Common(s) sense for
our universities
A guide to cultivating commons systems and
commoning in and around our universities
Michael Vermeer (10470727)
THESIS ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM: MODELS OF FUTURE SOCIETY Supervisor: Annette Freyberg-Inan
June 2019
Master Thesis Political Sciences UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Preface
1. Introduction
Part 1 – Economic, critical and historical perspectives 2. Common Goods and Common Pool Resources 3. Capitalist capture and the politics of the Common 4. Commons histories – a tale of enclosures
5. Implications for the university Part 2 – Patterns and Systems
6. Commoning - the social dimension of commons 7. Categories and patterns of commoning
8. Social system analysis Part 3 – Commons and Capital
9. Relations between commons and capitalist social systems 10. Structural analysis of the capital-commons relation
11. Commons working within market contexts
12. From commodities to common wealth – aiming for distance between commons and commerce
13. Educating subjects between commons and commercial systems
14. Escaping the power of capitalist capture – potential roles of the university Part 4 – Prefigurative University Commoning
15. An education in university commoning
16. Applying commoning social labour to an urban university 17. The trust university
18. Designing research according to commoners’ value practices 19. Conclusion 4 5 6 9 15 19 25 29 31 33 37 38 42 44 47 55 60 63 67 71 74
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Yvonne and Wilco, for all the care and space that you have given me in the past months so that I could research and finish this thesis. This paper talks a lot about
reproductive labour, and I am well aware that you have put a lot of such loving effort into taking me back in your house. I’m proud that my family has been the place in which I picked up many of the ‘commoning patterns’ I mention in my writings.
I am also hugely grateful for all the support and insights that my fellow commoners at Commoning UvA have given me. Joining this research group with you has changed me forever. Especially, Soheila, you have been so generous with sharing your knowledge and wisdom. Danna, Sepp, Koen, Anna, Max, Geertje, Ernst and Thijs, I have learnt so much working with you and hope to continue commoning with you all.
Preface
Commoning goes down deep in human history in all civilisations. As a practice, it has adapted and transformed itself to stay alive through empires, genocides and waves of enclosures taking away lands, dwellings, rivers and coastlines to put them in the hands of some profitable or military enterprise. It developed across generations, it moved from rural
places to cities and vice versa, always bringing memories and resources of all types which were pulled into new contexts: on shop floors among co-‐workers, in lavatories among women, along rural roads being mended by entire communities. It gave birth to children, it
nurtured them, it healed them, it cared for them, it played with them,
it fed them,
it educated them.
1. Introduction
On a February night in 2015, I rushed to the city centre of Amsterdam to witness an event that changed my life: The Maagdenhuis, central administrative building of the University of Amsterdam, had been occupied by students and staff. Some of them had occupied other university buildings in the weeks and months before in resistance to proposed budget cuts to the humanities faculty. Others had only just joined, like me. Many people harboured a long frustration with a gamut of policies, which undermined their autonomy and rationalised the operations of the university to the detriment of disciplines that could not justify themselves in economistic terms. Apart from a resistance to such neoliberal policies at the UvA, the protests also created a common space to articulate critiques of the broader economic and political trends in society.
I was unsuspecting at the time, just very curious what was going on, but this event and its reverberations in the weeks and years thereafter changed my life. About a year later, I met Soheila, Sepp and Koen, who had organised themselves as an embryonic social group of what was to become Commoning UvA. Their burning question was what would happen at the UvA, if nothing happened. This was, admittedly, a vague question, yet it was a question that set us on an open ended journey of inquiry and experimentation. Meanwhile, things were happening at the UvA. The public pressure, anger and joyful energy of the occupation had translated into three commissions that had a mandate and widespread public support to research the origins of the protest and recommend changes. A commission on Democratisation and Decentralisation proposed four governance models, which were then subjected to a university-‐wide referendum. One of the models was termed ‘the self-‐organising university’ Its ‘organizational design and arrangements of units at the basic level’ would be ‘developed by employees and students.’ The point of departure for this model ‘is as much self-‐management and distributed leadership as possible (Commissie D&D, 2016, p. 136). Three years down the road, such visions have not materialised at the UvA. Yet since I joined Commoning UvA, I have spent much time together with other members researching what a self-‐organising university may mean in theory and practice and how we could transform the university into that direction.
