“I gave the following talk at “The Tragedy of the Market: from Crisis to Commons,” in January of 2012. Billed as “a community gathering,” it certainly was that, but it also took on a very “Occupied” focus as many in the audience had either participated in, or were vary curious about, the Occupy movement, and what “the commons” could tell us about it.

In this talk I try to re-purpose Marx’s famous “equation” about the circulation of commodities—C-M-C
(commodity-money-commodity) by replacing “commodity” with “commons,” so that our “social metabolism”
begins and ends in the commons—something that I think reflects “reality,” and which we could do with
paying attention to as we pursue our critique of crisis-ridden capitalism and the unfolding of Occupy’s “idea whose time has come at last.””