The Commons of Labor

Jeff Shantz (Canada, 2025)

The historic heart of communism is the struggle to defend, reclaim, and restore commons — the very basis of life, for humans and non-humans alike. This is often overlooked or forgotten today as communism has come to mean achieving and wielding state power. Autonomist Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh outlines this relationship:

“In the 1840s, then, ‘communism’ was the new name to express the revolutionary aspirations of proletarians. It pointed to the future… [I]n contrast, the ‘commons’ belonged to the past, perhaps to the feudal era, when it was the last-ditch defense against extinction. Now in the twenty-first century the semantics of the two terms seem to be reversed with communism belonging to the past of Stalinism, industrialization of agriculture, and militarism, while the commons belongs to an international debate about the planetary future of land, water, and subsistence for all. What is sorely needed in this debate so far is allegiance to the actual movement of the common people who have been enclosed and foreclosed but are beginning to disclose an alternative, open future.”1

The shift in the meaning of communism has simultaneously accompanied the rise and dominance of the party form and state conquest through the party. Yet, struggles over commons — over land — are still among the most pressing of our time. Perhaps the most pressing given the rapid advance of ecological crises and collapses, mass extermination and extinction, and despoiling of the means of survival through pollution, habitat destruction, “resource” extraction, and toxification of land, air, and water.

Anarcho-syndicalist movements would benefit from a renewed focus on commons, modern enclosures, and de-enclosure and commoning movements for reclaiming commons — what I have called ‘commonism.’ At the same time, commoning movements, many of which have tended to overlook labor organizing, would benefit from engagement with anarcho-syndicalism.

I have argued previously for the significance of anarcho-syndicalist solidarity with land back struggles and Indigenous land defense.2 I have also argued for anarcho-syndicalist solidarity with unhoused workers defending encampments (de-enclosure, reclamations of commons).3 A significant question becomes, “How might we also restore commons to the heart of labor struggles?”

Enclosure of Commons and Capitalism

The necessary focus on struggles over work at the workplace has led to an obscuring of, or forgetting of, the original struggles that make wage labor and labor markets possible under capitalism. These original struggles are the struggles over commons and their enclosure. These are struggles over the creation and imposition of private property and private property systems. Enclosure, and the resultant whips of homelessness, hunger, and starvation, provide the spur of violence always present (but too little acknowledged) driving capitalist labor markets.

Capitalism requires for its development a source of “free” labor, selling labor power to capital as a commodity on a labor market. The basis for this “free” labor — labor without other obligations — has always been the enclosure of commons — the dispossession of those who would make up the working class (of labor power sellers). That is a population of potential laborers who are separated from their means of subsistence and who, as a result, must sell their labor power to capital for a wage. In exchange for a wage that allows them to purchase subsistence as a commodity, from capital, the buyers of their labor commodity.

The dispossession of commons and their conversion into private property has never occurred without a fight, without resistance. These struggles — for commons, for land — have been unending against capitalism. We might also add briefly that modern policing emerges precisely to regulate, manage, and control the dispossessed proletariat, driven from common lands by enforced necessity and manufactured scarcity, and displaced to the cities. The term ‘police’ itself comes from the ancient Greek term polis, meaning simply ‘the city.’ Policing has always been largely about preventing the reclamation, recreation, or defense of commons, especially in the cities, but, of course, also in rural areas, as in the policing of Indigenous territories.

On Commons and Labor

Focus on commons and enclosure keeps a revolutionary focus on the demarcation between those who own and control means of production (subsistence) and those who own nothing but their labor power. It keeps focus on the violence inherent in private property. It keeps focus on the violence (police, military) on which that demarcation is created and maintained. It returns the proletariat to its original meaning of being dispossessed. Without commons, human life becomes precarious, desperate, and exploitable.

Labor as commons removes the divide between production and reproduction. It stresses the vast reproductive labor, overwhelmingly done by women, that goes into the care, sustenance, and reproduction of the working class — labor that is not paid for by capital but on which the possibility for value in labor is based.

