In this period of market globalization and widespread privatization of the world, Marx’s articles on the theft of wood are of troubling relevance. The purchase of the labor power of others establishes a relation of appropriation/expropriation, not only in the workforce but also in public services, public savings, consumption, bodies on display, and in space handed over to real estate and land speculation. Privatization affects not only public enterprises but also education, information, law (the generalization of private contract to the detriment of common law), money, knowledge, violence—in short, public space as a whole.
In his Lectures on Industrial Society, Raymond Aron liked to quote a passage from Capital where Marx says that “the dispersion of capital in large corporations already provides for the destruction of property,” in order to conclude that “if dispersion equates to the elimination of private property, a large U.S. corporation is not private property.” Despite the tales and legends of “popular capitalism” and beyond the apparent spread of property for the benefit of “employee ownership” and “small shareholders,” concentration of ownership has reached unprecedented levels. In late 2003, global market capitalization reached thirty-one billion dollars, or nearly 90 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Shareholders now hold well over three-quarters of humanity’s market wealth. If this wealth appears dispersed to the margins, it is in fact concentrated in a very small number of developed countries, so that 5 percent of the world’s population (half of the United States) have almost all the world’s stock holdings and seventy-seven thousand of the leading “ultrarich” alone hold approximately 15 percent of global wealth: “For many years, the population of the very rich grew much faster than that of the entire globe, and the expansion rate of their assets is higher than that of the global economy; in addition, the population growth of the ultra-rich is even faster: wealth inequality therefore tends to increase.”60
To stifle the scandal of this monstrous private appropriation of natural and social wealth, the dominant discourse promises that everyone can become owners (of their own homes) or shareholders (of their businesses). It is not certain that the beneficiaries of “employee ownership” through shareholding truly feel as though they are the owners. It is likely, however, that their dual representation on boards of directors, as employees and as shareholders, will make them schizophrenic the day the dormant shareholder within will have to dismiss the employee within in order to ensure a return greater than 15 percent on investment. Other than imagining a financial version of the miracle of the loaves, the only way to achieve such a goal with a growth rate of under 3 percent is through the reduction of “labor costs.” On this point at least, Proudhon was prescient, when he proclaimed the predictable cruelty of “impersonal property”: “That which seems to soften and humanize property is precisely what reveals its hideousness: divided and impersonal property is its worst form.”
Privatization aims at more than just natural resources or the products of work. It also desires knowledge and skills. This is what is at stake in the ongoing discussions and negotiations within the World Trade Organization on services, intellectual property, and patent law.61 The traditional distinction between invention and discovery has been blurred, and the very limits of patentability have become problematic. Since the early 1980s, the need has emerged to legislate on scientific practices (such as the manipulation of life) in contrast to the definitions of property rights currently in force.
