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THE CIRCULATION
OF THE COMMON
Nick
Dyer-Witheford [University of Western Ontario]
Introduction
This paper makes
theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a “coming
community” that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place
within it of “immaterial labor.” [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows.
Marx
deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for
exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced
the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition
of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of
autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a
circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point. But although this
concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary
anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these
struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute.
Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider
this silence.
I
suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good
produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces
how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation – associations – that 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 recognise differing moments
in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the
customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner
commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare
state); and networked commons (the free associations open source
software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other
socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of
mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its
contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital. A twenty-first century
communism can, again by analogy, 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. These must however, also be
seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other
commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the
circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new
combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous
association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.
The Circulation of Capital
Marx famously
described the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners,
as the “cell-form” of capital, the primordial point from which grew all its
more complex and composite manifestations.
“The wealth of
societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an
‘immense collection of commodities; the individual commodity appears as its
elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the
commodity.”[2]
The processes of
this growth were however, not fully described until Volume Two of Capital,
which outlines a model of the circulation of capital. This model traces the
metamorphosis of the commodity into money and back again. This cycle is
expressed in the classic formulae M ─ C (LP/MP) . . . P . . .C' ─
M'. Money (M) is used to purchase as commodities (C), including labor power
(LP), and the machinery and raw materials that are the means of production
(MP). These are thrown into production (P) to create new commodities (C') that
are sold for more money (M'), part of which is retained as profit, part of
which is used to purchase more means of production to make more commodities.
The money at the end of the process is greater than that at the beginning and
the value of the commodity produced is greater than the value of the
commodities used as inputs: repeat ad infinitum.
This
circuit could, both in any specific instance or in general, fail. A C may not
find its M if a seller does not meet a buyer, nor M tryst with C, if a buyer
lacks a seller, and all may fall completely apart in the ugly abode of P. But
if it surmounted these hazards, the circulation of capital becomes an
auto-catalytic, self-generating, boot-strapping growth process, a “constantly
revolving circle” in which every point is simultaneously a point of departure
and a point of return.”[3]
This
circuit is the dynamic process that converts the cell form of the commodity
into what Marx termed more “complex and composite” forms, a process of
organ-creation, forming an entire capitalist metabolism, that subsumes previous
forms of the social body. It is, to use a different language, the path from
capital’s molecular level to its molar manifestation.
The
circulation process that begins with money and ends with more money is a never
ending process, but it can be punctuated in different ways. We could look at it
beginning and ending with the act of production or with capital in a commodity
state, or in its money state. As David Harvey puts its, “We can create three
separate windows to look in on the overall characteristics of the circulation
of capital. From each window we can see something different. . . .In the end,
of course, we are interested in the circulation of capital as a whole, but we
cannot understand this . . . without first examining the differentiations
within it.”[4] So, for example, the transformation of commodities into money
(C-M) is the role of mercantile capital; that of the production of commodities
by means of commodities (P) is mediated by industrial capital, and the
conversion of money capital into productive capital is the ostensible task of
financial capital (M-C). While all have an interest in the expansion of surplus
value, they do not necessarily always agree about how to divide it up.
These
different sectors are both synchronic and diachronic aspect. That is to say,
while they are simultaneously necessary for the fully actualised operations of
capitalist society, each has assumed preeminence at different times. So, for
example, the growth of mercantile capital from 16th to 18th century is often
seen as the precondition for the emergence of industrial capital in the 19th
century, which in turn has generated an increasing preeminence to financial
capital in the late 20th century. None of these different subsets of capital
replace each other, but at specific historical moments one or other sounds a
keynote or takes the lead for the entire ensemble.
The
ramifying elaborations arising from these circuits have been depicted by
theorists who have developed Marx’s model into intricate diagrams showing our
current deep entanglement in the commodity-form. If we think of a rotating
sphere not only accelerating in velocity around its circumference but expanding
in diameter as it fills more and more space we have the image of global
capital, aka “empire.”
