Geographical Review of JapanVol. 67 (Ser. B), No. 2,126-135,.docx

Geographical Review of Japan
Vol. 67 (Ser. B), No. 2,126-135,1994
The Social Construction of Space and Time:
A Relational Theory
David HARVEY*
I want first to situate my argument against the
background of the main project I am currently working
on, which concerns the fundamental meanings of three
words space, place and environment. These are very
important words, words that are being discussed in many
disciplines now, words that are becoming central to social
and literary theory as well as words of considerable
political importance. Now it also happens that almost
everything that geographers do and have done can be
looked at in terms of these three words. From time to
time, geographers have taken one of these three words
and sought to construct the whole discipline around it.
For example, the word space has given rise to the idea
of geography as a purely spatial science, the word place,
if you put it back into the context of an older word
' region' is a very traditional idea of what the central
core of geography should be and this has recently revived
in a variety of new guises such as discussions of 'locality'
and 'place' as well as in the idea of a so-called 'new'
regional geography. And the world environment has for
long captured the attention of geographers, particularly

those with physical interests, who have focussed on those
processes that shape the physical and biological
landscape of the earth around us, particularly as a
consequepce of human action. Here, too, we find
geographers who have sought to define geography as a
study of "man and the land" or, if you want to avoid
the gender bias of that term, the relationship between
human occupancy and environmental change.
My central argument is that geography as a discipline
has to understand itself as working with all three of
these concepts simultaneously and in relationship to each
other, and any attempt to pull the discipline exclusively
into one or other corner is doomed to limit its
achievements if not to outright failure.
This argument is particularly important today
because, as I have mentioned, these three concepts have
become increasingly important in soical and literary
theory. I for one find myself increasingly called upon
by my colleagues in the humanities, history and the social
sciences, to tell them what it is that we know about
* The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
these three concepts and do we have something special
to say that they do not already understand. My answer
to that question is 'yes,' that we do have something
special to say but that this cannot be understood in

isolation from what has long been said, though often
without noticing it, in the social sciences and humanities
as well. So it is for this reason that I decided to try to
spell out, in the book I am now working on, exactly how
we should think about these three concepts and exactly
how we should understand the relations between them
both in the constitution of geography as a discipline as
well as the way they may operate in social and literary
theory.
Today since I have only limited time, Twill concentrate
only on the first of these concepts, space, about which
it is very difficult to speak without invoking the con
cept of time. But I hope you will get some sense from
my talk, as well as from the discussion, concerning
the particular way in which I want to connect the
understanding of space with that of place and en
vironment.
The central thesis I want to put forward is that of the
social construction of space and time. This is an idea

that I have been working with for more than twenty
years now, it is an idea that can be found in the work
of Lefebvre, it is an idea that goes back to the sociologist
Durkheim and one that has innumerable expressions in
the works of anthropologists, sociologists, historians ,
archaeologists as well as goegraphers. In fact in nearly
all the social sciences and humanities, the idea of the
social construction of space and time is widespread and
generally accepted. So there is nothing specifically
geographical about the proposition.
But what do we understand exactly by this idea? We
certainly understand, that different societies construct
very specific conceptions of space and time. Furthermore,
the actual manner of construction of space and time is
important to look at if only to understand how we , in
our own contemporary circumstances , are actively
constructing and supporting certain notions of space and
time rather than others. To give you one simple example ,
the hour was invented in the thirteenth century , the
minute and the second were seventeenth century
Social Construction of Space and Time 127

inventions and it is only recently that we have come to
talk about nano-seconds. The same thing has occurred
with the metric of space. So those measures of space
and time which we now treat as natural conditions of
our existence were in fact the historical product of a
very specific set of historical social processes achieved
within a specific kind of society.
This leads me immediately to make four particular
statements about the social construction of space and
time.
1. Even though we are dealing with a social
construction we are not dealing with something purely
subjective or ideal, that is outside of the material world
in which we have our existence. What in effect we do
is to take some one particular feature of that material
world and treat it as if it is the way in which to
understand time and space. For example, if we are
considering a hunting gathering society, then notions of
space and time are largely dictated by the biological
rhythms that govern the reproduction of the species
being hunted and gathered, and their rhythms of
temporal and spatial movement. The development of
mechanical knowledge and capitalist technology from
the sixteenth century on in Europe entailed a quite new
and different set of ideas about space and time.
2. The second point derives from the first. Nature
does not present us automatically with a natural measure
of space and time but offers a wide range of possibilities
from which we can select. The fact that society chooses
one out of many such possibilities is what matters and
that choice is largely a product of myth and of culture
(in which I include the culture of science itself) at the

same time as it strongly attaches to the way in which
a particular society makes its livelihood in its material
environment.
3. To say that something is socially constructed does
not mean it is subjective and arbitrary. A particular
societal choice of what is space and time is fundamental
to how the whole of that society works and it therefore
operates in relationship to individuals with the full force
of objective fact from which no one individual can escape
without severe penalty. As a simple example, many of
you probably came here by train. Think of the train
timetable. Think what the world would be like if the
driver, the signalmen, the passengers all made up their
own minds each and individually and subjectively as to
what was space and time. You can quickly see that all
of us are strictly disciplined into the notion of an objective
structure of space and time that allows the trains to run
and you and I to catch them. The German sociologist
Simmel, writing at the beginning of this century, came
up with a wonderful figure: imagine what would happen,
he wrote, if all the clocks in the city went wrong by
only one hour-what total chaos would ensue!
4. The particular way in which space and time get
determined is very closely bound up with the power
structures and social relations, particular modes of
production and consumption, existing in a given society.
Therefore the determination of what is space and what
is time is not politically neutral but is politically
embedded in a certain structure of power relations. To
regard a particular version of space and time as 'natural'
is to accept the social order that embodies it as also

' natural' and therefore incapable of change.
But societies have and do change. Such changes have
always been associated with changes in the ways in
which space and time get constituted. And that poses
the problem of not only documenting the different
historical and geographical ways in which time and
space have been constituted, but also understanding
exactly how such changes occur.
There are two ways in which I like to think about
such changes. The first case concerns one in which a
dominant society imposes its particular conception of
space and time on a subservient society. The example
I would appeal to here would be the settlement of the
United States by the European colonists and their
encounter with Native American Indian groups. The
latter held particular conceptions of space and time
connected with their own economy, to the seasonality
of their resource base, the seasonality of movement of
fish and game, the availability of fruits and other
products. The conception of space and time was very
special to them and was totally different from that of
the colonial settlers. The latter bounded the land, cut it
into spaces and had property rights to those spaces in
perpetuity. This was a very European conception of
space and time. Native Americans moved across the land
and had no conception of bounding the land in this way.
Native Americans named the land in ways that were
full of environmental meanings, like this is the meadow
where deer gather in spring, this is where the fish run,
this is where the beavers work. The settlers named the
land as their space, as Johnstown or as Kings county,

reflecting an act of possession of space in perpetuity.
The whole manner of identification and bounding of the
land and the conception of rights to the land was
superimposed on Native American society and of course
it destroyed that society because it was a conception of
space and time totally at odds with the Native American
128 D. HARVEY
way of life.
Recognition of this has produced the radical thought
on the part of Native Americans and some radical
activists in Europe that if you wish to challenge power
relations in our own society then maybe one of the things
to do is to start to treat of space and time in a radically
different way, moving over space in disruptive ways
disrespectful of property rights. There is a group in
Britain, long-term unemployed young people for the most
part, who are called travellers who move around the
country at will, living at whatever they can do or off
whatever they can find as they move, and this has proved
so threatening to bourgeois society that the government
has introduced a most terrifyingly repressive criminal
justice bill that says that anyone who travels in that
space and time will be subject to criminal penalties.
Notice, once again, how dissidence from the prevailing
idea of space and time often carriers with its severe social
sanctions.
But this brings me to the second way in which changes
in conceptions of space and time can occur, This really

arises from contestation within a society, between
different segments of a society in terms of their particular
objectives and concerns. What this leads to is the idea
that space and time, in our own society in particular, is
really to be understood not as homogeneous but as
heterogeneous and variegated in special ways. Consider
some examples:
1. There is a difference between a finance capitalist
operating in financial markets and an industrial
producer. The former moves currency around the world
very fast, responding to speculative pressures here and
there across spaces designated as dollars, yen or
deutschmarks and with a time-horizon of nanoseconds .
An industrial producer has a different time horizon, not
unlimited of course because most producers limit their
thoughts about the future, depending on their product,
to five, ten or at most twenty years but they also operate
with a different conception of spaces as localities of
production, marketing, resources, and communities that
offer them opportunities and services. So we have two
notions of space and time at work even within the
capitalist logic itself and, as is well known, these different
notions are often at odds with each other producing
conflicts if not crises within capitalism itself.
2. Consider the chapter in Marx's Capital on "the
working day." The capitalist there says that he is
interested in procuring a full day's labor for a sum that
will allow the laborer to return to work the next day,
but the worker says that he thinks about his working
life and says by working me that way you will shorten
my working life to which the capitalist in effect replies,