In the “new economy,” a prototype created by research and development laboratories is often much more expensive in terms of fixed investment capital than the mass reproduction of the product. The acquisition of knowledge and the protection of the monopoly thus become the major issue in legislation on the new status of intellectual property. Yet open science is more favorable and “better adapted to the creation of new ideas than the market economy.”62 The privatization of research and its resulting knowledge, its sequestration away from competitors, the culture of secrecy and the pursuit of monopoly hinders the dissemination of socialized knowledge that could benefit the greatest number: “This contradiction reflects a twenty-first-century equivalent of what was in the last century a conflict between the public and private sector: the rivalry between ‘free’ and ‘paying.’ The temptation to download movies and songs, to circulate counterfeits, or manufacture generics is a permanent feature of the new economy, for the very reason that it costs little to duplicate the first unit of a product once it has been discovered.”63
In 1992, the firm Agracetus obtained a patent not only on genetically modified cotton, but also on any change to the cotton gene in general, in other words, “on the very idea that one might modify the cotton gene.” Through the course of the 1990s, we have seen the development of a logic of global enclosure. Such a development has major implications on research conditions. The staggering proliferation of increasingly diverse patents that venture into the domain of research itself has turned the arena into a minefield of patents, left to patrol and limit not only the discoveries themselves but also areas of research and investigation likely to be made: “Private Property! No entrance!” Large firms have at their disposal a bank of litigious and argumentative troublemakers skilled at dissuading maverick researchers from risking venture into the thicket of costly litigation. “Changes have been so radical,” says Dominique Pestre, “that there is now a movement underway toward the recollectivization of patents by large cartels who pool their patents to avoid having to constantly negotiate and slow down the innovation processes. Large companies allow each other to use the knowledge gained by each other. By contrast, for those not working within these cartel networks, it raises complex problems, in universities, for example.” In fact, this recollectivization consists in a collective monopoly on the rents gained from brainpower, just like how energy cartels share oil revenue.64
Universities will be increasingly reduced, through private funding, to a subcontracting role in the service of these new knowledge cartels. There are already cases in Canada and the United States where the partnership agreement includes confidentiality clauses: the firm that subsidizes university research thus ensures exclusive control over the knowledge produced, to the detriment of its free circulation within the scientific community. These privacy clauses are not new. Previously, however, they were generally limited in time, pending filing and possible patenting, whereas they tend now to be permanent.65 It is understandable that sincere or naive liberals end up being moved by it. All of this has nothing to do with “free and undistorted competition” anymore!
Reflecting on the ongoing debate in the United States on freedom, innovation, and the public domain, Grégoire Chamayou is justifiably surprised that critical resistance to intellectual property is no longer articulated in relation to that of traditional property. There is, of course, a certain specificity to the form of knowledge and the social production characteristic of intellectual property, but this is certainly not an “intellectual exception.” France once boasted of having advanced “the cultural exception” in international trade negotiations, arguing that culture (cinema, literature, music . . .) is not a commodity like any another. Perhaps. But is health, education, or housing like other goods? In an age that wants to commodify everything, definitions and boundaries are uncertain. This is why battles around intellectual property can serve to reveal the contradictions inherent in the very idea of private property. As Grégoire Chamayou notes, “in a [liberal] conceptual context where property is linked to freedom, intellectual property is a paradoxical case where property comes to thwart freedom.”66 In property matters, is not this paradox the rule? At least that was what Proudhon was already trying to demonstrate.
Knowledge emerging from social practices was once confiscated and monopolized by the clergy or an upper caste. With industrial machinery, the appropriation of living work and its expertise acquired a new immediacy. With big industry, the whole range of sciences was, says Marx, “captured and put at the service of capital”: “Historical development, political development, art, science, etc. . . . are located in the higher spheres above them. But it is only capital which has subjected historical progress to the service of wealth . . . At this point, invention becomes a business, and the application of science to immediate production itself becomes a factor determining and soliciting science.” However, as big industry grows, “the creation of real wealth becomes less dependent upon labour time and the quantity of labour employed than upon the power of the agents set in motion during labour time. And their power—their POWERFUL EFFECTIVENESS—in turn bears no relation to the immediate labour time which their production costs, but depends, rather, upon the general level of development of science and the progress of technology, or on the application of science to production.” Thus, “the theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation.”67 This miserable base is the reason for the disturbances of the world. The law of value can no longer measure the excesses of the world except at the price of ever-increasing global outbursts and violence.68
In July 1998, the European Union authorized the grant of patents on “biological material”: “An element isolated from the human body, or otherwise produced by a technical process, including the sequence or partial sequence of a gene, may constitute a patentable invention, even if the structure of that element is identical to that of a natural element.”69 Researchers do not “invent” a gene. Following the classic distinction, they are content to discover it. The boundary is becoming porous between the two notions, just as it is between the natural and the artificial. According to a director of industrial property at Aventis, invention would now consist in “assigning a technical function to the discovery sequence.” Such broadening of the notion can lead very far. One can easily imagine how firms, pharmaceutical or other, could take advantage of this, and what interests are at stake in the patent battle.70 We have a glimpse of this in the Myriad Genetics patent case on breast cancer screening tests. European institutions had developed cheaper and more reliable tests. Myriad objected to the marketing of these tests in the name of its property over “predisposition genes” and their uses. The European Patent Office, hit with numerous complaints, finally withdrew the firm’s privileges.
