Ana Margarida Esteves on Commoning

In an excellent essay from 2016 about Tamera Ecovillage (Radical Environmentalism and Commoning pdf , the portuguese sociologist Ana Margarida Esteves approaches commoning - following Massimo de Angelis on Commoning as follows:

- commoning is a process - commoning has a technical and a political dimension - the technical dimension relates to the technological and methodological aspects of pooling resources (see Pool & Share - the political dimension relates to how structural and symbolic inequalities between people affect commoning itself

"While the former is widely acknowledged by radical Environmentalism, the later has been explored mainly by scholarship rooted in political economy.

"the result of a symbiotic relationship in which capital and the de-commodified realm of the commons actively and reciprocally contribute to each other's constitution and reproduction. Such autonomy is especially important in matters of social reproduction, particularly at the initial stages of a process of commoning (de Angelis, 2014). If "resource-pooling and community-building are functional to the production of commodities", i.e. to capital", de Angelis speaks about "distorted commons". (de Angelis, 2012).