Communes and Other Mobile Commons

Abstract

The article is the introduction to the special issue of Theoretical Practice which is dedicated to “the communes and other mobile commons”. The editors of the issue explain how we could conceptualize various attempts to create communes in terms of mobile commons and mobile commoning. Since the exemplary case of the Paris Commune many social movements – urban, rural, indigenous, feminist, or migrant – experimented with communes as alternatives to state and capitalism and redefined in this way the meaning of spatial practices, work and the labor movement. Against the assumption that the commune is a necessary localized and sedentary political form, the authors who contributed to the special issue propose to grasp it from the perspective of subversive mobilities: as kinetic entities. The introduction presents the common ground on which these proposals meet each other and come into dialogue. Various models of mobile commons described here – communal, insurgent, liminal, temporary, latent, care, fugitive, maroon, black, indigenous, undercommons, uncommons, and many more – testify of a recent mobility turn in the theories of the commons.