2.

  Situating the sharing economy: between markets,

commons and capital
Adam Arvidsson

INTRODUCTION
The “sharing economy” constitutes a new combination of market exchange, commons-
based sharing and capitalist profit-seeking. Most observers have focused on one of these
components, seeing the sharing economy either as a new commons-based alternative to
markets and capitalism (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2004), or as a new more intensified and
far-reaching form of capitalist exploitation of the commons (Belk 2014). In this chapter,
I will take the perspective of historical sociology to suggest that the articulation of these
four elements—sharing, markets, commons and capitalism—could be viewed differently.
Indeed, today’s sharing economy can be understood as manifestation of a more general
tendency whereby capital accumulation has come to depend on new kinds of commons
that are embedded in the communicative flows of everyday life processes and supported
by digital technologies, and where, at the same time, commons-based markets are emerg-
ing as an alternative to capitalism. A similar articulation of commons-based markets
developed at the turn of the last millennium, as the European “commercial revolution”
(Lopez 1975) laid the foundations for a developing market society. Seen this way, today’s
sharing economy might not be a historical novelty or anomaly, but rather a symptom of
a recurrence of an older institutional articulation that, 1000 years ago, was fundamental
to the emergence of modernity in the West.

CAPITALISM, COMMONS, SHARING AND MARKETS

The notion of an inherent opposition between sharing and common resources on the
one hand, and market exchange and capitalism on the other, is heavily influenced by the
historical experience of the industrial revolution in Northern Europe. Indeed, the 19th
century was a time when capitalism advanced though the expansion of markets, and
where inter-capitalist market competition was intense. The English industrial revolu-
tion that provided the context for Marx’s analysis of capitalism was based on relatively
small companies (by today’s standards), which engaged in intense competition (Mokyr
2010). With this example in mind, it is easy to equate capitalism with markets, a view
that has become even more plausible over recent decades of neoliberal reforms whereby
marketization has invested public services as well as growing areas of everyday practice.
At the same time, contemporary capitalism is increasingly organized around large and
powerful corporations and financial actors and, lately, platform unicorns such as Uber
and Amazon. They do not engage in market competition as much as they seek to sit
on and extract monopoly rent from markets that they own, in whole or in part. In this

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 Situating the sharing economy  11

s­ ituation, a Braudelian perspective seems more plausible. To Braudel, capitalism is not the
same thing as markets. Instead, capitalism developed historically as a series of attempts
to control and regulate markets on the part of small cliques of powerful interests, often
mobilizing state power in some form. Markets, on the other hand are well-nigh universal,
at least in the history of urban civilization, and possibly even further back. To put it in
Giovanni Arrighi’s terms:

The capitalist character of market-based development is not determined by the presence of

capitalist institutions and dispositions but by the relation of state power to capital. Add as many
capitalists as you like to a market economy, but unless the state has been subordinated to their
class interest, the market economy remains non-capitalist. (Arrighi 2007, 331‒2; cf. Braudel
1977)

At the same time, capitalism is a concept that, particularly given its history, is difficult
to define. I will attempt a rather simple definition. Drawing on the recent focus on value
and valuation in economic sociology, I suggest that we think of capitalism as a system of
social action organized around the drive to maximize the accumulation of capital. This
can proceed through the expansion of markets, or by means of controlling markets and
erecting powerful barriers to entry. The important thing is that things can be transformed
into capital, and thereby function as assets that can be a source of profit. We can define
capitalism simply as a system that transforms things into capital, that is, into assets that
are valuable from the point of view of continuous capital accumulation (cf. Muniesa et
al. 2017).
What about the commons? Applying the same perspective, the commons can be under-
stood as an alternative way in which things can operate as assets. Commons are thus not
simply natural givens or resources that are free to all, but they are based on social systems,
usually systems of production that define and regulate them. As Elinor Ostrom argued,
such social systems, or “communities” regulate the commons; they define rules of access
and norms of common property, and enforce these rules and norms through collective
sanctions. They distinguish commons from the kinds of open access to which, instead,
Hardin’s famous argument of the “tragedy of the commons” might more plausibly apply
(Ostrom 1990).
However, such processes of commoning are not simply ways of regulating commons,
they also define the commons: they provide a network of symbolic meanings and
social relations that define the value of common goods and enable them to function as
assets in relation to some kind of productive goal. Seen this way, the commons do not
simply represent a form of property or governance alternative to that of capitalism (or
the state). They also come with a distinct logic of value. In capitalism, things become
valuable, they become assets to the extent to which they can contribute to the process
of capitalist accumulation. This presupposes that they can be rendered commensurate
with other things, either through market exchange or through the administrative logic of
the corporation (or, for that matter, the algorithmic logic of the platform: an expression
of appreciation becomes valuable as an asset when, expressed as a “like” it can enter a
relation of algorithmic commensuration on the Facebook platform). On the commons
things become valuable, they become assets to the extent to which they can contribute to
the distinct goals and aims that are inherent in the process of commoning that sustains
them. These might be very different from the goals and aims that inform other kinds of

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 12  Handbook of the sharing economy

commoning. The logic of value of the commons is thus based on singularity rather than
equivalence. Indeed the creation of a symbolic and affective framework that is able to
support such singularity (often in the form of an “experience”) is an important aspect
of practices of commoning in the contemporary context. Indeed, as Peter Linebaugh
summarizes a perspective that has been prevalent among many cultural historians of the
Polanyian great transformation, starting with E.P Thompson:

