Commons

Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth
by David Bollier
$26.00, Routledge,
260 pages, 2002

When our times finally come to rest in the history texts, I think they will be called the Age of Enclosure—the age of privatization. It is a time when everything has become a commodity, and everything is for sale.

The opinion establishment was in raptures over the resulting money gush. Now that the party’s over, they pine for a return. Yet as the concept of the market comes to define all human experience, so too does the market’s central paradox: the way it creates scarcity even as it produces abundance.

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Words are a form of magic. They conjure thought out of the confusion of experience, and they form the lens through which we see the world. Politics is largely a contest over words – over a version of reality. Those whose words prevail, rule; and those who rule choose the words.

Nowhere is this more evident than in economics. Though couched in the trappings of science, economics is basically a word game. Define anything produced as a “good,” and the debate is over before it starts. Who wouldn’t want more “goods?” Define “growth” to mean simply an increase in monetary expenditure, and you can claim economic “progress” even if much of that expenditure results from “goods” that are not so good – the obesity and medical bills arising from junk food, for example.

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My friend John Francis maintains that we must be the change we want to see. When he witnessed an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in the early 1970s, he swore off motorized transit for almost 20 years. When he saw people spouting opinions but not listening, he stopped talking, too, so that he could learn to listen better.

John walked and listened all the way across the United States, and down most of South America as well. He observed how changes in himself rippled out into his surroundings. Since he wasn’t talking, family and friends had to communicate by letter – a small step, as it were, for literacy. Since he walked everywhere, others had to adjust their pace to his. Life slowed down where John went. So, when we first spoke about recent events, it was not surprising that John didn’t dwell on feckless jingoism and the rest. Instead, the talk turned to clotheslines.

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My wife grew up in what western experts call, not without condescension, a “developing” country. The social life of her village revolved largely around a tree. People gathered there in the evening to visit, tell stories, just pass the time. Some of my wife’s warmest childhood memories are of playing hide and seek late into the evening while the parents chatted under the tree — or on a neighbor’s porch, which was another version of the same thing.

The tree was more than a quaint meeting place. It was a productive asset — an economic asset in the root sense of that word. It produced a bonding of neighbors, an information network, an activity center for kids who ran and played and invented their own games. It provided a bridge between generations. Older people could be part of the flow of daily life, and children got to experience something scarce in the US today — an unstructured and noncompetitive setting in which their parents are close at hand. In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from community centers to kiddie videos to try to achieve those results, with great inefficiency and often much less positive effect.

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