Seven Ethics Against Capitalism. Oli Mould
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all. In short, a planetary commons needs to continually be ‘alive’ and look to move with the needs of the people and community it is serving, all the while bringing more people in. As soon as the commons becomes static, rigid and steeped in institutional wrangling, it runs the risk of falling back into capitalistic modes of operating.
So adding the term planetary to the commons forces an expanded ontology, one that takes seriously the materiality of the commons and our inextricability from it, as well as its ethical potential. Elias and Moraru denote the ‘ethical’ nature of planetarity as infectious; a contagious way of being-in-the-world. Put bluntly, political activism is inherent in the commoning practice. The more strongly activism attempts to bring additional people and things into its ideological orbit, the more ethical potential it has. Configuring the commons as planetary, then, demands a focus on its infectious, contagious and activist characteristics and highlights how it can spread to those realms of social life that have hitherto been ravaged by capitalism.
This book therefore attempts to tease out the kinds of ethics that can aid in the flourishing of a planetary commons. It does so by offering a suite of carefully identified ethics that has the potential to articulate what a flourishing of a planetary commons may look like, what kind of characteristics it may enliven. And so the next question to ask is ‘what does it mean to be ethical?’
Ethics
As Elias and Moraru have intimated, being ethical is part of the conceptualization of planetarity. It is the infectiousness of the commoning procedure. This is an important starting point for thinking ethically, but how can we be ethical? The word ‘ethics’ is used in many fields. There are medical ethics, which operate to guide physicians and other health professionals in their work. All new doctors are required to take the Hippocratic oath, stating that they will do no harm and putting patients’ needs above any other consideration (with or without personal protective equipment). There are legal ethics, which are a set of codified rules, often enshrined in particular national legal frameworks and enforced by dedicated institutions. Within the university context, there are research ethics that each project has to adhere to. Students are given ethics forms to fill out when they are proposing their dissertations. There are business ethics that often appear as ‘codes of conduct’ that a corporation may (or may not) choose to enforce on its employees. People even talk about corporate ethics, which are a tacit ‘agreement’ of sorts that companies and costumers will enter into when transacting. None of these are the ethics that this book will focus on. In fact, these ‘ethics’ are the antithesis of the kind of ethics that will be explored.
This book builds on the idea of ethical thinking as infectiousness, but colours this with the conceptualization of ethics as immanent, and not beholden to any predefined higher power. Essentially, ethics are allowing for the continuation of commoning. Hence, they are not a ‘code of conduct’, but a suite of positionalities that catalyse a planetary commons wherever and however they unfold in real time. If commoning is the realization that an oppressive ideology can be resisted, then ethics are ‘soft articulations’ of how to maintain this resistance. Ethics therefore are ‘immanent’ and always unfolding, rather than some suite of transcendental ideals that are predefined. They take stock of a situation, and are subsequently articulated depending on how the commoning is unfolding. To be ‘ethical’ in this sense is to be guided by the given situation in all its diversity, density and difference, rather than any preconceived or external ‘guide’. Such ethics are fleeting in action, but can become more durable and embedded in the world as they diffuse through the social fabric. This reading of ethics is in the tradition articulated most forcefully by the French radical philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his sole-authored work but also in the magnum opus he wrote with his co-conspirator Félix Guattari.26 In intricately analysing the notion of ethics within this work, the feminist philosopher Tasmin Loraine has argued that ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of an immanent ethics calls on us to attend to the situations of our lives in all their textured specificity and to open ourselves up to responses that go beyond a repertoire of comfortably familiar, automatic reactions and instead access creative solutions to what are unique problems.’27
The ‘problem’ of capitalism is far from unique – it is global in its imposition – yet an ethics that aims to resist the myriad of injustices and inequalities can follow the same immanence outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. In other words, opening up spaces to allow recognition and indeed a celebration of the different forms of living justly in this world, beyond the totalizing hegemonic force of capitalism, is an ethical act.
As discussed above, thinking the commons as planetary entails thinking them ethically, in that they are always immanent and unfolding; they are always in a state of becoming the commons in conjunction with a community; the act of commoning. Indeed, Gibson-Graham, with their articulation of commoning, invoke a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of becoming, arguing that it aids in producing a ‘generative ontological centripetal force working against the pull of essence or identity’.28
Therefore, I want to build on this lineage of thinking ethically that refuses totalizing predetermined forces that can restrain difference, and instead embrace the variance that exists in the world in any given situation, in any given time, in any given place. The ethics I want to outline, then, are first and foremost grounded in this ontology; they are ‘soft’ articulations. They are articulations in that they can be communicated (i.e. via this book) and they are soft because they are malleable, porous and transmutable (i.e. they are necessarily ‘open-source’ – they can be used, adapted and transmogrified). They are behavioural and emotional ‘patterns’ that are constantly in flux, rather than rigid templates to adopt.
What is important to factor into this discussion, however, is that the actualization of this reading of ethics is always related to an event. The ethics are not predetermined or imposed; an event always happens first. In other words, for ethics to have a grounding or indeed something to be ethical towards (other than complete nihilism), they are tethered to, and unfold from, a pre-existing ‘event’. As Deleuze has argued, ‘ethics is concerned with the event; it consists of willing the event as such, that is, of willing that which occurs insofar as it does occur’.29 But just want do we mean when we say ‘an event’?
The Covid event
An event is when something happens that is so extraordinary that it changes the entire way everything – society, politics, economics human and nonhuman behaviour – is. More than that, though, an event is creative. It brings into existence entire ways of being in the world that simply did not exist beforehand. Some of these exist only as possibilities, or possible possibilities. An event emerges unexpectedly as the ‘old’ world ruptures, bringing new subjects, new truths and radically different experiences into existence, and shifts how that world works in its entirety. Deleuze would argue that events are ‘eruptions’ within a collective that calls for its complete transformation; in his words, they ‘overthrow worlds’.30
But such ruptures happen often. What makes an event an event is what happens after. How people react to the event maintains its ‘eventfulness’. The radical change that an event brings upon the world happens through the actions of the people, communities, institutions and things that are compelled to advocate and affirm the newness that the rupture has exposed to the world. It becomes a cause to fight for, something to believe in, a truth that must be defended.
There are many revolutionary episodes throughout modern history that have been revered as exemplar events: the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the 1968 uprisings in Paris and, more recently, the Arab Spring.31 Events are indeed revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) precisely because they change the whole makeup – governance, behaviour, attitudes and politics – of society. The ‘new’ things that an event creates, then, are new voices for those whose voices have been silenced, hope for those whose hope has been oppressed, and opportunities for those made destitute. Events therefore are radical acts that bring new forms of justice