Capitalism and the Commons

On the Commons

As the Italian ‘autonomist’ Marxist tradition has insisted for a long time, digital capitalism builds on the commons in new and important ways. Examples are the ‘collective intelligence’ that makes contemporary corporations tick; the shared knowledge and innovation that proliferate in global value chains; common intellectual property created in cooperation between corporations and public research institutions; the importance of open source software for the business models of companies like IBM or Amazon; and, last but not least, the forms of everyday language and affect that support the revenues of Facebook and similar social media platforms (Terranova, 2000).

At the same time, the commons are central to emerging alternatives to the capitalist value form. Already at the turn of the century commons-based peer production had grown to account for the lion’s share of global software production, making software effectively a common good (Benkler, 2006). The phenomenon has since expanded to include a range of open software, open knowledge and open hardware resources. Today blockchain technologies promise to empower autonomous forms of productive organization via alternative currencies or other devices (Fumagalli, 2017). In policy discourse, the collaborative or ‘sharing economy’ – building on such commons in some form – has been invested with a plurality of hopes for economic development and urban renewal, as well as novel political alternatives (Schultz, 2016). The global commons movement has been significantly empowered by digital technologies and has united struggles for the defence of natural and land commons along with the ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ life forms that they support. Together these struggles have made the commons central to contemporary radical politics (Hardt and Negri, 2009).

The growing centrality of the commons to anti-capitalist struggles has inspired a thread of social theory that views the commons as a negation of capitalism and markets, or even as the source of a ‘rejection of all hierarchies and inequalities and all principles of othering and exclusion’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: 95). Some even see the commons as a possible source of a new social model organized around sharing and voluntary participation: commoning, or even commonism (De Angelis, 2017). Albeit in less theoretically sophisticated ways, popular authors like Paul Mason (2015) and Jeremy Rifkin (2015) have proposed that the new affirmation of the commons as a core productive institution in the digital economy will more or less inevitably lead to an overcoming of the capitalist mode of production in favour of an as of yet undefined ‘post-capitalism’.

However, ever since they ‘came out’ with free/open source software in the late 1970s, the digital commons have also inspired an archipelago of market-oriented enterprises (Bauwens, 2005). Since the turn of the century such small-scale, labour-intensive and commons-based enterprises have become an alternative for people who no longer find or desire a place within the shrinking opportunity structure of the mainstream capitalist economy. This is the case for knowledge workers who are forced to go freelance, who embark on start-up ventures, or who launch neo-artisan craft enterprises, notably in the food economy (Ocejo, 2017). They can do this because freely available digital media, open source solutions and skill-sharing in co-working spaces or other kinds of communities have substantially reduced the capital requirements necessary to engage even in advanced forms of business activity (Arvidsson, 2019). It is also the case for popular entrepreneurs in the global ‘pirate’ or ‘shanzhai’ economy who rely on the fact that global supply chains have made the knowledge and skills necessary to engage also in advanced forms of commodity production common to an unprecedented extent. Empowered by freely available digital technologies and e-commerce platforms, ‘suitcase entrepreneurs’ connect Chinese factories with overcapacity to a global popular demand for cheap cell phones, gaming consoles or knock-off branded footwear (Mathews et al., 2012).

These two parts of the new commons-based economy – ‘peer-to-peer’ and ‘poor-to-poor’, to use Alain Tarrius' (2015) terms – are both marked by low earnings, low capital requirements, and long working hours. Actors frequently combine market orientation with an orientation to alternative values like ‘authenticity’, ‘impact’, or ‘freedom’. Such novel commons-based petty production mostly unfolds outside of the financial flows of global capitalism.

This new commons-based economy might provide an alternative to a capitalist economy in what seems to be accelerating decline (Streeck, 2014). This is already the case for popular consumers. (In the last decade, it was Chinese shanzhai or ‘pirate’ phones, not Nokia or Apple, that provided access to the internet to consumers in India and Africa; Zhu and Shi, 2010.) In the future it might provide new forms of resilience in the face of a growing ecological crisis. Whatever the case will be, its emergence over the last decades problematizes the straightforward opposition between commons, solidarity and sharing on the one hand, and markets and capitalism on the other. We need to return to these concepts, however briefly, before embarking on the historical argument.

The 19th century, when most of our theories of capitalism were formed, was a time when capitalism advanced though the expansion of markets and the destruction of traditional privileges and monopolies (Polanyi, 1957). It was also a time when inter-capitalist competition was intense. The English industrial revolution that provided the context for Marx’s analysis of capitalism was based on relatively small companies engaged in intense competition (Mokyr, 2010). With this experience in mind, it is easy to equate capitalism with markets, a view that has become even more plausible by recent decades of neoliberal reforms whereby marketization has invested public services as well as growing areas of everyday life. However, contemporary capitalism is increasingly organized around large and powerful corporations and financial actors and, lately, platform unicorns like Uber or Amazon. They do not engage in market competition as much as they seek to sit on and own markets. In the 20th century, and ever more so in the last decades, capitalism has come to rest on monopoly power rather than market competition (Baran and Sweezy, 1966; Foster, 2011).

