The Commoner

Issue 08: Autumn/Winter 2004

‘Around commons and autonomy, war and reproduction’

Do commons have a place? Or it is rather, like others have argued, that grassroots globalisation networks constitute a `non-place’ of resistance?


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

‘In my view, it is no coincidence that, in these last 20 years, the woman’s question, the question of the indigenous populations (3), and the question of the Earth have assumed growing importance, for they are linked by an especially close synergy. The path towards a different kind of development cannot ignore them. There is much knowledge still in civilisations which have not died but have managed to conceal themselves, and their secrets have been maintained thanks to their resistance to the will to annihilate them. The Earth encloses so many powers, especially its power to reproduce itself and humanity as one of its parts. These powers have been discovered, preserved and enhanced more by women’s knowledge than male science. It is crucial, then, that this other knowledge–of women, of indigenous populations and of the Earth, whose ‘passiveness’ is capable of regenerating life (Shiva, 1990)–should find a way of emerging and being heard. This knowledge appears now as a decisive force that can lift the increasingly deadly siege capitalist development imposes on human reproduction’
[Mariarosa Dalla Costa]