Contenu du sommaire : La démocratie des communs

The commons are now part of a dynamic that promotes cooperation and solidarity instead of economic and political predation. They call us to consider a radical social and ecological democracy.

Because it is right for everyone to own their work and because the incentive for research should not be removed, some refuse to lift patents on Covid-19 vaccines. However, collaborative forms of production could ensure global justice and public health with more efficiency.

Accounting standards are the grammar of economics. Once reduced to their financial dimension, they exclude human and environmental costs. However, other models, especially based on the commons, propose to consider them under ecological constraints and make them tools of economic democracy.

Because they presuppose an equal sharing of resources, the commons have nothing to do with the relations of production created by capitalism. They are the beginnings of a social solidarity, beyond State and market. But we must be careful that they are not taken over by capitalism.

The limits of the commons are also those of democracy, especially in relation to governmental structures. Municipalism plans to replace the latter with a confederation of municipal assemblies, following the example of the Yellow Vests movement or the Sudanese revolution.

Although it responds to a legitimate ecological concern, the movement aiming to grant rights to nature forgets democracy. On the contrary, considering living environments as commons, of which humans are users, makes it possible to make ecology a democratic issue.

The directors of three major national institutes shed light on the recent restructurings of public action. While they insist on the importance of their autonomy, in an increasingly competitive context, they want to strengthen the confidence of citizens and employees towards the State.

The new National Institute of Public Service, created to replace the National School of Administration, does not promote access to a greater sociologic diversity of profiles. Its main effect is the abolition of the great bodies of the State, and therefore the opening of a market for the senior civil service.

The concept of tribe, a nomadic and stateless society, is still used to designate the indigenous populations of North Africa. But it has carried European colonization, which believed it was thus taking over the heritage of the Roman Empire, as well as the patrimonialization that followed independence. However, stripped of its ideological charge, it remains useful for describing the social realities of the Maghreb.

In Les Foudres de Nietzsche, Jacques Bouveresse wonders how we could forget Nietzsche's reactionary violence. And he regrets that Foucault relies on Nietzsche to confuse the truth with the abuses of power committed its his name. Such confusion indeed encourages distrust of science.