Republished from a 3-party treatment of a George Caffentzis essay on March 4, 2009:
George Caffentzis: A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons.
Earlier, we reviewed his description of the revival of the Commons, and how it is rooted in a long-standing struggle to destroy forms of common property. Today, the author asks: is the idea and defense of the Commons necessarily antagonistic to the current form of Globalization.
His answer is negative: against the onslaugths of neoliberalism, which would require a generalized coercion and a surveillance state in order to protect its irrealistic concept of intellectual property, a movement has arisen which wants to make the commons compatible with capitalism.
George Caffentzis:
“The antiglobalization movement’s critique of neoliberal globalization (with its apotheosis and totalization of the commodity form and private property) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (with its generalization of state property), has set the historical stage for a political relaunching of the commons and common property. But is a politics which calls for the extension of common property to many areas of social life that have been either state or private property inevitably anticapitalist?
Our answer is negative, i.e., capitalist development is compatible with certain kinds of commons and so there is a middle ground between the antiglobalization politics of the commons and the neoliberal globalizers’ violent abhorrence of the commons. As anticapitalists were rediscovering the commons in the 1990s, there was an intellectual and political backlash to the neoliberal hegemony in academe and international agencies. This reaction took a number of forms.
The Communal Aspects of Capitalism
One form took shape in opposition to the individualistic “survival of the fittest” self-image of capitalists projected by neoliberalism (that lead to the bubble of the late 1990s and the scams and scandals of the new century). Many theorists pointed to the importance of the communal aspects of capitalism expressed in concepts like “embeddedness” or “social capital” [(Granovetter and Swedberg 1992) (Cohen and Prusak 2001)]. This new interest in the communalism of capitalism and its dependence on “trust” within the capitalist class and the firm was not only expressed in the proliferation of pacifying phrases like “the business community” or “the investment community” and in cozy real estate and architecture jargon like the mall or housing development “commons” (Fukuyama 1995). There was also a corresponding interest in re-imposing self-managing “community rules” on capitalists in the wake of the Enron-like scandals. Ironically, the Marxist tradition has also analyzed many communal aspects of capitalists, especially what Marx called the “freemasonry of capital,” i.e., the distribution of the “common pool” of surplus value created throughout the capitalist system to separate firms on the basis of the capital invested in them. As Marx expressed it: “the individual capitalist as well as the capitalists as a whole in each particular sphere of production are participants in the exploitation of the total working class by the total capital, and in the degree of that exploitation, not only out of general class sympathy, but also for direct economic reasons, because assuming all other conditions, among them the value of the advanced constant capital to be given, the average rate of profit depends on the intensity of exploitation of the total labor by the total capital” (Marx 1909: 232) For all the trumpeted virtues of capitalist individualism, the most important measure of capital’s effectiveness, the average rate of profit, is a collective creation. In fact, the very competitive process is, according to Marx, the primary way this value is distributed (for more details see the Appendix).
The Example of the World Bank
More important to our argument, however, is that, in response to the movements of indigenous people and peasant farmers throughout the planet to the neoliberalism-inspired agricultural “reforms” of the 1980s and early 1990s mentioned above, there was a cautious and qualified acceptance of the commons on the highest levels of international planning. For one of the first targets of the World Bank’s SAPs in the early 1980s was the reform of agriculture, especially in Africa, largely guided by the neoliberal Berg Report that called for a systematic attack on both communal farming and government marketing boards for agricultural commodities. The World Bank took the occasion of the debt crisis to call for governments in Africa to begin to privatize communal land and to eliminate price controls and subsidies in food marketing and production. Berg argued that the serious decline in the productivity of African agriculture could be turned around only if “the prices are right” (both for land and crops) (Caffentzis 1995). The World Bank added the corollary that Africans should increase the percentage of their crops destined for export (presumably the Africans’ comparative advantage).
