Primitive Accumulation of Capital and De–Commoning
(from Vocabulary of Commons, article 12)
by Ritajyothi Bandyopadhyay
De-commoning
Primitive accumulation of capital and de-commoning:
Three moments in the history of capital
This chapter is a commentary on the relationship between commons and industrial and postcolonial capitalism. It will argue that Marx used the term as a part of his critique of political economy at a time when industrial capitalism was at its peak. The chapter will then show how the appropriation of the very notion of commons has taken place in the development discourses of the trans-national governing organisations in the last four decades. Citing two very contradictory usages of the term in Marx and in World Bank, in critical moments in the history of capital, the chapter seeks to understand the properties and possibilities that the concept embodies that make it palatable to a range of ideological positions. It then argues that commons is a useful term in forming a radical critique not only of private property but also of all forms of property. The chapter proposes that a slippage between commons and common property makes the concept coterminous with the public in a bourgeois city. Rallying for commons is a historical project as it calls for a radical unlearning of the pedagogy of the property regime and modern law.
Primitive accumulation in the West and enclosure of commons
Though it now strains credulity, there was once a time, roughly from the late fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, before capital’s spectacular self-imagining had fully colonised modern practices of knowledge, politics, and representation. Capital was then waxing, and capitalism’s star was ascending. Its bid to totality remained, nonetheless, yet only an ideal and thus still tentative in its global reach. There had once been a time when capital could be figured as partial absence. Such was the time of what Karl Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital, which refers to the initial centralisation and concentration of capital and the complementary expropriation of peasant or primitive masses, both equally prerequisite for capitalist political-economic relations: ‘The centralisation of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power’. In many of the states in Europe, primitive accumulation transpires as the enclosure of feudal common lands, which ‘freed’ serfs from their ties to the lords’ land but also forced them to exchange for the sake of survival the only commodity they possessed, labour power, since the common lands were no longer theirs for subsistence farming. ‘So-called primitive accumulation’, then, refers to ‘nothing less than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’, argued Marx.
Adam Smith’s treatment of the notion of ‘previous accumulation’ as a precondition for ‘division of labour’ pushes it back to a mythical past, disconnected from the viciousness of the contemporary instances of accumulation. Marx, pointing out this weakness in Smith, emphasises on historicisation of the process through an ‘extensive documentation of the subject’. However, one can easily locate some traces of confusion in Marx over the issue of continuity of primitive accumulation in the advanced stages of capitalist development. The source of this confusion, as Michael Perelman (2000) argues, resides in the Marxian conviction that the ‘silent compulsions’ of the laws of market are more brutal and effective than the crude forces of primitive accumulation.
What do commons and enclosure have to do with primitive accumulation of capital? In describing the logical condition for the origin of capitalism, ‘accumulation by dispossession’, as David Harvey would put it, Marx presented a vivid account of how the violence involved in the separation of the peasants from the means of subsistence was sanctioned and legitimised by the British Parliamentary Acts of enclosure of common lands (that Marx called the ‘Parliamentary form of robbery’) over nearly four centuries. To Marx, then, commons pertains to the moment of transition from pre-capital to capital. It is an initial condition which capital would transform into land and property. The persistence of commons even today is then the historical remainder of a still incomplete separation of the worker from the means of subsistence and hence a logical impediment to the totalisation of capitalist relations. It was also a ‘historical prefiguration of another, non-commodified world where rational association and human solidarity would become the basis of social life’ (Caffentzis 2010).
The states in Western Europe addressed the effect of primitive accumulation of capital (dispossession) in two ways. First, Marx provided a clear historical example of how British Parliamentary Acts, over the four centuries, legalised the violence associated with the enclosure of the commons. In this process, Marx tells us, commons and enclosure became well defined legal terms in England. Marx writes in Capital Volume I:
The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of commons (admitting thereby that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor (Marx 1887: 506).
