WE ARE ALL COMMONERS
It is more reasonable to suppose a thing to have been invented by those to whom it would be of service, than by those whom it must have harmed.
—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, Discourse on Inequality
The first three times I heard the word “commons,” I had no idea what it meant. Hearing the phrase “House of Commons” in a media report from the British Parliament, I guessed that to be a part of the “Commons” meant being rich, white and aggressively drunk. The next time, it appeared in the context of a British children’s television series in the 1970s—The Wombles, a group of furry creatures who practiced the dark arts of recycling on Wimbledon Common. A common was a place I imagined to be littered with exciting things that were removed by the Wombles to be reused in their burrow. The third time was on a holiday in New York, where my family was told that if we wanted to have the full American experience, we needed to head to Woodbury Common, one of the larger shopping complexes outside New York City, so that we could shop like real Americans. (I got a sweater with an American flag on it.) Commons, I thought, was American English for “shopping center.” What I never quite understood was that “common” could be not only a place, but a verb to describe how to value and share the world around us.
Although it is often associated with Britain and its colonies, the commons as place and process can be found in societies from Central America to South Asia and, most recently, cyberspace. A commons is a resource, most often land, and refers both to the territory and to the ways people allocate the goods that come from that land. The commons provided food, fuel, water and medicinal plants for those who used it—it was the poorest people’s life-support system. This was why the commons in England was ground zero in the great transformation. To value something involves both identifying it and setting up rules through which it can be used by society, and the rules of commoning were fundamentally incompatible with capitalism. By turning public land into private property, not only did land become a commodity, but the rural poor were cut off from their only means of survival, and forced to sell the only thing they had left—their labor. From the enclosure of the commons were born two new kinds of payment—rent and wages.
This history, however, is far removed from the understanding of “commons” that circulates today. Look to the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, and you’ll read that a common is “the undivided land belonging to the members of a local community as a whole. Hence, often, the patch of unenclosed or ‘waste’ land which remains to represent that.”1 The entire history of enclosure and rural dispossession has been collapsed by the lexicographers into the word “hence.” The dictionary, however, merely reflects contemporary thought, making space for a more modern interpretation of how the commons became waste; today, the idea of a commons is most often associated with its dereliction, with its “tragedy.”
The term “tragedy of the commons” was coined by microbiologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 Science article, in which he asks what happens when individuals compete for a scarce resource.2 The principal character, in fact the only character, in Hardin’s tragedy is one we’ve met before—Homo economicus. Hardin argued that when faced with a shared resource, people will be overrun by their own selfish desires to consume it, even if they know that they’re destroying it in the process. So, propelled by animal urges of self-satisfaction, in a world of scarcity, people will end up destroying the thing that they depend on for survival. Hobbes couldn’t have said it better. Hardin’s views weren’t, however, based on any experimental or observed evidence, and they ignored the history of the enclosure of the commons. Despite this disconnection from the past, his essay became one of the most widely cited think-pieces in the twentieth century.
In many ways, Hardin’s world looks a lot like our own, as we destroy it at a pace made more frantic by the recession. If you’re looking for a tragedy, you can find it everywhere from the scrambling coltan-mining communities in the Congo to the increasingly desperate actions of farmers applying inorganic fertilizer to the soil to replace the fertility that their monoculture has destroyed. Hardin’s is also a perspective that resonates with a particular breed of environmentalist. The Friends of the Earth saw their concerns reflected in his work—in 1972, he was inducted into their Environmental Hall of Fame.3
Scratch the surface, though, and Hardin’s arguments blame the victim. The question isn’t whether we are in dire environmental straits—we are very clearly in trouble. Every indicator in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an exercise involving 1,360 scientists over five years in an international effort to measure humanity’s impact on the natural world, shows that we’re destroying the planet. The issue is a question of motive. The logical structure of the tragedy of the commons rests on a foundational model of the world in which people are, for whatever reason, prepared to override their own better judgment in service of their selfish natures. It’s a world that resembles the one painted by the first professional economist, Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that any population would, tragically, always exceed the resource base available to feed it. It’s not hard to see how the tragedy of the commons could apply here—poor people driven by their urges to procreate (even though they know the consequences) make more babies than there is food to feed them and this, according to the theory, explains why there is hunger in the world.
