The Commons

Front matter

VANGELIS PAPADIMITROPOULOS

A J

Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies Series Editor: Christian Fuchs

Contents

1.1 The Contours of the Commons 1.2 Neoliberalism and the Problem of Collective Action 1.3 The Tragedy of the Commons 1.4 Mainstream vs Non-mainstream Economics 1.4.1 Post-Keynesian Economics 1.4.2 Radical Economics 1.5 In Defence of the Commons 1.5.1 The Digital Economy 1.5.2 The Commons 1.6 Structure of this Book 1.6.1 Thesis

Part 1: The Liberal Commons 2. The Liberal Commons

2.1 Introduction 2.2 Local Commons 2.2.1 A Typology of the Commons 2.2.2 Institutional Economics vs Neoclassical Economics 2.2.3 The Critique of Polycentrism 2.3 Global Commons 2.3.1 The Digital Commons 2.3.2 Commons-based Peer Production 2.4 The Lack of the Political I 2.4.1 ICTs and Deliberative Democracy 2.4.2 Critique of the Digital Commons 2.4.3 Castoriadis and the Political 2.4.4 The Challenges of Direct Democracy viii Contents

Part 2: The Reformist Commons 67 3. The Reformist Commons 69 3.1 Introduction 69 3.2 The Green Governance Commons 70 3.3 The Collaborative Commons 73 3.3.1 The Third Industrial Revolution 74

3.3.2 Platform Capitalism, aka the Sharing Economy 78

3.4 Platform Cooperativism 83 3.4.1 The Stocksy Case 84

3.4.2 The Fairmondo Case 85

3.4.3 The Challenges of Platform Cooperativism 86

3.5 Open Cooperativism 88 3.5.1 Extractive Peer Production 88

3.5.2 Generative Peer Production 93

3.6 DECODE: A Multidisciplinary Framework for the Commons 103 3.7 Productive Publics 109 3.7.1 Revisioning Value in Terms of the General Sentiment 111

3.7.2 The Politics of Productive Publics 114

3.7.3 Critique of Productive Publics 115

3.8 Digital Distributism 117 3.8.1 Digital Industrialism and Artificial Intelligence 118

3.8.2 Technological Unemployment 119

3.8.3 Digitisation, Finance and the Start-up Economy 121

3.8.4 Installing Digital Distributism 122

3.9 Envisioning Real Utopias 125 3.9.1 Critique of Marxism 125

3.9.2 A Socialist Transformation Strategy 126

3.9.3 Social Empowerment over the State 128

3.9.4 Social Empowerment over the Economy 129

3.9.5 Critique of the Reformist Approach 133

3.10 The Lack of the Political II 134 Part 3: The Anti-capitalist Commons 137 4. The Anti-capitalist Commons 139 4.1 Introduction 139

4.2 The Post-hegemony of Common Democracy 140

4.2.1 Politics and the Political 4.2.2 Verticalism: Laclau and Mouffe 4.2.3 Horizontalism: Hardt and Negri

4.2.4 Beyond Verticalism and Horizontalism: Commoning the Political 4.3 The Self-instituting Power of the Common 4.4 The Community Economy 4.4.1 Overdetermination and Hegemony 4.4.2 Class and Second-wave Feminism

4.4.3 A Weak Theory of a Community Economy

4.4.4 Transactions, Labour, Surplus

4.4.5 Necessity, Surplus, Consumption and the Commons 4.4.6 The Cooperative Enterprise: The Mondragon Case

4.4.7 Critique of the Community Economy 4.4.8 Affect, Sexuality, Reproduction 4.5 Autonomous Marxism and the Common 4.5.1 The Circulation of the Common 4.5.2 Omnia sunt communia 4.5.3 The Reproduction of the Common 4.6 Communism and the Common 4.6.1 The Idea of Communism 4.6.2 The Crowd and the Party 4.6.3 Historical Geographical Materialism 4.6.4 Post-capitalism 4.6.5 The Critical Theory of the Commons 4.7 The Lack of the Political III