Marx further argues that in the nineteenth century the connection between agricultural labourer and the commons had vanished from the public memory. As a result, the peasants ceased to receive compensation for the series of enclosures taken place between 1801 and 1831. As Marx seems to suggest, the legalisation of violence associated with the primitive accumulation of capital by the parliament led to the erasure of a certain public memory. This was how, according to Marx, the English state politically handled dispossession. It is in this endeavour that the state received ideological as well as political support from the classical political economists. Perelman argues that while economists such as Smith and Ricardo were advocating laissez-faire on a theoretical level, on a political level, they championed state actions that actively impoverished the peasantry, rather than relying on the market mechanism. The creation of wage labour, far from being a natural outcome, was accomplished through an explicit political agenda that favoured the interests of the capitalists over smallholders. In this connection, Perelman picks up a particular instance of institutional arrangements to show how contrived statist interventions were brought into action to set the premise for laissez-faire. A stricter than before enforcement of the Game Laws—laws ‘protecting’ the forests from the encroachments of the rural poor, prohibiting hunting, fishing, and collecting fruits for reasons other than feudal pleasure—guaranteed starvation for a large number of ‘indolent vagabonds’ and forced them to look for work in the factories.
Stricter enforcement of the laws served the interests of both capital and nobility: the lords could enjoy the pleasure of hunting without being interrupted by ‘unruly intruders’ and the capitalists could enjoy the fruits of labour of the people forbidden to have free access to animal protein. Apparently, the classical economists were dismissive of the question of the Game Laws as an ‘ugly residue of ancient feudalism’ (matter of a mythical past). Their interest in the subject was perversely related to the construction of a new ‘bourgeois vision of nature’, which, incidentally, facilitated a greater degree of primitive accumulation by appealing to the metropolitan desire for a pristine elsewhere. For example, Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were quite influential in initiating a ‘craze for deer parks’, which were nothing more than ‘closely managed game reserves’. The eighteenth century longings for this pristine elsewhere persists even today in the environmentalist pleas for preservation of unadulterated urban spaces through evicting slums and prohibiting ‘lowly’ slum-dwellers from using lake-water for domestic purposes (see Solomon Benjamin’s chapter in this volume).
The second option for the Western European states to tackle the question of dispossession and social unrest and revolts caused by the dispossessed peasants had been to deport the surplus humanity (expropriated and not integrated into the factory working class) to penal colonies in Americas and Australia. In the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century the British used North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. When that avenue closed in the 1780s after the American War of Independence, the British began to use parts of Australia as penal settlements. France sent criminals to Louisiana in the early eighteenth century and to French Guiana in the mid nineteenth century (Taylor 2001). In this connection one may remember a series of novels and short stories written mostly in the twentieth century (Franz Kafka’s short story, In the Penal Colony, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s historical fiction Botany Bay, Henri Charriere’s autobiographical novel, Papillon) depicting the process of deportation and the life of the people in the newly colonised land.
De-commoning and the colonial rule
The pre-colonial Indian peasant economy was largely based on the subsistence ethic. The Mughal system broke down in the second half of the eighteenth century as surplus extraction became more vigorous and land became a commodity affecting the peasants’ subsistence provisions and resulting in peasant revolts. Any standard textbook of modern India gives a fairly detailed account of such revolts culminating into the Great Revolt of 1857. The growth of property rights in land and consequently of a land market ultimately replaced customary production relations with contract and what Ranajit Guha has called the ‘revitalisation of landlordism’ (Guha 1994: 7). The standard textbook account would then say that due to changes in property relations, the actual farmers lost their occupancy rights and were turned into tenants-at-will. The high land revenue demand increased the peasants’ need for credit. Growing indebtedness led to dispossession. As Guha puts it, the landlords, moneylenders and the state came to constitute ‘a composite apparatus of dominance over the peasant’ (Guha 1994: 8) leading to a dissociation between the peasant and the means of production.
Not until 1859 did the colonial state look at the tenancy issue and do anything to protect their right. Even after that, dispossession remained a burning issue. In the inter-war period the question of rural dispossession which was earlier represented only in the papers in the writings of the economic nationalists, came to be integrated in the Gandhian national movement and quite often in socialist and communist political mobilisations. In the nineteenth century the colonial state sought to address the question partially following the Western European tradition of sending people across the sea. Thus, between 1820 and 1890, millions of Indians were sent to South Africa, Trinidad, Surinam and Fiji as indentured labourers.