The Circulation of Struggles
It was the great
rediscovery of autonomist theory that the circulation of capital was also a
circulation of struggles. Each node in the circuit of capital is a potential
site of conflict where the productive subjectivities capital requires may
contest its imperatives. If not all, at least many of the breakdowns in
capital’s circulation occur because LP (labor-power) refuses to remain LP: it
resists and re-appropriates.
Although
this insight was given many expressions, perhaps the most complete English
language version is the essay by Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver, “Marx’s Theory
of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle.” [5] This proceeds systematically
around the circuit of capital showing the range of insurgent interruptions
possible at each phase. Thus the attempt to purchase the commodity labor, M-C
(LP), could be interrupted by struggles over dispossession of populations
necessary to create a proletarian workforce, or the maintenance of that
workforce in a suitable condition of precarity. The purchase of raw materials,
M-C (MP), might be frustrated by eco-struggles. The moment of production (P)
was the site of classic work place resistances to exploitation, from strikes,
occupations and sabotage. The sale of commodities, C-M, was menaced by dangers
from theft to boycotts to public reappropriation.
Furthermore,
each of these flashpoints might ignite others. This knock-on effect might
happen as it were unconsciously – if, for example, capitalists exposed to
heightened costs for raw materials caused by “resource wars” responded by
intensifying the rate of exploitation in production, thereby precipitating
strikes, or responds to strikes by technological innovations that then
overproduce so much that goods cannot be sold, generating recessions,
unemployment and militant movements of the immiserated. But the connection
could also be a conscious process, as subjects contesting capital at different
points linked or allied one with another. The concept of the circulation of
struggles underlies much of the richest thought about the use of means of
communication, old and new, to link together these variegated agencies into new
combinations, a line of analysis running from Romano Alquati’s reflections on
“radiating the operational information of struggle” to Cleaver’s concept of the
“electronic fabric of struggle.”[6]
In
its intention, Bell and Cleaver’s analysis of the circulation of struggle was
an attack on objectivist Marxism that saw capital proceeding to crisis
according to teleological laws: what they showed was that most of these “laws”
were the outcome of colliding vectors of struggles waged by collective
subjects. But ultimately, the concept of the circulation of struggles had even
wider implications. In its various autonomist articulations it decentered
traditional Marxist concerns with conflict at the immediate point of
production. A focus on factory resistance became displaced to a multiplicitous
view of contestation throughout a circuitously interconnected social factory.
Marx’s singular old mole of the proletariat digging through the factory floor
became the”tribe of moles”, burrowing a network of tunnels through schools,
households, and welfare offices. [7] This view of a widening circulation of
struggles, occurring at different nodes all along the circuit of capital, all
potentially interlinked, is part of the genealogy of transversal politics and
of the multitude, concepts which have .become part of the theoretical lexicon
of the contemporary movement of movements.
Yet
if the theory of the circulation of struggle both subverted objectivist Marxist
accounts of crisis, and de-centered the classic Marxian focus on the immediate
point of production, it also, in a very classically Marxian way, has little to
say about the long term outcome of these struggles. Yes, sufficient
proliferation of such struggles will bring capital to breakdown. Yes, in the
struggles subjects self-valorise, reappropriating use-values from the sphere of
exchange, winning back time and life. Bell and Cleaver’s wonderful essay ends
by remarking that what “defines a revolutionary subject” is “not only the
negative power to abolish capital but the positive power to increasingly define
its own needs, to carve out an expanding sphere of its own movement and to
create a new world in place of capitalism.”[8] But the organizational or
institutional forms this “expanding sphere” might take are unnamed. If today
the concept of circulation of struggles speaks well to the multiple voices
declaring “another world is possible,” to the begging question “but which
world?” –or even, if one wishes to emphasise a potential diversity of
arrangements, “which worlds?” – it does
not answer.
The Circulation of the Common
Because the
practical struggles of a multiplicitous movement, and the theoretical
reflections that arise in tandem with them, have over the last decade and a
half reached quite a high level, we might now be able to take another step.
Having gone from the circulation of capital to the circulation of struggles, we
can proceed from the circulation of struggles to the circulation of the common.
