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• Kolya Abramsky and Massimo De Angelis: Introduction: Energy crisis (among others) is in the air. [PDF]
• Tom Keefer Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, and Class Struggle. [PDF]
• Kolya Abramsky: Energy and Labor in the World-Economy. [PDF]
• Evo Morales: Open Letter on Climate Change: “Save the Planet from Capitalism”. [PDF]
• George Caffentzis: A Discourse on Prophetic Method: Oil Crises and Political Economy, Past and Future. [PDF]
• Ewa Jasiewicz: Iraqi oil workers movements: spaces of transformation and transition [PDF]
• Patrick Bond: The global carbon trade debate: For or against the privatisation of the air? [PDF]
• Ariel Salleh: Climate Change, Social Change – and the ‘Other Footprint’ [PDF]
• Director Shannon Walsh: Video clip: H2Oil. [video]
• Shannon Walsh: The Smell of Money: Alberta’s tar sands [PDF]
• Jane Kruse and Preben Maegaard: An authentic story about how a local community became self-sufficient in pollution free energy and created a source of income for the citizens [PDF]
• TRAPESE Collective: The Rocky Road to a Real Transition: The Transition Towns Movement and What it Means for Social Change [PDF]
• Mónica Vargas Collazos The Ecological Debt of Agro-fuels [PDF]
• Tatiana Roa Avendaño and Jessica Toloza: Dynamics of a Songful Resistance [PDF]
• Sergio Oceransky: Wind Conflicts in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec- The Role of Ownership and Decision-Making Models in Indigenous Resistance to Wind Projects in Southern Mexico [PDF]
• Jane Kruse: The End of One Danish Windmill Co-operative [PDF]

 Introduction: Energy crisis (among others) is in the air

Kolya Abramsky and Massimo De Angelis

There seems to be a general consensus, left and right, that we are in the midst of a new energy crisis. Either, “Peak Oil” is to blame, based on the argument that oil resources are about to peak bringing about serious constraints on future use of energy. Or, climate change is highlighted, warning that the sustained use of fossil fuel is heating up the planet and bringing about catastrophic changes in climate patterns.

With this issue of The Commoner we have sought to create a space to discuss the current energy crisis from a perspective that considers technology and energy within the social relations that they are part of, both being shaped by these relations and also shaping them. The editors of this issue do not believe this crisis is simply one of finite resources (“peak oil”), or that there is a technological path out of these crises, despite the indisputable fact that both resource scarcity and technology are nonetheless important factors. Instead, we understand the use, production, and distribution of energy as moments of capitalist social relations of production. As such, energy and technology are both important sites of struggle, and are shaped by these struggles. Like all phenomena, the basis of the current energy crisis does not have one but many converging “causes”. A politically essential one is the many resistances against capital’s appropriation of natural resources, beginning with oil and gas but not limited to these. [whole PDF article].

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or “Art And Immaterial Labour” Conference: A Sort of Review
(Tate Britain, Saturday 19 January, 2008) by David Graeber

On the 19th of January, several of the heavyweights of Italian post-Workerist theory—Toni Negri, Bifo Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Judith Revel— appeared at the Tate Modern to talk about art. This is a review. Or, it is a review in a certain sense. I want to give an account of what happened. But I also want to talk about why I think what happened was interesting and important. For me at least, this means addressing not only what was said but just as much, perhaps, what wasn’t; and asking questions like “why immaterial labor ?”, and “why did it make sense to all concerned to bring a group of revolutionary theorists over from Italy to talk about art history in the first place?” Asking these questions will allow me to make some much broader points about the nature of art, politics, history, and social theory, which I like to think are at least as interesting and potentially revealing than what happened in the actual debate.