The enclosures were not only a force in the creation of the land market but they destroyed the
spiritual claim on the soil and prepared for proletarization of the common people, subjecting
them to multifaceted labor disicpline, the elimination of cakes and ale, the limitation of sports,
the shunning of dance[,] the abolition of festivals and the strict discipline over the male and
female bodies. The land and the body lost their magic. (Linebaugh 2008, 51)

The commons are thus not simply a form of property or governance. They are also a
way of making something valuable, by singularizing it or, which is the same thing, giving it
magic. (This is an important point as it suggests that the predominance of singularization or
“enrichment” in the contemporary economy—capitalist and not—can somehow be related
to the prevalence of the commons as a productive force; cf. Boltanski and Esquerre 2017.)
If we take this perspective on capitalism and commons—as systems of valuation, as
processes by means of which things become valuable—we can relate the commons to
Braudel’s concept of the longue durée of everyday life. The commons are the ways in
which the relational and affective framework of everyday life—not necessarily moving at a
glacial speed, as for Braudel, but perhaps changing quickly in a time of digitally enhanced
“social acceleration” (Rosa 2013)—enter into economic processes (not necessarily capital-
ist ones). The post-traditional commons, distinct from the commons that Ostrom studied,
are the institutional form in which life becomes valuable as it is put to work in a time of
what Andrea Fumagalli (2017) has called biocapitalism. Such valuable life in common can
be directly subsumed by capital, as is often the case in the contemporary app economy; or
it can be out of its reach, as in the case of the anti-capitalist commons that Massimo De
Angelis (2017) describes. Or the relation can be somewhere in between.
Returning thus to Braudel, we can revisit his famous tri-partition between capital-
ism as the “great exchange” that moves above ordinary markets (or the level of “small
exchange”), which in turn sit upon a longue durée of everyday life made up of material
culture and social beliefs and practices that change only very slowly. Capitalism remains
“at the top” as it (more or less successfully) imposes its logic of value on markets and the
commons, making things into assets for capital accumulation. The commons remain “at
the bottom” they define the value of things—make them assets—in relation to relational
life processes that have “lost their magic,” lost their natural and obvious roots in a genuine
longue durée, that have become reflexive and “liquid” in radically new ways, as the sociolo-
gists would say. At the same time, the commons confer new magic on these processes as
they have been reflexively reconstituted as forms of commoning endowed with aims and
goals. Markets stay in the middle. They mediate between but also within the two levels:
markets can be spaces of exchange between capital and the commons, as well as between
capitalist actors and between individuals or communities defined by singular processes
of “commoning.”
What about sharing? In its “pure” form, sharing is a form of distribution that does
not presuppose reciprocity, and that reinforces and reproduces social relations with their

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 Situating the sharing economy  13

accompanying norms and values. According to Yochlai Benkler such “social sharing” or
“sharing nicely” is an economically disinterested practice. Rather, it is oriented towards
“building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychologi-
cal needs of companionship and mutual recognition” (Benkler 2006, 92). He goes on to
suggest that such social sharing has become a key feature of new, often digitally mediated
communities of commons-based peer production, including non-commercial aspects of
the sharing economy (such as tool libraries or communitarian car-pooling schemes). In its
pure version, sharing would thus be strictly linked to the commons. The practice of “pure
sharing” unfolds against the backdrop of a common set of resources that can be shared,
as well as a common lifeworld made up of norms and values that structure the practice
of sharing. At the same time, such sharing reinforces the values and norms that keep the
commons together; it becomes an essential part of what Massimo De Angelis describes
as commoning: the construction and maintenance of social systems that govern, define
and, essentially, constitute the commons.
Historically such sharing has been the main principle of distribution in the parts of
economic life that have unfolded outside of markets. The family or the village economy
have traditionally built on such forms of normatively sanctioned—and often highly
inequitable—forms of sharing. As have the commons. The commons are by definition a
shared resource, endowed with norms and values that structure such practices of sharing.
But is sharing a feature of the commons, as Benkler seems to suggest, and vice versa?
Recent developments seem to indicate that things are more complicated. As Russell Belk
has suggested, much of the contemporary sharing economy is, in fact, a matter of what
he calls pseudo-sharing: practices of sharing that do not reproduce social relations or a
common lifeworld, but rather are distinguished by “the presence of profit motives, the
absence of feelings of community, and expectations of reciprocity” (Belk 2014, 7). Such
pseudo-sharing seems to be a feature of those aspects of the sharing economy that have
been commercialized or otherwise subjected to impersonal managerial forms of govern-
ance. Bardhi and Eckhardt’s research on the commercial Zipcar car-sharing network, for
example, emphasize how, instead of communal relations, participants tend to foster the
opposite: a “lack of identifications, negative reciprocity resulting in a big-brother model
of governance, and a deterrence of brand community” (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012, 1).
Alternatively, algorithmic forms of governance also tend to de-socialize practices of
sharing. Parigi and Cook (2015) show how members of hospitality sharing networks
such as Couchsurfing rely on digitally mediated reputation mechanisms in order to
create interpersonal trust. They also show how this, at the same time, makes it harder to
establish strong interpersonal ties. Similarly, research on commons-based peer production
communities suggest that rather than social sharing, participants rely on quantifiable
measurements of impact which, in turn, translate into individual endowments of reputa-
tion. Participants see collaboration in these communities not only as a form of sharing,
but also as a way to accumulate transferable social capital in the form of a reputation
(Arvidsson et al. 2016). Arguably, something similar happens when sharing is mediated
through the state and transformed into—often impersonal—forms of welfare redistribu-
tion (Polanyi 1957).
Similarly, capitalist organizations inevitably rely on practices of sharing. Every organi-
zation that has reached a certain degree of complexity runs on informal rules and prac-
tices, or tacit knowledge, which are shared and reproduced in social interaction among

