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Title: Commoning and Scarcity Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: June 2012 Language: en Topics: the commons, commoning, capitalism, scarcity Source: Tides of Flame. Retrieved on 5 April 2013 from https://tidesofflame.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/tof20.pdf
The commons are a world apart from capitalism. They are a source of
livelihood that people share. Before the spread of capitalism, most of
the planet was commons. Cultures that treated the commons as a gift from
nature that had to be treated with respect, tended to have the most
bountiful commons and therefore the fewest problems of survival.
Cultures that treated the commons as property or an exploitable resource
generally exhausted them, and either brought about their own collapse or
had to resort to warfare and conquest to survive. Some of these cultures
would eventually form capitalism.
Capitalism theorizes and creates scarcity. Capitalism has thrived by
destroying or privatizing the commons wherever they arise. As long as
people have access to the commons, they can enjoy a measure of
self-sufficiency and cannot be forced to sell their labor to the wealthy
in order to survive. For common people, capitalism is a blackmail: work
or starve. The commons offer another option: self-sufficiency by
harvesting the gifts of nature. Because the basis of the commons is the
spontaneous gift, people who live in or of the commons often recreate
the gift economy; sharing, cooperating, and helping each other out in
order to attain a high standard of living. Also for this reason, the
commons are the enemy of capitalism.
Primitive accumulation—privatizing land or seizing wealth to fuel
investment, industry, and, in a word, capitalism—is not only an early
phase of capitalism, as theorized by Adam Smith or Karl Marx.
Privatization, legalized theft, slavery, and the imposition of labor
discipline are constant activities in every moment of capitalism, from
the 15^(th) to the 21^(st) centuries.
Likewise, the commons are not an ancient and outdated reality but an
ever present possibility that repeatedly erupts into our daily lives,
contradicting capitalism’s myth of scarcity. After arable land was
privatized and enclosed—in Europe from the 15^(th) to the 17^(th)
centuries, in India and other colonies in the 18^(th) and 19^(th)
centuries, and in parts of Africa today—forests, woodlands, marshes, and
pastures became the principal commons because capitalism was still
unable to exploit those areas effectively. In these commons, people
gathered fruits, nuts, medicinal plants, fuel and construction
materials, they grazed livestock, hunted, and fished. They may not have
been able to get their daily bread from the forests and pastures, but
they could meet most of their other needs.
Nowadays, in order to function, capitalism must base itself on an
exaggerated and imprecise mass production. This creates a huge amount of
garbage that capitalism is still unable to exploit effectively. This
garbage is the new commons: millions of people around the world scavenge
the garbage in order to gather food, clothing, construction materials,
or items that can be scrapped and sold for money. Many of the people who
live in this way develop cooperative cultures based on sharing and
mutual aid, relating through solidarity rather than through
commercialized relations.
Skills, culture, and traditional wisdom also constitute a commons. They
constitute tools that help people relate with their environment, gain
their livelihood, and improve their quality of life. In the past, these
tools were shared within society. For about a century, capitalism has
been increasingly trying to privatize knowledge and culture. Many people
are resisting the privatization of the intellectual and cultural
commons. Some people destroy fields of genetically modified crops owned
by companies seeking to patent life itself, some indigenous communities
keep out anthropologists, biologists and other researches trying to
catalogue and patent their traditional music, folk medicine, or heirloom
seeds, and some people share their music and art through “creative
commons” licenses rather than copyrights.
While the original pirates liberated goods that had been exploited in
the massive process of primitive accumulation known as colonialism
(freeing slaves, stealing gold and silver mined with slave labor,
seizing rum and sugar that came from the plantations), one of the major
forms of modern piracy is the liberation of so-called intellectual
property (such as movies and music) using new tools on the internet.
The scarcity on which capitalism is based never arises naturally.
Sometimes it is the result of the bad choices of a society, destroying
its soil, overfishing or overhunting, not balancing its population.
Frequently scarcity is directly and intentionally imposed by the State.
During the Irish potato famine, Ireland was forced to produce food for
export by the British military occupation. The Great Famine in Ukraine
was caused by the Soviet government, forcibly changing the traditional
mode of agriculture. The US government killed off the seemingly endless
herds of bison so that the Lakota and Cheyenne of the Great Plains (who
had defeated the US in an important war) would lose their food source.
Governments around the world have stopped at nothing, killing millions
of people, in order to make self-sufficiency impossible. If we can take
care of ourselves, we don’t need government, and we don’t need to work
for the rich people that government exists to protect.
A related function of the State is to destroy the commons wherever they
arise. The first modern legal codes in Europe served to criminalize the
traditional use of the commons. A major application of the death penalty
in 18^(th) century England was to punish hunting, foraging, and other
traditional uses of the forests that previously had been legal, and were
even protected in Magna Carta. Today, the World Bank and IMF force
debtor countries to change their laws and criminalize traditional uses
of the commons, allowing them to be privatized by transnational
corporations. In 1994, the NAFTA agreement with the US and Canada forced
Mexico to change its Constitution and remove the protection of communal
land tenure. Another major point of collaboration between world
governments involves cracking down on piracy or sharing of the creative
commons, so-called intellectual property. More generally, the US and
other leading governments want to tame the internet entirely so it is no
longer a space of sharing and anonymity—a commons—but rather a
commercialized space easily controled by the police and exploited by
corporations. This is similar to how the forests and marshlands were
cleared and drained for economic reasons and for military reasons
simultaneously. Due to their opacity and defensive advantages, these
spaces were off limits to commercial development and they were also
where rebels, bandits, and revolutionaries often hid out.
