Gene Ray: Your systems theory approach to commoning in Omnia Sunt Communia takes us far beyond the management of pooled resources, for the emphasis on skilled making, growing and doing-together reminds us that commoning is both a mode of production and of social reproduction.[note]Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and Post-Capitalist Transformation, London: Zed, 2017[/note] You describe how local commons systems can combine into more complex commons ecologies. This raises the important question of how far commons ecologies can go, in capitalist societies. Clearly, commons are goods in themselves. But do you conceive of commoning as a first step or transitional social form that leads elsewhere - perhaps to forms of eco-socialism? Or do you see commoning as a form of self-determination that has the potential to challenge the very existence of the state? Could you clarify and discuss a little the relation between commoning and eco-socialism, as you see it?

 

Massimo De Angelis: My systems-theory approach to commoning indeed moves beyond the mere management of pooled resources. Commoning is not only about governing scarcity, but about the skilled making, growing, and doing-together that reproduce life itself. Yet it is not only a matter of skill directed toward the production of use-values. It is also about affective relations, and we need to acknowledge that any form of praxis—every useful purpose we set ourselves to achieve in social cooperation—is also an act of social reproduction, because it involves relations with others and with Gaia. Commoning, in this sense, is a praxis open to the problematization of these relations, both internally and externally to the commons. By “externally” I mean in relation to the outside of any specific commons—an outside that, in the overconnected world we inhabit, is composed of multiple circuits of social cooperation, and therefore of many life-worlds, which together constitute the common (singular) condition of our living. This common condition we identify with the word “capitalism,” since these circuits are overwhelmingly hegemonized by capital.

But what is capital? It is a system of living and non-living elements organized in such a way as to fulfill a conatus—which we can summarize as the circuit M–C–M′—together with a potentia, given by the intricate systemic workings of circuits of social cooperation oriented toward a hierarchical order of purposes and, consequently, toward a hierarchical order of value praxes.[note]M–C–M′ (money is converted into commodities, which are then converted into a greater sum of money) is “the general formula for capital” (or for the valorization process in capitalism) derived by Karl Marx in Chapter 4 of Capital, volume I.[/note] Our bodies and our subjectivities inhabit daily environments bent to this socially necessary order of purposes in cooperation: the making of money above all other purposes. This is the systemic order that Trump epitomizes well with his transactional mode of politics: in a sense, he captures the figure of Monsieur le Capital.

The influence of capitalism and its systemic order perturbs our bodies daily, in countless occasions, ways, and contexts. We live through it in forms of praxis that burden our lives with all that is needed to sustain capital reproduction. We face its constraints: the need to obtain employment at almost any cost, and the need to work under conditions not of our choosing. We undergo its effects: exhaustion, precarity, dispossession. We communicate daily through its codes, replicating the taboo that the dominant way to circulate use-values is through money bound to profit-making agglomerates. We are subjected to policies calibrated to reproduce the centralization of economic and political power, to competitive militarization, and to the securitization of everyday life. We participate in consumption cycles colonized by commodification and profit-maximization, where even our most intimate needs and desires are folded into the machinery of accumulation. And often these constraints are mirrored in their impacts: wars fought with bombs and words, financial turbulence in stock exchanges to which pensions and livelihoods are tied, work routines marked by exploitation and indignity, and ecological environments increasingly rendered unsafe for living.

In Omnia Sunt Communia, I argued that commons are not isolated entities but nodes in wider ecologies of cooperation. In The Pyramid and the Common I developed this further by showing that these ecologies are, with varying intensities, present throughout ordinary life, yet always constrained, shaped, and disrupted by the hierarchical organization of capitalist value praxis.[note]Massimo De Angelis, The Pyramid and the Common: Social Reproduction, Value Praxis and Transformation, New York: Bloomsbury, 2026[/note] Commoning, then, must be understood not as an enclave apart from this order, but as a living praxis entangled with it, simultaneously reproducing life and struggling against the systemic subordination imposed by capital.

