What follows is the concluding essay in Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance PM Press, 2014.
DEAR KEVIN, MALAV, AND SILVIA,
I said that I would write you about “the invisibility of the commons.” I just have three literary examples in mind. One’s from the 1930s, another’s from the 1790s, and then there’s one from the 1940s.
George Orwell wrote an essay; “Marrakech,” in 1939. He wrote, “People with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.” His theme is racism and invisibility, though we would add to this obvious and unexamined misogyny. “The file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it.” This is the imperialist eye; it sees product, product, product, while the producer simply vanishes. Orwell testifies to this eye: gold from South Africa, tea from Ceylon, tin from Malaya, rubber from Congo, aluminum from Jamaica, on and on they march carrying the wealth of the Third World to be transmuted into the superiority of western economic “development,” if not the white-skin privilege of imperialist entoptics. And still they hobble on. But where does the firewood come from? Orwell does not ask. By what right, by what custom, was the firewood gathered? What struggles had preserved this practice?
Yet this is the seventh chapter of Magna Carta, the widow’s estovers, meaning social stability required that the sovereign recognize her right to wood in the “reasonable common.” In other words there are centuries of struggle preserving the practice, and it provides an essential principle in legal tradition. Did Orwell not know this? “One day a poor old creature,” Orwell continues, “who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman, that is to say as a beast of burden.” Orwell does not talk to her, the money is in her hand. “Gratitude”: how characteristic of imperialism’s attitude, forever doing good deeds! Orwell projects the racism, the misogyny, into his description, but he does not take the opportunity to talk with the commoners. Where does the wood come from? What fires will it fuel? What children will it warm, or aged parents? Why did he not converse with her?
That is my first example. It points to an attitude characteristic of many who fulfill subaltern roles in the imperialist regime, the belief that they are doing good to people who are basically beasts. This attitude can be maintained only by refusing to engage, or to talk, with the people. “We must ever believe a lie when we see with, not through, the eye,” said William Blake.
The second is similar, and it comes from Book IX of William Wordsworth’s Prelude, the exalted autobiographical poem of English Individualism and Romanticism which records the growth of the poet’s mind in the midst of revolution and counter-revolution. I quote from the 1805 version. It describes an oft-quoted encounter that occurred in the summer of 1792 when he visited Michel-Arnaud Beaupuy who participated in local political discussions in Blois, and its provincial club Les Amis de la Constitution (Jacobins) in the transition in the national discussion which was moving the country from limited constitutional monarchy to radical republicanism and the downfall of monarchy. Beaupuy supported the Jacobin republicans and later became a military hero dying (1796) in defense of the Revolution. The young men rode their horses through the beech forests of chateau country, Wordsworth dreaming of chivalry until brought up short by Beaupuy.
And when we chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,
Who crept along fitting her languid self
Unto a heifer’s motion — by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood
Of solitude — and at the sight my friend
In agitation said, ‘Tis against that
Which we are fighting! I with him believed
Devoutly that a spirit was abroad
Which could not be withstood; that poverty,
At least like this, would in a little time
Be found no more; that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The industrious and the lowly child of toil
(All institutes forever blotted out
That legalized exclusion, empty pomp
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power
Whether by edict of the one or few);
And finally, as sum and crown of all,
Should see the people having a strong hand
In making their own laws — whence better days
To all mankind.
Wordsworth’s poetic transition in these lines begins with the observed image of a starving, overworked, young cow-keeper and goes to idealist hopes of the abolition of poverty and the achievement of self-government by the people. Like Orwell, the young revolutionaries do not stop to talk to the worker, and instead, mixed the warmth of pity, they came to their own grandiose conclusions without talking to the young woman.
