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AbstractBoth Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri inCommonwealth(2008) and Peter Linebaugh inThe Magna Carta Manifesto(2009) want to put the commons and communism—understood as a form of society in which private property has been replaced by property in common—"back on the agenda." They even insist that just such a social and economic order "grounded in the common" is "already in process" and that communism is thus more relevant and possible than ever. To a certain extent, they are right. We need a functioning commons if human society is to remain viable. But we also need a functioning commercial economy capable of feeding the billions that human society has and most likely will continue to produce.

AbstractThis research article presents an agent-based simulation hereinafter called COMMONSIM. It builds on COMMONISM, i.e. a large-scale commons-based vision for a utopian society. In this society, production and distribution of means are not coordinated via markets, exchange and money, or a central polity, but via bottom-up signalling and polycentric networks, i.e. ex ante coordination via needs. Heterogeneous agents care for each other in life groups and produce in different groups care, environmental as well as intermediate and final means to satisfy sensual-vital needs. Productive needs decide on the magnitude of activity in groups for a common interest, e.g. the production of means in a multi-sectoral artificial economy. Agents share cultural traits identified by different behaviours: a propensity for egoism, leisure, environmentalism and productivity. The narrative of this utopian society follows principles of critical psychology and sociology, complexity and evolution, the theory of commons and critical political economy. The article presents the utopia and an agent-based study of it, with emphasis on culture-dependent allocation mechanisms and their social and economic implications for agents and groups.

Open Education, and specifically the Open Education Resources movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and increasing privatisation of the public education system. An important aspect of this movement is a reinvigoration of the concept of 'the commons'. The paper examines this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education and the underlying notion of 'the commons' to the test of critical political economy. The paper acknowledges the radical possibility of the idea of 'the commons', but argues that its radical potentiality can be undermined by a preoccupation with 'the freedom of things rather than with the freedom of labour'. The paper presents an interpretation of 'the commons' based on the concept of 'living knowledge' and 'autonomous institutionality' (Roggero, 2011), and offers the Social Science Centre in the UK, as an example of an 'institution of the common'1. The paper concludes by arguing the most radical revision of the concept of 'the common' involves a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes social or common wealth.

Any inclusive comprehension of the inner nature, deep structures, and conflictual dynamism of capitalism is potentially a transformative cognitive Commons. Likewise, to achieve an inclusive understanding of the existing post-capitalist praxes and the imaginary visions of utopian futures require cumulative, collective, and cooperative learning. Thus, theories of capital and the post-/counter-capital alternatives can be generated and treated as the Commons. In this paper, I argue that although there is no single/exclusive line of historical progress beyond Capital, it is possible to create integral theoretical frameworks for orchestrating common actions across different alternative praxes. This becomes a strong possibility if our knowledge of the existing or imminent post-capitalist experiences is liberated from the disintegrating forces of the corporatized Eurocentric intellectual institutions. A transformative scholarship in collaboration with communities of struggle is therefore vitally needed today to generate educational Commons as a means for establishing organic unities among alternative praxes. This in itself is a prefigurative movement. The political goal should then be to go beyond the localized fragmented radical struggles without reducing their multiformity to challenge the totalizing effects of the capitalist markets and states. The process of building organic unities or what we may call 'Commoning the alternatives' requires 'organic intellectuals' to help post-capitalist initiatives to self-reflectively explore and address their limitations. Therefore, Commoning the knowledge and experiences of alternatives is a self-rectifying endeavor that translates paralyzing assortments into collective learning processes through which each movement becomes capable of traversing (rather than transcending) their self-inflicted ideological boundaries and thereby of developing integral macro-political projects to transcend capitalism; i.e. a Commonist project.

As capitalist societies in the twenty-first century move from crisis to crisis, oppositional movements in the global North have been somewhat stymied (despite ephemeral manifestations like Occupy), confronted with the pressing need to develop organizational infrastructures that might prepare the ground for a real, and durable, alternative. More and more, the need to develop shared infrastructural resources — what Shantz terms "infrastructures of resistance" — becomes apparent. Ecological disaster (through crises of capital), economic crisis, political austerity, and mass produced fear and phobia all require organizational preparation — the common building of real world alternatives. There is, as necessary as ever, a need to think through what we, as non-elites, exploited, and oppressed, want and how we might get it. There is an urgency to pursue constructive approaches to meet common needs. For many, the constructive vision and practice for meeting social needs (individual and collective) is expressed as commonism — an aspiration of mutual aid, sharing, and common good or common wealth collectively determined and arrived at. The term commonsim is a useful way to discuss the goals and aspirations of oppositional movements, the movement of movements, because it returns to social struggle the emphasis on commonality — a common wealth — that has been lost in the histories of previous movements that subsumed the commons within mechanisms of state control, regulation, and accounting — namely communism.