The
common, and the commons, are terms that have amongst activists recently become,
well, common. The usual point of reference is the lands collectively
used for subsistence purposes by pre-capitalist agricultural communities and
destroyed by enclosure in the process of primitive accumulation.[9] Although
enclosure was resisted by overt and clandestine insurrections whose full
dimensions were only recently disclosed by Peter Linebaugh and Maurice
Rediker’s account of a “hydra-headed” rebellion, these struggles were lost.[10]
But interest in the commons has been revived by opponents of global capital
seeking a vantage from which to criticise the “new enclosures” privatizing of
natural and social resources across the planet.[11] Some accounts romanticise
the historical commons as a pre-capitalist utopia, rather than a marginal
supplement to a hierarchic feudal order. Others invoke the commons only the
better to plan their commercialization. But the concept remain an important
lever for rethinking issues of collective production and ownership, and it is
to this end, and with a profound debt to theorists such as John McMurtry and
Massimo de Angelis who have already thought along these lines, that it is
deployed here.[12]
If
the cellular form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of
communism is the common. A commodity is a good produced for exchange. A
common is a good produced for shared use. Capital is an immense heap of
commodities. Communism is a multiplication of commons.
The
commodity, a good produced for exchange, presupposes private owners between whom
such exchange occurs. The common presupposes collectivities within which
sharing occurs, collectivities that coordinate, organise and plan this sharing.
I will call these collectivities Associations.
We
can thus postulate a circulation of the common. This traces how
associations of various types, from tribal assemblies to socialist cooperatives
or open source networks organise shared resources into productive ensembles
that create more shared resources which in turn provide the basis for the
formation of new associations. If C here represents not a Commodity but
Commons, and A stands for Association the basic formulae is therefore: A
─ C ─ A'. This can then be elaborated as:
A
─ C . . . P . . . C' ─ A'; repeat ad infinitum.
Two notes on this
formulae. First: we are dealing not only with Commons instead of Commodities,
but with Associations instead of Money. The implication is that collective
organization, not market exchange, governs the distribution of Commons, whether
through mutual aid, public planning or gift economies. We will discuss this
later. Second: in this formulation, the resources organised by Association into
Commons production cannot be described as Labor Power and Means of Production,
because these terms imply precisely the reductive abstraction and alienation
that is inherent to commodity accumulation. To indicate that human creativity
and ecological riches become something other than just factors of production
when organized through Association, they are labeled here as GI, General Intellect
and NM, Natural Metabolism. These may be the wrong terms, but we won’t discuss
this further, because it is the topic for another paper.
If
an agricultural Association (A) on the basis of its successful cultivation of a
Common banana plantation (C) joins together with other such Associations, first
to place more lands under cultivation, and then to form a industrial packing
plant which then provides the nucleus for further cooperatively conducted
activities, we have a circulation of commons. If the Associative organization
of a publicly funded education system researches collectively created software
that provides the basis for open source associations (A’) we have a circulation
of commons. And if these open source software is then made freely available to
our initial agricultural cooperative to enable its planning activities, we have
a further circulation. The circulation of the common is thus a dynamic in which
commons grow, elaborate, proliferate and diversify in a movement of
counter-subsumption against capital, generating the “complex and composite”
forms of communism.
We
can describe this composite complexity by analogy with Marx’s differentiation
of specific sub-circuits within the circulation of capital. Similarly we can
differentiate specific moments in the circuit of the common, moments which give
varied priorities in the basic relation of Associations and Commons, and which
also have, at varying historical moments had a different weight or importance.
So, we might speak of:
Primitive
communism (so called), based on a terrestrial commons that involves the
sharing of natural resources, such as land, game, firewood and water, on the
basis of associations shaped by custom. In so as these associations take as
their foundation the apparently given quality of natural resources, we can say
they proceed from Commons to Association (C-A).
In
contrast, various forms of planner commons emerged as radical project
for the public ownership and state management in the factories and urban
conurbations of the industrial revolution. Insofar as these centered on the
marshalling of new industrial capacities of production into forms of
collectivity, they proceeded from Production to Commons (P-C). The main
examples are the command economies of authoritarian socialism and the welfare
state of liberal capitalism, bit there are also the important minoritarian
traditions of the cooperative and self-management movements.
