Enacting post-capitalism | Series | 1

How do we make sure it does not reboot? Photo Credit: Anticap.

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Revolutions happen

NOTES ON
THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM AND THE SUBVERSIVENESS OF THE COMMON

Devon G.
Peña | Las Colonias de San Pablo, CO | April 18, 2014

Revolutions happen. One has already started though
many people are yet to recognize it. But they may already be participating in
it and helping to bring alterNative[1]
futures forward. The resurgence of the
common is the revolution quietly unfolding around us and through each of
our relations and actions.

In this series, I explore the enactment of a new
social revolution the multitude – a.k.a. the 99% – is creating to ‘sublate’ (aufheben)[2] neoliberal capitalism in the spaces of direct material production and
bio-politics, qua reproduction. The
resurgence of the common is the underlying force driving a largely subaltern and
protean process of revolutionary change.

It is through the agency of collaborative networks and
their spaces of autonomy that we are disrupting the empire of the commodity
form and threatening the stability and long-term survival of the neoliberal state of economic exception (Negri 2008). Success sublating
neoliberalism depends on our awareness and understanding of the subversive
qualities of constituent
power. Negri writes of constituent power as a movement that sublates
the negative dialectic of constituted power (i.e., established hegemony):

…there is only the radical
continuity of the discontinuous, the continual reappearance of the time of
strength as alternative, but at the same time as resistance, to the “realistic”
and “sovereign” dissipation of time (320). [See Chaput 2011]

Neoliberalism is the current form of this negative
dialectic of constituted power and the revolution of the resurgent common is
its feared nemesis.

The common involves social and
ecological solidarity.

Credit: Sojourners

The common[3]

What is the common? First, the common includes all the
community-based institutions of collective action known as common property
resources (CPRs). Hardt and Negri (2004)
mistakenly confine this form of the common largely to the past and lament the
tragic enclosure of these
communal and ancestral homelands. It would be more accurate to recognize that hundreds
of thousands of CPRs still exist across the planet primarily in places with
multigenerational and millenary indigenous and militantly place-based communities
including wide swaths of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

People in cities are also producing the common by
pursuing their mutual reliance interests and organizing on the basis of ancient
cooperative labor norms that emphasize self-reliance, conviviality, autonomy,
and new forms of direct action to reoccupy urban space through projects like urban
farms and community gardens for food justice and housing cooperatives.

A second meaning of the common, more in line with
what Hardt and Negri  (2004) describe as
the ‘social common’, involves the entire web of social knowledge and
relationships produced across the multitude of humanity, especially when people
pursue – out of sheer metaphysical necessity – what Marx terms “species life”.
This includes all the unique life-ways and right livelihoods of ethnic cultures,
place-based communities, as well as the always shifting rhizome-like networks
of subaltern affiliations of persons based on qualities related to shared
trades and crafts or associations springing from the value persons agree to
place on affective and artistic skills. I live and work on a common that is a
CPR and a social common – the San
Luis Peoples Ditch, Colorado’s oldest continuously operating community acequia irrigation association (est.
1852).

This knowledge-belief-practice common can be understood
as the cumulative result of exchanges derived from an always culturally- and
historically-specific ontology of labor. 
Bruno Gulli (2005)
calls this the “fierce creative fire” of labor, understood as the social activity
of the inherently sensuous body in relation to others. For Marx, production and
reproduction are always intertwined social affairs and the defining qualities
of species being that render possible
our becoming and enacting right livelihoods
as practitioners of personal and collective social and biological activities
passed on through the creative force of the common.

‘Rational’ subjects against the mutual reliance common

In local ethnic and indigenous communities – like our
acequia farming villages in Colorado and New Mexico – we usually are able to enact
and perform labor as a set of cultivated sensibilities and skills born of
multigenerational experiences within the ecology of place. This does not always
happen easily – especially without investment in keen interpersonal efforts to
resolve daily disputes on our mother ditch or acequia madre.  It seems there
is always a constant threat of defections from mutual reliance norms resulting
in conflicts over governance among the members of our irrigation common.

Most of these conflicts have to do with the reign of
the commodity form – i.e., the good old $ sign or as one parciante told me yesterday, “It is the debt-sucking bank I hate,
not my neighbors,” when explaining recent conflicts on our acequia. The
political economic conditions in this valley, like any other colonized zone,
have for too long been defined by capitalist norms that enshroud antecedent autochthonous mutual reliance networks of
the indigenous common– still more informally organized than formally
constituted despite the 2009
Acequia Recognition Law.

