That was the message sent via “text mob” that guided protesters forward at the Republican National Convention street march in 2004, relieving them of the panic that no doubt would have ensued when the plumes of smoke rising up ahead were observed. Text mobs also helped shut down San Francisco for 12 hours when the war in Iraq broke out in 2003 and the initiation of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine was signaled by the sound of student cell phones ringing.

Just read Rebecca Tarlau's article on Bolivia and the real revolutionary leaders of Latin America: the people on the ground. Describing community assemblies and the power of massive mobilizations, Tarlau focuses on the list of demands poor people are making in their community councils, including the nationalization of oil and the retraction of private property rights. She points out that you can change a government, but to really address the problems in a society, you have to structurally change the way people participate in a society to ferment a culture of freedom built on a common vision.

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A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons

George Caffentzis, University of Maine

Abstract

In the last decade the concept of the commons has increasingly become the basis of anticapitalist thinking in the antiglobalization (or, as some now have it, "the global justice") movement. It has been politically useful both as an alternative model of social organization against the onslaught of "there is no alternative" neoliberal thinking and as a link between diverse struggles ranging from those of agricultural workers demanding land, to environmentalists calling for a reduction of the emission of "hot house gases" into the atmosphere, to writers, artists, musicians and software designers rejecting the totalitarian regime of intellectual property rights. But, like any concept in a class society, it can have many and often antagonistic uses. Our paper will show that there is a use of the concept of the commons that can be functional to capitalist accumulation and it offers an explanation as to why this capitalist use developed, especially since the early 1990s. The conclusion of this paper will assess the political problem that this capitalist use of "the commons" (both strategically and ideologically) poses for the anticapitalist movement.