Massimo De Angelis

Massimo De Angelis is a professor of Political Economy and Development and co-director of the Centre for Social Justice and Change. He has aLaurea in Political Sciences and a PhD in Economics. His numerous publications discuss research on values, crisis, the critique of economics, social movements and alternative socio-economic systems. His current research is on commons.

In August 1995, he participated to ¾ and later wrote about ¾ the first Encuentro for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, organized by the Zapatista’s communities inside the military surrounded Zapatistas autonomous zones.

In 2001 the social forum movement begun. He attended several editions, and helped organising the London edition of the European Social Forum in 2004. All these movements were bringing together a diversity of participants to discuss problems, organise in cities, bring together social movements across the world, and starting to develop a language, a pluralism and horizontality in decision making later picked up by new generations of activists in the 2010s (Occupy! In the US and the indignatos in Spain for example).

It is in the context of the alter-globalisation movement that Massimo set up The Commoner web journal.  The aim was to bring together an international network of scholars and activists to develop a commons discourse without the field of power relations of contemporary capitalism.

During field work in 2004, Massimo witnessed the mass movement against water and electricity privatization in South Africa turned into a struggle for and through commons, by means of thousands of grassroots reconnections. The relation between commons and social movements became clearer to Massimo few years later in 2010, when he travelled to Latin America and spent three months in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, which he reported in the editor’s blog in The Commoner.