World Bank Commons
= refers to the World Bank's support for the Commons, and what this means poltically
Discussion
Silvia Federici:
" First, since at least the early 1990s, the language of the commons has been appropriated by the World Bank and the United Nations and put at the service of privatization. Under the guise of protecting biodiversity and conserving the global commons, the Bank has turned rain forests into ecological reserves, has expelled the populations that for centuries had drawn their sustenance from them, while ensuring access to those who can pay, for instance, through eco-tourism.4 For its part, the United Nations has revised the international law governing access to the oceans in ways that enables governments to concentrate the use of seawaters in fewer hands, again in the name of preserving the common heritage of mankind.5
The World Bank and the UN are not alone in their adaptation of the idea of the
commons to market interests. Responding to different motivations, a re-valorization of
the commons has become trendy among mainstream economists and capitalist planners;
witness the growing academic literature on the subject and its cognates: social capital,
gift economies, altruism. Witness also the official recognition of this trend through the
conferral of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009 to the leading voice in this field, the
political scientist Elinor Ostrom.
Development planners and policymakers have discovered that, under proper conditions, a collective management of natural resources can be more efficient and less prone to conflict than privatization, and that commons can be made to produce very well for the market.7 They have also recognized that, carried to the extreme, the commodification of social relations has self-defeating consequences. The extension of the commodity form to every corner of the social factory, which neo-liberalism has promoted, is an ideal limit for capitalist ideologues, but it is a project not only unrealizable but undesirable from the viewpoint of long-term reproduction of the capitalist system. Capitalist accumulation is structurally dependent on the free appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that must appear as externalities to the market, like the unpaid domestic work that women have provided, upon which employers have relied for the reproduction of the workforce.
It is no accident, then, that long before the Wall Street meltdown, a variety of economists and social theorists warned that the marketization of all spheres of life is detrimental to the market’s well-functioning, for markets too, the argument goes, depend on the existence of non- monetary relations like confidence, trust, and gift giving.8 In brief, capital is learning about the virtues of the common good.
Even the Economist, the
organ of capitalist free-market economics for more than 150 years, in its July 31, 2008
issue, cautiously joined the chorus.
- The economics of the “new commons” – the journal wrote – is still in its infancy. It is too soon to be confident about its hypotheses. But it may yet prove a useful way of thinking about problems, such as managing the internet, intellectual property or international pollution, on which policymakers need all the help they can get.
We must be very careful, then, not to craft the discourse on the commons in such a way as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself, posturing, for instance, as the environmental guardian of the planet." (http://www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/federici-feminism-and-the-politics-of-commons.pdf)