The Sadness of Post-Workerism: full review article

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Contents

• Devi Sacchetto: Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations: the South-Eastern and Central Eastern European Case. [PDF]
• Massimiliano Tomba: Differentials of Surplus-Value in the contemporary forms of exploitation. [PDF]
• Ferruccio Gambino: A critique of Fordism and the Regulation School. [PDF]
• Siliva Federici and George Caffentzis: Notes of the edu-factory and cognitive capitalism. [PDF]
• Massimo De Angelis: Measure, excess and translation: some notes on “cognitive capitalism”. [PDF]
• Patrick Cuninghame: Reinventing an/other anti-capitalism in Mexico: The Six Declaration of the EZLN and the “Other Campaign”. [PDF]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Reruralizing the World. [PDF]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Two Baskets for Change. [PDF]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Food as Common and Community. [PDF]

Introduction [PDF]
This issue proposes some lines of enquiry around three interrelated themes: the migratory flows of people in today global factory, the dynamics and hierarchies underpinning the production of value for capital, and the production of values other than those for capital. The search for the connection among these themes is what allows us to weave together these papers so much different in style and subject matter.
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This issue is guest edited by Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis

Contents

• Angela Mitropoulos: Autonomy, Recognition, Movement [PDF]
• Nick Dyer-Witheford: Species-Being and the New Commonism [PDF]
• Precarias a la Deriva: A Very Careful Strike – Four hypotheses [PDF]
• P.M: The golden globes of the planetary commons [PDF]
• George Ciccariello-Maher: Working-Class One-Sidedness from Sorel to Tronti [PDF]
• Silvia Federici: The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s [PDF]
• Ida Dominijanni: Heiresses at Twilight. The End of Politics and the Politics of Difference [PDF]

Introductions [PDF]

Massimo De Angelis
After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the problematic of commoning.
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Contents

• David Graeber: Value as the Importance of Action [PDF]
• Massimo De Angelis: Value(s), Measure(s) and Disciplinary Markets [PDF]
• George Caffentzis: Immeasurable Value?: An Essay on Marx’s Legacy [PDF]
• Harry Cleaver: Work, Value and Domination [PDF]
• David Harvie: All Labour is Productive and Unproductive [PDF]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Development and Reproduction [PDF]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Dario De Bortoli: For Another Agriculture and Another Food Policy in Italy [PDF]
• Silvia Federici: Women’s Land Struggles and the Valorization of Labour [PDF]

Introduction
In this issue of The Commoner we are beginning to clear a path (or maybe several paths) out of the dust emerging from the front line, and try to make sense of what is the reason for the smoke and sparks. We see a strange phenomenon occurring: what we practice is often not what we value and what we value is often not what we practice (and in saying this let us not forget that “practice” means many diverse things: work, shopping, eating, filling forms, writing, taking the train, watching the telly, harvesting a crop, reading, struggling, changing nappies … and each and one of these involve direct or indirect relations to the “other”).
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Content

• James W. Lindenschmidt: From Virtual Commons To Virtual Enclosures: Revolution and Counter-Revolution In The Information Age [DOC] [PDF] [SXW]
• Matthias Studer: Gift and Free Software [DOC] [PDF] [SXW]
• Ariel Salleh: Sustainability and Meta-Industrial Labour: Building a Synergistic Politics [DOC] [PDF]
• Mercedes Moya: Some Common Goods: an Afro-colombian view [DOC] [PDF]
• Franco Barchiesi: Citizenship as Movement. Migrations, Social Control and the Subversion of State Sovereignty [DOC] [PDF]
• Amory Starr: Hunting democracy down in Miami for free trade [HTML]

Introduction
In this issue of The Commoner, we bring together diverse contributions all highlighting what people and communities are up against in creating and sustaining modes of life despite capitalism, whether these modes of life are in the street of Miami, along the rivers of Colombia, emerging from the flows of migrants, or flourishing within the post-scarcity cyberspace. We bridge these with one paper by Ariel Salleh making the case for the need to bring the invisible work of reproduction, what she calls meta-industrial labour, at the center of a Synergistic politics. This labour is characterised by the direct mediation of human and natural cycles whereas productivist labour, is linear and pursues a single goal regardless of consequence.
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Content