This thesis represents my most sustained account of those inquiries to date. It maintains that universities have the potential to be common goods for society, yet are currently surrounded by systems and infiltrated by mechanisms which extract valuable knowledge for private or individual profit. My central thesis is that a perspective and application of commons systems and patterns of commoning may provide a genuine path forward out of this impasse, by generating possibilities for new alliances between a growing commons ecosystem and university faculties which reorient their mission and internal organisation to serve this commons system. Commoning universities thus carries a double meaning – the patterns of commoning can be applied both internally and externally. By choosing commons as my interpretation of ‘self-‐organised university’ suggested in commission’s report, I ground my proposals for the university in a wider field of expertise and empirical studies.
In part one, therefore, I investigate scholarly traditions surrounding common pool resources and the Common. To gain a more in depth understanding of my subject matter, I enquire how self-‐organising and cooperative efforts break down or persist in relation to capitalist pressures from a historical and environmental perspective and I integrate key insights from feminist economic thought in my analysis. Out of this first inquiry, I sketch a preliminary research and action agenda.
In part two, I delve into the intricacies of commoning as social practice. I discuss its patterns and elaborate upon a systemic perspective on commons. This social systems perspective then allows me to return to the central theme of this thesis, in part three, which is the fraught relation between commons and commercial/capitalist systems. I argue that these should be kept at a distance from each other in order to prevent the enclosure or appropriation of commons. From here, I question how the university can play a role in invigorating commoning practices and producing cooperative ‘commoner’ subjectivities with a commons transition in mind.
For the final part, I take the position that some commoning practices are already present in contemporary universities. Taken as prefigurative instances of what could become a commoning university, I investigate two cases. The first deals with an example in which social
labour of students is mobilised for commoning. They thereby reproduce basic university services as commons and may acquire a sense of what it means to be a commoner. The second case deals with establishing joint research agendas and practices between staff, students and urban commoners. I apply both cases to the UvA and, drawing from the previous theoretical discussions, I present possible difficulties with their implementation. Lastly, I give an indication of other case studies and proposals that could be investigated or experimented with in a similar way.
Throughout my research, I synthesise the latest insights into commoning practices and commons systems with my own experiences and the particular environment of university research and education. The scholarly novelty of this thesis lies in its argumentation for commoning as a new paradigm for universities, as also the application of the theory to case studies which prefigure such a university. The research has its main applicability on social sciences and humanities faculties, since I know these best and they are well covered by the literature which I consult. I have chosen an approach in which I oscillate between critiques and proposals for universities in general and the University of Amsterdam in particular. This is necessary for two reasons. First, much of the literature that I use, deals with analogous trends in university (systems) elsewhere and thus allows me to abstract from the UvA to a more general picture. Second, sometimes the discourse on commoning compels me to locate the exact environment of a commons system and its practices, and in those cases I resort to the UvA if not stated otherwise.
Part 1 – Economic, critical and historical perspectives
2. Common Goods and Common Pool Resources
In this chapter, I recount economic scholarship on common pool resources and discuss the problems with the popularly known account of the tragedy of the commons. Then I present Elinor Ostrom’s enduring contribution to the field of commons scholarship. I argue, however, that her research in the tradition of rational choice theory has several weaknesses and is unsuitable as a general method for my inquiry.
The most prevalent way in which commons are understood in our society is through defining them as common goods. This classification stems from the work of economists Samuelson and Musgrave, who were preoccupied with translating the macro-‐economics of Keynesian welfare states to goods provision in the 1950’s. In capitalist countries after World War Two, states took upon themselves the task to provide large quantities of public services – examples are national healthcare, pension systems, expanded and accessible higher education, and large infrastructure projects. The economists’ efforts to categorise the various types of goods provided a framework to define which goods normatively should be provided as public goods and which ones would need to be private (de Angelis, 2017, p. 37).