The heterogeneous world of postcolonial capital
When postcolonial nation-states like India began to undertake massive industrialisation and urbanisation projects, they could not make use of the deportation strategies that their erstwhile masters could do with much ease. With the proliferation of the notion of popular sovereignty along with electoral politics, the independent nation-state developed a compulsion to address the masses on the questions of dispossession and enclosure. Put differently, while the decolonisation of colonial law did not take place, the postcolonial state had to justify its succession by establishing its difference with the colonial state and colonial capital accumulation.
The ‘drain theory’ could not be held responsible for poverty. The difference was established by subsuming all interests to the paramount national interest, by justifying the state actions through the techno-scientific rationality of planning (Chatterjee 1997) and also to some extent by extending the state’s pastoral function as a remedy to dispossession. It was also the time when transnational governing organisations such as the World Bank, IMF, etc began to influence the policy-making in the so-called third world. In the first two decades since decolonisation the problem of dispossession could have been kept at bay with the combination of a Rostowvian optimism and state repression.
But in the 1970s, the problem of dispossession began to pose a serious threat to states all over the third world. In such a complex moment of capital’s hegemony, there had been the sudden recognition in the ‘development discourse’ that a sub-economy consisting of a variety of petty economic activities not only exists but stands out as ‘a potential provider of employment and incomes to millions of people who would otherwise lack the means of survival’ (Sanyal 2007). Already in the 1970s, the notion of development mutated from the focus on accumulation to a focus on promotion of welfare through direct intervention. Today, the goal is to constitute ‘an economic space outside and alongside capital, for its castaways, rather than to create entitlements for them through distribution of income’. This is, as Kalyan Sanyal (2007) holds, governmentality in a more complex and effective form.
The most important aspect of the ‘informal sector’ is that its producers are estranged from the means of production as a result of primitive accumulation of capital. But they are unable to become the ‘working classes’. Sanyal conceptualises this ‘dark space of classlessness’ as a ‘need economy’—an ensemble of economic activities undertaken for the purpose of meeting needs, as distinct from activities driven by an impersonal force of systemic accumulation.
This producer is not a petty producer in the historical sense for they have to purchase their means of production with the mediation of money from the market. Also, need-satisfaction as a goal of production does not rule out the existence of surplus in the need economy because ‘consumption’ includes present and future consumption. In Sanyal’s conceptualisation, all production activities driven by need, outside the ‘accumulation economy’, irrespective of whether they use wage-labour or not, are constituents of the need economy.
The circuit of the ‘accumulation economy’ inevitably encroaches upon the need economy and usurps its space within capital’s own domain. This is the ongoing process of primitive accumulation. Yet at the same time, in a simultaneous process, the dispossessed are rehabilitated through the ‘pastoral functions’ of the international organisations and the developmental state. Sanyal calls this a ‘reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation’.
The relation of dominance continues to be operative in the ‘complex case of hegemony’: While capital acts on its own, the ‘need economy’ exists as population groups, as constituted objects on which the techniques of governance can be applied. The asymmetry is also reflected in the fact that while need-based production must conform to the logic of the market, and the rules of the market pertain to the system of capitalist production, the accumulation economy cannot be ‘questioned from the perspective of consumption and need’. But the ‘formal–informal’ dualism hides this asymmetry by describing them as two autonomous and parallel spaces without any contradiction, thereby placing them on a ‘non-political terrain’.
The development discourse, however, confines the need-based production to a space outside the world that is capital’s own. Partha Chatterjee (2008) discerns in this twin process of the need economy being promoted and also quarantined, in its constitution through developmental intervention, the ‘implosion of the two regimes of power described by Foucault: the restrictive and the productive’. It is in this moment of the heterogeneous temporalities of capital that the transnational governing bodies have started re-appropriating the commons. The entire era of social forestry and then community forestry in 1980s and 1990s witnessed certain de-fencing of ‘public’ forests. These spaces were then imagined as the essential common property for the reproduction of the community—the community which would protect the common property, collect minor forest products freely and also market them taking financial assistance from microcredit institutions. For the microcredit institutions the poor who were once estranged from the means of production would now become the prime site for accumulation. Thus, commons has now been associated not only with the reproduction of subsistence economy but also with the accumulation of corporate capital. This is the reason why, in the 1990s there had been a cautious acceptance of the commons at the highest levels of international planning.
