Enclosures

Marco Armiero

Political ecology course

What is a commons?

• Work in group to identify 3-4 characteristics which define what is a commons

• List some existing commons

The mother of all narratives

• Garrett Hardin, The tragedy of the commons, Science 1968

‘Picture a pasture open to all’

Each herder is motivated to add more and more animals because he receives the direct benefit of his own animals and bears only a share of the costs resulting from overgrazing

• The herders are assumed to wish to maximize their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. The utility of each additional animal has both a positive and negative component:

• Positive for the individual

• Negative for the commons and the collectivity

Main points against the commons(or supporting Hardin)

• The behavioral explanation: humans are biologically egoistic

• The economic explanation: maximization of individual profit

• The prisoner’s dilemma: in the context of game theory each player will act in a way which will deplete the commons

Uses of the Tragedy of the Commons narrative• Explain overpopulation

• Crime in the cities

• Famine in Sahel

• Inability of the US congress to stop the overspending

Critiques to the Tragedy of the Commons

• The misunderstanding:

open access for commons

Everybody can access a resource; absence of any form of control and/or property right

Es.: air, ocean

Only specific groups of people canaccess those resources/landsSet of rulesEs.: forests, pastures,

How Commons Works I

Property rights

Collective property rights

Groups of families local institutions

Oral/written rules

Residency

How Commons Works II

Common uses

Rights of access(do not imply property rights)

Territoriality

Oral/written rules

Enclosing the commons• History (England):

Long history of enclosures – 1516 Thomas Moore; sheep eating people 1750-1860 Enclosure Acts = regarding 7 millions of acres (28,000 square km)

• History (France):French revolution, abolition of feudality, Napoleonic Code

• History (Empires) Cultural monocultures; denying ‘other ways of possessing’ (Cronon’s on New England);Conservation policies: game preservation, forests for the empires,

Feudal system(in relation to commons)

Property

Allodium Feudal Individual and exclusive Individual property +

property rights collective use rights

+ or

rights on resources

without private property

rights

Example

• Feudal lord

Land where a community could exercise its rights to gather woods, rising animals, collecting wild fruits, hunting, fishing etc.

• Abolition of feudality

How to compensate the community?

Showing rights; land (to whom?); monetary compensation

The question of value was not to be measured in the broad terms of the social relationships engendered by independence of the wage

Enclosures as primitive accumulation?

• the narrative goes something like this: before capitalism there are enclosures or 'primitive accumulation'. These processes of expropriation are preconditions of capitalism, because they create and develop markets for commodities such as labour power and land

• Marx's concept of so-called primitive accumulation indicates the historical process that gave birth to the preconditions of a capitalist mode of production. These preconditions refer mainly to the creation of a section of the population with no other means of livelihood than their labour power-to, to be sold in a nascent labour market, and to the accumulation of capital that may be used for nascent industries

Latter days enclosures/commons

• Work in group and think about enclosure which are occurring today

• Is it possible to create commons? Which are the new commons?

A taxonomy of new types and modes of enclosure

Land and resources expropriation Land policies: through direct expropriation (e.g.Mexico's ejida) or indirect means (e.g. use of cash-tax)

Externality: land pollution (e.g. Ogoni land

in Nigeria; intensed shrimp production in

India)

Against reappropriation (e.g. against MST

in Brazil)

Water privatisation (e.g. Bolivia)

Neoliberal war

Urban Space Urban design

Road building

Social commons Cuts in social spending

Cuts in entitlements

Knowledge and life Intellectual property rights

Marketisation of education

(De Angelis, 146)

Three stories of enclosures

• Black act

• Naples waterfront

• National park

Black Act• Source: E.P. Thompson, Whigs and

Hunters

• Geordie’s Ballad.

• Black Act: 1723. Death penalty for those who were surprised to hunt, collect wood, setting fires in the forests

• Aggravating circumstances: groups, black faces, threatening practices

• Crimes vs. acceptable practices

Who is speaking?

You will never succeed in making us believe that there is a crime where there is no crime, you will only succeed in converting crime itself into a legal act. You have wiped out the boundary between them, but you err if you believe that you have done so only to your advantage. The people sees [sic] the punishment, but it does not see the crime, and because it sees [sic] punishment where there is no crime, it will see no crime where there is punishment. By applying the category of theft where it ought not to be applied, you have also exonerated it where this category ought to be applied.

Narratives on commons• If commoners who lost

common right at enclosure had long before ceased to benefit from it, or if the stock they fed on commons was inferior and diseased, then enclosure, in taking commons away, impoverished no one

• Waste gave them a variety of useful products, and the raw materials to make more. It also gave them the means of exchange with other commoners The habit of living off commons made the habit of regular employment less necessary. For commoners it was customary to make a living first out of the materials on hand; after all, the common came first, wage labour was a relatively recent arrival

Commons in the city

• Privatization of services (water)

• Privatization of space (gated communities)

• Health measures as attack against commons (the grazing of animals in the cities)

Naples’ Waterfront

• In the 1880s Naples was hit by a cholera epidemics

• The sanitization of downtown Naples

• The seashore shifted from a place of work, deeply connected to a special mode of production and living, to a place of leisure

• The demolition of old fishing houses; the end of free access to the beaches; the dislocation of fishers from their areas

Imperial enclosures• Denying other ways of possessing/using

the land. The transaction between colonists and natives in New England (Cronon)

• Rational use – Forests for the Empire or for the nation

National Parks as enclosures?

• Natural parks as representation of harmonious, untouched space of nature, mask the colonial dislocation and obliterate the history of those dislocations, along with the history of the space which existed previously

• Europe was culture and the colonies were nature

• The right to hunt has historically served as powerful symbol of class privilege and an important source of class identity

• Territoriality; whose rights? (the issue of Masai)• Preserving what for whom? (a hunting reserve

for Europeans)