 Welcome everyone, let's make a start. Welcome to this talk on the plunder of the commons, a manifesto for sharing public wealth. This is based on Guy Standing's new book and we're very pleased to have him here. Guy is a Professorial Research Associate here in the Department of Development Studies. He's an economist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He's also a fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society of Arts. He's co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network, and council member of the Progressive Economy Forum. He's an economic advisor to the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonald, and he was previously a professor at SOAS, the University of Bath and Monash University, and also director of the ILO's Socioeconomic Security Program. He's been a consultant for many international bodies including UNICEF, UNCTAD, UNDP, the European Commission, and the World Bank. He's also worked with SEWA in India. In addition to all of that, he's also been director of research for President Mandala's Labour Market Policy Commission. In addition to this book, which has got a greater claim already, he's author of The Precariat, The New Dangerous Class, published in 23 languages, and also of Basic Income and How We Can Make It Happen, and that's also been published by Pelican in 2017. So, thanks Guy for coming, sharing your thoughts on your new book. As well, Subir Sinna, who will be joining Guy and also making contribution of his own. He's been working on the Commons for very many years. He studied history at the University of Delhi and political science at Northwestern University, and has taught international politics and world history at Northwestern, and global environmental history and politics at the University of Vermont prior to coming to SOAS. His research interests are institutional change, sustainable development, social movements, state society relations in development, and South Asia politics, with the current focus on decentralised development in India, early post-colonial planning, and the global fish workers movement, and he's written about this also in many different journals, including the Journal of Agrarian Change, and more recently he's also written on the Commons and the politics of commoners on populism and on tense relations between Marxism and post-colonial theory. So, you can look up his work as well. So, Guy will introduce the book, tell us more about it, and then Subir will speak, and we'll open up to questions from you. Thank you. Thank you, Fazir. An introduction that made me feel very old. So, I hope I don't sound it or show it. Imagine the scene. In November the 6th, a dank morning, as I say in the book, I don't know whether it was a dank morning or not, but it had to be because it was in London. A ten-year-old king stood and watched while the regent put his seal to two documents that were to become the base of the British constitution, and I was reliably assured by the American Bar Association both were influential in the American constitution and in many other democratic government's constitutions. One of those documents has gone down to be taught in every school around the world, probably, it's the Magna Carta. The other document was actually to be more influential for many, many generations. And was probably the most subversive document ever voluntarily signed by a monarch. He spent the next 56 years of his reign trying desperately to repeal it each time being stopped by his advisors who warned him that if he did, then there would be civil war. That document was the first environmental charter in history. The first charter to say that everybody, every commoner had a right to subsistence. The first document that said everybody had a right to a home and a right to work and a right to raw materials. In a sense you could say it was more radical and subversive than the Communist Manifesto or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its implications. It was also the only document of which I'm aware which rolled back the advantages taken by the state and by the aristocracy and introduced reparations for losses suffered by the commoners. It was a remarkable document. It also has the distinction of being longer on the statute books than any other piece of legislation in history. I await contradiction from an historian from somewhere or other but it was only repealed formally, finally, in 1971 which is a long time for a piece of legislation. The first charter was a single page in Latin and it was the charter of the forest. A forest in those days didn't mean what we now imagine a forest with a lot of trees and everything. It involved the commons, the open lands, the open places, the resources that belonged to the commoners. It was remarkable because if you look at British history you can, without being too generous, regard most of the great upheavals in British history as a defence of the commons, most conspicuously in the peasants' revolt of 1381, the chartists in the 19th century and so on. The interesting thing is that if you look at the perspective of the commons you get a nice way of looking at what's been happening in the neoliberal era. That, of course, is what would interest most of us, particularly those of us who are interested in development studies or interested in economics and political developments. What the book is about is about how commons come into existence, how commons are preserved or not preserved, and the mechanisms by which the commons are plundered. Of course you have to have a definition of what you mean by the commons and the long chapter two of the book, which I've just been looking at to refresh my own mind, is pretty dull. I make no pretense to say that it's a sexy chapter but I think it's important if anybody who wants to look at the perspective of the commons as a way of looking at structural change because the conceptual framework is that the commons are not defined just as natural resources and