Commons - their historical role and possible futures (was: Re: [ox-en] keimform.de: Reopening the Commons: Reversing the Enclosure)

Hi Christian and all!

Nice article :-) . Also interesting food for thought for a political
agenda like it could be useful for the pirate party...

Last month (54 days ago) Christian Siefkes wrote:
> http://www.keimform.de/2009/08/04/reopening-the-commons-reversing-the-enclosure/
> 
> Nowadays, almost everybody is forced to sell their labor power in order to
> survive (or, at least, to avoid hardship and official harassment). This
> necessity seems so natural to us that we seldom think about why it exists
> and how it came about.

It is so important to repeat this! It is *not* nature which dictates
an exchange based system. It is a social relationship created by
mankind and thus abolishable by mankind.

> The creation of the doubly free wage worker was a historical process that
> accompanied and enabled the emergence of capitalism (described by Marx in
> his chapter(s) on the ~"so-called primitive accumulation"
> <http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm> in
> Capital I [~German original
> <http://www.ml-werke.de/marxengels/me23_741.htm>]). One aspect of this
> process was the liberation of slaves/serfs (introducing the legal
> possibility to sell your labor power); the other aspect was the "~enclosure
> of the commons <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure>," the privatization
> of land and other resources which had formerly belonged to all (introducing
> the factual necessity to sell your labor power). Both these aspects had to
> come together to create the specific status of the "doubly free wage
> worker"--which nowadays is so widespread that is seems "natural" to us,
> though it isn't.

What you describe here is what is called the "tragedy of the commons"
since the respective article from 1969(?).

On the one hand I agree that commons existed and that they played a
role in pre-capitalist economies / lives. Describing this as a tragedy
is of course ideology. Commons did not fit into the capitalist
framework and thus they have been destroyed - given the fact that most
of the time the forces to defend the commons were too weak. However,
there are still commons which exist. IIRC the classical example is the
right of way across privately owned land in UK.

On the other hand I doubt that the commons played such a big economic
role as you seem to mean. When I think of the history of Germany for
instances regions can be distinguished by how the land of a farmer was
inherited to his offspring: There were regions where it was
distributed among all sons and regions where all land was given to the
oldest son [#]_. And AFAICS this land which has been inherited this
way was the economical basis of the family.

.. [#] I'm leaving out females here consciously because AFAICS
       inheritance in a family followed the male line only.

This example shows that privately owned land played a major role -
though for sure commons also played a role.

So I'm not sure whether it is historically correct to think that the
enclosure of the commons were *the* second big thing in the beginnings
of capitalism. For instance in Scotland for poor families from the
highlands working in the emerging textile industry was simply an
alternative to staying on the land which was not very fertile anyway.
They need not be deprived of their land for this.

> Since the workers (or would-be workers) are "free" in a double sense, there
> are two ways in which they can lose their wage worker status:
> 
> 1. They can lose their *right* to sell their labor power, reverting from
>    legally free human beings to serfs or dependents of some sorts. Losing
>    the option to switch employers (provided they can find a new one), they
>    would be bound permanently to a single master.

Loosing the right needs not necessarily end up in a dependency. You
could think of transformative law which forbids working for money
favoring Selbstentfaltung / peer production instead. Just an idea...

> 2. They can lose the *necessity* to sell their labor power, gaining access
>    to a sufficient share of the means of production to be able to live
>    without the need to earn money.

That is in fact the important point similar to capitalism: The means
needed for a good living (sic! - not only for survival!) must be
available by different ways than in the previous regime.

> The latter option would require a reversal of the historical process of the
> "enclosure of the commons": a **reopening, recreation, and restoration of
> the commons.**  And indeed we can see many traces of such recreations and
> reopenings already taking place, as new commons are created (free software,
> Wikipedia etc.) and struggles for old, or former commons (land, water etc.)
> are increasing.

Well, reverting the enclosure is of course a nice picture. But as I
said above I'm questioning whether it is historically correct in the
first place.

Second I doubt whether a reversal of a historical process really
matches what we see / need. Is peer production the same as commons in
the historical sense? Or rather: What is similar and what is
different in the two phenomenons?

For instance: In many instances beneficiaries of historical commons
were also obliged to maintain the commons. This is not the case in
peer production: I can use Free Software / Wikipedia / OpenAccess
science / Free Music without the need to maintain the respective
commons. I'm allowed to (aka internal openness) but I'm not obliged. I
think this is a very important difference.

The essential similarity is of course that neither maintaining commons
nor peer production are economic activities with alienated goals such
as making money.

Another similarity could be that the governance of commons and of peer
production processes is based on different principles than capitalist
ownership - though this may be a result of the non-alienation
just mentioned.

Also I guess a difference is that peer production is based on
voluntary contributions though AFAICS historical commons were often
something you could not choose to take part in. That would also be an
important difference regarding the Selbstentfaltung.

Well, the longer I think about it I think it would be useful to ask
someone who has real knowledge about historical commons for a
comparison. May be you already did?

> So we're still faced with two very different futures, which ~Rosa Luxemburg
> <WP> contrasted as "socialism or barbarism" almost hundred years ago.
> Though nowadays, seeing that the reopening of the commons is an essential
> precondition for the positive alternative to appear, we might prefer to
> call it commonism
> <http://www.keimform.de/2008/11/08/seven-hypotheses-about-commonism/>
> instead.

Well, at least it is a nice word play :-) . And since "commons" is not
such a well-known concept it is probably possible to fill in the right
meaning reagrdless whether it is historically correct or not.


						Grüße

						Stefan
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