BY ANNEXING the inviolable commons capital unfurls its flag of
democracy, which is dictatorship over all its hostiles. It’s the commons
robbery by the lords of capital, and reiteration of capital’s
ever-expansionary accumulating totalitarian character: appropriate
everything — from alpha to omega, all labour and all the nature — and
turn these into private property and commodity.
Country and democracy, although not property, are commons, and at times,
country, all its resources, and democracy are virtually encroached by
capitals. At times, it’s individual or individuals, members of a class
or classes, at times, it’s their organisations and institutions, at
times, multinational organisations — corporations, banks, regime for
free market, programmes and projects — appropriate all and everything
people own. Enclosure of democratic space turns a stepping stone for
enclosure of other commons. Encroachment of the commons ultimately turns
political, and at times, questions of national and people’s sovereignty
and dignity emerge.
Usurpation of the commons — an act of dispossessing people — is being
done by capital with desperate vigour as subjugating the Earth, from
Africa to the Andes, from Albania to Australia, has almost been
completed by capital. In societies, the pie for plunder is either
comparatively smaller or competing sections of dominating capital find
encroachment of the commons one of the easier ways to accumulate. This
‘accumulation by dispossession’, David Harvey tells us in his A Brief
History of Neoliberalism, gains assets at very low or zero cost,
allowing immediate profitability.
In a society, state of the commons tells the power equation in society
as forces of production and social relations get reflected in the state
of the commons. Encroachment of the commons in a society signifies
orientation, type, level and state of domination in society. Relations
between the commons and people are distorted in favour of dominating
capital as dominating capital gets the mastery of the commons. Capital
with its allegiance only to its interests has a free hand in occupying
and ravaging the commons and its power is promulgated as it encroach the
commons.
Encroached and stolen commons are turned into private property while
private property is sanctified and protected, and thus encroachment
echoes Proudhon’s pronouncement: La propriété, c'est le vol!, Property,
it is robbery! (What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of
Right and of Government, 1840) Engels wrote while discussing Mark, an
old German institution: ‘[E]ven the royal lands, were named, without
distinction, almänningar, common land.’ (The Mark) And, ‘all the land
that had at any time belonged to the noble lord was nothing but land
stolen from the peasants.’ (ibid)
Neo-liberalism lends its muscles to the commons robbers and directly and
openly stands against the commons as physical invasion of the commons
by capital cheaply fills its crave. States provide greater independence
to the commons encroachers by snatching away commoners’ democratic
rights and by protecting the acts of encroachment.
In societies, usurpers of the commons are helped by a section of law
enforcers and a section of jurists, by a section of media and a section
of political leadership. In societies, legislation, administration and
jurisdiction turn servile to the commons robbers, and long hand of law
‘fails’ to catch the commons thieves. The entire act turns out as ‘[t]he
parliamentary form of robbery […] decrees of expropriation of the
people.’ (Marx, Capital)
It’s a process, and in the process, quoting Engels as he wrote about the
old-day German peasantry, ‘the lord always won and the peasant always
lost. The spiritual lords helped themselves in a more simple way. They
forged documents, by which the rights of the peasants were curtailed and
their duties increased.’ (The Mark)
Facts about the old-day poor peasantry in Germany, enclosures in
England, turning of community property into king’s property in India are
facts of the past. Now, it’s the entire citizenry in
societies, whose rights, spaces, access, opportunities are enclosed by
the commons robbers embellished with forgery, falsification, fake
litigation, misinterpretation and confiscation of laws, execution of
threat, coercion, rape, murder and politics, and the robbery is
legitimised. These robbers don’t have to face inquiries and
inquisitions. Rather, it turns out, as Marx wrote, ‘the law itself
becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land […]’
(op-cit)
Relation between the commons and private capital is antagonistic.
Conflicting interests — of people and of the commons-occupying capitals —
stand face to face. The contradiction is between encroachers and
commoners.
In societies, confiscation of the commons turns out as the shortest road
to wealth as the robbery is part of the whole system. Encroachment and
privatisation of the commons, David Bollier writes in Silent Theft: the
Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth, limit social investment and
environmental protection, encourage short-term profits, and ‘threatens
to sacrifice the environmental, political, cultural, and information
commons that communities rely on for their long-term health and
prosperity.’ Silent Theft cites laws related to copyrights of digital
files that empower private capital and its ruling machine — state — with
Orwellian power, and that encroach people’s rights over the commons.