It’s not surprising that Hardin was a strong advocate of population control. He is not alone in thinking that the way to solve environmental degradation, hunger and climate change lies in preventing the poor from reproducing, but it’s a view that misunderstands the problem. The reason people go hungry today has nothing at all to do with a gap between the amount of food in the world and the number of people who are hungry. There’s more than enough food on earth today to feed the world one and a half times over. The reason people go hungry is because of the way we distribute food through the market, as private property, and the people who starve are simply too poor to be able to afford it. If there were fewer people in the world but the way we distributed food remained the same, the poor would still go hungry. This isn’t to say that women shouldn’t be in charge of their own fertility—on the contrary, the single best route to reducing fertility rates in developing countries, bar none, is girls’ education, and one of the victims of the fee-for-service model of education is that women and girls have been prevented from attending school.4
This is intimately connected to why Hardin’s tragedy is misleading. For Malthusians, modern and classical, the reason we’re headed to hell in a handbasket is that people are rapacious and untamable, creatures of passion and impulse. Those drives will lead us inexorably to consume endlessly, but we’ve seen that people aren’t always like that, while corporations are always like that—the profit motive makes them so—which offers a way for us to understand the deeper tragedy of the commons.
Fisheries are perhaps the most cited example of the tragedy of the commons.5 The argument is that every little fisherman is driven to catch as much as he possibly can, knowingly driving his fishery, and his livelihood, toward collapse. Many of the world’s fisheries are in sharp decline—one article in the journal Science predicts the collapse of global ocean fisheries by 20486—but writing off fisheries’ decline as the tragedy of the commons is misleading. There have been fisherfolk for millennia, and the modest growth of fishing communities can’t explain the destruction of the oceans. In many instances the commons are not being overrun, but taken over. A report by the international development NGO ActionAid provides a striking example.
Pakistan’s six-hundred-mile coastline is blessed with marine riches—squid, mackerel, shrimp, tuna and scores of other fish have supported over 180,000 small-scale fisherfolk, like Abdul Majeed Motani, for centuries. Motani fishes with a crew of ten other villagers in his small wooden boat. He and his fellow villagers have seen their catches drop off dramatically in the past decade. The Pakistani Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), a local fishermen’s group, reports a 70 to 80 percent decline in the local fisheries, and with it, growing hunger, indebtedness and poverty in villages across the Arabian coast.7 So why, after centuries of sustainable use by local fisherfolk, have the seas been emptied?
Locals report that the decline began when Pakistan’s military government, eager to step up the nation’s export earnings, relaxed restrictions on foreign-owned industrial trawlers. Pakistan first opened its waters to foreign boats in 1982, but in 2001, it rewrote a rule that kept foreign boats at least thirty-five miles off the coast. Now only the largest foreign-owned trawlers are supposed to stay thirty-five miles back, while smaller foreign-owned trawlers are permitted between thirteen and thirty-five miles off the coast. The closest twelve miles inland is supposedly reserved for locals. The government officially licensed twenty-one transnational trawlers and twenty-three midsize trawlers in 2007,8 but local fisherfolk have identified over one hundred foreign-owned vessels trawling Pakistan’s coast each year. Many of them are joint-owned ventures, reflagged as “local” boats, which openly fish the twelve-mile local zone. Local fisherfolk complain that the government flouts these rules, turning a blind eye to abuses in order to keep the graft economy turning over.
Unlike the locals, industrial trawlers can scour the oceans day and night, with nets stretching three kilometers out to sea, dredging up everything in their path. According to the PFF, only 10 percent of the trawlers’ catch has any value on the international market, and the other 90 percent is thrown away. It sounds high, but internationally, even factoring in some of the best-regulated global fisheries, bycatch makes up some 40 percent of all marine catches.9
Once again, women disproportionately bear the burden from reduced catches. Net and basket making and local fish drying and marketing, traditionally women’s work, is no longer in high demand. According to the ActionAid report, women are being driven to work in local textile factories or industrial shrimp-processing plants, where many complain of hazardous working conditions.
The Pakistani proverb “When all else fails, the sea will provide” remains partly true. Even though fisheries are on a sharp decline, they continue to provide—but who they provide for is changing.10 Pakistan’s marine commons aren’t being overrun by rapacious local fisherfolk. They have been enclosed by transnational business interests, facilitated by the government. These interests are in no danger of destroying their own livelihoods. Free international markets mean that when Pakistan’s fisheries collapses, the industrial trawlers will simply move to more lucrative and profitable waters. Pakistan’s traditional fishing families, however, are not so free. No richer waters await them.