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 14  Handbook of the sharing economy

its members (Roy 1954; Polanyi 1958). Such tacit knowledge has become more important
in knowledge-intensive organizations where the “collective intelligence” embodied in the
unstructured social relations that make up the organization has become an important
source of value and profitability. To some, such “collaborative communities” that inevita-
bly arise in complex organizations—capitalist or not—constitute a negation of the power
of capital and point on towards a sort of “stumbling into socialism” (Mason 2016; see
also Adler and Heckscher 2006). However, Marx saw the constitution of such a “general
intellect” as an inevitable consequence of the consolidation of the capitalist economy and
a source of its further development as well as its potential negation (see below).
In conclusion, rather than seeing commons and sharing on the one hand, and markets
and capital on the other, as intrinsically linked opposite models of social relations it is
probably more productive to view these four elements—markets and sharing, capitalism
and commons—as four distinct institutional logics that can combine in different ways
in different historical moments and social contexts. In what follows, I will (very briefly)
examine the evolving relations between these institutional logics in the long history of the
modern capitalist economy.

THE COMMONS IN EARLY MARKET SOCIETY

This reflexive nature of the commons comes out clearly if we look at their emergence in
Europe during the “commercial revolution” of the Middle Ages (Reynolds 1997; see also
Lopez 1976). In earlier scholarship, the origin of the commons, when discussed at all, was
often attributed to tradition or custom; sometimes the ancient traditions of Germanic
tribes who, as E.A. Thompson suggested, lived in a society where “the private ownership
of land was unknown” and where the soil was worked collectively (Thompson 1966, 74).
In this tradition the commons are understood as residuals of earlier, more “primitive”
forms of property that have survived into the modern age; a view that was shared by
liberal promoters of the 18th century enclosures, as well as by some of their critics such
as, notably, Friedrich Engels (cf. Bravo and De Moor 2008). An alternative view sees the
commons not simply as residues of a more primitive past, but as distinct institutions
that rise into prominence in specific historical periods as the result of particular forces
and contradictions. Perry Anderson noted (in passing) something of the sort, attributing
the rise of the commons in rural England to the origins of feudalism in which “scattered
Celtic hamlets gave way to nucleated villages in which the individual property of peasant
households was combined with the collective coaration of open fields” (Anderson 1974,
124). More recently, historians such as Avner Grief (2006) and Tine De Moor (2008) have
suggested that the rise of the kinds of commons that were to figure as the nemesis of
liberal market society in the modern age be understood in the context of the commercial
revolution of the 11th to 14th centuries.
To put this argument extremely schematically: the demographic upswing and the
return of viable communications that marked the European 11th and 12th centuries led
to a repopulation of Europe. The face of the countryside changed, cities grew, and the
social fabric became denser and interaction more frequent and intense. This new density
of people and communication led to a series of mutually reinforcing processes. First,
and most simply, this created an increased pressure on land and other natural resources.

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 Situating the sharing economy  15

Arable land became scarce, and as a consequence the pressure to convert forest and
pasture increased. Second, there was an intensification of commerce and a growing
centrality of towns’ markets and commercial culture more generally, along with areas of
early “industrious development” centered on wool manufacture in Flanders, Picardy and
Lombardy. Third, there was a centralization of power as kings affirmed themselves against
lesser feudal seigneurs. Fourth, there was a growing crisis of feudalism, which was related
to all of these preceding factors as well as to inherent limitations in the productivity of
agriculture, thus reinforcing the first tendency of increasing pressure on land use. Fourth,
and finally, there was a shift in the relational modality, a sort of social modernization if
you like, expressed in the emergence of new institutions, such as the monastic orders,
based on free association rather than kinship (Moore 2000). These factors all interacted
to favor the emergence and institutionalization of new forms of commons.
In the countryside, population increase coincided with the rising levels of exploitation
that derived from new forms of royal taxation, together with more intense seigneurial rent
extraction. (This was in turn an expression of the crisis of feudalism. It was linked to the
declining relative value of land rents vis-à-vis profits from expanding commercial activity,
and more costly seigneurial habits deriving from their courtly presence and new forms of
conspicuous consumption.) As Jean Birrell saw the process, in his study of the English
forest commons in the 13th century:

Increased population pressure in the 13th century, the growth of towns and increase in demand
and in trade produced a pressure on resources, which was sometimes acute. In particular,
shortage of arable land led to the [assarting] of marginal land often at the expense of pastures
and clearance of woodland. At the same time seigneurial pressure on the peasantry was stepped
up, as lords of manors attempted to maintain their incomes in the face of rising prices and the
attractions of a higher standard of living  and in doing so took advantage of their power over a
numerous and often impoverished peasantry. (Birrell 1987, 22)