Appropriating the commons, and turning these into private property of
appropriators, frauds, thieves, is part of the brutal class war, direct
and formal, indirect and informal, capital wages constantly. Virtually
absolute arbitrary power — legislative, administrative and judicial — of
the commons robbers takes away democratic space of people,
disenfranchises people, and commoners dispossessed of rights are sent to
the ghetto of sufferings, hardship, pauperization, destitution,
debt-servitude. Thus the issue of the commons turns political, turns
into an issue related to democracy. Through overwhelming and all
encompassing act of appropriation commoners are led to forget almost
absolutely the axiom that the commons belong to them.
By violation of the commons, a shared resource of people, capital
violates the principles of equity, equality and equal rights, freedoms
of assembly and association, freedom from discrimination and torture,
freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and denies the rights to
food, clothing, health, housing, education, work, rest, creative work,
information, culture, security and safety, participation, and to
democracy.
Robbery of the commons strengthens and intensifies de-democratisation
process as it mars citizens. Neo-liberal measures including selling
out/privatising the commons undermine the intrinsic value of the commons
and democracy. In societies, denying democratic rights facilitates
robbery of the commons.
Not only the marketable commons, but social and cultural spaces,
resources, institutions and traditions that help define people’s life
are being usurped in countries. Democratic commonwealth, public lands,
natural systems and resources including atmosphere, scientific and
academic research carried on in public institutions and paid by
taxpayers, the information and knowledge commons including indigenous,
local, folk, traditional and scientific knowledge and wisdom, the global
commons including climate, environment and gift economies are not safe
from enclosure. The list of the commons systematically vandalised,
trespassed, enclosed, confiscated, occupied, appropriated, privatised
and traded is long, yet incomplete: water resources including oceans,
seas, rivers, canals, water bodies, lakes, riverbanks, seashores, forest
resources, wildlife, agriculture and fisheries including seed-lines,
irrigation systems and agro-technology, fallows, heaths, moors, meadows,
grazing lands, hunting grounds, deserts, glaciers, mountains, oil,
minerals, non-renewable energy, non-traditional commons including urban
commons (sidewalks, playgrounds, parks, urban green space, urban
forestry, parking spaces), industrial areas, roads, bridges, air, wind,
sunlight, rain water, sky, outer space, ecosystems, biodiversity,
budgets, language, education, ideas, creativity, innovation, history,
sports, games, folklore, fairy tales, song, New Commons including
electro-magnetic spectrum, genetic data, and ‘frontier commons’, ‘the
natural world that have historically been too large, too small, or too
elusive for any market regime to capture and that have often been
regarded as parts of a common human heritage’ but now being planned to
market.
This reality leads Jonathan Rowe, fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute
and a contributing editor of Washington Monthly, to question: ‘Who owns
the genetic materials that pharmaceutical companies are taking and
patenting from native cultures? Who owns the atmosphere that polluters
use as a dump? Who owns the quiet that cell phones take from us on the
subways, or the civic spaces that get branded with corporate names?
(‘The Majesty of the Commons’, A review of David Bollier’s Silent Theft,
Washington Monthly, April, 2002)
To demolish commoners’ power to claim enclosed commons, commoners are
demobilised, deactivated, depoliticised; their organisations and
determining section of leadership of these organisations are purchased
and co-opted and the committed section of the leadership is made
isolated; the vacuum in the areas of commoners’ politics and resistance
thus created are stuffed with slogan mongering pseudo- , ultra- and
philistine-fighters, and all out efforts are made to perpetuate
ignorance, confusion and indiscipline.
Within a generation, the commons robbers turn elites, aristocrats and
nobles donating to charities and orphanages, patronising arts, culture
and education, mastering all acts of arts and culture including the fine
art of propagating lies, practicing robbery and deception, sending
records and memories of their ‘gallant’ acts of robbery to the chambers
of amnesia and silence, and their
property gained through such ‘gallantry’ gets the unmistakable regal
seal of ‘fruit of hard labour, innovation, courage, venture,
entrepreneurship, calculated risk taking, sacrificing significant
portion of life.’ By the grace of propaganda power and with the
legitimating seal it owns by political clout the avaricious character of
the commons robbers is ennobled with the ‘attributes’ of ‘benevolence
and social service, love for humanity and kindness to the downtrodden.’
