By Patrick Huff
Editorial Note: We are very pleased and excited to have the opportunity to publish this interview with Massimo De Angelis conducted by Patrick Huff. Because the full in-depth interview runs a considerable length, we have decided to publish it in three parts in the print and online in the journal’s forthcoming issues. It must be emphasized that the excerpts below are meant only as suggestive previews of the complete discussion to come.
Introduction: Massimo De Angelis is a leading thinker of commons and commoning. He is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy and Social Change at the University of East London. He founded The Commoner: a web journal of other values. His pioneering work connecting strands of commons research, autonomous Marxism, and cybernetic theory has opened new intellectual pathways for emancipatory theory and practice. In this interview we discuss his recent book, The Pyramid and the Common: Social Reproduction, Value Praxis, and Transformation (2026), where it fits in his oeuvre, the influence of Romano Alquati and Italy’s workerist struggles, how he ended up in Utah studying Marxist political economy, his critical solidarity with the Kurdish Freedom Movement, cybernetics, and much more. At the heart of Massimo’s intellectual journey is the basic question of how do we change the world?
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An Open Exploration of Social Possibilities
Patrick Huff: I always sense a rejection of dogmatism or doctrine in your work. That’s one of the things I find really refreshing. It seems you’re always asking questions and searching for opening to find an answer, which takes you to interesting places like cybernetics and complexity theory. Is that something that you very consciously do or is that just a disposition you have?
Massimo De Angelis: I suppose it began as a disposition and gradually became more conscious. I certainly had a more doctrinaire phase when I was younger. But when I started studying economics, I kept encountering a world that mattered enormously and yet didn’t seem to fit within the categories of mainstream or even radical economics. That made me question what those categories allowed us to see—and what they left out.
Over time, this became a more deliberate concern. When I develop an argument, I want to give it a clear structure, but I also want that structure to remain open to encounters with other ideas and experiences, including things that might force me to revise it. That’s partly what draws me to complexity theory: the recognition that social life contains a variety of relations and processes that no single author or framework can fully encompass.
There is, though, a central thread that I hold on to: class struggle, understood also as a struggle over measures—over what counts, what matters, and whose criteria organise our activity—as the demands of reproducing our lives come into conflict with those of reproducing capital.
Of course, you still have to make claims and give reasons for them. Keeping a framework open doesn’t mean making it so vague that anything fits. It means being precise about what you’re claiming while recognising that your categories may need to change as you encounter something they don’t adequately explain. I want a framework that helps us ask better questions and make connections, and that remains porous enough to learn from what comes through those openings.
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The Kurdish Freedom Movement
Patrick Huff: Well, maybe we can switch gears a bit, again. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the Kurdish Freedom Movement since its project of Democratic Nation and Democratic Confederalism13 seems to share many points of affinity with the commoning movements in Europe and North America?
Massimo De Angelis: The Kurdish Freedom Movement, and especially the experience of democratic confederalism in North and East Syria, has opened one of the most important political experiments of our time. Under conditions of war, siege, displacement, and continual existential threat, Kurdish, Arab, Syriac-Assyrian, Armenian and other communities have attempted to construct forms of democratic self-government rooted in communes, councils, women’s autonomy, and multi-ethnic coexistence. Their struggle deserves not only solidarity, but careful listening.
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Patrick Huff: Yes, important considerations. What do you believe are some significant differences between Rojava and North American and European contexts?
Massimo De Angelis: The problem confronting Western capitalist societies is different. Here the issue is not primarily how to administer already-existing autonomy, but how to generate the social force capable of producing it in the first place.
In advanced capitalist societies, social cooperation is deeply fragmented and already integrated within highly complex systems of capitalist command: wage dependence, debt, platform governance, logistics, managerial hierarchies, individualized precarity, financialization, algorithmic mediation, and the decomposition of collective life. The terrain of struggle is therefore not simply the municipality or the commune, but the entire field of social reproduction: housing, care, education, health, ecological regeneration, food systems, workplace struggles, migrant infrastructures, digital networks, public spaces, and affective life itself.
For this reason, the problem of Organisation, as I formulate it, concerns the emergence of an autopoietic infrastructure of commoning capable of politically recomposing fragmented social cooperation.
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Exploring the Pyramid and the Common
Patrick Huff: Perhaps it is time to return to The Pyramid and the Common and dig a little deeper into its contents and its place in your oeuvre. If I were to describe, in one word, the central concern of your previous book, The Beginning of History, the word would be ‘value.’ Likewise, I’d suggest ‘autopoiesis’ in the case of Omnia Sunt Communia. What is the significance of these concepts for The Pyramid and the Common?
Massimo De Angelis: Well, both are central to The Pyramid and the Common, and what interests me is how they connect. Autopoiesis concerns how a living system continually recreates itself through its activity. When I bring that idea into the study of social cooperation, the question becomes: how do we reproduce the relations and conditions that allow our activities to continue? And value enters because we have to ask what those activities sustain, what matters to the people involved, and which priorities organise their cooperation.
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So, autopoiesis is the process of organizing social cooperation and reproducing the conditions which make production possible, whatever the forms of production are. So, it’s fundamental. And by looking at the notion of autopoiesis, we can understand why in the face of all major crises of social reproduction that we’re seeing today capital just pushes ahead. And whatever, you know, climate disaster, who cares. Unless, of course, there are powerful struggles and powerful movements and powerful ways to organize from the bottom to set limits to it, and possibly shift into a different direction.
And this is where autopoiesis connects with what I call systemic force. It helps us ask how many different activities reinforce one another, continually renewing the relations that give a system its persistence. Capitalism has reproduced itself for centuries through enormous changes and repeated crises. The pyramid is an attempt to understand how its different processes work together to produce that resilience, while also examining the struggles and forms of commoning that could develop a systemic force of their own.
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