I can't and don't care about your working life it is only
your working day that can matter to me. Again two
different time horizons of political-economic action and
activity which lie at the source of conflicts over the
working day, the working week, the working year, the
working lifetime. These conflicts have been one of the
huge struggles waged throughout the history of
capitalism and it has been a struggle over the very
conception of time itself. The struggle over the
micro-spatiality of surveillance of the activities of
workers, not only in the work place but also in the realm
of consumption and politics has likewise been of great
significance as has the perpetual struggle over the
differential spatial mobility of capital that gives it (when
needed) a power over workers by threatening to move
operations elsewhere if workers do not submit to the
necessary discipline.
3. Space and time are also often gendered in all sorts
of intriguing ways. This varies from the realm of myth
where you will find the idea frequently expressed of
"Father Time" engaging in activities with respect to
"Mother Earth" often depicted as an active male principle
operating on a passive female principle, to something
more tangible such as the gender biases implicit in urban
planning and design theories. Marion roberts has pointed
out in a recent book on Living in a Man-Made World,
for example, how the whole Abercrombie plan for Greater
London rested upon a certain supposition concerning
the role of women in the family, as suburban housewives
raising kids and very active in the kitchen. As this plan
was put into effect it made it very difficult for women

to escape those spatial confines and to the degree that
they did they had to pay a penalty of isolation and
relative exclusion because of the way the spaces had
been planned. The changing role of women, as they
entered the labor market in greater numbers and as
families broke up, created a lot of stresses because a
new order of spatiotemporality on the part of women
was in collision with an older order implanted in the
built environment and therefore very hard to change.
4. The conflict that occurs between economists and
ecologists over what is the proper time horizon for the
exploitation of a resource or making land use decisions
offers yet another example of how different interests
generate different conceptions of space and time. The
market, represented by the neoclassical economists these
days, looks to the future only via the discount rate which
at most has a time horizon of twenty years though it is
often as short as a seven or eight, whereas the ecologists
have a much longer conception of time, arguing that
sustainability must be achieved in perpetuity, into an
indefinite future.
The point here is to see that all of these conflicts are
effectively conflicts over the nature of time and space
and the social manner in which space and time are
constructed. An answer to the question: what is the space
and time at work here, has profound impacts on what
will happen in particular places and how environments
will be used and transformed.

I want to argue then that the question "what is space
and what is time" is highly contested in our society in
many ways, so even though there may be a dominant
notion as to what space and time are, a dominant notion
given by the market and the railway timetable example,
there are abundant signs of diverse oppositions and
heterogeneous conceptions that perpetually exist as
threats to that dominant notion and the social relations
it embodies.
At this point in my presentation I am faced with a
critical decision as to which direction to take my
argument. I can either take it back towards what I will
call the metaphysical roots of the particular ideas of
space and time that I am talking about, or I can take it
into the practical world and ask what has been driving
the changes in the sense of space and time that have
occurred in the last twenty years or so and what the
impacts have been on people, places, cities and
environments. In fact I am going to doo a bit of both.
I take up the metaphysical question first. There are
three dominant ideas about the nature of space and time.
The absolute theory is largely associated with classical
mechanics and the name of Newton. The relative theory
is strongly associated with Einstein's theories. The third
is the relational conception which goes back to Leibniz
but which also has a more contemporary representative
in the philosophical work of Alfred North Whitehead;
and I am also going to argue that Henri Lefebvre is
firmly in this tradition.
Under the absolute conception, space and time are

regarded as existing independent of any of the processes
operating within them. Space and time are material
frameworks (having independent existence) within
which such processes occur. Given what I have said
about the social construction and the resultant
heterogeneity of constructed spaces and times, obviously
Newton is of little use. I can understand Newton as
creating one particular construction of the idea of space
and time of great utility to mechanics and engineering
science closely connected with the technological practices
of a modernising capitalism. I can even in this way
understand, given the success of those practices, how
the Newtonian view became hegemonic and dominant,
particularly when neatly modified and stripped of its
contradictions through the genius of Kant's interven
tions.
Under the relative view, space and time still have
independent reality and existence, but in this case the
space and time metrics warp and change depending upon
the nature of matter, its density and character. But this
still does not permit of a multiplicity of spaces and times
of the sort that I have been talking about in the realm
of contested social practices. So Einstein does not help
either.
This leaves me with the relational views of Leibniz
and Whitehead in which it is understood that each
process produces its own space and time. This relational
view is the only one that is consistent with the argu
ment I have been setting out. There is a marvelous
correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke. The latter

was a close colleague of Newton and it is understood
that Newton monitored the correspondence so in effect
we have a correspondence between Newton and Leibniz
mediated by Clarke. Leibniz's objection to Newton was
that the absolute theory made it seem as if God was
located in space and time and that therefore space and
time existed prior to God-this generated an intense
theological argument. And to prove his point Leibniz
invented what he called "possible worlds" characterised
by completely different processes generating completely
different notions of space and time to those that actually
existed and that Newton had correctly observed. The
point was to show (a) that space and time had no
independent existence apart from processes and (b) that
God had chosen the best of all possible worlds in
designing the actual world we live in. Although we live
in a world characterised by one space and time in
actuality, it was one out of many possible worlds of
space and time chosen by God.
So Leibniz envisaged the idealist possibility of a
multiplicity of spaces and times even though there was
in practice only one. If, as a materialist Marxist, I
secularise Leibniz's notion then I would not say that
God chose a particular space and time as the best of all
possible worlds, but we would say that a multiplicity
of interests and processes are defining a heterogeneity
of spaces and time out of which one gets chosen as
dominant to reflect the interests of dominant powers.
Instead of being ideal, these possible worlds are real.

130 D. HARVEY
Since Leibniz is usually regarded as one of the founding
figures of German idealism, a tradition against which
Marx revolted, then this appears as a well-trodden path
for a Marxian analyst such as myself to take, in turning
Leibniz's idealism into a practical realism.
I am fortunately (or unfortunately) supported in this
idea through the work of Alfred North Whitehead who
developed a realist position distinctive from Leibniz in
insisting that there are a multiplicity of spaces and times
at work in the actual world rather than a singular
conception. The task of science was to grapple with that
multiplicity, discovering its origins in the study of
diverse processes rather than assuming with Newton
and to some degree Einstein that there was a singular
spatiotemporality that could somehow be measured.
Space and time are, as with Leibniz, contingent upon
process. A multiplicity of processes can in principle be
thought of as determining a multiplicity of spatio
temporalities. But Whitehead also understood that this
was an impossible formulation and that it had to be
modified in a crucial way through the idea of what he
called "cogredience." By this he meant that processes
often necessarily hang together in ways that make them
interdependent and if that is the case then the space and
time so defined has also to hang together in a much
more unified configuration. So for Whitehead the
definition of what is space and time boiled down to a
study of how different processes relate and generate
cogredience and coherence. This was rendered analogous
to communication so that processes that were in
communication with each other would define a dominant
notion of space and time. This idea of communication

