Sarah Kumnig

Capitalism and the Commons focuses on the political and social perspectives that commons offer, how they are appropriated or suppressed by capital and state, and how social initiatives and movements contest these dynamics or build their struggles on commoning. The volume comprises theoretical and empirical approaches that engage with three main themes: conceptualizing the commons, analyzing practices of commoning, and exploring commons politics. In their contributions, the authors focus on the development of anti-capitalist commons and explore the issue of practice and politics through case studies from Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Africa more broadly, Austria, Germany and South Korea, ranging from peri-urban and rural agriculture to urban commons and how they manifest in the Global South as well as in the Global North. The book engages with different discourses on the commons in regard to their relevance for social change and thereby reinvigorates the political meaning of the commons. It provides an original and important approach to the topic in terms of conceptualization, detailing diverse empirical realities, and analyzing potential perspectives. In so doing, the book transcends narrow disciplinary boundaries and expands the focus to the global. Providing a fresh perspective on the commons as a decisive component of alternatives, this title will be relevant to scholars and students of resource management, social movements, and sustainable development more broadly.

Gemeinnützige Bauträger sind etablierte Akteure am Wiener Wohnungsmarkt. Die in den letzten Jahren exorbitant gestiegenen Grundstücks-und Baukosten sowie eine steigende Nachfrage nach leistbarem Wohnraum haben weitreichende Auswirkungen für die Bereitstellung von leistbarem Wohnraum in Wien. Diese Entwicklungen führen nicht nur am Wohnungsmarkt im Allgemeinen zu Verschiebungen, sondern auch innerhalb des gemeinnützigen Sektors. Der Beitrag nähert sich diesen Verschiebungen auf Ebene der gemeinnützigen Unternehmen an und untersucht a) welche Deutungen von Leistbarkeit und damit verbundene Herausforderungen im Feld der gemeinnützigen Wohnungswirtschaft zu finden sind, und b) welche Praktiken in der Bereitstellung von (leistbarem) Wohnraum zur Anwendung gelangen. Empirisch stützt sich der Beitrag auf leitfadengestützte Interviews mit Vorständen, Geschäftsführer*innen und Projektentwickler*innen aus der gemeinnützigen Wohnungswirtschaft, die zwischen 2020 und 2021 geführt wurden. Abschließend werden Implikationen für die Gemeinnützigkeit in Wien, sowie für die Bereitstellung von (leistbarem) Wohnraum diskutiert.

The era, in which we write this book, is one of multiple crises. Capitalist society has become riddled with increasing challenges stoked by a series of long-term cumulative and interconnected crises. They involve ecological relations, capitalist production, social reproduction, political stability, and the substance of liberal democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and parliamentarism. Yet, these crises are fundamentally about structural global inequalities and stratification. In the years following the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2007/2008, a surge in climate activism began, the phenomenon of land grabbing was discussed in the media—by activists and scholars—-and alternatives to capitalism-as-usual raised some interest in public debates. Widespread protests, reaching from the occupy movement to the so-called “Arab” Spring, shook the confidence of capitalist classes and political elites who had to realize that decades of rampant social inequality, insecurity, and exploitation finally brought neoliberal capitalism to question on a broader front. In many countries, ruling classes met massive bankruptcies and looming further capital destruction with brutal austerity programs. Global recession brought the commodity price rally that had benefited many governments in the Global South to a halt. The drop in export incomes fueled widespread discontent and pushed the pink tide in Latin America back into neoliberal waters.
The “summer of migration” 2015 was met with aggravated nativism and right-wing populism. Austerity took new forms, as spending previously directed to social policy was channeled to support transnational corporations and …

This book assembles a broad variety of different voices of and on the commons. Its pages sound with their individual melodies, varying rhythms, and distinct tonalities from different corners of the world. Taking inspiration from Anna Tsing by extending her metaphor of polyphony—“music in which autonomous melodies intertwine”(Tsing, 2005, p. 23)—to the current book, we may see this approach as the scholarly equivalent to the horizontalism of the “spirit of Porto Alegre” that Immanuel Wallerstein referred to (Curty, 2017). There is no sheet to sight-read from, no single composition that governs these voices or provides the rhythm for their individual and collective contributions, which form the chorus that has become this book. These voices as well as their chorus are the product of experiences of a manifold of different people, of authors engaging in countless conversations with commoners who are entangled in a diversity of circumstances. Circumstances made of places, ideas, animals and plants, forces, contingencies, encounters, and strategies reach out to touch our hearts, inspire our minds, make themselves heard, and ask us to listen. This palette of experiences is mediated through texts that talk of situations that were conveyed to their authors, who in turn also write about their own experiences; experiences with situations that others created and are affected by, often emerging from tangential participation, sometimes from active engagement. The scholars writing about commons in this book let the voices they heard resonate within them, amplifying some, muting others. Our book thus started with a brief session emphasizing some of the most …