Engaging the Non‐Flat World: Anarchism and the Promise of a Post‐Capitalist Collaborative Commons

Abstract

This paper challenges the use of a geographically site‐centred, flat ontology to justify contemporary anarchists’ predisposition to espouse exclusively prefigurative forms of action. By considering the anarchist, post‐capitalist potential of a technologically enabled peer‐to‐peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement, the case is made for the need to acknowledge and engage the higher‐order (emergent) nexuses between state apparatuses and capitalist flows. Doing so, it is argued, makes envisioning the process of creating anarchist oriented, post‐capitalist futures significantly more tangible and convincing.

The Social Life of Robots: The Politics of Algorithms, Governance, and Sovereignty

“…Blockchain is here pointed to as a quickly evolving cryptographic technology based on an organising principle of cooperative decentralisation, which can be applied, for example, to data storage and AI capacity, as opposed to a corporately controlled, centralised cloud (Zook ). Various crypo‐currencies are also emerging using blockchain technology as a way to fundamentally undermine the monopoly of value maintained by state sanctioned money, thus potentially undermining both capitalism and the state in one go (Zook and Blankenship ; also see Gerhardt ).…”

“…Gerhardt’s () paper uses the case of an emergent, technologically mediated peer‐to‐peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement to make the case for a “non‐flat” (i.e. trans‐local) ontological outlook within anarchist approaches to achieving a post‐capitalist society.…”

The Challenge of Building a Scalable Postcapitalist Commons: The Limits of FairCoin as a Commons‐Based Cryptocurrency

“…While it has not succeeded as money in the sense of being widely used for day to day transactions, it has set “a staging ground for debate” about the “role of money in society” (Swartz 2018:623). Since their emergence in 2014, FairCoop and FairCoin have been highlighted as a distinctive and important experiment due to FairCoop being a radical commons alternative that has the potential to expand and scale through peer2peer technologies (see for example Allon 2018; Bauwens and Pazaitis 2019; Chatterton and Pusey 2020; Gerhardt 2020; Griziotti 2019; Scott 2016). FairCoop has sought to do this through utilising FairCoin’s cryptocurrency blockchain design to facilitate the expansion of a commons that (unlike Bitcoin) seeks to sidestep capitalist logics of private value extraction.…”

“…Second, what can FairCoin and FairCoop tell us about the potential to generate scalable postcapitalist commons? Being scalable means the extent to which the commons can spread beyond the specific site (Gerhardt 2020) potentially to multiple other sites and regions, and thus become trans‐local in scale. As we will see the answer to the first question is negative for the reasons that emerge from the response to the second.…”

“…We begin by outlining what is significant about the case and then situate our own positionality and methodology in the investigation that follows. The investigation then proceeds across four sections: First by drawing on some critical conceptions of money to highlight its fundamental social and political importance (see Ingham 2004), and connecting this to what is distinctive about post capitalist commons (Chatterton 2016; Gerhardt 2020). Here the importance of commons boundaries is also highlighted, which serves to frame our investigation.…”