Certainly the neoliberal strategy of creating land markets and thus privatizing land has been and remains the primary impulse of the World Bank’s agricultural sector lending. But after a long period when discussion of land tenure fell off the policy map, the World Bank made a doctrinal reversal in 1992 (supposedly after sponsoring a study by its staff of customary tenure in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also, undoubtedly, after accessing the impact of the agrarian revolts its policies were generating) (Colchester 1993: 305). The World Bank in its 1992 World Development Report concluded in an extremely qualified way that common property in land, as far as Sub-Saharan Africa is concerned, is acceptable under certain circumstances:
Landownership in Sub-Saharan Africa traditionally resides with the community, but farmers are assigned rights to use specific parcels. These rights give sufficient security for growing crops and, when bequeathed to children, foster a long-term interest in land management. Farmers may have limited rights to transfer land they use to others without permission from family or village elders, and other people may have supplementary use rights over the same land–to graze the land during the dry season or to collect fruit or wood. Such restrictions, however, do not appear as yet to have had a significant effect on investment in land improvements or on land productivity. Moreover, as population growth and commercialization make land scarce and increasingly valuable, land is increasing privatized. The indigenous systems of communal tenure appear flexible enough to evolve with the increasing scarcity of land and the commensurate need for greater security of land rights. At the same time, the retention of some community control over landownership helps to prevent the emergence of landlessness (World Bank 1992: 144).
In the same report, the World Bank recommended that “a compelling reason for supporting community resource management is its importance for the poor” (World Bank 1992: 142) and that “Governments need to recognize that smaller organizational units, such as villages or pastoral associations, are better equipped to manage their own resources than are large authorities and may be a more effective basis for rural development and rational resource management than institutions imposed from the outside” (World Bank 1992: 143).
This is not the first time that the World Bank invested in “community action programs.” Here in Mexico the WB financed and supervised a series of programs and projects between 1975 and 1988 called Integrated Programs for Rural Development (PIDERs). PIDER was the WB’s version of Maoistic “participatory democracy.” Its methodology aimed at “getting the beneficiaries to participate in the actual planning of state investments for local projects.” This required an extensive local knowledge of the people and therefore all PIDER projects began with a field team going to a village to “(a) announce the purpose of the program preparation to the village population at large; (b) talk with small groups or individuals and to the find best informants; (c) identify natural leaders in the different community strata; (d) to ask the authorities for census data…” (Cernea 1992: 25) In other words, PIDER was a spying operation exchanging “development funds” for micropolitical information and, not accidentally, it took off at the time of intense popular agrarian organization while it was centered in states like Guerrero and Oaxaca where armed campesino groups had taken to the field. (Bartra 1986: 130-135) The PIDER “fingering” teams were going into the rural areas slightly ahead of the death squads that the PRI had dispatched to decapitate the movement. Thus it was one of the WB’s continuing efforts aimed at disintegrating anti-capitalist energies, “capturing the grassroots” and cynically turning them into forces of accumulation.
This interest in using micro-political initiatives to thwart and extirpate revolutionary movements on the grassroots level is clearly an aspect of the World Bank’s support for “community resource management” into the 21st century (while still firmly holding on to an overall neoliberal model on the macro-level).
For example, in a planning document entitled “Sourcebook on Community Driven Development in the Africa Region: Community Action Programs,” the team of authors, including Hans Binswanger, one the World Bank’s main students of the commons, write:
– The new approach of Community Action Programs…aims to empower not only local governments but civil society groups too. These could be geographical entities (urban neighborhoods), or groups with common interests (water users associations, parent-teacher association, fisherfolk, herders, members of a microcredit society, women’s groups, or youth groups (Binswanger et al. 2000).
In other words, common property management groups for resources like water, fisheries and pasture land have by 2000 been inducted by the World Bank into the world of “civil society” groups that it can capture.
Thus at the moment when the NAFTA and WTO agreements were being finalized in the mid-1990s, with their neoliberal prejudices in favor of private alienable property in land, the “there is no alternative” World Bank was carefully exploring “Plan B,” i.e., a political position to fall back on when the antagonistic response to the privatization of land becomes too powerful and aggressive. A key element in this alternative is the acceptance of the land or forest commons at least as a stop-gap, transitional institution when the revolts of the landless or the devastation of the forests become destabilizing to the general exploitation of a territory and population. Of course, the World Bank was not alone in its strategic reassessment of the commons. Both the Food and Agriculture Organization and many national governments also were also forced to recognize common property rights over land in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Colchester and Lohmann 1993).”