Finally,
a networked commons proceeds on the basis of social communicative
capacities, from language on up, that enable Associative practices to occur. So
the movement here is from A-C. Today we are seeing an explosion of new
developments in this sub-circuit, including open source software, peer-to-peer
networks, grid computing and other socializations of labor intrinsic to high
technoscience, which we will discuss further in the next section.
Like
the different types of capital, these different forms of commons have blossomed
or blazed at distinct historical epochs. Indeed, the varying forms of capital
and commons should be seen as each summoning each other, or provoking one
another into being. Thus terrestrial commons were attacked by the forces of
mercantile capital, which in doing so lay the basis for the industrial
capitalism to which the planner commons was a response. The temporary success
of these largely state based commons was then undermined by the fluid mobility
of finance capital, whose appearance is however, inextricably tied up with the
development of a means of communication – the Internet – which provided the
basis for the mergence of networked commons. The concept of the cycle of
struggles can be re-written as the story of this antagonistic spiral, between
the circulation of capital and the circulation of the commons.
Because
to date capital has mainly retained the initiative in this contest, many forms
of commons have been partially destroyed. Although terrestrial commons persist,
however imperiled, in some peasant and indigenous communities, we have
only a fragmentary understanding of how they worked in their heyday. To a great
extent planner commons have been conceived under conditions guaranteeing great
malformation, and then yet further attacked and degraded. We are dealing often
with an archeology of the commons, a set of ruins. But these ruins can also be,
to use Fredric Jameson’s fine phrase, an “archaeology of the future.”[13]
Complex Communism
A twenty-first
century communism can be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial,
planner and networked commons, in which each reinforces and enables the
other. As capital today operates as a systemic but differentiated unity of the
mercantile, industrial and financial moments of its circuit, so a contemporary
communism would from the cellular forms of the common grow complex, composite
forms that combine the logic of mutual aid customs, governmental planning and
free and open-source peer to peer networks.
The
terrestrial commons today reappear today as the requirement for a set of
ecological arrangements preserving the biosphere from exhaustion. The
imperative of new habits and norms and daily practices in regard to production
and consumption is the great message of the green movement. But the need for a
commons biopolitics extends beyond environmental questions to issues of climate
control, epidemiology, and administering the biotechnologies which are in
effect producing a common global social body. The generation of new customs in
common adequate to the reality of this shared corporeality, on everything from
safe sex to recycling to emissions and cloning, is the issue of the
production of subjectivity today.
Such
customs can neither be implanted, germinate nor flourish without new forms of
planning. Despite all libertarian objections, it seems to me impossible to
envisage address of global poverty, disease, or climate change without the
restoration of an ethic of public ownership and coordinated resource
allocation, and at all levels, municipal, national, and global. And at this
last level, it will have to be on a scale that would in fact make some of the
efforts of the planner states of the past look quit modest and circumspect. One
basis of twenty-first century communism is the return, possibly too late, of
the plan, to redress the ruination of the planet from phantasmagoria of
neoliberalism laissez-faire.
That
such planning could, however, be a nightmare is all too apparent from a legacy
of catastrophic socialist experiments. The only way such planetary
co-ordinations can take a radical-democratic, rather than a
despotic-technocratic one, is through a mobilizing the capacities of the
networked commons to open forms of collective ownership and planning
participation. It is in this context that we can locate the issue of immaterial
labor, which I loosely interpret as those forms of communicational and
affective production associated, not exclusively but strongly, with digital
networks. Here I make three propositions.
First,
such immaterial labor is bringing into being a post-scarcity software economy
whose commons logic troubles the commodity form. Free and open source” and
“peer to peer networks” are the twenty first century’s way of saying what Marx
in 1844 called “free association.”[14] Such experiments are not immune to
commercial capture, but in their non-rivalrous plenitude and instantaneous circulation
of goods they create acute problems private ownership and market rationing. Contra
the “tragedy of the commons” hypothesis favored by market advocates,
foretelling the inevitable degeneration of resources outside individual
ownership, such immaterial practices explore the possibilities of a “cornucopia
of the commons” in which collaborative creation and shared use generate most
robust and abundant goods. [15] In this sense, then, the construction of a
network commons has already been raised to a very high level.
