After a longer hiatus The Commoner is coming back. Here is the full invitation letter as .pdf
We herewith invite you to join a new round of commoning around questions such as these:
- How do we extend commons’ reach without falling into command or wealth hierarchies?
- How do we translate experiences from any given commons across geography, ‘sector’ or type and/or scale?
- Is it possible to abstract from concrete examples to formulate and articulate general political and organizational principles? How? If such an abstraction is possible, is it desirable, i.e. politically useful?
- How do we build systems of socio-ecological reproduction that increase communities’ autonomy and bargaining power vis-à-vis capital at different scales of social cooperation?
- How does a radical commons perspective help us to approach the “state”, the question of the “law”, and the current hegemonic private-public dichotomy?
In the context of these urgent questions, we believe it is time for The Commoner to wake up from its hibernation. We would like to invite you to participate in this project of reconstituting The Commoner. The project is yet to be defined in detail. Thus this invitation is also one to collaborate in such a definition. But, as a starting point, we can outline three initial basic elements (modifiable as people come in with new ideas):
First, a backbone of the new The Commoner is envisaged as the integration of blogger communities sharing commentaries, news items, videos and graphics. We envision them posting on themes that are relevant to and located at the front line of radical commons: from art to food, from care to cyberspace, from ecology to housing, from the use of time to the use of space, from struggles and commoning in the workplace to struggles and commoning in territories, from local struggles to international movements, from reclaimed spaces to report on new strategies of enclosures, from . These diverse and plural posts would have the purpose of keeping alive our collective sense of the plurality, diversity and evolving nature of commons – and the challenges they (that is, we) face.
Second, a revitalised peer-reviewed web-journal with a new editorial community, a network of associates acting as referees, and a larger networks of collaborators and contributors. We still have not worked out a final structure and organisation of the editorial board. Thus far the idea is that the steering group launching this initiative (that we like to call the “stirring” committee) take the lead and, with the addition of new members, eventually will morph into an editorial board. Editorial board members will also act as thematic and area editors to solicit submissions and organise thematic issues across The Commoner‘s broader community.
We hope you would like to take part in this new phase of The Commoner as part of the commoner community. Please let us know whether you are interested in participating in this open project, and share your thoughts about this initiative.
All the best,
The Commoner’s “Stirring” Commitee [Massimo De Angelis, Silvia Federici, Martin Pedersen, Marina Sitrin, Stavros Stavrides]