makes it possible here to link into the work of Habermas
who, through his theory of communicative action starts
to define an idea of the formation of certain spatial and
temporal orderings in the world being generated out of
human communicative action.
Now both Leibniz and Whitehead are much more
complicated in their arguments than this. But I do think
I have said enough to show that there is a case for seeing
the relational metaphysical views they advance as in
principle, though with obvious modifications, coherent
with the general argument I have been presenting about
the social construction of and social conflict over the
definitions of space and time. A metaphysical basis can
be found, therefore, for the arguments I have been
developing. This was, furthermore, the kind of
metaphysical basis of which Henri Lefebvre was
particularly aware, most conspicuously through his
knowledge of Leibniz. So it is possible to look at how
Lefebvre is picking up on this relational idea through
his work on the production of space.
But if this kind of argument is correct then we are
pushed to identify and define the dominant processes at
work, the communicative processes in Habermas's terms,
that are defining space and time for us in contemporary
society. And here I have a fairly simple solution. I reach
back for my favorite book, The Limits to Capital and
ask the question what is capitalism doing to space and
time and what has capitalism done to space and time
historically. And we quickly see that capitalism has been
revolutionary with respect to space and time perpetually

redefining them according to new needs and require
ments.
One of the crucial magnitudes that all capitalists are
interested in is turnover time, how fast can you turn
your capital over and get back a profit. And if you look
at the history of capitalist technological innovations you
will find that many of them are precisely about trying
to speed up the circulation of capital and to accelerate
the turnover of capital. Innovations in production
techniques, in marketing and consumption, in finance,
and the like, have accomplished this task. Where would
capitalism be if it still had the same turnover time as it
had some one hundred years ago? The answer is that
it would have long ceased to exist. Accelerating
turnover time by technological innovations produces
speed up, so that all of us find ourselves living a life
that is moving ever faster. Now this condition is not
unique to this phase of capitalism. It was as true of the
nineteenth century as now. There have been successive
phases of speeding up and going faster that have had
crucial social, political and economic impacts. Of course
in Britain now this process goes under the charming
name of 'Japanisation' since you have been particularly
good at it.
But capitalists are also interested in something else
which Marx called the annihilation of space through
time. This means that the perpetual reduction of spatial
barriers is vital to capitalist development of accumula
tion. Again this is not something new to this phase of
capitalism for it has been going on for many years. There
is a whole history of capitalist innovations that have

been precisely about overcoming spatial barriers and
once again you have there, when coupled with those
attached to accelerating turnover, much of the history of
capitalist innovation in general in a nutshell. The effect
is to compress space so that space become less and less
of a significant barrier to communicative action so that
the reduction of spatial barriers produces as it were its
own new spatiotemporality. The net effect is to produce
what I call time-space compression. And associated with
that time space compression are processes of creative
destruction operating to destroy certain kinds of life that
attach to certain spatiotemporal rhythms while creating
entirely new modes of life in which the new notions of
spatiotemporality are embedded.
This dominant and singular process, I want to argue,
produces, fragmented effects, fragmented according to
positionality within the labor market, positionality
within the capitalist economic system, positionality with
respect to different locations and activities, thereby
affecting patterns of place development and environ
mental uses. So the total effects of time-space com
pression are highly fragmented; by way of conclu
sion I want to give you just one example of how this
process of fragmentation works.
In Baltimore, the history of deindustrialisation and

destruction of much of the manufacturing base, a general
story of manufacturing in the United States with which
you are probably very familiar, has been countered by
a new investment strategy built around the idea of tourist
development, the production of spectacles and entertain
ments and cultural facilities, the development of a
convention trade and hotel industry, office activities as
well as retail activities of all sorts. Quite a lot of jobs
have been created by this new strategy but I want to
loo very briefly at the spatiotemporality of that job
creation and what it means for a significant segment
of the workforce. The Baltimore metropolitan area
has 2.2 million people, the city has between six and
seven hundred thousand people and we find that some
100,000 people passed through the temporary employ
ment agencies hands in the city in 1993. I put it this
way because the temporary agencies in the city do not
exhaust temporary agencies in the metropolitan area
but nor are their activities confined only within the
city boundary. However you look at it, a very signifi
cant portion of the Baltimore labor force is now in tem
porary employment.
Most of these jobs are connected to the service sector,
the new employment. When a theorist like Lyotard talks
about postmodernism in terms of the temporary contract
in everything, he mainly refers to personal relationships
and professional and intellectual allegiances rather than
to this sort of temporary contract that effects so many
people in the workforce in Baltimore. But this temporary
workforce contract is now fundamental to much of the
new employment in both Britain and the United States.
We have looked at the employment conditions operative

in key segments of the Baltimore economy built around
this new service sector economy and the general picture
that emerges is one of the construction of a new
spatiotemporality in which people have no future, the
best that they can hope is to get some money each day.
There are few prospects of upward mobility or promo
tion, of higher incomes in the future. Workers are locked
into a time system in which each day repeats itself
without any prospect of a change. Ideas that used to be
important about the work ethic, of deferred gratification
are completely eliminated by a day-to-day and hand-to
mouth existence that does not allow for the construction
of that longer term temporal behavior. By the same
token, most of the new workers are trapped within a
minimum wage structure that confines them to a certain
spatiality of living opportunities at best in the more
derelict and impoverished zones of the city, where
services are poor and quality of life severely
compromised. Furthermore many of them work at night,
cannot afford a taxi home and dare not, particularly the
many of them who are women, dare to brave the streets
at night to walk home. Indeed most of the people engaged
here are African American and women, binding together
race, class and gender into a particular configuration of
entrapment in space and time.
So we are witnessing the construction of a certin kind
of spatiotemporality within a whole segment of
Baltimore that is very different from the spatiotempo
rality of many of the managers who work in the offices
downtown and live in the suburbs. The point here is
that we have one single process, coherent in itself, that
is nevertheless producing a fragmentation of spatio

temporality within the population of the city. Every now
and again someone says this is a terrible situation and
we should try to do something about it but no one seems
to know exactly how. But it also turns out to be extremely
hard to organise workers living in that kind of
spatiotemporal world because organisers who try to
work with them find it extremely difficult because they
speak a language that is inconsistent with the space and
the time, as given in the material processes that govern
the lives of the workers.
One of the task of any radical movement it seems to
me is to tackle that question of how to confront that
space and time with an alternative possible world, as
Leibniz would put it, and define that not just as some
ideal construction but as a realist set of possibilities of
the sort that Whitehead allows. Changes are always
being wrought in space and time around us. Can we, as
radical theorists and political beings, grasp that nettle
132 D. HARVEY
of changing space and time relations and seek to direct
it in different ways? That seems to me to be an entirely
relevant question and one that is unavoidable for
contemporary geographers.
Answers to questions from the audience
Question: How difficult has it been to bring geographical
perspectives into Marxism?
Answer The first observation I would make is that it

has proved much easier to bring Marxism into geography
than to take geography into Marxism. There is an
interesting problem here and I think that it is best
specified by Raymond Williams, a British cultural
theorist who grew up in Wales. He launched the idea of
what he called "militant particularism" the idea that it
was in a particular place and a particular time when a
particular struggle gave rise to a conception of socialism
that was thought to have universal possibilities. What
Williams suggested was that all socialist struggles begin
as militant particularist struggles that move on to make
universal claims. The difficulty of course is that the
universalistic claims that make sense to the coalminers
of south Wales don't necessarily make sense to rural
peasants in Nicaragua so that there has always been a
tension within the socialist movement between militant
particularism and universal solidarity as the basis for
universalist claims and programs. The difficulty as I see
it now is that during the post war period strong and
well-organised communist parties almost invariably
used the rhetoric of universality and it was therefore
always threatening and uncomfortable for them to be
taken back to the idea that their politics were grounded
in militant particularist origins and that there may be
something problematic for them about imposing their
universalisms upon highly divergent and differentiated
geographical traditions. So it was threatening to the
communist movement to consider the geographical
fragmentations that lay at its origins and the geography
that ought to be imported into its politics as it moved
towards broader conditions of power.