certainly not just land. A lot of people think when they think of the commons they think of the land, they think of public land and so on. You can actually divide the commons into the natural commons, the natural resources that belong to all of us, not to the state, not to private property owners. You can also think of the social commons, the social services, the social amenities that are bequeathed to us, that are handed down to us as belonging to commoners or to groups of commoners. You can also think of the civil commons, the institutions of justice based on common law that we've gradually built up, whether it be in Britain or any other country over the generations. You can think of cultural commons, the cultural institutions and the cultural moors that embody the commons in our culture. Finally, and very critically in this modern era, you've got the knowledge commons, which I subdivide into information commons, intellectual property or intellectual commons and education commons. The story of the book begins by recalling a certain Margaret Thatcher, who infamously said in a rambling interview after she'd won the 1987 general election, she said several times, there is no such thing as society. I'm sure all of you have heard of that statement she made and I've always thought that actually she wouldn't have objected if the tents had been changed and so that it would have read there should be no such thing as society. And you can see the neoliberalism that she ushered in as not just an embodiment of the ideology of Hayek Friedman and the Montpelerin society, but going a little bit further than that and wanting this systematic dismantling of all institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity because they stand against the market, they distort and in that attack she drew very powerfully on Hayek who had drawn very powerfully on Bon Mises and the Austrian School of Economics where there is a theorem that something that has no price has no value. If something has no value, you can sell it and give it away or otherwise dispose of it or commodify it. And you can see much of the neoliberal agenda as being an onslaught on the commons precisely because the commons, both as institutions of sharing and in terms of common resources and common assets, if you like, as being disposable and therefore subject to removal or sale at knockdown prices. And what I've done in the book is I've taken the case of the UK mainly and I've looked at how the commons have been plundered, what mechanisms have been used since Thatcher came to office. I've just come from Barcelona where we're talking about the commons and of course anybody who knows Spain and Barcelona will know that the narrative is very relevant in Spain recently talking in Italy, it's very relevant in Italy. And interestingly I've been receiving in the last week very touchingly a lot of emails from people in Chile who are participating in the protests that we should all be supporting in huge numbers and they're saying we're part of the precariat and the rhetoric and narrative about the erosion and squeezing of the commons is really, really fundamentally what we're all about. It's a beautiful statement on a wall, it's not 30 pesos, it's 30 years, we're against. And Chile of course embodies that neoliberal experiment. Now what the book then tries to do is take each area of the commons and see how they've been created and how they have been lost. And before I come to that let me just present two hypotheses that guide the narrative in the book. The first hypothesis is that the commons represent what a number of commentators in the middle aged called the pause overcoat. They provide the support system for those who don't have access to resources for the property less. The commons is where you can go and you can survive. If you don't have a commons your threat to your existence, your very existence is much, much greater. And the fundamental hypothesis is if you lose the commons, if the commons are weakened then social income inequality increases dramatically. And in fact the claims in this country by the likes of Chris Giles for example, the economic editor of the Financial Times, that there's been no increase in inequality in the austerity era. Not only is it a complete lie anyhow, but it omits the incredible regressive effects that have taken place as a result of the erosion of our commons during the austerity era. And the second hypothesis is that what's been happening and I didn't really understand this when I started the book so I must be honest. But one thinks of losing the commons through social forgetting as I've called it, as opposed to social memory. The idea of a commons in history was something that came into existence and was accepted because it had been that way for time immemorial. And then gradually over time, whenever there was a contestation at a local level, they used to pull in the old folk, maybe someone like Paul or myself, and say, did that exist when you were a youth? And if the elderly could say this has been going on like that from time out of mind of man, then it was accepted as a commons. Very nice phrase, which I've quoted in the book. Time out of mind of man. But one of the ways that commons get lost is social forgetting as opposed to a social memory. Now, the main way that the commons have been lost are enclosure, whereby the state creates instruments to turn what is the commons into something ready for privatisation or commodification. And as a result of commercialisation, but fundamentally what's been happening to our commons in Britain in all five spheres is colonisation of our commons. That is an extraordinary development. Systematically what was our commons has been gradually converted into being controlled and owned by foreign capital. Remarkable development. You start with the natural commons, and I would invite anybody who is looking at their own country to think of the elements, which may sound rather crude in terms of doing an analytical