They devised a model based on whether goods were rivalrous, ‘in the sense that each individual’s consumption of such a good leads to no subtraction from any other individual’s consumption of that good’ (Samuelson 1954: 386). The other axis consists of the feasibility to exclude others from using the good. Ostrom has more recently revised this model from four binary options to a gradient scale, resulting in the following matrix:
It is important to realise that this matrix only classifies goods on the basis of how they are consumed, and so this does not say anything about the conditions under which they are produced (de Angelis, 2017, p. 37). In this classic economic distinction, the category in which goods fall have normative consequences for their governance or access regime. Lighthouses, pavement, fire protection and public order non-‐rivalrous and non-‐excludable – it therefore does not yield any business model for private enterprise, and the provisioning needs to be facilitated by the state.
Toll or club goods are often non-‐rivalrous up to a certain point, like motorways. Their use by one individual does not subtract from the use by another, up to the point that there is too much ‘consumption’, a situation we know as congestion. For these goods, the economist Buchanan argued that it is best to gate keep their use with pricing mechanisms. In such a way, membership to use a good can be regulated to an optimum (1965). If organisations succeed in building barriers to exclude people from public goods, these can become toll goods. Thus this goods category can be used to extract rent from goods that could easily also be provided in the public realm. In any case, ‘most tangible goods, both durable and non-‐durable, are subtractable goods’ which means that the use by one person subtracts for the amount that
can used by another (de Angelis, 2017, p. 39). If they are also excludable, like a banana that can only be eaten once or a house that owned and occupied by one person, the matrix classifies them as private. If they are non-‐excludable yet subtractible goods, they are common pool resources (CPRs). Fisheries, irrigation systems, forests and alpine pastures are prime examples of goods that are subtractable, prone to depletion upon use, while there is no way to exclude people from using them. For decades, neo classical economic doctrine has argued either for their privatisation, or for a public regulation of access. This ensures that people are excludable – ownership either by private individuals or by the state would prevent resource depletion.
At the heart of this argument to privatise CPS lies of the most cited works on commons, a 1968 paper by Garreth Hardin titled The Tragedy of the Commons. The article describes an economic scenario of an open grazing land for which no individual herdsman has an incentive to limit the number of cattle which they allow to graze on this land. Every single herder is rationally inclined to maximise their amount of cows, and use the land as much as possible. There is no fence around the pasture, and so no-‐one can be stopped from making use of it. This set-‐up inevitably leads to the overgrazing of the land and a breakdown of the ecological services that the pastures originally provided. This parable can be applied to numerous cases, such as the use of ‘fossil’ water from aquifers or overfishing. A solution on the basis of ethical principles is unattainable, Hardin argues, since collective action among these rational farmers is undermined by the famous free rider principle: ’Whenever one person cannot be excluded from the benefits that others will provide, each person is motivated not to contribute to the joint effort, but to free-‐ride on the efforts of others’ (Ostrom, 1990, p. 6). In this atmosphere of generalised distrust, a solution cannot be found in common. According to Hardin such a common solution would even be ‘too horrifying to contemplate’ (1968, p. 1247). The only incentives able to deal with this collective action problem are to either privatise the resource into private property rights or to regulate it through a public institution and state ownership.
Hardin’s account of the commons is flawed in the deployment of the concept of commons, the generalisability of the scenario, and in its empirical accuracy. Firstly, the assumption that every actor is rational in this very narrow self-‐serving way vastly underestimates the cooperative traits that humans can cultivate among each other. We find common self-‐
governed solutions among friends, in co-‐housing (the cleaning schedule) or in project teams. Hardin does not explain why the behavioural patterns of those conditions could not transfer onto a governance of CPRs. Secondly, while he makes this case for the regulation of natural resource CPRs through private or public property, his description is not of a commons but of an open access regime (Dietz, et al., 2002, p.7-‐8; Bollier, 2014, p.3). Commons are precisely a shared
property relation which prevents the resource depletion of a CPR. This misnomer has created much confusion among economists and the general public. His paper should have been called the tragedy of the absence of commons, or tragedy of open access to ungoverned natural resources. Lastly then, this theorisation is typical of broad swiped generalisation through stylised scenarios, instead of meticulous fieldwork and thus lacks empirical grounding, especially if contextualised (Dietz et. al., 2002, p.9).