In this situation, a Braudelian perspective is more plausible. To Braudel capitalism is not the same thing as markets. Instead, capitalism developed historically as a series of attempts to control and regulate markets on the part of small cliques of powerful interests, like the Venetian and Genoese traders who fought it out over the control of trading routes in the 13th century, the large agricultural entrepreneurs that took control over the wool trade in 16th-century England, or the Italian bankers who shaped the European financial economy in the 14th to 15th centuries. Markets are universal in recorded history, going back at least as far as the origins of urban civilization. Capitalism is more recent, and is usually imposed ‘from above’ in some way, mostly via the exercise of state power. This perspective opens up for the possibility of non-capitalist markets. Braudel acknowledges this. Looking at the Italian textile districts in Prato while composing the final words to his three-volume work on Capitalism and Civilization, he hinted at the persistence of such a mid-level economy, different from ‘true capitalism’ in its small-scale and egalitarian nature and its vicinity to the social fabric – to the longue durée of everyday life (Braudel, 1984: 630; cf. Deka, 2018).

Marx also discusses such pre-capitalist market-oriented relations of production as ‘petty production’ (or ‘petty industry’). He defines this as a condition where capital concentration has not yet proceeded beyond the limits of individual property; where ‘the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 541). While private property of the means of production remains an essential precondition, contemporary historians of ‘alternatives to mass production’ have stressed how such petty production has also relied on various forms of commons (Sabel and Zetlin, 1985). This can be a matter of the common skills of the Marshallian industrial district where ‘the mysteries of the trade become no mysteries, but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously’ (Marshall, 1922 [1891]: 271), or the ‘sharing’ and ‘community’ painstakingly achieved by contemporary co-working spaces (Bandinelli, 2019). In other words, market-oriented petty production has not simply been based on private ownership of the means of production but has also drawn on various kinds of commons. But what are the commons?

In the literature, there are essentially two definitions. First, ‘the commons’ are used to signify a resource that is freely available. Thus water is (mostly) common, as is air. This simple definition (Commons 1) has acquired renewed importance in contemporary Marxist analyses of digital capitalism where it is suggested that value feeds off the common (il comune) in the form of common linguistic, affective and cognitive resources (Negri, 2016). Similarly, eco-Marxists have stressed the role of capitalist metabolisms of common natural resources (Moore, 2015).

The second definition views the commons as an institution. In contrast to Garrett Hardin’s classic idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, Elinor Ostrom defines the commons as a third mode of property, distinct from that of markets or the state, which allows for the collective governance of ‘a resource system with some degree of success over a long period of time’ (Ostrom, 1990: 1). Commons are thus not simply natural givens or resources that are free for all but are grounded in social systems, usually systems of production, which define and regulate them. As Elinor Ostrom argued, such social systems or ‘communities’ regulate the commons; they define rules of access and norms of common property and enforce these rules and norms through collective sanctions. They distinguish commons from the kinds of open access to which, instead, Hardin’s argument might more plausibly apply.

Contemporary scholarship has expanded on Ostrom’s insights to suggest that communities do not simply regulate the commons – they also define them and give them value. What De Angelis (2017) calls commoning creates a network of symbolic meanings and social relations that define the value of common goods and enable them to function as assets in relation to some kind of productive goal. Seen this way, the commons also come with a distinct logic of value. In capitalism things become valuable to the extent to which they can contribute to the process of capitalist accumulation. This presupposes that they can be rendered commensurate with other things, either through market exchange or through the administrative logic of the corporation (or for that matter the algorithmic logic of the platform). On the commons things become valuable to the extent to which they can contribute to the distinct goals and aims that are inherent in the process of commoning that sustains them. These might be very different from the goals and aims that inform other kinds of commoning. The logic of value of the commons is thus based on singularity rather than equivalence. Indeed, as Peter Linebaugh summarizes a perspective that has been prevalent among many cultural historians of the Polanyian ‘great transformation’, starting with E.P. Thompson:

The enclosures were not only a force in the creation of the land market but they destroyed the spiritual claim on the soil and prepared for proletarization of the common people, subjecting them to multifaceted labor disicpline, the elimination of cakes and ale, the limitation of sports, the shunning of dance the abolition of festivals and the strict discipline over the male and female bodies. The land and the body lost their magic. (Linebaugh, 2008: 51)

If we take this perspective on capitalism and the commons, as frameworks within which things can become valuable assets, we can relate the commons to Braudel’s concept of the longue durée of everyday life. The commons are the ways in which the relational and affective framework of everyday life – not always moving at a glacial speed as for Braudel, but perhaps changing quickly in a time of digitally enhanced ‘social acceleration’ (Rosa, 2013) – enter into productive processes (not necessarily capitalist ones). Such commoning – the biopolitical shaping of subjectivities and value regimes – can occur as part of anti-capitalist resistance or, as we will come back to later, it can happen within the capitalist production process itself. Historically such communing has also occurred around market-oriented petty production.