The story in Pakistan is one with wider resonance, and a longer history. Looking at the twentieth century’s great environmental disasters, one doesn’t see people run amok. The environmental tragedies from the Dust Bowl to the mass extinctions of rain forest and ocean are the result of the behavior of corporations, of capitalist agriculture and forestry and fishing. The Dust Bowl happened because while individuals knew full well the value of the topsoil, their induction into capitalist agriculture turned them into exploiters of the very land on which their survival depended, transforming their connection to the world around them into one solely of short-term profit.
Commoning involves a web of social relations designed to keep our baser urges in check, fostering different ways of valuing our world, and of relating to others. We can see the destructive effects of enclosure not only in the scars left on the natural environment, but also within the most intimate of social relations around gender. When the way society valued work was transformed, the socially acceptable roles for men and women also changed. Those who wouldn’t accept the new order were targeted, and in certain parts of the world that persecution continues today. The term for this hasn’t changed, though—it’s still called “witch hunting.”
FENCING OFF THE COMMONS
In 2009, the pope visited Africa, where he managed to generate controversy, first by announcing that condoms aggravate the problems of HIV/AIDS and then by observing that Africans were “living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they end up even condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers.”11 This is a sort of caricature of Africa as a savage and superstitious place waiting for, depending on your faith, either the word of Christ or of free enterprise to be more forcefully spread so it can be fully developed. There is, of course, a link between the two—the spread of Christianity in Africa as in the Americas, and to a lesser extent Asia, was accompanied by the arrival of armed colonial forces in search of riches.
In a recent series of thorough and provocative articles, historian and social scientist Silvia Federici has suggested that the resurgence of witchcraft in Africa at a time of land grabbing and privatization isn’t an accident.12 The same coincidence could be seen in the great witch hunts that scoured Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The number of Europeans who died as a result of the witch trials is impossible to know. In Savoy, a hotbed of witch hunting, the trial documents were hung from the neck of the convicted woman and burned along with her. Conservative estimates put the death toll across Europe at between forty thousand and sixty thousand.13 The majority of those killed were women. Federici argues that their persecution coincided with a drastic change in their place in society.
She shows how the politics behind witch hunts concerns a new vision of the world, where women who insisted on their rights to value land, to their freedom to common, had no place.14 It was in their defense of commoning that women were killed as witches. Enclosure wasn’t, then, just about fencing off patches of land—it was also a way of foreclosing a set of political processes, and replacing them with novel ones in which women’s participation was circumscribed in new ways. While not all witch hunts were in response to some attempt to protect a particular common, they are always signs of deeper political struggles. It is not by chance that we use the term “witch hunt” as a metaphor for a mass hysteria that distracts us from bigger political machinations.15
To understand the commons today, it’s worth starting in feudal England—the birthplace of modern capitalism—by looking at the Magna Carta’s twin charter, the Charter of the Forest. Although largely forgotten today, the Charter of the Forest guaranteed the ability of commoners to access pasture for their animals, to till land, to collect wood, harvest honey, use medicinal plants, forage and so on. Peter Linebaugh, who has done more than any other contemporary historian to recover the history of this charter, observes in The Magna Carta Manifesto that a commons right guaranteed freedoms in perpetuity over local resources for everyone.16 This did not mean that everyone could take as much as they wanted. To have a commons isn’t to license a free-for-all, as Hardin suggests, and it is not what happened historically. The precise shape of commoning was negotiated in a particular place and time, dependent on the ecology and the community. Common rights evolved over time, shaped by the relative power of those around the table, as well as the changing geography of the physical commons itself. The commons was, in other words, both a place and a “process of freedom,” in which people fought for the right to shape the terms on which they could share the commons.