My own political conclusion to that is not to avoid
making universal claims; you have to make them
whatever you do if you want to do anything. But it is
important always to recognise the particularistic origins
of universal claims and recognise the potential for
injustice and the dangers that arise from imposing such
supposedly universal claims on the particularities of
others. Put in the language of today's talk, I think the
communist movement never had a very good grasp of
the spaceplace dialectic and if it had had a much better
grasp of that it might have done a much better job than
it did.
Question: How does your approach differ from that of
Doreen Massey?
Answer: The difference between Doreen Massey and
myself is that she wrote Spatial Divisions of Labor and
I wrote Limits to Capital. They are very different books.
Spatial Divisions of Labor was not set in the sort of
theoretical background that was fundamental to Limits
which was a book based straight in Marx's political
economy. If there was a theoretical grounding to
Massey's work, and I was not sure I could really identify
it, it lay with the structuralism of Althusser, rather than
with Marx. Now there is a tendency among many people
to think that Althusser equals Marx. There are many
people who have read Althusser very carefully without
knowing Marx. If anything I worked the other way
round, since I read Marx very carefully and dabbled a
little in Althusser and didn't particularly like it as general
theory though there were many insights to be gained
from reading him. So if you want to see the difference
it would be between my own particular grounding in

Marxian political economy and the Althousserian
trajectory that Massey and many others moved into,
which is the idea that having accepted the relative
autonomy of this or that segment of society you can
then move on to the idea of the relative autonomy of
almost everything. What I started to see in Massey's
work, rightly or wrongly, was this relative autonomy
notion pushing her geographical analysis back into a
kind of old fashioned regional geography without her
hardly noticing it. And in any case, the attacks in her
book mounted against any kind of "logic of capital"
argument suggested a break on her part with any kind
of commitment to theorising based in Marx's Capital
- which was, of course, exactly the kind of theorising
upon which I was resting my own work. This created a
considerable breach between us. I think since then she
has moved back somewhat to a rather more theoretically
informed position so that in her recent writings on place,
space, locality she has articulated a line that I would
certainly find much less objectionable. But she has since
found that feminism is a much more convenient stick
to beat on me with, so she has switched to that track.
If I can add one other point. If you look at my own
work I think you will find here an intense concern to
try to build an understanding of space and time into
some theory of capitalist accumulation. The idea of the
capitalist production of space and time become
integrated into how I'm constructing my own version of
Marxian political economy. You will not find that concern

in Massey. The spaces within which divisions of labor
occur are in her case given rather than produced. Space
is reduced to a framework for her analysis rather than
a framework itself continuously produced and re
produced by political economic processes.
Question: How does the deconstruction of metanarratives
effect your work?
Answer: Let me pick up one piece of the question and
go back to the idea of universal values-which often
get expressed as masternarratives stating universal
values-resting in particular claims. Consider one
universal value-social justice-in which I have been
interested for a long time. Now we can all be in favor
of a just society. The difficulty here, as many
deconstructionists and postmodernist have correctly
pointed out, is that the justice that gets specified is
almost invariably that of some ruling political order.
This is an idea that goes back to Plato where he has
Thrasymachus say that justice is whatever the ruling
class says it is. So if some universal claim of justice is
made and made operative then you often create particular
injustices for particular places and peoples. Now on this
point the postmodernist are correct. After all many
colonised peoples have suffered from the white man's
justice, women from partriarchal justice, workers from
the capitalist justice, people of color from a white racist
jusice. So what you are then left with is the idea that
no universal claim for justice can be made. But at this

point I part company from the postmodern style of
argument because as Engels long ago pointed out,
though justice is always an expression of political power
for itself, this also means that the overthrow of that
social order requires definition of an alternative sense
of justice to which many people can subscribe as part
of their political project. What this means is that any
oppositional form of justice to the hegemonic bourgeois
market-based form of justice must negotiate among
many different positionalities-colonised peoples, femin
ist movements, all of them different militant particular
isms to try to create some solidary sense of justice around
which a major political movement can cohere. Now as
soon as you talk that kind of language then a lot of
those who are postmodern, say you can't do that. My
answer is that I do that, and we should all do so albeit
with the recognition of the dangers that come from
applying some universal judgement of value across a
highly differentiated geographical and social space. The
nature of the problem raised by postmodernism is a
good question but the answer is futile and meaningless,
ending up in endless deconstructions to the point where
you end up deconstructing yourself-which is fine if
that is what you want to do but that is not particularly
what I would want to do.
Question: How and why exactly do changes in space and
time occur?
Answer: These are very interesting questions. The
easiest example, as I suggested in the talk, is that in
which coercion and force is used to impose some new
conception. But that is not the most interesting case.
The most interesting situations arise out of the very

subtle ways in which behaviors get organised and
orchestrated in a seemingly voluntary way, even through
such things as aesthetic judgements. And to be honest
I don't know quite how it happens and that is one of
the things we should be looking at very carefully because
to understand how it happens is also to find out how it
can be transformed.
Once we have accepted a certain time-space
construction it becomes rather difficult to change it
unless there is some strong coercion or some strong
compulsion working on you. I think about this in terms
of my own biography. I can remember a time when I
started as an academic when to write more than two
books in a lifetime was thought to be a bit greedy, pushy
and even unscholarly. Now, if you don't write a book
every other year people think you died. The word
processor comes along, a machine that is supposed to
help lighten the load of labor, and suddenly you find if
you want to get promotion in American universities you
have to raise the number of articles you publish each
year from say, two to five. Everyone rushes around
frantic for new ideas and things to say, though just as
often people take paragraphs from one article and merge
them with pieces from another and so create a third
article. Even I find myself doing that under pressure.
These are the sorts of things that we find happening to
us defining a situation to which we have to respond.
Maybe I'm nostalgic for some lost golden era, but I
remember a time during the 1960s when I had much
more time to think things through and I certainly find
that nowadays I have very little time to reflect at length
on things in deep rather than superficial ways. So we

find ourselves pushed by circumstances operating within
academia into a faster pace of production. But pressures
are also put from outside. Governments, such as in
134 D. HARVEY
Thatcher's Britain, start to insist upon a certain
productivity, of output measured in numbers of articles
and activities. We had to fill out more and more forms
explaining what we have done and if you had not done
all the things that some bureaucrat says you are
supposed to do then you don't get your rewards. The
effect is that I live a lifestyle that is much more frenetic
and faster than twenty years ago.
This was the result of a social process which I really
was not conscious of and whose rules of the game have
changed. In some respects this process has been fun so
when you have the energy and the adrenalin is running
it is invigorating; you write five articles and it feels
great. The problem arises when other things happen like
you feel tired, you have a kid or you don't feel up to it
quite. Those processes are there, they have existed in
my lifetime and I am sure you can find examples in
your own. But it is important to recognise how we
internalise the pressures, the changing sense of space
and time, without often noticing it. But these are very
good questions and we should pay careful atention to
them.

