Commoning as a postcapitalist politics

Today the planet faces a genuine tragedy of the unmanaged ‘commons’. For decades an open access and unmanaged resource has been treated with the same sort of disregard as Hardin’s pasture was treated. The planet’s life-supporting atmosphere has been spoiled by ‘ “help yourself ” or “feel free” attitudes’ (Hardin 1998: 683). We are now faced with the seemingly impossible task of transforming an open access and unmanaged planetary resource into a commons which is managed and cared for. With the cause and impacts of global warming now beyond debate, we are being pressed to take responsibility and to act in new ways. But how are we to do this? What type of politics is called for? In this chapter we explore how the process of commoning offers a politics for the Anthropocene. To reveal the political potential of commoning, however, we need to step outside of the ways that the commons have generally been understood. We discuss this capitalocentric framing of the commons in the first section and raise concerns about how this framing limits the potential of commoning as a politics for the Anthropocene. In the second section, we discuss a second predominant framing of commons as a ‘thing’ that is associated with publically owned or open access property. Instead we argue that commons can be conceived of as a process – commoning – that is applicable to any form of property, whether private, or state-owned, or open access. We then turn to three examples from the past and the present that provide insights into ways of commoning the atmosphere. We reveal how a politics of commoning has been enacted through assemblages comprised of social movements, technological advances, institutional arrangements, and non-human ‘others’. In the final section, we discuss the implications of this understanding of politics and particularly what it means for understanding how transformation occurs