• Paul Routledge: Convergence of Commons: Process Geographies of People’s Global Action [PDF] [DOC]
• David Harvie: Commons and Communities in the University: Some Notes and Some Examples [PDF] [DOC]
• Werner Bonefeld: Uncertainty and Social Autonomy [PDF] [DOC]
• Colectivo Situaciones: Causes and Happenstance (dilemmas of Argentina’s new social protagonism) [PDF] [DOC]
• George Caffentzis: Freezing the Movement: Posthumous Notes on Nuclear War [PDF] [DOC]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Capitalism and Reproduction [PDF] [DOC]

Introduction.
Do commons have a place? Or it is rather, like others have argued, that grassroots globalisation networks constitute a `non-place’ of resistance? Paul Routledge argues that “place” is still a central dimension of social movements. This because “they forge an associational politics” that is constituent of “a diverse, contested coalition of place-specific social movements”. In these “convergence spaces” conflict is prosecuted on a “variety of multi-scalar terrains that include both material places and virtual spaces.” Is the convergence of struggles in these material and virtual spaces the real constituent force of commons?
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Content

• George Caffentzis: The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure. [PDF] [DOC]
• Matthew Hampton: The Return of Scarcity and the International Organisation of Money After the Collapse of
  Bretton Woods. [PDF] [DOC]
• Massimo De Angelis: Neoliberal Global Governance and Accumulation. [PDF] [DOC]
• Les Levidow: Governance of Genetically Modified Food. [PDF] [DOC]
• Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey: New Labour’s neoliberal Gleichschaltung: the case of higher education. [PDF] [DOC]

Introduction.
In this issue we present two contributions on money and three contributions on neoliberal governance. What do money and neoliberal governance have in common? The Commoner suggests at least one thing: they are both different but complementary ways to organize our lives around the rat race of global competition.
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Content

• Massimo De Angelis: Reflections on Alternatives, Commons and Communities [PDF] [DOC]
• Olivier De Marcellus: Commons, Communities and Movements: Inside, Outside and Against Capital [PDF] [DOC]
• Peter Waterman: All in Common. A New/Old Slogan for International Labour and Labour Internationalism [PDF] [DOC]
• Franco Barchiesi: Communities between Commons and Commodities. Subjectivity and Needs in the Definition of New Social Movements [PDF] [DOC]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Seven Good Reasons to Say “Locality” [PDF] [DOC]
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: The Native In Us, The Earth We Belong To [PDF] [DOC]
• John Holloway: Is the Zapatista Struggle and Anti-Capitalist Struggle? [PDF] [DOC]

Introduction
The global justice and solidarity movement (and all its articulations) is increasingly posing the question of alternatives. In this issue of The Commoner we provide contributions on this issue. Several of these pieces (those of Massimo De Angelis, Olivier De Marcellus, Franco Barchiesi and Peter Waterman) were presented at a workshop on “Commons and Communities” during last European Social Forum in Florence, November 2002. Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s two papers are older, but still very much relevant to this debate. She also presented the themes of her papers at the workshop in Florence. Finally, John Holloway’s contribution is the only one in this list that was missing in Florence, but the question of dignity he poses is obviously central to any discourse on alternatives.
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Contents

• Peter Bell & Harry Cleaver: Marx’s Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle. [PDF]
• Ana C. Dinerstein: Beyond Insurrection. Argentina and New Internationalism. [PDF]
• Conrad M. Herold: On Financial Crisis As A Disciplinary Device Of Empire: Emergence and Crisis Of The Crisis. [PDF]
• George Caffentzis: On the Notion of a Crisis of Social Reproduction: A Theoretical Review. [PDF]
• Werner Bonefeld: Class and EMU. [PDF]
• Steve Wright: The Historiography of the Mass Worker. [PDF]

Introduction
Global recession, famine, AIDS, global warming, war and poverty : to list the instances of crises today could be an encyclopedic enterprise; the list could get longer and longer by the day. The crises that pervade the expanded reproduction of the fabric of global capitalist control (see the article by Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver) can only be plural, as plural are the social powers that long for liberation.
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