Babeuf defended peasants, such as this young woman, from encroachments by the seigneurs, such as the countess de la Myre who exploited the droit de voirie (timber rights along the highways). The issue here of course is not estovers but herbage or pasturage, perhaps the central common right of all. Take it away, and you take roast beef and milk away. Both the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution attacked customary rights in the land representing a great theft of the resources of one class — commoners — by another — privatizers. Wordsworth sees the girl as poor not as commoner. He saw dependence. Had he talked with her he might have understood her independence. Why didn’t he?
The blind spot here becomes a typical element in the bourgeois vision. The bourgeois revolution, remember, is not only a sweeping away of monarchy (“empty pomp,” “sensual state an cruel power”), it is a vast and massive expropriation of common lands and customs of commoning. That is the “spirit” which was “abroad.” So when Beaupuy says to Wordsworth “‘Tis against that which we are fighting” we wonder what is the “that” that he means? Is it the “that” of hunger? Is it the “that” of knitting furiously in order to compete with the new framework-knitting machine? Or is it the “that” of the commoner with her ancient, indefeasible relationship to land? Halsbury’s Laws of England expresses it this way, “the interest which a commoner has in a common is, in the legal phrase, to eat the grass with the mouths of his cattle.” Wordsworth does not explore the ambivalence. Wordsworth was in Blois that summer, not to visit with Beaupuy, but to see his lover, Annette, who was pregnant. When Wordsworth leaves France a few month’s later, he left not only the radical moment of the revolution but also his responsibilities as a father and lover.
The third example of the invisibility of the commons comes from C.L.R. James whose Notes on Dialectics meant much to the comrades of Detroit (the Johnson-Forest Tendency of the Fourth International) when they received it in its first form as carbon copies of a typescript sent from Reno, Nevada, in 1948. The Notes attempted to finish what Lenin and Trotsky started, namely the application of Hegel’s dialectics, and in particular the unity of opposites, to the history of the labor movement. At every stage in its history the labor movement meets its opposite which it must overcome. This was the philosophical grounding for the critique of the notion of the revolutionary party. It jammed philosophy against history and history against philosophy in discussion of the French Revolution and the English Revolution. The Notes became a central document to the postwar development of small groups of Marxist revolutionaries in Europe, America, and the Caribbean which in turn welcomed the movement of Third World liberation and working-class insurgency in the First World of the period 1955-1968. And yet it too yields a blind spot To me, studying the Notes years later in 1981, what was liberating was the unity in the concept of the labor movement from the 1640s (at least) to the 1940s. He apprehended this unity against the stadialist categories of bourgeois positivism (feudalism-capitalism-socialism) in inevitable progression but with ideas derived from dialectics — notion, idea, understanding, cognition, contradiction. Despite this powerful speculation, the commons was also invisible to James.
Why was James in Reno, Nevada? Like many he was there to establish residency in order to obtain a no-fault divorce, the only state in the USA where this was possible at the time. He stayed at a ranch near Reno, “the most beautiful spot you ever saw. But it belongs to an Indian tribe and is not commercialized or built-up in any way.” For a time he worked as a handyman on the ranch, helping in the garden and with the irrigation. His fellow workers were sailors, cowboys, Filipinos, Mexican, Chinese, and Anglos (as we might say now) from the Midwest. He was drawn to them, “the handsomest men I have ever seen in my life,” in contrast to the indigenous people, “The Indians down here are short, thick, dumpy.” And against all these stereotypes he recognized “the people here look on me as some freak.” He didn’t socialize much. He read and he wrote, in September, ten thousand words in one day. From August to November 1948 C.L.R. translated Guerin on the French Revolution and composed his Notes on Dialectics. The ranch was on a lake, Pyramid Lake.
His critique of state capitalism was written in surroundings of a struggle, invisible to him, of a guerrilla war for the common lands of the Paiute. Denis Dworkin, a social historian at the University of Nevada (Reno), wrote of this episode in History Workshop and appreciates its ironies. “As a Marxist and a British imperial subject, it is certainly plausible that James would view the Paiutes as shaped by the same world-historical process of capitalist imperialism as he himself. Yet aside from his acknowledging that the ranch’s location was on an Indian reservation, there is not a shred of evidence that James concerned himself with its inhabitants, let alone the land conflict.”
