Seven Ethics Against Capitalism. Oli Mould
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material resources are one thing, common global cultures and ideologies are another. There is very little or no cost of reproduction to a commonly consumed radio broadcast, film, creative idea or other cultural product; once it is made, it can be consumed without cost again and again by more and more people, potentially ad infinitum (unlike food or energy). Political theorists Hardt and Negri argue that the commons, enacted by an internationalist ‘multitude’ of people resistive to globalized capitalism, can also be ‘the languages we create, the social practices we establish, [and] the modes of sociality that define our relationships’.17 Yet even this more Heraclitian view of the commons is being enclosed by contemporary techniques of capitalist accumulation. Intellectual property rights (and the aggressive legal defence thereof), the hyper-individualization of everyday life by personal technologies and social media, and the quantification of everything (so as to be more amenable to markets) are just some of the processes that are enclosing ‘common’ shared global socio-cultural experiences. Cultural artistic forms such as music, film and TV that have been collectively experienced and enjoyed are now being deliberately produced to appeal to algorithmically created playlists, accessible on personalized media rather than speaking to social issues more broadly. Marginalized collective (sub) cultures are being appropriated for commercial gain. The very relationships we have with our friends and family are being filtered through technological interfaces that optimize advertising revenue. All this stifles any sense of a common collective culture as an alternative to a digital, individually tailored and highly commercial form of capitalism.
So all of these articulations of the commons18 – a spiritual and philosophical collective humanity, a commonwealth of land, a political resistance of radical equality, an economic rationale and a cultural collective – are vital to understanding what it is that we create by simply being together. But it is the interplay between the common resource that is created and the community it creates and sustains that is the cornerstone of any further conceptualization of the commons.
The planetary commons
Yet today, as we reel in the wake of a deadly coronavirus and attempt to learn lessons as to how to survive future pandemics better, as well as continuing to face climate catastrophe, realizing the commons on a planetary scale is more crucial than ever. In building the commons as a dialectic between community and a common resource, the recognition that the spiritual, land-based, political, institutional and economic commons that we create are extensions of the planet we inhabit is vital.
The mixing of the planet’s resources with our labour for millennia has created a world that we cannot extricate ourselves from. And as we have depleted those resources to critical levels, so too have we depleted ourselves. Capitalism, particularly the neoliberal-soaked versions of it that have produced a re-emergence of governmental fascism,19 mental health epidemics,20 violent borders21 and a chronic inability to deal with pandemics, is itself a pathogenic symptom of our disconnection with the world. The more we drive an ideological wedge between who we are as a species and what the planet is as a living resource, the more damaging capitalism has become.
Adding the prefix ‘planetary’ to ‘the commons’ augments the conceptualization of the commons as a community–resource dialectic in two related ways. First, it extends the co-creation of both the commons and community to include the planetary resources that we have been intermingling with ever since we began using tools as a species. The land, subterranean resources, forests, fauna and flora, the atmosphere, our bodies and near space: the materiality of the planet (and beyond) is a complex mingling of things and people being created, destroyed and recreated continually. But more than that, the intangible parts of our collective life – culture, society, economies, communities – are products of how we have used the material world around us. Even the ‘virtual’ commons of the internet, globalized culture and the zeitgeist itself uses materials to sustain itself; the cables, servers, smart devices, geostationary satellites and raw materials that they are made from are just as vital to the creation of the digital commons as the creative and cultural content that populates it.
Furthermore, a planetary mode of organization recognizes our material and psychological intimacy with the planet as Gaia.22 As the philosopher Bruno Latour has argued, we need to ‘rematerialize our belonging to the world’.23 Within this process there is the necessity to resist totalizing narratives that reduce the heterogeneity of the world’s population into a single homogeneous entity. As Latour (among others) has continually stressed, the nature/culture divide is a false one, and attempts by culture to curb and control nature are at the root of capitalistinduced climate catastrophe. A planetary commons rejects this divide and calls for a ‘reterrestrializing’ of our existence in the world.24
Second and relatedly, in their conceptualization of the ‘planetary turn’, the scholars Amy Elias and Christian Moraru have argued that globalization is a totalizing and homogenizing force, one that is suspicious of difference as an inefficiency in the smooth functioning of global capital across the many parts of our world (i.e. the Bretton Woods institutions and their allocation of the ‘global commons’). Globalization is the creation and maintenance of the global scale that contains the flows of capital and the elite, at the expense of the nuances of the local. Globalization is a homogeneous force that seeks to annihilate difference. Instead, Elias and Moraru talk of planetarity or ‘worlding’ as something that focuses on relationality and, crucially, ethics. They argue: ‘Planetarity is configured – artistically, philosophically, and intellectually – from a different angle and goes in another direction [from globalization]. It represents a transcultural phenomenon whose economical and political underpinnings cannot be ignored but whose preeminent thrust is ethical.’25
Planetarity is less thinking the world as the same than celebrating its difference. It is a rejection of the powerful forces that seek to homogenize the world into an abstract consumption product so as to improve the bottom line. Instead, being ‘planetary’ widens our aesthetic and ideological gaze, and views the world as a multiplicity of cultures, people, places and things, all held together in balance, against a capitalism that is very much imbalanced. A planetary commons, then, is not one that is global (that would be to the detriment of the local), nor is it international (that would be to fall back on existing geopolitical structures that continue to fail us). Hence, configuring the commons as planetary acknowledges their infectious and contagious characteristics and highlights how they spread to those realms of social life that have been ravaged by capitalism.
On a practical level, this requires safeguarding and protecting what we have created in common throughout the millennia (and continue to create), but not in the way that is currently done via institutional forms. To shift our focus on the commons to a planetary conceptualization requires an understanding of not only what it is that we create by being together, but how an empirically new form of society can be brought into being that realizes a common world that can be safeguarded from the violence of capitalism. So, more than affirming a simple ‘stewardship’ of the world’s resources (which can often slip into neo-colonial contexts that order society around those who qualify to be stewards and those who do not), a planetary commons denotes a far more intimate connection with those resources we seek to protect.
But in the midst of a powerful, all-pervasive enclosure by capitalism, how is the ideology of a planetary commons to survive? Is the idea of the commons forever to be marginalized? How can the spirit of Heraclitus, the materiality of the Diggers, the political imaginary of the Paris Commune, the economic rationality of Ostrom, the shared cultural internationalism of Hardt and Negri’s multitude thrive?
The answer that this book propounds is to rekindle an ethics of the commons and reconceptualize it as not just a potential enclave of resistive anti-capitalism (which of course is important), but as more: as a creative, and infectious force of planetary commoning independent of capital. As Gibson-Graham have argued, if the commons is thought as a verb, then its emancipatory potential is further unleashed. By establishing community-based protocols that articulate access and use, but also taking a careful and thoughtful approach to resources and distributing them in a way that focuses on the most