The Medieval Commons

In recent decades, historians have come to pay new attention to the role of the rural commons and their urban equivalents, in the form of guilds and fraternities, both in the transition to capitalism and as harbingers of ‘modernity’ more generally. In earlier scholarship the origin of the commons was often attributed to tradition or ‘custom’, like the ancient traditions of Germanic tribes who, as E.A. Thompson suggested (along with Tacitus before him), lived in a society where ‘the private ownership of land was unknown’ and where the soil was worked collectively (Thompson, 1966: 74; cf. Anderson, 1975: 107). In this tradition the commons were understood as residuals of earlier, more ‘primitive’ forms of property that had survived into the modern age: a view that was shared by liberal promoters of the 18th-century enclosures as well as by some of their critics, like, notably, Friedrich Engels (Bravo and De Moor, 2008: 160, cf. Linebaugh, 2008). Although the commons may certainly have ancient roots, contemporary scholarship agrees that they underwent a process of formalization and institutionalization as part of the consolidation of European feudalism.

‘Feudalism’ remains a contested concept. However, there is little doubt that a distinct institutional arrangement emerged in Western Europe around the turn of the last millennium. The reaffirmation of social order and the strengthening of royal power in the 11th century allowed for a demographic upswing and an increase in commerce and communications; cities grew and, as Marc Bloch (1961) notes in his classic work, the social fabric grew denser. This new density of people and communication led to a series of mutually reinforcing processes. It created an increased pressure on land and other natural resources. Early merchant capitalists connected Europe to the Chinese-centred ‘world-economy’. Centres of manufacturing grew in Flanders, Lombardy and Picardy. This ‘commercial revolution’ allowed for rising prosperity, which was concentrated in Italy but spread across Central and Northern Europe (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Lopez, 1976). The intensification of commerce led to a new importance of cities and markets, along with the rise of new strata of urban and rural ‘petty producers’. It also led to a growing cultural centrality of towns and promoted a shift in the relational modality, a sort of social modernization if you like, expressed in the emergence of new institutions, like the monastic orders or the fraternities that were based on free association rather than kinship (De Moor, 2008: 179). This allowed the Church to mobilize ‘the little people’ in ideologically motivated resistance to arbitrary seigneurial power. Robert Moore goes as far as suggesting that the ensuing ‘Peace Movement’, organized around itinerant preachers who mobilized the power of relics, constituted a ‘First European Revolution’ from which feudalism emerged as a (more or less) balanced settlement of claims and interests between peasants, lords, the Church and the growing strata of market-oriented petty producers (Moore, 2000: 51; Wallerstein, 1992: 581).

The commons were part of this settlement. In the countryside the rural commons became an integral element of the feudal manorial system comprising the land of the lord, the private plots of peasants and the common lands of the village. In part this was simply a consequence of the greater population density. Already Perry Anderson noted (in passing) something of the sort, attributing the rise of the English rural commons to the development of feudalism in which ‘scattered Celtic hamlets gave way to nucleated villages in which the individual property of peasant households was combined with the collective co-aration of open fields’ (Anderson, 1975: 124). The commons were an essential part of the village economy, supplying a necessary foundation for the reproduction of the feudal workforce, as well as a source of popular empowerment and opposition.

In the following centuries population increase coincided with the rising levels of exploitation that derived from new forms of royal taxation, together with more intense seigneurial rent extraction. This process tended to increase seigneurial interest in enclosing the commons as well as peasant interest in defending them (Birrell, 1987). The result was a cycle of peasant struggles where traditional common rights were defended and, when successful, codified and made explicit in new ways, and where new ones were introduced. The resulting commons, often highly complicated arrangements of varying rights of access, should be seen as ‘settlements of conflicts that arose between the lords and the inhabitants of a village’ in the context of the ‘great European reclamations that took place during the tenth to the twelfth centuries’ (De Moor, 2008: 185). Sometimes this process included the inscription of some of these settlements into law, as in the case of the English Magna Carta and the accompanying Forest Charter of 1215.

The development of the feudal economy thus put the commons at the heart of economic exploitation as well as social struggles. This tended to transform them from ‘Commons 1’ – more or less freely available resources with little or no legal or customary value, as was the case in the ‘affluent society’ of Carolingian Europe (Moore, 2000: 45ff.) – into ‘Commons 2’ – collectively enforced property arrangements with culturally sanctioned forms of economic and identitarian value, or ‘magic’.

The urban guilds that flourished in the same period can also be understood to have antecedents in classical institutions like the Roman collegia. However, they flourished as part of the development of market relations in the 11th to 14th centuries, leading to the proliferation of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of such organizations by the year 1300 (De Moor, 2008: 191). The flourishing of guilds was linked to the new social environment of the growing cities. Attracting serfs that had fled or somehow been purged from a countryside facing intensified seigneurial pressure, or other ‘masterless men’ – to use Norman Cohn’s (1961) old expression – that sought their fortune as traders or craftsmen, the cities exemplified the new prevalence of free association over kinship. Along with fraternities and religious orders, guilds provided a space where new identities and rule systems could be articulated. These would serve to regulate and improve productive and commercial activities, ensure quality and reduce insecurity. This applied in an economic sense as guilds were able to fix prices, set the rules of market exchange and provide a number of welfare services for their members. It also applied in an existential sense. Like the new monastic orders, guilds provided a new meaningful framework for life, endowing it with goals and aims, along with the secrets and rituals that were able to sustain them (Lucassen et al., 2008).

