The Social Artist, www.douglassocialcredit.com, Summer 2018
Enclosure forces us to confront the issue of power, of who controls resources and decision-making, of how power is exercised, by whom and for whose benefit. If the beneficiaries of enclosure have been able to maintain their power, it is not because those who have been disadvantaged by the process are compliant – on the contrary, resistance to enclosure is a constant everyday phenomenon – but because enclosures have built up structures of social control that enable them to maintain their power and influence despite resistance from the commons.
Understanding these structures – how they work and who the major players are – is vital to the struggle to reclaim the commons. For it is such structures, rather than “lack of political will” or “insufficient knowledge,” which are the major barriers to reclaiming the commons.
Today, economic and political power is entrenched in a network of interest groups whose influence on policy lies in the scope and intricacy of the mutually beneficial, though often uneasy, alliances that hold them together. Such alliances now bind industrialists to government officials, politicians to individual companies, companies to the military, the military to the state, the state to aid agencies, aid agencies to corporations, corporations to academia, academia to regulatory agencies, and regulatory agencies to industry. Although the alliances may be unequal, all the partners have something to gain from joining forces. The result is a web of interlocking interests that effectively ensures that what is deemed “good” for those interests is deemed “good” for society at large. Transnational Corporations (TNCs) epitomize the logic of enclosure.
Disembedded from any one culture and any one environment, they owe no loyalty to any community, any government or any people anywhere in the world. They are the most blatant example of what the anthropologist Roy Rappaport has called the “special purpose institution.” Such institutions – from the military to government departments and international agencies – are driven by the desire to promote their own interests, to perpetuate themselves and to increase their power and influence. Decisions are not made because they are of benefit to the community or on environmental grounds but because they serve the institution’s particular vested interest.
Employees are similarly disembedded from the real world. When acting for the organization, company loyalty takes precedence over the moral and cultural restraints that mediate the rest of their lives. Dennis Levine, a Wall Street highflyer who was imprisoned for insider trading, captures the detached world in which much corporate decision-making takes place: “We had a phenomenal enterprise going on Wall Street, and it was easy to forget that the billions of dollars we threw around had any material impact upon the jobs and, thus, the daily lives of millions of Americans. All too often the Street seemed to be a giant Monopoly board and this game-like attitude was clearly evident in our terminology. When a company was identified as an acquisition target, we declared that it was ‘in play.’
“We designated the playing pieces and strategies in whimsical terms: white knight, target, shark repellent, the Pac-Man defence, poison pill, greenmail, the golden parachute. Keeping a scorecard was easy – the winner was the one who finalized the most deals and took home the most money.”
The power wielded by these organizations is greater than that of many, if not all, governments and makes a mockery of certain countries’ claims to democracy. With the world as their gaming table, TNCs are beholden neither to local communities nor to national electorates, but can dictate policy through their control of markets and the economic havoc they can cause by withdrawing support from a government. As such, they are the chief obstacle to the resolution of our environmental and social problems. If incalculably more money has been spent in the last 40 years on nuclear power rather than solar energy, for example, this is not because communities or electorates have favoured nuclear over solar; it is because TNCs, acting in alliance with state corporations, stand to benefit more from nuclear energy, whereas solar power has a potential to put control of energy back into the hands of the community.
This material was first published in The Ecologist, Vol. 22, No. 4, July/August 1992.
Our Comment
We are, today, most fortunate in the resources available to us through which we can learn about “the structures of social control” that have facilitated the theft of the commons in the first place, and that continue to promote the pillaging and ravaging characteristic of our present political economy.
Two of the most chilling features of the enclosure dynamic driving those who wield the power or those who serve it is the lure of the “game,” and the sort of detachment described by Dennis Levine.
Understanding this commanding incentive behind the ambition to enclose, also has implications for how we deal with power.
Élan