Multilateral masters and lenders, corporations and private banks appear
guardians and preachers of ‘transparency, accountability and democracy’
while they keep their coins of corruption under their carpet. Hypocrisy
and immorality stands as the moral standard of robbing the commons.
Section of theoreticians is there to uphold the commons robbers’ cause.
So, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (Science, 162, 1968) by Garrett Hardin,
a biology professor and author of a biology textbook, turns into a
sacred script to the mainstream intellectuals bent on denying commoners’
rights on the commons although the professor wrongly refers to an
article on nuclear war to put his conclusion on false premise, stuff the
article with incomplete ‘facts’ and inconsistent arguments: ‘Every new
enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s
personal liberty.’ After expressing this ‘innovative’ analysis that
confuses the commons and personal liberty the professor recites Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall watch the watchers themselves? but
fails to watch the comedy his sham arguments present.
The professor once proposed, like the Nazis, ‘control of breeding’ of
‘genetically defective’ people (Biology: Its Principles and
Implications, 1966).
However, forces and institutions standing against commoners embrace the
professor’s article. Ian Angus observes: ‘Since publication of The
Tragedy of the Commons in Science it has been anthologised in at least
111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear
in any scientific journal. […] Like most sacred texts, The Tragedy of
the Commons is more often cited than read. As we will see, although its
title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of
science.’ (‘The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons’)
Citing ‘The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some
Conceptual and Operational Fallacies’, a World Bank Discussion Paper,
Ian writes: ‘For 40 years [the article] has been […] “the dominant
paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues”.
[The article] has been used time and again to justify stealing
indigenous peoples’ lands, privatizing health care and other social
services, giving corporations “tradable permits” to pollute the air and
water, and much more.’ (ibid)
‘The tragedy thesis’, Jonathan Rowe writes, ‘is rote to first-year
economics students. […] The theory has no relevance at all to commons
that are without boundaries or limits, such as language, knowledge, and
networks such as the Internet.’ (op-cit)
Quoting Iain Boal’s essay ‘Interview: Specters of Malthus: Scarcity,
Poverty, Apocalypse’, Ian tells us more bitter facts: ‘What’s shocking
is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a
brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental
destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed
experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and
United Nations agencies. Hardin’s fable was taken up by the gathering
forces of neo-liberal reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the
“scientific” foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure
of commons and privatization of public property.... The message is
clear: we must never treat the earth as a “common treasury”. We must be
ruthless and greedy or else we will perish.” (op-cit)
But commoners don’t always accept tyranny of the commons robbers. Engels
pointed out in The Mark: ‘Against these robberies by the landlords, the
peasants, from the end of the fifteenth century, frequently rose in
isolated insurrections…’ Naomi Klein in her talk, ‘Reclaiming the
commons’, delivered at the Centre for Social Theory and Comparative
History, UCLA in April 2001, finds: ‘[A] spirit of resistance is taking
hold around the world. People are reclaiming bits of nature and of
culture, and saying “this is going to be public space”.’ Jonathan tells
us: ‘Enclosure is complete when we no longer are aware of it. The
lingering memory of life outside the fences means there’s still hope of
tearing them down.’ (op-cit)
The twenty-first century finds there are public responses to the commons
robberies with rebellion and resistance. At moments, these carry and
express unimaginable power, force and velocity. Now, the number of these
resistances and rebellions is near to innumerable around the globe,
almost worldwide — from Ukraine to the US, from Tunisia to the UK, from
China to Canada, from Japan to India, from Belgium to Bahrain, a
globalisation of protest and resistance, a complex chess board, an
achievement in this phase of the planet’s history, unimaginable only a
few years back.
In countries, los indignados, the indignant, and the Occupiers hold high
the standard of commoners, also termed as 99% or We Are the 99%. They
are occupying factories to schools to auction houses to company share
holders meetings to city squares and parks. These are initiatives,
movements, protests, resistances; these are claims to the commons,
public spaces [a number of nouveau columnists in some poor societies
perceive, as they ‘wisely’ express, public space in only physical
terms], to democratic spaces.
