Political Commons in Academia and Beyond

Commentary for the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Netherlands Graduate School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC) on March 7.

Miriam Meissner

So when you first invited me to this panel. I thought: Political commoning in academia and beyond. What a cool topic! I’m keen to participate.

And then I reconsidered the task you gave us all – and had a big attack of imposter syndrome.

“How can PhDs craft career paths outside of academia that do not necessarily place them within the confines of global capital interests and the private sector?”

If I had a good, readily realizable answer to this question, I think that I wouldn’t be a university-employed academic anymore.

So, I’m afraid I don’t have THE answer, but I do have two suggestions.

The first seems simple: It’s build communities.

It’s a commonplace to say that commons and community have the same root. It’s also a commonplace to say that communities are important.

Yet, what do we actually mean when we say ‘community’?

At the neoliberal university, we often tell PhDs that they should go out and network.  

Personally, I hate this. It makes me feel nervous. It makes me do the Angela Merkel hands.

For me, the problem with the neoliberal networking is that it asks you to go somewhere to find someone from whom you can – at some point, in some way or the other – extract value. It’s an extractivist project. It frames people as resources, as means to an end, the end being projects and careers. So, I’m not advocating for us to go out and network.

But I’m still interested in forming political communities.

For me, political communities are groups of people who meet regularly and who share a political interest. This can a political ideal (such as that of socialism), but it could also be just the fact that we’re all precarious academics and don’t like this situation.

Currently, I think that the biggest challenge to forming communities is not that we don’t have shared political interests.

I, for instance, have lots of shared interests. And what that means, in practice, is that I have plenty of group chats on Signal and Telegram, most of which I’m ghosting at the moment.

So, the challenge is not finding shared interests. The challenge is finding regularity and presence.

And, that’s not a coincidence.

As academics, we’re all in a system that is designed to extract maximum productivity from us. To remain competitive and possibly get a tenured job, we must make sure to not fall behind – whether it’s in publishing, conferences, teaching experience, email correspondence, or whatever.

So, in a way, we’re all too busy to form political communities – and that’s a structural condition. It’s not our personal fault.

I don’t know how to break out of this dynamic, but I do think that we need to be honest about the fact that our capacity to break out will at times rely on privilege.

Spending extra time on community building, is not something we can do when we are overstretched and burned out already (due to health issues, or caring obligations, or whatever)–so that makes it a privilege.

Yet, I’m not using the concept of privilege as an accusation. I think that, often, when we say ‘privilege’, what we actually mean is something that we wish everyone had access to.

So, if you happen to have access to some extra time and energy, then I think it’s worth using it to build a community that shares your political interests, and that meets regularly, in person.

This, I think, is the simple base for anything to follow.

In Emergent Strategy, the writer, activist and facilitator Adrienne Maree Brown argues that what makes social movements strong is building critical connections.

And for that, 3 ingredients are particularly important. The first is presence (as opposed to just a Signal group). The second is regularity. And the third is pleasure.

As a starting point, this might be as simple as forming a book club that meets regularly, or a writer’s self-help circle, or even a burnt-out academics pub-crawling crew. I think that, when it comes to building communities, regularity and presence really trump big ambitions.

Again, Maree Brown is a bit of a prophet here. In Pleasure Activism, they write about grounding all activist work in practices that bring us pleasure, while at the same time using pleasure as a tool to research how systems of oppression and supremacy deprive us – some of us more than others – from that which actually makes us feel good.

There are many potentials in this approach, but I also see limits.

On pessimistic days, I fear that this small-scale, grassroots, lifestyly approach to politics is based on wishful thinking. That the only reason why it persists is that it’s no actual challenge to the powers that dominate – above all global capital.

Jodi Dean brought this to the point when she said: ‘Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chicken’.

So, on pessimistic days, that’s my line of thinking. But I also have more optimistic days, and on those days, I think:

Yes! Let’s build political communities inside and outside of academia, but let’s also not leave it there and hope for the best.

So, whatever we build at the small scale: whether that be workers unions, or freelancer cooperatives, or housing commons, or whatever – it at some point needs to be united into an overarching political project with a united political strategy, a strategy with an organizer.

So, what I think needs to stop is that we keep building beautiful single-issue initiatives, and that we then think this will be enough to change a system that is exploitative by design.

Now, to make this claim, I partly draw on my background in degrowth research. I won’t bore with the details of my research. It suffices to say that degrowth does not see exploitation as something that a small-scale reform could solve.

You know, it’s great to oppose this government’s budget cuts to education, for example. I’ll be on strike for it soon. But – even if we are successful – this won’t change anything about the fact that, in a growth-driven capitalist economy, there is really little room for any kind of activity that does not bring direct profit for an economic elite – whether that be education, or care, or art, or whatever.

So, if we really want to forge PhD paths outside of capital interests and the private sector, then we need to strive to change that overall system, and this is possible. That I’d like to emphasize. It is possible to imagine an end of capitalism. And it is possible to pursue this goal collectively.

So that’s the degrowth argument for why smaller-scale political initiatives may have their limits. The second reason why I think that issue-based political movements have their limits is the movement experience of the last decades, which has not led to much change.  

Vincent Bevins shows this well in If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.

We’ve had Occupy Wall Street, and Fridays for Future, and many more – and they did not achieve their goals.

One might even say that they gave rise to something worse. Right now, in Europe, few worry about the climate crisis (even though this crisis is massive). Instead, we are forced to worry about genocide, fascism, and a possible World War Three.

I think that it’s very much time for us to ask what kind of political entity we consider capable of navigating this time of polycrisis.

Personally, I don’t think that commoning movements alone are up for the task.

In addition, and as a means to unite these efforts, I think it that needs an international eco-socialist party.

My thinking here is largely inspired by the work of Jodi Dean and Kai Heron as well as by the youth-led organization Climate Vanguard.

So, what they mean when they say party is not just an electoral party, but an organizational entity that is able to unite all these small-scale movements that are currently opposing capitalist exploitation in its multiple forms – from labor exploitation, to neoliberal austerity, to imperial oppression, to ecological extractivism.

Now, these are big ideas, and I’m running out of time.

What I’d like to end on, is a call for making political organizing a key subject of our debate today.

You may not all agree with me on the need for an eco-socialist party. You might even feel alienated by the Leninist rhetoric. And that’s of course okay.

Yet, if I could ask one question to us all here today, then it would be the following:

How can we make all those beautiful commoning initiatives to be presented today enter an alliance that is powerful enough to change the broader structural conditions that are working against us?

And, I’m very curious to see what answers we may find. Thanks.