It’s important not to romanticize the idea. Commoning did not take place in some protodemocratic Eden where everyone got a fair and equal say. The commons were an ongoing battlefield between lords and their serfs, but it was one in which the poor had won some victories, and had managed to stake a claim to public space in defiance of those who oppressed them. The Magna Carta itself represented a line in the sand, a negotiated end to the rapacity of King John of England who, in order to bankroll both a crusade and a war in France, had committed all manner of crimes. He taxed barons, stole forests, took children hostage and even sold his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, to the Earl of Essex for twenty thousand marks.17 The barons rebelled. In 1215, they marched into London, where they were met with open gates, a mark of the City’s approval. They confronted the king, and negotiated hard. The Magna Carta certainly included demands made by the barons, merchants and the well-to-do in London, but it also included a strong set of protections of common rights, providing common access to the food, fuel, freedom and fruits of the forest provided for common people, returning to the public the natural resources that King John had taken for himself. This is the commons that historians have pointed to in rejection of Hardin’s arguments. Contrary to the prediction, people figured out how to manage and maintain access to a scarce resource, despite the desire of kings and nobles to privatize it. If one’s looking to affix the word “tragedy” to the commons, the nightmare did not begin with the creation of the commons, but with the process of its destruction, the process under which it was taken under private ownership.
Sometimes piecemeal, sometimes sweeping (as with Henry VIII’s 1536 dissolution of monasteries), enclosure was the process by which land was once again taken out of public hands. Surveyors would use their chains, known as the devil’s guts, to rope off areas of common land and formally assign title to a single individual. Not only fields, but forest and water were similarly enclosed—with lords preventing access to ponds and streams well stocked with fish, and forests teeming with game that had provided the poor with meat. By 1500, 45 percent of cultivable land in England had been enclosed, and took on a new logic—not only to provide private land for individual landlords, but also to drive up the price of rent for those landlords.18
Needless to say, this theft was deeply unpopular and provided the backdrop for rebellions ranging from small-scale acts of insubordination (the Lord of Arundel lost one hundred swans in a night—the killing of game was a warning to the rich) to the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, to the Diggers in the mid-1600s and beyond. The protests and resistance were always crushed, and because enclosure had seized the peasants’ only means of survival, they had only two choices: to work for their new landlords, or to try their luck in the cities. Adam Smith lamented the violence being done to the commons by the spread of private property, though by the time he made his remarks, the process was already over: “The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them . . . [he must now] pay the license to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces.”19 It was these displaced peasants who, within a generation, were to become the proletarion backbone of the industrial Revolution.
The world was being enclosed well beyond England, of course. By the time capitalism was firmly entrenched in Europe, colonists were killing and commodifying overseas. “Savage” was colonialism’s magic word—it not only opened the door to the Aladdin’s cave of land from Ireland to Australia, but was also used in the sorcery of turning bodies into things that could be bought and sold, in the Middle Passage enslavement of over ten million Africans. In the Americas, 75 million died in the century after colonization,20 and although straightforward killing was a tool of enclosure, the colonists also had a set of arguments and rationales with which to explain their actions as those of civilized people. The justifications for enclosure were provided by none other than John Locke, the man who today is considered one of the godfathers of liberalism. His argument that the natural rights of man were “life, liberty and estate”21 appears, with one slight change, in the American Declaration of Independence.
As secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations, and in his role as secretary to the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas, Locke was intellectually and financially invested in finding a reason to increase the acreage under his company’s ownership. His justification for turning “unowned” land into private holdings had two parts. First, because everyone owns their labor, improving land with that labor means you own it. If you’ve worked on land, that’s yours to keep, but anything that appears not to be used properly was considered fair game for enclosure. Second, land can be taken out of the commons if there is “enough and as good” left for everyone else.
Although the reasons that the English wanted to scoop up property in the Americas were utterly selfish, the justification for property and ownership yields an important clue about how a different market system might work. Private property requires society to approve of it being taken out of common hands. Property is, in other words, social—there’s nothing natural about the way some people are allowed to exclude others from land, for instance. Indeed, it was the rescinding of rights to share common resources that radicalized a young German thinker who had recently left the academy, and was working as a journalist. His political opinions ran to an optimistic liberalism—think of him as a nineteenth-century Wired reader—a man who thought that with a free press and functioning parliament, the future would be bright. Two events would change his opinion. The first was when he witnessed the debates in the local parliament over customary wood-gathering rights in Rhineland forests, which made him realize the centrality of questions of property to politics. The second was the ease with which the Prussian censorship closed down his paper. It was these events that nudged the young Karl Marx toward thinking about the centrality of property in politics and society.
