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Expropriating the Commons: Review of Daniel Bensaïd's The Dispossessed

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tae.2022.0021

2572-6633

Mark J. Kaswan,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Expropriating the Commons:Review of Daniel Bensaïd's The Dispossessed Mark Kaswan (bio) Daniel Bensaïd. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx's Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. Translated by Robert Nichols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 160 pp. $25.00 (pb). ISBN: 9781517903855. The task of writing a review of this small book is a curious one, for it is not one writing, but three. The core of the book is a short essay by the French-Algerian philosopher Daniel Bensaïd published in French in 2007, accompanied by an introductory essay by the translator, Robert Nichols, and a set of articles by Karl Marx written in 1842 during his tenure as editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung. These works are presented in reverse chronological order, and the reader is tempted to read them from back to front, since Bensaïd's essay is, in part, a commentary on Marx's articles, and Nichols reflects on both. Bensaïd's and Nichols's essays each bring the older works into communication with contemporary questions in their own way. As the title suggests, the connecting thread of these works is dispossession—although "expropriation" works well here, too. Bensaïd uses Marx's articles as a starting point for a discussion of property, the right to property versus the right to survival, and modern forms of the enclosure of the commons, and how this has produced multiple crises of wealth accumulation, inequality, and climate catastrophe. Nichols brings Bensaïd's argument even closer to the present by using it to discuss how the legitimation of the appropriation of the commons has become a "governing rationality" for our age (xxiv). Nichols calls Bensaïd (1946–2010) an engaged intellectual ("intellectuel engagé")—one who saw his work as contributing to the social movements of which he was a part. Born in Toulouse to a mother who came from a long line of communists and a Jewish Algerian father who barely escaped extermination at Auschwitz, his experience of exclusion based on his identity was an important part of his childhood, and he came to embrace this "critical exteriority" (xxvii). At sixteen he was already active in the youth communist movement in France. He played a leadership role in the dramatic events of Paris in 1968 and continued as a leader of the communist movement in France through the 1970s. That decade also found him among revolutionaries in Latin America, and he helped launch the Partido dos Trabalhadores that would become one of Brazil's ruling parties. By the end of the century he turned his activism to antiglobalization protests. The Dispossessed is organized into three chapters. The first focuses on Marx's experience at the Rheinische Zeitung and his critical analysis of a proposal before the Rhineland Assembly criminalizing wood-gathering in privately owned forests. Bensaïd contextualizes Marx's essays, noting that they were his first foray into material questions, leading to his break with Hegel and the writing of the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and [End Page 493] On the Jewish Question, and advancing his movement from "Rhineland liberalism to socialism" (7). The second chapter is a more theoretical discussion of Marx's essays alongside seventeenth- and nineteenth-century work (mainly the Levellers and Proudhon) on the conflict between the customary rights of the poor, which had served to ensure a kind of baseline subsistence under feudalism, and the individual rights of property that developed with the rise of liberal capitalism. Bensaïd focuses on two distinctions: that between private property and mere possession, and that between understanding property as theft (Proudhon's position) and property as the product of exploitation (Marx's position). From this discussion, Bensaïd draws out theoretical insights about the way propertied interests subsume the power of the state to their own interests in order to enclose the commons, reduce the domain of free activity, and ensure their ability to profit from, well, everything they can get their hands on. He focuses on contemporary concerns of the global commons: the privatization of knowledge that stifles scientific advancement, neoliberal privatization of natural resources, and the increasing...