The question of how far commons ecologies can go in capitalist societies is both strategic and ontological. On the one hand, all sorts of commons are valuable in themselves: they enable sustenance, autonomy, care, and conviviality even within hostile environments. On the other hand, commons ecologies also have systemic potential: they can expand, interconnect, and reconfigure the field of social reproduction in ways that challenge the dominance of capital and command. Yet this potential depends on how boundaries are drawn and lived. Every commons requires boundaries to protect its resources and relations from enclosure, but a commons that is only projected into itself, refusing connection or solidarity, risks becoming reactionary. The challenge, then, is to cultivate porous boundaries that safeguard without isolating, that open onto other commons, wider ecologies of cooperation, and social movements.

The limits, however, are double. Externally, commons are hemmed in by the capitalist pyramid, which continually seeks to subordinate them to accumulation and state regulation. Internally, commons encounter the challenge of organizational capacity: the ability of commoners to federate, to resolve conflict, to maintain trust, and to scale decision-making without losing reciprocity. The horizon of commons ecologies is therefore shaped simultaneously by the pressures of external command and by the difficulties of sustaining durable, self-organized forms of cooperation.

This is where the debate on eco-socialism becomes relevant. In the literature, eco-socialism names a broad family of Marx-inflected projects that link ecological repair to the democratic reorganization of production and social reproduction. From the manifestos of Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy, which defined eco-socialism against both productivist socialism and market environmentalism,[note]Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy, “International Ecosocialist Manifesto” (2001), in M. Löwy, Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015[/note] to John Bellamy Foster’s ecological Marxism and the “metabolic rift” tradition,[note]John Bellamy Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology: Socialism and the Defense of Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023[/note] eco-socialism has been conceived as the re-integration of human activity into the cycles of nature through democratic planning of energy, food, and material flows. More recently, degrowth-oriented perspectives such as Kohei Saito’s “degrowth communism” have emphasized sufficiency, decommodification, and public goods as the substance of a post-capitalist abundance.[note]Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023; and Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, New York: Astra, 2024[/note] Across these strands, one point recurs: capitalist states, structured by accumulation and imperial relations, cannot themselves resolve the ecological crisis, but the transition on the scale and speed required will inevitably involve repurposing and democratizing state capacities to enable public ownership, planning, and provisioning. The state, in eco-socialist thinking, is thus a terrain of struggle—instrumental in the near term, but not a savior in the long run.

My own framework intersects with eco-socialism on these points but also extends them. In The Pyramid and the Common, following Giuseppe Micciarelli, I distinguish between fundamental commons—the ecological conditions and social institutions that make life possible—and emergent commons—the institutions and practices people invent to reproduce themselves cooperatively. Eco-socialism can be seen as the project of scaling and protecting fundamental commons (land, water, energy, atmosphere, health care, work conditions, and so on) through the deepening of democratic participation and planning, while also cultivating (with rights and resources) emergent commons so that they federate into durable ecologies of cooperation. Here the role of the state is real but ambivalent: eco-socialism presupposes some form of state, but unless it grows the organizational capacity of commoners and secures their autonomy, it risks reverting to programmatic imposition from above.

The crucial difference I would stress is that while eco-socialism may serve as a horizon for reorganizing social metabolism, commoning is first of all a praxis—an enactment of self-determination here and now. Eco-socialism remains largely a strategic projection, a political program, while commoning is a lived process that dissolves old forms and generates new ones in the contexts where it operates. Without the ground of commoning, eco-socialism risks abstraction; without the systemic ambitions of eco-socialism, commons risk fragmentation. It is in the dialectic between them that new futures open.