Silver was struck in Virginia City in 1857. Cattle ate the pinon nuts, so the ranchers cut the pinon trees, as indirect attack on the indigenous people. In 1860 white men abducted two Indian women. The Indians fought back at Pyramid Lake that year. Sarah Winnemucca tells the story in Life Among the Paiutes (1883), said to be the first book by a Native American woman. A year later, Jack Wilson, better known as Wovoka, who had worked for a white rancher cutting trees for mine shafts, cord wood, and fence posts, had his vision that “the Messiah is coming to earth again and will put the Indians in possession of the country” and began his dance, “the Friendship Dance of the Indian Race” as he called it but known to the world as the Ghost Dance, shuffling along inch by inch, men and women in a circle with fingers inter locked, bodies painted in red and white pigments in order to eliminate illness and bring the dead closer. It was this dance that so frightened the USA that it massacred the Plains Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890. The dance was held in late spring in association with the fish runs.
Mary Austin wrote in 1924, “The Indian problem is of world dimension.” She wrote feelingly of the Paiutes and their defeat at Bitter Lake, “they died in its waters, and the land filled with cattlemen and adventurers for gold.” In The Land of Little Rain (1903) she described one of the ways they commoned. “In the river are mussels, and reeds that have edible white roots, and in the soddy meadows tubers of joint grass; all these at their best in the spring. On the slope the summer growth affords seeds; up the steep the one leafed pines, an oily nut. That was all they could really depend on, and that only at the mercy of the little gods of frost and rain. For the rest it was cunning against cunning, caution against skill, against quacking hordes of wild-fowl in the tulares, against prong horn and bighorn and deer. You can guess, however, that all this warring of rifles and bowstrings, this influx of overlording whites, had made game wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted. You can surmise also, for it was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became in turn the game of the conquerors.”
Their land was surveyed at the time of the Civil War and President Grant gave this reservation legal status in 1874. Mary Austin describes the actuality of the enclosure: “the beginning of winds along the foot of Coso, the gathering of clouds behind the high ridges, the spring flush, the soft spread of wild almond bloom on the mesa…these are the Paiute’s walls and furnishings.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1941 published a study of The Northern Paiute Indians by Ruth Underhill. “Just as the white man looks for a job, so that he can support his family, the Indian looked to the resources of the country for enough to support his family.” But it’s not the same at all — the job-seeker finds a wage only with a boss, the Paiute finds resources only if these are conserved. Anyway, in 1941 the white man, it is true, found the job, but it was the Indian woman who was expert at subsistence. Another study of the Paiute reports that “gathering firewood became part of the ceremony for a young Indian girl when she became a woman.” Like other proletarians, the young Paiute in the 1940s worked in the defense plants. In an experience described by N. Scott Momaday in House Made of Dawn (1966) the proletarian subjectivity of the California defense plants could not eliminate the native hunger, the metaphysics, for land.
A year after C.L.R. left Nevada, the New Yorker writer, A.J. Liebling, visited the Pyramid Lake Ranch, for much the same reason C.L.R. had also established a temporary residence in the “divorce haven.” But, unlike C.L.R. who Zeus-like was hurling theoretical thunderbolts through the clouds of the Cold War, Liebling, a food and sports writer, was utterly absorbed by the dispute of the Paiute that he returned with an interest in the legality of the various claims and in the Paiute in general. He wrote a series of articles published in 1955 about the Paiute Indians and “the longest running Indian war in U.S. history.” The lake was home to a unique species of fish, the kwee-wee, whose spawning run was the major annual event for the native people living there. These “the kwee-wee eaters” as the Paiute were called settled around this bounty about a thousand years ago. They spoke an Aztec language.
