Danzantes del Alba: Dance, Textile, and the Communitarian Weave

In this stark statement, Marx announces game over for the commons. After four hundred years of land enclosures and privatization, the European working class had lost not only physical access to common lands, but also the “very memory” of the commons as a basic right and co-existential truth. He thus draws a distinction between the commons as a physical site and the sensibility associated with its collective use—call it commons- sense. To lose the physical commons is to incite struggle—as occurred across centuries of peasant revolt in Europe. But to lose commons- sense, Marx implies, is to eclipse from the imagination the very possibility of a collective way of organizing our lives.