A 1998 UN declaration equates the human genome with “the common heritage of humanity.” In 2000, the G8 prohibited the patenting of gene sequences. The ongoing conflict between the logic of industrial (especially pharmaceutical) profitability and public health puts a redefinition of sharing between private and public on the agenda. Despite the agreement of specialists to patent the interpretation of the gene sequences, discomfort persists regarding the patenting of the sequences themselves. Accessible on the Internet, many biologists can now work on it. Patent law would pave the way for global judicial persecution of researchers who may, in good faith, violate patent-protected property rights. Here again, the contradiction between the private use of knowledge and its social character, connected at a cultural and technical level, is explosive.
Controversies over multiple forms of patenting (including genome sequencing) thus revolve around a distinction between discovery and invention, and its legal interpretation. Can we privatize an idea, such as when software is basically only one element of applied logic, that is, a piece of “dead labor” that is built on accumulated intellectual work?71 According to this logic of privative appropriation, could one go so far as to patent mathematical equations and subject them to property rights? The socialization of intellectual work begins with the practice of language, which is obviously a common social good of humanity that cannot be appropriated. Ongoing conflicts around intellectual property law tend to push hard against classic liberal notions of right and its legitimization of property through work.
These philosophico-legal puzzles are the result of contradictions between the growing socialization of intellectual labor and the private appropriation of ideas, on the one hand; between abstract labor, which underlies the market measure, and concrete work which is difficult to quantify, on the other. From these contradictions results a generalized disruption of the law of value as an increasingly wretched means by which to measure exchange and social wealth. Liberal economist Daniel Cohen recognizes that intellectual property “breaks with the pattern of property as a whole.” A song or a chemical formula cannot be bought and consumed in the usual sense of the term. They survive the private use that is made of them. Buying a house or shoes amounts to claiming a legal monopoly over their use. Whereas property generally “makes possible the appropriation of an object,” intellectual property “restricts it.”72
“Free access to knowledge is a global public good.”73 Nevertheless, software patenting exploded in the 1990s in the United States, exceeding one hundred thousand. In this profusion, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to publish software without being liable to counterfeiting. It is also becoming more and more difficult to distinguish the “software patent” from the “patent on intellectual method,” to distinguish between technique and invention. Patenting thus reinforces industrial secrets and curbs innovation.74 James Boyle draws an analogy between the “enclosures” at the time of primitive accumulation and these “new enclosures” of intellectual property.75 Private land grabbing was defended at the time in the name of agrarian productivity, the increase of which was supposed to eradicate hunger and famine—even at the price of appalling urban misery. Today we are witnessing a “new wave of enclosures,” justified in turn by the race for innovation or the exigencies of global food production. The differences between the two phenomena are not, however, insignificant. While the use of the land is mutually exclusive (what one appropriates, others cannot use), knowledge and expertise are “noncompetitive”: the good does not go out of a gene sequence, software, or digital image when they are used. This is why, from the monastic scribe through to traditional printing, photocopying, and e-mail, the cost of reproduction has continued to decline. It is also why private appropriation is today justified by its role in the stimulation of research, rather than by the use of the product.
