Common struggles, common interests?
| Author | Leighton, Daniel |
| Position | Editorial |
What do the following have in common?: the expense account and dining partners of the outgoing head of the National Audit Office; the government's pre-consultation support for a second runway for Heathrow; campaigns by the open software movement to reform supra-national rules on intellectual property rights; rulings of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) over which drugs are provided by the NHS; the privatisation of QINETIQ; the recent wave of party funding scandals ...
Quite reasonably, many would struggle to find a single common thread among this list. If stretched some might suggest they are linked by a vague if pervasive sense of distrust in politics and the competence of the state in particular. Yet according to an emerging body of thinkers and activists, associated with though by no means restricted to the 'anti-globalisation' or 'global justice' movement, these issues all relate to struggles over 'the commons'--an umbrella term linking a seemingly disparate range of material and immaterial resources that are said to morally, if not legally, belong to us all as 'gifts' of nature and culture.
As with all political narratives that aim to mobilise, be it the republicanism of seventeenth century England or the class struggle of the nineteenth century Europe, the rhetoric of the commons attempts to make visible a struggle between antagonistic social forces: 'one privileged, arrogant, rapacious or selfish; the other innocent, passive, good hearted, even pastoral' (Parker, 2001). The flourishing of the commons is said to be under threat by a globally enforced neo-liberal practice of 'enclosure', in which commons are variously plundered, privatised and/or impaired by financial and economic elites. Assisted by the 'market state' of the global era, this process unhinges the historical association of the state and the 'public good': both in terms of its diminishing role in the monopoly provision and management of services and resources and, due to its concomitant entanglement with the private sector, its capacity to act as the neutral arbiter in the 'public interest'.
On the one hand the dynamic between commons and enclosure is said to be animating the most vibrant forms of social and political activism. On the other it fails to gain recognition from mainstream parties struggling to escape the binary logic of 'statism' and 'privatism' that dominated the political imaginaries of the twentieth century.
This issue of Renewal explores the potential contribution of this emerging discourse for the development of an offensive political narrative that can articulate the grievances and hopes of today's citizens concerning the distribution, management and access to 'common goods'. This was sorely lacking in the first ten years of New Labour, in which it absorbed the market populism of the 1980s and early 90s in order to mount a defence of the last vestiges of post-war social democratic legacy. This ongoing lack of a progressive and contemporary notion of the common good is something that Gordon Brown is struggling to articulate.
The theory of the commons
Contemporary commons rhetoric is a metaphorical appropriation of the criticisms of the original enclosure movement that accompanied the development of capitalism in England, whereby common land was fenced off and turned into private property. As...
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