And while the guilds certainly functioned to protect against the risks of the market, they also supported the development of a new market society. They did this by regulating market transactions, but also by providing a source of social capital and a shared identity for traders and artisans, thus contributing to altering their status. Importantly, they also functioned as a source of significant legal developments. Along with the universities to which they were sometimes closely linked, the guilds drove the re-discovery of Roman law and its development into a new lex mercatorioum, for the regulation of commerce, and by extension the civic life of towns as well. As Avner Grief (2006) has argued, these new organizations were fundamental for the formation of an infrastructure for the modern market economy. Indeed guilds or guild-like organizations are a structural feature of many pre-capitalist economic arrangements, based on labour-intensive production for relatively egalitarian markets. Similar ‘Smithian’ productive arrangements marked pre-capitalist Europe as well as China, India and the Islamic empire. In all these contexts, guilds or guild-like organizations served to insure against market insecurity, guarantee quality, regulate labour markets and, importantly, codify and protect knowledge commons in the form of shared standards for skills and craftsmanship (Gustafsson, 1987: 2ff.)

It might be justified to distinguish between the emergence of the rural commons as reactions to intensified exploitation and the emergence of the urban guilds as, instead, institutionalizations of a new more ‘modern’ relational modality typical of an early market society. However, the picture is not that simple. The urban guilds many times rose to defend petty producers from both seigneurial pressure and the pressure from city governments. Some took the side of the oppressed in important social struggles, such as the revolt of the artisan guilds in Ghent, or the Ciompi rebellion in Florence in 1381.

Conversely, the rural commons were also an effect of the marketization of rural society. The penetration of market relations into the countryside favoured new forms of free association and facilitated the cooperation between village communities. This drove the emergence of a new ‘rural middle class’, like the English gentry that used the commons as a resource for market participation and in affirming their position against feudal lords (Maddicott, 1984: 25).

In the European Middle Ages the relation between commons and markets was complicated. On the one hand, guilds and commons developed as a consequence of resistance to marketization, and for rural commons in particular, resistance to the intensified seigneurial exploitation that resulted from this. On the other hand, the commons and in particular the guilds enabled the expansion of a new market society, both by offering the kinds of protection that enabled market participation and by providing the legal and institutional framework necessary for the expansion of commerce and manufacture.

However, the commons were not simply an economic institution. They also supported a new ideological outlook centred on the notion of individual freedom and social equality, what Antonio Negri calls a ‘first modernity’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 70 ff.) These ideas were present already in the early millenarian movements inspired by the thought of Joachim of Fiore. They would inspire the humanist thought that flourished in prosperous Italian city-states in the 13th and 14th centuries, culminating in the Renaissance. In the wake of the Black Death they would guide radical social revolts leading up to the Protestant Reformation that emerged out of the German peasant struggles of the 16th century. In the English 17th century, these ideas guided the defence against growing enclosures on the part of movements like the Levellers and the Diggers, who would invoke, among other things, the Magna Carta as a bulwark against new forms of appropriation and exploitation (Rees, 2017: 55, cf. Cohn, 1961; Hill, 1972). Throughout the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, the guilds along with fraternities and social movements would support the development of a modern civil society, along with imaginations of modernity centred on ideas of freedom and justice (Black, 1984). Such early commonism was based on a vision of a more egalitarian commons-based market society. Here market exchange and communal sharing were thought to be complementary, and commercial exchange was understood as an integral component of a new civil society founded on reciprocity, freedom and a new kind of secular individualism. This vision was supported by the guilds and new universities that acted as sources of legal and institutional innovation. It also affected the development of Franciscan economic thought and inspired innovations like the Monti di Pietà and the rural monti frummentari that combined an embrace of markets with new kinds of solidarity and reciprocity. Arguably it remained influential also for 18th-century thinkers like Genovesi, Ferguson and Smith, who envisioned a kind of market society that was radically different from the industrial capitalism that was emerging around them as they wrote. This tradition became an important source of the ‘Protestant ethic’ dear to Weber and his followers (Linebaugh, 2008; cf. Bruni and Zamagni, 2004; Nuccio, 1983; Rothschild, 2013).

The commons developed as part of a process of social acceleration put in motion by feudalism, and as that system entered into crisis, intensified social struggles would both invoke and strengthen the institution of the commons as the fundamental element to a social vision that combined market exchange and new kinds of solidarity and civic culture. This vision did by no means always correspond to reality – on the contrary, social inequalities and levels of exploitation intensified during the growing crisis of feudalism starting in the mid-13th century and again in the mid-15th century after a brief period of higher levels of social equality due to labor shortages. In the early modern period, growing market size led to a proletarization of guild workers and growing social divisions between masters and apprentices, as evidenced by the London revolts of the 1640s (Riess, 2016: 43 ff.). In retrospect, however, the guilds and the commons came to stand for a nostalgic vision of pre-industrial life untouched by capitalist exploitation. Indeed, Bravo and Moor (2008: 160) suggest that the idea that the commons embodied more egalitarian life forms was consolidated in the 18th century, as a response to an advancing capitalist mode of production.