Is an algorithm an invention or a discovery? Alan Sokal recalls that most mathematicians consider any mathematical structure a discovery and not an invention, because the big book of nature is itself written in mathematical language. But even if an algorithm were considered an invention, its patenting would remain questionable: “Consider the inventor of an encryption algorithm used in all electronic transactions whenever anyone in the world uses his credit card. This is obviously a useful invention for which the inventor deserves to be paid, but does it deserve unlimited royalties? This problem already arose for traditional inventions, but it becomes more pressing for algorithms because they can be reproduced at almost zero cost.” Initially, the principle behind the patent (and, in another form, that of the copyright) was to reward the inventor by granting him or her a limited-term monopoly, while promoting the circulation of knowledge now protected by the patent. However, the trend today is to accumulate preventive patents, extend their duration, and retain rather than circulate knowledge: firms can file patents on innovations that remained unused for the sole purpose of preventing them from being used by a competing firm.76
If computer science is a language, and if its innovations are patentable, can neologisms of everyday language become so? Concepts? Theories? To what unprecedented neuroses could this compulsion for intellectual property lead?! An outdated conception of appropriation is becoming more and more irrational and incompatible with the sharing of knowledge, to the point of becoming an obstacle to human development. Catherine Tasca, then French minister of culture and information, declared on July 10, 2000: “to avoid the risk of drying up creativity, we cannot carelessly render the work of the mind—an idea, a mathematical formula, software codes, a new formal expression—into the object of a patent.” In that same year, marketing director at Microsoft France, Olivier Ezratty, declared himself in favor of a global harmonization of legislation: “Although we tend to place it under the model of research, characterized by a need to share knowledge, in fact, software creation is today an industrial process” that needs to be protected. He concluded: “We cannot encourage companies to create value if they cannot protect it.”77 The conflict of interest between social development and private interest couldn’t be better described.
The principle behind free software records in its own way the highly cooperative character of intellectual labor, which is crystallized therein. The private monopoly of the owner is no longer contested, as in the case of liberals, in the name of the innovative virtue of competition, but rather as an obstacle to free cooperation. It is interesting to note the ambivalence of the English term “free” when applied to the software: liberty rhymes with availability.78
The extension of the commodification of the world to knowledge and life itself poses with new acuteness the question of the public good and the common good of humanity. The World Assembly of Legislators and Citizens for Water has set itself the goal of including access to water in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.79 As a “universal common good,” water would then become “inappropriable.” In 2006, the European Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing water as a human right. What works for water could do so for a number of other goods, be they natural or produced by the accumulated cooperative labor of many generations.
For Jean-Baptiste Say, arable land was “given free to man” and not created by him. Accordingly, it should be considered as part of the wealth of nature. However, the earth, being fixed, limited, and not “fugitive” like water, had become “a social resource whose use one had to pay for.” Use? Of the products of the earth, or of the earth itself? Proudhon had already raised this thorny issue: “How can the goods of nature, the wealth created by Providence, become private property?” It is certainly easier to exercise an occupancy right over the land than the air, he replied, but “it is not a question of how easy something is.” Say mistakes “opportunity for right.” The question was not one of knowing why the land was more open to appropriation than the sea. Rather, “we only want to know by what right man has appropriated the wealth which he did not create and which was freely given to him by nature.” Locke’s argument, legitimizing property through labor, was turned against the proponents of the private appropriation of the common natural good: “But who made the land? God. Therefore, proprietor, retire.”80
For Proudhon, “water, air and light are common things, not because they are inexhaustible, but because they are indispensable.” Similarly, the earth, being indispensable to our conservation, is therefore inappropriable: “In two words, the equality of right is demonstrated by the equality of need.” Therefore, like a “prophecy of equality” and a “republican oracle,” “social sovereignty” conflicts with “individual property.”
