Commons versus public goods: social movements and rural development

The paper discusses some of the theoretical issues surrounding the relationship between new social movements and the bottom-up process of rural development, as it has been theorized in the last decades. It offers a critical examination of the debate on what have been called “new” social movements, drawing on both the theory developed by Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, and the analytical framework on Multitude developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The aim of the paper will be to demonstrate that these collective practices redefine forms and contents of social interactions, constituting a time/space of a different social existence: a laboratory of innovation able of giving rise to commons, in terms of both social relations and material goods. The attempt of the paper will be to demonstrate that these new forms of antagonistic collective actions constitute in itself new politics of liberation