This and similar processes led to a cycle of peasant struggles where traditional common
rights were defended, and, when successful, codified and made explicit in new ways,
and where new ones were introduced. The resulting commons, often highly complicated
arrangements of varying rights of access, should be seen as settlements of conflicts
that arose between the lords and the inhabitants of a village in the context of the great
European reclamations that took place during the 10th to the 12th centuries. Sometimes
this process included the inscription of some of these settlements into law, as in the case
of the English Magna Carta and the accompanying Charter of the Forest of 1215.
The social struggles unleashed in this period as a consequence of the growing crisis
of feudalism and the rise of manufacture and commerce institutionalized and codified
specific commons as settlement of conflicts. But even when these struggles were unsuc-
cessful, they contributed to a value shift. As Norman Cohn (1961) suggested long ago,
the crusades of the 11th century and onwards served in part to defuse a situation of
widespread popular unrest, but they also centralized dispersed struggles into a united
multitude that, informed by ideas such as those of the Waldensians, the Fraticielli or the
followers of Joachim of Fiore, was informed by a new mentality in which the notion of
having things in common could emerge as a common idea. These ideas would persist
as a radical undercurrent throughout European history, to resurface in many forms.
Among them was the English revolution where they guided the defence against g­ rowing

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 16  Handbook of the sharing economy

e­ nclosures on the part of movements such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who would
invoke, among other things, the Magna Carta as a bulwark against new forms of appro-
priation and exploitation (Rees 2017). The story of the rural commons can thus be read
as one where traditional rights and practices were recodified as explicit claims, sometimes
as in England acquiring the force of law. At the same time the struggles that drove
these processes created a new common imaginary that would inform present and future
struggles against appropriation and exploitation, in particular in the period of “primitive
accumulation” that would ensue.
The urban guilds that flourished in the same period can also be understood to have
antecedents in classical institutions such as the Roman collegia. However, the flowering
of guilds in the 11th to 14th centuries is notable, leading to the proliferation of “hun-
dreds of thousands” of such organizations by the year 1300 (De Moor 2008, 191). The
flourishing of guilds was of course linked to the new social environment of the growing
cities. Populated to a large extent by serfs who had fled or somehow been purged from a
countryside facing intensified seigneurial pressure, or other “masterless men” who sought
to make their fortune as traders or craftsmen, the cities exemplified the new prevalence of
free association over kinship that Moore (2000) puts at the basis of the “First European
revolution.” Along with fraternities and religious orders, guilds provided a space where
new identities and rule systems could be articulated. This would serve both to regulate
and improve productive and commercial activates and, importantly, to reduce insecurity.
This applied in an economic sense, as guilds were able to fix prices, set the rules of market
exchange and, importantly, provide a number of welfare services for their members. It
also applied in an existential sense as, like the new monastic orders, guilds provided a
meaningful framework for life, endowing it with goals and aims, along with the secrets
and rituals that were able to enforce them. As De Moor writes:

[the guilds and commons] developed a sytsem of market regulation in order to protect their
“own little world”. Measures were taken by both guilds and commons to achieve a reasonable
income for their members and to eliminate the disruptive effects of the market, which was still
at an early stage of development, when commons and guilds were set up in Europe. Institutions
such as guilds could make functioning in this setting less risky, though without losing too many
of the advantages that the market offered. (De Moor 2008, 197)

And while the guilds certainly functioned to protect against the risks of the market,
they also supported the development of a new market society. They did this by regulating
market transactions, but also by providing a source of social capital and class identity for
merchants and artisans, thus contributing to altering their status. Importantly, they also
functioned as source of significant legal development. Among other things, the guilds,
along with the universities to which they were sometimes closely linked, drove the redis-
covery of Roman law and its development into a new lex mercatorioum, design to regulate
commerce. The guilds would play a vital part in supporting innovation and promoting
economic recovery as the ecological disasters of the 14th century broke the backbone of
European feudalism (Pamuk 2007; Moore 2002).
It might be justified to distinguish between the emergence of the rural commons
mainly as reactions to intensified exploitation, and the emergence of the urban guilds
as institutionalizations of a new more “modern” relational modality typical of an early
market society. However, the picture is not that simple. The urban guilds rose many times

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 Situating the sharing economy  17

to defend petty producers from both seigneurial pressure and the pressure from city
governments and other more powerful guilds. They often took the side of the oppressed
in important social struggles, such as the revolt of the artisan guilds in Ghent, and the
Ciompi revolt in Florence in 1381. (Only later would the guilds instead come to figure
as an object of popular rebellion and discontent, as in the English Revolution, the Civil
War of the 1650s.) Conversely, the rural commons were also to some extent an effect of
the marketization of rural society. This applied in the sense of the penetration of market
relations into the countryside that favoured new forms of free association and facilitated
the cooperation between village communities. It also applied in the sense of the emergence
of a new “rural middle class” who used the commons as a resource for market participa-
tion and in affirming their position against that of feudal lords. As Maddicott describes
the role of the new English gentry in enforcing the Magna Carta in the 13th century:
[In this period] we for the first time see the emergence of the gentry of the shires as a political
force . . . In the thirteenth century their authority and cohesion was enhanced by  a nexus of
more recent social and legal changes. The rise of the knights as an administrative class, the
growth of the freedom to alienate and inherit land, which gradually emancipated them together
with their tenants from the bonds of feudal lordship, the permeability of the boundary between
knights and freeholders, which maintained the privileged positon of the freeholder, once the
villein had lost access to the royal courts. These changes worked to produce a society in which
the ties of neighbourhood mattered as much as those of lordship. They helped create the gentry,
which embraced more than the relatively small elite of knights who headed it and which was
sharply sensitive to local needs and interests. (Maddicott 1984, 25)