Question: How has the work of Anthony Giddens related
to your own?
Answer: The relationship to the work of Giddens arises
out of an episodic reading of his work. I sometimes have
found that very helpful and sometimes infuriating. One
of the things I learned from Giddens is that if you want
to become well-known then you label things, then you
become well known because of the labels you
have put on things. Giddens is one of the most
astute namers of things and concepts in social theory.
But if you ask what those names mean you often find
very fragile explanations and sometimes very little
depth. If you are concerned about spatiotemporality, for
example, then to name something like "time-space
distanciation" often seems to explain a phenomena but
it does so by merely naming it. But if you go on to ask
what is this time-space distanciation, where did it come
from, what is its theoretical prounding, then you often
fi nd not much depth of understanding of processes. But
he is very astute as an observer and he reads extensively
and synthetically with a great deal of intelligence. He
absorbs ideas quickly and transforms them often in very
creative ways. So I have occasionally drawn some
stimulus from this. He occasionally refers to my work
but in recent years he has avoided that. This may be
connected with some of the theses I have been advancing
and their connection back to Marxism (which he is often
hostile to). I personally find also that if you push ques
tions like what is money or what is time and space into
the heart of Giddens theory then that thoery starts to
come apart. I have learned to judge how good graduate
students are by how quickly they move on from Giddens
as a vital introductory set of ideas back to the orginals
from which Giddens draws, such as Marx and Weber

or Durkheim. And I think this is a general judgement.
I had occasion last year to travel Britain interviewing
many people for a series of BBC programs on cities and
I often talked with sociologists and I was in the habit
of asking them what they thought of Giddens. They all
of them said the same thing: that there came a point
where they stopped reading him. The date varied
according to which particular text they found
unfulfilling. Often the thought was there that Giddens'
arguments were becoming predictable and repetitive, but
also that at some point the lack of depth was troubling.
Yet there was also a general recognition and appreciaton
of the importance of his contribution, particularly in
focusing attention on the relations between structure and
agency and the importance of the ontological and
epistemological status of the structure-agency debate. I
fi nd myself concurring with that judgement. I found his
early work most interesting but have gotten very little
out of reading him after the Critique of Historical
Materialism.
(This article is based on the lecture at the symposium
on socioeconomic geography held at the general meeting
of the Association of the Japanese Geographers on 15
October 1994 at Nagoya University.)
空間と時間の社会的構成
D・ハーヴェイ*

地理学者は,「空間」,「場所」,「環境」のどれか1つ
を取り出して学問を構築しようとしてきたが,本当は3
つの概念を同時に相関的に扱わねばならない。ただ本日
は,このうち「空間」を中心にし,空間と時間の社会的
構成について話したい。
異なる社会は各々に個別性ある時空概念を構築する。
社会的構成は物質世界の外にある純粋な主観でなく,物
質世界の様相において時空を理解するやり方である。時
空の尺度を選択するのは自然でなく社会である。この選
択は社会の作用にとり基礎的・個人にとり客観的事実
で,個人がなされた選択から逃れると罰をうける。決定
された時空様式は生産・消費様式や権力と結びつき,時
空様式を中立とみると社会変革の可能性の否定になる。
社会変容は構成された時空の変容と結びつく。支配的
社会はそれ固有の時空概念を従属的社会におしつける。
ここから,時空様式の変革から社会を変革しようとする
思想と行動が生まれた。時空概念は社会諸部分の相異な
る目的や関心により変容し,異なる時空性は互いに葛藤

する。例えば,数十年の将来を利子率だけでみる新古典
派経済学者と無限の将来にわたる持続性を説く環境論者
とで時空性は異なる。男女の旧い分業に基づく時空性に
基づき計画された都市と,そこに住み社会で働く女性が
もつ時空性とは矛盾をきたす。
空間と時間について,ニュートンの「絶対」,アイン
シュタインの「相対」,ライプニッツやルフェーブルの
「相関」の3概念がある。「絶対」では,時空がその中で
作用する過程から独立な物質的枠組とみなされる。「相
対」では,依然独立とされる時空の尺度がその物的性質
に応じ変化するが,時空の多元性を許容しない。これま
での議論と整合的なのは,各過程が自らの時空を生産す
るという「相関」である。ライプニッツは,ニュートン
の同僚クラークとの論争で案出した「可能な諸世界」の
考えを説いた。マルクス主義唯物論者として私はこれを
世俗化し,利害と過程の多元性が諸空間の不均質性を規
定し,この諸空間のなかから支配的権力がもつ利害を反
映した時空が選びだされる,としたい。

この考え方は,現実における時空の多元性を強調する
ホワイトヘッドと共通している。彼にあって空間と時間
は,異なる諸過程が関連しあって生み出される「一体性」,
ならびに共存せざるを得ない諸過程の相互依存から空間
と時間の共存とその統一された編成が出てくる「共成性」
生成の研究により定義される。コミュニケートしあう諸
過程はある支配的な空間と時間の考えを規定するから,
これはコミュニケーションと類義となる。
現代社会の空間と時間についてみると,『資本の限界』
で論じたように,資本主義は19世紀以来永続して革命
的で,回転期間と資本流通の高速化が技術革新により達
成されてきた。また,空間がコミュニケーションにとっ
てもつ障害は一層減少し,時間・空間の圧縮が生じた。
これにより同時に,旧い時空リズムは創造的に破壊され
全く新しい時空性をもった生活様式が生まれる。だが,
この支配的過程がもつ効果は,場所の発展や環境利用の
パターンに影響する労働市場や資本主義の経済システム
内部における位置や立地などの位置性によって断片化さ

れ,時間・空間の圧縮全体の効果が断片化される。内的
に整合性あるたった1つの過程が,都市人口内部などに
断片化された時空性をもたらすのである。
ラディカル運動の任務の1つは,現在を変革した先に
ある世界がもつ時空に直面する問題に取り組み,現実的
な可能性として規定することである。移りゆく時空の諸
関係にそれと違う方向付けを与える課題は,今日の地理
学者に避けがたく緊要である。(水岡不二雄)
* ジョンズ・ホプキンズ大学
,ボルテイモア,アメリカ合衆国
the commoner www.thecommoner.org other articles in commons
Feminism And the Politics of the Commons *
Silvia Federici
Our perspective is that of the planet’s commoners: human
beings with bodies, needs,
desires, whose most essential tradition is of cooperation in the
making and maintenance

of life; and yet have had to do so under conditions of suffering
and separation from one
another, from nature and from the common wealth we have
created through generations.
(The Emergency Exit Collective, The Great Eight Masters and
the Six Billion
Commoners, Bristol, May Day 2008)
The way in which women’s subsistence work and the
contribution of the commons to the
concrete survival of local people are both made invisible
through the idealizing of them
are not only similar but have common roots…In a way, women
are treated like commons
and commons are treated like women (Marie Mies and Veronika
Bennholdt-Thomsen,
The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy,
London: Zed Books,
1999).
Reproduction precedes social production. Touch the women,
touch the rock. (Peter
Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, University of
California Press, 2008)

Introduction: Why Commons
At least since the Zapatistas took over the zócalo in San
Cristobal de las Casas on
December 31, 1993 to protest legislation dissolving the ejidal
lands of Mexico, the
concept of ‘the commons’ has been gaining popularity among
the radical left,
internationally and in the U.S., appearing as a basis for
convergence among anarchists,
Marxists, socialists, ecologists, and eco-feminists.
1
There are important reasons why this apparently archaic idea
has come to the
center of political discussion in contemporary social
movements. Two in particular stand
out. On one side is the demise of the statist model of revolution
that for decades had
sapped the efforts of radical movements to build an alternative
to capitalism. On the
other, the neo-liberal attempt to subordinate every form of life
and knowledge to the logic

of the market has heightened our awareness of the danger of
living in a world in which
we no longer have access to seas, trees, animals, and our fellow
beings except through the
cash-nexus. The ‘new enclosures’ have also made visible a
world of communal properties
and relations that many had believed to be extinct or had not
valued until threatened with
privatization.
2
Ironically, the new enclosures have demonstrated that not only
the
common has not vanished, but also new forms of social
cooperation are constantly being
produced, including in areas of life where none previously
existed like, for example, the
internet.
The idea of the common/s, in this context, has offered a logical
and historical
alternative to both State and Private Property, the State and the
Market, enabling us to
reject the fiction that they are mutually exclusive and
exhaustive of our political

possibilities. It has also served an ideological function as a
unifying concept prefiguring
the cooperative society that the radical left is striving to create.
Nevertheless, ambiguities
as well as significant differences remain in the interpretations
of this concept, which we
need to clarify if we want the principle of the commons to
translate into a coherent
political project.
3
What, for example, constitutes a common? We have land,
water, air commons,
digital commons; our acquired entitlements (e.g., social security
pensions) are often
described as commons, and so are languages, libraries, and the
collective products of past
cultures. But are all these commons equivalent from the
viewpoint of their political
potential? Are they all compatible? And how can we ensure that
they do not project a
unity that remains to be constructed? Finally, should we speak
of ‘commons’ in the

plural, or ‘the common’ as Autonomist Marxists propose we do,
this concept designating
in their view the social relations characteristic of the dominant
form of production in the
post-Fordist era?
With these questions in mind, in this essay, I look at the
politics of the commons
from a feminist perspective where “feminist” refers to a
standpoint shaped by the struggle
against sexual discrimination and over reproductive work,
which, to paraphrase
Linebaugh’s comment above, is the rock upon which society is
built and by which every
model of social organization must be tested. This intervention is
necessary, in my view,
to better define this politics and clarify the conditions under
which the principle of the
common/s can become the foundation of an anti-capitalist
program. Two concerns make
these tasks especially important.
Global Commons, World Bank Commons