As Perry Anderson (1974: 203 ff.) concluded long ago, the transition to capitalism was not revolutionary in the stereotypical sense of a head-on confrontation of opposing social forces. Rather the relations of production changed slowly and gradually, long before a new mode of production could consolidate as a more or less complete societal model. Commons-based petty producers were central to this process, developing an institutional as well as technological framework – particularly in pre-industrial manufacturing – along with a vision of modernity that pointed beyond feudalism.

Capitalism and the Commons

All participants in the complicated ‘transition debates’ that raged in the 1960s and 1970s agree that the petty producers played a crucial role in the transition to capitalism. Exactly how that played out is too complicated and varied a story to reproduce here (cf. Sweezy et al., 1976; Wallerstein, 1992; Heller, 2011; Moore, 2002). There is also general agreement on the fact that the overall affirmation of a capitalist society – as opposed to the mere existence of capitalist institutions and dispositions – rested on the proletarization of petty producers and the enclosure of the remaining commons and the widespread destruction of the alternative life forms that they supported (particularly by targeting women as ‘repositories of communal knowledge’; Federici, 2018). With this came a transformation of the radicalism of the Renaissance ‘First Modernity’ into a commercial mentality marked by the overall framework of ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson, 1973).

In Europe, the enclosure of the rural commons started with the early commercialization of agriculture in Tudor England and lasted well into the end of the 19th century (Bravo and De Moor, 2008: 160). Indeed at a global level the process is still going on. Since the 1980s the New Enclosures that accompanied neoliberal globalization have enacted various measures, from IMF imposed structural adjustment programs to voluntarily adopted ‘deregulation’ of welfare states. This has led to a massive commodification of land and natural resources (notably in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc), along with the privatization of public goods like housing and pensions.

The legal destruction of the guilds instead set off in earnest in the 18th century and intensified during the industrial revolution. This process not only entailed the triumph of industrial mass production but also the defeat of a deeply engrained moral economy grounded in the ‘magic’ of the commons as collective institutions (Thompson, 1971; De Munck, 2011). Bonneuil and Fressoz (2017: 258) go so far as to suggest that the defeat of this pre-industrial economic imaginary constituted a decisive step towards our entry into the condition of the Anthropocene.

However, the affirmation of a capitalist civilization did not simply enclose and destroy the old commons. It also created new ones. These capitalist commons emerge at three levels. First, we have the organizational commons. The capitalist corporation guarantees the communal governance of complex production processes, replacing the market with the ‘visible hand’ of management (Chandler, 1977), and accomplishes the (partial) socialization of ownership and risk-sharing within the capitalist class. The personal property of the single capitalist is replaced by a number of ‘capitalist commoners’, united in the joint stock company. Indeed the term ‘socialism of capital’ was used by late 19th-century observers in relation to the rise of corporations (cf. Beverungen et al., 2013: 484; Caffentzis, 2012).

A second related level consists of what Marx called the ‘surplus value commons’ whereby surplus value is socialized and divided within the capitalist class, starting with the joint-stock corporation and leading up to today’s financial markets where surplus value is appropriated globally and distributed in ways that are largely ‘beyond measure’ (Fumagalli, 2017; Orlean, 2009). Negri famously understood the Keynesian welfare state in these terms. Through this arrangement, surplus value is divided between capital and labor (according to the universal ‘measure’ of the labor theory of value). At the same time, capital achieves a ‘social organization of […] despotism [diffusing] the organization of exploitation throughout society, in the form of a new planning-based State that […] directly reproduces the figure of the factory’ (Negri, 1994 [1967]: 45).

Third and most importantly, the capitalist commons derive from the creation of genuinely capitalist life-forms. These lived capitalist commons result from the re-mediation of productive and social relations put in motion by their subsumption under the logic of capitalist accumulation. Marx saw this clearly. In the famous passage from the Grundrisse retrospectively entitled ‘The Fragment on Machinery’, he suggested that as productive cooperation becomes more complex – and the virtue of the factory system is precisely that of making new, more complex productive cooperation possible – production tends to rely more on skills and competences that are specific to the production process itself. The worker apprehends these things by becoming part of its productive ‘community’, ‘by virtue of his presence as a social body’, and she creates them through her interaction with others in the factory environment (Marx, 1973 [1939]: 705). Marx suggested that as capitalist production becomes more complex and interconnected, such genuinely social knowledge becomes the main source of technical innovation, embodied in machinery. A similar perspective affirmed itself for economists and management scholars during the 21st century, starting with the path-breaking work of Fritz Machlup (1973). The nurture of the corporate knowledge ‘Commons 2’ through managerial tactics that support continuous innovation, along with their legal protection through intellectual property law, becomes the secret to success in the capitalist game in what became known as the ‘knowledge economy’ (cf. Mattelart, 2000). However, Marx also suggested that this common knowledge would become a growing source of surplus value, eventually marginalizing ‘the simple theft of labour time’. This would empower the working class since, even though it might be embodied in machinery and the common environment of the corporation more generally, such ‘general intellect’ emerges from how the life-in-common of the working class has been organized by capital. Indeed to the Italian autonomist tradition it is the general intellect of the working class that acts as the prime mover of capitalist innovation, contrasting the basic capitalist tendency towards the consolidation of monopoly power (Tronti, 1966).

