Commons engaging with the state is the only way to solve the harms of biopolitics

Much of the anti-state discourse in the radical commons literature is curiously lacking in concrete analysis of the relations between something called the state, civil society and political struggles and movement. When real world cases are invoked they tend to be rather simplistic. The perspective on the Zapatista struggle (e.g. Cunninghame, 2008) sees the Mexican state as a negative totalizing apparatus of domination and enclosure. Yet, things are more complicated. The repeals of the Eijido laws under the Salinas government in the run up to the NAFTA agreement were themselves the creation of the 1917 revolutionary state in response to the original Zapata-led communal movement to re-insert traditional collective rights to land. While the Mexican revolution, like many in the twentieth century, failed to live up to its more anti-capitalist aspirations, the state’s role historically in relation to common rights was certainly more ambiguous than is generally portrayed. Some of the more interesting reflections on these issues have not surprisingly come from other parts of Latin America where the most serious resistance to neoliberalism and global corporate rule has emerged over the past decade and a half. Self-critical reflection on past revolutionary failures has led to a more nuanced sense of how a new “war of position” might be forged through rethinking the relations between a radical civil society and the state (e.g. Escobar, 2010; Harnecker, 2007; Robinson, 2008; Sader, 2011). Rather than writing off engagement with the state, these reflections emphasize the way that new movements fuse older left forces such as trade unions with indigenous groups to contest existing state structures while continuing to organize outside of them. Whether this is with Venezuela’s experiments with “participatory and protagonist democracy” (Escobar, 2010, p. 14) or with Ecuador and Bolivia’s attempts at incorporating new indigenous and nature-based rights into existing constitutions, there is a serious attempt here to challenge hegemonic power structures and shift towards a more radical and democratic alternative. While such projects remain problematic in practice, not least because of the deep-seated power of existing political and economic elites at home and abroad (e.g. Becker, 2011; Radcliffe, 2012), they represent serious attempts to renew relations between state, society and the economy in what Escobar has termed a new “pluri-cultural imaginary” (Escobar, 2010). Rather than fully rejecting the state, they seek to integrate social and political spheres in a more dynamic and imaginative way than previous top-down leftist state projects (Sader, 2011). In contrast, the rejection of the state by autonomous theorists amounts ultimately to a serious failure to address political strategy.