Enclosure is one of the defining scourges of commons. The powerful and wealthy have always sought to appropriate—ahem, steal—the shared resources that commoners rely on in their everyday lives. Whether feudal or aristocratic, capitalist or authoritarian, political elites have found that enclosure is an easy, inexpensive way to expand personal fortunes, business profits, and state power. They just take common wealth, whether by kingly decree, law, or force.
Enclosure is a profound act of dispossession and injustice, and not just a taking of land, forests, fish, creative works, or digital information. Enclosure inaugurates the erasure of a world-view, social practices, and memories of commoning. It replaces them with capitalist myths of progress and dreams of individual wealth. Instead of collective security and stability, enclosure ushers in a world of competitive individualism, separation from nature and the cosmos, and rentier capitalism.
Indigenous Peoples have known these dynamics for generations. So have traditional, racial, and ethnic communities. Historically, capitalist colonizers have seized their lands and eradicated “primitive” ways of commoning in the name of divine will and civilizational development. The racialist dimensions of enclosure cannot be overstated. Over centuries, as Europeans and Americans have forcibly enclosed common wealth, they have also erected hierarchies—political, economic, social—to enslave or control nonwhite human beings. The legacy of this racialized expropriation and stigmatization continues to define relations between peoples of the industrialized North and the Global South.
Part I offers an overview of historic and contemporary enclosures, starting with the fable that has often been used to justify them, “the tragedy of the commons.”
David Bollier at david /at/ bollier.org | New Society Publishers