In decades of empirical studies, Ostrom set out to prove Hardin wrong. She analysed how CPRs are used and maintained. From this she drew the conclusion that these goods could be sustainably used without having to turn them into private goods, or regulate their use by government oversight (1990). Importantly, Ostrom and the research tradition she initiated view commons as a tripartite system consisting of a CPR, a community using the CPR and the institutional framework (norms, rules, sanctions) devised by the community to maintain the CPR. For her commons are ‘a self-‐governed common property arrangement [CPR] in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them’ (1990, p. 20). She abstracted ‘design principles’ for commons from a multitude of case studies to get a sense of the internal workings of commons systems, and what were general factors for their successful governance of CPRs. These are the eight design principles:
1. boundaries are clearly defined (effective exclusion of external unentitled parties); 2. rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources are adapted to local conditions;
3. collective-‐choice arrangements allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-‐making process;
4. effective monitoring is carried out by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
5. there is a scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
6. mechanisms of conflict resolution are cheap and easy to access;
7. the self-‐determination of the community is recognised by higher-‐level authorities; 8. in the case of larger common-‐pool resources, organisation takes the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.
(Ostrom 1990, p. 90; de Angelis, 2017, p. 158)
Since their publication, an entire framework for abstracting institutional regulations has developed around the governance of CPRs, called institutional analysis and development (IAD). It seeks to encapsulate ‘the ways in which institutions operate and change over time. The IAD framework assigns all relevant explanatory factors and variables to categories and locates these categories within a foundational structure of logical relationships’ and under the assumptions of behavioural rational choice theory (McGinnis, 2011, p. 169). This rational choice theory takes the actions of individuals and their inclinations to decide one way or another. It ‘incorporates effects of visual and verbal cues, norms of reciprocity and fairness, and willingness to sanction rule violators’ (ibid.). The framework that Ostrom and fellow researchers have provided is exceptionally detailed, and provides a methodology grounded in empiricism which is exemplary for the discipline of economics and has proven Hardin’s generalising theorems on ownership and goods access wrong. For her efforts, Elinor Ostrom was the first and to date only woman awarded the Swedish Central Bank’s Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009. For a number of reasons, however, I will not use her methodology for my further investigations.
Firstly, rational choice theory is premised upon methodological individualism which foregrounds individual actors and institutional arrangements. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that commons represent a different worldview, that should not be analysed in this way because they question neat arrangements of objects of individuals (2015). Ostrom’s resort to methodological individualism carries within it the assumption that ‘in order for research to be scientific it must base political rationality on economic logics of choice’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017, p. 42). A political rationality is a ‘condition of possibility and legitimacy of its [governing] instruments’ and ‘the field of normative reason from which governing is forged’ (Brown, 2015,
p. 116). I seek to foreground social relations and systems to break with normative scientific standards that reproduce our worldview of rational individuals. In this investigation I assume that individual subjects with their specific choice patters become those subjects through collective processes of subjectification (Lazzarato, 2014). Helfrich and Bollier explain that this rationality ‘points to a dynamic in which my development presupposes the unfolding of others and vice versa. The term thus forms a counterpoint to an (…) orientation in which it is considered "rational" to act at the expense of others’ (2019, p. 85). The name she has in mind for this rationality is Ubuntu rationality. My research methodology needs to reflect these insights. I therefore adopt a methodological understanding that departs from individual choice as the baseline of theorisations in favour of systems analysis, a pattern language of cooperative (commoning) behaviour and a relational definition of humans as commoners, whenever they participate in commons systems.
Secondly, in this investigation, I seek to connect to people’s intuitive experience of commons and commoning, as a central argument of mine is that the majority of humans have practiced it in some way or another. The IAD framework provides a comprehensive and empirically grounded codification of rules and institutions, and yet its mathematical and sign based codification may provide impractical for connecting theoretical insights with practice. McGinnis admits that ‘although designed as a tool to simplify the analytical task confronting anyone trying to understand institutions in their full complexity, over time this [IAD] framework itself has become quite complicated’ (2011, p. 169). Instead, in my case studies I loosely refer to patterns of commoning and the relational dynamics in the commons system. The downside of the approach I choose is that it loses intellectual rigour, and yet for my specific purposes this is fine. While the IAD framework has its own merits, I am not trying to draft a policy paper on the legal and administrative requirements of (access to) commons. Instead, I grapple with patterns of commoning and intend to shed light on how to mobilise overlooked social dynamics for new cooperative cultures.
