Nate Ela, Reclaiming the Commons, Activating Space: A Dual Genealogy
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Nate Ela PhD Candidate, Sociology University of Wisconsin – Madison 1st IASC Thematic Conference on the Urban Commons Bologna, November 6, 2015
![Reclaiming the Commons:
Genealogy of a Sociolegal Imaginary
[Summer 2015]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Nate Ela, Reclaiming the Commons, Activating Space: A Dual Genealogy
- 1. Reclaiming the Commons, Activating Space: A Dual Genealogy Nate Ela PhD Candidate, Sociology University of Wisconsin – Madison 1st IASC Thematic Conference on the Urban Commons Bologna, November 6, 2015
- 2. Reclaiming the Commons: Genealogy of a Sociolegal Imaginary [Summer 2015]
- 3. Urban Agriculture and the Problem of Property: Tracing the Roots [Spring 2015]
- 4. Reclaiming the Commons, Activating Space: A Dual Genealogy Nate Ela PhD Candidate, Sociology University of Wisconsin – Madison 1st IASC Thematic Conference on the Urban Commons Bologna, November 6, 2015
- 5. Dunn
- 9. “reclaiming the commons” as sociolegal imagination Longue-durée genealogy activating unused space (and people) as social practice of &
- 10. • collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures (or of resistance against the undesirable). • animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology. Sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff)
- 11. • collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures (or of resistance against the undesirable). • animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in legal technology Sociolegal imaginations (Jasanoff, adapted)
- 12. Diggers
- 13. Diggers
- 14. Diggers
- 15. Diggers
- 16. Locke “Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use.”
- 17. T. Jefferson T. Paine Two Thomases
- 19. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. Jefferson to Madison, Oct. 28, 1785 The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent.
- 20. Paine
- 21. Young
- 24. Peter Kropotkin
- 27. Continuities? • Private property as a problem • Linking idle land and idle (or hungry) people • Reclaiming = reimagining • “Land-fix” and “Tax-fix” strands • as alternatives • as conditional • as combined • Mapping and counting acres, to estimate production
- 28. Discontinuities? • God and natural rights… • Role for the state • Role of taxation • Focus on inequality and poverty
- 31. Reclaiming the commons Connecting idle people with idle land Tax + Transfer Relief gardens Allotments Community gardens Garden Cities VLGAs Jefferson: fundamental right to work earth Paine Agrarian Justice Social security George: Land Value Tax Food Stamps Victory Gardens Idle land as criminal Diggers Locke: Land reverts to commons Young’s plan WWI Gardens Land Trusts Gleaning Parish tax / parish rolls Claiming Waste Land / Activating Space Kropotkin 16901785179718011830s187918921890s164919171931193519421980s20091970s
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Reclaiming the Commons: A Genealogy of a Sociolegal Imaginary.” But the basic story is similar to what was promised, if you looked at the abstract.
- Reclaiming the Commons: A Genealogy of a Sociolegal Imaginary.” But the basic story is similar to what was promised, if you looked at the abstract.
- Thanks for being here. So, my title changed. It’s now this:
- Reclaiming the Commons: A Genealogy of a Sociolegal Imaginary.” But the basic story is similar to what was promised, if you looked at the abstract.
- Over the past few years I’ve been doing fieldwork with gardeners and farmers who are looking for access to land in Chicago, and I sometimes I hear people talk about reclaiming the commons. Ken Dunn, for example, told me about how he created a community garden by dumping a bunch of compost on a vacant lot used by drug dealers. He explained that private land left unused “reverts to the commons.” And he cited John Locke.
- Social scientists also talk about urban agriculture as reclaiming the commons. David Harvey has cited community gardens as prime examples of “a social practice of commoning.”
- Nathan McClintock, another geographer, writes that urban ag “produces new commons, by returning – at least partially – the means of production to urban populations.” He searched Oakland for “fallow, vacant, or unused commons that could potentially produce food for the city.”
- There’s lots lots more I’ve been trying to think about what work it does to say this is “reclaiming the commons”? In this paper, which is very much a work in progress, I ask what we would find if we trace the historical roots of “reclaiming the commons” both as idea and practice.
- The notion is to sketch a longue durée genealogy of “reclaiming the commons” as a sociolegal imaginary. That means looking over a long time period for this:
- collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures (or of resistance against the undesirable). animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology. Legal technology
- So, taking a concept developed by Sheila Jasanoff, a science and technology studies scholar, and focusing on legal technology. In this case, legal ideas around the commons. Genealogy, following Foucault, basically just means let’s not assume there’s an origin, or one glorious continuous tradition, and instead look for discontinuities, in order to better reflect on, and inform, our current tactics.
- I pick up the thread on St. George’s Hill in Surrey, about 20 miles outside of London.
- . Today, it’s a golf course.
- In 1649, Gerrard Winstanley and his followers occupied some common land, to protest the enclosure of common lands. They weren’t reasserting the customary rights of commoning – like grazing and gathering wood and fuel. Instead, they dug up the commons and planted crops. They became known as the Diggers.