During the last decades, a new mode of production has emerged, for which names such as "commons-based peer production," "cornmonism," and "peer economi' have been proposed, This article explores the main characteristics of this mode of prodnction and discusses the relationship between commonism and communism: if communism is "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things", can commonism become the mode of production which allows this movement to realize this purpose?

Varying shades of green -- Green governmentality -- Green scare -- Fascist earth -- Commonism -- Welcome to the dark side of dignity and development -- Urban clearcutting -- Protest without people -- So to speak

IT IS FASHIONABLE TO STATE THAT COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY IS DEAD. BUT THE QUASI-RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, IN THE CLASS STRUGGLE ENDING IN A CLASSLESS SOCIETY AND THE SELF-REGULATING COLLECTIVE FORMED BY PERFECT MAN HAS REMAINED THE UTOPIAN GOAL OF COMMONISM IN CHINA AS MUCH AS IN THE USSR. AS WE STUDY THE CHINESE SITUATION WE NEGLECT THE ROLE OF IDEOLOGY IN ITS SYSTEM.

THE LIBERAL IDEALISM NIEBUHR BEQUEATHED TO HIS POST-WAR DISCIPLES INCLUDED THREE ELEMENTS: A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE THAT ASSUMED THE FUTILITY OF APPEALS TO SCIENTIFIC REASON IN SOCIAL AFFAIRS; A CONCRETE SET OF IMMAGES, ESPECIALLY THOSE OF DEMONIC COMMONISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETY OF THE WEST; AND A STYLE OF POLITICAL PROPAGANDA BASED UPON THE USE OF MYTHS OF A THEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL NATURE

This open access book presents an alternative to capitalism and state socialism through the modelling of a post-market and post-state utopia based on an upscaling of the commons, feminist political economy and democratic and council-based planning approaches. It discusses the left's need to explore non-capitalist modes of production, the inability of green or socialist market economies to produce real social and ecological change, and the need to look beyond traditional ideas of reform and revolution. The book discusses how a socio-economic organisation beyond money, wage labour, patriarchal division of work and centralised state planning may look like. It develops an approach to societal transformation based on seed forms of commons practices and social movements. This book will be relevant to activists, students and researchers interested in fundamental social change, political economy and feminist and Marxist economics. This is an open access book.

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Affect and Capital: Discourse, General Intellect and Affective Capitalism -- Chapter 3: Algorithms and Big Data: Surplus Value of Codes and Flows -- Chapter 4: Affect and Neuromarketing: The Affective Economy of Molecular Enslavement -- Chapter 5: Tarde, Affect and Network Effect of Social Media -- Chapter 6: Algorithm and Affective Politics of Molecular Traversal: The Free Software -- Chapter 7: From Cloud to Crowd, again: Restoring Points of the Peer-to-Peer and Decentralized Internet -- Chapter 8: The Digital Democracy of Blockchain: Beyond Libertarianism to Commonism -- Chapter 9: Digital Rent and Universal Basic Income: The Social Distribution of 'User Created Value' -- Chapter 10: From Structure to Affect: Molecular Sociology of Becoming.

Intro -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Catharsis: The Politics of Enjoyment -- It Begins with a Joke -- Catharsis and the Backlash of the Right -- Zizek and the Critique of Political Correctness -- Jokes and Catharsis -- Zizek's Ironic Discourse -- Trump, Zizek, and Reality Media -- Trump the Primal Father -- Technologies of Catharsis -- Chapter 3: Pathos, Hysteria, and the Left -- Traumatic Memory -- Zizek and the Global Monster of Capitalism -- Chapter 4: Ethos, Transference, and Liberal Cynicism -- Ethos and Transference -- Hegel's Ethos and Ideology -- Transference and Narcissism -- Saving Hegel -- Christianity and Cynical Conformity -- Obama and Liberal Cynicism -- Chapter 5: Logos, Global Justice, and the Reality Principle -- Reality and the Real -- Zizek and the Science of the Real -- Modernity and Separation -- Chapter 6: Conclusion: Communism or Commonism? -- Index.