Thirdly, a blind spot of Ostrom’s literature is that it does not generally evaluate the failures of commons in relation to capital and its enclosures, but rather in terms of ‘combinations of outcomes that can be measured by efficiency, sustainability and equity criteria’ and improved with better designed institutions (Caffentzis, 2004, p. 25). To answer my question, how self-‐
organising and cooperative efforts break down or persist in relation to capitalist pressures, and how the university can play a role in revitalising commoning of privatised services and producing cooperative subjectivities, I need to look at a much more broad scope than just a perspective on goods, such as CPRs and rules to appropriate them.
In the tension between an ‘interpretation of commons as endogenous social systems, and commons as systems influenced by external social forces or capitalist social forces’, I pursue the second direction. This has consequences for my line of analysis: In the tradition of Ostrom, ‘whether a commons fails or succeeds to reproduce itself depends on its management principles. In the second case, it depends on the power relations vis-‐à-‐vis the enclosing (which simply destroys commons) or co-‐opting (which sucks surplus value by using commons as a way to keep social wages down) force of capital’ (de Angelis, 2017, p. 169). In the coming chapters then, I investigate production processes, the reproduction of commons systems and the feedback loops that exist between commons and capital systems from contemporary and historical perspectives and then conceptualise the behaviour of human actors that are formed by commons as they navigate through them and create them.
3. Capitalist capture and the politics of the Common
This chapter discusses the commons in explicit relation to capitalism, through the particular perspective of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the Common. I show that this tradition of scholarship gives numerous inventive ways to critique the appropriation of knowledge and labour at universities. The critiques of Lazzarato, who operates in the same autonomist Marxist tradition as Negri, remain highly significant throughout this paper, yet the concept of the Common proves to be too unwieldy for a fine-‐grained analysis of pathways to transform the university and its surrounding society.
In their efforts to analyse contemporary economic and political structures, Hardt and Negri reframe basic shared functions of our planet and human cooperation as a global Common – using the term in singular, and sometimes capitalised. To distinguish between other uses, I capitalise the term whenever I use Hardt and Negri’s conception. They agree with Ostrom that
‘the common must be managed through systems of democratic participation. We part ways with her, however, when she insists that the community that shares access and decision-‐making must be small and limited by clear boundaries to divide those inside from outside. We have greater ambitions and are interested instead in more expansive democratic experiences that are open to others, and we will have to demonstrate the feasibility of such a new, fuller form of democracy.’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017, p. 99)
They depart from the empirical framework of CPRs in favour of an investigation of potentialities for ridding the Common from privatisation. The Common is understood as both our global environmental system (productive forces of life), and also as the result of humanity’s aggregate creativity, shared culture, language and our ‘immaterial’ production (the productive forces of social/cultural/technical systems). They highlight the parallels between both types of Common and the way in which (neoliberal) capitalism appropriates them: The former are turned into profit through resource extraction, mining, plantations etc., and the latter through a different kind of extraction: for instance, by privatising public or indigenous knowledge through intellectual property rights and turning social interactions into marketable data on platforms like Facebook. In the new economy of immaterial production, capital is not directly involved with production processes, since ‘every intervention of the capitalist in the processes of the production of the Common, just as every time the Common is made property, reduces productivity’ (Hardt, 2010, p. 351). Whereas in industrial capitalism, the factory was the means of production with which capitalists could achieve the accumulation of their capital, the new production occurs as spontaneous ideas, generative interaction or transmission of affects like a storm of public outrage on social media, which then only needs to be ‘captured’.
Some scholars even go a step further in their analysis of this soft core of the ‘common’, which is surrounded by processes of capitalist capture and accumulation. Lazzarato argues that the productive interactions that humans forge together with machines in a ‘machinic’ whole are impossible to account for in the traditional Marxist and economic distinction of labour (workers) and means of production (factories, machines, raw material etc.). This machinic dimension of production arises for instance in the interaction between driver and car, or an office worker with a computer, the data cataloguing system accessed through the computer
and the built office environment in which these interactions take place. Humans and their surroundings are jointly integrated into a production in which both are cogs in a larger productive and machinic whole. In contemporary capitalism, ‘children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.’ have also become integrated in such machinic processes. As producers of data, they provide surplus labour for free, which is accumulated and sold for profit (2014, p. 49). ‘In these circumstances, users (of unemployment insurance, television, public and private services, etc.), like all consumers, tend to become "employees." "Consumer labor" epitomizes a productivity that no longer adheres to the "physico-‐social definition of labor."’ (ibid.). This user activity, captured and repackaged as data sets, is an evocative example for Hardt and Negri’s account of the Common.