The New Petty Producers

While the guilds were dismantled early in the transition to industrial capitalism, the world of pre-capitalist petty production left an enduring heritage in the form of networked small-scale artisan workshops. Such ‘guild or yeoman industrialization’, building on a ‘communitarian world of petty producers’, would remain influential in some sectors like advanced textiles and precision metal works throughout the first half of the 20th century (Sabel and Zetlin, 1985: 152, 174). It would resurface as part of post-Fordist flexible specialization regimes in the 1980s. Already in the 1970s observers pointed at the Italian industrial districts, relying on a combination of traditional craft skills and new numerically controlled machinery as manifestations of such a ‘not properly capitalist economy’ (Bagnasco, 1977). Similar forms of organization based on the networking and geographical concentration of a multitude of small scale, capital poor operations using commons skills were also prevalent in Chinese electronics or automobile parts districts in the 1990s and 2000s (Lee et al., 2016). Since then, similar forms of commons-based petty production have become a recourse for the new outcasts generated by the crisis of digital capitalism.

The disappearance of stable industrial jobs in the West (and increasingly also in Asia as factories automate), and the transformation of the countryside in Africa and South America due to new enclosures along with climate change, is creating a new generation of outcasts without much to expect from traditional life forms. Increasingly they are joined by middle-class university graduates, who are forced into freelance careers. Together these new ‘masterless men’ have given rise to a new sector of commons-based petty production.

At its more popular end we find the ubiquitous cell phone charging and repair shops that proliferate on street markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and rely on open source software and peer-to-peer hacker forums (Deka, 2018). The global pirate or shanzhai economy of petty traders that connect Chinese factories to Parisian banlieue markets via Istanbul or Dubai relies on the common nature of the skills needed for even advanced forms of commodity production, along with open design practices and new collaborative business models (Gao, 2011). At the knowledge worker end we have a global wave of start-ups, peer production communities, sharing economies and new artisanal businesses. Such knowledge worker petty production is mostly oriented towards immaterial ventures, the creation of business models, of new forms of software and digital services, or new forms of collaboration and collective action, as in the important crypto economy sector. (Although the proliferation of neo-artisanal ventures, particularly in the food economy, is also a significant aspect.) It relies heavily on the new digital commons in the forms of free or open source software, along with freely available communication and collaboration tools, often created or owned by capitalist corporations. Indeed the common availability of such tools has reduced the costs of launching an entrepreneurial venture by a factor of 100 in the first decade of the new millennium (Palmer, 2012).

This new strata of commons-based petty producers stand in a complex relation to capitalism. Like feudal lords who profited from taxing markets and fairs, capitalist corporations attempt to govern contemporary petty production in various ways. The venture capital system seeks to standardize innovation and utilize it for product development as well as financial speculation (Luise, 2019). The platform economy builds on organizing and owning markets for new kinds of simple commodity production (in the form of delivery services or freelance immaterial labor) and seeks to profit from taxing the transactions that occur (Srnicek, 2017). To a great extent the new petty producers have been an effect of capitalist restructuring: the hipster service economy is a result of the more sophisticated demands on the part of a new financial bourgeoisie; the proliferation of small-scale labor intensive workshops at the bottom end of supply chains is, or used to be, a consequence of the outsourcing of production. (Contemporary industry 4.0 programs are driving a re-concentration of basic commodity production to automated factories, particularly in China; Fai, 2018). However, there is also a tendency to create new autonomous value circuits. The shanzhai system prospered for almost a decade, supplying the world’s poorer consumers with cell phones and gaming consoles in ways that largely ignored the financial flows and legal claims of capitalist corporations. Today the crypto economy has generated a significant autonomous market for capital as well as a viable alternative systems for venture funding (see below).

This ambiguous relation to capitalism is perhaps clearest at the level of aspirations and mentalité. Almost universally, the new petty producers embrace entrepreneurship, business model thinking and market-based solutions. This is true even for the radical fringes, like Italy’s occupied social spaces that envision alternative markets (based on alternative currencies) as new ways to foster alternative life forms (Fumagalli and Braga, 2017). While the widespread acceptance of entrepreneurship and market solutions might be a consequence of decades of neoliberal governmentality, it does point beyond neoliberalism in important ways. Indeed, an important consequence of the spread of the ideal of the entrepreneurial self has been that the meaning and reach of entrepreneurship has expanded far beyond the economic domain. Lifestyles, political objectives or social causes can and do now lead to the creation of a business. For popular actors, entrepreneurship remains the only viable alternative to the drudgery of factory labour. For most, the aspiration is to set up your own business, to be your own man, to create a life that is a little better, a little more dignified and a little more meaningful. (Sopranzetti, 2017). To many knowledge workers the ‘bullshit’ nature of a corporate job becomes obvious after a few years and the aspiration is to do something else that is more fulfilling, creative, or simply freer (Graeber, 2018). Overall a common structure of feeling is emerging, not dissimilar to the civic economy of the medieval First Modernity, where entrepreneurship and markets are coupled to visions of a more egalitarian and transparent world. Like the ‘civic economy’ of 14th-century Franciscans, today’s petty producers imagine a decentralized market economy marked by transparency and relative equality. A world where economic action remains embedded in moral and civic responsibility, where ‘value sovereignty’ allows you to stay in the market while being true to your ethical aspirations.