One doesn’t need to be a Marxist to see how property is social. To take one example, consider how governments deal with broadcast spectrum. The airwaves are owned by the government, and the right to broadcast on a particular frequency is sold to media companies subject to their fulfilling certain social purposes. If broadcasters transmit material that’s considered lewd or inappropriate, they will be fined, and if they continue to violate those sanctions, their right to use that bit of spectrum can be taken back. The laws that govern how animals can be treated provide another example.22 Most countries have laws that permit animals to be owned as property, but there are nonetheless restrictions—cruelty to cats and dogs is prohibited in most countries. Under the Napoleonic Code, there are similar provisions when it comes to other private property. Land, for example, can be privately owned as long as it’s being put to use, but the moment it is left derelict, or if the land is owned purely for speculative purposes, ownership rights to the land are forfeit, and it becomes available to anyone who will put it to greater use. Property rights, in other words, can be far more flexible and elastic than we currently imagine them.
When the social role of the land was decided by the standards of the colonial British, however, things didn’t work out well for native North Americans. Although their hunting techniques were in harmony with the environment, and often improved it, they couldn’t prove this to the people who took their land. When white people came along, they saw rich and fertile land that appeared to be occupied by Native Americans only for a short period of time every year—they didn’t see how the land was part of a wider system of sustainable nomadic grazing. Among some tribes, however, there was permanent agriculture, with large areas of land under cultivation, using sophisticated agroecological methods of maintaining soil fertility and ecological integrity—one example is the intercropping of corn, beans and squash (the Three Sisters of Native American agriculture). Within these tribes, as in much of the Global South today, it was women’s work to tend to the growing of food for domestic consumption while the men went out hunting. The English couldn’t comprehend that agriculture was exclusively managed by women whose English counterparts had been confined to domestic, noncommercial duties. So the colonists described the women’s activity not as agriculture, but as gardening; and then they expropriated their land.
Along the Pacific coast in North America, indigenous economies came under different forms of attack. An institution central to many cultures was “potlatch.” It was a ceremony in celebration of a guest or event—each society had its own specific set of rules and customs. The common denominator, and the one that most exercised the white government, was that a potlatch involved the mass redistribution of wealth in which the giving away of things was a sign of rank. In the eyes of the U.S. and Canadian governments, without the morally improving virtues of frugality and prudence, Native Americans would be condemned to perpetual backwardness. Potlatch was described as “[the] parent of numerous vices which eat out the heart of the people. . . . [It] is not possible that Indians can acquire property or can become industrious with any good result, while under the influence of this mania.”23 So, from 1885 to 1951, the Canadian government declared it illegal, levying a punishment of between two and six months in jail.
These nasty little stories have contemporary variants: Governments and corporations are still enclosing forests, fisheries and agricultural land because, allegedly, the indigenous people on the land are incapable of managing it for the common good, or because the indigenous people simply don’t count. Locke’s legacy can be seen in the international legal standard of terra nullius (land belonging to no one), which was used to vacate the rights of indigenous people from the United States to Australia. It remains a live issue, with the same legal doctrine being haggled over from the West Bank to the South China Sea, and wherever “marginal land” is licensed over the objections of marginal people.24 Which returns us to the rise in witch hunts in Africa today.
The boundaries of African countries look as if they were drawn with a ruler because that is precisely what happened in Berlin in 1884. The Berlin Conference brought together the great European powers, who bickered and trucked over who should get what in Africa, setting off a ruinous chain of events that today leaves the continent desperately impoverished, militarized and degraded. In the early twenty-first century, the continent finds itself once more in the crosshairs of the world’s great powers. This time, though, there’s no formal conference at which the spoils are decided. Instead, the United States, Europe, the Middle East, China, India and other Asian countries are staking claims through various means, such as private sector contracts, mercenaries, armed bases (the United States recently unveiled AFRICOM, its unified command post, which, because of its unpopularity among Africans, is currently based in Frankfurt), development deals and “aid.” All of these are attempts to control and channel resource wealth, biodiversity, food supplies and land.
