Enclosure, like capital, is a term that is physically precise, even technical (hedge, fence, wall), and expressive of concepts of unfreedom (incarceration, imprisonment, immurement). In our time it has been an important interpretative idea for understanding neoliberalism, the historical suppression of women as in Silvia Federici, the carceral archipelago as in Michel Foucault’s great confinement, or capitalist amassment as in David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession. In our time it has also been an important empirical fact. On the one hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the current moment; on the other hand, the vain security fence between Mexico and the United States, and the hideous gigantism of the Israeli wall immuring Palestine, also define the current moment.
Radical History Review (Issue 108, Fall 2010) has a new essay by historian Peter Linebaugh, available here, of which the above is the first paragraph. Apart from new historical details and a devastating critique of Garreth Hardin’s Tragegy of the Commons essay, it also explains the revival of the commons today:
(see also the comments by David Bollier)
Peter Linebaugh:
“The “English enclosure movement” has belonged to that series of concrete universals — like the slave trade, the witch burnings, the Irish famine, or the genocide of Native Americans — t hat has defined the crime of modernism, limited in time and place but also immanent with the possibility of recurrence. Raj Patel writes, “Over the past thirty years the accelerating pace of enclosures, and the increasing scale of the theft, have brought our planet to the edge of destruction.” Yet enclosure’s antonym — the commons — also carries with it a promising but unspecified sense of an alternative. Philosophically, too, the concept has stood close to the center of our times, as in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent book Commonwealth. Enclosure indicates private property and capital: it seems to promise both individual ownership and social productivity, but in fact the concept of enclosure is inseparable from terror and the destruction of independence and community.
…
The enclosure of the commons has reappeared in the twenty-first century owing to four developments at the end of the twentieth century. First was the uprising in Chiapas led in 1994 by the Zapatistas in opposition to the repeal of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution that provided for ejido, or common lands, attached to each village. The renewed discourse of the commons formed part of the struggle of indigenous people against the privatization of land. A process of “new enclosures,” however, took place in Africa and Indonesia.6 If the cowboy novelist implied a rela- tion between the fence and money, Pramoedya Toer draws attention to the relation between crime and the fence, or the criminal and the indigenous, using the example of Buru Island under the Suharto regime in Indonesia.
A second development of the late twentieth century bringing about a discussion of enclosure and the commons was the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a knowledge commons. The privatization of intellectual property was challenged at the “battle of Seattle” in 1999.
A third process was the pollution of the planet’s waters and the poisoning of its atmosphere.
Finally, a fourth factor in this renewed discourse was the collapse of the USSR and of the communist countries of eastern Europe, which made it easier to discuss the commons without automatically being suspected of ideological intercourse with the national enemy.”