The colonial conditions of external administration
continue to impose a regime that demands acquiescence on the part of every
irrigator before the presumed neutrality of prior appropriation and private property
norms held by the defector minority (Hicks and Peña 2010).
Since the common always faces this sort of internal threat, the reproduction of
governance norms, including the ethics of fair and equitable appropriation of
resource units, requires constant renewal through the social and ritual life of
the common – in our case the acequiahood.
Through a combination of loving conviviality and graduated sanctions defectors
might be induced to rejoin the network and partake in its social and cultural
capital, thereby contributing to the integrity and resilience of the watershed
common.

In our Colorado watershed, one way this conflict
unfolds is as a result of the effects of the hundred-plus year hegemony of the prior
appropriation regime. This has led many of our farmers to forget or abandon
the norms of acequia
customary law (Hicks and Peña 2003).
For example, in the prior appropriation regime the shareholder in a mutual
ditch company “owns” water rights as a form of private property with value that
can be sold to water markets and other users. Under customary acequia law, the irrigator,
or parciante, does not “own” the
water as private property but rather has a right to use adjudicated water rights
as an asset-in-place and only under a farmer self-managed allotment scheme based
on the equitable and fair distribution average of the net cubic feet per second
(cfs) flows in the ditch proportionate to the size of the private land s/he
irrigates.

In this sense, the acequia farmer benefits from a
hybrid of common and private property rights that are subordinated to mutual
reliance interests. The parciante does
not own the water but rather participates in the ancient tradition of
collective repartimiento de agua dedicated
to be sure toward production on private
farmland, albeit much of it used or worked in a communal fashion along with
the sharing of farm machinery, implements, and labor.

The occupational vernacular of most Colorado and New
Mexico acequiahoods involves the use of the terms parciante (water rights user) and socio (cooperative society member) but not dueño (owner) or entitulado
en propiedad privada (private property owner or titleholder), although acequiera/os are clearly also both of
the latter. Again, this is a matter of negotiating subjectivities caught
between an indigenous cultural pole that favors mutual reliance interests and
cooperative production and an intrusive capitalist juridical pole that seeks to
privilege rational actor models of economic behavior that emphasize maximizing
individual acquisitive utilities, i.e., use-values accruing only to the
individual property owner without any value to the welfare of the community or
environment.

In this context of the threat of defections commoners
must decide whether or not to consciously enact a decolonial political project to contest hegemonic subjectivities as
these are constructed and negotiated in different difficult contexts: In our
case, parciantes on the Peoples Ditch wage a daily struggle to overcome myriad contradictions
posed by a system in which defection to hegemonic fixed legal identities allows
the takers to partake of the advantages of a juridical order designed to serve neoliberal
capitalists in the unrelenting quest to privilege
property rights over mutual reliance interests.

In the struggle for the revolution of the common, we
can expect this to happen in all relationship domains wherever people actively seek
a more democratic transformative set of cooperative relations to meet
collective and personal needs and yet still are, for now, located within the gravitational
pull of a predatory economy that forces producers and consumers alike to
compete on the basis of selfish utilitarian interests, justified by what
Michael Taylor (2006) wisely derides as an “ideology of disconnection.”

The revolutionary subjectivity of the common is the anti-thesis
of neoliberal behavioral economics, particularly as constructed by the
political project and neoliberal frame of methodological
individualism. Hayek, von Mises, and the rest of the ‘ordo-liberals’ who
inspired and mentored the Chicago School boys and their neoliberal collective
(Milton Friedman, et al.) believed that the individual was not reducible to the
whole and that collectivism of any type was a threat to freedom, liberty, and
prosperity for the greatest number.

The radical behavioral economics of the neoliberal
rational choice theorists proposes that greed is good and selfish pursuit of
individual interest is the most natural and rational model for each of us to
fulfill the demanding role of being economic actors. This sad ideology was a
reaction against the specter of communism but in the end the flight from
totalitarian states has led to the totalizing oppressiveness of the rule of the
market and its investor-state formation as ultimate arbitrator of all human agency, and especially that
related to the production and reproduction of life itself, what Foucault terms
bio-power.

In contrast to a disconnected ontology of Homo economicus, the collaborative
economics of the common posit that liberty and the general welfare are best
grounded in the production of self-sacrificing ‘bread labor’ – Gandhi’s
borrowed and extended concept from Tolstoy signifying for him a step towards
social justice. Akulova (n.d.) notes:

Even if people perform manual
labour unwillingly, mechanically and without deep understanding of the truth
lying behind it, Gandhi was quite happy, because one day this constant practice
should become their one nature and they will detect the spirit and beauty
behind it. He emphasizes as Tolstoy did that only manual labour can make the
best in intellectual pursuits. Even though Gandhi gives…importance to bread
labour as such, he goes further and says that intelligent bread labour is the
highest form of social service. Intelligent here means…labour which is done in
[sic] the sake of the service to others.

