Hobohemia Commons

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= according to George Cafftentzis, an example of a Anti-Capitalist Commons


Source

* Article: The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital? George Caffentzis

URL = http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/articles/69_Caffentzis.pdf


Case Study

George Caffentzis:

"The commons I will discuss relates to the establishment of ‘Hobohemia’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35 The ‘hobo’ residents of Hobohemia were migratory ‘white’ male workers in North America of that period who used the railroads and railroad property as their commons. Although they were individually nomadic, in the sense that they did not travel in the boxcars of freight trains in large permanently defined groups (as Eastern European, Chinese and Mexican workers often did), at the same time they were quite collective in their reproduction, since an essential part of hobo life was ‘the jungle,’ that is, a site ‘located in close proximity to a railroad division point, where trains are made up or where trains stop to change crews and engines’.36 Hoboes would congregate in the jungles when they were on the road. They were places where they could cook their ‘Mulligan stew,’ clean themselves and their clothes, sleep in relative safety, share their knowledge about the whereabouts of the railroad police or of jobs, and persuade their mates about their politics.

Although some jungles were temporary others were continuously in existence, even though the turnover of residents was quite high. They dotted the rail arteries of the nation and provided nodal points for the practical communalisation of the railway system. The jungles were in general hospitable and democratic (although they rarely challenged the colour and gender lines that divided the working class then as now).37 They were run on the basis of a number of ‘unwritten Jungle laws’ that banned acts like making fire by night in jungles subject to raids, wasting food or destroying it after eating, leaving pots or other utensils dirty after using, and so forth. These rules were strictly enforced internally by the hobo rule-makers themselves just as they would defend the jungle from external invasion by police, vigilantes and the Klu Klux Klan.

Jungle committees would deal with infractions of the rules and prescribe punishments. For example, on one occasion mentioned by Nels Anderson, an ex-hobo sociologist, a ‘hi-jack’ was caught in the act of robbing some ‘bo’ who was sleeping; a committee was immediately formed and a chairman selected to decide on what should be done. The committee decided that the hi-jack should be whipped … but ‘no one steps forward; everybody declines to apply the strap or stick’!38 After a confused hiatus, a young fellow agreed to fight the hi-jack, and a boxing match is arranged, where the hi-jack is eventually knocked out. When he came to he was kicked out of the jungle. ‘By eleven o’clock [at night] the excitement is over. Different men announce that they were headed for so and so and that the freight starts at such a time. To this someone replies that he is going that way too so they start off together’.

Through the complex organisation of movement, information exchange and reproduction nodes, the hoboes created a nationwide network that used the private property of the railroad companies as their commons. True, they expressed many different political ideals - with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) perhaps defining the predominant one - but their actual achievement was to show that the railroads and their land could be communalised. This was no mean feat, since they had to confront an industry which owned the most important transport modality for the continental economy at the time and that had just reached its peak of expansion marked by the laying of the 254,037th mile of rail in 1916.40 Along with the tracks, another measure of the railroad companies’ power were the enormous land concessions granted to them by the government from the Civil War on that made them the arbiters of the economic direction of the nation west of the Mississippi. Howard Zinn estimates that the Federal government gave the railroad companies about 100 million acres during the Civil War alone.

The main ‘economic’ purpose of the communalisation of the railroad territory and the freight trains was not immediately revolutionary. Hoboes rode the rails usually to follow the harvest, to go to a distant job contracted for, say, at one of the employment agencies on West Madison Street, Chicago (called the ‘main stem’), or, ironically enough, to go to a rumoured railroad construction site, for track laying was a standard job for a hobo. But the hoboes’ national presence was huge, since hundreds of thousands of men passed through one or another region of Hobohemia (the rails, the jungle or the main stem) in the course of a year. Moreover, there is no doubt many a hobo’s politics was anti-capitalist, and the rails could not only bring workers for a harvest or a building boom, they also could bring a swarm of supporters to a ‘free speech’ fight or a general strike. Consequently, they constituted a communal challenge to the heart of US capital. The hobo commons of freight trains and the railroad territory had to be enclosed, since, after all, the hoboes were recommunalising the communal land of the indigenous Americans that had been first conquered and nationalised by the federal government and then privatised through land grants to railroad companies.

The path of enclosure was complex, involving raw repression as well as technological and ideological transformations.

The repression was obvious in the period of the Palmer raids. First, the IWW became the object of governmental harassment and the physical elimination of its leadership. Second, a tremendous number of railroad ‘trespassers’ were killed and injured in the course of those years, for instance, 2,553 were killed in 1919 and another 2,166 in 1920,43 often with assistance of the railroad policemen’s guns. Third, the increase in the anti-radical activities of the KKK and other more local death squads of the 1920s were often directed against the hobo jungles.

Along with this anti-hobo violence was a technological change in the modality of transport, the automobile and truck were beginning to replace the passenger and freight train as the dominant form of transport as the highway system expanded and the rails declined. The movement of labour power over the highway generated a completely different relationship to class struggle than the rails, thus undermining Hobohemia.

Ideologically, the hoboes were attacked as examples of deviant ‘white men’ who had become ‘homeless’ and without the restraints of ‘home,’ hence they were dangerous to capital. The federal government, especially with the New Deal, saw the ‘problem of the hobo’ as resolvable by the creation of ‘suburbia as the nation’s dominant residential form’.44 By WWII the effort to transform the railways into a commons had been definitely defeated.

Hobohemia revealed its distinctive anti-capitalist character in the state’s and capital’s violent efforts to enclose, criminalise and extirpate it. It is no accident that the standing joke of the employer class during this period was that ‘IWW,’ the name of the most coherent political expression of the hobo working class, was an acronym of the exclamation ‘I Won’t Work!’ In this case as with that of the Atlantic pirates, these efforts at enclosure did succeed; the jury is still out on the efforts of the software commoners." (http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/articles/69_Caffentzis.pdf)