The ecological crisis is helping to put back on the agenda the idea of inappropriable common goods of humanity. Water is the best example, but the air has also become a disputed object with the establishment of a market on the right to pollute. And the land has never ceased to be so for agrarian movements fighting against land grabbing by large property owners. Land remains the focus of the struggles of the landless (in Brazil and elsewhere), but also of the new urban struggles: how will we face the urban crisis and the global explosion of slums, favelas, shantytowns, without “energetic incursions” into the sanctuary of private landed property and real estate?81
The “common good” no longer concerns only that which nature has supposedly “freely given” according to the classic argument of natural law. It is now equally relevant to human cooperative production. Proudhon already affirmed this: “Talent is a creation of society rather than a gift of nature; it is an accumulated capital of which the recipient is the guardian.” For him, “just as the creation of every instrument of production is the result of collective force, so also the talent and knowledge of a man are the product of universal intelligence and general knowledge slowly accumulated by a number of masters and with the aid of many inferior industries.” This is precisely the case with cognitive and cultural “capital”: “as the traveller does not appropriate the highway which he travels, so the farmer does not appropriate the field which he cultivates . . . [A]ll capital, whether material or mental, is the result of collective labour and so is collective property . . . [A]nd since all capital is social property, no one has exclusive property of it.”82
David Harvey defines capitalist globalization as a new phase of “accumulation by dispossession.” He sees the continuation of the practices of “primitive” or “original” accumulation in force at the dawn of capitalism: “The reversion of common rights won through years of hard class struggle (the right to a state pension, to welfare, to national health care) into the private domain has been one of the most egregious of all policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neo-liberal orthodoxy.”83 This “accumulation by dispossession” is a condition of the survival of capitalism. Beyond the appropriation of raw materials, energy resources, cheap labor, it also includes the market appropriation of cultural history, notably through tourism, or even the pure and simple looting of cultural heritage. It uses various means, ranging from external coercion to the cannibalization by market logics of those forms of activity and production that still elude it (e.g., domestic work, human services, food production, etc.).
This offensive of neoliberal accumulation obviously involves the destruction of existing social rights and the criminalization of popular resistance (under the pretext of “antiterrorist” legislation). Thus we see a whole range of provisions that constitute a new kind of “poor law,” aimed at strengthening social control and imposing a new discipline of flexible work through generalized precariousness.
In response, we are witnessing new forms of resistance of the dispossessed—those “without’” (without documents, homes, shelter, employment, or rights)—in the name of the defense of public services, in the name of the energy and food sovereignty of countries subject to imperialist looting, in the name of common goods (e.g., water, land, air, life) coveted by cannibalistic companies or pharmaceutical firms on the lookout for new patentable molecules. Or, simply, in the name of the right to have rights!84 Claims for the recognition of indigenous languages and cultures against standardizing globalization are part of this resistance to dispossession.85 If these struggles are often initiated in the name of a defense of “habits and customs,” or traditions, it is important to recall Marx’s concern in his articles on the theft of wood. Behind the consensual appearance of custom resides the latent antagonism between the customary rights of the dominant and the dominated. This is perhaps what Walter Benjamin also understood when he juxtaposed the tradition of the oppressed to the conformity that always threatens it.86
The 1842–43 articles on the theft of wood and on the situation of the Moselle vine growers were for Marx the starting point of a radical critique of private property in relation to the means of production and exchange. Five years later, in the Communist Manifesto, he made this question the touchstone of the nascent communist movement: “Communists can summarize their theory in this unique formula: the suppression of private property.” This is why, in “all of their movements,” they “put forward the question of property, to whatever degree of evolution it may have arrived, as the fundamental question of the movement.” Accordingly, of the ten programmatic points that conclude the first chapter of the Manifesto, seven relate very directly to the forms of property.87 They imply a primacy of “moral economics” over the competition of all against all, of solidarity over egoistic calculation, of the customary rights of the poor over the privilege of proprietors, of the public interest over private covetousness. It is not a question of abolishing all forms of property, just “the private property of today, bourgeois property,” in other words “the mode of appropriation” that is based on the exploitation of the labor of others.