exercise, but it opens up the door to looking at how things have changed. If you start in the British case with the natural commons, what is not appreciated enough is the extraordinary degree of land concentration in this country, and it's been due to five waves of enclosure, whereby millions and millions of acres of land have been taken from the commons to give to private interests. As a result of which today, for example, the largest landowner in Britain, I love using this example because it gives me a chance to show my control of words, is the Duke of Bloclo. I think I got that right, the Duke of Bloclo. And he has 277,000 acres of land, he inherited, and only because he's the 10th descendant of the illegitimate child of Charles II. He can then do a single day's work for that 277,000 land, but not content with that, and being a nice donor to the Conservative Party, every year he gets over a million pounds in subsidy from the government to help him keep his land in good shape. You can't make up these characters, but there are enormous number of others, and what has been happening is our land has been enclosed and privatised increasingly. If you turn to water, and water is a good example because it's linked to land, Margaret Thatcher privatised all our water, and as a result she converted our national water system into nine private monopolies. All of those nine monopolies in this country are now owned by foreign capital, and they've converted their system into huge debts on their corporations, and have repatriated something like 19 billion pounds of profits to their foreign shareholders, and every single one of them has been convicted of acts that should be regarded as crimes. Thames water, and I think all of us drink Thames water, you'll be careful, Thames water had to admit that it's poured 1.4 billion tonnes of untreated sewage into the Thames estuories. It's a lot of sewage. It's killed a lot of fish and animals, and poisoned a lot of people. They don't realise that it's due to that sewage pouring, and they got a slap on the wrist. They admitted it, they've done it. They got a slap on the wrist of a small fine, which was about a hundredth of the profits they've been making, and they've been allowed to go on, no one's been prosecuted. Other water companies have been prosecuted, and they're allowed to choose what fines they pay. That's a very good deal. I wish I could have that. Now, here you have a system whereby you've lost your commons, but not only that, Thatcher gave those water corporations 424,000 acres of land, many of which don't adjoin any water supply at all. That's part of the privatisation and loss of our commons. The same use signed with the seashore. The seashore is part of the commons, surely. It belongs to all of us. And yet, the Royal Estate is currently in the process of auctioning off large blocks of our seashore to make vast money for the Royal Estate, some of which they will pay to the Treasury, but they want to use most of it to improve the living standards of the monarchy. A very worthy cause, unless you're like someone like me who's a Republican. But you see each of these bits of the commons being privatised and commercialised. We have a forestry commission. They tried to privatise it, this government, but there was a public protest from some of their constituents, and so they've been commercialising and selling off parts of our forest. Huge numbers of hectares of forest have been sold and have been commercialised for luxury cabins for the elite to use at knockdown rates. You go on, you look at what's happening to parks. We have 27,000 parks in this country. I didn't know that until I did the research for the book. I had no idea that we had so many parks, but they did a survey of all the park managers and a result of austerity budget cuts. The parks, 92% of them said they're in a state of strong deterioration and they're having to sell off parts of the land and commercialise with eventism. Not a nice word that I didn't use to know. Eventisms such as Simpatici Park, for example, where each year now there are 600 commercial events each year which does incredible damage to the parks. You see also things like greens. In British history, the village green is a part of our commons. You use it. But the greens have been reduced to so there are only about 3,000 left and it's a remarkable erosion of public space for low-income children in particular. Another feature which is not only in Britain but is in many other countries is we have had a system of allotments. Allotments have always been a really important social and natural phenomena with political implications. In the 1940s and 50s there were about 1.5 million allotments in this country. Now there are about 250,000 as a result of a lot of sale and conversion into car parks and supermarkets. So you go on with the erosion of the natural commons I'm not going to go any further detail, I don't have the time. When you turn to the social commons the most important part of the social commons has been housing. But housing has been converted from being part of our social system into being largely privatised and commodified. As everyone knows that you had to buy a house to buy to allowing council houses to be sold. But council houses are not the ownership by the current occupants. They are part of the commons. They belong to all of us as a community. They don't belong to any individual. So in effect it was a subsidy to a select few. As a result of what's been happening to our council housing there are more than, we've lost more than 2 million council housing units since the 1980s. We have 2 million fewer. In addition social housing has been lost. Of course not only have we seen an erosion of social housing and the fabric of social housing but we've seen a growth of homelessness and rough sleeping at the same time. A subject which is not often seen as part of the social commons but I think it should be is student accommodation. I hardly need to tell you what sort