Abstract
Massimo De Angelis is Professor of Political Economy at the University of East London. He is the author of several research publications on value theory, globalization, social movements and the political reading of economic narrative. His most recent book, The Beginning of History: Value Struggle and Global Capital, came out in 2007 with Pluto press. He has a blog at the The Commoner site. This is a web journal that he edits.
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Notes
For a general popular discussion on commons, see, for example, the website www.onthecommons.org. A sense of the wide extension of the range of applications of commons and commons analysis in development can be acquired by browsing the papers in the digital archive of commons, the website set up by the International Association for the Study of Commons (http://www.iasc-commons.org/). The work of Elinor Ostrom is extensive, but her classic book (Ostrom, 1990) is worth singling out. See Caffentzis (2004) for a radical critical engagement with this approach. De Angelis (2007) offers a general discussion of the problematic of commons and enclosures in relation to capitalist development. Federici (2004) discusses the relation between commons and women power in the community in the history of capitalism, whereas Federici (2010) problematizes the politics of commons from a feminist perspective. For an example of how commons are constructed in security discourses, see Denmark and Mulvenon (2010).
In my interviews with community activists as well as with government officials, I was told that the two carry similar meanings. This can be disputed, see Lambert (2011: 3).
There is of course just the opposite view. Reportedly, the Feministas Comunitaris de Bolivia ‘denounced that the understanding of Pachamama as synonym of Mother Earth is “reductionist and machista, and that makes reference only to fertility in order to keep women and Pachamama under patriarchal domination”’. The argument claims this on the basis that instead Pachamama is a ‘whole that goes much beyond the visible nature … and that includes life, the relations established within living beings, its energies, necessities and desires’. But this holistic and relational meaning is precisely the one that I gathered was given to the notion of Mother Earth in pretty much all interventions I heard and references to it, and not, as it is alleged, ‘as something that can be dominated and manipulated at the service of “development” and of consumption’. If it was the latter, the entire discursive construction, processes of the conference and the final document would not make any sense!
The emphasis on relational fields implies discussion on the meaning of ‘community’. Mignolo (2009) critically counterpoises the Western-centred discourse on commons to a decolonial perspective centred, instead, on community.
For a review of the debate of Buen Vivir in the context of political movements around the Andes, see Acosta and Martínez (2009).
The verb ‘commoning’ was introduced by the historian Peter Linebough (2008) and is now generally understood as a generative praxis of commons. For an explicative note, see De Angelis (2009).
See www.conamaq.org.bo for a critique of extractivism in progressive governments in Latin America (Gudynas, 2009).
References
Acosta, Alberto and Esperanza Martínez (eds.) (2009) El Buen Vivir. Una vía para el desarrollo, Quito: Abya Yala.
Anonymous (2010) ‘Feministas dicen que concepto de la Madre Tierra es machista’, Opinion 27 April, p 13A.
Caffentzis, George (2004) ‘A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the crisis of neoliberalism and question of the commons’, The Commoner Other Articles in Commons, http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=96, accessed 27 February 2011.
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Mesa 18 (2010) ‘Declaration of Table 18 Collective Rights and Rights of the Mother Earth National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu’, http://cochabamba2010.typepad.com/blog/2010/05/mesa-18-declaration-english-spanish.html, accessed 27 February 2010.
Mignolo, Walter (2009) ‘The Communal and the Decolonial’, http://waltermignolo.com/2009/09/06/the-communal-and-the-decolonial/print/, accessed 27 February 2011.
Ostrom, Elinor (1990) Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Proposes how to change the eco-social relations determining our livelihoods in the face of climate change
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De Angelis, M. Climate Change, Mother Earth and the Commons: Reflections on El Cumbre. Development 54, 183–189 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.26