In the European commercial revolution of the 10th to 14th centuries the relation
between commons and markets was thus an ambivalent one. On the one hand, guilds
and, particularly, commons emerged as a consequence of resistance to marketization,
and for rural commons in particular, resistance to the intensified seigneurial exploitation
that resulted from this. As De Moor suggests, these institutions served, overall, to protect
their members from the new risks that came with the expansion of market relations. On
the other hand, the commons and, in particular, the guilds enabled the expansion of a new
market society, both by offering the kinds of protection that enabled market participa-
tion and by providing the legal and institutional framework necessary for the expansion
of commerce and manufacture. Indeed, as Grief has argued, these new organizations
were fundamental for the formation of an infrastructure for a modern market economy.
As virtually all contributions to the complicated “transition debates” agreed, the petty
producers, both urban and rural, who relied on these new institutions for support and
strength would pay a vital role in undermining the feudal system, and prepare the way for
the transition towards capitalism (cf. Wallerstein 1976). However, initially some of these
petty producers also supported and were mobilized by a vision of a more egalitarian
commons-based market society, a society marked by what Marx would later call “petty
commodity exchange.” This vision of the market as an integral component of a new civil
society founded on reciprocity, freedom and a new kind of secular individualism informed
the economic thought of the Italian manisti civili of the 12th to 14th centuries. It was
supported by the guilds and new universities that acted as sources of legal and institu-
tional innovation. It also affected the development of Franciscan economic thought and
inspired innovations such as the Monti di Pieta and the rural monti frummentari, which
combined an embrace of markets with new kinds of solidarity and reciprocity. Arguably it

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 18  Handbook of the sharing economy

also remained influential for 18th century thinkers such as Genovesi, Ferguson and Smith,
who envisioned a kind of market society that was radically different from the capitalist
one that would emerge from the great transformation of the 19th century (Nuccio 2008;
Bruni and Zamagni 2004; cf. McCloskey 2010).

CAPITALISM AND THE COMMONS

That guilds and commons stood in the way of an emerging industrialization and were
eventually swept away by it, to the extent that “most historical commons—at least in the
Northwest of the European continent—had been largely eliminated by the end of the 19th
century,” is a well-known fact (Bravo and De Moor 2008, 160). It is generally understood
that the defeat of the commons, in the form that they had assumed during the European
Middle Ages, was a precondition for the development of modern, industrial capitalism.
This great transformation, to use Karl Polanyi’s term, did not only entail the material
enclosure of the rural commons and the legal dismantling of the urban guilds. The triumph
of industrial production rested on the defeat of a popularly rooted moral economy where
market exchange was to be based on skilled labour deploying common skills and shared
practices, and rooted in a common morality. As Bonneuil and Fressoz describe what they
understand to be a decisive moment in this conquest—so decisive in fact that they see it as
a key factor behind our entry into the “Anthropocene” (or “Capitaloscene”)—the defeat
of the “machine-breaking movement” of the late 18th century:

The machine breaking movement was made up of urban artisans (typographers, textile workers)
and rural labourers (peasants who spun, wove and knotted by hand, seasonal cereal threshers
etc.). They expressed their refusal to see themselves dispossessed of their skills, their livelihood
and a way of life that combined agriculture with manufacture. They rejected poor quality
industrial products and championed the idea of a fair price for their labour against the machines
that were the cause of imbalance and inequality. (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, 258)

To put it briefly, Karl Polanyi’s great transformation was a process in which the
commons became capital. Things ceased to function as assets in relation to produc-
tion processes that were rooted in communitarian life forms and oriented towards the
singular values that they embodied. Instead, the very same things—land, human bodies,
culturally embedded skills and shared social relations—began to function as assets in
relation to a unified process of capital accumulation that expanded to embrace the
whole world market. As the rural commons were enclosed, they became capital to be
exploited in new kinds of commercial agriculture. As the commoners left the land and
entered factories, their bodies were transformed into variable capital, embodiments of
a new social force, generic and abstract labor. In their free time their needs and desires
were mobilized by an expanding culture industry and shaped into a similarly abstract
“audience labor,” the source of a new and more predictable consumer demand. This
process of capitalist appropriation of the commons still goes on, particularly in the
Global South where land-grabbing along with military force masked under slogans such
as the “War on Drugs” is repeating the process of primitive accumulation of the early
modern European countryside. At the same time, however, capitalist development has
created new kinds of commons.

