Paper short abstract:

The question of value may not have been abandoned by people involved in commoning, so much as the processes through which value is now extracted by capital have been addressed through new strategies of resistance. I examine these processes in relation to ethnographic research in Europe and the US.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2011, protests in Europe, the US and elsewhere have occupied space over time and claimed territory through commoning. Such protests reflect and have been adapted to the era of financialization in which industrial unions and strikes have more limited effects and are immeasurably more difficult to pursue, constrained through new regulations and the fragmentation of the workforce. With financialization, personal, national and international debt have come to the fore as a major medium of extraction and control. As has been argued, the accumulation of dispossession has once again become a central tactic of capital. Under these conditions, the working class has expanded with the reduction of incomes and autonomy of professional workers, displacement, wars and immigration. However, workers have also become more fragmented.

The transformation of labor in it’s location as well as configuration has rendered the extraction of value more individualized. However, I will argue that, although more difficult to counteract, such processes are not invisible to the working poor. Nevertheless, flexible work and the central importance of debt have forced workers to rethink collective action. From this perspective, the question of value may not have been abandoned by people involved in commoning or many analysts of the commons, so much as the processes through which value is now extracted by capital have been addressed through new strategies of resistance.

I examine these processes in relation to my ethnographic research and the literature on commoning and protests in Europe and the US