This article addresses the extent to which an ecological critique that unquestioningly restates the assumed autonomy of the dominated fails to define a political alternative. Rather, it is necessary to study the social conditions for access to politicisation (and activist knowledge) in order to understand the genesis and durability of forms of self-organisation likely to produce commons. Perhaps the problem has less to do with locating experiments in the self-government of people and resources than examining the ways of engaging those who do not participate in it. From such a standpoint, a sociology of domination calls for paying greater attention to the dominated, who are doomed to remain in the ‘damaged world’ of a capitalism in ‘ruins’ and without whom it is difficult to conceive of a global political project aimed at breaking with the existing order.