First, since at least the early 1990s, the language of the
commons has been
appropriated by the World Bank and the United Nations and put
at the service of
privatization. Under the guise of protecting biodiversity and
conserving the global
commons, the Bank has turned rain forests into ecological
reserves, has expelled the
populations that for centuries had drawn their sustenance from
them, while ensuring
access to those who can pay, for instance, through eco-tourism.
4
For its part, the United
Nations has revised the international law governing access to
the oceans in ways that
enables governments to concentrate the use of seawaters in
fewer hands, again in the
name of preserving the common heritage of mankind.
5
The World Bank and the UN are not alone in their adaptation of
the idea of the
commons to market interests. Responding to different
motivations, a re-valorization of
the commons has become trendy among mainstream economists

and capitalist planners;
witness the growing academic literature on the subject and its
cognates: social capital,
gift economies, altruism. Witness also the official recognition
of this trend through the
conferral of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009 to the
leading voice in this field, the
political scientist Elinor Ostrom.
6
Development planners and policymakers have discovered that,
under proper
conditions, a collective management of natural resources can be
more efficient and less
prone to conflict than privatization, and that commons can be
made to produce very well
for the market.
7
They have also recognized that, carried to the extreme, the
commodification of social relations has self-defeating
consequences. The extension of the
commodity form to every corner of the social factory, which

neo-liberalism has
promoted, is an ideal limit for capitalist ideologues, but it is a
project not only
unrealizable but undesirable from the viewpoint of long-term
reproduction of the
capitalist system. Capitalist accumulation is structurally
dependent on the free
appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that
must appear as
externalities to the market, like the unpaid domestic work that
women have provided,
upon which employers have relied for the reproduction of the
workforce.
It is no accident, then, that long before the Wall Street
meltdown, a variety of
economists and social theorists warned that the marketization of
all spheres of life is
detrimental to the market’s well-functioning, for markets too,
the argument goes, depend
on the existence of non- monetary relations like confidence,
trust, and gift giving.
8
In
brief, capital is learning about the virtues of the common good.
Even the Economist, the

organ of capitalist free-market economics for more than 150
years, in its July 31, 2008
issue, cautiously joined the chorus.
The economics of the “new commons” – the journal wrote – is
still in its
infancy. It is too soon to be confident about its hypotheses. But
it may yet
prove a useful way of thinking about problems, such as
managing the
internet, intellectual property or international pollution, on
which
policymakers need all the help they can get.
We must be very careful, then, not to craft the discourse on the
commons in such a way
as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself,
posturing, for instance, as the
environmental guardian of the planet.
What Commons?
A second concern is that, while international institutions have
learned to make

commons functional to the market, how commons can become
the foundation of a non-
capitalist economy is a question still unanswered. From Peter
Linebaugh’s work,
especially The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008), we have learned
that commons have been
the thread that has connected the history of the class struggle
into our time, and indeed
the fight for the commons is all around us. Maine are fighting to
preserve access to their
fisheries, under attack by corporate fleets; residents of
Appalachia are organizing to save
their mountains threatened by strip mining; open source and
free software movements are
opposing the commodification of knowledge and opening new
spaces for
communications and cooperation. We also have the many
invisible, commoning activities
and communities that people are creating in North America,
which Chris Carlsson has
described in his Nowtopia (2007). As Carlsson shows, much
creativity is invested in the
production of “virtual commons” and forms of sociality that
thrive under the radar of the

money/market economy.
Most important has been the creation of urban gardens, which
have spread, in the
1980s and 1990s, across the country, thanks mostly to the
initiatives of immigrant
communities from Africa, the Caribbean or the South of the
United States. Their
significance cannot be overestimated. Urban gardens have
opened the way to a
‘rurbanization’ process that is indispensable if we are to regain
control over our food
production, regenerate our environment and provide for our
subsistence. The gardens are
far more than a source of food security: They are centers of
sociality, knowledge
production, and cultural and intergenerational exchange. As
Margarita Fernandez (2003)
writes of urban gardens in New York, they “strengthen
community cohesion” as places
where people come together not just to work the land, but to
play cards, hold weddings,

and have baby showers or birthday parties.
9
Some have partner relationships with local
schools whereby they give children environmental education
after school. Not least,
gardens are “a medium for the transport and encounter of
diverse cultural practices” so
that African vegetables and farming practices, for example, mix
with those of the
Caribbean (ibid.).
Still, the most significant feature of urban gardens is that they
produce for
neighborhood consumption, rather than for commercial
purposes. This distinguishes them
from other reproductive commons that either produce for the
market, like the fisheries of
Maine’s “Lobster Coast,”
10
or are bought on the market, like the land trusts that preserve
open spaces. The problem, however, is that urban gardens have
remained a spontaneous
grassroots initiative and there have been few attempts by
movements in the U.S. to

expand their presence and to make access to land a key terrain
of struggle. More
generally, the left has not posed the question of how to bring
together the many
proliferating commons that are being defended, developed, and
fought for, so that they
can form a cohesive whole and provide a foundation for a new
mode of production.
An exception is the theory proposed by Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt in
Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and recently Commonwealth
(2009), which argues that
a society built on the principle of “the common” is already
evolving from the
informatization and “cognitivization” of production. According
to this theory, as
production presumably becomes production of knowledge,
culture, and subjectivity,
organized through the internet, a common space and common
wealth are created that
escape the problem of defining rules of inclusion or exclusion.
For access and use
multiply the resources available on the net, rather than
subtracting from them, thus

signifying the possibility of a society built on abundance – the
only remaining hurdle
confronting the “multitude” being how to prevent the capitalist
“capture” of the wealth
produced.
The appeal of this theory is that it does not separate the
formation of “the
common” from the organization of work and production but sees
it immanent to it. Its
limit is that its picture of the common absolutizes the work of a
minority possessing skills
not available to most of the world population. It also ignores
that this work produces
commodities for the market, and it overlooks the fact that online
communication/production depends on economic activities –
mining, microchip and rare
earth production—that, as presently organized, are extremely
destructive, socially and
ecologically.
11
Moreover, with its emphasis on knowledge and information,
this theory
skirts the question of the reproduction of everyday life. This,
however, is true of the

discourse on the commons as a whole, which is mostly
concerned with the formal
preconditions for the existence of commons and less with the
material requirements for
the construction of a commons-based economy enabling us to
resist dependence on wage
labor and subordination to capitalist relations.
Women and the Commons
It is in this context that a feminist perspective on the commons
is important. It
begins with the realization that, as the primary subjects of
reproductive work, historically
and in our time, women have depended on access to communal
natural resources more
than men and have been most penalized by their privatization
and most committed to
their defense. As I wrote in Caliban and the Witch (2004), in
the first phase of capitalist

development, women were at the forefront of the struggle
against land enclosures both in
England and in the “New World” and they were the staunchest
defenders of the
communal cultures that European colonization attempted to
destroy. In Peru, when the
Spanish conquistadores took control of their villages, women
fled to the high mountains
where they recreated forms of collective life that have survived
to this day. Not
surprisingly, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the
most violent attack on
women in the history of the world: the persecution of women as
witches. Today, in the
face of a new process of Primitive Accumulation, women are
the main social force
standing in the way of a complete commercialization of nature,
supporting a non-
capitalist use of land and a subsistence-oriented agriculture.
Women are the subsistence
farmers of the world. In Africa, they produce 80% of the food
people consume, despite
the attempts made by the World Bank and other agencies to
convince them to divert their

