In the next few days we will present an important essay by George Caffentzis which though written 2004 is still important and very informative.
It’s a review of the antagonistic usages of the concept of the Commons and why it matters for political struggle.
The author cites Brecht, who said: “it might be necessary to mix wine with water, but you should know what is the wine and what is the water! “, and distinguish a ‘reformist’ interpretation of the Commons, compatible with the current political economy, and a radical one, which isn’t. In the process, he reviews the history of the concept, the struggle for its survival and resurgence, and the scholarly and institutional responses to it.
Today, we present a first historical part.
The essay is
A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons. By George Caffentzis
Summary
“Like any concept in a class society, it can have many and often antagonistic uses. Our paper will show that there is a use of the concept of the commons that can be functional to capitalist accumulation and it offers an explanation as to why this capitalist use developed, especially since the early 1990s. The conclusion of this paper will assess the political problem that this capitalist use of “the commons” (both strategically and ideologically) poses for the anticapitalist movement.
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? ”
The other conference: the International Association for the Study of Common Property
“The immediate problem of this paper is simple. On the same day that this paper is to be presented at our gathering in San Miguel de Allende on “AlterGlobalisation, another conference will begin in Oaxaca. That conference is being organized by the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) and co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and UNAM. The conference title is “The Commons in an age of Global Transition: Challenges, Risks and Opportunities” and it will address the following issues:
…how communities and the resources they manage continue to adapt to, and are being changed by, the globalisation process. This includes the creation of new institutional and organizational relations that are strengthening the links between local and global institutions and networks. For developing countries, the often asymmetric power dimensions of these relations are of particular significance (IASCP 2004)
The language of this passage is a bureaucratically opaque (e.g., what global institutions are being referred to?) So to further clarify their intent, the organizers elaborated ten subthemes should be of particular relevance to the conference participants:
-Indigenous Peoples and Common Resources -Environmental Services and Common Resources -Governance, Conflict and Institutional Reform -Conservation Policy and Common Management -Contemporary Analytical Tools and Theoretical Questions -The Impacts of Geographical Information Technologies and Environmental Information on the Commons -Markets and Common Resources -The New Global Commons -Globalization, Culture, Identity and the Commons -Demographic Change and Commons Management
Hundreds of papers will be presented by scholars, NGO activists and others on these themes which, aside from a somewhat stilted international agency vocabulary (cf. the telltale trace of “governance” and “environmental services”), would undoubtedly be of interest to the participants of our conference. When we perused the names of the announced participants we found people with a wide range of political histories, including a number who we would consider comrades. Indeed, there might be people in this gathering who will even be presenting papers or panels at the IASCP conference!
Given that our “AlterGlobalisation” conference is devoted to exploring how concepts like the commons, the cooperative and public goods are useful in defining a non-capitalist society, the problems this paper addresses is: What is the political relationship between this conference here in San Miguel de Allende and the one in Oaxaca? Is it conflictual? Is it cooperative? Is it ambivalent? Or, perhaps, more accurately, what should the relationship be, given the fact that at the time of this writing neither conference has taken place. There is also a historical question that we wish (indeed, need) to address: Why should there be two conferences with such similar themes taking place in Mexico in August 2004?”
Neoliberal Globalization as a struggle against surviving Commons
” At first, much of this “other” struggle was dismissed as a “dead ender” defense of state property; but as the neoliberal period unfolded, it became clear that the aim of SAPs (designed by the planners of the World Bank and IMF) was not only to undermine state property, their overt aim. They were also devised both to destroy the basis of common property that has been struggled for and defended in the Third World and the so-called First for centuries and to prevent future common property regimes from forming anywhere. Just as neoliberal bankers and government officials were demanding the totalitarian transformation of everything into a commodity, many throughout the planet recognized the life-and-death importance of various forms of common property that were rapidly being “enclosed.”