The need for an alternative ‘capitalism-friendly’ theory of the Commons
“A new theory had to be developed that articulated arguments concerning the “appropriateness” of common property regimes in certain circumstances and integrated knowledge of what neoliberal economists had defined out of existence. Adherents of such a theory would thus be perfect advisors to a government in a political and/or military stalemate with an indigenous apposition demanding common lands or forests (e.g., in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, or Nigeria). For they would not simply repeat their economistic version of the imperialist cry–“exterminate the brutes”-but would provide other “possible worlds” and a full “menu” of options that would make a negotiation feasible.
Though the revolt of indigenous people and peasants around the world gave urgency to the development an alternative theory that would incorporate the commons, there were also other forces that were also pushing to the save result.
The problematics posed by the global commons are high on capital’s agenda, since we are now at a moment when billions of people either suspect or know that the capitalist system is on the verge (if not already over the edge) of precipitating multiple apocalypses-from human species-annihilating climate change, to the cutting down of the remaining tropical forests, to the total exhaustion of ocean fisheries, to the generation of human nature-destroying genetic pollution. This tampering with the global commons is, perhaps, the mortal danger for capital in the 21st century, since these fears profoundly undermine capitalism’s claim to be the “steward” of the world’s resources. The neoliberal’s response to these problematics – let the markets allocate access to the global commons of the atmosphere, the forests, the fisheries, and the genome – is now a “wisdom” so tarnished and dubious that even many of the most ‘hard-nosed” capitalists know an alternative approach, offering more serious options, is or will be necessary. Such an alternative theory that could conceptualize multiple property regimes that offers “a way out” since it can conceive of a capitalism that would be self-regulating, but that still would be in charge of the fate of the planet and the human race (Sachs 1993).”
Solving the Crisis of Value inherent in classic IP
“There was also an assault on the ideological pretensions of the neoliberal intellectual property order from both sides of “development.” First, the ‘computer revolution” and the internet had generated a huge group of enthusiasts who systematically rejected the notion that the product of individual intellectual effort ending on the net should be considered private property. This maxim has generated a revival of the notion of an intellectual commons, or in Larry Lessig’s term, a “creative commons” (and the complementary notion, due to Boyle, of “a second enclosure movement”) [(Boyle 2003) (Lessig 2001)].
As Lessig writes:
– It is a commonplace to think about the Internet as a kind of commons. It is less commonplace to actually have an idea what a commons is. By a commons I mean a resource that is free. Not necessarily zero cost, but if there is a cost, it is neutrally imposed, or equally imposed cost….Open source, or free software is a commons: the source code of Linux, for example, lies available for anyone to take, to use, to improve, to advance. No permission is necessary; no authorization is required (Lessig 2002: 1783, 1788).
From this perspective then, the huge income Microsoft and other software companies have been accruing over the last two decades is as illegitimate as the gold the conquistadors looted from the palaces of the Aztecs and Incas. Could a theory be developed that would both give a legitimacy to the common and still create a flow of profits?
Second, indigenous peoples and others in the Third World claimed that their knowledge of plants, medicines, and agricultural techniques was being stolen from them by “gene hunters,” “ethno-botanists,” and “global musicians” who then had the temerity to demand that the victims of theft should pay them to use the products they stole! (Caffentzis 2000). Where was the place for indigenous and local knowledge which was collectively produced in a world that recognized only private property claims?
As Vandana Shiva writes:
Patents in the context of agriculture and food productio involve ownership over life forms and life processes. Monopoly ownership of life creates an unprecedented crisis for agricultural and food security, by transforming biological resources from commons into commodities. It also generates a crisis of values and ends which guide social organistion, techological change and development priorities (Shiva 1993: 121)
This crisis of values is now engulfing the whole neoliberal intellectual property project. For throughout the last decade it become clear that a purely neoliberal approach to “intellectual property rights” (which largely comes down to private property rights) will lead to a planetary police state where surveillance and exclusion costs will be untenable economically, politically and ideologically. This crisis calls for a theory that can offer property rights “solutions” to the field of technological, artistic and software production that just might preserve profitability and put the bulk of surveillance and exclusion costs on the creators and consumers of these commodities and not on the corporations marketing them.”