activities to cash-cropping. In the 1990s, in many African
towns, in the face of rising
food prices, they have appropriated plots in public lands and
planted corn, beans, cassava
"along roadsides…in parks, along rail-lines.." changing the
urban landscape of African
cities and breaking down the separation between town and
country in the process.
12
In
India, the Philippines, and across Latin America, women have
replanted trees in degraded
forests, joined hands to chase away loggers, made blockades
against mining operations
and the construction of dams, and led the revolt against the
privatization of water.
13
The other side of women’s struggle for direct access to means
of reproduction has
been the formation across the Third World, from Cambodia to
Senegal, of credit
associations that function as money commons (Podlashuc,
2009). Differently named, the

tontines (as they are called in parts of Africa) are autonomous,
self-managed, women-
made banking systems that provide cash to individuals or
groups that have no access to
banks, working purely on a basis of trust. In this, they are
completely different from the
microcredit systems promoted by the World Bank, which
function on a basis of mutual
policing and shame, reaching the extreme (e.g., in Niger) of
posting in public places
pictures of the women who fail to repay the loans, so that some
women have been driven
to suicide.
14
Women have also led the effort to collectivize reproductive
labor both as a means
to economize the cost of reproduction and to protect each other
from poverty, state
violence, and the violence of individual men. An outstanding
example is that of the ollas
communes (common cooking pots) that women in Chile and
Peru set up in the 1980s
when, due to stiff inflation, they could no longer afford to shop
alone.

15
Like land
reclamations, or the formation of tontines, these practices are
the expression of a world
where communal bonds are still strong. But it would be a
mistake to consider them
something pre-political, “natural,” or simply a product of
“tradition.”
After repeated phases of colonization, nature and customs no
longer exist in any
part of the world, except where people have struggled to
preserve them and reinvent
them. As Leo Podlashuc has noted in “Saving Women: Saving
the Commons,”
grassroots women's communalism today leads to the production
of a new reality, it
shapes a collective identity, it constitutes a counter-power in
the home and the
community, and opens a process of self-valorization and self-
determination from which
there is much that we can learn.

The first lesson we can gain from these struggles is that the
‘commoning’ of the
material means of reproduction is the primary mechanism by
which a collective interest
and mutual bonds are created. It is also the first line of
resistance to a life of enslavement
and the condition for the construction of autonomous spaces
undermining from within the
hold that capitalism has on our lives. Undoubtedly the
experiences I described are models
that cannot be transplanted. For us, in North America, the
reclamation and commoning of
the means of reproduction must necessarily take different forms.
But here too, by pooling
our resources and re-appropriating the wealth that we have
produced, we can begin to de-
link our reproduction from the commodity flows that, through
the world market, are
responsible for the dispossession of millions across the world.
We can begin to
disentangle our livelihood not only from the world market but
also from the war machine
and prison system on which the US economy now depends. Not
last we can move beyond

the abstract solidarity that so often characterizes relations in the
movement, which limits
our commitment, our capacity to endure, and the risks we are
willing to take.
In a country where private property is defended by the largest
arsenal of
weaponry in the world, and where three centuries of slavery
have produced profound
divisions in the social body, the recreation of the common/s
appears as a formidable task
that could only be accomplished through a long-term process of
experimentation,
coalition building and reparations. But though this task may
now seem more difficult than
passing through the eye of a needle, it is also the only
possibility we have for widening
the space of our autonomy, and refusing to accept that our
reproduction occurs at the
expense of the world’s other commoners and commons.
5. Feminist Reconstructions
What this task entails is powerfully expressed by Maria Mies
when she points out

that the production of commons requires first a profound
transformation in our everyday
life, in order to recombine what the social division of labor in
capitalism has separated.
For the distancing of production from reproduction and
consumption leads us to ignore
the conditions under which what we eat, wear, or work with
have been produced, their
social and environmental cost, and the fate of the population on
whom the waste we
produce is unloaded (Mies 1999:141ff.). In other words, we
need to overcome the state of
irresponsibility concerning the consequences of our actions that
results from the
destructive ways in which the social division of labor is
organized in capitalism; short of
that, the production of our life inevitably becomes a production
of death for others. As
Mies points out, globalization has worsened this crisis,
widening the distances between
what is produced and what is consumed, thereby intensifying,
despite the appearance of
an increased global interconnectedness, our blindness to the
blood in the food we eat, the

petroleum we use, the clothes we wear, and the computers we
communicate with (ibid.).
Overcoming this state of oblivion is where a feminist
perspective teaches us to
start in our reconstruction of the commons. No common is
possible unless we refuse to
base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others,
unless we refuse to see
ourselves as separate from them. Indeed, if commoning has any
meaning, it must be the
production of ourselves as a common subject. This is how we
must understand the
slogan “no commons without community.” But ‘community’ has
to be intended not as a
gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests
separating them from
others, as with communities formed on the basis of religion or
ethnicity, but rather as a
quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of
responsibility to each other and to
the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals.

Certainly, the achievement of such community, like the
collectivization of our
everyday work of reproduction, can only be a beginning. It is no
substitute for broader
anti-privatization campaigns and the reclamation of our
common wealth. But it is an
essential part of our education to collective government and our
recognition of history as
a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the
neo-liberal era of
capitalism.
On this account, we too must include in our political agenda the
communalization
of housework, reviving that rich feminist tradition that in the
U.S. stretches from the
utopian socialist experiments of the mid-nineteenth century to
the attempts that
‘materialist feminists’ made from the late nineteenth century to
the early twentieth
century to reorganize and socialize domestic work and thereby
the home and the
neighborhood, through collective housekeeping – attemps that
continued until the 1920s

when the Red Scare put an end to them (Hayden 1981 and
1986). These practices and,
most importantly, the ability of past feminists to look at
reproductive labor as an
important sphere of human activity not to be negated but to be
revolutionized, must be
revisited and revalorized.
One crucial reason for creating collective forms of living is that
the reproduction
of human beings is the most labor-intensive work on earth and,
to a very large extent, it is
work that is irreducible to mechanization. We cannot mechanize
childcare, care for the
ill, or the psychological work necessary to reintegrate our
physical and emotional
balance. Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are
making, we cannot robotize
care except at a terrible cost for the people involved. No one
will accept nursebots as
caregivers, especially for children and the ill. Shared
responsibility and cooperative work,
not given at the cost of the health of the providers, are the only
guarantees of proper care.
For centuries, the reproduction of human beings has been a

collective process. It has been
the work of extended families and communities on which people
could rely, especially in
proletarian neighborhoods, even when they lived alone so that
old age was not
accompanied by the desolate loneliness and dependence on
which so many of our elderly
live. It is only with the advent of capitalism that reproduction
has been completely
privatized, a process that is now carried to a degree that it
destroys our lives. This trend
must be reversed, and the present time is propitious for such a
project.
As the capitalist crisis destroys the basic elements of
reproduction for millions of
people across the world, including the United States, the
reconstruction of our everyday
life is a possibility and a necessity. Like strikes,
social/economic crises break the
discipline of wage work, forcing new forms of sociality upon
us. This is what occurred
during the Great Depression, which produced a movement of
hobos who turned the
freight trains into their commons seeking freedom in mobility

and nomadism (Caffentzis
2006). At the intersections of railroad lines, they organized
hobo jungles, pre-figurations,
with their self-governance rules and solidarity, of the
communist world in which many of
the hobos believed.
16
However, but for a few Boxcar Berthas,
17
this was predominantly a
masculine world, a fraternity of men, and in the long term it
could not be sustained. Once
the economic crisis and the war came to an end, the hobos were
domesticated by the two
great engines of labor power fixation: the family and the house.
Mindful of the threat of
working class recomposition during the Depression, American
capital excelled in its
application of the principle that has characterized the
organization of economic life:
cooperation at the point of production, separation and