In Capital, Marx contrasts individual with private property: “The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.”88
Paul Sereni happily works to elucidate this enigmatic text. Marx recalls that among the Germanic tribes the ager publicus89 is a mere complement to individual property. Each individual owner has then his share of the pasture, the hunting ground, or the common woods. The result is a historical distinction between individual and private property, and the identification of a type of property that does not tie the product to a single individual, cut off from the whole, the association, and the community. Sereni quotes the astonishing 1844 text in which Marx argues, “Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings . . . I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and hence a power beyond all doubt . . . In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature. In the individual expression of life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature. This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours.”90
The contrast between individual and private property is repeated in The Civil War in France. There, Marx stresses that the Paris Commune “wants to make individual property a reality,” and thus “restore” a form of appropriation that is genuine personal property. What does it mean, asks Sereni, to posit this restoration as the negation of the negation? He concludes that individualization in Marx is not the same as privatization. By reconciling the emancipation of each with that of all, the reestablishment of “individual property” becomes therefore compatible with social appropriation. But it is not, insists Marx, a simple return to an original community or some lost paradise. On the contrary, the “recovery” in question is based on the “acquisitions” or conquests of the capitalist era. What we are talking about is the emergence of a collectivity and a new individuality.
For Sereni, “the decisive point is the supposition that any form of self-realization can be called property.” Marx would thus reconnect with another, original meaning of the notion of property, as used by Locke, for whom “every man is the owner of his own person,” or by the Levellers who still saw in it the foundation of individual autonomy: “Marx appears to follow therefore the presupposition behind the idea of property in oneself.”91 This inalienable self-ownership would resist commodification in the labor force and would rebel and balk if required to offer itself on the labor market. As Marx writes in Capital, the “living personhood of a human being” will not resign itself to becoming a commodity like any other. This is why he evokes the perspective of a form of social appropriation that preserves “individual property” as self-realization. This implies more than a change in the legal status of property because, for him, social appropriation differs fundamentally from state ownership. From tirades against “vulgar communism” in the Parisian Manuscripts of 1844 to the Critique of the Gotha Program, to his polemics with Lassalle, Marx never varied on this point. It is necessary to unpack all the consequences of the dispossession of the process and the product of work from the worker in terms of its effects on forced labor, commodity fetishism, and alienated work.92 Owing to the “acquisitions” of capitalist development, the era of the private property of the individual worker is irredeemably lost, but an “individual form of possession in the broadest sense” remains the condition of the “free development of each”: “Thus care of the self is central to communism and to its conception of individuality, so one must not ask whether there is a Marxist individualism, but rather in what sense it should be understood.”93
Faced with widening inequalities and increasing exclusion, the new distribution of wealth becomes a social emergency. This is not simply about a more equitable distribution. The question is inextricably linked to that of property. Paradoxically, while privatization is in full swing and its concentration reaches an unparalleled level, there arises the strange idea that the issue of property is now part of the prehistory of the labor movement. Because licensing rights take precedence over the right of sale, providing license holders with a new form of rent, the question of property becomes soluble in shareholder salaries and the access economy.94 Jeremy Rifkin, who had once imprudently ventured to prophesy “the end of labor,” still argued in The Age of Access in 2000 that in the “new economy” property was doomed to give way to access, and the market would dissolve into the Internet. The market, however, is alive and well. To tame the Internet, the market simply needed to become networked. Hasn’t it always been so? As for “access,” it didn’t replace property. Like all tolls, it is only a right of entry.95
In short, for Rifkin capital itself is being decapitalized. After “the end of labor,” the end of capital? The two being closely intertwined, a common fate for them would have been logical. Their common survival is just as important. Nowadays we must work even harder, not to earn more, as Sarkozy’s speeches would have us believe, but to pay more and live less. The more you work, the more capital prospers.
