Gardeners of commons, for the most part, women

The question of the commons is at the heart of current discussions about democracy. ¹ In some of their recent texts, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define the commons as something which is not discovered but produced:

We call ‘biopolitical production’ the current dominant model to underline the fact that it involves not only a material production in straight economic terms, but also it affects and contributes to produce all other aspects of social life: i.e. economic, cultural and political. This biopolitical production and the increased commons that it creates, support the possibility of democracy today.

(Hardt and Negri 2004: 9–10) A sustainable democracy should be based on a long-term politics of the commons but also on social solidarities understood as commons. ‘Creating value today is about networking subjectivities and capturing, diverting, appropriating what they do with the commons that they began’ (Negri and Ravel 2007: 7).