- The Diggers put out a manifesto laying out their vision. Winstanley, a radical Protestant, said god “made the Earth to be a Common Treasury.” He worked out from this premise. God “is mightily dishonoured” when people buy and sell land. Landowners get it “by Oppression, or Murder, or Theft,” and so violate the seventh and eighth commandments. The manifesto calls for a general strike, saying laborers dispossessed their of rights to the commons shouldn’t work for landlords, but should instead cultivate the commons and share the fruits of their labor. The revolt didn’t last long. They were kicked off the land within a few months – but the episode provides one imagination of what it means to reclaim the commons.
- At the time, John Locke was sixteen, a student in London. Maybe he heard about the Diggers; there’s some eventually would’ve seen their manifesto. His thinking about property and problems of enclosure responded to the same radical shifts to England’s legal and physical landscape that the Diggers were trying to resist. In his second treatise on government, Locke started off much like Winstanley: “God gave the world to men in common.” He moved on to his famous proviso, framing the basic problem of turning common land into private property: Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. At some point, there wouldn’t be enough remaining for “the unprovided.” That’s the rub. Locke didn’t really propose a solution, beyond suggesting that surplus property reverts to the commons, since “Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.” (That’s what Ken Dunn was getting at.)
- A century later, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine each proposed a solution. Here’s Jefferson.
- Jefferson came to it while visiting the royal chateau at Fontainebleau. He was walking among lands reserved for the king’s hunt, and met a poor woman. She said she often couldn’t find work, and couldn’t buy bread to eat.
- That night, he wrote to James Madison: “Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.” The logic was familiar: The earth was given as a common stock; and “if to encourage industry we allow appropriation of land, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed.” How would that work? He didn’t fully think it through, since in the U.S. the problem wasn’t as bad yet as in Europe. It was “too soon yet” to “to say that every man who cannot find employment, but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent.” But Jefferson basically imagined a “land fix” to Locke’s problem.
- A dozen years later, Thomas Paine imagined an alternative. Paine also saw land as “the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race.” If it weren’t for agriculture, it might have stayed that way, but with cultivation came “the idea of landed property.” Paine said people dispossessed by cultivation had a right to a share of the natural property that ought to have been theirs. “Every proprietor… of cultivated land, owes to the community a groundrent.” This would go to a national fund, that would support benefits for the elderly and a one tie payment to young adults. It would share the value of commons without “diminishing or deranging” current holdings. It would keep people from being burdens to society. And it might help prevent revolutions. Traces of these two visions – either reconnect people with land, or tax it and transfer the value – have appeared in later visions.
- Really quickly: in the paper I discuss some of these visions: a vision by Arthur Young, an English agrarian expert, to put the poor on land to get them off parish rolls (and thereby reduce taxes).
- How that and similar visions informed allotment gardens in England, and workers’ gardens in France, and Germany
- A vision by American social reformer Henry George of creating a on the value of land.
- A vision by anarchist Peter Kropotkin of how intensive agriculture could feed a city in revolt, and might’ve allowed the Paris Commune of 1871 to succeed;
- And some ideas that combined parts of these visions: Ebenezer Howard’s proposal for garden cities, where residents would have allotments, and all land would be held in trust and assessed a ground rent.
- Experiments with vacant lot gardening and farm colonies for the unemployed in U.S. and England in the years after the panic of 1893. Some of these were funded and promoted by Joseph Fels, a soap magnate who was a fan of Henry George, and a friend of Kropotkin.
- What’s the kicker? The basic notion is that understanding the genealogy of the idea and practice of reclaiming the commons could help reflect on current ideas and tactics. It feels worth noting some continuities: social problems created by systems of private property There has been a continuing concern about idle land and idle people Reclaiming a commons is also about reimaginging a commons Jefferson’s “land fix” and Paine’s “tax fix” have provided two threads for reimagining I hear echoes of the land-fix in Chicago, where people are discussing how to create a system to hold land in trust, so that beginning urban farmers may access it at below-market rates. And where we’ve been looking for parts of postindustrial wastelands that might be suitable for farming. Paine’s tax-fix vision is echoed in social welfare programs like food stamps and Social Security, which even has his pamphlet on its website. These fixes are sometimes imagined as alternatives, as when Paine, or Arthur Young, or vacant lot garden promoters say offering land will reduce taxes for poverty relief And one is sometimes conditional on the other, as in Young’s plan to give common land to poor families only so long as they stay off the dole Visions of reclaiming the commons have often turned on imagining vacant, unused, or underused spaces as collective resources. This was the instinct behind Jefferson’s vision and Howard’s garden cities, and current efforts to map urban vacant land that could be cultivated. Imagining the potential of vacant land has repeatedly inspired exercises in calculation – how much land is available; how much food could be grown; how many people fed; how many people put to work. We see this in Kropotkin’s calculations for revolutionary Paris, and estimates of how many vacant lots there are in Chicago.
- Discontinuities: What isn’t being reclaimed? Despite the similarities, there is much to distinguish past visions for reclaiming the commons from each other, and from contemporary visions. Perhaps most obvious is how few people today argue based on natural rights, or by beginning from the premise that the earth is common property because God made it so. STATE NOT EXPLICIT TAXATION NOT SEEN AS CONNECTED INEQUALITY AND POVERTY NOT EXPLICIT