of thing that's been happening to student accommodation but when I was a student you regarded the student accommodation as part of the system. As part of an integrated whole. Now 80% of student digs have been privatised and the biggest owner of student digs in this country is Goldman Sachs. Now I find that quite extraordinary that Goldman Sachs makes a lot of money from our students accommodation but is replicated in other countries as well. I won't go further into details. Another part of our social commons is the health service and as I document in the book and I had to have the lawyers go through some of this stuff because I was so angry by this stage the national health service is not the national health service that we think it is or thought it was. Huge parts have been privatised. The chief executive of the NHS England had been working as vice president of the United States biggest corporation in the world, United Health when they were fined $1 billion for corruption. I'm sure he had absolutely nothing to do with it but he stayed in the company as vice president for five years after that and I'm sure that's pure coincidence so nobody should quote me as saying anything different but when he came back and took over the NHS United Health became an internal consultant on the committee determining the tendering and the awarding of outsourced contracts and this has led to a huge increase in outsourcing of many aspects of the NHS including management, including diagnostics, including administrative services and many other parts that are documented. It is a lie that we have a commons in our national health service. I can go on with elder care, playgrounds, youth centres but I just want to mention one other aspect of what's been happening to our social commons which is POPs. You're all living in London or working here in London and London is an example of POPs, privately owned public spaces. Huge parts of London and many of our other cities and towns have been sold off to property companies, financial institutions and multinationals of other sorts. The irony is, of course, that when Boris Johnson was campaigning to become mayor of London he bemoans the corporatisation of London. In other words, the fact that it was being sold to foreign capital. As soon as he was elected he rushed off to the Far East all expenses paid and encouraged all the property companies there to buy up bits of London. So we have Malaysia Square now and Singapore upon Thames and large parts of central London is actually owned by foreign capital. Even our stock market, Paternoster Square and the mayor's office for London, the mayor of London's office. With other bits I won't go into the transport services and so on and I just want to get to the other chapters to give you a general idea without going into any detail but the one that gave me the most pain in writing it and I do recommend you not to read this chapter is chapter 5 on the Sibyl Commons because the anger I experienced in writing it was painful to recall but what we've seen is a systematic privatisation commodification and a loss of universalism in our justice system. An incredible erosion of the principles of Magna Carter and the Charter of the Forest the erosion of respect for due process. Nobody should be allowed to be convicted unless they've been subject to independent trial with an independent judge and to be able to defend themselves. Anybody who's taken any trouble to look at universal credit would realise that that principle is completely lost in the way social policy is being enacted. But we go through all the different aspects. Thousands, not hundreds or dozens thousands of actions that were not crimes in the 1980s are now criminal activities today. And huge loss of due process has gone with the privatisation of things like litter monitoring. Simple thing like that. They've privatised and where they've privatised litter monitoring and finding by private companies you will not be surprised there has been a huge increase in the number of people who've been convicted of dropping pieces of litter. And it's mainly targeted on low income groups. Imagine if you're a rough sleeper out there now under the new law that's been passed last year or the year before anybody can be fined £150 for dropping a piece of paper on the spot without any legal process at all. But you can see that in many other spheres like asbos and crimbos and all of the erosions plus we're seeing a privatisation of the prosecution process and a privatisation of our prisons and surprise surprise private prisons get paid by the number of people they have in their prisons. So if I'm not a duck that gives them an incentive to maximise the number of people A they put in prison and B they keep in prison. You will not be surprised that that's exactly what's happened. Privatisation of the probation service it goes on. So what you've seen is an erosion of the civil commons which is fundamentally corrupting the capacity of the state to be a servant of universalism. The erosion of the cultural commons I won't mention because I'm running out of time but it's important and there are a lot of examples that I think reflect an erosion of our culture which is really very worrying but I just want to conclude by mentioning a big area which is the plunder of our knowledge commons. The plunder starts of course with the fact that we have had the information system privatised, commodified and increasingly owned and manipulated by the plutocracy and you can document that I hope I've done so adequately in the book and of course they manipulate not just through fake news and all of that stuff we know about but subliminal messaging and having enormous power in the surveillance system. We've also seen a plunder of the intellectual commons. Thomas Jefferson famously said ideas in nature cannot be made the subject of property. Well since the passage of trips in 1994 what's happened is we've seen a globalisation of the US intellectual property rights