Their principal oppoment was Senator Pat McCarran who for as long as anyone could remember introduced bills into the U.S. Senate in favor of a few squatters on the last remaining lands of the Paiute. Six hundred acres were left and in 1948 the Paiute moved back into them but found them dry as a bone.
Their neighbors claimed water rights and had cut the water off. In this context the anti-communism of McCarran takes on deeper meanings for not only did he admire notorious international anti-communists like the Franco and Chiang Kai-Shek, in the U.S. he was a close ally of Joe McCarthy and the sponsor of the 1952 McCarran Act which specifically denied entry into the U.S. of Communists, “subversives,” and “fellow travellers.” In 1985 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that belief that Nevada was aboriginal could not be litigated, denying any claim at all to land which the Paiute had inhabited for a millennium.
C.L.R. was examined under the Internal Security Act of 1950. In 1952 C.L.R. was imprisoned in Ellis Island. His appeal was rejected under the McCarran Act on the grounds that James was a Communist. He was not, though he was a Marxist revolutionary, but the distinction was lost on most people at the time, including the judge in the case. James wrote while in Ellis Island awaiting deportation that the main aim of the Department of Justice was “the extermination of the alien as a malignant pest.”
Senator McCarran wanted to destroy the Indian commons and he wanted to prevent the entry of communists into the USA. Quibble as James might that he was not a Communist as in Communist Party member, he certainly was an opponent of capitalism and an advocate of working-class revolution. As such, however, he did not appreciate the commoning inherent in the Paiute way of life, even though he sat in the midst of the struggle for it. Writing on the edge of Pyramid Lake, neither the muse of Winnemucca nor the ghosts of Wovoka and the dance that that came out of defeat, disease, famine, and confinement to send shivers through the federal government– none apparently affected James. As James, Grace Lee, and Cornelius Castoriadis wrote in Facing Reality (1958), “a spectre is haunting Marxism.” Now a spectre haunts the self-activity of the working class — the spectre of the commons.
To be fair to James, in 1971 he published in the student radical journal, Radical America, an essay from his The Gathering Forces in which he quoted D.K. Chisiza, a leader of the independence movement of Tanzania, from Realities of African Independence (1961). Why won’t Africans settle down into industrial employment? “The loneliness which comes close to being a torture.” Life in the village was based on “mutual aid and cooperation.” “Like land, it is the equivalent of banks, savings, insurance policies, old age pensions, national assistance schemes, and social security.” Or, as we might, the commons.
•
So. There are three examples of the invisibility of the commons. What obstructed the vision of these otherwise acute not to say profound observers, Orwell, Wordsworth, and James? I do not know for sure. What are your ideas? All I’ve come up with is that each failed to engage in conversation, in a true dialectics, where each party in the discussion is changed by it. Orwell might have found a way to ease the burden of kindling, learned the language, and taken an interest in the lives of the women, and thereby reported for us the origins of the wood. Wordsworth too might have stayed on in France (I think of Samuel Beckett living a peasant’s life in a dreary French village during World War II) helped out with Annette and his child and learned where milk and roast beef came from even in times of scarcity. And James? Would he have had to forsake his intellectual penetration as a Marxist thinker and his contributions to the pan-African revolt already in embryonic form by including the struggle for the indigenous common?
We must ask, too, how is it that we are able to see these commons when they did not? Considerable scholarship has unearthed the customary rights in the taking of forest wood for fuel, and it has made us sensitive to so-called “wood theft” as a form of commoning. Likewise, with the custom of herbage, or grazing commons, where the scholarly literature is vast and extends arourd the world. As for the indigenous commons, it has become a subject of international law even for those who were blind to the struggles initiated at Pine Ridge (1973) or Chiapas (1994).
The usufructs of each of these examples — fuel, protein, and land — are different, just as their ecologies are specific and just as the social relations of each are separate. What is gained by seeing them as commoning? An answer arises in the universality of expropriation, and a remedy to these crimes must be found therefore in reparations for what has been lost and taken.
Yours for commons for all,
Peter
August2008