In this publication, the authors introduce us to the issues at stake in their research-guided art project Arts of Commoning, from which this dossier originates.

This dialogue with one of the preeminent historians of the Atlantic commons, ranges across the rich history of mutualist invention and solidarity, from the aesthetics of commoning to the resistance to industrial “counter-revolution,” from the Jacquard loom targeted by Ned Ludd to contemporary data centers and AI, from The Book of Ruth to the Forest Charter, and from the Many-Headed Hydra to the jubilee. Linebaugh reminds us that commoning was born and lives on in class struggle, “within as well as beyond capitalist institutions.”

In this wide-ranging conversation, Massimo De Angelis reflects on the commons as both a living tissue of everyday cooperation and a systemic force capable of reorganizing social reproduction beyond capitalism. Drawing from his forthcoming book The Pyramid and the Common, he traces how commoning unfolds as praxis—an art of enactment entangled with capital yet oriented toward autonomy, care, and habitability. The discussion moves through key fault lines of our time: the ambivalent role of the state in eco-socialist transitions; the confrontation between effectiveness and efficiency in technological development; the aesthetics and sensuous allure of commoning as music, dance, and art; the imagination of more-than-human commons; and the emergence of “commoners’ sense” in an age of planetary crisis and war. What emerges is a vision of commoning as both resistance and composition—a practice that dissolves the old while rehearsing, rhythm by rhythm, the forms of a livable world.

In this deep-reaching dialogue, Alexandros Kioupkiolis sets out the logic of a counter-hegemonic strategy for advancing a commons-based eco-socialist politics, assesses the legacies of horizontally organized social movements, offers critical evaluations of artificial intelligence and digital technologies, and affirms the political importance of love in a planetary conjuncture of deep social and ecological polycrisis.