Commons vs. Capitalism

By JIM VAN DER POL

“Commons” is an idea reminiscent of medieval society, which was, like our own, organized in such a way that the elites had most of the wealth and wasted it on idleness, war and killing. But at that time, the means had not yet been devised to turn every bit of the earth’s wealth into money, as is the case with us today. Consequently, the use of the earth for a variety of purposes agricultural, such as grazing, foraging, and food production was largely available to the peasant class. The coming capitalist fever dream had not yet taken root and much of this agricultural activity was in common, perhaps a forerunner of the eventual idea of cooperatives.

In any case the sentiment of the Cargill executive in the 20th century who exclaimed that farmers are, “somewhat like their crops, available to be harvested,” was prefigured 500 years ago in medieval times. Peasants harvested and plucked from the earth, while the elites violently appropriated the proceeds at whim. This idea of the commons has taken up lodging in my head, I must admit, and I have not been able to shake it. But I have not so far been able to devise a way to make it happen with the land. The last people who lived that way here suffered genocide. I have not and will not give up thinking about it though, because it seems evident that if we could get land use right, so many other good things would follow.

In the meantime, I have substituted in the common things we need from our society and communities in order to live well. These would be, in no particular order: Health care for all. Access to free first-rate public education for all, for 16 years or to a certificate. Four to six weeks required vacation time. Paid parental leave of one year for both parents and an additional year for the mother. A good job or other occupation guaranteed. Early enough retirement so that people who live their full life span would only spend one third of it working. These are the bones of my substitute commons. And it is sufficiently radical in our American context to garner some attention, as certain left politicians are discovering to their delight.

This is easily possible for any economy as rich as ours. As an indicator, we can take the fact that Amazon had a profit of $5.6 billion in 2017 and paid no federal income taxes. Think for a moment that Amazon is the replacement for substantially the entire rural and urban retail economy that went before and then ask why we should not treat that $5.6 billion as ours. Amazon replaces an entire system of stores, delivery services, long distance cartage, wholesale purchasers and local economic life, a system that provided millions with decent work at a reasonable wage, and it does so with control of sources, huge warehouses staffed by desperately underpaid people and a grossly inefficient individual delivery service. Think of how many miles those UPS and FedEx trucks run every day nearly empty, and compare that to a semi-load of goods, or even a boxcar-yes that is possible-bound for a store. And remind yourself that this is happening in a climate already sick from overuse of transportation fuels. Amazon is, after all, essentially the creation of our own greed and disorientation and our desperate grasping at anything labeled “convenient.” We can no longer be bothered to step into a store, evidently.

But capitalism disorders our dreams. And the alternate commons I have envisioned above is indication enough of that. After all, that list is nothing more than what Germany already does and Germany is not freer of right wing ferment and discontent than are we. I think the key is the item having to do with work. My life and lifetime of work, continuing now well into what should be retirement poses a real question for the universal desirability of spending only one third of one’s life at work. I have been able to spend my life so far at work that I mostly love. (I hate it some of the time, too, but that is another argument.) This is work, hard and frustrating as it often is, that is often enough satisfying and suffused with meaning, as far as it is possible to get from the poor bugger peeing in a bottle in the Amazon warehouse because taking a break may mean getting fired.

Those of us who are awake have noticed that the rising employment statistics, about which the right wing brays incessantly, are kept carefully separate from any statistics about or analysis of the quality of that work. Human satisfaction does not compute in this connection.

Robots threaten to replace workers. And the proceeds from all economic activity are increasingly soaked up by the banks. These two facts add up to a real loss of agency for working people. Loss of agency is the loss of satisfaction. Satisfaction-at least some of the time-with work is connected with place and home for most people and stable family and community structure. And before industrialization, family and community, being at home and the joy of life-as well as sorrow-were all anchored together in that relationship with the earth. This was still true of the German and Norwegian farmers I was raised among 60 years ago. When we landed in St Paul in the first years of our marriage, it was in the midst of an Irish railroad community just as strong as the one I was raised in, but one generation disconnected with the land. It is not amiss to notice that while my people have been separated from the land generation by generation since WWII, the Irish neighborhood in St. Paul has more recently been replaced by upwardly mobile professional types. Railroad workers can no longer afford to live there. Nor can adventuresome farm kids.

Industrialization and the dislocations it seems to thrive upon have the flavor of an out of control experiment of which we have not yet reached the end. It would be presumptuous to argue that every human being needs an intimate connection with earth. I don’t know that to be true and would not know how to make the argument. But I would suggest that any culture that strains its relationship with the earth too severely will become unbalanced and unmoored. Everyone may not feel the need to be bonded with the Earth, but that is not to say that a culture without any earth connection can be a healthy one. The relationship with the earth was one of the casualties of industrialization and I have matured in my thinking to the point that I realize it may have been the most important one. Political independence is based on economic independence, something progressives need to consider. The two concepts are connected by a sense of responsibility. Like it or not, a good social safety net, as critical as it is, does not replace the need for a society’s earth connection. Nothing can do that. We are creatures of earth.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, Conversations with the Land, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2018

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