As with the enclosures in Europe, the deepening of market society has meant a transformation of gender roles as traditional ways of managing resources are uprooted. Figures are hard to come by, but in the 1990s, according to one conservative estimate based on published figures, 22,000 people were killed for witchcraft.25 It’s no accident that violence against women, couched in accusations of witchcraft, has been particularly intense in and around areas where resources are being expropriated for tourism. In Zambia, witches have frequently been found on land destined for game reserves, and on breeding grounds for animals destined for “canned hunts,” in which rich tourists celebrate the wonder of Africa’s Big Five—the lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino and leopard—by killing one of each.26 In Nigeria, women in the Iguobazuwa forest reserve were displaced from their land when the government sold the forest to the Michelin tire company. Michelin set about turning the forest into a rubber plantation, destroying the subsistence farms that women had been using to feed their communities.27 Mabel Ubara, one of the women affected, reported that “two years after my husband’s death, I started farming. . . . Michelin came with his evil bulldozer and destroyed everything I had planted. I was crying. . . . I was trying to stop them; they threatened to bulldoze me with their caterpillar if I don’t allow them.”28
Reports of landgrabs do not, however, appear in the newspapers alongside the stories of African witch hunts—so it’s not surprising that from afar the killings of women appear mysterious and barbarous. Outside Africa, we’re encouraged to understand this as an inexplicable symptom of the Heart of Darkness. Yet it is nothing less than the death throes of one form of society at the hands of another. This is not to suggest that there isn’t an ecological crisis, in Africa as elsewhere, or that these traditional systems were absolutely just and desirable, but in their transformation into modern market society, the voices most silenced are those of Africans themselves.
In addition to the loss of life, there’s a cultural loss that attends this kind of destruction, the disappearance of knowledge about sustainably managing natural resources for the local community. Preserving this knowledge about how to value natural resources can mean the difference between sustainability and extinction. Let’s return to the quintessential “tragedy of the commons,” the fisheries. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, especially when it comes to near-shore, artisanal fisheries. But in asserting their collective political and economic rights, the Pakistani fishermen’s groups may have the key to protecting their fisheries. A case study of traditional fisheries in Chile suggests that giving communities the rights to the commons as a commons can be highly successful. Chile banned industrial trawlers in the 1960s so that its artisanal fishing sector would be sheltered from competition with destructive transnational operations. After a quota system failed, the government began to work with fishermen’s organizations up and down the coast. Together, they came up with a system of TURFs—or territorial use rights in fisheries. Fishing villages and fishers’ organizations were awarded collective rights over specific traditional fishing grounds that they’d known and fished for generations. Enforcement was devolved to local fisher people’s unions. It worked: The fisheries recovered. The TURFs were modeled on the historical fishing grounds of local fisherfolk, essentially granting present-day collective rights to what in previous centuries had already belonged to the local community.29
The Chilean experience is, however, an exception to the rule. Generally, commons systems aren’t being supported in the twenty-first century—they’re being dismantled. As they disappear, we lose millennia of accumulated knowledge about how to manage scarce resources sustainably, both in terms of the harvesting technology to keep the resources abundant and also the social systems necessary to ensure that no one takes more than his or her fair share. These systems of knowledge are displaced by the guiding motives of profit-driven markets. This isn’t to say that the existing systems are perfect—they’re not—but they do seem to have offered ways in which societies have survived, and thrived, with a mechanism for setting the value of resources different from that exercised by the profit-driven market. As British activist and writer George Monbiot has noted, the European Union’s “transferable quota” system of fishing rights has resulted in millions of tons of fish being thrown away, 88 percent of fisheries being overexploited and the cost to the public being far greater than the value of the catches.30
The enclosure of the commons has destroyed the rich networks of knowledge that once helped guide the way we valued the world. Polanyi’s transformation is, however, never total and never complete—there are always practices, ideas and experiences that persist, and offer tools with which we might begin to think of new ways of valuing beyond profit-driven markets. Now that the ecological and economic crises created by the first of Polanyi’s two movements have become so acute, it seems reasonable to ask where the second movement is. Why hasn’t society started to automagically heal itself from the violence of profit-driven markets? The answer heard all too often on the left is that things aren’t quite bad enough, and that it will take immense tragedy to mobilize enough sentiment to spur political change.
The trouble with this argument is that things are fairly bad already; the number of people going hungry in 2009, for instance, is projected to be in excess of one billion—a planetary record. A second response to the question of why Polanyi’s double movement hasn’t happened is that the original countermovement protagonists aren’t around anymore. The Speenhamland laws were spearheaded by a failing sliver of the landed aristocracy, and there aren’t too many of those people left. But perhaps the most satisfying answer is that, in fact, there is a countermovement—indeed, there are many countermovements, progressive and reactionary, inclusive and exclusive. It’s just not widely reported, as, especially in the case of progressive examples, the people leading such movements are the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the people on whose shoulders the externalities of the rich often fall, the world’s least free people who are discovering that they are The Change They’ve Been Waiting For. In the next part, we’ll look at how, exactly, they’ve tried to rebalance market society and how they’re trying to transform the way value is set, not by returning to the commons, but by reinventing it.
