Abolish the People

In recent years, populism has become so much the destructive domain of the right — so thoroughly claimed by the Trumps, Mileis and Melonis of the world — that it might be strategic to cede it for the time being and seek out other terrain. One alternative, tricky in its own way, is the commons. The term typically describes a set of resources that are shared freely among a collective. But this is not a given condition, much less a natural state. Always contingent, the commons is in fact defined by its opposite: enclosure, or the claim of private property on things and places that were once, or should be now, collectively owned and available to all. More precisely, the commons is defined in resistance to enclosure. Crucial to this resistance is a utopian dimension which, I believe, could help us to subvert the dystopian impulses of many populist projects today, perhaps opening up a path beyond them.

How to locate this utopian dimension in history, as opposed to before it or beyond it, and how to harness it in the present? In his essay on Surrealism, published in 1929 on the brink of economic catastrophe, Walter Benjamin praised this school of artists as ‘the first to perceive the revolutionary energies in the outmoded’. Benjamin described a number of decaying objects the Surrealists saw in this light, as André Breton scoured the Paris flea markets for disused items that had taken on an uncanny charge, and Louis Aragon roamed through the Paris passages that had entered into a spectral afterlife. Yet at the top of his list Benjamin placed what he called ‘the first iron constructions’ — the ambitious architectural creations of the rising bourgeoisie, such as those that housed the world exhibitions of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

‘Utopian’ may be a better word than ‘revolutionary’ to describe the energies trapped in these structures and spaces. Benjamin believed that any class on its ascent to power has the confidence not only of its new dominance in the present but also of its unfettered vision for the future. This is a future that — at least initially, at least in principle — is not restricted to this class alone, but radiates outward to society at large. In time, the class sacrifices its political vision in order to protect its economic privileges. It forfeits its own utopia. But the energies of that vision are not altogether lost; they continue to exist as a resource held in common, like a nontoxic fuel buried deep in the earth which can be extracted at a later date. For Benjamin, the Surrealists were engaged in exactly this sort of probing for the buried dreams of the bourgeoisie, and there is no reason why we cannot now attempt something similar, more than a century later.

This means seeking out a commons of lost pasts: pasts with utopian energies, however faint; pasts with visionary futures that we hold collectively. While such visions are often rapidly compromised — the utopian can slip into the ideological and sometimes into the dystopian — we know that a utopian glimmer can still linger even in the most reified of things.

A couple of kitschy images from the long life of the bourgeoisie might serve to evoke this particular type of commons. Here is a manipulated photo of the Empire State Building: a skyscraper built in the depths of the Great Depression and originally conceived with a towering dock for a new kind of air travel, which looked beyond the downturn of the present to a dazzling techno-future. This vision was never achieved, of course, but it still conveys a desire, a utopian desire, for a transformed world, even if what came to pass was anything but.

And here is a still from the famous advertisement that introduced the Macintosh personal computer during the Super Bowl of 1984: a female athlete breaks into the drab prison-world described in the Orwell novel and smashes the giant screen of Big Brother with a sledgehammer. Here, the utopian energies take the form of a society transformed by information, liberated from its overlords by the diffusion of digital media. Once again, this utopian desire was later co-opted: we now know what our surveillant overlords, federal or corporate or both, can do with this kind of technology. Yet the fact that this transformative force was eventually rechannelled does not erase it from these early images of the internet age. It remains suspended there. Another resource waiting to be tapped.

Along with this commons of lost pasts we can also point to a different but related one: a commons of damaged presents. This commons is made up of the industrial ruins that still lie, in pieces, around us — the decayed infrastructure of the modern city as a centre of manufacturing that has mostly disappeared: shuttered factories, defunct power plants, disused train lines, bypassed viaducts and the like. Over the last few decades this commons became an attractive target for a new wave of enclosures, as old areas of industrial production have been retooled as new sites of postindustrial spectacle (‘the Bilbao Effect’) or real estate speculation (‘the High Line Effect’). Although such utopian energies were short-lived, that doesn’t mean they didn’t stir, even or especially in the souls of the designers who worked out the redevelopment of these abandoned areas.

Finally, there is another corollary version of the commons of damaged presents to consider, one that will inevitably expand in the coming years: the commons of lands scarred by climate change — fires, floods, and other natural and unnatural catastrophes — as a result of industrial capitalism. Obviously, private property persists in this situation too, as big banks and hedge funds circle the disaster zones like dragon vultures. But even so, might a claim for the commons be made for parts of this new terra incognita?

This is to stretch the concept of the commons beyond recognition. But rather than pull back, why not push the idea of enclosure further as well? ‘Capitalism began with enclosure’, Fredric Jameson reminds us. As far back as 1516, Thomas More was warning against the predations of private property in his Utopia. Today, enclosure continues both at the micro level, in the monetising of our data or the manipulating of our genes, and on a macro scale, in the exploitation of the oceans or the planned colonisation of the planets. AI is a soul-killing expropriation of our cognitive labour, of what Marx called our ‘general intellect’: not so much an enclosure as an outright theft of untold amounts of intergenerational work. This struggle of the cognitive commons against technological capture may end up being as important as the environmental fight against fossil capital — from which it cannot easily be separated, given the proliferation of resource-hungry data centres.

In Latin law, which remains vestigial in current international law, many of these entities — the oceans and the planets — would fall under the rubric of res nullius, meaning ‘things belonging to no one’, and res nullius est res communis, ‘things belonging to no one are things belonging to everyone’. This holds right up to the point when they suddenly belong to someone: that is, when they are expropriated. To insist on the commons in the ruins of the 2020s is to resist enclosures of this kind.

‘Capitalism began with enclosure’, Jameson writes, and then continues, ‘and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires.’ Historically, enclosure involved conquest, empire, resource extraction, labour exploitation (often in the form of chattel slavery) and settler colonialism. Slave plantations are enclosures, so are Indian reservations, so are the camps of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (extermination centres in Nazi Germany, concentration camps in the US during World War II, rendition centres after 9/11, refugee camps throughout the two centuries), and so are the Gaza Strip and ICE lockups today. To resist enclosures is to insist on the commons as a form of utopia in the etymological sense, as a no-place to claim in the name of everyone.

If philosophy is class struggle in thought, as Louis Althusser liked to say, then ideology is all the more so, and on that front the right has beaten the left badly in recent decades. Progressive populism appears to be overwhelmed by reactionary populism, which speaks of ‘the people’ as though it had a monopoly on the category, as though it alone can give voice to a collective beyond class. My wager is that ‘the people’ may have now become a force of the anti-commons, of enclosure, in whose name detention camps and data centres are being built. Hence my vote for a temporary moratorium on the word, and a search for its utopian antithesis.