The preferred way in which capital accumulates this initially shared productivity is by extracting rent, for instance through patenting knowledge and then demanding rent for usage (Hardt, 2010). In cognitive capitalism, there is an ‘external position of capital with respect to the production of the Common’ (ibid., p. 351). In this line of reasoning, the Common serves as a potential source of emancipation. ‘Through the increasing centrality of the Common in capitalist production -‐ the production of ideas, affects, social relations, and forms of life -‐ are emerging the conditions and weapons for a communist project’ (Hardt, 2010, p. 355). Since if we can find ways to cut off extractive circuits surrounding production in the Common, and attribute this shared productivity to all who were involved, we are moving beyond this capitalist capture. This possibility implies new strategies for popular and transformative struggles in which the ‘multitude’ of people involved in production in common recognise their mutual interests – from indigenous communities bent on preserving their knowledge and practices, to farmers protecting communal seed commons, to researchers publishing their knowledge open source, to cultural workers or Uber drivers forming social unions (2017). In sum, the framing of the Common in Hardt and Negri’s work serves to articulate a language of common ownership and democracy on a much larger scale.
This perspective sheds an interesting light on the productivity located in universities. If the productivity of machinic assemblages, such as research units really is a shared affair, what then are the justifications for a stark hierarchy in pay-‐scale and job security between tenure track professors on the one hand and PhD and post docs on the other? Lazzarato addresses
this question by expounding on a second power mechanism in which human subjectivity is melded together. Not only are there machinic de-‐individualising pressures in which individuals become mere cogs and data, but subject formation also needs a corresponding process of social subjection. This latter power consists of narratives and discourse that delineate categories and hierarchies. It ‘mobilizes signifying semiotics, in particular language, aimed at consciousness and mobilizes representations with a view to constituting an individuated subject ("human capital")’ which is marked for instance by a professional position of post doc or tenured professorship (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 39). While universities have historically developed this hierarchy of seniority under other discursive traditions, for instance etatism (organising hierarchy like a state), these categories are now mobilised in a widespread social subjection that demands that we make the most of our human capital. This redeployment of traditional hierarchies in market terms legitimises the stark difference in pay-‐scale and job security at contemporary universities.
For universities, another important strand of argumentation using the concept of the Common lies in the critique of intellectual property rights. These days, one can argue that they function as a form of capitalist capture of publicly funded research. The soft core of un(-‐der-‐) capitalised work at universities is surrounded by layers of capture mechanisms bent on monetising it. This ranges from extraction of social relations data on Academia.edu and ResearchGate.com, to monopolistic publishing conglomerates like Elsevier that categorise and rank research and extract a rent by turning their databeses into for-‐pay club goods. In some cases, the capitalist capture surrounding universities even assumes a geographic spatial form, comprised of start-‐ups and spin offs encircling university campuses. Wendy Brown writes about this trend in the context of American universities:
… on the horizon are new “enterprise zones” encircling public universities, where businesses large and small will make direct use of university goods, including research, technology, consultants, and cheap student labor. Not only does this vision pose a striking contrast with the classic university-‐town ambiance of cafés, bookshops, pubs, and thrift stores, it literalizes as it spatializes the domination of the university by the needs and purposes of capital and spatializes as well the merging of business, state, and academe. (2015, p. 198)
So all in all, this angle of looking at common production before it is individualised and marketed yields interesting critiques that are applicable to universities. Yet I will not use the term common in the sense of the Common, since its scope is too broad. It has a number of marked downsides, which are addressed by an emphasis on patterns, boundaries and local specificity of practices. I am more interested in investigating a commons transition at and around universities from the perspective of commons as social systems, centring the roles of reproductive labour and an awareness that commons are comprised of and constituted by commoning practices. Before I turn to commoning practices, however, I find it important to draw a connection between contemporary capture of commons production and its historic precedents. The following chapter will demonstrate the salience of thinking the dynamics between commons and capitalism in terms of ‘enclosures’.