While in the early 1980s the neoliberal Berg Report called for a systematic privatisation of the communal land in Africa, the 1992 Human Development Report of the UNDP made a policy reversal saying that ‘a compelling reason for supporting community resource management is its importance for the poor’ (World Bank 1992: 142, quoted in Caffentzis 2004) and that ‘governments need to recognise that smaller organisational units, such as villages or pastoral associations, are better equipped to manage their own resources than are large authorities and may be a more effective basis for rural development and rational resource management than institutions imposed from the outside’ (World Bank 1992: 143, quoted in Caffentzis 2004).
In the new era of capitalist accumulation, the reunification of the dispossessed with the means of production has been the primary means to keep alive the circuits of capital accumulation. The poorest of the poor—the ‘bottom billion’ would serve as a frontier market opening up new horizons of capital accumulation. One should keep the fact in mind that microfinance institutions are not always non-profit organisations. They are after profit like commercial banks, investment vehicles and money-markets. The new accumulation economy mines the fortunes of the bottom pyramid, first by re-associating them with the common property and other means of production and then by making profit out of this reunification seeking to ‘eradicate poverty through profit’ (Prahalad, 2004).
If this is the case, then the ‘need economy’ (as Sanyal conceptualises and Chatterjee largely agrees) is far from being a sphere separate from the accumulation economy only providing the conditions for the hegemony of the corporate capital. The present moment of capitalist development invests more on common property than on the notion of the public and private divide. As the example of community forestry in the 1990s shows, the current capitalist development can even be read as anti-public in nature. Any slippage from commons to common property in anti-capitalist scholarship runs the risk of accepting the recent capitalist purchase of the concept of commons.
Commons as a negation of property
What does an anti-capitalist scholar or an activist do with the concept of commons? Michael Hardt’s (2010) reading of Marx that commons is a critique not only to the private property but also to all forms of property including the state ownership of resources (the grand Soviet model) is the most appropriate. Commons is then a part of the critique of political economy for, as Marx and Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto, the critique of political economy is, at its heart, a critique of property. ‘The theory of communists’, argued Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto may be summed up in a single sentence: ‘Abolition of private property’. A few lines before this famous declaration, Marx and Engels state that the ‘distinguishing feature’ of Communism is the ‘abolition of bourgeois property’ (emphasis is author’s). By seeking to abolish the bourgeois property relations Marx and Engels could specify the historic role of the Communists: abolition not only of private property but also of the entire archaeology of bourgeois property—the very separation between public and private property. It is in this sense that the present chapter uses commons as a challenge to all forms of property. Again, in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, as Hardt shows, Marx makes a distinction between crude or corrupt communism and its ‘positive expression’. The crude communism merely generalises private property by extending it to the entire community, as universal private property. Hardt (2010) argues that by the oxymoron ‘universal private property’ Marx seems to tell us that for Communism, the withering away of private component of property is not enough; the positive communism should fight for the very abolition of the notion of property (read property after bourgeois revolution). To Marx, then, the essence of communism lies in the idea of commons, which is a paradigm to question the legitimacy of private property, public property and the state property.
Public/Commons
Thinking of commons as a critique of property in the cities is essentially a historical project. The concept of the modern city builds itself in the systematic negation of the notion of commons and in the promotion of a separation and ordering of spaces in public and the private. The slippage between commons and common property makes commons yet another version of public property making it palatable to the liberal argument. Rallying for the notion of commons as a critique of public is a part of a historical activism as it seeks to fight the repression that the city and its public have imposed on commons—a fight against historical and discursive erasure of a certain set of ideas. This section will show how the history of public is also a history of the erasure of the memory of commons in Kolkata.
In the British legal tradition, good government referred to the protection of the ‘public good’ or ‘public interest’ from the depredation of sectarian and purely private interest. This is well represented in the promulgation of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1862. The section 268 of the IPC defines a person guilty of public nuisance as ‘who does not act or is guilty of an illegal omission which causes any common injury, danger or annoyance to the public or to the people in general who dwell or occupy property in the vicinity, or which must necessarily cause injury, danger or annoyance to persons who may have any occasions to use public rights’. The colonial law in India sought to build public spaces in the cities emulating the European model. For instance, as Prashant Kidambi (2007) argues, the 1902 Police Act in Bombay empowered the police to ‘target those sections of the urban poor who made a precarious living on the streets of the city: beggars, barbers, carriage drivers, cart-men, cobblers, hawkers, prostitutes, vagrants and the like’ (Kidambi 2007:149).
