elizabeth blackmar, appropriating the commons

"Property can be thought of as enforceable claims to the benefits of resources. These claims carry with them duties and liabilities. The Anglo-American legal tradition has recognized essentailly three kinds of property rights. Private property is the right of individuals to exclude others from the uses or benefits of resources. (Legal individuals can be human or 'artificial persons,' as in the case of corporations.) Public property, owned by governments, gives state officials the right to determine who has access to resources held on behalf of a wider constituency. Common property is an individual's right not to be excluded from the uses or benefits of resources. Historically, common property rights were recognized and enforced for members of a bounded community. Thus, common property is usually distinguished from 'open access' or unappropriated resources that are beyond a prescribed political jurisdiction (as might be the case with fish outside territorial waters)" (Blackmar 51).

Ok, so:

private property = it's mine, i have the right to exclude whomever i want. no punks in my mall, no gay people in my house, whatever.

public property = it's the government's. in a representational government, representative officials say who can be there and who can't, presumably based on the desires of the broader constituancy. i guess this is why parks can close at a certain hour and homeless people can be run out, because officials have the authority from the community to do so?

common property = close to public, but requires some distinction as to who has the right to use. since it states 'for members of a bounded community,' it begs a question of membership. resident? taxpayer? citizen? human? it gets complicated. this is central to the issue of american indians and card-carrying...do you have enough 'native blood' to belong? can you prove it?

this article tackles 'the tragedy of the commons,' a 1968 article that i countered to argue for fruit-bearing treens in public spaces for mark francis' class last spring. what the tragedy of the commons states is basically that people operating in their rational self-interest will use resources from the land to their own benefit rather than the benefit of the collective, and each individual operating this way in the same commons will eventually ravage and destroy the commons because they have no personal stake in maintaining them. this has been used over and over to defend privatization -- if someone has stakes in land or resource, then it means that it will be better cared-for than without. the essay uses sheep herders as the example and grass as the resource.

'tragedy' assumes a few things without naming them as assumptions.

first, that it's not in anyone's self-interest to value commons as an entity onto themselves; that common space, sharing, and interacting with one another are inconsequential to people, or that valuing this is an exception to natural human behavior rather than the rule. i don't believe this.

we're social creatures, first and foremost. we like together and form communities. we watch each other. given the opportunity, we monitor one another. Allan Engler points out, “supporters of capitalism cite what they call the tragedy of the commons to explain the wanton plundering of forests, fish and waterways, but common property is not the problem. When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it…Capitalism recognizes only private property and free-for-all property. Nobody is responsible for free-forall property until someone claims it as his own. He then has a right to do as he pleases with it, a right that is uniquely capitalist” (58-59).

Additionally, Blackmar points out that also missing from this analysis is labor. Economists elaborated that common property offered no incentive to labor, and without incentives to it society would have to deal with "free riders" who don't pay their way, and "shirkers" who "cost too much and do too little." Anxieties of these people -- fueled by history of exclusion and a fear of a backlash from folks excluded (black people written out of opportunities for self improvement, immigrants used as strike-breakers) -- sponging off of public coffers morphed the way the public realm was utilized, from charging admission to formerly tax-funded venues like parks and zoos to expecting the government to run like any other private agency, and contract jobs to the lowest bidder (and assuming the false opposite, that if you don't, the ONLY outcome is the government overspending for less result.) (Blackmar 70-71)

She writes: "In retrospect, we can see that removing public labor from public property lifted a very big stick out of the bundle that historically had compromised American public space by integrating matters of governance, maintenance, use, and accountability. And in retrospect, we can also see that what was at stake in cracking the whip on shirkers and free riders was a determination that the politics of public space would no longer at its heart be a contest over the redistribution of wealth, even at the most basic level of paying public workers a fair wage" (71)

She actually offers a possible truism that i disagree with substantially. She asks, "When did people not resist paying into a common fund in order to sustain facilities that they only partially used themselves and that might be widely used by people they did not know?" (76) I can apprecate an American history containing a current of resistence to tax increases as the public sector expanded, but consider also Mexican migrant Hometown Associations. Throughout the united states (and presumably anywhere else), Mexican migrants are organizing in new locations to collectively send remittances back to the towns they've migrated from to fund community redevelopment projects. The mexican government is currently matching these dollars three for one, and they are being used to build parks, renovate churches and various other projects for municipal support. in addition, it's worth noting that migrant remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of income, just behind oil. (get sources for this from leticia.) obviously these people are demonstrating a willingness not only to send money back home, but to go to an additional effort to cooperate to put these dollars to work for the commons, even when dollars in the united states are few and these individuals may never return to mexico again. it suggests something about the importance of culture to political economy, and the power of the two to shape one another. what's going on with the united states culture that has devalued the public sector so tremendously? I can't offer any succint and essentialized answer. but i do think that our unique history of racism and exclusion in a country full of immigrants and our experience of slavery offer some clues.