Second,
the consequence of this development are flowing back through other commons
sectors – those of the terrestrial and planner commons. If the network effects
was simply to stay in the realm of immaterial goods – music, films, games, intellectual
production – it might be contained as an aberrant and ghettoised sub-sector of
an otherwise un-impeached capital. But such containment is increasingly
difficult. This is because the circulation of software is a “traffic in tools”
that distributes, as code, instruments for production and planning. [16] This
has profound implications for the reinvigoration of a planner commons of public
ownership and governmental coordination.
The
creation of the personal computer was arguably a major step in the socialization
of production. But this step is already being extended by the creation of
microfabricators. low cost, programmable machine tools that can “print out”
what were formerly thought of as large scale industrial artifacts, and also the
tools to make even larger ones promises to bring manufacturing the same
informational logic that pervades the cultural field.[17] If one starts to
think of peer to peer networks of microfabricators running on open-source
software one sees the possibility for a decentralised collective dispersion of
industrial capacity to make the pioneers of workers’ cooperatives delirious.
Something
of the same process is affecting even the politics of governmental planning
projects. The electronic fabric of struggle is today made up not just by the
circulation of e-alerts, communiqués, and guerilla news but equally importantly
by a circulation of research instruments, cyber-geographical tools, search
capacities, accountancy packages, data banks, knowledge aggregators,
spreadsheets and simulators. This is effecting dissemination down to levels of
molecular activism of administration, management and planning capacities that
were once the possession of the great molar concatenations of governmental and
corporate power. In this sense Lenin’s aphorism that “every cook should learn
to govern the state”, so bitterly ironic after of a Soviet experiment where
“the state governed every cook,” is being obliquely renewed. [18]
Some
of the most dramatic implications of this networked socialization of production
tools bear on the new terrestrial commons of eco- and bio-spherical concerns.
Large scale research projects such as the search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence, global warming and climate change prediction and epidemic
control, requiring vast calculative capacities, are being realised through the
myriad singular donations of unused computing cycles from individuals. Adopted
on a very large scale, this would amount to voting with one screensaver as to
which programs of research to support –
a massive re-socialization of collective knowledge, an exercise of
general intellect.
Let
us take it as understood that the these radical potentials can be actualised,
not according to any automatic technology determinist progression, but only via
struggles about not just the ownership but the most basic design and
architecture of networks, struggles that have to be not only fought, but fought
out in detail, with great particularity. With that undertanding – and only with
that understanding – there are grounds for suggesting that while a twenty-first
century communism should be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial,
state and networked commons, the strategic and enabling point in this
ensemble is the networked commons of immaterial labor.
The
third proposition is, however, more cautionary. While the expansion of
networked commons created by immaterial labor can circulate through other
commons sectors, the actualization of network potentials is also dependent on –
perhaps sometimes even in contradiction with – transformations in these other
sectors. Thus, whether or not the democratizing capacities of networked commons
are realised will depend on planner commons in constructing free or cheap
access communication infrastructures, from municipal wi-fi hotspots to mass
distribution of ultra-cheap laptops; in building educational and literacy
programs; in rolling back corporate IP regimes; and in establishing open source
standards for public institutions. It is true also that digitally networked
commons, dependent as they are electrical supplies, on resource intensive and
computer fabrication, and on the generation of e-wastes places its own
ecological load on the terrestrial commons. These types of interconnections,
interdependencies, and possible contradictions between different sectors are,
however, precisely what a model of the circulation of the commons highlights,
and as an invitation to grounded utopianism.