Even before this, the Bombay Municipal Act of 1888 introduced by-laws that prohibited all usages that were deemed to be ‘encroachments’ upon ‘public streets’ (Kidambi 2007:150). The Kolkata police—according to its 1870 report—roped in all who were accused of acts such as unlawful gathering, sounding musical instruments on public streets without a pass, bathing on public streets, letting off fireworks on public streets, begging for alms on public streets, and even uttering obscene and abusive words. On this latter charge alone, at least 378 people were arrested in Kolkata in 1870, out of which 275 were convicted (West Bengal State Archive, Report of the Police of the town of Kolkata and its suburbs, 1870, by Stuart Hogg, Commissioner of Police, Kolkata. Home Department, Police B, 15 July 1871, No 5). Similar developments were also replicated elsewhere in the colonial world. Thus in the late nineteenth century, the colonial state in Singapore acted as the ‘guardian of the public arena’. Moreover, a new kind of crime, the ‘public nuisance’, which, ‘[b]etween 1870 and 1920... absorbed the single largest fraction of police energies in most parts of India’ (Anderson 1992:9), led to ‘a massive intervention in the social use of the physical environment’ (Anderson 1992:2), so that, for instance, ‘[r]oads that had been the stage for itinerant hawkers, occasional markets, and small-scale manufacturing fell under the prohibition on obstructions...[and] could be made the object of prosecution’ (Anderson 1992:19). In addition to this, street demonstrations of religious festivals such as Muharram, Nam Sankirtan, Charak, etc., were designated as criminal acts and codified as ‘miscellaneous offences’ under the Indian Penal Code. The Kolkata elite began to keep themselves away from these popular cultural expressions. Following the establishment of the Society for the Suppression of Public Obscenity by the ‘educated natives’ at a meeting in the Kolkata Town Hall on 20 September 1873, resolved to ‘aid the government in putting in force the sections of the Penal Code and the Printing Act which were meant to preserve public purity’ (Friend of India, 25 September 1873, quoted in Banerjee 2003). The Kolkata police finally prohibited the sawng (pantomime) performances on the streets during the Charak festivities in 1874. The sawng performances were treated as ‘indecent behaviour on public streets’ in the list of offences in the Indian Penal Code (Friend of India, 25 September 1873, cited in Banerjee 2003.).
There are at least three ways in which politics and claim-making on urban land have taken place in India. A history of the public, which is a negation of commons, is possible by looking at the three forms that urban politics on land has taken.
First, as scholars working on the history of public space in India have elaborated (Anderson 1992 and Glover 2007), much of the uniqueness of public owes to the legal distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Anjaria 2008). Historians agree that in Indian towns and cities there had been common spaces (Bayly 1983). But these were not organised by the public and private divide (Kaviraj 1997). Instead, as Sudipta Kaviraj (1997) tells us, rules concerning the social uses of these spaces entailed both obligations and responsibilities (Anjaria 2008). Yet at the same time, this is not to suggest that the colonial concept of ‘public space’ completely erased the traces of prior socio-spatial arrangements. Rather, one notices the ways in which the historical and legal development of the concept of ‘public space’ in India under colonialism partially reveals the heterogeneous and intersecting legal and political lineages that inform its contemporary fraught usage (Anjaria 2008). In this way, scholars see contemporary debates on urban space in India as what Kaviraj calls a ‘peculiar configuration of the modern’ (Kaviraj 1997:92). In this connection Kaviraj has made an interesting distinction between the bourgeois public and what he calls pablik—a vernacularised and proletarian appropriation of the term as well as a territorialised negotiability of public norms and meanings as a radical consequence of democratisation of democracy. Hawkers and pavement dwellers in Kolkata, for example, regularly use the English terms ‘public’ and ‘public space’ to advance their own political claims in the city. But, as one observes, the pablik also implicitly accepts the notion of the bourgeois public. Without the understanding of the public it is hardly possible to recognise the Indian vernacular genius that corrupts the public. This very way of interpreting the everyday quotidian practices contributes to the forgetting of the notion of commons.
