Commons & Pirates

Peter Linebaugh (who co-authored Many-headed Hydra with Marcus Rediker) has a new book out, which reads the Magna Carta and the Forest Charter together as manifestos/ procedural mechanisms of the commons. I read one chapter (published as an essay in CNS Dec 07) which draws primarily on the work of south asian historians of forestry. First off, how weird that one of my favorite pirate-historians (and a student of E P Thompson, trained as a Europeanist) should write a chapter of a book on commons ( my current obsession) drawing from the obscure forest-historiography circuit I spent a decade in, and which I thought I had to (reluctantly) leave behind as I engaged with the twenty first century. Well actually it’s not really weird, as much as fabulous. I am excited largely because the connections I’ve been trying to make in my head (forests, nineteenth century british colonial admin, early modern science and economics, marx, material conditions, and social reproduction, commons experimental communities, the narrowing of commons under neoliberalism, the pre-figuring of this under 17th century liberalism, subjectivation under conditions of  coercion/ colonialism as well as resistance/ freedom, the lessig-type creative commons, etc etc) seem to come together in this book. I’ve only seen one chapter so far, so perhaps it is not so much the structure of the book as the fact that these themes are out in the public and it seems feasible to put them together. Some people are dismayed when their “thesis” seems “scooped” by others but I see it as a sign that there is something in the world, historically and in a lived sense, that people are picking up on (and today I am thrilled that it is a favorite historian, as opposed to a slick stanford law prof, but hey, i am happy about lessig’s work too; just amused by his a-historicity). Anyway – this post is so bloggish that i really havent advanced an argument, have I? I shall have to post again when I have actually read the book.

Labor: Immaterial, Virtual, Affective

There are some old questions in marxist theory that are getting interesting shake-outs and re-molding. Labor, Property, Value are standard analytical categories in political economy. The 1970s socialist feminist critiques of household labor (drawing on Engels) were influential in feminist economics (the gender politics of time-accounts, for example, became standard in economics of the ’90s, at least among those who acknowledged the contribution of feminism) and in some policy circles, e.g. in UN studies of gender in international development. [Note: I haven't seen a study of economics as a discipline and how the feminist influence was felt from the '70s thru '90s, but I would guess that a lot of the critiques of neo-classical modeling, such as Amartya Sen's, but even more mainstream work like Gary Becker's, was in some way influenced by - even if only to appropriate and coopt the interests of - feminist 1970s economics. But that's just a wild guess; would love to know if there is a study on this. But anyway, it seems to me that the work was less influential as the humanities side of feminist theory took the cultural turn. Political economy fell out, even though it partially  returned in cultural form, as an attention to consumption and circulation of commodities. But hard core econ seemed too dry and boring to yield exciting insights in the move to language and culture studies. 

 

So now, is there a way to keep the insights of the cultural turn, and to re-ask the tired old questions about labour and value in an interesting way? 

 

Some thoughts on the directions I want to think in :

(1) TIME : I was reading Bliss Lim's work on time and cinema (a forthcoming book), and was reminded forecefully that there is an important link between time, labor and value. (Caffentzis mentions in his book on Locke and pirated coins, that Locke was concerned with the continuous identity of the self over time, and this enduring self was key to property. I'll post on that later.) 

 

(2) Affective Labor

From intro to the Ephemera 7.1 special issue (Editorial)

"there is always an excess that labour produces in the process of reproducing capitalist

socialist relations. This is an excess whose threatening potential capital must always

work to recuperate, trapped as it is in its eternal dependence on the power of what is at

once its condition of possibility and (potentially) mortal enemy, labour." 

This excess is what interests me.

 

(3) Subjectivities and modernities

Lisa Rofel's first line of Desiring China, "... i saw a new kind of human.." [not exact quote], describes the ways in which modernities (hybrid and multiple) keep making new subjects; but also her conviction that this (now, here in china as she sits in a coffee shop talking about queer sexualities in 2004-6) is not just one in many possible new subjects that are produced daily, but a critical juncture – a rupture, to be foucauldian -  with particular histories of modernity (in her case, post-confucian, post-mao, post-’opening-up-to-global-mkts’)