Theoretical approaches to participation beyond the state and the market

The paper discusses the contributions of the young Karl Marx and Michel Foucault in order to draw the basic elements of public spaces far away from liberal individualism as well as abstract statism. This kind of social criticism tries to go beyond the categories of statehood and market. The young Marx advances the perspectives of men finally able to gain a subjectivity and a relation capacity escaped the meshes of alienation while Foucault’s attention is directed to the forms of manifestation of life in a biopolitical context that can weaken the state and the market. These two institutions fall into crisis as devices of social organization, and they are undergoing the competition of horizontal and cooperative networks of individuals that express more effectively common needs and desires, offering a fresh and engaging perspective of participation. The new forms of pariticipation are emerging more and more (i. e. crowdsourcing, open source software, fair trading, co-housing, etc.) because they express a cooperative and empathic society where the collective intelligence can auto-organize. The paper aims to show how the deep challenge to the public/private distinction has its roots in the radical theoretical reflection and to illustrate some empirical evidence relating to the progressive formation of a participated and auto-organized public spaces.