system. I've just been looking at the latest statistics from WIPO the World Intellectual Property Organisation which is responsible for collecting the data on the registration of intellectual property. Intellectual property is a matter of converting public ideas or ideas that should be in the public into private property and profit making as an instrument. Before trips was passed trade related aspects of intellectual property in 1994 which was passed by financial institutions and big farmer and big tech by the US fewer than one million patents were filed internationally each year. A patent gives the owner of the patent a monopolistic profit for 20 years or in the case of pharmaceuticals 40 years. It's the opposite of anything like a free market. Just look to the latest figures that now over three million are registered each year 3.3 million this last year and 14 million patents are enforced globally which are a force of rentier capitalism depriving the precariat systematically. It's the same with copyright it's the same with industrial brands, designs and so on. We've had a huge commodification of ideas and it's unjustifiable morally, economically it doesn't accelerate innovation it doesn't accelerate economic growth or whatever you want. And finally the education commons. The education commons is what we think of our education system. It's something we hold in common it's something that is meant to be imparting the values of the enlightenment civilisation culture. But I don't need to tell you in detail how much we've seen the commodification of the education system and the privatisation which is rapidly growing with brands processing of students processing of degrees and whittling away the subversive cultural thinking that should be the hallmark of universities and the pursuit of human capital. So the teaching and learning of civics not in a great place like so as I hope but in many places where I get to speak have been shunted aside why do you need to teach people about history it's not going to get a job why about culture, why about your philosophy why about critical thinking you don't need it If that's the culture that is created by the cock brothers and the others who are peddling their brands you can work out the consequences for political thinking. For me the commons therefore is an avenue we can see how the neoliberal project is actually able to fragment and poison our social system and therefore I think it's a useful way of conducting analysis. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you Guy and now we'll hear from Subir. Thanks very much Guy not just for this fantastic introduction to your book but in fact for writing the book in the first place I've had the chance to read it perhaps I should have read it with a little more depth if I had a little more time but as Guy says this book starts very historically looking at the history of the commons and its erosion primarily within the English context and then broadens out into looking at most of the themes that he has talked about what I'll basically do in my 10 or 12 minutes is to link it up with some of the other debates which are going on about the commons and perhaps we could have a conversation then as I expect some or most of you to be aware of there's a lot of political theory writing about the commons for the last 10 or 15 years perhaps the last 20 years a lot of writing by people who want to think of constructing a new society worldwide around the commons it's not just something that we are losing but how can we recover it and expand it so that a future can be built around the commons given that we are facing the multiple crises that we are of liberal democracy of the environment and obviously of capitalism and in that kind of literature the argument we can also look at for example large scale mobilisations like the climate action network which says explicitly that the solution to the environmental catastrophe that we are facing is to go towards a system where more and more things are used and perhaps even owned in common as once was the case now in order for us to make that kind of a case it seems to me that a greater degree of specificity is required about the very varied history of the commons not just within the UK but worldwide and not just about forests or land but about a whole range of other kinds of resources as well and to my mind that leads to a number of tricky positions one of them is how much work is the word commons doing when we are really describing a whole range of phenomenon including the kinds of things that Guy is talking about but primarily privatisation as the main threat to the commons if one was to take into account a parallel debate which is the kind of environmental history debate of the post-colonial variety what happened to the commons in the colonies you'll find very often mentioned in the pre-colonial in the writings on the pre-colonial histories of Latin America or the Americas or Africa or of Asia that there was no property form such as the one that we know today a private property system which dominates the entire globe Much of the world these people would argue is used to be the commons and as a result of colonisation it begins to transport itself into other kinds of systems of ownership or access or of use was privatisation the main mechanism for the conversion of the commons to something else and it turns out that yes that was obviously part of the story but there's another very large part of the story which is the erosion of the commons not by dissolving it into private property but it's the assumption of state control over these kinds of commons so for example until fairly recently you could make a plausible claim that 40% of forests in South Asia are under state ownership and they also exclude the commoners and criminalise the activities of for example collecting wood for small scale fire for fuel within families and so on so how do we think in terms of the other parallel dimension which is not happening so