Great Britain

In the latest issue of Stir to Action, John Gurney, an historian of the Diggers of the 17th century, has some fascinating perspectives on the Runnymede Eco-Village, a squatters encampment that began in June near the site where the Magna Carta was signed by King John.  In his essay, “The Diggers, the Land and Direct Activism,” Gurney reflects on the parallels between today’s encampment and a similar one that occurred in April 1649:

"It was in April 1649 that the Diggers, inspired by the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, occupied waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots and beans. For Winstanley, the earth had been corrupted by covetousness and the rise of privatge property, and the time was ripe for it tobecome once more a ‘common treasury for all’. Change was to be brought about by the poor working the land in common and refusing to work for hire. The common people had ‘by their labours … lifted up their landlords and others to rule in tyranny and oppression over them’, and, Winstanley insisted, ‘so long as such are rulers as calls the land theirs … the common people shall never have their liberty; nor the land ever freed from troubles, oppressions and complainings’. The earth was made ‘to preserve all her children’, and not to ‘preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the earth from others, that they might beg or starve in a fruitful land’ – everyone should be able to ‘live upon the increase of the earth comfortably’. Soon all people – rich as well as poor – would, Winstanley hoped, be persuaded to throw in their lot with the Diggers and work to create a new, and better society. To Winstanley, agency was key, for ‘action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’.

….Digging lasted for just over a year from April 1649. The Surrey Diggers abandoned their St George’s Hill colony in the summer of 1649, after having succumbed to frequent assaults and legal actions, and by late August they had relocated to the neighbouring parish of Cobham. Here they remained until 19 April 1650, when local landowners brought hired men to destroy their houses and burn the contents and building materials. New Digger colonies had, however, sprung up elsewhere, inspired by the Surrey Diggers’ example and by Winstanley’s extraordinarily rich body of writings.

And now, the movie poster for The Olympics – or as John Stewart puts it, deference to the IOC’s bullying over unauthorized uses of the trademark “Olympics,” “The Quadrennial corporate sponsored international ring-based sports event.” 

This poster was made by Smuzz,  a British illustrator of sci-fi books, among other things who lives in Lancashire.  Funny how the Games™ seem more of an excuse for corporate branding and image-polishing than something that belongs to the athletes themselves or to Londoners.

For those of you who (like me) have trouble reading the fine print on the poster, it reads:  “£25 billion taken from depleted public funds.  Square miles of public land permanently truned over to private contractors.  £553M on security.  13,000 armed forces personnel – more than Britain deploys in Afghanistan.  New police powers.  Wholesale destruction of public parks, sports facilities, allotments, conservation areas, and public spaces.  The Olympics – a self-governing multinational – transforming public property into private assets in every city it lands.  Policed by  G45.  Sponsored by Dow Chemicals.”

Noam Chomsky recent gave a meaty talk, “Destroying the Commons:  On Shredding the Magna Carta” that shows how fragile the rights of commoners truly are. Achieved after enormous civil strife, the Magna Carta supposedly guaranteed commoners certain civic and procedural rights.  A companion document, the Charter of the Forest later incorporated into the Magna Carta, expressly guarantees commoners stipulated rights to access and use forests, land, water, game and other natural resources for their subsistence. 

Both documents are now being shredded today with barely a peep of acknowledgment that centuries-old principles of human rights are being swept aside.  Much of Chomsky’s talk is dedicated to his familiar critiques of US geopolitics and corporate globalization.  But he has a few illuminating passages about the Charter of the Forest and modern-day enclosures, especially in the global South.  Chomsky gave the speech at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

Citing Linebaugh’s book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, Chomsky writes:

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization…. By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.  

With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility.  In Bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history.  The World Bank has just ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining.  Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world….

The International Olympics Committee is one of the biggest, most aggressive marketers of the Olympic Brand.  It should come as no surprise that athletes want a piece of the action for themselves.  American runner Nick Symmonds has shown his appreciation for the true Olympic spirit by auctioning off a corporate sponsorship on his left shoulder. 

Hanson Dodge Creative, an advertising and design agency in Milwaukee, won the right to pay Symmonds $11,000 to tattoo its Twitter hashtag on his left shoulder.  As a piece by Stewart Elliot in the New York Times assures us, it’s only a temporary tattoo – but it will be there for the duration of the Olympic Games and 2012. 