Gandhi was happy because he understood that manual
labor is not menial labor and when
intelligence and service are involved it becomes a creative force for change
and general well-being. I think of our work as acequia farmers as a form of intelligent bread labor. For example,
acequiera/os provide a service to the community and larger society by
preserving permaculture landscapes, relying on agroecological practices and
methods that sustain agrobiodiversity, and producing vital ecosystem and
economic base services among many other virtues. This intelligent bread labor
strengthens the resilience, conviviality, and prosperity of the entire acequia
watershed commonwealth and provides social, cultural, economic, and ecological
values to the wider society (Peña 1999,
2003).

To explore the revolution of the resurgent common, I
am drawing from three decades of experience in an integrated system of CPR
water and land domains tied to a deeply agroecological social knowledge common.
I have devoted 25+ years to the study of the ethno-science and law of what are
basically processes of interconnection, dynamic adaptation, and resilience
through a balance of place obligations and personal economic needs.

The mobility of the place-based knowledge common

The fields of ethnobiology and ethnoecology – including
especially agroecology – and their various branches represent one set of
interdisciplinary ethno-scientific approaches to community-based and
collaborative study, analysis, and development of the precious and subversive bodies
of place-based knowledge.

Singing the land, signing the land.

Credit: IndigenousKnowledge

For example, according to noted ethnobiology scholar Eugene
Hunn (2008),
by the age of ten, the average precociously learned Zapoteca child identifies
and names hundreds of local plants used by her indigenous community for food, medicine,
and ceremony. I would like to further observe that the practice of such place-based
knowledge is actually quite disruptive of globalizing processes precisely
because its practitioners do not consume products obtained from the capitalist
commodity chains that encircle the globe and can displace these livelihood and
place-making practices and knowledge bases.

The post-NAFTA Mesoamerican Diaspora – now numbering
at least 2 million indigenous Mexican origin peoples – is an alterNative
indigenous response to the neoliberal strategy and deployment of investor-state
treaties. But the contradiction here is that the very same Zapoteca child Hunn
celebrates in his ethnography may now be part of a trans-border community
linking the origin places in Mexico with “transnational suburbs” along the
entire West Coast from California to Alaska. Yet, she is still able to make use of the same plants from home that are obtained through the trans-border networks,
grown in home kitchen or community gardens, or purchased and bartered for in
local botánicas as well as learning
about the useful [sic] plants in her new ‘northern’ home as part of the enlarged enacted environment of the Diaspora
(Davis 2001;
Peña 2005;
Mares and Peña 2010,
2011).

While the knowledge common exists in many locales,
the form and substance and processes that shape and define these into the qualities
that create self-organizing institutions of collective action are in fact gravely
threatened today by the brutality of continued neoliberal empire-building
regimes and, in an ironic twist, especially in those very communities with the deepest
and most intractable attachments to place.

The recovery and focus of this type of local
place-based common is the revolutionary struggle of our time because it is the
one form of collective action for autonomy that directly negates neoliberal capitalist globalization and the advent
of, lets be honest, fascist-corporatist thanatopolitics, including those hybrid
forms that harbor hopes of détente between some future kinder gentler
capitalism with “zero marginal costs” and the collaborative economy of the “commons”
 [sic] (Rifkin 2014).

Zeroing out the obvious and hidden injuries?

Coming home and thinking about the past 30 years
spent in the San Luis Valley is what inspired me to start developing these
notes. I was especially anxious to revisit the topic of the common because I
live it everyday in the acequiahood and because of the appearance of several
books by influential progressive thinkers. I find some interesting contrasts
and differences in two thinkers whose works remain central to my own thinking
about the revolution of the common: Vandana Shiva’s book Earth Democracy (2005)
and Jeremy Rifkin’s more recent tome The
Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014).
Both seek to move past neoliberal corporate capitalism for the sake of
democracy, community building, and the fulfillment of personal freedom; and
that is where the similarities end.

Napster’s idea of the Internet of
Everything?

Image credit: J. D. Moyer

I want to explain their differences and clarify what
I believe are the complementary possibilities in the Shiva-Rifkin discourse.
The discourse on ecology, economy, and democracy is crucial and pithy. A simple
straightforward clarification is in order and I believe we need to explore how structural violence continues to produce
uneven geographies of opportunity and prosperity and allows capitalism to
continue morphing into the rarified world of fictitious capital while it
deploys the prison industrial and national security minimalist state to hold
the multitude in check while pretending the free market and democracy nirvana
of zero marginal cost has been attained.

