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by Nick
Dyer-Witheford
Summary: This paper makes
theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a coming
society that is neither capitalist, statist nor anarchic, and the place within
it of ‘immaterial labor.’ Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the
commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. The cellular
form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in
association. Marx’s circuit of capital traces the metamorphosis of the
commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be
transformed into more commodities. The circuit of the common traces how
shared resources generate forms of social cooperation that can coordinate the
conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the
circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital – mercantile,
industrial and financial – unfolding at different historical moments yet together
contributing to an overall societal subsumption.
By analogy, we should recognize differing
moments in the circuit of the common. These include terrestrial commons
(the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); state
commons (socialist government, the planner state); and networked commons,
(open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and multiple other
socializations of labor intrinsic to high technoscience). Capital today
operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moment,
but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial
capital. A twenty-first century communism must also be envisioned as a complex
unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and
enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons, which open
possibilities for new combinations of planetary planning and autonomous
association.
Nick
Dyer-Witheford
Faculty of
Information and Media Studies,
University of
Western Ontario,
Canada