Communology: The Emergence of a Social Theory of the Commons

Against the spectacle of environmental, economic, social, and institutional crises spawned by capitalism, the authors advocate the urgency of a radically new social science: the nascent field of communology. As Marxism did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, communology challenges orthodoxy. This article presents communology’s evolving terminology, historical perspective, and intersections with law, politics, technology, and social sciences. The commons are subversive to the status quo; they do not assume—as given—sovereignty, statehood, boundaries, or territorial or property structures. That is precisely why their study within the positivist approach dominant today is inadequate, often misleading, and even dangerous to projects of emancipation. Commoners constantly struggle for a different world, for a radically inclusive alternative to all patterns of capitalist exclusion, both private and public. Neither capitalism nor socialism, in any of their forms, constitutes “the end of history.”