1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1992, s.v. “common,” http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50045107 (accessed June 1, 2009).
2. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968).
3. I’m happy that, today, Friends of the Earth is a great deal wiser, not least because it has decentralized its decision making.
4. At least Hardin was consistent—he and his wife were members of the right-to-die Hemlock Society, and took their own lives soon after their sixty-second wedding anniversary. I’d very much like to see advocates of population control become advocates of feminism, but I suspect that they’re coming from a place where women’s empowerment isn’t their top priority.
5. David Feeny et al., “Questioning the Assumptions of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ Model of Fisheries,” Land Economics 72, no. 2 (1996).
6. Boris Worm et al., “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem services,” Science 314, no. 5800 (2006).
7. Alex Wijeratna, Taking the Fish—Fishing Communities Lose Out to Big Trawlers in Pakistan (Johannesburg: ActionAid International, 2007).
8. Ann Kelley, “Net Losses,” Guardian, April 11, 2007.
9. R. W. D. Davies et al., “Defining and Estimating Global Marine Fish-eries Bycatch,” Marine Policy 33 (2009).
10. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Fishery and Aquaculture Country Profile,” Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, 2009, http://www.fao.org/fishery/countrysector/FICP_PK/en (accessed April 21, 2009).
11. Henry Makori, “Why Belief in Witchcraft Remains Strong among Africans,” Catholic Information service for Africa, April 6, 2009.
12. See, for example, Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
13. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006).
14. This isn’t an argument that all women everywhere were resisting enclosure, and that this is specifically the only reason why there were witch hunts. If that were true, then one might expect witch hunts to be directly correlated with enclosures, and the historical record is much messier than that. But it is to suggest that some women died defending their right to control resources in ways inimical to the market.
15. This is the logic that makes Arthur Miller’s The Crucible such a powerful indictment of McCarthyism.
16. Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See also Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital (London: Pluto, 2007).
17. Linebaugh, Magna Carta Manifesto, 27.
18. I am grateful for Edward Vallance’s excellent Radical History of Britain for this background: Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries—the Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms (London: Little, Brown, 2009).
19. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, p. 8.
20. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), quoted in Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 85.
21. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: Whitmore and Fenn, 1821), 259.
22. For a fuller discussion of how capitalism, animals and property work together, see Bob Torres, Making a Killing: The political Economy of Animal Rights (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007).
23. Gilbert Malcolm Sproat to the Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs, October 27, 1879, RG 10, vol. 3669, f. 10961; quoted in Tina Loo, “Dan Cranmer’s Potlach: Law as Coercion, Symbol, and Rhetoric in British Columbia, 1884– 1951,” Canadian Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1992).
24. The hunt for land on which to grow agrofuels offers a painful demonstration of this. See Gaia Foundation et al., Agrofuels and the Myth of the Marginal Lands (London: Gaia Foundation, 2008).
25. One source is Richard Petratis, “The Witch Killers of Africa” (2003?), http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_petraitis/witch_killers.shtml. (accessed March 1, 2009), whose well-referenced sources include a report from Tanzania claiming five thousand deaths alone between 1994 and 1998.
26. Officially, Safari Club International calls this “the Big Five Grand Slam.” Of course, animals have been commodities for longer than people, but it’s surprising how recently that transformation has been completed—see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
27. Environmental Rights Action, “Field Report #172: Michelin Converts Prime Forest to Plantation” (Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Lagos, Nigeria, 2008).
28. World Rainforest Movement, Women Raise Their Voices Against Tree Plantations: The Role of the European Union in Disempowering Women in the South (Montevideo: World Rainforest Movement, 2009).
29. J. M. Lobo Orensanz et al., “What Are the Key Elements for the Sustainability of ‘S-Fisheries’? Insights from South America,” Bulletin of Marine Science 76, no. 2 (2005).
30. George Monbiot, “These Are Not the Mariners of Old but Pirates Who Make Bureaucrats Blanch,” Guardian, June 1, 2009.