Public-common partnerships, autogestion, and the right to the city

Abstract

In this chapter, we attempt to construct a politics of the commons that is adequate to the urgency and scale of social transformation that the climate crisis demands. Political thinking around the commons often figures them as existing in-spite-of and despite the state. Too often, this positions the commons as isolated “lifeboats of autonomy”, which fail to connect and expand into a systemic challenge to capitalism. We use a critical engagement with Lefebvre’s theorization of autogestion and the Right to the City to argue for a politics of the commons that operates within, against, and beyond the State. We then offer a new model of ownership and governance, Public-Common Partnerships (PCPs), as an instantiation of this form of politics. By modeling the flow of surplus within a circuit of the commons, we aim to counter the self-expansive dynamic of capital by setting in motion a self-expanding circuit of radical democratic self-governance. In this chapter, we not only model the flow of economic surplus with the PCP model, but also begin to model the flow of knowledge and competencies upon which the expansion of democratic participation, or as Lefebvre would term it, autogestion, depends.

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