5.1 Liberal, Reformist and Anti-capitalist Arguments

5.1.1 The Liberal Argument

5.1.2 The Reformist Argument

5.1.3 The Anti-capitalist Argument

5.1.4 Towards Post-hegemonic Holism 5.2 Liberal, Reformist and Radical Formats

References Notes Index

Contents ix

140 143 146

215 215 217 219 221 221

227 249 251

CHAPTER |

The last decades have witnessed the rise of peer production driven by three main interdependent and mutually reinforcing factors: 1) the sustainability crisis; 2) neoliberalism, and 3) low-cost information and communication technologies (ICTs). Peer production is a type of social relations, a technological infrastructure and a new mode of production and property, whereby participants have maximum freedom to cooperate and connect (Bauwens et al. 2019, 1). Peer production disrupts centralised capitalist production through the decentralised use of the Internet and open source technologies. It is a relational dynamic playing out in terms of sharing, openness, co-creation, self-governance and bottom-up eco-techno-social innovation (Bauwens et al. 2019, 2). ‘Peer production (often also “P2P Production”) has been broadly portrayed as a generic form of self-organisation among loosely-affiliated individuals that volunteer on equal footing to reach a common goal’ (Bauwens et al. 2019, 4).

Peer production is often referred to in the literature as the collaborative economy, comprising various sorts of economic models (Morell et al. 2017). This book, however, will stick to the term ‘peer production, since, as will become evident later on, the term ‘collaborative economy’ is often attached to models that are rather extractive than collaborative, that is, they centrally coordinate online decentralised peer production downstream to disproportionally reap the benefits upstream.

The literature (Bauwens et al. 2019; Benkler 2006; Morell et al. 2017; Kostakis and Bauwens 2014; Scholz 2016a; 2016b; Troxler and Wolf 2016) has documented thus far three main streams of peer production: 1) firm-hosted peer production or platform capitalism (user-centric open innovation business models, the so-called sharing and gig economy); 2) the commons (local and digital commons, the solidarity economy); and 3) and a hybrid commons-based peer production operating on the models of platform and open cooperativism.

The commons consist of distributed or common property resources/ infrastructures (natural resources, technology, knowledge, capital, culture),

Papadimitropoulos, V. 2020. The Commons: Economic Alternatives in the Digital Age. Pp. 1-30. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997 /book46.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 self-managed by their user communities in accordance with collectively established rules or norms (Bollier and Helfrich 2012; Ostrom 1990). While platform capitalism solely focuses on creating company value and maximising profits from leveraged user knowledge, commons-based peer production introduces new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship and financialisation in a mission to promote sustainability and empower individuals and communities against the pervasive economic inequalities and power asymmetries generated by neoliberalism.

This book focuses on commons-based peer production, or briefly the commons, which is facilitated today by the architectural design of the Internet and free/open source software/hardware, supporting various grassroots initiatives operating in terms of sustainability, decentralisation, openness, self-governance and equitable distribution of value (Benkler 2006; Scholz 2016a). Whereas plenty of diverse theoretical approaches to the commons have been developed over the last decades, only two comprehensive critical accounts of the commons are currently available in the literature. Alexandros Kioupkiolis (2019) and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2014) have recently offered two illuminating critical studies on contemporary theories of the commons. This book deviates from these two influential works in at least one major respect: it takes into account a number of techno-economic factors, the cross-examination of which is deemed appropriate to introducing a multidisciplinary approach to the commons.

This work attempts to contribute to the contemporary discussion over the commons, which revolves around three main axes: a liberal (Benkler 2006; Lessig 2001; Ostrom 1990), a reformist (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013; Bollier 2003; Kostakis and Bauwens 2014; Rifkin 2014; Rushkoff 2016; Scholz 2016a; 2016b; Wright 2009) and an anti-capitalist (Caffentzis 2013; Dardot and Laval 2014; Dean 2009; 2012; De Angelis 2017; Dyer-Witheford 1999; 2015; Federici 2012; Fuchs 2008; 2011; Gibson-Graham 1996; 2006; Hardt and Negri 2000; 2004; 2009; Harvey 2003; 2010; Kioupkiolis 2019; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mason 2015; Söderberg 2008; Žižek 2008; 2010).