4. Commons histories – a tale of enclosures
Commons have been established, practiced, experienced and theorised differently during the ages. In this subchapter I touch upon the pre-‐capitalist history of this type of social system and their enclosures through privatisation. I argue that framing pre-‐capitalist commons as backwards and socially repressive through Marxist or modernising perspectives is not justified. In order to reimagine what it means to be a commoner today, that is: to be a part of a commons, we can draw on a long lineage of commons to demonstrate the viability of such social systems for people and the environment. Based on this assessment, we can rid the term of its negative connotations by remembering how democratic values were practiced as part of systems of common property ownership in the past.
The English word commons originally refers to collectively owned pastures, forests and ponds, from which villagers throughout the countryside sustained their livelihoods for a large part. The Magna Carta, a set of feudal rights recognised by the English monarch in 1215, ‘restricted the King’s absolute power and settled a number of long-‐standing disputes in early thirteenth-‐ century English society’, notably between the court and local aristocracy (Weston & Bollier, 2013, p. 107). It was soon followed by the Charter of the Forest in 1217, which guaranteed and reaffirmed the right for free men to use forests and pastures as their commons throughout England.
The rights were essentially rights of subsistence, because the commoners depended on the forests for food, fuel, and economic security through their traditional rights of pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing), and turbary (cutting of turf for fuel), among other practices. (ibid, from: Linebaugh, 2008)
According to Linebaugh, we should interpret the Charter of the Forest not as a listing of rights but a grant of perpetuities. As long as the collective labour processes with obscure-‐sounding names continued to use and maintain the commons, this law would grant these practices and their locally crafted rules a degree of legitimacy and protection from state terror (2008). In a time marked by feudal hierarchies, this less well known addition to the Magna Carta ensured free men and their communities a measure of autonomy from aristocratic wealth accumulation which we usually associate with feudalism. This is just one local and Anglo-‐ centric example of historical commons rights and practices. In the Netherlands these social forms were called meent, and in German speaking lands they were called Allmende. In fact, these types of common land tenure existed across the entire globe and they supported a range of egalitarian and democratic cultural practices. With the entwined rise of capitalism and colonialism, many forms of commons – in Europe and overseas – were enclosed, privatised or colonised. By recognising the enormous regression that took place during that violent process, we can recuperate valuable lessons for today’s visons of commoning in society and the university. In the next paragraphs I will substantiate this regression in opposition to narratives about progress.
Beyond Europe, the pre-‐colonial Americas and Africa were home to many civilisations in which commons formed a core source of sustenance – both in terms of resources and for sustaining cultural practices and social continuity. In many of these societies, the concept of private property was limited to a small number of objects, if it even existed at all. In these commons based systems, a gendered division of labour and governing, with men in power, women in subordinate positions and the existence of trans or intersex people erased, was less frequent or ‘necessary’ than in (early) capitalist and colonial societies. When the Native American Montagnais-‐Naskapi people encountered French settlers, the latter were impressed by their sense of cooperation ‘and indifference to status, but they were scandalized by their “lack of
morals”’ (Federici, 2004, p. 111; from: Leacock 1981:34—38). Morals for these French merchant-‐settlers and traders meant French upper class standards of private property, male superiority and monogamous marriage. Jesuits were instructed to ‘educate’ the Montagnais-‐ Naskapi people with French morality so that they would become reliable partners in the fur trade. Thus Native American men were enticed ‘to provide themselves with some chiefs, and bring “their” women to order’, by instilling profound inequalities upheld by violence in marriage and between adults and their children (ibid.). The women who resisted were to be branded as ‘possessed by the devil’ -‐ a move reminiscent in many ways of the witch hunt of independent-‐minded women on similar grounds in Europe.