In my next post in this series I will return to
explore the Shiva-Rifkin discourse to initiate a strategic or political reading
of their work to inform autonomy movements. I believe Rifkin fails to
understand the role of structural violence as a ‘negative externality’ [sic]
that makes it impossible for the “Internet of Things” and its “Collaborative
Commons” [sic] to eclipse capitalism in any way. I also believe that Shiva fails to
consider the state of economic exception and how precariousness in the ‘bare
life’ shapes all politics, including struggles for the social-ecological common
that is her topic in Earth Democracy.

I interject this issue because as long as structural
violence is associated with the social process of production there can actually
be no “zero marginal cost” for all the actors in an economy. The ability to
ignore the law, to suspend the rule of law, is a major feature of the impunity
with which corporations and capitalists operate today. This impunity is
especially pronounced when we examine the consequences for individual
capitalists when their corporate activities result in thousands and even
millions of deaths and injuries. There are very few consequences for these
criminals who are routinely left unpunished while their victims languish in sickness
or induced poverty.

The biopolitical machine of the post-liberal capitalist formation does not imply that there is an
absence of the rule of law; instead, the law is the law of the ironclad
oligarchic capitalists who wish to decide on their own who lives and who dies
and under what conditions. This twisted ideological formation derives directly
from the long trajectory at the end of WWII involving the articulation of
dominant capital-state interrelationships that must always aim to maintain a
juridical order in which corporations can act like “people” and yet get away
and indeed reap rewards for the direct and indirect murder of millions.  Fascist holocausts, out! Global neoliberal
death machine, in!

Neoliberal capital is most absolutist in its desire to
reshape the liberal democratic welfare state as economic government – see Foucault’s Collège de France lectures
on neoliberal
governmentality – and this is the basis for the reproduction of the
structures of market-steered domination since there is no political sphere separate
from economics because the market encompasses all politics (Hardt and Negri
2004). To understand the revolutionary possibilities embedded in the current
crisis of neoliberal capitalism we must understand its ideological roots in the
positive philosophy of methodological individualism also known as rational
choice theory (RCT), which is rooted after all in the atomistic ontology of
Democritus (see Fleetwood
1995).

Neoliberalism is really the end of classical
liberalism, if we follow the path to methodological individualism envisioned by Hayek and his followers at the Mount Pèlerin
Society (see Mirowski
and Plehwe 2009). Damien Cahill (2014) of the University of Sidney  explains
that the conceptual starting point for neoliberal theory is the rational,
self-interested individual. From the position of this rational subject, Cahill argues, an entire philosophical and an economic defense of the free [sic]
market system is constructed.

Fictitious capital. Credit: MetaMute

The crisis of neoliberalism: fictitious capital and the social common

Most current Left thinking on the crisis of
neoliberalism focuses on an emerging market-state formation that is taken to be
a response to the global financial crisis (GFC) that started in 2007-08 with
the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and the entire class of so-called
derivatives like credit default swaps.[4]
From the point of view of the loyal or neo-Keynesian Left – represented here
most clearly by Paul Krugman (2013) – the crisis is invariably attributed to a GFC
that unleashed the destructive forces of massive unemployment (with the
concomitant effect of under-consumption) and lack of competitive markets to
stimulate capital re-investment (with the concomitant effect of over-accumulation).

The neo-Keynesian perspective endorses a hybrid strategy
that seeks to respond to the GFC by melding state intervention via stimulus spending with enhanced, more efficient and innovative privatization and acquiescence to further expansion of neo-regulatory regimes to initiate a new cycle of
accumulation with renewed investment in productive capital to make material things rather than just Internet Things. Note: Of course, the Internet of Things depends on the exploitation of labor in the post-Fordist assembly lines that make things with labels that read “Made in China” or “Made in Mexico”. The theorists of working-class
autonomy do not wish for the crisis to be resolved and view the GFC as a
multiphase ‘Derivatives Depression’ associated with two major structural
contradictions:

(1)   The inability of capital to complete the phase of the
realization of surplus value, which is necessary to make a transition to the circuit
of the expanded reproduction of capital.
The underlying form of the value crisis for capital is not the result of under-consumption
or over-production but instead a crisis
in the realization of value.[5] 

(2)   The inability to engage in the expanded reproduction
of productive capital leads
capitalists to engage in a variety of activities including luxury consumption, wealth
hoarding, investments in control of political parties (post-Citizens United),
and speculative investments that are not directly productive of new capital. 