Second, the separation between public and private in bourgeois legal institutions had given birth to modern subalterns who could make use of this distinction to form a legal argument with the colonial state. In this context, a case of ‘communal tension’ in Kolkata from the ‘Daily Notes’ of the Taltala Thana submitted to the Deputy Commissioner of Police (DC) of the ‘Special Branch’ between 12 January 1910 and 20 April 1910, recorded as the ‘SB Secret Report on Communal Groups and Muslim Affairs’ (SB/ SW/636/1910) is illustrative. It demonstrates both the interpretation and the process—the different interpretations of the term ‘public’ at play in defining the city space, and the process of translation from one domain of urban practice to another that the case entailed. The purpose of citing this case is to point to the connections between the colonial histories of the ‘public space’ and the more recent deployment of that term in struggles over space in the contemporary city. It is from the English translation of the original petition attached with the Daily Notes of the Taltala Thana and not the original papers of Baksh.
Khuda Baksh, a shopkeeper from Faizabad, migrated to the city in early 1898, built a mosque on the ‘public land, marginally encroaching the footpath of the Dharmatal Street, half-mile east to the Tipu Sultan Shahi Masjid’, in the vicinity of the Esplanade in Central Kolkata. Before the building was fully plastered in January 1910, Khuda Baksh was summoned to the Taltala Thana and asked by the police officer in-charge to stop construction. Some days later, however, Baksh and some of the fellow shopkeepers of the neighbourhood submitted a petition to the Municipal Committee of the Kolkata Corporation stating that the mosque would not be used for the ‘public prayer’ and would purely be ‘used for private accommodation and convenience of himself and his friends’. The officer in-charge reluctantly agreed to this restricted use until it became apparent several weeks later, that azans (Islamic calls to prayer) were regularly made from the mosque and ‘the public generally in the neighbourhood and bazaar’ was using the mosque. Baksh was reportedly summoned to the municipal authority and ordered to deposit a Rupee 1000 surety bond to ensure that he would not have the azan called in the mosque. He replied by submitting another petition that reversed his earlier claim in fundamental ways: ‘the masjid (mosque) is not my private property but devoted to the pious uses. For this reason I object to give security....No Muslim law prohibits worship because of fear or other scruples. No masjid is a private property...nor do I invite anybody to pray in this masjid— and from this date I will not go there myself’.
Usage of the word ‘public’ in the English translation suggests that Baksh had acquired consummate skills to make use of bourgeois legal terms to defend his case. The case also shows that subjection constitutes a form of repressive and productive power; power subordinates the subject (and maintains each subject within a state of subordination) but it also produces the legal subject, rendering subjectivity, desire and agency possible. The subordinating power, argues Judith Butler, that precedes and exceeds the subject that it produces, may be appropriated by the subject in the form of opposition or resistance. In other words, power subjugates but it also ‘subjectifies’ enabling claims to empowering subjectivity and agency or reflexivity.
Third, one may use the logic of the legitimate use of the public as enshrined in law to corner and erase other existing and possible pablik practices. The streets can be strictly designated for automobiles and footpaths to the pedestrians. Such spaces can then be disciplined and mapped by grid, lines and fences. Mobilising this logic, the state may encircle an open field and transform it into a public park where morning-walkers are welcome if they agree to pay a maintenance fee. Mobilising the same logic of space management, the zoning laws can get implemented which would not only govern the space but also manage the groups who use that space. The National Policy on Urban Street Vendors in India is a classic example of such a mobilisation of the public. There are many activist groups who find the National Policy as providing the solution to all street problems.
All the three forms of the articulation of the public in claim-making belong to the narrative of property. When Baksh, in our second case, successfully subverted the public/private binary and explored the linkages between the two to justify his case, he did so without questioning the very sanctity of private and public property. His actions emboldened rather than debased the notion of property.
This precisely is the disciplinary integration process in which all forms of value production gets reduced to a singular form of value production. Disciplinary integration entails a double history: the history of legalisation of property and also the history of the negation of commons. An agenda for commons is a project to undo property and to unlearn the pedagogy of modern law. This might be an impossible project. But, it is impossibility that constitutes the very philosophy of activism.
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