In short: commoning is not merely a first step, nor merely a local practice. It is the living tissue out of which any eco-socialist project, any “degrowth communism,” but also any anarchist utopia, or indeed any livable future horizon must be woven. And it is simultaneously the practice by which people, here and now, challenge the very forms of state and capital that organize our social metabolism. Eco-socialism may provide one name for a future systemic horizon, but commoning is the art of enactment—dissolving the old and generating the new in every gesture of cooperative life.

 

G. R.: The issue of technology is an urgent one today. As both Marx and Walter Benjamin after him noted, technology development should foster and govern good relations between humanity and nature. Under capitalism and its inter-state system, this is far from the case: the relation to nature is one of attempted domination and extraction, with ruinous results. So-called disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and gene editing, are now being rushed into operation without any real public debate or critical reflection. AI in particular turns out to be ecologically devastating, in its material, energy and infrastructural requirements - to say nothing of its weaponization. Yet the decision has already been made to infiltrate and saturate everyday life with this technology, regardless of risks and consequences. How should commoners evaluate and make use of such technologies, if at all? There is an ongoing debate about the possibilities or impossibilities of a digital commons. Some, like Jonathan Crary, argue that the internet complex is too implicated in ecological and social ruination and in the concentration of monopoly power to be used in commoning.[note]Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, London/New York: Verso, 2022[/note] What are your thoughts about these energy- and mineral-intensive structures and technics?

 

M. D. A.: Technology under capitalism is selected and scaled for efficiency—measured by exchange value, speed, and throughput—rather than for effectiveness, which in my framework means the reliable reproduction of life and habitability within ecological limits. Artificial intelligence (AI) illustrates this clearly. In 2024 the International Energy Agency projected that global data center electricity demand will roughly double by 2030, approaching 1,000 terawatt-hours annually, with AI as a principal driver. Studies showed early on that training large deep-learning models requires vast computational resources, producing significant energy use and carbon emissions. More recently, studies of water consumption show that hyperscale computing facilities often withdraw billions of gallons annually from local supplies.

The political economy is no less stark. As you mention, Jonathan Crary argues that the “internet complex” itself—intertwining extractive supply chains, militarized applications, and attention capture—is structurally implicated in ecological and social ruination, such that it cannot provide a basis for commoning. But although this is correct, I would side with authors such as Tiziana Terranova, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, who emphasize instead that the internet, like pretty much everything, should be treated as a terrain of struggle, where corporate enclosure can be contested through counter-examples like commons-based peer production or infrastructure-commons such as Guifi.net in Catalonia.[note]Guifi.net is an open, free “Commons Telecommunications Network.” See online https://guifi.net/en/node/38392.[/note] These examples remind us that the question is not technology “yes or no,” but whether it contributes to effectiveness: sustaining life, strengthening reciprocity, and respecting ecological thresholds. They thus show that digital commons are possible only under strict conditions: transparent governance, energy and material budgets tied to ecological thresholds, and non-extractive protocols.

From this standpoint, commoners should evaluate technologies by effectiveness rather than efficiency. The question becomes: do they enlarge the reliability of social reproduction within ecological thresholds? Do they strengthen relational values? Do they reduce dependence on command and capital? This reframes the issue of limits. Externally, commoning is hemmed in by the capitalist pyramid of value, which prioritizes accumulation and state regulation. Internally, limits arise from commoners’ own organizational capacities: the ability to federate, resolve conflict, manage energy and material budgets, and maintain infrastructures over time. Both limits must be problematized and acted upon.

Practically, this suggests a stance of selective adoption, radical reduction, and redesign of digital technologies. High-intensity frontier AI models should be refused by commoners and their allied public institutions—that is, through forms of democratic regulation and collective self-limitation—unless they meet stringent commons-based tests: locally budgeted energy and water use, transparent governance, and non-weaponizable applications. Where digital tools are adopted, they should be re-embedded in commons infrastructures: community-controlled mesh networks, repairable hardware, open-source protocols, and long device lifespans. The goal is not technophobia but alignment: turning technology into an instrument of effectiveness in social reproduction, rather than efficiency in capital accumulation. In this sense, technology becomes one instrument among others in the music of commoning—useful only insofar as it helps transform rhythm under compulsion into rhythm as resonance, turning repetition into shared endurance.

