despite this, the advocates of a capitalist way of life continue to preach that the only way to achieve progress and a better and greener world is to blindly continue along the same path of destruction we have travelled on for so many years. But they are wrong. To tackle the global problems of the future starting with the present climate catastrophe, capitalism needs to be replaced with something else entirely.
But how can this be done? What should replace it? History is littered with revolutionary events, when the oppressed rise up and overthrow their capitalist masters and attempt to install a fairer form of society. But from small-scale, local changes to generation-long episodes of state-led communism, they have all – to a greater or lesser degree – fallen foul of the lure of capitalist dogma that decrees ‘there is no alternative’. This is because in attempting to ‘scale up’ anti-capitalist societies, these revolutionary events have – in one way or another – started to (and in some cases, completely) mirror the injustices of capitalism by invoking the same kind of power imbalances, authoritarianism and inequality, just with a different political economic hue. Their anti-capitalist fundamentals have been lost.
But there is one societal ideology that has remained constant throughout these episodes. From human prehistory, throughout capitalism’s growth, and all those failed revolutions, the very real ideology of the commons has remained. Now, it is an idea whose time has come. But in order for it to aid in the reconstitution of our planet and the healing it requires, we need a planetary commons. This is the coming together of all peoples and resources in the world into a planetary (not global, or international) mode of socio-economic organization that recognizes our material, cultural and psychological intimacy with the planet we inhabit and the human, nonhuman and intangible resources it offers. Planetary thinking embraces the differences of and in the world, and as feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued, it resists the image of the ‘globe’ or globalization as a false totality.1 Practically, then, the planetary commons is a mode of organizing communities, nations and societies that foregrounds the very characteristics that capitalism defenestrates. Solidarity, stewardship, protecting the vulnerable, slowness, and even love; these are some of the ethical ways of being that capitalism diminishes, yet are vital if a planetary commons is to come into view.
Sometimes hidden, the traditional view of the commons has historically – either physically or ideologically – always been a means to subvert, resist and critique the prevailing order of social organization (be that feudalism, fundamentalism, a dictatorship or, today, capitalism). The commons has provided people and communities throughout history with a mode of existence within the cracks of hegemonic societal systems that we are living under. Today, within the cracks of capitalism, a common world is flourishing.2 The commons, as an ideology of human community, has existed in, through and outside of the prevailing order of society for millennia. It has provided societal organizations that are, on the whole, not only ecologically sustainable, but more equitable and just. The commons doesn’t need the creation and exchange of capital to thrive; it only requires the willingness of those who believe in it to succeed.
However, caution is clearly required because the predatory growth of capitalism in the twenty-first century feeds off those forms of life that exist ‘outside’ of it. Appropriating anti-capitalist motifs,3 accumulating by dispossessing,4 and violently enclosing land, societies and ideologies that are not conforming to the mantra of profit-maximization, capitalism thrives off those people, places and experiences that critique it. And via its leading edge of marketing, public relations, advertising and the vernacular of ‘creativity’, capital is created out of the eventual privatization of that which was once held in common. Land, nature, housing, knowledge and even creativity itself have all been wrenched out of common ownership and been carved up and profited from by frontier capitalists. And that which is still common (e.g. the internet, the air we breathe and, now, outer space) is being targeted for privatization and subsequent commercialization.
Therefore to grow the commons to a point at which it is a viable social alternative requires protecting it from enclosure by contemporary forms of capitalism. It requires an active anti-capitalism that is also simultaneously a form of growing the commons, something that political geographers Gibson-Graham call commoning.5 Commoning as a practice by some creates more commons as a resource for us all to benefit from. Despite the voracity of capitalism’s enclosure, there are examples of communities building a commons that is not only resisting this process, but also expanding the more sustainable, just and equitable social organization it creates back into the capitalist world for everyone to share. For example, there are inner-city squats that have resisted enclosure for decades and are now beginning to inform how cities are being built beyond the pure pursuit of profit; community gardening groups that have influenced urban agricultural practice to be more ecologically sustainable; refugee activist groups that have made spaces for people otherwise trafficked and brutally oppressed; climate justice movements that transformed city centres into enclaves of play, theatre and protest and are now shaping national and international policy on climate change; factory workers who have forcibly taken over the management structure to make it more equitable for all workers; and, in the wake of the coronavirus, mutual aid networks that have sprung up all over the world to help deliver food to the isolated, care for the sick, and educate and entertain locked-down children.
These are already-existing (and spreading) examples of the anti-capitalist commons that show how alternative ways of organizing our economies and societies are possible beyond the injustices of capitalism. They point tantalizingly towards a future beyond the environmental and societal injustices that we currently endure. They showcase the kinds of practices, behaviours and mindsets that have not only resisted capitalism, but built fairer worlds. But only a radical emancipation and diffusion of those already-existing commoning practices into a powerful collectivized force can see it viably resist capitalism. Before we can even begin to think about what structures, institutions, policies, governments and cities we need to build, there needs to be a radical change in the ethical position of our societies to reflect the emancipatory potential of the planetary commons. Wrestling back, maintaining and then spreading the commons away from a predatory capitalism requires ever more physical, virtual and emotional resources from those people invested in the commons’ survival (which, if we are to avoid the omnicide that a capitalist realism is marching us towards, will need to be everyone). In short, these resources need to be harnessed, to create an ethical commitment to realizing a planetary commons before it is too late.
This book therefore proposes a set of seven ethics that are gleaned from the already-existing commons. Individually, they can be seen as characteristics of the commons that are in direct opposition to the deleteriousness of capitalism. They are ethics against capitalism. But together, they can act as a mode of understanding the broader movement of commoning, and how it has the potential to resist and undo the deleterious effects of the current prevailing world order. What they are not is a static blueprint for action, a hegemonic view of a new planetary order that will only replace one form of ideological colonialism of the world with another. Indeed, scholars have argued that many of history’s most barbaric colonial acts, not least the destruction of indigenous Americans by European ‘pioneers’, are tied up with the imposition of ‘common land’ for the settlers.6 Instead, commoning is a way of being-in-the-world that disrupts the smooth functioning of the capitalist status quo and its planetary violence on all peoples. So together, these seven ethics are a call to rethink and re-engage with the planet in more just, equitable and ecologically sustainable ways that will safeguard our future-in-common. I will outline in detail what I mean by ethics, but first, what do I mean when I say the commons? And how can they be planetary?
The commons
There is no shortage of definitions and articulations of what is fundamentally a very elusive concept. The term ‘common’ refers perhaps to banality or the mundane, maybe a shared interest between friends, or even a derogatory slur upon a particular class of people. As easily dismissed as these can be as part of the quotidian vernacular, there is an underlying
