[MD] capitalism - enclosure of the commons

[gav]

hiya platt, john, dave et al

like john and presumably others i cringe at the situation we have vis-a-vis land and land rights. it seems aesthetically wrong/ugly to me.

platt suggests that if it weren't for private property, supported by law, then we would lose our properties to rampaging gangs.

but surely we could still have law that supports a different sort of tenure aswell?

the enclosure of the commons is not a single historical event but a gradual process that has culminated with the definition of land and land ownerhip we all know today. this process was well and truly active in europe by the time of the industrial revolution (at its height in britain in the 16th century) but in countries such as india it is a much more recent phenomenon.

vanadan shiva (indian physicist, author, eco-feminist): 

"The Western bias in defining property rights

Today we have to look beyond the state and the market place to protect the rights of the two-thirds majority of India - the rural communities . Empowering the community with rights would enable the recovery of commons again. Commons are resources shaped, managed and utilised through community control. In the commons, no one can be excluded. The commons cannot be monopolised by the economically powerful citizen or corporation, or by the politically powerful state.

Commons and communities are beyond both the market and the state. They are governed by self-determined norms, and are self managed. In the 'colonial' and 'development' era, the commons were enclosed and community power undermined by takeover by the state. Thus, water and forests were made state property, leading to the alienation of local communities, and the destruction of the resource base. Poverty, ecological destruction and social disintegration and political disempowerment have been the result of such state-driven 'enclosures'.

In the globalisation era, the commons are being enclosed and the power of communities is being undermined by a corporate enclosure in which life itself is being transformed into the private property of corporations. The corporate enclosure is happening in two ways. Firstly, IPR systems are allowing the 'enclosure' of biodiversity and knowledge, thus eroding the commons and the community. Secondly, the corporation is being treated as the only form of association with legal personality.

IPRs are the equivalent of the letters patent that the colonisers have used since 1492, when Colombus set precedence in treating the licence to conquer non-European peoples as a natural right of European men. The land titles issued by the Pope through European kings and queens were the first patents. Charters and patents issued to merchant adventurers were authorisations to 'discover, find, search out and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people'. The colonisers' freedom was built on the slavery and subjugation of the people with original rights to the land. This violent takeover was rendered 'natural' by defining the colonised people into nature, thus denying them their humanity and freedom.

Locke's treatise on property effectively legitimised this same process of theft and robbery during the enclosure movement in Europe. Locke clearly articulates capitalism's freedom to build on the freedom to steal; he states that property is created by removing resources from nature through mixing with labour in its 'spiritual' form as manifested in the control of capital. According to Locke, only capital can add value to appropriated nature, and hence only those who own the capital have the natural right to own natural resources; a right that supersedes the common rights of others with prior claims. Capital is thus, defined as a source of freedom, but this freedom is based on the denial of freedom to the land, forests, rivers and biodiversity that capital claims as its own. Because property obtained through privatisation of commons is equated with freedom, those commoners laying claim to it are perceived to be depriving the owners of capital of freedom.
 Thus, peasants and tribals who demand the return of their rights and access to resources are regarded as thieves and saboteurs.

The takeover of territories and land in the past, and the takeover of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge now has been based on 'emptying' land and biodiversity of all relationships to indigenous people.

All sustainable cultures, in their diversity, have viewed the earth as terra mater (mother earth). The colonial construct of the passivity of the earth and the consequent creation of the colonial category of land as terra nullius (nobody's land), served two purposes: it denied the existence and prior rights of original inhabitants and negated the regenerative capacity and life processes of the earth.

In Australia, the concept of terra nullius (literally meaning 'empty land') was used to justify the appropriation of land and its natural resources, by declaring the entire continent of Australia uninhabited. This declaration enabled the colonisers to privatise the commons relatively easily, because as far as they were concerned, there were no commons existing in the first place!

The decimation of indigenous peoples everywhere was justified morally on the grounds that they were not really human; and that they were part of the fauna. As Pilger has observed, the Encyclopedia Britannica appeared to be in no doubt about this in the context of Australia: 'Man in Australia is an animal of prey. More ferocious than the lynx, the leopard, or the hyena, he devours his own people.' In another Australian textbook, Triumph in the Tropics, Australian aborigines were equated with their half-wild dogs. Being animals, the original Australians and Americans, the Africans and Asians possessed no rights as human beings. Their lands could be usurped as terra nullius - lands empty of people, 'vacant', 'waste', and 'unused'. The morality of the missions justified the military takeover of resources all over the world to serve imperial markets. European men were thus able to describe their invasions as 'discoveries', piracy and theft as 'trade', and
 extermination and enslavement as their 'civilising mission'.

Whether it is the gradual privatisation and divisibility of community held rights or the declaration of terra nullius, the transformation of common property rights into private property rights, implies the exclusion of the right to survival for large sections of society. The realisation that under conditions of limited availability, uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources involves taking away resources from those who need them for survival, has been an underlying element of Indian philosophy. Prudent and restrained use of resources has been viewed as an essential element of social justice.

According to an ancient Indian text, the Ishopanishad:

'A selfish man over utilising the resources of nature to satisfy his own ever increasing needs is nothing but a thief because using resources beyond one's needs would result in the utilisation of resources over which others have a right.'

This relationship between restraint in resource use and social justice was also the core element of Mahatma Gandhi's political philosophy. In his view:

'The earth provides enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.'

The eurocentric concept of property views only capital investment as investment, and hence treats returns on capital investment as the only right that needs protection. Non-Western indigenous communities and cultures recognise that investment can also be of labour or of care and nurturance. Rights in such cultural systems protect investments beyond capital. They protect the culture of conservation and the culture of caring and sharing.

There are major differences between ownership of resources shaped in Europe during the enclosures movement and during colonial takeover, and 'ownership' as it has been practised by tribals and farmers throughout history across diverse societies. The former is based on ownership as private property, based on concepts of returns on investment for profits. The latter is based on entitlements through usufruct rights, based on concepts of return on labour to provide for ourselves, our children, our families, our communities. Usufruct rights can be privately held or held in common. When held in common, they define common property.

Equity is built into usufruct rights since ownership is based on returns on labour. The poor have survived in India in spite of having no access to capital because they have had guaranteed access to the resource base needed for sustenance - common pastures, water, and biodiversity. Sustainability and justice is built into usufructuary rights since there are physical limits on how much one can labour and hence there are limits on returns on investment of labour and return on investment. Inequity is built into private property based on ownership of capital since there is no limit on how much capital one can own and control and invest. "