Wow! Absolutely stunning in its advancement of revolutionary thinking!
It's so encouraging to see people popping up in various parts of the world who are actively engaging in both theoretical projects and practical experiments to build a sustainable and peaceful world. This time we see a Canadian contribute with this essay to this grand effort.
Haiven challenges us to think deeper about what really constitutes revolutionary thinking.
Is a right something granted by a state or sovereign, or is it something that emerges more organically from communities as they struggle? I think the latter is true.
And so then how can we speak of a “right” to the commons? I think we cannot imagine that this right will ever be “granted” to us by those in economic and political power. In the end, the ideal of the commons (horizontalist, grassroots democracy, sustainable reciprocity, community-level decision-making and radical autonomy) is completely antithetical to the state-form and the Eurocentric regime of sovereignty that has, to date, been the “container” of “rights” as we are accustomed to imagining them. So any “right to the commons” would necessarily need to be an insurgent right, a radical demand aimed at undermining and replacing state sovereignty.