atomization at the point of
reproduction. The atomized, serialized family house that
Levittown provided,
compounded by its umbilical appendix, the car, not only
sedentarized the worker but put
an end to the type of autonomous workers’ commons that hobo
jungles had represented
(Hayden 1986). Today, as millions of Americans’ houses and
cars are being repossessed,
as foreclosures, evictions, and massive loss of employment are
again breaking down the
pillars of the capitalist discipline of work, new common
grounds are again taking shape,
like the tent cities that are sprawling from coast to coast. This
time, however, it is women
who must build the new commons so that they do not remain
transient spaces, temporary
autonomous zones, but become the foundation of new forms of
social reproduction.
If the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it
is women,
historically the house workers and house prisoners, who must
take the initiative to
reclaim the house as a center of collective life, one traversed by

multiple people and
forms of cooperation, providing safety without isolation and
fixation, allowing for the
sharing and circulation of community possessions, and, above
all, providing the
foundation for collective forms of reproduction. As has already
been suggested, we can
draw inspiration for this project from the programs of the
nineteenth century materialist
feminists who, convinced that the home was an important
“spatial component of the
oppression of women,” organized communal kitchens,
cooperative households calling for
workers’ control of reproduction (Hayden 1981).
These objectives are crucial at present. Breaking down the
isolation of life in the
home is not only a precondition for meeting our most basic
needs and increasing our
power with regard to employers and the state. As Massimo de
Angelis has reminded us, it
is also a protection from ecological disaster. For there can be no
doubt about the
destructive consequences of the “un-economic” multiplication
of reproductive assets and

self-enclosed dwellings that we now call our homes, dissipating
warmth into the
atmosphere during the winter, exposing us to unmitigated heat
in the summer. Most
importantly, we cannot build an alternative society and a strong
self-reproducing
movement unless we redefine our reproduction in a more
cooperative way and put an end
to the separation between the personal and the political, and
between political activism
and the reproduction of everyday life.
It remains to be clarified that assigning women this task of
commoning/collectivizing reproduction is not to concede to a
naturalistic conception of
femininity. Understandably, many feminists view this
possibility as a fate worse than
death. It is deeply sculpted in our collective consciousness that
women have been
designated as men’s common, a natural source of wealth and
services to be as freely
appropriated by them as the capitalists have appropriated the
wealth of nature. But to
paraphrase Dolores Hayden, the reorganization of reproductive

work, and therefore the
reorganization of housing and public space, is not a question of
identity; it is a question
of labor and, we can add, a question of power and safety
(Hayden 1986:230). I am
reminded here of the experience of the women members of the
Landless People’s
Movement of Brazil [the MST] who, after their communities
won the right to maintain
the land that they had occupied, insisted that the new houses be
built to form one
compound so that they could continue to communalize their
housework, wash together,
cook together, take turns with men as they had done in the
course of the struggle, and be
ready to run to give each other support when abused by men.
Arguing that women should
take the lead in the collectivization of reproductive work and
housing is not to naturalize
housework as a female vocation. It is refusing to obliterate the
collective experiences, the

knowledge and the struggles that women have accumulated
concerning reproductive
work, whose history has been an essential part of our resistance
to capitalism.
Reconnecting with this history is a crucial step for women and
men today both to undo
the gendered architecture of our lives and to reconstruct our
homes and lives as
commons.
Endnotes
*Published in Uses of a WorldWind, Movement, Movements,
and Contemporary Radical
Currents in the United States, edited by Craig Hughes, Stevie
Peace and Kevin Van
Meter for the Team Colors Collective, Oaskland: AK Press,
2010.
1
A key source on the politics of the commons and its theoretical
foundations is the UK-
based electronic journal The Commoner, now entering its
fourteenth year of publication

(www. commoner. org.uk).
2
A case in point is the struggle that is taking place in many
communities in Maine
against Nestlé’s appropriation of Maine’s waters to bottle
Portland Spring. Nestlé’s theft
has made people aware of the vital importance of these waters
and the supporting
aquifers and has truly reconstituted them as a common (Food
and Water Watch Fact
Sheet, July 2009). Food and Water Watch is a (self-described)
"non-profit organization
that works to ensure clean water and safe food in the United
States and around the
world."
3
An excellent site for current debates on the commons is the
recently published issue of
the UK based movement journal Turbulence. Ideas For
Movement (December 5, 2009).
turbulence.org.uk
4
For more on this subject, see the important article “Who Pays
for the Kyoto Protocol?”
by Ana Isla, in which the author describes how the conservation
of biodiversity has

provided the World Bank and other international agencies with
the pretext to enclose rain
forests on the ground that they represent “carbon sinks” and
“oxygen generators.” In
Salleh (2009).
5
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted
in November 1994,
establishes a 200-mile offshore limit, defining an Exclusive
Economic Zone in which
nations can exploit, manage, and protect the resources it
contains, from fisheries to
natural gas. It also regulates deep-sea mining and the use of the
resulting revenues. On
the development of the concept of the "common heritage of
mankind" in United Nations
debate see Susan J. Buck, The Global Commons. An
Introduction (1998).
6
As described by Wikipedia, Ostrom’s work focuses on common
pool resources and
“emphasizes how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain

long-term sustainable
resource yields.” Wikipedia, January 9, 2010, p.1.
7
For more on this topic, see Calestous Juma and J.B. Ojwang
eds., In Land We Trust
(London: Zed Books, 1996), an early treatise on the
effectiveness of communal property
relations in the context of capitalist development and efforts.
8
David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our
Common Wealth. New York
and London: Routledge, 2002: 36-39.
9
See Margarita Fernandez, “Cultivating Community, Food and
Empowerment,” project
course paper, unpublished manuscript, 2003:23-6. An early,
important work on urban
gardens is Bill Weinberg and Peter Lamborn Wilson eds., Avant
Gardening: Ecological
Struggle in the City & the World. (Brooklyn (NY):
Autonomedia, 1999).
10
The fishing commons of Maine are presently threatened with a
new privatization policy
justified in the name of preservation and ironically labeled
“catch shares.” This is a

system, already applied in Canada and Alaska, whereby local
governments set limits on
the amount or fish that can be caught by allocating individual
shares on the basis of the
amount of fishing that boats have done in the past. This system
has proven to be
disastrous for small, independent fishermen who are soon forced
to sell their share to the
highest bidders. Protest against its implementation is now
mounting in the fishing
communities of Maine. See “Cash Shares or Share-Croppers?”
Fishermen’s Voice,
Vol. 14, No.12, December 2009.
11
It has been calculated, for example, that 33,000 liters of water
and 15-19 tons of
material are required just to produce a personal computer. (See
Saral Sarkar, Eco-
Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?: A Critical Analysis of
Humanity’s Fundamental Choices,
London: Zed Books, 1999:126). Also see Elizabeth Dias, "First
Blood Diamonds, Now
Blood Computers?" July 24, 2009. Dias cites claims made by
Global Witness - an

organization campaigning to prevent resource related conflicts -
to the effect that the
trade in the minerals at the heart of the electronic industry feeds
the civil war in the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
http://www.time./com/time/world/article/0,8599,1912594,00.ht
ml
12
Donald B. Freeman, "Survival Strategy or Business Training
Ground? The Significance
of Urban Agriculture For the Advancement of Women in
African Cities." African Studies
Review, Vol.36, N.3 (December 1993), pp. 1-22. Federici
2008a.
13
Shiva 1989, 1991:102-117, 274
14
I owe this information to Ousseina Alidou, Director of the
Center for African Studies at
Rutgers University (NJ)
.
15
Fisher 1993, Andreas 1985.
16
Anderson 1998, Depastino 2003, Caffentzis 2006.

17
Boxcar Bertha (1972) is Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Ben
Reitman's Sister of the
Road, "the fictionalized autobiography of radical and transient
Bertha Thompson."
(Wikipedia)
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