It's true that Marx defined commodities not as things but as social relations, but it was Karl Polyani who depicted most graphically these precise social changes that occurred in the British countryside during the time of enclosures, famous calling this period "The Great Transformation."

Well, with the rhetoric of the "new enclosures" sweeping social and legal theory today, it is crucial to understand the concurrent and indeed constitutive social transformations that define these enclosures of the "intangible commons of the mind" (see James Boyle's "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain"). Intellectual property threatens the information commons, according to theorists and activists alike, but what is the relationship of these information commons to our changing social relations, or to political governance more generally?

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.