Global Commons / Global Enclosures: Notes

Global Commons / Global Enclosures

Some notes on talks by Iain Boal and Raj Patel

CounterPulse, San Francisco, April 22 2009

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"the commons" >> an unctuous and pious discourse?

the new information enclosures, patrolling the perimeters of popular speech

cf. the 1996 telecommunications act

"commons" as a discourse of resource and asset vs. "commons" as a set of social relations

the only terms worth contesting are those which conceal and congeal the sediment of division and contradiction

i.e. "commodity", can we return it to its root in "commodious"?

the world bank says "yes" to the commons (common property regimes)

the global as an emblem of sovereignty

the "local" trapped in the discourse of globalism

rights of common: rights to turbary, rights to piscary

(but a commons independent of a sovereign power that confers its rights?)

"global commons" obscures uneven property relations

marketization of waste == externalization of costs (nature as the common sink)

the atmosphere as the scene of capital's externality (cost-shifting)

we are all downwind of plutonium

environment and organism : co-constituted and co-produced

"i don't like resources"

what would a non-Malthusian way to refer to scarcity be?

the problem of "declaration of rights" = it's not a process, it's a wait.

check out Crimes Against Nature [Jacobi]

common form vs. commodity form

anything under 3 ft., forced into the cash nexus

debt, being the link between ecosystems

(but how to regulate the commons outside the logic of capital, outside managerial prerogatives?)

"it is a right," as in it is right, it is *just*, as opposed to some abstract Lockean right.