The Olympics once prided itself on honoring amateurism in athletics – a standard that was often controversial on the margins because it was hard to enforce.  Everyone needs to earn a livelihood somehow, and the eastern bloc countries for years had a form of state-sponsored professionalism of athletes.  That said, is it an emancipation for athletes to be selling their bodies as a vehicle for corporate tattoos?  Talk about “branding”!

Hanson Dodge bought the "tattoo rights" before Nick Symmonds won a berth on the US Olympic team.  After he made Team USA, it meant that Hanson Dodge would now get far more public exposure for its $11,000 than originally anticipated.  Symmonds proudly noted, “You’re never going to find a better cpm.”

Yes, athletes have become experts on advertising.  A “cpm” is a trade term for “cost per thousand,” or the cost that advertisers pay TV, radio or newspaper outlets to reach a thousand consumers.  One might say that Symmonds is a perfect representative for Team USA:  sell, sell sell! 

There is something very sad about the Olympics becoming little more than a strike-it-rich business opportunity.  Symmonds is unapologetic.  When he finished first in a race in June, he stuck out his tongue in defiance, and said:  “My brand identity is to treat every day like it's your last, live life to the fullest.”  Living life to the fullest apparently means acting like a boor and leveraging the cash value of Brand Symmonds.

To judge from James B. Quilligan's recent series of talks in London, Brits are more receptive to, and interested in, the idea of a commons-based economy than ever.  Below, James reflects on his many encounters and dialogues over the course of two weeks.  --DB

Twelve seminars in twelve days? Each on a different topic?

Imagine the angst I felt last winter when organizers in London approached me to make this demanding array of presentations on consecutive days.

They explained that each of the sponsoring groups had a unique perspective on the commons, ranging from economics, business, politics, democracy, culture and technology to land reform, private property, trusteeship, interest rates, systems theory and spirituality.

Once I’d grasped the constellation of issues, I welcomed the challenge of integrating them with the commons. It sounded like real fun.  After extensive preparations, the Quilligan Seminars were held from May 7 - 18 at various locations in London. (For reference, my talking points on all the sessions are included here.)

The commons agenda may seem a long way removed from electoral politics and mainstream respectability.  But we have already seen how the commons sensibility has propelled the Pirate Party to its surprising breakthroughs in Sweden and Germany.  And now we have Blue Labour in the U.K. making a strong bid to re-conceptualize British politics.

A key figure in this transformation is Maurice Glasman, an academic, activist and Labour life peer in the House of Lords.  Glasman has earned wide respect for his community work in London, such as working on a living wage campaign for cooks, security guards and cleaners.  He also worked with faith communities on immigration issues, including a campaign called “Strangers into Citizens” that sought to integrate immigrants into their neighborhoods by fostering social understanding and cooperation among people.

“The very simple idea of people’s relationships with others is what is at stake here,” Glasman recently wrote in the Guardian. “The centrality of one-to-one conversations, of relationship building, of establishing trust between what were seen as incompatible communities and interests transformed my understanding of what a politics of the common good could be, and of what Labour should be about.”

The "Blue" in Blue Labour refers to its commitment to a “small-c conservatism."  By “conservative,” Glasman and his colleagues mean a commitment to cultural tradition, community and social solidarity – those old-fashioned, “soft” things that are usually treated by politicians as sappy rhetorical inspiration.  What makes Blue Labour stand out from this tradition, however, is the way it brilliantly blends a deeper humanistic vision with a hard-nosed economic analysis, including a staunch opposition to neoliberalism and globalization.

While Bradley L. Garrett may be an anthropologist by training, he prefers to call himself an “urban explorer” or better yet, a “place hacker.”  He recently came into public view after secretly climbing to the top of the Shard, the tallest building in Europe (1,061 feet/309.7 meters), in London.  He evaded security systems and at 2 am climbed to the top of the building, still under construction, earning a spectacular view over the twinkling London nightscape.

The night's adventure garnered wide media exposure for what is legally known as an act of trespassing. Garrett doesn’t consider this mere adventurism, although he concedes it is a thrill.  Rather, he sees himself as a thinking-man’s explorer of the meaning of urban ruins – derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals, abandoned military installations, sewer and drain networks, foreclosed estates, mines, and ruins of all sorts.  Garrett considers it ethnographic research into the physical detritus of modernity – and a statement about the scarcity of public spaces in cities for discovery, camaraderie and fun. 

