DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW: PLUNDER OF THE COMMONS by Guy Standing

This one is hitting a little close to home, since I personally know Guy Standing, and have been to several of his recent book launches. But, I mentioned it pretty heavily last week, so feel the need to do it this week.

Gratuitous name drop over, this book is one of the books that shaped in no small part my dissertation, and still shapes a considerable amount of my work. Not only, as I mentioned, has a lot of my work focused on the centralisation of capital and intellectual property rights in the ICT industry and the profoundly negative impacts it has had on the economy, our politics, and our wider society, but I am also an active member and promoter of a number of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. I am the annoying coworker that never shuts up about Linux and/or R, depending on the time and place. As a fan of Linux and/or R, it really 'gets my goat' when 'big tech' firms steal code from open source projects and use it blatantly in their own products. I have even written pieces about the practice of 'Sherlocking' and its impacts on wider software development, and in the last book review, I mentioned the stifling impacts that IPR laws have on 'innovation', as demonstrated by Schwartz.

Standing does not talk at all about software or the 'digital commons', which is what I'm talking about above. However, Standing's concept of the commons has many applications, and yes, I've used it many times to extend to the concept of the digital commons. Either a couple of reviews ago, or in the Marx and the Death of the Author series, I don't remember, everything's blurring together, I mentioned the lengthy love affair that neo-liberal/neo-classical economists have had with the Magna Carta, the English/British legal document of 1215 that forms the oldest part of the loosely affiliated documents the modern UK calls its 'unwritten constitution'. In the near millennium since the original Magna Carta received Royal Assent, most of the charters have been repealed or superseded, save two, the one that creates the insidious tax haven known as the 'City of London', which is confusingly only a square mile within the much larger Greater London you're actually thinking about now, and the first go at enshrining private property rights in modern Britain. The charter on private property rights forms the central basis of what many neo-liberal and neo-classical economists consider the 'secret ingredient' in British economic success.

Of course, this is largely because the slavery, genocide, extreme labour exploitation, outright theft, and considerable environmental destruction don't go down as smoothly.

This love of private property has also led to the emergence of a popular myth, one that even non-economists frequently quote back at me, as if I'd never heard of it in my decade-and-a-half of working as an economist, the 'tragedy of the commons'. The myth goes thusly: there's a popular commons in a village, and the villagers take it for granted, allowing it to get run-down, and ultimately preventing improvements to it that could enhance its productivity. This is not only an insanely cynical way of looking at the world (which I'm not usually against, as a considerable cynic myself), but it is also a rather dire insight into why orthodox economists aren't fun at parties.

You see, when the Magna Carta created the concept of modern private property, it didn't immediately make all land in England into private property. Quite a bit of land, in fact, was set aside as part of 'the common', land that was explicitly not to be own by any person, so as to allow the public to use it as they saw fit, rather they were relaxing (which is NOT maximising its productive potential, you see), grazing animals, or simply travelling. Some of London's most famous areas are named after these commons, from the fairly obvious Clapham Commons, to the less obvious (because the olde English name obscures it to the modern eye) Hampstead Heath and Black Heath ('heath' being the old English that is obscuring it, as you likely figured out). During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Hampstead Heath became a frequent 'hang out' spot for me, as it was near my house of the time, and remains a lovely park to this day, as does Blackheath. These commons, in their modern form show, in many ways that private ownership is not necessary to maintain or improve them, as historically community efforts and now council efforts do the proverbial tricks.

Of course, such leisure is not profitable. Nor do we 'optimally' extract all surplus value from these commons. The commons, Standing argues, fall outside of mainstream capitalist economic arguments because it is 'nothing more' than a place where man and nature alike can rest. The lack of private ownership inhibits the capacity for profit to be made, which to an orthodox economist, is a loss, a marketplace inefficiency. To the capitalist class, it inhibits the building of luxury flats (just build more housing to fix housing! shout the teenage undergrad econ and business students on YouTube without much research into distribution).

Standing takes the reader through the history of 'the Commons' in Britain, from the medieval origins to the increasing attacks on the Commons from the Enlightenment Era (1640s onwards in Britain), to today. He outlines the diminishing area of the Commons and describes how the average British person suffers from the deprivation of the Commons. He also outlines the role that Parliament, aristocratic families, and the Royal family themselves have played in the ongoing destruction of the Commons in Britain (King Chuck III not as environmentally friendly as he'd like you to believe).

He further examines the tendency of capital to exploit public property and resources to make a profit, and then turn around and pretend that they were 'self made' all along. Something that might sound familiar if you read last week's review, or are familiar with basic infrastructure. (I forgot to mention last week that Apple only could get started because of a grant from the state of California, a state that struggles to maintain a power grid because it was privatised to 'save costs').

A good companion book, also written by Standing that I am not going to take the time to write a full review on because it's more of the same, but focused on water is the 'sequel' to this book, Blue Commons where he focuses on Britain's increasingly adverse relationship with our national waters, and examines similar cases across the Commonwealth and the world.