There in the map of resistance appear names from the forests in India.
There in Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement, in Chile and other
countries, the student movements against privatization of education, in
the US, Take Back the Land, in the UK, The Land is Ours raise. There
artists with chalk draw protest line on footpath in Los Angeles.
To claim the commons, farmers and farm workers, human rights and
environment activists fight oil giants, hungry fast-food chains,
monstrous for-profit entities, radiation traders, waste and toxic
business magnates, pharmaceutical demons facilitating deaths by
corrupting drugs production and marketing, mischievous multilateral
banks and donors, and they all provide justification to resistance.
It will be a meaningless and infantile exercise to expect and search
immediate success of all these resistances and rebellions, confine
inquiry
into immediate achievement of these initiatives as dynamics of history
doesn’t engage in childish game. To learn, mechanical ‘mind’ should look
at any singular or a number of slave rebellions or some other single
rebellion. But all rebellions, singular or series, are part of history’s
forward movement, which at those moments of history were not perceived
by many. Instead, far reaching implications of today’s risings and
resistances, significant in terms of claiming the commons, should be
searched.
Other than country- , society- and city-wide activities for claiming the
commons there are activities that include, as Naomi Klein tells,
kicking ads out of classrooms, organising parties at busy intersections,
planting organic vegetables on over-irrigated golf courses, reversing
the privatisation of water supply, creating commons on the internet for
swapping music instead of buying it from multinational record companies,
liberating billboards, setting up independent media networks,
destroying hectares of genetically modified soy beans in Monsanto test
site, planting organic crops on land after occupying it and making
efforts to turn the farm into a model of sustainable agriculture. ‘In
short, activists aren’t waiting for the revolution, they are acting
right now, where they live, where they study, where they work, where
they farm.’ According to Jonathan, parents are rising up against the
commercial invasion of their kids’ classrooms. The New Urbanism is
advancing ways to reclaim the civic commons of street life and
traditional Main Streets. (op-cit)
Earthcide, declining democratic space, dispossession and debt confront
people across the world. ‘It’s time to stop granting private entities
free access to and use of public resources. […I]t presents a large
political challenge. […R]eckless privatization of public resources has
resulted in demonstrable harm to taxpayers, consumers, and the
environment.’ (David Bollier, ‘Why we need to protect our public
resources from private encroachment’, Boston Review, Summer issue, 2002)
The amount of money in coffers of the commons robbers is not a petty
one. Citing an estimate referred by Bollier Jonathan writes: ‘the
resources of nature – air, water, forests and the rest – are worth more
than the GDP of the entire world. That’s not even counting the services
of the many forms of social commons, from universities and libraries to
languages and Main Streets.’ (op-cit)
For people in countries safe food, water and air are difficult to find,
affordable healthcare and education are absent, decent shelter is
somewhere in imagination, hours for sleep, rest and creative activities
are being squeezed down, information highway is being obstructed by
capital.
One of the ways for a stable and peaceful society is to restore the
abused commons to its owners — commoners, people. James Harrington, the
author of Oceana, said the worst possible situation is one in which the
commoners have half a nation’s property, with crown and nobility holding
the rest — a circumstance fraught with instability and violence. A much
better situation (a stable republic) will exist once the commoners own
most property, he suggested.
Along with studying the political power of the commons robbers forging
coalition and organising movement of political parties, peasants,
labour, women, consumers, students, rights and environment activists at
local and national levels are the need. Alliance at international level
is also possible. Society-wide protracted, consistent campaign and
publicity is the immediate need. To resist confiscation of the commons
by capital, to protect and share all the commons, spreading word —
disseminate information among people — that expose encroachment and its
perpetrators is one of the primary steps.
Resistance and rebellion shouldn’t get confined only into street
marches, agitation, etc. Along with asserting rights to the commons and
getting engaged politically there should be initiatives of commoners,
not of donors, that organize consumers for safe food, safe water,
democratic public education, health care, fair price shop, cooperative,
media shunning big capital advertisement, proper waste management,
compost preparation, safeguarding water bodies, etc.
Encountering the commons robbers, national and international, is a
political fight. A cultural fight also. An informed, aware, organized
and politically active people, the owners of the commons, can
successfully claim the commons.