 

G. R.: Let’s shift now to art and the aesthetics of commoning. What are the images, sounds and sensations of the commons? What is the “allure” of commoning – its power as an “attractor”? How can art convey the sensuous content and complex feeling-structures of commoning, as “doing-together” reaches for mutualist, convivial forms of social enjoyment?

 

M. D. A.: The images, sounds, and sensations of the commons are those of shared rhythm: hands moving in coordination at a harvest or repair table, polyphonic voices that hold dissonance without collapse, tools that pass smoothly from one body to another, meals that lengthen into assemblies, decision assemblies that dissolve in convivial release of friction, the anxiety for one’s own predicaments being absorbed by the comforting presence of a collective body, and the self-assuredness of a collective being challenged by the singular specificity of one of its subjects.

Clearly, rhythm and coordination are not in themselves unique to commoning: they also appear on the assembly line of a capitalist factory, where synchronization is extracted and imposed, or in corporate simulacra of conviviality to revive team spirit in the face of an exhausting competitive race. What marks the aesthetic of commoning is not the mere fact of cooperation, but the way cooperation is supposed to be enacted — as reciprocity rather than command, as mutual sustenance rather than exploitation, as resonance rather than depletion, as collective definition of the measure of things of social cooperation, rather than total submission to an external measure. In commoning, gestures are animated by an intentionality that returns value to those who enact it, and to the ecological and social context in which it operates, producing an allure of togetherness and being part of something greater that cannot be reduced to productivity and profitability. The aesthetic key lies not only in the choreography of movements, but in the felt quality of participation: the difference between exhaustion and joy, between alienated repetition and convivial rhythm, between being used and being in-common.

Commoning thus resembles music — sometimes syncopated, sometimes harmonious, but always in movement. It is not the march of imposed command, but the polyphony of listening and improvising together. Its allure lies in the capacity to transform rhythm under compulsion into rhythm as resonance, turning dissonance into texture and repetition into shared endurance.

And because music calls forth bodies, commoning is also a dance: the visible enactment of shared rhythm. In dance, music takes form in gestures, in proximity, in the spacing between bodies that move together yet never fuse. Here too the difference matters: the regimented drill, where steps are dictated and freedom is suppressed, stands opposed to the open circle, where anyone can enter, where the pattern bends to include and improvisation becomes belonging. Commoning dances in this latter sense — it makes rhythm visible as relation, it lets bodies feel their interdependence, and it teaches that the grace of movement lies not in unison but in the continual adjustment to one another.

 

G. R.: What changes or becomes possible, when art itself is conceived as a common good or when artmaking is organized as commoning? What pathways may be opened up, prefigured or modeled in the intersection of art and commoning practices?

 

M. D. A.: When art is treated as a common good or made through commoning, authorship becomes stewardship, and access is organized as use and care rather than profitability. In this shift, exchange value is subordinated to another order of the measure of things; use-value moves away from spectacle and toward the reproduction of capacities; and relational values among the pluri-subjects making, using, and living art take on the form of a collective sensuous life. From here new pathways open: cooperative studios and guilds, shared tool libraries and archives, residency-commons that include governance, childcare, and kitchens, and licensing frameworks that protect collective use against enclosure. At this intersection, art can prefigure infrastructures—food, water, data, shelter—by working as a social prototype: a rehearsal room for democratic coordination that models rules, roles, and rhythms transferrable to other domains of life. Yet the relation is reciprocal. The very practices of coordination, care, and conviviality enacted in food commons, water commons, housing cooperatives, and digital commons also feed back into the creation of art. They infuse artistic making with the embodied knowledge of sustenance, repair, and ecological attunement. In this dialectic, art both models and absorbs: it translates the lived logics of commons governance into sensuous form, while offering those other domains symbolic intensities and shared imaginaries that help consolidate their practices.