Generally, the State claims to be protecting us when they destroy the
commons or clear wilderness, which are often the only spaces where we
can still be free. In 2008, a shipwreck off the coast of England left
thousands of tons of wooden beams washed up on shore. The wood could no
longer be sold to major buyers, because it had seawater stains, but it
was still perfectly usable for fuel or building. The shipwreck had
brought a new commons into being, and quickly people came to collect
wood. The government jumped into action and prohibited the scavenging of
wood, in the name of a national emergency. Their reasoning? People could
get splinters, therefore collecting the wood was dangerous.
As for the widespread commons of garbage, several governments around the
world are working to criminalize and suppress it. In the US, several
cities have arrested people for sharing free dumpstered food. In Spain,
where bakers traditionally give away unsold loaves at the end of the
day, chain bakeries have started to count all their loaves of bread,
returning and destroying (or selling to livestock and other industries)
every loaf that hasn’t been paid for. In many cities in the Netherlands,
new trash containers store the garbage underground, making it impossible
to access. Once again, they prefer that people starve instead of being
able to get anything for free.
With urban gardens and the planting of fruit and nut trees, many cities
could come close to food self-sufficiency. The anarchist scientist
Kropotkin wrote about this emerging possibility a century ago, using
Paris as his model, but since then governments and urban planners have
made sure to prevent this new commons. Sometimes, urban gardens are
evicted and bulldozed, as in Los Angeles. In general, cities avoid
planting edible plants in the urban green spaces. Athens or Barcelona,
for example, are graced with thousands of orange trees, but the variety
the city governments choose to plant only produce an inedible kind of
orange.
One notable exception to this rule can be found in Seattle. During
several months of the summer, one can harvest a variety of edible,
delicious fruits and berries from trees and bushes growing in the city.
However, most people have lost the traditional skills and knowledge to
carry out this simple task, or to even realize that food comes from the
earth and not from the supermarket. People are so alienated that most of
the fruits and berries go to waste.
This sad fact demonstrates the connection between knowledge and
material. Intellectual or cultural commons and commons of land or
resources are inseparably related. If the State can seize the land, the
know-how to live from it eventually disappears. If the State can
alienate people from their traditional knowledge, they will not know how
to use common land or resources even if they are right next door.
Another interesting fact about cities is that food grown in them will be
contaminated by automobile pollution. For this reason it could be easy
to argue that growing food in cities is not the best idea anyway. But
there is no natural connection between cities and cars. In fact, cities
function far more efficiently without car traffic, using instead public
transportation and bicycles.
But a focus on efficiency ignores the historically important fact that
the State prefers to subsidize and implement those technologies that
foster dependency, erode the commons, and create new opportunities for
professionalized management (particularly within a paradigm of security
or protection). Trains create new common spaces and can be
self-organized by their operators. Car traffic, on the contrary, is so
atomized it requires state intervention in order to be directed and
organized. It creates new dangers the State must protect its citizens
against, with an absurdly high number of traffic fatalities even in
societies where the governments effectively manage car traffic. Last but
not least, it creates the possibility—for the first time in history—of a
crowd of thousands of people who are side by side, when stuck in
traffic, yet totally isolated from one another and without immanent
possibilies of collective action.
In sum, the commons hold a central place of importance in the struggle
against capitalism. The commons can be constituted by land, wilderness,
skills and experiences, scavenged goods, or public spaces. They do not
only exist in peripheral societies that can still claim to be
traditional; the commons are an ever present possibility in every fold
of human existence, from the most developed countries to the least.
The commons are both a structure and a practice. Commoning is one of the
most popular and subversive forms of action against capitalism. It is
not the provenance of professional revolutionaries but an activity
undertaken instinctively by people around the world.
Because commoning is instinctual, communism is a fraud. The attempt to
abstract the commons or to mediate the practice of commoning through an
ideology rends it from the unique conditions of daily life that give it
breath and substance. The commons will be reconstituted in a different
form in every different part of the world, at the hands of those people
who are closest to the available matter and memory that can be
transformed into the basis for collective survival. Commoning is the
task of those who will become part of each new commons.
Capitalism created classes, and these classes will not destroy
capitalism. Building on the material of the feudal castes, those who
could wield a military and economic advantage constituted themselves as
the owning class, and forcibly constituted the proletariat as those who
only owned their labor power and their ability to reproduce. The same
property relationship that enclosed the commons forced those who could
not resist these enclosures to become the working class. Class society
and capital will be abolished by those who win the force to be able to
see themselves in relation to the commons and not in relation to
property.
The enemy who constantly scatters this force and tramples the commons
wherever they pop up is the State. Our struggle must aim for the
destruction of the State, to open up the new spaces where the commons
can flourish. Commoning itself is not the property of any party or
theory, but the shared potential that makes any communication possible.
Anarchy is a prerequisite for the commons. The stronger the State, the
narrower the margin on which new commons may arise. And the more
bountiful our commons, the stronger and more sustained our attacks
against the State. Whether the State is destroyed by anarchists is
unimportant, except for those anarchists who share with the communists a
need to author the plan that will be foisted on the new world.
What is important is that our dreams again take root in the commons,
that our theories take aim on the State, and that our struggles create
new commons and revitalize the old ones.