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 Situating the sharing economy  19

The idea that capitalism not only appropriates and eliminates the commons, but
also creates new ones, is shared by at least two traditions of thought within the field of
political economy, broadly defined. I will draw on both of them in attempting to flesh
out an analysis of the role of the commons in the contemporary crisis of capitalism.
Most famously, perhaps, Antonio Negri, Micheal Hardt, Massimo De Angelis and other
exponents of the Italian school of autonomist Marxism have made this a key argument
in their analysis of contemporary capitalism. To them, contemporary informational or
“cognitive” capitalism mainly builds on the commons, in the form of everyday linguistic
and affective relations as its main productive force. In processes of “vital subsumtion”
(sussunzione vitale) these lived commons are mobilized into immaterial labor that pro-
duces the cognitive or immaterial assets such as innovation, flexibility and brand (cf. Negri
2016; Hardt and Negri 2000; De Angelis 2007; Fumagalli 2017). Capitalist accumulation
builds on forms of social cooperation that are embedded in ordinary life processes and,
therefore, not fully controlled by the wage relation.
This argument builds on the famous passage from the Grundrisse retrospectively entitled
the “Fragment on Machinery.” There Marx develops his analysis into seemingly contra-
dictory conclusions. To simplify the argument: the more complex productive cooperation
becomes—and the virtue of the factory system is precisely that of making new, more
complex productive cooperation possible—the more it depends on skills and competences
that are shared within the factory itself. How to operate a machine, how to relate to fellow
workers and bosses, along with mastery of informal tricks of the trade, are necessary to
function productively in a factory environment. Such tacit knowledge—to use a term that
has since become popular with management consultants—comprises things that one only
apprehends by entering the factory and becoming part of its productive community; the
worker acquires it “by virtue of his presence as a social body” (Marx 1973, 705). This
shared social knowledge that enables productive cooperation is subsequently embodied in
machinery, which in turn mediates cooperation in new ways and thus generates new kinds
of knowledge. The important thing is that the common knowledge, or general intellect,
thus generated is embedded in social relations that unfold beyond the direct control of
capital and the wage relation; “it is in a word the development of the social individual
which [now] appears as the great foundation-stone of production and wealth”:

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become
a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life
itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance
with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form
of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process. (Ibid.)

To Marx the development of the factory system thus also entails a process of reme-
diation of cooperation, whereby new social relations, new forms of “commoning,” are
created and these in turn come to generate and embody new kinds of commonly available
knowledge, of general intellect. At a certain point, this general intellect becomes the most
important force of production, surpassing the “theft of labour time,” and here it is as if
we stumble directly into “post capitalism”; not with a bang but with a whimper, as it were:

The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation
in the face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct

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 20  Handbook of the sharing economy

form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be
its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value . . . With that,
production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process
is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities and
hence not the reduction of the necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the
general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to
the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means
created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction. (Marx 1973, 705‒6)

This stumbling into communism, through a process put in motion by the “moving
contradiction” of capital itself, whereby the new commons that it generates somehow
become its negation, is the cornerstone of the political analysis of Italian autonomist
Marxists, as well as of more popular and influential analyses that this tradition has
inspired. Something of the sort does indeed happen as this “communism of capital”—to
use Negri’s term—is institutionalized in the corporation (indeed the term “socialism of
capital” was used by late 19th century observers in relation to the rise of corporations;
Bevergungen et al. 2013). Substituting exchange value and the market for bureaucratic
control of the “visible hand,” the corporation becomes organized around the protection
and cultivation of its proprietary intellectual capital. As becomes gradually more evident
for economists and management scholars during the 20th century, starting with the
path-breaking work of Fritz Machlup (1973), the nurture of the corporate knowledge
commons through managerial tactics that support continuous innovation, creativity or
even collaborative communities, along with their legal protection through intellectual
property law, becomes the secret to success in the capitalist game in what has become
known as the “knowledge economy.”
A second perspective takes the opposite point of view. Rather than focusing on capital
concentration, this view argues for the persistence of small-scale, flexible and relatively
capital-poor producers within industrial capitalism. Departing from Alfred Marshall’s
(1922) theory of industrial districts, as well as more recent “revisionist” historiography
of the industrial revolution that has redefined the importance of large-scale factories in
that process, this approach suggests that networked small-scale companies can in some
cases compete successfully with large-scale mass production. They do this by cultivating
flexibility, innovation and skilled labor. In order to achieve this, industrial districts need to
invest in the cultivation of common knowledge and skills through education, training and
research. They need to cultivate a “general intellect,” which then becomes the “immate-
rial” secret to their success; as Marshall (1922) observed on English industrial districts
“the mysteries of the trade become no mysteries, but are as it were in the air, and children
learn many of them unconsciously.” This tradition posits a continuation of the balance
between commons and market orientation that characterized pre-modern “industrious”
petty commodity production. Indeed as an ideal-typical end-point to the political scale,
Sabel and Zetlin (1985) envision a “guild or yeoman industrialization” building on a
“communitarian world of petty producers.”
While post-war policies that favored Fordist mass production made the “communitar-
ian world of petty producers” of Marshall’s industrial districts seem less attractive, this
view has reappeared in analyses of contemporary capitalism. The main driver of this
development was the revitalization of European industrial districts, as a consequence of
post-Fordist restructuring and the availability of more advanced forms of automation