Capitalist greed blocked realization and the expanded
reproduction of capital, leading to the current phase of fictitious capital
fleeing from the collapse and on the road toward the next catastrophe when the
new cycle of post-2010 real estate, stock market, and derivatives market
bubbles deflate. Sovereign debt in the EU and USA have been major global focal
points of derivative action as hedge funds and private mega-wealthy investors
play the risk market in credit default swaps to the tune of more than $600
trillion globally according to a 2009 report by the International Monetary Fund
(see Singh 2009).

Cyborg Marx? Credit: icanhaschezzburger.com

At its heart, the crisis of neoliberalism involves a
rupture in the realization of surplus-value in which productive capital accumulated
in the money-form has few socially productive
outlets. The recent past and near-future second collapse of the derivatives
market reflects dynamics associated with the financialization of capital (Marazzi 2011).
As noted above, the derivatives market has surpassed $600 trillion in exposure
globally and four megabanks (all considered too big to fail) control 70 percent
of the risk market (Singh 2009). So much capital accumulation was created under
the neoliberal policies of the past 34 years these greedy bastards could not
think of anything better to do than invest it in the commodification of risk (Marazzi 2011), which is itself a form of what
Marx calls fictitious capital in the
section on credit in The
Grundrisse (also cf. with Humphrey 2010)
and in Chapter 25 of Volume III of Capital.

The critique of the “violence of financial
capitalism” is the next step in this series and in a week or so I will post a
new set of notes – as this is what the exercise entails, note-taking – that
present preliminary thoughts on an approach that integrates the work done by various autonomist
Marxists with recent and separate theoretical interventions related to decolonial discourse and the problematic of precarity, hyperobjects, and resilience.

Revolutionary subjectivity, I will argue next, is
perhaps best understood today as the radical embrace of the ‘bare life’ rather
than as a retreat seeking admission into the politics of the citizen and state-recognized (and governmentalized) subject, but this also entails movement
away from all statist forms of power as
a political project in which precarity becomes the basis for an end to
neoliberal capitalism through the strategy of the ‘great refusal’. The multitude
has the possibility of becoming the ‘hyperobject’ that terminates the reign of
the commodity form and finally opens the world to the revolution of the common.

---

[1] The meaning of the term alterNative as I am using it
involves several elements that incorporate aspects of indigeneity and alterity:
The Native part of this is somewhat self-evident. I am referring to indigenous
knowledge systems, an epistemology that is place-based because it arises from
the ontology of becoming in place through shared memories and the knowledge
common. But dislocations alter this place-based being, rupturing generations of
attachment to one’s homeland and ancestral common. So the Native is “altered.”
But it does not end there, that is the anti-thesis; the synthesis, or rupture,
is in the ability and strategy of the altered Native to alter the circumstances of the dislocation: Our “alterity” means
that we have had to change our perspective to that of the Other, for e.g., the
cosmopolitan city-dwelling Other. But this also means we alter these new spaces
in order to re-inhabit place; to re-locate our being in place. But in the
process, we also re-invent and adapt our sense of place and indigeneity as
forms of oppositional consciousness.

[2] I first learned the concept of aufheben from Philosophy Professor Doug Kellner when I was an
undergraduate student at the University of Texas and the idea stuck with me
ever since. That introduction involved reading and musing over Karl Marx’s
critique of Hegel in which he describes aufheben, per the translation, as
closely bound up with Hegel’s idea of ‘sublation’ [aufheben]: to negate, and
thereby to preserve the inner truth of something. See Ethical Politics.

[3] Note my use of the term ‘common’ rather than
‘commons’. I am following two traditions here: First, New England toponyms use
the singular form as in, for e.g., Boston Common. This is true of Mexican
Spanish place names for CPRs, they are named Ejido de… (singular). Second, Elinor Ostrom (1990) played a major
role shaping the theory, method, and discourse of the study of common property
resources and also adopted the singular form. The plural form is associated
with Garrett Hardin’s tragically misconstrued theory of the commons [sic] and
is a problematically loaded signifier.

[4] Credit default swaps are a type of ‘fictitious’
capital and involve a casino type of capitalism in which investors hedge their
bets by playing the risk insurance market or by betting against someone else’s
investments – both in effect a form of the commodification of risk. This form
of capital is ‘fictitious’ because it does not exist in the money-form and  instead represents itself as a potential
realizable gain only in the event of another capital’s investment failure or
credit defaults. This produces profit out of thin air with no involvement of
productive capital that might be transformed to social uses.

[5] On this, Rifkin is incorrect to make the argument
that the blending of IT and the commons [sic] creates zero marginal cost,
making it possible to produce things for free.