The notion of a commons of labor understands labor as a collective resource rather than as an individual commodity or individual labor power. It integrates productive and reproductive labor and emphasizes that labor, like any resource, must be cared for and be sustained rather than simply being expended as it is under capitalism (with the worn-out version simply discarded and replaced as is done by capital). This sustenance is a “communing of labor.”

 For commonists — proponents of commonism — the emphasis on a commons of labor is about detaching (freeing) labor from both the market and the state. Commonists stress the actions of wresting control over conditions of production and reproduction that have animated communist politics historically. Indeed, commonism has emerged as a response to, and alternative to, the statist developments in communism.

Commonism reclaims that which should be shared as integral to communism. Commoning moves against capital’s spatial conquest — its conquest of means of survival — first and foremost, land. Commoning poses a terrain of struggle for transforming social reality against capitalist enclosure and accumulation and beyond it to a world of solidarity and mutuality.

Labor As Commons

My colleague, autonomous labor chronicler Dario Azzellini, argues that labor should be understood as a commons as part of contemporary anti-capitalist struggles.4 Situating it this way helps contribute to the understanding of how commons are part of transforming social relations. To do so, Azzellini suggests focusing on worker-recuperated workplaces, as in Latin America and Europe. These worker-recuperated workplaces are companies self-managed by their workers after the previous capitalist owners shut them down, typically because they are no longer profitable. While, of course, operating within the dominant capitalist markets, these workplaces struggle against capitalist logic. For Azzellini, they represent “germinal forms of labor as a commons present in society.”

Along with my late colleague Jose Brendan MacDonald, I documented a number of such projects in the book Beyond Capitalism. Taken together, labor as commons suggest solidarity economies that can provide infrastructures of resistance for broader transformation against and beyond capitalism.

This, of course, accords with historic anarcho-syndicalist visions and strategies of workers’ struggles to wrest workplaces away from employers and organize and run them according to working-class community needs rather than profit. Labor as commons re-orients production toward community class needs on a sustainable basis that reduces or removes harms to nature in production and distribution. 

Labor as commons reminds us that labor struggles and gains are those of the working class as a whole. Union resources, for example, are working-class resources, built up through the commons of labor, including labor of reproduction.

Labor as commons centers land struggles and defense as part of working-class defense against the ravages of capitalism. Struggle, too, is labor, most expressively labor in common.

Notes

1. Linebaugh, Peter. Stop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2014, 212

2. Shantz, Jeff. 2024. “Anarcho-Syndicalism Must Mean Land Back.” Anarchist Union Journal https://anarchistunionjournal.org/2024/04/11/anarcho-syndicalism-must-mean-land-back/

3. Shantz, Jeff. 2024. “Anarcho-Syndicalism is Class-Wide Struggle: Solidarity with Unhoused Workers.” Anarchist Union Journal https://anarchistunionjournal.org/2024/03/28/anarcho-syndicalism-is-class-wide-struggle-solidarity-with-unhoused-workers/

4. Azzellini, Dario. 2016. “Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies.” Critical Sociology 44(4-5) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920516661856

References

Azzellini, Dario. 2016. “Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies.” Critical Sociology 44(4-5) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920516661856

Linebaugh, Peter. Stop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2014

Shantz, Jeff. 2013. Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid beyond Communism. Brooklyn: Punctum

Shantz, Jeff. 2024. “Anarcho-Syndicalism is Class-Wide Struggle: Solidarity with Unhoused Workers.” Anarchist Union Journal https://anarchistunionjournal.org/2024/03/28/anarcho-syndicalism-is-class-wide-struggle-solidarity-with-unhoused-workers/

Shantz, Jeff. 2024. “Anarcho-Syndicalism Must Mean Land Back.” Anarchist Union Journal https://anarchistunionjournal.org/2024/04/11/anarcho-syndicalism-must-mean-land-back/

Shantz, Jeff and José Brendan Macdonald (eds.). 2013. Beyond Capitalism: Building Democratic Alternatives for Today and the Future. New York: Bloomsbury