The 'Capitalist' Commons as Plan B to Save the System From Fundamentalist Neoliberalism?

Michel Bauwens, The P2P Foundation

In an extensive essay, George Caffentzis thinks we must be weary of commons that are conceived as saving the system of capital from fundamentalist neoliberalism, and believes we must learn to distinguish between 'capitalist commons' and 'anti-capitalist commons'. The essay examines the Zapatistas, Live8 and the Hobohemia Commons of the 30′s as case studies helping us distinguish one from the other.

* Source: The Future of 'The Commons': Neoliberalism's 'Plan B' or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital? George Caffentzis

Excerpted from George Caffentzis:

Part 1: The Capitalist Commons:

"Ostrom's reliance on social capital (the commonism in capitalism) to explain commons behaviour is part of a tendency among capitalist intellectuals that developed as a complement to neoliberalism.

The apparent triumph of neoliberalism with its aim to totalise the reign of capital has created its own reaction, that is, the conviction that there is a necessary 'commons' to capitalism itself. Thus the notion of 'social capital' and the importance of 'community' and 'trust' have been brought to the fore at the very moment of the so-called triumph of the market.28 In fact, this led to a re-recognition of a social ur-level before contract and 'the market' that structures them (which had been discussed for the first time by David Hume in Scotland during the eighteenth century) and is a sine qua non of capitalist accumulation.

These friends of capitalism revealed that neoliberalism was capitalism's own worst enemy, especially when not controlled by the threat of an alternative. For capitalism can reach, both theoretically and practically, what I call the 'Midas Limit' (when all transactions are based on pure utility maximising without any concern for the poorly sanctioned rules of fair exchange, and hence are surfeited with fraud and deception, or in other words, individualism gone wild). Such a generalised condition threatens the system's own survival as illustrated by the periodic crises produced by a generalised 'lack of trust' from the days of the burst of the South Sea Bubble when the system reached one of the first Midas limits. Some have speculated that this limit was again reached in the so-called 'dot.com' era of the late 1990s when Enron and Tyco executives (among thousands of others) were largely looking to the value of their own stock portfolios rather than the long-term health of the corporations they were running. There is little doubt that an even more dangerous Midas limit was reached once more in the 'subprime' mortgage crisis of 2007 that has led to the freezing of credit and a worldwide recession in 2009. This era has given what might be thought to be oxymoronic creatures, capitalist moralists or business ethicists, a new burst of employment in lamenting the 'state of the world' and drawing up new rules to generate trust in the executors of capital's will.

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