What makes art distinctive here is not that it alone organizes cooperation, but that it does so through the register of aesthetics: it renders the felt textures of commoning—its rhythms, tensions, and harmonies—perceptible and memorable. Food commons or water commons reproduce life directly; in them, the dimension of necessity is dominant, since they are organized around use-value and sustenance. Yet within this necessity, aesthetic dimensions frequently arise — in the rituals of sharing, the beauty of cultivated landscapes, the songs or gestures that accompany work. Art, by contrast, reproduces life indirectly by shaping the very forms through which commoning becomes sensible to itself. This is the difference that makes the difference: art contributes not primarily through material sustenance, but through the creation of sensuous, symbolic, and affective resonances that allow commoning to recognize itself, desire itself, and thus endure.

 

G. R.: How would artists investigate or imagine an emergent more-than-human commons (or “latent commons,” as Anna Tsing has called it[note]Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 255-258[/note]), beyond or against extractivist forms of anthropocentrism? How far can commoning align with and foster a biospheric orientation that centers the needs of habitability and more-than-human co-produced communities? If the biosphere and biodiversity are considered as a more-than-human commons, how could this notion effectively enter and transform anthropocentric politics?

 

M. D. A.: To imagine a more-than-human or “latent” commons, artists can treat landscapes, watersheds, soils, mycelial webs, and urban ecologies as co-authors rather than scenery. Methods include long-duration attention, situated measurement and sensing, different forms of spiritual connections with the totality of the web of life in which we are part of, and protocols that give nonhuman agencies a seat in decision-making—seasonal calendars, river-level thresholds, pollinator corridors treated as curatorial constraints. Commoning aligns with a biospheric orientation when success is measured by habitability and renewed fertility. If biodiversity is understood as a commons, then the concept enters politics through enforceable care mandates: ecologically indexed budgets, rights-of-nature statutes paired with community custodianship, and cultural protocols that make extraction legible as harm to a shared life-support system.

This requires that we learn to dynamically hold together and be able to shift between two modes of observation, what cyberneticians call first and second order observation. The first, rooted in daily life praxis, in which we act upon our systemic context that we observe while being immersed in particularly given orders of value. The second, in which we observe ourselves acting in that systemic context, that is able to formulate a judgment, provide critical scrutiny of the order among value domains in which we operate and the effect of such an order: a reflexive move that broadens our perspective, reconfigures our filters, redirects our amplifiers. A reflective moment that is more productive the more collective and porous it can be in given contexts.

 

G. R.: What new “commoner subjectivities” may be emerging around and by means of experiences and mutualist practices of commoning? What frameworks of alternative realism, beyond the geopolitics of extractive anthropocentrism, may be embedded in an emergent “commoners’ sense”?

 

M. D. A.: Commoner subjectivities emerge where people repeatedly experience efficacy, fairness, and convivial limits together: the feeling of being able to shape conditions rather than merely endure them. This “commoners’ sense” is an alternative realism grounded in reliability—who shows up, what gets repaired, which needs are met—rather than in spectacle or nationalist abstraction. It carries frameworks that resist extractive anthropocentrism: mutual aid as everyday sovereignty, polyphonic decision-making as normal, sufficiency and maintenance as dignified aims, conflict processed through rules that preserve relationship. The result is a subject who perceives value as co-produced and who instinctively asks how any practice reproduces, or depletes, shared capacities.

 

G. R.: How can art and educational institutions foster conditions in which commoning and its values may develop and thrive? How can the mutualist and convivial social relations of the commons be protected from the competitive and individualizing pressures of the contemporary art system? How can art engaged with commoning be realized differently, taking more fully into account the socio-ecological polycrisis?