The most obvious type of common property was of land (in the forms of arable, pasture, and forest land) in many parts of Africa and South America, but soon the types of recognized resources that could or should be communalized included access to water, “rights” not to have your body polluted by industrial waste, indigenous knowledge, cultural artifacts, the oceans, the electro-magnetic frequency spectrum and even the human genome. These, and other examples of near common property including traditional ones like the provision of “public goods”–e.g., intergenerational support systems, education, and health care–were abominated by the new political economy and their doctrinal fate was to be sold to the highest bidder.”
In the 80’s: Struggles for Common Land
“One of the first reactions to these New Enclosures was a world-wide war for land and in defense of the commons that took place in the 1980s, but it passed largely unnoticed since it appeared under a variety of confusing rubrics. Up the Andes into Central America and Mexico there had been desperate and chronic armed struggle over the control of land (frequently referred to in the US as an aspect of the “drug problem” or the “spread of communism”) (Weinberg 1991). In West Africa there was a micro-level of armed struggle against seizures of communal land by the state, oil companies and development banks (frequently discussed as anachronistic “tribal war”) (Okonta and Douglas 2003). In southern Africa, the battle over land and its communal control, both in town and country, was referred to as an aspect of “the struggle against apartheid,” while in East Africa it was considered a “problem of nationalities.” War for common land and resources (including water) was and is, of course, what the “Palestinian issue” is about, while from Afghanistan through India to Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Indonesia, proletarians took up arms or put their bodies on the line against the New Enclosures under a wide variety of slogans. For example, the Chipko movement in India was seen as “tree hugging” women’s movement for the preservation of the forest categorically distinct from the efforts of the communist New People’s Army of the Phillippines which used armed struggle to block the building of a World Bank-supported dam that would destroy the common land of thousands of tribal people (Shiva 1989) (Colchester 1993b: 85-86).
But in the 1980s this War for common lands was not only a rural, “third worldist” struggle. From West Berlin, to Zurich, to Amsterdam, to London, to New York, squatters, street people and the “homeless” have battled against police, arsonists in the pay of real estate developers, and other agents of “spatial deconcentration” not simply for “housing” but for common land and communal space and all that it means (Midnight Notes 1990).”
In the 90’s: Recomposistion of a Global Commons movement
” Slowly, however, a commons/enclosures discourse in the 1990s allowed different components of the antiglobalization movement to connect their struggles, from indigenous peoples’ demand for a return not just of land, but of common land and the practices that make its use possible, to the software designers who were demanding that their creations become part of a larger human pool of communication and creativity accessible to all, to the environmentalists who concluded that the ecological climax phase of capitalism is not compatible with the survival of millions of species (including the human one) and were demanding the transformation of the atmosphere, the oceans and the remaining large-scale forests into a common, democratically regulated for the survival of species, including (and for some, especially) the human one. The commons/enclosures discourse also allowed militants of the antiglobalization movement to distinguish themselves from the defenders of state property (either in Keynesian, socialist or communist mode) with whom they often were allied in the demonstrations against the introduction of neoliberal policies.
The “commons/enclosures” discourse not only described the multisided nature of this struggle against neoliberal globalization but it was very useful in recomposing the elements of the movement. For example, beginning in 1994 the Zapatista struggle against the repeal of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution–which provided the basis of the ejido system and legitimated common land for families and villages–and the discovery of “cyberspace” as a new common that needed to be defended by “cybercommonists” brought together, politically and strategically, two ends of this terrain into an “electronic fabric of struggle,” as Harry Cleaver put it.
This political development showed that the anticapitalist struggle had not “collapsed” with the Soviet Union (Midnight Notes 1990, 1992, 2004). On the contrary, an antiglobalization movement supporting common property and suspicious of private and state property was one of the most widespread and “recomposing” movements in history with a capacity for instantaneous communication and coordination across continents, dramatically expressing itself in “global days of action” that brought millions of people into the streets of the world’s cities simultaneously to protest the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and their neoliberal globalization policies.”