Forwarded from the old list. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: fran ilich <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 7:29 PM Subject: Re: [p2p-research] [Commoning] Information sector: a qualitative different mode of production? To: Miguel Said Vieira <[email protected]> Cc: p2p research network <[email protected]>, [email protected] Going over what Miguel Said says: i jwanted to point out to an example in north america: the work of the EZLN Zapatistas. not only they have commonalized farming and agriculture, but also government with their juntas del buen gobierno. and they even do international trade with collectives from the so called west (which funny enough happens to be towards the east since 518 years ago).... i don't see them pushing the issue of ownership or even caring about it either... actually legally they don't even own the land where they live, but obviously they are descendents of persons who have been there much longer than those who came with colón and cortez to reactivate the economy in their kingdom. also they are part of an oral (and alive) culture where intellectual property licenses (including creative commons) don't make much sense and haven't had much echo... so there you go, we have one example... strong and autonomous and economically sustainable. best. f. On Jan 4, 2011, at 3:13 PM, Miguel Said Vieira wrote:
Just adding to Martin's position here, I'd mention that the MST (the Brazilian landless workers movement) is strongly focused on some sort of recommonalizing of land.
Some of the land that MST members occupy or get from land reform is "commonalized" (coop production, communal land ownership), some is not (there is individual ownership of each parcel); but even in the latter cases, I believe land reform is always recommonalizing to some extent, and even more so in the way MST advocates it. Apart from that, MST is by almost all accounts the most important social movement in Brazil in the last couple of decades.
Sam Rose pointed to some interesting examples of possible urban land commoning. In Brazil there are also organized "homeless" workers movements (MTST is one I know of) that occupy abandoned buildings -- mostly those left for speculation, or those whose owners refuse to pay land tax. (My father worked in São Paulo's public service, dealing with land tax issues, and told me he never heard of a single case of "eminent domain", a concept which also exists in our Constitution and laws -- even though land tax nonpayments are very common, and even though some of these speculators owe more in land tax than the current market value of their buildings.)
These movements are far smaller and less successful than MST, but they exist nonetheless (so there's some wiggle room and some popular demand). Once they occupy a building, they work collectively to clean it up (literally tons of accumulated garbage), to get minimal electricity and water services running, to organize a school and library for the children in the occupation etc. People (especially those who are unemployed) work in shifts in varied tasks: maintenance, cleaning, security, cooking... it sounds a lot like commoning to me, and I believe we should support this kind of initiative.
All best, Miguel
P.S. -- thanks to all for such an interesting discussion. I was tempted to join it quite a few times, but so far I've always been some 30 messages behind. :-)
P.P.S. -- while I've heard lots of praise on how these movements deals with participation and decision-making (for example, women are very influential in them), I've also heard some critiques regarding their hierarchical organization or --in the case of urban movements-- the effective extent of their popular grounding nowadays. (Richard Pithouse had mentioned this one to me, which applies to urban movements: http://abahlali.org/files/rio.pdf particularly pp. 8-14). These issues are obviously important if we look at those movements as commons struggles.
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