The Commons - new book

[Ariel Salleh]

Matt York and Marina Sitrin eds,
Deep Commons:
Cultivating Ecologies of Solidarity and Care Beyond Capitalism, Patriarchy, Racism, and the State.
Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 2025.


Foreword - by Ariel Salleh*

The Deep Commons is about restoring ways of knowing that have become lost in a universalising modernist culture. The now familiar South African ubuntu saying - 'I am because you are' - expresses one such capacity with its blend of psychological insight and political respect. Feminists in the Middle East connect this wholesome mutuality with matristic values. Among Indigenous Australians, it is not so much the body of the mother that orients sociality, as the body of the Earth and the shared knowledge of living 'in place' with 'country'. As they always remind us: land belongs to no one, we all belong to the land.    

On opening the pages of this new book, a sense of joy moved in me. Here were voices of hope, people talking about 'politics as care'. Defying the global violence of market and state, the collected essays describe grounded utopias maintained in everyday life by people who let them selves be touched by the pain of others. After all, sensitivity and trust is the flesh of social and ecological living. Here, the radical politics of our old Left comrades takes another shape; it becomes 'an embodied materialism'.

The big picture of capitalism today, with its planetary emergencies, species loss, and surging tides of homeless refugees, cannot be understood without looking into its roots in colonialism. And colonialism in turn, cannot be understood without examining its source in patterns of patriarchal domination extending way back beyond the eye of history. In fact, the contemporary patriarchal-colonial-capitalist system - brutal in so many ways yet known as 'civilisation' - is a single entanglement. Its still evolving layers are continuously recharged by restless libidinal energies. Day after day, through different institutional forms - religion, law, economics - those who adopt this powerful masculinist imaginary strive to position themselves as Humanity over and above the rest of Nature.

The book's closing reflection by John Clark also talks about the past unfolding through a series of 'revolutionary phases'. In the beginning, social relations were cooperative and autonomous, not hierarchical and ruled. Life was experienced in the reciprocity of flows - natural and human - metabolic and symbolic. This understanding still inheres among cultures on the margins of the patriarchal-colonial-capitalist imperium; those corners of the Earth where peoples managed to avoid the arrogant imposition of modernity. One essay in Deep Commons encapsulates the spirit of this bioregional sensibility in the Mexican Huasteca's claim that 'corn is their blood'.

Editors Matt York and Marina Sitrin describe the Deep Commons as a search for these 'grounded utopias' and perhaps elements of them that still exist in the fissures of the capitalist mega-machine. Across the globe, they uncover prefigurations of another future, one in which 'holding labour' nurtures the reproduction of living cycles. Indeed, if it were not for the healthy materiality of that humanity-nature metabolism, capital's market exchange value, man-to-man, could never be achieved. The question is how to communicate this regenerative way of life as a political perspective? How to re-define 'our frontiers' beyond the pathologies of commodification? The answer is more than Ostrom's famous commonsense management by neighbourhood communities. Regulation in the Deep Commons is re-enchanted.

The book discusses many exemplars of communal solidarity built on hevalti or revolutionary love. We meet the Kurdish women's subsistence communities in Rojava, North East Syria, with their classic call jin jayan azadi - 'women, life, freedom'. Another chapter finds strong parallels between this alternative and the autonomous Zapatista communities of Chiapas in their defiance of the Mexican central government. In Belize, Mayan landscapes display models of 'eco-sufficiency' in the name of buen vivir. In the industrialised world, vital reactions to business-as-usual are organised by urban neighbourhood collectivities. These initiatives are reported in chapters from Spain and Catalonia, Anatolia, and Cyprus, The latter essay is also a poignant reminder of the 'embodied extractivism' - an unspoken social debt that comes with single motherhood and fatherlessness.

The next question is: how to include children in revolutionary spaces, and animals too? Now the call is made for total liberation and multispecies justice, highlighting both the predation of children's bodies and the terrorisation of animal lives as routine prerogatives of the patriarchal-colonial-capitalist Androcene. A contrast is drawn with new justice systems being developed by activists in Syria and in Chiapas. Here, the exercise of law is embedded in peoples' daily routines and celebrations; it is educative and committed to support for victim and offender alike.

A minority tradition in political thought has always argued this way. One thinks of Kropotkin's 'mutual aid' and Elisee Reclus' 'globalisation from below'; Proudhon's assertion that 'the centre is everywhere'; Ghandi's 'principle of nonviolence' and the sarvodoya communities of India that have followed it; Martin Luther King's 'beloved community'; the streetwise legacy of Seattle and Occupy; and Quincy Saul's ecosocialist turn towards Indigenous 'future-making'. Not to forget that since the 1970s, ecofeminists have demonstrated a politics of care for Life-on-Earth: from the UK encampment at Greenham Common missile base, to the grandmothers of Fukushma, and on to Mies' and Shiva's 'Earth Democracy'.

Deep Commons is a call for rediscovery and renewal - a political paradigm shift from relations of production to 'relations of reproduction'. Collective commoning for sustainability is both about nature at large, and humans as part of it. That is to say, the anthropocentric lens is replaced by an ecocentric lens. In the book's Introduction, the editors cite a Nasa Indigenous leader from South West Colombia saying: 'We are the extension of the earth, let us think from the earth's heart'. Turning to Oceania, the New Zealand Maori epistemology is guided by a belief in whakapapa, the continuum of Earth-soul. Today, thanks to this powerful understanding, the Wanganui River has been accorded legal rights, which will protect its integral flow.

More instrumental policy and data analytics drives us ever deeper into the modern cul de sac of 'development'. The key is to replace patriarchal-colonial-capitalist mastery and its old dualisms - 'global versus local', 'is versus ought' - with an open process-oriented politics. True to this existential commitment, Matt York and Marina Sitrin urge us to 'consciously resist the temptation to overly reify and essentialise then abstract yet more fixed blueprints for future social formations'. Rather, the future will be pluriversal, made up of 'a world where many worlds fit' and our transversal learning will be energised with hevalti. If Life-on-Earth is to survive the scarcity of 21st century excess, engendering this Deep Commons and its grounded utopias is an urgent call.


*Ariel Salleh, DeColonize EcoModernism! The Androcene and its Others. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.