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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,