This book is not all-inclusive. It covers only authors who do not rest on a piecemeal approach to the commons that singles out one dimension over others - collaborative consumption (Botsman and Rogers 2010), free/libre and open source software (Raymond 1999; Weber 2004), open culture (Leadbeater 2010; Stalder 2005), firm-hosted peer production and open innovation business models (Tapscott and Williams 2006; Benyayer 2016), networking (Castells 2000; 2009; 2010), intellectual communal property (Wark 2004), produsage (Bruns 2008), access (Belk 2014; Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012), decentralisation (Crowston and Howison 2004) or stigmergy (Siefkes 2010). This book, instead, grapples with the work of authors who intend to make or extend a more or less systematic theory out of the commons in terms of an alternative socio-economic paradigm that opposes neoliberalism.

The classification of liberal, reformist and anti-capitalist authors is but a schematic one since arguments often intersect. It does not, therefore, seek to produce any sort of dualities. The classification criterion corresponds to the position where each argument situates the commons in relation to market and state operation. Advocates of the liberal argument take a stand in favour of the coexistence of the commons with market and state operation. The reformists argue for the gradual adjustment of the state and capitalism to the commons, while the anti-capitalists differ from both liberals and reformists by placing the commons against capitalism and the state.

The core thread that penetrates both the reformist and the radical argument dates back to Karl Marx’s claim that the technological evolution of the means of production will force capitalism to transform into communism in the long run. Marx was of course a humanist and not a techno-determinist theorist. This conviction, however, does not detract from the fact that technology assumes a central role in his political economy. Today, the presumed advent of communism is projected through the prism of a post-capitalist transition powered by the Internet of Things (IoT), free software/hardware (FOSS), the digital commons and Blockchain. The commons literature portrays multiple variants of this potential transition.

A similar reading of the politics of the commons has been recently undertaken by Antonios Broumas (2017; 2018), though to a limited extent. Broumas classifies theories of the commons into two basic strands: social democratic and critical, with the social democratic diversifying into liberal and reformist versions, and the critical into poststructuralist and anti-capitalist ones. However, Broumas’s work focuses on the intellectual commons, that is commons referring to the production, distribution and consumption of information, communication, knowledge and culture, whereas this book examines all types of commons, whether material or immaterial, local or global. This book purports to cover the overall political landscape of the commons, while elaborating a unique critical perspective on the commons.

Drawing on the work of Kioupkiolis and Dardot and Laval, the main thesis of this book is that there is a significant lack of the political in the post-capitalist argument. The political is understood in the theoretical framework of Cornelius Castoriadis’s (1988; 1993) concept of the commons as the self-instituting power of the people, exercised against capitalism and the state. The political embraces democracy as the core moral value of society, promoting individual and collective autonomy. Real democracy is based on the equality of all people participating in the creation of the law governing society (Papadimitropoulos 2016).

Whereas all approaches to the commons substantiate the self-instituting power of the people as the key concept of the common, they do not fully address the political in terms of radical democracy, agonistic freedom, conflict and power structures (Kioupkiolis 2019; Mouffe 2005, 15-16, 22, 33-34; Tully 2008, 306-314). Theorists often rest on a limited or ideological standpoint that runs counter to a holistic account of the political, which would translate into a set of cross-disciplinary policies conducive to the sustainability of the commons against the current neoliberal hegemony.

This book intends to produce a critical dialogue between the different approaches to the commons. By no means can it cover all the issues, nor is the coverage of any particular issue complete. The book serves as an introduction to the commons. It aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the core arguments on the commons. Yet the book does not limit itself to a broad-brush approach. It rather seeks to put forward a multidisciplinary account of the commons with the aim of bringing together technology, finance, politics, economics, sustainability science, education and law under commons governance. It does not elaborate another systematic theory of the commons, nor does it reproduce another postmodern, ‘anything goes’ narrative. It rather maps key proposals that stand out in the literature in a mission to integrate them into a holistic, multi-format political strategy that could variously advance the self-instituting power of the people beyond capitalism and the state. By ‘multi-format’ strategy this book does not introduce a politics a la carte, but an arsenal of policies that could variously pursue a unique goal: the advancement of the commons into the dominant socio-economic paradigm. The objective here is to critically reconstruct the current theoretical framing of the commons in the networked information economy and unravel the potential of ICTs for the creation of an economic democracy based on sustainability, openness, solidarity and cooperation.

