Engaging the Non-Flat World: Anarchism and the Promise of a Post-Capitalist Collaborative Commons

Abstract

This paper challenges the use of a geographically site-centred, flat ontology to justify contemporary anarchists’ predisposition to espouse exclusively prefigurative forms of action. By considering the anarchist, post-capitalist potential of a technologically enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) economy and Collaborative Commons movement, the case is made for the need to acknowledge and engage the higher-order (emergent) nexuses between state apparatuses and capitalist flows. Doing so, it is argued, makes envisioning the process of creating anarchist oriented, post-capitalist futures significantly more tangible and convincing.