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 Situating the sharing economy  21

and control technologies. To some extent this model has resurfaced in contemporary
debates on the “fourth industrial revolution” (Schwab 2016). At the same time, however,
a host of recent scholarship has pointed at the decline of industrial districts and, more
importantly, their subsumption under global supply chains where control remains
firmly in the hand of large industrial players (Harrison 1994; Foster 2011). Both of
these approaches have provided insights on the contemporary relation between capital
and the commons. Indeed, most analysis of contemporary capitalism, whether Marxist
or managerial (or, as is sometimes the case, both), builds on a combination of the two
perspectives.
Let me now attempt a summary. Contemporary informational capitalism is marked by
the twin tendencies towards the outsourcing of production, often in the form of global
value chains, and the financialization of value (indeed, Marx saw the establishment of
“surplus value commons” and the shift to financial rent as consequences of the network-
ing of capitalist production). The development of digital information and communication
technologies (ICTs), starting with corporate intranets in the 1970s, can be understood as
driven in part by the need to integrate a large number of actors, inside as well as outside
of corporate organizations within extended forms of commoning, where knowledge and
skills are shared. This happens implicitly, such as when digitized instructions for how to
create a specific component (such as a touch screen for an iPhone) are sent to a subcon-
tractor. It also happens explicitly, such as when subcontractors are often contractually
obliged to contribute to innovation processes (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013, 27‒33).
However, the digitalization of the capitalist commons introduces a particular dialectic.
ICTs and technologies such as computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided
manufacturing (CAM) make possible the outsourcing of production to third parties. This
process started in the late 1970s under the heading of “Toyotism” as car manufacturers,
facing stiff competition and having learned from recent waves of labor unrest, began
to make use of small factories—in the Philippines for Toyota, in the Italian industrial
districts for Fiat—to produce some of the things that they had manufactured in-house
before. With the successive opening up of the Chinese market after Deng Zhiao Ping’s
reforms of 1979, the process accelerated and China along with some of the “Asian Tigers”
became the manufacturing powerhouses of the world, the places to which the production
of car parts, computers, cell phones, toasters and refrigerators were located. Production
no longer unfolded in a single factory or a single corporation, as was the case for the Ford
Motor Company that controlled every part of the automobile production process, from
glass and rubber works to retail and distribution. Instead, outsourcing located produc-
tion to hundreds of factories, organized in hierarchies with assemblers such as Foxconn
employing millions of workers at the top, and small family operations churning out
plastic cell phone casings in a Shenzhen garage at the bottom. This meant that productive
cooperation was extended far outside the factory walls to invest complex value chains or
value networks that spanned the globe. This also meant that that the technical solutions,
skills and competences necessary to make a decently working washing machine became
common in new and radically extended ways. The result, as management scholars Paul
Adler and Charles Heckscher put it: “the ‘mysteries’ of effective commodity production
have become common knowledge; they are now merely tickets for entry rather than keys
to winning in competition” (Adler and Heckscher 2006, 28). To use management speak,
production, even advanced commodity production, has become commoditized: that is,

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 22  Handbook of the sharing economy

reduced to an undifferentiated good produced under conditions of intense competition

where profits levels are heavily restricted.
Commodity production has become a common skill that millions of factories around
the world, and maybe billions of workers, are able to engage in. It is possible that the
coming new wave of automation, along with new digital infrastructures (what is known as
“the fourth industrial revolution”) will strengthen this tendency, to the extent that many
now speak of “on tap” manufacturing: the possibility to make even technically advanced
things as an instantly available resource at low cost (cf. Schwab 2016). As a consequence
of the skills and solutions involved in manufacturing becoming common and generic,
most commercial products have become similar to an unprecedented degree.
In a similar way, the globalization of culture following the deregulation of the media
market in the 1980s, and its subsequent networking via the internet, has entailed a similar
process. Nationally or locally, specific traditions or lifestyles have been transformed
into elements of a new global commons of planetary dimensions. With social media,
the details of the everyday life of billions of people—the Braudellian longue duree at its
most intimate level—have been transformed into a gigantic data commons, albeit almost
completely enclosed and controlled by a handful of corporations. Capitalist success builds
on mining and appropriating these commons.
Branding is about combining specific forms of (in itself commonly available) produc-
tive knowledge, with specific cultural features (in themselves commonly known), and
using the (proprietary) data commons to insert the resulting hybrid into the daily life of
the right people at the right moment. Logistics—of goods, of knowledge of aesthetics and
affect—has become the key to success. Consequently, knowledge and managerial work
has become a matter of creating singular combinations of such flows: it has become a
matter of exercising “creativity” or “excellence” in ways that cannot be prescribed by a
job description. This, at any rate, has been the key suggestion of management thought
since the 1980s and the publication of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of
Excellence in 1982.
One way of seeing this process is that capital has reached deep into the intimacy of the
lifeworld, subsuming life itself and transforming it into capital that can potentially be
exploited in all of its moments. Nothing is safe any more: love, friendship, sex, hunger,
everything, can be transformed into an asset that contributes to the capitalist accumula-
tion process. However, this complete transformation of the common lifeworld into capital
also means that capital itself, as a productive asset at least, has become common in new
and radical ways.
Indeed, one of the most tangible consequences of the “second great transformation”
put in motion by digital technologies is that capital has begun to retreat from commodity
production. This is true for material production: across most industries we have witnessed a
shift in productive activity from large capital-intensive corporations to small and medium-
sized factories integrated in supply chains. The outsourcing of production to small and
medium-sized enterprises has in part been made possible by the decline in the capital
requirements for engaging in commodity production. This is visible at the bottom end of
global supply chains, where the cost of machinery necessary to participate is well within
the reach of an extended family budget (cf. Joonkoo et al. 2016). It is manifest in a perhaps
extreme way in contemporary platform labor, where the capital deployed is composed of
already available yet underutilized resources: the bike and the smartphone for the Deliveroo