The core argument running through this book is as follows: for the commons to become a fully operational mode of peer production they need to reach a critical mass. Economic democracy cannot exist without a critical mass participating in it. To do so, the commons need to create compelling benefits and use cases for people. They need to provide a steady income to their members along with the incentive to join an alternative socio-economic paradigm anchored in openness, sharing, cooperation, sustainability and democracy. Much of this depends on the degree to which technology can democratise finance and politics, while offering user-friendly solutions to citizens’ concrete needs, supported by commons-friendly state policies. In short, to rephrase Bauwens and Kostakis’s dictum, it all depends on whether commons-based peer production can become competitive with capitalist production.

The commons could be viewed as vehicles for the creation of a more inclusive social economy, aiming to eliminate the gaping inequalities and power asymmetries of neoliberalism by establishing a sustainable mode of production anchored in openness, sharing, democratic self-governance and the equitable distribution of value. The intent here is not to carve out a unique path but rather to encompass alternative visions of a commons-orientated transition under a holistic, post-hegemonic perspective that contrasts the liberal conception of the commonsas ‘club’ goods, as niche markets coexistent with capitalism and the state. It also disengages from the anarcho-capitalist or libertarian strand of the commons that champions individualism as the core moral value of our times.

My perspective is post-hegemonic in that it seeks to embed the market into the political by socialising the state and economy. The goal is to transform capitalism into the post-capitalism of the commons, that is, a social economy self-organised around the commons. Post-hegemonic holism expresses the need to radically transform the core structure of society by cross-fertilising commons policies and practices across the entire psyche and body of the social. It is often underestimated in the literature that the key to this social change is first and foremost the moral transformation of society; the replacement of ‘everyday libertarianism’ with ‘everyday cooperativism. This requires the reinvention of humanism and community, the expansion of the politics of care and the overall improvement of the quality of life, including tackling climate change, securing health, food quality and well-being, promoting culture, affection, gender equality, sexuality and self-realisation, which are all primarily tasks of politics, everyday education and collective action.

My argument develops against the backdrop of the struggle between the commons and neoliberalism, which mutates today into the struggle of the digital commons (Aigrain 2012; Griffiths 2008; Morell 2010; Stalder 2010) against platform capitalism. This book situates this struggle within the broader normative framework of Marxism and liberalism, where major political concepts such as power, democracy, freedom, justice and equality are debated (Freeden 1996; Swift 2019). This book cannot but draw some basic lines of argument that serve as an introduction to the struggle between the commons and neoliberalism. Central theoretical categories (i.e. the commons, the political, Marxism, neoliberalism) are outlined upfront to help the reader connect the dots, when necessary, and gain a solid understanding of the core argument. Several other major concepts such as ‘platform capitalism; ‘the digital commons, digital labour, ‘immaterial labour’, ‘post-Fordism, the ‘general intellect’, ‘cognitive capitalism’ and ‘the multitude’ are recurrent themes variously worked out in the course of the book. My argument, thus, disassembles into several modules to be reassembled at the conclusion in a set of concrete policies intended to put forward a post-capitalist, commons-orientated transition beyond neoliberalism.

1.1 The Contours of the Commons

Historically, the term ‘commons’ has served diverse theoretical contexts, charged with heterogeneous philosophical, religious, legal and economic connotations. To begin with, the etymology of the word ‘commons’ (cum = with and munus = obligation), analysed through the prism of ethnology and sociology (Clastres 1989; Godelier 1999; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Mauss 1967), implies a political principle of shared responsibility in the collective practice of public tasks, which is of theological-mythical origin, dating back to primitive societies (Dardot and Laval 2014, 25). The commons represents the ‘common good’ inherited from Gods/ancestors and further ‘incarnated’ in the communal institutionalisation of society and nature (Dardot and Laval 2014, 24-27). It is not society and nature in terms of objects or properties that constitute the commons, but the very collective activity of the instituting.

