Fictions of the Dismal Theorem

Abstract

Any thoroughgoing assessment of the current mobilization on the Left must take note, among other features, of what Fredric Jameson has recently characterized as the “political revitalization of the theme of enclosure and the commons since globalization.” Indeed, we may well claim that this resurgence dates precisely from the inception of the current round of militarized neoliberalism in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, for it was in the immediate run-up to this conflict that the Midnight Notes Collective first published its text on what it termed “the new enclosures.” Enclosure would come to be understood, not as a unique historical episode (theft “on a colossal scale,” as Marx wrote, through which the great landlords and capitalist farmers of the modern era had emerged, while laborers were forced off the land and thereby “‘set free’ . . . as proletarians for manufacturing industry”), but as an analytic tool with which to comprehend the ongoing dynamic of capitalism, “a regular return on the path of accumulation and a structural component of class struggle.” Under the heading of the “new enclosures,” the Midnight Notes Collective has described the last quarter century as a period of perhaps the greatest division of the commons in world history, with an accompanying “proletarianization” on an almost unimaginable scale. This theme has been closely echoed in the writings of Retort, where it is directly related to the logic of primitive accumulation, and has been popularized by activists like Naomi Klein. However, despite the efforts of groups like Midnight Notes and Retort, for the vast majority of intellectuals the connotations of “the commons” are those outlined in the famous 1968 essay of Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” From an essentially Malthusian perspective, Hardin argued that freedom must necessarily be curtailed if human population growth was not to dwarf the ecological carrying capacities of our planet. He drew deeply on a little-known tract published in England in 1833 by William Forster Lloyd, a disciple of Malthus and an apologist for the Parliamentary enclosures that were at the time eradicating much of the remaining common land in Britain and Scotland. In it Lloyd had posed a number of polemical questions: “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so different ly from the adjoining enclosures?” His answer was simple: because an individual owned his animals, the gain of adding to the herd accrued to him alone, while the loss incurred by overloading the common is distributed among all Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.