphors and actual experiences, from the free software movement provide any...
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