The sense of community through unity and equality took a juridico-political and philosophical turn in Greek and Roman thought, without ever losing its theological component, especially after the birth of Christianity (Dardot and Laval 2014, 24-27). Aristotle’s Politics defines the ‘common good’ in terms of the collective activity of the demos to autonomously decide on the law governing the city. The ‘common good’ is less a common land and more a public deliberation over the city’s common interests. Thus, in Aristotle, the ‘common good’ refers to the political self-institutionalisation of the city by citizens themselves (Dardot and Laval 2014, 24-27). Cicero revived the Aristotelian republican content of the commons by reconfiguring the ‘common good’ under the invention of the Roman law (Dardot and Laval 2014, 24-27). The officials of the Roman Empire were obliged by law to serve the ‘common good, which was replaced by the public good as represented by the state. Roman republicanism nationalised the ‘common good. The state now held the monopoly of the commons. The common good translated into the public good run by the state and its officials.

The commons republicanism had at least two counter-effects. It highlighted, on the one hand, the juridico-political dimension of the commons over the theological dimension, while limiting, on the other hand, the knowledge of the commons to the experts, namely the legislators or the sovereign. Rousseau would, in one sense, redemocratise the commons by rendering the ‘common good’ the object of the general will. The ‘common good’ identifies with what is common between the particular interests of the citizens, turning the sovereignty of the general will against the monopoly of the state (Dardot and Laval 2014, 30, 241-242, 385). Thus, Rousseau prioritised anew the concept of the common as the self-instituting power of the people, which would take an economic turn in the Ricardo school of socialists and the work of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and Marx.

Marx, in particular, radicalised the content of the common by integrating the economy into the ‘common good.” Contra the separation of the economy from the ‘common good’ and the representation of the latter by the state, adopted by both republicanism and liberalism, Marx locates in the primitive communism of tribal societies the socio-economic model of the free association of producers that would replace capitalism and state despotism with future communism (Dardot and Laval 2014, 67).

The last two centuries have witnessed the emergence of a post-Marxist and post-foundational political ontology of the commons (Marchart 2007). Following the rupture with the philosophical foundations of modernity brought about by Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, a number of authors have embraced a post-Heideggerian notion of community and the common with the aim of ‘commoning the political; that is, refiguring politics in light of an ontological sense of coexistence, aiming to clear the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy.

Drawing on the conceptual difference between the ‘political and ‘politics, first introduced by Carl Schmitt, a number of authors such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito elaborate on a concept of the common that welds together a plurality of singularities in a way that overcomes the fragmentation and exclusion of gated communities marked by fixed ethnic, cultural and ideological boundaries (Kioupkiolis 2017). Contrary to economics, the political is the ontological substratum that sustains the different areas of politics, including the economy, culture and state policies. Politics is the concrete instantiation of the political, which is the very ontological possibility of the social (Marchart 2007).

Nancy (1991; 2000), Agamben (1993) and Esposito (2011; 2012; 2013) attempt to address the ‘retreat of the political’ caused by the current hegemony of neoliberalism by bringing to the fore the political as an open, plural and ‘inessential commonality, thereby aiming to reinvigorate the politics of the common. Contrary to variants of liberal communitarianism (Freeden 1996) that conceive of the community in terms of tradition, family, state and nation, the common represents the being-with a plurality of singularities, thus opposing closed identities of blood, soil, community or self. The political brings to the fore an ontological community that determines politics in terms of a collective deliberation that constitutes the common accordingly.

Alexandros Kioupkiolis, among others, has pointed out the political limits of this existential thought. He argues that Nancy, Agamben and Esposito reproduce an abstract level of philosophising, detached from any actual politics (2017, 284). Conversely, he attempts to politicise the common by comparing the ontologies of the common with the political theory of hegemony set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

Laclau and Mouffe (1985) draw on the work of Schmitt and Gramsci, among others, to put forward a politics of the common predicated on the premises of hegemony and antagonism. Hegemony is the articulation of a precarious chain of equivalence among political alternatives, subject to constant change due to the antagonism inherent in the political. Conflict, power and representation are necessary components of democratic politics due to the unavoidable division between oppositional blocks.

In Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic politics, the commons refers to a multiplicity of spaces, social relations, movements, forms of identification and democratic practices, which retains its partial autonomy with regard to the ever-changing hegemonic articulation of the social (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 176-193). Kioupkiolis (2017, 300) detects a tension, however, between the hegemony of a particular chain of equivalence and the autonomy of the commons. The hegemony of hierarchy is the cause and effect of uneven power, which contrasts the plurality and horizontality of the commons. To mitigate the tension, he situates hegemony and autonomy at different sites of the political, calling for the post-hegemonic alignment of the former with the latter.

Post-hegemony is the democracy of the common that seeks to balance out hegemony and autonomy.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004) were the first to dissolve the misconception of the commons as certain properties or natural resources by introducing the notion of the common in the singular, thereby describing the peer production of the multitude, that is, a network of individuals spontaneously self-organising around common resources. The common stands beyond the private and public sphere of capitalism and the state respectively. It is not so much about destroying or protecting the commons, but about producing the common as the trans-historical political principle of governing nature and society according to collective rules and norms.

David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (2015, 1-12) describe the commons as shared resources, co-governed by their user community, according to the rules and norms of that community. They (2015, 1-12) emphasise the activity of commoning as a social process. The commons is neither the resource nor the community that determines protocols for its stewardship, but the dynamic interaction between all these elements. The term commoning, popularised by historian Peter Linebaugh, signifies the relationship between physical resources and the communities that utilise them and depend upon them for essential human needs. Massimo De Angelis (2017, 119) defines the commons as social systems in which resources are pooled by a community of subjects engaging in commoning, that is, the self-governing and reproducing of the community and the resources. Therefore, the commons consists of three elements: 1) the common-pool resources or common wealth, 2) the community and 3) commoning.

Dyer-Witheford (2006) and Gibson and Graham (1996; 2006) champion the circulation of the commons alongside the capitalist economy with the aim of transforming the latter into a post-capitalist economy. In the same vein, Bauwens and Kostakis (Scholz 2016b, 163) treat the commons as ‘a new logic of collaboration between networks of people who freely organise around a common goal using shared resources, and market orientated entities that add value on top of or alongside them. Arvidsson and Peitersen (2013) refer to the commons as productive publics that help rationalise the public sphere along ecological and democratic lines. Kioupkiolis (2019) approaches the common as a post-hegemonic regime of agonistic freedom, radical democracy, conflict and antagonism. Similarly, Dardot and Laval (2014) conceive of the common as a new type of collective right best exercised under regimes of direct democracy.

Yochai Benkler (2006) discovers this new type of right in the digital commons of the Internet and free/open source software. For Benkler, the commons constitute a third institutional axis of civil society that coexists alongside capitalism and the state. He introduces the term ‘commons-based peer production’ to demarcate a non-market sector of information, knowledge and cultural production, not treated as private property but as an ethic of open sharing, self-management and cooperation between peers having access to fixed capital, namely computers and software (2006, 59-90).

The commons are also often used with a neoliberal connotation. Corporate terms such as ‘flat hierarchies, ‘community spirit, ‘the sharing economy, ‘consumer tribes’ and ‘the collaborative economy’ are euphemisms and marketing buzzwords that aim to exploit commons-based peer production. Neoliberalism occasionally manages to infuse a competitive mentality into the commons themselves, alienating them into extractive enterprises adopting capitalist criteria.

On the flipside, several values of the commons such as common ownership, egalitarianism and collective self-government throb at the heart of communism. Yet the commons are at odds with several features of orthodox communism such as the centrality of the state and the party, top-down direction, totalitarian control, authoritarianism, violence, terror and the idolatry of leaders. Therefore, the signifier is not up for resignification, since it contrasts with the self-instituting power of the people, advanced here as the quintessential concept of the common.