Jeremy Rifkin’s ranting would be unimportant if it wasn’t so revealing of the general trends in the early 2000s, in particular the new Blairist “Third Way” winds that were starting to blow over European social democracy. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin then glibly declared that “our industrial policy has gone beyond the question of the ownership of the means of production.” He believed in it so much that he privatized on his own more than the right-wing governments (Balladur and Juppé) that had preceded him. As for Laurent Fabius, he crowed from the top of his roost in the National Assembly: “This problem [of the ownership of the means of production], despite its central role in the theory and practice of the Left in the twentieth century, is now behind us, even if, like starlight, we continue to discuss it long after the stars themselves have since disappeared.”96 Drawing out the conclusion to this audacious theoretical renovation, he announced with equal flourish that “all that is competitive is ultimately destined to be privatized.” Judging by this energetic formula, the extension of privatization depends on what is deemed competitive; it is enough to decide that health or education should become competitive to infer that they should be privatized. Neither senile post-Stalinism, nor Mme Royal’s social liberalism, nor Cohn-Bendit’s eco-liberalism, nor Kouchner’s humanitarian neocolonialism were especially moved by this hardy farewell to socialism.97
Contrary to leftists who have converted over to market euphoria, the economist Milton Friedman, the late leader of the ultraliberal school known as the Chicago boys (who have left more corpses in their wake than Al Capone and his henchmen), knew very well that property remains the heart of social war: “The crucial question is not whether the market will be played or not. All societies—communist, socialist, capitalist—use the market. The crucial question is that of private property.”98 Incidentally, Friedman thereby advised the fertile brains of Blair–Giddens’s “Third Way” and Schröder–Hombart’s “New Center” to “overcome the political obstacles to market expansion, to put an end to the ‘tyranny of the status quo,’ to ‘discourage free-ridership and entitlement benefits.’”99 There is no doubt that, from beyond the grave, this path inspired Sarkozy and his uninhibited right, just as it has the left-wing Italian coalition aligned behind Romano Prodi.
The question of property and social appropriation permeates society. Under pressure from the Don Quixote Right to Housing public opinion campaign, in the fall of 2006 parliament passed a law establishing an “enforceable right” to housing.100 Enforceable against whom or what? In theory, against public authorities, by providing legal recourse against public authorities if they are unable to provide housing to those who request it. However, this right to a roof over one’s head conflicts with property rights—whether in the requisition of current residences, vacant housing, or sites for new building—such as when municipalities like Neuilly invoke their shortage to justify the absence of social housing on public land.
Among the ten objectives of Nicolas Hulot’s Ecological Charter, signed by almost all the presidential candidates in a touching preelection consensus, was the goal of “containing suburban sprawl,” “relocating human activities,” and “establishing a true price on the services rendered by nature.”101 The desire for a harmonious balance between town and country is hardly new. It was already one of the ten priorities of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It was also a major concern of Soviet village policy in the 1920s. It is true that the crisis of space is quite urgent today. The extension of transport increases pollution. Cities are being lost to shapeless, suburban wastelands. How can we imagine rebalancing this without affecting land ownership? Or without affecting real-estate speculation, which is driving the working underclass further and further out? More generally, how can we imagine a spatial revolution without social reappropriation?
Endeavoring to establish a “true price” for the services rendered by nature seems even more improbable. In order to establish their final price, the services in question must first be converted into a monetary value. This conversion presupposes an evaluation by the market, whose metabolism alone transforms qualitatively different goods and labor into abstract and commensurable values. But how can we evaluate in monetary terms the price that the planet pays for the burial of nuclear waste whose long-term effects are unpredictable? For deforestation? Ocean pollution? Melting glaciers? Climate change? Mercantile exchange and ecological development exist in different temporalities. The evaluation of the social cost of ecological disasters is not instantaneous, at the discretion of stock-market prices or the whims of the Dow Jones and CAC 40.102
Striving in seven hundred pages to quantify the costs of climate change, the Stern report on global warming has reached an approximate bill of 5,500 billion euros, including damage to urban infrastructure, health, and food production.103 These forecasts can’t pretend to incorporate the unforeseen long-term costs. The diagnosis is nevertheless categorical: climate change portends “unprecedented market failure”! Climatologists estimate the energy potential of solar radiation to be eight thousand times that of humanity’s current needs and believe that currently available technology could already cover more than eight times these needs, provided there is a rapid transition to the new energy system. However, profits from oil, and the various interests tied to them, work in favor of vigorously maintaining the current “ecocidal” model. After the commodification of wood, coal, gas, and oil have all also become objects of exclusive appropriation. It would be difficult to make a diffuse and unlimited energy source such as solar power a similar source of profit.104
The Stern report compares the cost of inaction (waiting and leaving the market to it) with the cost of saving the climate, restricting itself as much as possible to the methods and criteria of market economics to do so. These accounting acrobatics convert things that are not commodities (e.g., human life, ecosystems) into that form, and then assign them a market price, which only illustrates the impossibility of solving the ecological challenge via the ruthless law of market value. With the support of scientific expertise and compassionate ethics, Nicholas Stern therefore recommends that governments drown social criticism of the ecological fracture in sermons on changing consumer behavior.