This is just one of many examples of how the shift from a common property regime to one that produces for (global) markets actually entailed a violent repression of values such as equality, reciprocity, equal standing and co-‐governance prevalent in societies structured around commons. Linebaugh highlights these values as closely related to re-‐productive capacities of commons. ‘The commons of the past has not been an exclusively male place. In fact, it is one very often where the needs of women and children come first.’ Decision-‐making and responsibility often also lay in hands of women ‘from the neighborhoods of industrial slums to the matriarchy of the Iroquois confederation to the African village’ (Bollier, 2015, p. 17). This is because ‘in a commons, care work or “affective labor”’ -‐ also called reproductive labour -‐ ‘is primary’ (ibid.). In late medieval Europe, common property regimes and the practices that maintained these forms of collective local ownership played an important role in ensuring women’s autonomy:
The commons were the material foundation upon which peasant solidarity and sociality could thrive. All the festivals, games, and gatherings of the peasant community were held on the commons. The social function of the commons was especially important for women, who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on them for their subsistence, autonomy, and sociality. (Federici, 2004, p. 71)
While there is abundant historical evidence of this emancipatory function of commons, they also should not be romanticised. Hardt and Negri warn that we should not yearn for the re-‐
creation of pre-‐capitalist social forms because in many cases they were ‘characterized by disgusting, patriarchal, hierarchical modes of division and control’ (2017, p. 98). And a regress to any pre-‐capitalist commons is illusory for another reason. All contemporary existing commons systems (except maybe for those that exist among fully isolated tribal groups) have somehow developed alongside or in reaction to the capitalist system (Federici, 2011).
Like land reclamations [by landless Brazilian peasants], or the formation of tontines [autonomous, self-‐managed, women-‐ made banking systems in Senegal], these practices are the expression of a world where communal bonds are still strong. But it would be a mistake to consider them something pre-‐political, “natural,” or simply a product of “tradition.” After repeated phases of colonization, nature and customs no longer exist in any part of the world, except where people have struggled to preserve them and reinvent them. (ibid., p. 5)
The Euro-‐Atlanctic cultural memory of these pre-‐capitalist social forms and their contemporary cousins has been cast in a negative light, though. Especially narratives of progress, to which both liberal and Marxist theorists have subscribed, commit this fallacy. This becomes apparent in the conception of progress for Marx, for example, in which he posited that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a necessary and ultimately good one since this would bring socialism or communism closer. He is influenced here by a teleological view of history – a progression with a clear goal which justifies earlier ruptures. As key aspect of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, he describes original accumulation of capital, the process by which the British commons were privatised with fences to provide merchant elites with a source of wealth which they could subsequently invest in more projects of (colonial) enclosure, accumulation and industrialisation.
From a feminist or de-‐colonial perspective, it is not at all apparent that Marx’ Hegelian, teleological perspective holds. Federici challenges Marx, arguing that he ‘could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women’ (2004, p. 13). She points at numerous ways in which the promotion of private ownership and enclosure of commons led to reduced autonomy for peasants and a privatisation of reproductive work, so that men could pursue productive in factories or the
exploitation of nature on an industrial scale. This relegation of care work into the service of productive labour for the benefit of global markets, as the Montagnais-‐Naskapi example shows, was pursued through redrawing boundaries between subjects and their roles. In this specific case, men were to hunt for fur and build hierarchical governing structures for reliable trade, while women should shoulder reproductive tasks of child bearing and rearing. This division was to be explicitly hierarchical and gendered. Federici argues that racialized hierarchies were introduced in similar efforts to break possibilities for solidarity and cultures of commoning. She observes that racial lines of division were only drawn, enforced and culturally solidified in the 18th Century, after plantation owners in the Americas had experienced multiple rebellions in which proletarian white indentured workers had allied with black and native American slaves against their common exploiters, for instance on Barbados and Bermuda and in Virginia (2004, pp. 106-‐107).
More generally speaking then, she argues that capitalism could only expand through an ‘accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat’ (ibid., p. 63). That is why it is hard to maintain that the process of original accumulation, with the institution and ‘accumulation’ of these differences, was a good or necessary step towards a socialist end.
Critics of pre-‐capitalist commons who do not subscribe to the Marxist end or purpose to history (telos) have other grounds for their historical objections to or contemporary marginalisation of the commons as viable social form. A commonly levelled argument for the transition from commons to capitalist social systems is that we owe a lot to the technological innovation of industrialisation. The violent enclosure of commons and establishment of market relations increased productivity and innovation of various sectors by enormous amounts. A fine grained analysis of resource systems and their social effects helps to counter these modernising positions. Two arguments can be made against the modernising narrative against commons, one focussed on social inequalities and the other on environmental degradation. As prime example, we could focus on agricultural output in the transition from farming on common land to sixteenth and seventeenth commercialised and privatised agriculture.