Paradoxically, the digital commons meet with neoliberalism at the crossroads of cyber-libertarianism and cyber-collectivism. Whereas cyber-libertarianism advocates for a minimal state that protects the social and economic freedom of the individual to voluntarily reach mutual, consent-based, online agreements, cyber-collectivism embraces a state that promotes the cybernetic ‘general will’ or ‘common good’ (Thierer 2009). Maximum freedom and autonomy for the individual are common moral values within cyber-libertarianism and cyber-collectivism. But the digital commons part ways from both cyber-libertarianism and cyber-collectivism by opposing capitalism and the state. By reformatting the mechanisms of managerial hierarchies, property rights, contracts and prices, the digital commons play out in a variety of formats ranging from networked socialism to spontaneous networked anarchism or anarcho-communism (Benkler 2006; Wright 2009).

Ultimately, the concept of the common as the self-instituting power of the people today has three major and often entangled interpretations: a liberal, a reformist and an anti-capitalist. Yet all three interpretations falter to a lesser or greater degree upon the problem of collective action, formalised today by neoliberalism.

1.2 Neoliberalism and the Problem of Collective Action

The task of this chapter is to explore the problem of collective action posed by neoclassical economics which sustains the bedrock of neoliberalism, which, according to Michel Foucault (2004), is a new form of governmental reason, expanding the corporate model into state management. After exposing the problem of collective action in the normative framework of neoliberalism (1.3), the chapter goes on to introduce a number of challenges to neoclassical economics posed by non-mainstream currents of economic thought (1.4). The task of the latter section is to highlight some crucial heterodox economic points of view that could support a commons-orientated transition.

1.3 The Tragedy of the Commons

Aristotle (1932, Book II, ch. 3) observed long ago that individual interest often prevails over what is considered common to the greater number. Thomas Hobbes’s parable of man in a state of nature indicates that the innate selfishness of humans culminates in a war of all against all, whence the need for a Leviathan state to settle conflict and prevent civil war. Most recently, Garret Hardin (1968) introduced the famous “Tragedy of the Commons to pose the free-rider problem in economics. He called on us to picture a pasture open to all, in which each herder acts as a self-interested actor, aiming to maximise his/her gain by adding more and more animals for grazing. Self-interest alone eventually results in overgrazing and pasture depletion. Hardin’s metaphor has been often formalised as a prisoner’s dilemma game expanding from economics to international relations and politics. To address the alleged tragedy, Hardin advocates for private-public control of common-pool resources, which resonates today with neoliberalism, that is, a contemporary version of economic liberalism.

The crux of the classical economic liberal argument is that the basic motive of behaviour is self-interest, the unintended consequences of which generate common welfare (Smith 1977/1776). By trying to maximise her own benefit via commerce and entrepreneurship, each individual unwittingly serves the common good. Unfettered markets are the most efficient means of allocating scarce resources, ensuring that everybody does what they are best suited for and gets what they deserve. Value derives from scarcity and, hence, is confronted by an opportunity cost, that is, the benefit one misses out by choosing one alternative over another. Unrestricted individual exchange guarantees the flow of scarce resources to the highest valued uses. Collective action, on the other hand, cannot produce the ‘spontaneous order of the market’ due to a lack of the information necessary to coordinate economic activity (Hayek 1944). Collective action either planned by the state or by groups misallocates resources, resulting in societal malfunction.

Classical economic liberal responses to the problem of collective action combine Hobbes’s Leviathan approach - central command and control - with Smith’s theory of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market that matches supply and demand through property rights and contracts enforced by the state. Cycles of the Leviathan state and the invisible hand of the market intersect historically at the overlapping peripheries of liberal democracy and the market economy, which demarcate multiple variants of state capitalism.

Neoclassical economics built on classical liberalism’s ethics of individualism to construe a utilitarian theory of economics that laid the moral foundation for neoliberalism. David Hume and Jeremy Bentham introduced the notion of utility to argue that each individual aims to satisfy her economic preferences. This ethical idea spilled over into economics to replace the labour theory of value with the theory of utility maximisation. Whereas in classical economics value is synonymous with the labour necessary for the production of a