~ by Stavros Stavrides ~
A rather simplified version of the land distribution problem in Colombia may be articulated thus: Peasants (especially mestizos and white people) mostly understand land as private or family resource. They therefore ask for land ownership titles to be delivered after a just land re-distribution. Afro-Colombians (descendants of forcefully enslaved people) see land as a resource to be shared within their communities. Thus, they support a community land ownership system. Indigenous people consider land as Mother Earth and themselves as tenders of a relationship with land based on complementarity and respect. They may be considered as caring commoners.
In those three approaches which differently question established inequalities and capitalist exploitation of people and natural resources alike, the problem of land commoning is epitomized: Distributed (more or less equally) property, community property or common property?
The two most important contemporary emancipatory movements, Zapatista resurgent self-managed communities in Mexico and Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria face the problem in a way that challenges its formulation in terms of ownership. What if use rather than ownership is to be developed according to an ethos of just sharing, according to an equalitarian community?
Recently Zapatistas have declared: Recuperated land should be considered as common. “That is, without property. Neither private, nor ejidal [indigenous community owned land], nor communal, nor federal, nor state, nor business, nor anything. A non-ownership of land. As they say: ‘land without papers.’” (Zapatistas, Mexico, 2022).
And the 2012 declaration of Rojava sates: …“The democratic-communitarian economy rejects both extremely individualistic, antisocial and anti-nature property, as well as state property under the name of collective or public property… it is not property but the right to social usethat should be its base”(Rojava Autonomy, Syria 2012)
Studying different, mostly non-western or pre-capitalist cultures we may find out that land commoning is often, if not always, linked to social life in its totality. Not only part of a society’s’ economy it is crucially embedded in shared world views and collectively held ethical choices. The example of Mother Earth approach is indicative: indigenous people in many parts of the world would treat their relation to non-human nature in the context of a cosmovision that considers Earth as a living entity providing to all beings the means to subsist and to complement each other’s presence. It is however important not to confuse this approach with an ecosystemic rhetoric that, still trapped on a logistics of efficiency, sees the mutual dependence of beings as part of a win-win strategy (or rather tactics). By considering themselves as tenders of land rather than as calculating users of resources indigenous people develop practices more akin to a gift mentality than to a just exchange approach.
Maybe we should include in the question of land commoning aspects of a sought for or emerging post-capitalist ethic that tries to liberate itself from the preconditions of economic reasoning. One of those preconditions is of course treating nature as an aggregate of recourses. When this reasoning is captured by neoliberal (as well as liberal) approaches it is forced to accept the universal necessity of the market.
Ethic, however, is probably a term that fits better in the context of analysis of predominant western cultures. Since these cultures inherit a strong attachment to problems of individual accountability, a reference to rules that are supposed to provide judgements for individual acts seems appropriate. In many societies, however, acts that are either praised or condemned necessarily involve whole communities. The Mexican indigenous people Tojolobales, for example, would say: “One of us we committed a crime” (as the anthropologist Carl Lenkersdorf shows us). Such a co-responsibility of acts defines a kind of social bond that differs from the one implied in the concept of the sovereign individual.
It is thus not a paradox to find in the context of such cultures the same word used for the community and the territory it inhabits. Or, more generally, to observe a close relation between the land on which a community’s subsistence depends upon and the collective identity that characterizes this community. Becoming related to land, thus, is more than being able to regulate a community’s exchanges with its environment. It is about being able to shape human relations of reciprocity and mutual support that are similar to the relations this community develops with its non-human “outside”. Or perhaps, even the term “outside” is not sufficient for describing a relation that is more like a continuum of nuances and complementarities than a set of differentiating distinctions.
Commoning land may become a mechanism that shapes social relations based on mutual support, equality and solidarity. It somehow condenses in a multifarious process that conflates legal, economic and value choice aspects the two important constituting foundations of the emancipatory potential of commoning: the re-invention of community and the recuperation of collaboration.
Sharing land is performed. It has to do with acts through which people develop bonds of mutual dependence rather than relations of unilateral dependence, which essentially amount to exploitation. Working together on a land that belongs to no-one and to everybody at the same time (provided that each and everyone accepts and supports this kind of openness), literally makes land the material warranty of commoning ethos. This process of collaboration, liberated from capitalist or feudal capture and enclosure, re-invents community itself in the form of an open community of commoners.
In Palestine West Bank the liberation of collaboration from Israeli settler colonialist command demonstrates the emancipatory potentialities of land commoning. The productive strategy described by the term “economy of resistance” is primarily based on the organizing of a network of self-managed cooperatives that tries to ensure self-sufficiency and food sovereignty for the Palestinian population.
By producing forms of social organization based on participation and mutual support, this kind of economy develops elements of anti-colonial resistance. Not only it strives to disengage people from the imposed dependence on Israel’s agricultural production and market but also targets a main area of struggle: land use opposed to occupation. Zionist politics and claims explicitly target the rights of Palestinians to their land and in many ways destroy, poison or outwardly confiscate cultivated land important for the survival of those people. The economy of resistance in Palestine shows that economy, politics, grassroots resistance and cooperativist principles and practices may intersect in practices of protecting land as a commoning horizon.
There is a crucial step that needs to be taken in the prospect of emancipatory land commoning: to open land to the uses of newcomers. Commoners will in such a prospect become all those who are willing to join in by accepting to share responsibilities. Their contribution to a developing network of practices of care (for the others as well as for land) should be considered as an essential characteristic of emancipatory commoning.
Trusting pre-capitalist and pre-colonial traditions of rural communities for solving the problems of land commoning in a post-capitalist perspective in not enough. Community land ownership or community land control may be deeply depended upon forms of community governance that do not accept equality. As reports from post-apartheid South Africa show, returning to some kind of customary forms of community control over land may increase inequalities (affecting gender relations, family and tribe relations etc.). Downward accountability should be guaranteed in communities represented by traditional councils but this is not always the case. And often it is not enough.
If commoning is to be understood as a constituent element of an emancipatory society, forms and mechanisms of power sharing should be its primal expressions. However, commoning power does not mean only a kind of power distribution that gives to every member the opportunity to be assigned a position in a society’s or commoning governance. It also means that those who choose to join in will have the same rights as long as they accept the fundamental choices of agreed upon power commoning institutions.
The starting point of such a process may be an existing community that defends and maintains collectively shared land. But for commoning to grow, such a community must develop the potentialities of commoning in the direction of encompassing new members and in support of emerging commoning networks that may include more communities. This is the principle of federation – a federation of commoners and a federation of commoning groups. Common land can thus be defined as a territory which such federations may share and jointly use and care for.