Conclusion: Pre-Cogs
This long-sealed
issue of left utopianism has in fact over the last decade been reopened from
numerous directions. This resurgence has taken its impetus from both the
streets of Berlin and the jungles of Chiapas – from the fall of command
socialism, and the revival of anti-capitalist activism. It is, I suggest, an
important move. In Milan, precarious entrants to the cognitariat or immaterial
labor force have, using the metaphor of Minority Report, refrrred to
themselves as “pre-cogs.” Taking that metaphor seriously, let us see into the
future to perceive not just its dangers, but its hope. This paper has attempted
such a glance, while avoiding the locked gaze of the abstract utopianism Marx
so famously criticised. Just as the idea of a circulation of struggles arises,
methodologically, from the concept of the circulation of capital, so the notion
of a circulation of the commons arises that of the circulation of struggle.
Fights for commons – terrestrial, planned and networked – are happening, now. Complex communism is a
forward projection of these aspirations.
It
is a concept of emergence. Postulating the common as its cellular form, and the
circular generation of common goods and associative organization as its dynamic
of growth, it envisages a composite communism built from the aggregation and
interlinking of such cells and cycles. Unlike the top down, seamless blueprints
of some other current left utopias, it envisages a communism bubbling from
below. We might think by analogy with shifts in artificial intelligence
research. Here emphasis has over recent decades shifted from the programming of
comprehensive and impeccable logic-models to the assembly of many small units
of code that can in their interaction bootstrap themselves, albeit
unpredictably, to higher levels of complexity. The motto of such research is
“Fast, cheap and out of control.” [19] Commons may be fast or slow; even better
than cheap is free; but out of control – out of the control of the society of
control, out of control from global capital – that is indeed the aim. By moving
from a cellular model of commons and association that is simple, even
rudimentary, this paper has aimed to suggest a process that is scalable,
thinkable at levels from the domestic to municipal to the planetary, and terms
of the interconnections between these levels. And by speaking of a communism
composed by a circulation of distinctive modalities – terrestrial, planner,
networked – that nonetheless can be linked and reinforce on another it has
tried to wake from the hallucination – dream-world or nightmare – of a uniform
utopia, of which Soviet style socialism was the only the most notorious, in
favor of a heterogeneous communism built from multiple forms of common logic, a
communism of singularities. Under such conditions it may be possible once again
to say: “Omnia sunt communia.”
1. Giorgio Agamben,
The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota; Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard: Harvard University press, 2000.
2. Karl Marx. Capital.
Volume 1. New York: Vintage, 1977, 125.
3. Karl Marx, Capital
Vol. II. New York: Vintage, 1981, 180.
4. David Harvey, The
Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. 69-71
5. Peter Bell, and
Harry Cleaver. “Marx’s Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle.” Research
in Political Economy 5 (1982). Available online The Commoner: A Journal
for Other Values 5 (2002). http://www.commoner.org.uk/cleaver05.pdf
6. Romano Alquati,
“The Network of Struggles in Italy,” Unpublished Paper, 1974. Red Notes
Archive: London.
7. Sergio Bologna,
“The Tribe of Moles.” In Italy: Autonomia – Post-Political Politics, ed.
Sylvere Lottringer and Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, 36-61.
8. Bell and
Cleaver, 60.
9. See E.P.
Thompson, Customs in Common. Merlin, London, 1991; Michael Perelman, The
Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of
Primitive Accumulation. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
10. Peter Linebaugh
& Maurice Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and
the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon, Boston, 2000.
11. Midnight Notes
Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy. War 1973-1992. New York:
Autonomedia, 1992.
12. John McMurtry, Value
Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy. London: Pluto, 2002;
Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Global Capital and Value
Struggles. London: Pluto. Forthcoming.
13. Fredric
Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
14. Karl Marx, Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts. New York: International Publishers, 1964.
15. Garrett Hardin,
“The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science. 162 (1965) pp. 1343- 48; Eric
Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by
an Accidental Revolutionary, O’Reilly Media, New York, 2001.
16. Peter
Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
17. Neil
Gershenfeld, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – from Personal
Computers to Personal Fabrication. New York: Basic 2005.
18. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution;
Spunk Library: An Anarchist Library and Archive, “The Bolsheviks and Workers
Control 1921.” Available on-line: http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/1921.html
19. Rodney Brooks
and Anita Flynn, “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar
System,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 48 (1989), pp.
472-485.