Occupy the commons

N+1 QuinternaLab, April 5, 2014 (*) Minutes from the conference call of April 1, 2014 During the conference call on Tuesday evening, in which 18 comrades took part, they discussed about the issue of commons. In his speech to the protesters in Zuccotti Park, October 9, 2011 Slavoj iek said: "The only way wherein we are communists is that we care for the commons, the commons of nature, the commons of knowledge that are privatized by the intellectual property rights, the commons of biogenetic, for this and only for this we should fight. Communism absolutely failed, but the problems of the commons are here. According to the Slovenian philosopher defense of the commons, after the collapse of communism, is the only viable horizon of struggle. The topic has been much debated in recent times. Sociologists, intellectuals and politicians, in an attempt to bring the anti-capitalist requests into the institutional paths, write books, organize conferences and, in some cases, give rise to unspecified constituents. Even the Catholic Church dealt about that in one of the Constitutions resulting from the Second Vatican Council and proposed the following definition: "From the more and more tight and little by little interdependence, extended to the entire world, descends that the common good - that is, the set of those of social conditions which allow as groups as individuals, to reach their perfection more fully and more easily - now becomes more and more universal, involving rights and duties that affect the entire human race "(from Gaudium et Spes). In Italy, the commons became popular with the referendum movement for the water as common good. Some intellectuals proposed the establishment of "free zones" so that certain goods are considered to be non-tradable. Stefano Rodot (an Italian politician) presented to the Senate a bill for the reclassification of commons on the basis of economic and social nature. The concept is actually quite unclear and could be applied to everything from the water environment, from the transport to the job. According to Wikipedia: "Common goods or common resources (commons) are goods used by multiple individuals, compared to which we observe - for different reasons - difficulty of exclusion and whose consumption by a stakeholder reduces the chances of fruition by other ones: they are generally resources lacking restrictions on access and essential to the human survival and/or subject to growth with the use. The American OWS movement has among its programmatic trends a strong attraction to the problem of the commons. The italian communist magazine "n +1" published several pamphlets on the subject, identifying itself not only with the movement, but endorsing a horizon that we can easily define Occupy the commons. We are obviously far from each single formulation that arises from the magmatic movement, but the set is

clearly determined by the extreme contradiction of capitalism, and that is the fatal antithesis between social production and private appropriation. While the evolution of our species is now more "external" than "biologic" (Leroi-Gourhan) and then the social organism with its technique, organization, etc.. is prevails on the individual one, the exemplified 1% gobbles up everything and starves the world. That complementary 99%, far from being a publicity stunt, it's a meme that was successful precisely because the "absolute law of Capital" never worked so at the bottom: the movement "was in the air," ready to produce iconography, liturgy, and (unfortunately) theory. The commons topic has a lot to do with the ample world of peer to peer (P2P) networks. Michael Bauwens, in the article From the Communism of capital to a Capital for the Commons, highlights the paradox that, thanks to the most communist of the sharing licenses , the General Public License, multinationals use free software to capitalist purposes (shining examples are IBM and Linux). On the one hand there is the requirement that anyone can use, modify and share the source code of free software, and this is technically communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. On the other hand also capitalist operators exploit the system to derive profit for their own exclusive benefit. In this way, the accumulation of intangible commons, born from a participant process and oriented to the sharing of them, is subsumed by the process of accumulation of Capital. For this reason Bauwens proposes, to eliminate the paradox , the establishment of Peer Production License. The PPL is designed to activate and strengthen the mutual "anti-hegemonic" economy, which combines the cooperative no profit organizations while provides for the charging of a fee for the for profit companies, which use the software without contributing to the development of the share. The adoption of this type of license would facilitate the growth of a "countereconomy, the one of the commons, which could be the basis of a political and social transformation. Obviously, the proposed solution does not solve the problem of the exploitation of the commons by Capital, indeed the categories that it wants to deny - surplus value, money, exchange, etc. - would instead be reproduced. Bauwens, however, cannot help but notice the increasingly apparent contradiction between private appropriation and associated labor, the shell choking a content that no longer matches with it. Lets take as example the world of the apps and the transformations that passed in the world of online services related to certain products. In the article 2014: Year Of The Open Ecosystem there is a little history on the disruptive power of technology and its innovations. Nowadays, with the development of the app economy and the predominance of the service supply (continuous) on commodities (discrete), the major brands are turning into large platforms, based less on the characteristics of their products and more on the extent and the quality of their connections. By making available, in a process of openness and feedback with the environment, development kits or API to take advantage of external collaboration, Apple, Intuit and Kareo, for example, have thousands of developers working to improve our products and do not cost a penny to the companies. More than just platforms they seem rather ecosystems. And the interesting thing is that they are not isolated but interconnected to turn into a larger ecosystem, where is critical the integration of the knowledge that develops outside the corporation walls. Capitalism firstly generates and then tries to adapt itself precisely to those mechanisms that represent its negation. The article argues that the important innovations are those that change the world so deeply that the previous order becomes untenable. Yet the true impact does not begin with the invention, but with the adoption of it: the car was important not so much because it replaced the horse, but because it created roads, service stations and shopping malls. The same thing happens with smartphones and related apps. Example: Waze is a free app for road navigation for mobile devices based on crowdsourcing. The more

information the user enters into the system, the more he interacts with the app, the more he receives information and updates. According to a recent study of the Polytechnic of Milan, the economy linked to the applications will be worth 40 billion of euro in 2016, equivalent to 2.5% of gross domestic product. Today, therefore, the context is worth more than the product, and you have to add to this the need to decode billions of information collected on the network or outside it. In fact enterprises born to manage Big Data, huge volumes of data from different sources that, analyzed in real time, provide a new way to manage and interpret the information, and allow for new forms of corporate knowledge. Also the intelligence makes a run into this world, in order to predict where the next riots could break out: "Before the revolution of Big Data, to predict the future of a country was an operation involving secret projects. The information was element too precious to share, but today everything is different. Its increasingly difficult to keep a secret. And a new generation of open-source prediction models comes" (Uprisings and revolutions, an algorithm to predict it: so the intelligence changes, from La Repubblica of March 26, 2014). Capitalism has the need to integrate the differentiated works of the single factory workers into a single product of the global worker and today we can consider the whole capitalist production not as a set of discrete goods but as a single continue commodity. Starting from the continuous characters of the production and the value, Marx defines the industrial complex as a historical mediation, as a transition to a more advanced stage of society. The latter will not be created according to a model, as claimed by the utopians, but it is already included as communist element in a nutshell, within capitalist society. The revolution will be the positive, practical liberation, of this existing element.

__________ (*) Translation by Dante Cruciani, from the original text in italian http://www.quinternalab.org/teleriunioni/aprile-2014/287-occupy-the-commons