Social ecology has its own logic, which the madness of capitalism ignores. We cannot entrust the care of the planet to the shortsighted judgments of the stock exchange or the mechanisms of market regulation, even if it is a “green market,” because we know very well that the competitive logic of capital stimulates the production of useless or harmful goods, demands expensive advertising campaigns, and generates overproduction and waste. The rather vague idea of “sustainable development” evokes a long and slow temporality, incompatible with hysteria in the race for capital gains or with the compulsive consumption incentivized by advertising. Between market logic, where abstract labor time is the standard for all things, and the reasoned relations of time and space characteristic of natural conditions for the reproduction of the human species, there is no common measure. The incommensurability between market values and ecological values marks one of the historical limits of the capitalist mode of production.
Faced with the cruelties of the market jungle, the Attac Manifesto outlines a series of measures meant to overthrow the pillars of neoliberalism.105 But to attack these pillars is to call into question the sovereignty of property owners. Indeed, how can we plan for an ambitious, long-term program of energy conversion without challenging the power of the big oil companies or the nuclear industry, or without confronting the private lobbies of weapons manufacturers or the communications industry, which are more and more closely aligned? This is no longer about the comparative advantage of rational economic solutions. It is rather a test of political strength. Herein lies the distinction that makes all the difference. The resolution to defy the despotism of capital and markets is what separates a weak, minimal antiliberalism from one with real consequences. In other words, it defines an anticapitalist movement determined to change the world before it crushes us.
“Provided it is not taken in the narrow sense that it receives in the context of intellectual property law, nor reduced to a strictly formal conception of freedom of access, nor defended by ‘differentialist’ arguments, nor dissociated from the alternative forms of organizing production, the idea of the public domain can have an irreplaceable political significance,” wrote Grégoire Chamayou.106 These are many conditions, but they are those of an effective struggle against new forms of capitalist predation and accumulation. In the United States, some contest the fetishization of the term “public domain” on the grounds that its lexical unity covers very different situations. What is the relation between a copyright on a text and a patent on a molecule? To conflate these questions under the general heading of intellectual property, opposing it in an equally general manner to the idea of the public domain, may cause confusion: “It is true that the various issues gathered under these terms do not have the same degree of urgency nor the same actors. Still, I cannot rid myself of the idea that hackers who fight lockdowns on proprietary software, peasants who oppose technological control over seeds, internet users attached to the peer-to-peer model, scientists concerned with the ethics of sharing research results, librarians defending the principle of first sale against the taxation of reading, associations which oppose drug patents and the taxation of health, artists who think that all creation proceeds through sampling and collage of all sorts, autochthonous communities for whom the figure of the individual inventor has no meaning, and many others, are not unrelated. And perhaps the concept of ‘public domain’ could function to intensify these relations, which are as yet only attenuated.”107
Through the debates on the theft of wood, Marx debarked in 1842 on the steep path toward the “critique of political economy,” which led him to the heart of the mysteries and wonders of capital. From the customary right of the poor, passing through the principle of a “public domain” to the common heritage of humanity, the subject matter has changed but the question endures. Who will prevail: self-interested calculation or solidarity and common interest, property and an enforceable right to existence? Our lives are worth more than their profits: “Rise up, dispossessed of the world!”108