As a video about place hacking notes, it’s all about the “psychogeography of place.”  It's about the desire to transcend the contrived, commercially constructed facade of the city to reach a rawer, more authentic sense of urban life.  And it’s about creating a community of fellow adventurers who share in discovering and investigating secret or derelict spaces.  Aficionados call such spaces T.O.A.D.S., “temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces.” 

New issues of two of my favorite journals have come out.  Time to check out some fascinating articles on commons-related themes.  First, an introduction to the two publications, Common Voices and Stir to Action.

Stir to Action – with the tagline, “Anger.  Analysis.  Action” – is a scrappy, fiercely smart quarterly that prowls the cultural and political frontier that few other publications cover.  Stir is published and edited by Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh in the UK.  Stir understands, citing Nathan Schneider, that “politics is not a matter of choosing among what we’re offered but of fighting for what we and others actually need, not to mention what we hope for.”  While established political journals handicap the horserace with smarty-pants/cynical commentary, Gordon-Farleigh has shown just how much fresh, uncovered political innovation there really is out there.  It's not just that "another world is possible," he writes, but that "another world is happening."

Stir deliberately avoids “the disproportionate fixation on Washington and London [that] produces mere spectators who can only rely on financial and political elites to save them and who can only be disappointed and failed by them.  This read-only political culture dominates our experience of our options and choices, and the German comedian Klaus Hansen expresses this reversible point in terms of commercial sport — “Football is like democracy: twenty-two people playing and millions watching.”  As Stephen Duncombe says in his interview, “It’s not enough to change people’s minds.  You have to change the social, political and economic structures in which they live.” 

So Stir gets out of London, avoids the venerable pundits and pols, and gets out on the street, and even ventures abroad.  In the latest issue, cultural anthropologist Marianne Maeckelbergh has a thoughtful piece about the horizontal decision-making process in the Occupy movement.  Maeckelbergh, who has participated in such processes in Barcelona, New York and Oakland, describes the history of participatory decisionmaking models and the rationale for them at Occupy gatherings.  She writes:  “In order to create new political structures we actually have to let go of certain economic relations which we take as given. For example, horizontal decision-making does not work when we assume a) that resources are scarce, b) that we therefore need to compete with each other and c) ownership is an exclusionary relation – a proprietary relation.”

Two recent developments suggest that the reactionary regime of maximalist copyright can still command a lot of raw political power to beat back commoners, flout legal principles and craft the law to its liking. Yet at the same time open networks and default norms of sharing are getting some serious traction these days, as two other developments attest. Could a post-reactionary world of free culture be at hand?

First, the bad news. A few weeks ago the EU extended the term of copyright protection for music recordings by another twenty years – an ignoble replay of what the U.S. Congress did in 1998 for U.S. copyright law. You may recall that the Disney Co. was determined to stop Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain, and the motion picture, recording and publishing industries were just as eager to reap a public giveaway worth billions of dollars.

If the copyright extension had not been adopted, lots of British music recordings from the 1960s from the Beatles to the early Stones and many others were expected to enter the public domain in 2012. Now there's a chilling thought: music that's still popular becoming free!  Alternatively, the artists themselves could begin to distribute the music themselves, rather than having to let the record labels have exclusive rights for another 20 years.

A new British publication, Stir, short for Stir to Action, has released its second issue as editor Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh bravely tries to give voice to a new kind of post-liberal, globally aware activist readership.  True to its name, Stir features a number of provocative articles and invigorating interviews with iconoclasts.  If we're lucky, this venture from the edge may actually help assemble a "constituency of unrealistic pragmatists," in the words of George McKay, author of a wonderful piece on on “radical gardening.”

In an interview with author Mckenzie Wark, we learn some of the lessons that the Situationists may have for contemporary political and cultural activism.  The Situationist International “was an extremely marginal avant-garde movement that was formed in 1957 and then dissolved itself in 1972,” Wark noted, describing his new book, The Beach Beneath the Street.  “Why the hell would anybody be interested in this tiny marginal activity? The footprint the Situationists left in political aesthetic culture is vastly greater than their actual numbers. As their leading light, Guy Debord, said ‘all you need is a few trustworthy comrades’.”

That’s a great premise for any movement:  a few trustworthy comrades with the imagination and daring to challenge the narcoleptic conformism of our times.  Even some of the most active activists that I know are half-asleep because they have so internalized the prevailing political paradigm and cultural norms.