Digitalization and capitalist restructuring have empowered new forms of petty production, and at the same time made them more central to the capitalist accumulation process (through outsourcing and the more recent proliferation of platform-based business models). As a result, most of this sector remains under the control of large corporations (just like medieval petty producers outside of the free cities remained largely controlled by feudal power, well into the 16th century). However, at the bottom of supply chains there are signs that commons-based markets are seeping out of the control of the capitalist value form. A similar seeping out is occurring at the level of aspirations, as the universal spread of entrepreneurship and market solutions is starting to support a wide range of value rationalities, including anti-capitalist ones. It is likely that the intensification of the crisis of capitalism, its accumulation of dysfunctionalities and its decreasing ability to live up to its promises will accelerate this process. At the same time declining productivity levels for knowledge work, the growth of graduate unemployment, and the ongoing digitalization of the pirate economy might lead to a convergence in productivity levels as well as world-views between popular and middle class petty producers. Indeed something similar has been going on in Shenzhens’ electronics districts or Bangkok’s fashion markets for a long time, joining impoverished university-educated designers or engineers with workers and small-scale bazaar traders in economies that are embedded in common value frameworks (Arvidsson and Niessen, 2015; Fernandez et al., 2016). If indeed contemporary capitalism is incompatible with the new planetary environment of the Anthropocene, then petty producers might once again provide an important impetus for systemic transition, as they did in the 14th century.

What will the outcome of this be? Four questions arise with the experience of the crisis of European feudalism in mind.

First, innovation. The commons-based petty producers soon became the most dynamic element of the medieval economy, pioneering new institutions, new forms of social organization and new methods of production. This was particularly evident after the disaster of the Black Death, where the guilds were instrumental in developing new kinds of capital-intensive productive techniques that could compensate for the lack of workers, and that contributed significantly to the development of manufacturing (Pamuk, 2007). Indeed Bois (1976) suggests that at least at the level of everyday life, the Renaissance might also be a result of the inability to contain bottom-up innovation as the relative power of workers increased and repressive state power was hollowed out. In the early modern period guilds acted as a substantial force of piecemeal, cumulative innovation, adapting existing technologies to the demands of expanding markets, as well as experimenting with mechanization (Epstein, 1998).

Today, commons-based, capital-poor organizations have become the most dynamic part of the digital economy. This was true already three decades ago as the ‘hacker’ counterculture (broadly speaking) along with free and open source software drove most of the innovations that turned the internet into a popular medium (Turner, 2010). Today start-ups, communities of peer production and social enterprises along with pirate entrepreneurs are the main force behind adapting digital technologies to popular needs. Corporations have acknowledged this, increasingly outsourcing innovation to their supply chains, to start-ups, and to their employees and consumers. With few exceptions, corporations seem to be rather averse to anything but incremental product innovation. The automobile industry is only slowly adapting to the need for electric vehicles, while maintaining the standards and formats of the petrol age. Digital companies seem to imagine that they can feed off an advertising-fuelled consumer economy forever, and so do most fast-moving consumer goods companies who, in some sectors like food and beverages, now find their business threatened by smaller, artisanal incumbents (Daneshku, 2018). The enormous cash holdings of contemporary corporations indicate that most of them find very little worth investing in. Instead, most investments go to the accumulation of so-called ‘intangible assets’ (mostly branding) that essentially signify building and securing market power (Foster, 2011). As even advanced productive technologies are becoming cheaper and more accessible – more Commons 1, in other words – it is likely that similar commons-based operators will cater to the new needs that arise as we go deeper into the tumultuous era of the Anthropocene. Will the needs of tomorrow’s food economy be met by organizations like RuralHack that develop cheap and accessible farm machinery based on open source technologies, by back-alley shanzhai entrepreneurs equipped with $1000 systems for genetic editing like CRISPR, or by corporate behemoths like Monsanto?

Second, will today’s petty producers build a new institutional framework to support the development of new relations of production, like the guilds and fraternities did in the Middle Ages? In the last two decades there has been a significant development of new institutions that facilitate commons-based production, whether oriented to markets or not. New forms of productive collaboration like co-working spaces, accelerators, fab-labs, or hacking spaces; new juridical formats like open source or creative commons licences and institutions that support new commons-based lifestyles, like co-living spaces and forms of collaborative consumption. So far, these institutions have struggled to secure economic viability for commons-based production (Arvidsson et al., 2016). More recently, however, guild-like institutional forms that support revenue sharing and new kinds of welfare systems have begun to emerge. These have been facilitated by blockchain technologies and the easy access to complex organizational solutions, like currency systems, smart contracts or Distributed Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs) that they enable. Blockchain technologies have also given rise to a significant autonomous value circuit. While the trading activities that have emerged around ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) are often highly speculative (and sometimes downright fraudulent), and while they tend to replicate the tendency towards unequal wealth distribution well known from capitalist markets, there is no denying that ICOs have supported a significant non-capitalist market for capital (to the extent of $21 billion in 2018; Dupont, 2018). This largely transpires outside of the control of the established financial system. Such token investments have realized significant alternative value circuits that enable community funding of new ventures (pooling small-scale ‘retail investors’) and new forms of remuneration for contributors, without having to pass through an official start-up system that is now perceived as wasteful and exploitative (Burke, 2017). The many ‘global nomads’ that populate the co-working spaces of Chiang Mai or Bali are one small but significant manifestation of these new guild-like organizations.