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 Situating the sharing economy  23

driver, the empty room or second house for the Airbnb host. Indeed the platform model,
as Srnicek (2017) suggests, first developed as a technology for integrating and controlling
corporate supply chains, populated by a multitude of relatively small actors. Only later,
with the generalization of mobile connectivity, did it extend to coordinate a multitude of
“gig workers” who put up their own cars, bikes and smartphones as capital.
Mostly the markets that these capital-poor actors operate on are controlled by corpo-
rate capital, as in the case of corporate value chains, or the “unicorn” platforms of the gig
economy. But these actors are not in themselves capitalist in any meaningful sense of the
term: like the petty producers of the late Middle Ages they engage in market competition
based, mostly, on their use of common assets. Indeed, as Andrea Fumagalli (2017) argues,
capitalist accumulation rests less on the direct exploitation of productive activity, and
more on the control of complex flows of money, knowledge, goods and affects that coor-
dinate such activity. This is reflected in two significant tendencies: the rise of financial rent
as a percentage of corporate profits and the rise of intangible assets as a percentage of the
market value of corporations. The two are, in fact, intrinsically linked. Intangible assets
essentially represent the ability to exercise such control: the ability to put all components
of a value chain to work in generating continuous innovation, or the ability to coordinate
complex logistics; most importantly, the ability to make everything come together in a
brand that both justifies and underpins up to 60 percent of the value of corporations.
The creation and maintanance of such a valuable fiction rests on both seduction and
control: on the ability to control complex flows of logistics, and on the ability to attract
and create intensities of affect (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013). Essentially, the creation
of brands entails the construction of an artificial commons (marketing pundits speak
of “brand communities”) whereby a product that is technically and often aesthetically
similar to other products, themselves made by the same people deploying the same com-
monly available skills and solutions, can be understood to embody singular values that
confer unique qualities on it. Such processes of singularization, or enrichement, represent
an important principle of value creation in contemporary consumer capitalism, and
they are a direct outcome of the prevalence of common resources as the most important
productive resource (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017).

CONCLUSION

In the “First European Revolution” of the high Middle Ages the commons worked to
support the development of a market society. Rather than opposites, markets and com-
mons were, for some time, complementary institutions that enabled a social development
that both gave rise to feudalism, and pointed beyond it. The commons themselves arose
as a consequence of the remediation of the medieval social fabric. Improved communica-
tions, the rise of towns and the intensification of commerce led to intensified social
interaction—a social acceleration perhaps—which made possible the commons as a new
institutional form.
Today, we are in the midst of a similar remediation of social interaction. Digital
technologies have made possible social cooperation at an unprecedented global scale and
substantially accelerated the pace of communication and information transfer. These
technical affordances have been deployed to extend the realm of the capitalist valorization

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 24  Handbook of the sharing economy

process, both formally and substantially, to encompass an unprecedented range of human

action on a global scale. Our new digital commons are a result of this. They have become
crucial to capitalist accumulation, just as the commons were central to the feudal economy
and the seigniorial accumulation of rent. But, just as then, they have also given rise to new
forms of market-oriented industrious development that cannot easily be contained within
the institutional framework of post-industrial capitalism.
The sharing economy is a manifestation of this deeper structural tendency towards the
growing centrality of commons and sharing to value creation. This applies to capitalist
processes of value creation proper, as well as increasingly to less capital-intense industrious
processes whereby small-scale actors draw on common resources to engage in market-
oriented petty commodity production. Like the feudal lords of yesteryear, contemporary
capitalist corporations seek to subsume such market-oriented commons-based industrious
activity, chiefly by monopolizing the platforms on which it can come to market. The
re-feudalizing logic of digital capitalism is based on such a retreat from direct commodity
production in favor of monopolisitic rent-seeking, in the form of the platform economy as
well as an increasing financialization of everyday life. Starting in the 14th century, European
feudalism ran into increasing difficulties in controlling and subsuming market-based petty
production, in particular when confronted with an ecological crisis—soil exhaustion, with
an ensuing decline in agricultural productivity—and the subsequent arrival of the Black
Death in 1348. This ecological crisis broke the backbone of a European feudal system
already in crisis, and opened up for the social forces and conflicts that would eventually coa-
lesce into capitalism on the one hand, and modernity on the other. To use Marxist language,
the crisis of feudalism unleashed a development in the relations of production that would
eventually, after centuries of conflict and turmoil, coalesce into a new mode of production.
Whether the contemporary “sharing economy” is equally pregnant with future poten-
tial remains an open question. However, the return of the commons as a fundamental
component of economic activity testifies to a transformation in the relations of produc-
tion that cannot be entirely accommodated within the capitalist mode of production, at
least not in its present version.

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