 

M. D. A.: I guess art and educational institutions can foster commoning by becoming shelters for it: long-term, trust-based residency models; shared governance with binding responsibilities; parity pay scales; curricula that devote space for critical appraisal of the perverse systemic logic of capitalist social cooperation and curricular time for maintenance, conflict transformation, and collective budgeting; IP practices that default to commons licenses. To protect convivial relations from the competitive art system, institutions can de-link evaluation from market visibility and tie it to indicators of social reproduction—how many people learned, ate, rested, co-decided, or healed through a project; what ecological baselines improved. Art engaged with commoning is realized differently when it internalizes the polycrisis: slower tempos, multi-year commitments, climate contingencies as formal constraints, and partnerships with commons systems and infrastructures (community gardens, seed libraries, repair cafés, social clinics, cooperatives, social movements), all oriented toward social justice as the equitable distribution of care, resources, and voice within the shared conditions of life.

To say that art engaged with commoning “internalizes the polycrisis” is not only to recognize crisis as an external condition, but to affirm that its very aesthetics change. The dominant aesthetics of the polycrisis—rooted in speed, novelty, extraction, spectacle, and competition—are themselves part of the problem. They are the sensory forms through which capital organizes attention, compresses time, and aestheticizes destruction.

By contrast, when commoning internalizes the polycrisis, it produces a different aesthetics altogether: one oriented toward care, sufficiency, and continuity. Its rhythms are slower because regeneration requires time; its forms are provisional because ecological and social conditions shift; its beauty arises from maintenance, repair, and conviviality rather than shock or accumulation. The aesthetic of commoning is thus not ornamental, but constitutive of survival—it makes perceptible the textures of reciprocity, the fragility of ecological thresholds, the dignity of ordinary gestures.

In this sense, to internalize the polycrisis aesthetically is to refuse the capitalist sensory regime that generated it, and to cultivate another: one that foregrounds habitability, relational resonance, and the allure of shared endurance. It is an aesthetics that renders visible and sensible the praxis of living otherwise despite capitalism.

 

G. R.: What are the prospects for commoning and the values of the commons in the given geopolitics, now exhibiting an alarming drift toward war and what Marx called “common ruin”? If the intensification of contradictions and antagonisms in the nation-based world-system has now shattered the post-1945 international order and established a “post-truth” information space, how and to what extent can “commoners’ sense” gain consideration and traction? In the wake of the party Left’s many defeats, might “disaster commonism” emerge from below, as the core of a new realism?

 

M. D. A.: In a geopolitics tilting toward war and “common ruin,” commoning’s prospects rest on credibility in a fractured information space. “Commoners’ sense” gains traction when it produces verifiable goods—food on tables, warmth in winter, bandwidth in outages—and when it federates across places without dissolving into doctrine. Disaster commonism can become a sober realism from below if mutual aid infrastructures harden into durable institutions, if cooperative logistics outpace extractive supply chains, and if counter-media practices tie claims to shared measurements and lived outcomes. This is a struggle across what, in The Pyramid and the Common, I call the “throbs of command”; that is, the recurrent systemic pulses through which capitalist domination regulates itself—setting purposes, distributing agency, managing crises, displacing costs, mobilizing instruments, and recalibrating thresholds of survival. Crisiscraft is contested by carecraft, displacement is met with hospitality infrastructures, instrumentality is repurposed through open tools, and threshold recalibration is set by habitability rather than profit. The wager is that reliability, enacted at scale and linked translocally, can out-argue “post-truth” by feeding, warming, repairing, and governing—rhythm by rhythm—what we hold in common. In this sense, commoning is the art of enacting hope in a hopeless world (to use John Holloway’s terms[note]John Holloway, Hope in Hopeless Times, London: Pluto Press, 2022[/note]), hope not as a crass belief that things will be ok, but as a persistence to organize social cooperation and the reproduction of life on different terrain despite capitalism.

 

This interview was conducted by email in September and October 2025.