Will new guild-like forms of welfare, like the Brazilian musicians’ guild fora do eixo that allow its members to live in a number of communal houses and to partake in collective revenue sharing, develop to replace crumbling welfare states in the support of a precarious market existence for new commons-based petty producers? Will cryptocurrencies successfully complement official currencies in the support of local or interest-based economies (as in the case of the CommonCoin implemented by Italian artist collectives)? Will automatic organizations like DAOs enable networks of commons-based producers to create organizational forms that can rival the complexity of corporate organizations? Will the next Apple be a collective? What will happen when these organizational innovations are taken up by the less ideological and more pragamatic operators of the pirate economy?

Third, how will capitalism respond to these developments? At present the most important response to the new forms of commons-based petty production are the platform economy and the venture capital system. Both institutional forms strive to standardize entrepreneurship and innovation and bring it onto a common platform, where it can generate predictable streams of financial rent. While platforms and venture capital are US innovations, China is rapidly becoming a world leader in implementing them. Unlike US actors, Chinese digital companies together with the Chinese state are implementing digital platforms and venture investments with an overall social and economic strategy in mind. Digital ecommerce platforms and investments in micro-enterprises aim to generate ‘mass innovation and entrepreneurship’, particularly in rural areas (Li, 2017). Connecting to markets via Alibaba’s TaoBao platform, so-called ‘TaoBao villages’ have generated 37 million jobs based on small-scale enterprise (Lucas, 2018). Similar programs combining ecommerce platforms, small-scale venture investments and the re-discovery of traditional agricultural techniques aim at transforming parts of the Chinese agricultural sector into an economy based on small enterprises, locally specific agricultural techniques and a re-appropriation of centuries-old forms of ‘village rationality’ (Wen, 2015)

At the other end of this spectrum, China is a world leader in developing new despotic control systems using digital data and surveillance algorithms. These are used for a multitude of purposes, from evaluating worker performance to predicting urban crowd behaviour and, importantly, estimating credit scores on the bases of more or less virtuous patterns of online and consumer behaviour (Lucas and Feng, 2018). This model is set to expand geographically as Chinese digital platforms follow the Belt and Road Initiative for economic expansion into Central Asia (Sit et al., 2017; Zhang, 2017).

The combination of an economic base of petty producers and top-down despotic control via algorithms and platforms strongly resembles the model of Chinese imperial political economy established already in the Ming period, prior to the ‘great divergence’ that effectively set the West apart from the rest (Hong, 2001; Pomeranz, 2009). Are we seeing a resurrection of the long discredited concept of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ as a model for a new Chinese-centred cycle of accumulation combining commons-based petty production with despotic governance?

Fourth and finally, the question of the imaginary. The emerging Chinese cycle of accumulation remains locked into a capitalist vision of unlimited growth. This vision remains dominant worldwide, locking most of the world’s population into the condition of ‘capitalist realism’ where ‘there is no alternative’ (Fisher, 2009). Such continuous growth is not sustainable in view of an intensifying ecological crisis and growing resource scarcity. Will the contemporary commons, like their medieval precedent, support the development of a new political imaginary? Indeed, we seem to be witnessing a return of a pre-modern conception of value, as commons-based entrepreneurs are developing a combination of authenticity and reputation as a criterion of value. (Just like guilds operated with a conception of value combining the notion of intrinsic quality with the reputation of master craftsmen; De Munck, 2011). This is most visible in the food economy where a new wave of neo-rural farmers are emerging worldwide, driving ‘quality’ revolutions based on a combination of the rediscovery of traditional production methods, digital technology commons, and an orientation to ecological diversity and sustainability. A similar orientation has guided ‘Southern’ peasant struggles, like the Via Campesina movement (Foster and Clark, 2012). It is also orienting the Chinese new rural reconstruction movement, using digital platforms to put rural farmers together with students and quality conscious urban consumers (Wen, 2015). Are we witnessing a return to a Smithian market economy where small-scale producers engage in transparent and relatively egalitarian exchange and gradual piecemeal innovation oriented to specific local conditions, while remaining true to singular communitarian values?

Conclusion

The medieval commons emerged out of the process of social acceleration put in motion by feudalism. In turn, they supported new relations of production that pointed beyond feudalism. Capitalism developed through the privatization and enclosure of the medieval commons. At the same time, the process of social acceleration put in motion by capitalist real subsumption has generated new commons in the form of a planetary ‘general intellect’. Today we begin to see how these new commons are supporting new forms of petty production. It is possible that such commons-based petty production will affirm itself as an alternative to a capitalist economy in decline, first for the masses, and later also for the elites. This process is likely to be accelerated by a combination of economic decline and ecological crisis, similar to that of the 14th century.