Etymologically the word ‘meent’ shares its root with ‘menigte’, which is the Dutch translation of the Latin ‘multitudo’ (Philippa et al. 2005, 179-81 and 2007, 323-24). They share a Middle Dutch adjective, ‘maneg’ meaning ‘many’ (Philippa et al. 2007, 334). Because this was the same in Old English and Old Frisian, the ‘meent’ and the ‘menigte’ even have the same root as the English words ‘mean’ and ‘common’ – through the Latin contraction of ‘cum’ (with) and ‘munus’ (office, tribute, gift) into ‘communis’.

Excerpted from Aetzel Griffioen:

“At first face, Ostrom’s understanding of the commons and the autonomous understanding of the common are at odds with each other: scarce resources in need of endogenous management versus abundant social relationships access to which needs to be increased. However, the commons constitute mainly a question of governance whereas the common constitute one of ontology. At a time in which it is clear that capitalism, once having trumped politics, is now being trumped by the planetary ecology, it is also clear that another kind of economy will have to be adopted. Such an ecological economy has to be an economy that is based on social justice and economic democracy. A better understanding of the commons and of the common is necessary. Their differences, their relations, and their aims need to be explored and enacted as widely as possible. It is my own aim to do this, but for the last part of this paper I restrict myself to their strictly theoretical application in Dutch. Because these concepts, used almost exclusively in English in Dutch academic circles, will remain academic if they don’t get translated into Dutch. Also, such a translation might provide new applications and specific pathways for a commonalist governmentality that opposes the market-led destruction of the planet. It provides a direct link between the common and the multitude, and it also joins up Foucault’s concept governmentality.

In a country where the word capitalism is still shunned – because this does not only hold for most academics – all this can be awakened by pushing the right linguistic buttons. Right now, the Dutch version of the commons, ‘meent’, is retained only as a name for certain places. In a country exemplary for its history of cooperation almost no one still knows what the word means, let alone the concept. An excavation of the ‘meent’ can function as a means of awakening ideas of ownership and use that are buried deep in our political history, but have been eclipsed by the market orientated approach that also started along the Rhine on the basis of this strong spirit of cooperation.

Etymologically the word ‘meent’ shares its root with ‘menigte’, which is the Dutch translation of the Latin ‘multitudo’ (Philippa et al. 2005, 179-81 and 2007, 323-24). They share a Middle Dutch adjective, ‘maneg’ meaning ‘many’ (Philippa et al. 2007, 334). Because this was the same in Old English and Old Frisian, the ‘meent’ and the ‘menigte’ even have the same root as the English words ‘mean’ and ‘common’ – through the Latin contraction of ‘cum’ (with) and ‘munus’ (office, tribute, gift) into ‘communis’.

The Middle Dutch ‘meente’ was in turn derived from the adjective ‘gemeen’ which actually has the same sense as the English ‘mean’ – joint, common, public, general, universal, shared by all, possessed jointly, and low-quality, inferior, poor. The prefix ‘ge-’ in this case goes back along the lines of ‘same’ and ‘together’. The affix ‘-te’ in both ‘meent’ and the only word that derives from it that is still in use, ‘gemeente’ (municipality), functions to create nouns out of adjectives (Philippa et al. 2009, 353). In Middle Dutch then, the municipality wasn’t principally an administration, but a community with a certain amount of land. Public property wasn’t an issue. Ownership was a mix of private and common property.

To reinvigorate the autonomous tendency’s use of the common, Sjoerd van Tuinen and me have proposed the term ‘het gemene’ (Griffioen and Van Tuinen 2010). And in my opinion, the ontological and ecological state of abundance that the concept of the common points to always needs to be activated and kept going through any number of use systems.

Because this socio-ontological pole of the concept needs to be actively brought into play – because its political pole is not conceived of in terms of emergence but in terms of organisation that deals with the creation of more social relationships out of a situation of abundance – the common needs to be fed into different new commons that will produce more commons, not captured into markets that decrease it. ‘Het gemene’ needs to be played out in new ‘meentes’. And the object of new meentes should exactly be to use the ontological common to create new ‘meentes’. Therefore, the meaning of the concept ‘meent’ shouldn’t be confined to its old meaning of self-managed systems of scarcity (land, forest and water use), but should be used also for the self-management and self-creation of intellectual, affective and social domains. It points the way to a governmentality of biopolitics instead of biopower.
The common is buried deep in the Dutch language (meent), but when dug up it presents us with an immediate connection to the multitude (menigte), thus creating a discourse that is no longer academic but understandable for everybody. The only word from this root that is still in wide use is ‘gemeente’ or ‘municipality’. Thus in Dutch the concept of the common is directly linked with governance and governmentality, rather than simply with property or even ownership.

However we phrase it, the proposal stays the same. Commonality provides no shortcut to a better politics. It isn’t a guarantee for a happier life: the common can be mean. This is because on a deeper level we can discern another ambivalence in the common. We already know that it is both a socio-ontological and a political concept. But what needs to be emphasized is that as a political concept, it needs to be chosen. If that does not happen, the ontological state of the common is turned against itself. This is true all the more at a time when the State has resigned itself to the corporate management of the public good and corporations have claimed the right to take care of the private good. The political claim to the common as developed by and out of Italian autonomous Marxism seeks to capture capital and turn it over into social production, reversing the way capital gain is made over the social production of the multitude. It means trying to cut off as many possibilities to privately gain from common efforts and is a way of fighting the ‘immaterial civil war’ that stems from the ‘dark side of the multitude’. Looking for the common is fighting against economic and social deprivation. The radical calls for going ‘beyond the state’ that are also a post-autonomous heritage need not be avoided, but need to be valued for what they are: a rally against Big Government that first decided that there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families, and now calls upon Big Society to alleviate its debt. No such thing must come to pass. Neo-liberal government needs to be recaptured and turned into common government. “We are not commodities in the hands of bankers and politicians”.

* Source: From theArticle: No such thing as Big Society. The commons, commonplaces, commonalism. Paper presented at the Post/Autonomia Conference, Amsterdam, 19-21 May 2011. By Aetzel Griffioen.