The alternative is compeeirsm—compeerist communing offers lines of flight outsides capitalist structures key to organizing and chaotically ending capitalism

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Compeerists of the World Unite!” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 175-177. /LJS

As explained at the outset of this book, the compeerist outlook is best understood as an amalgamation and sharpening of existing thought. Hence, while it embraces the P2P position that commons-centred, collaborative production has the potential to outcompete and ultimately replace our current mode of production, such a process is also seen, in line with most autonomous Marxists, as far from easy or straightforward given that capital currently infiltrates almost every aspect of our socio-economic reality. In thus seeking to answer how an evolutionary turn from capital to the commons could unfold, we can start by revisiting the insightful work of autonomists Massimo De Angelis and John Holloway. For Holloway, our reality within capitalism is seen as dominated by abstract labour, understood as work that is stripped of all meaning for the worker beyond its value as a commodity, what we have posited in this book as a consequence of the apparatus of capture (Holloway, 2010; 2012). Holloway goes on to point out that abstract labour, which has far-reaching material and psychological consequences, is largely inescapable as long as capitalist social relations dominate. For De Angelis, in turn, who broadly accepts Holloway’s starting point, alienated labour makes up an integral component of the broad ‘middle class’, defined as a ‘stratified field of subjectivity’ that is fundamentally formed by, and complicit in, capital’s ‘disciplinary markets, enclosures, governance and … profit seeking enterprises’ (De Angelis, 2010, p 960). Also naturally included in such a subjectivity, we should add, is the acceptance of ‘consumerism as a way of life that contains its own self-reproducing end values’ (Carroll, 2010, p 190). In other words, De Angelis’s specific understanding of the middle class encompasses the majority of the populace living by the dictates of capitalism. Given how entwined we are in capitalism’s logics and mechanisms, the imperative to have an ‘outside’ space (both mental and physical) from where resistance can be envisioned and pursued, takes centre stage. For both scholars such an ‘outside’ is hard to come by but not impossible. Importantly, for Holloway, it is not to be found by positioning ourselves in relation to socially constructed, reified ‘things’, like money, capital, or the state, as these simply lead us to become ‘entrapped within an organizational and conceptual prison that effectively strangles any aspirations for revolutionary change’ (Holloway, 2010, p 917). Instead, Holloway’s answer, which resonates with many other anarchist and autonomist approaches to the commons, is that the outside to capital is essentially achieved through a continuous, prefigurative act of often local or site-based ‘doing’, where work is reclaimed for the purpose of creating use-value. De Angelis similarly points to the need for Holloway’s ‘doing’, which he calls instantiations of ‘commoning’. Importantly, for De Angelis and many others, ‘commoning’ must here not be conflated with simply engaging in collective work organized from the top down. It is only in the pursuit of a commons that is democratically conceived and governed according to community-established values, such as fairness, charity, and sustainability, that actual ‘commoning’ is being conducted (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Dyer-Witheford, 2015; De Angelis, 2017b). De Angelis and Holloway, however, also recognize that such genuine, counter-capitalist efforts of ‘doing’ and commoning must achieve some form of critical mass to effect larger, systemic change, but details here are scarce. Holloway (2010; 2012) posits how the many acts of ‘doing’ must be multiplied to form the ‘millions of cracks’ needed to overcome capitalist domination. The accumulation of these prefigurative cracks, which align quite well with our lines of flight, is ultimately to be achieved via a ‘chaotic and fragmented … movement of movements’ (Holloway, 2010, p 918). Yet, beyond referencing the cracks that would comprise such a movement, there is little that Holloway is willing to say regarding its emergence, coalescing, and ultimate dynamics. De Angelis, in turn, offers a somewhat more specific proposal by suggesting the need to figuratively explode the ‘middle class’ mental framework to create a consciousness that can think beyond taken-for-granted capitalist assumptions (De Angelis, 2010). In his view, such rogue consciousness would entail the mental internalization of some key insights that are actively repressed by current middle class subjectivity. These include: 1. recognizing the increasing irrationality of our collective work in the service of capital (leading, for instance, to artificial scarcity and environmental meltdown); 2. understanding that this service to capital is leading to stagnant and even slipping wealth and wellbeing for most; and 3. realizing that the threatening ‘other’ we have been made to blame for our growing insecurity/unhappiness is, in fact, a myth spawned by the ulterior motivations of vested, powerful actors. De Angelis further explains that a full ‘explosion’ of the middle class would express itself in a ‘proper movement’, describing it as a ‘socio-cultural shockwave’ (De Angelis, 2010, p 968). At the same time, however, he also honestly concedes to not knowing how such an explosion would actually be triggered and sustained.