much within the OECD framework but in the rest of the world where for example right now we have large scale evictions of indigenous populations in Asia and Africa for tiger conservation projects or conservation projects in general it is not only the fact that these forests are being privatised for transnational capitalist firms which are engaged in mining but also this kind of a responsibility that states have assumed for conservation which among its other very strong impacts and effects involves the shifting of populations from the natural commons that you are talking about a second issue is looking at guys chapters and you know as someone who basically worked on common property and the commons as a kind of a political theory person I can sort of think in terms of two different ways that we are talking about the commons here where the traditional writings about the commons seem far more appropriate when talking about the natural commons and perhaps far more of a stretch of the term of the commons when we are talking about the other kinds of privatisations that he is talking about the civil commons, the social commons and the like and in fact in some political theory such as some of the writings on the commons which self-confessed radical political theories are writing they make an argument of the commons which were destroyed by capitalism and the commons which are made possible by capitalism this is particularly a very strong argument in the writings of people like Hart and Negry for whom the idea that capitalism also produces possibilities of the commons you refer to them as pops I would perhaps refer to them as pseudo public spaces but there is a lot of that kind of writing especially with relation to knowledge networks and the knowledge commons so I wonder Guy if you would like to speak a little bit about whether the same notion of the commons is equally appropriate and productive whether we are talking about Britain or other places or whether we are talking about the natural commons or other kinds of shared things for example in your own book you talk about the commons which are open to everyone and at the same time you also talk about the commons which are much more restricted to a set of commoners historically speaking people who actually enjoyed the commons or made use of them and as you again point out in your book there is a notion of community which undergirds the notion of the commons and community by its very definition cannot be inclusive of everyone so who does the apportioning of who is a commoner for what kind of commons and who is not and so on and so forth and that has implications for the chapter that you have on rule making and rule enforcing on the commons and the way in which you describe the work of Eleanor Rostow for example so that could be another productive line for us to consider a third sort of line that one could take a look at here is the idea of the political subjectivity of the commoner what I like among other things in your book is that there are very practical chapters two of them towards the end when you talk about the commons fund and the ways in which that could be set up for the preservation and the expansion of the commons but that is not in my view a sort of a description of the political subject who wants the commons to survive or who is pushing for the commons to expand for example one random example from recent social movement politics in India where you had in the Bailadilla mines you have a picture of tribals they have basically made a claim to the land partly on the basis of the fact that it is essential for their subsistence but also making a claim that this is religious for them and this is holy for them and in fact in many cases we find that the cultural religious argument in the current wave of Indian politics tends to have more traction than the social justice or traditional claims to the commons that you are talking about so in actual lived politics of the commons we find these kinds of expressions of commoners making claims to lands which go beyond just the social justice arguments to those kinds of lines which are to some extent culturally exclusive only those who are indigenous populations of a particular forest can make religious claims to that kind of land so yes both of these are different kinds of politics making claims to the same kinds of commons but perhaps one is more inclusive and the other one by definition is far less so the fourth maybe point of conversation that we could have here has really to do with the question of violence you sort of talked about the fact that and you've given a long history of the evictions and so on and so forth of people from the commons and in fact obviously I like very much your mentioning of memory and forgetting in a highly overlooked sentence in Capital Volume 1 Marx talks about the fact that by the middle of the 19th century the British working class had no memory of the rural origins from which they had emerged now that is in a scenario in which the erosion of the commons happens over several centuries what we are now sort of facing in Asia, Africa, Latin America is that the lived commons is very much a part of not only the memories of those who are being evicted from it but they also are taking steps to despite having been illegalised make use of those kinds of commons despite the fact that they have been made illegal so to what extent are you thinking of the commons as something that needs to be formalised because obviously a lot of commons practices are informal but also a lot of commons practices and ways of commoning are very seasonal so if you think of the work of the American economist James Boyce of Bangladesh, he has a fascinating paper where he is looking at what he calls seasonal commons on the flooded river plains of Bangladesh where once the river floods the plains anyone can take the fish from the flood but once the flood waters recede the silt remains on the private property of the person who is the owner of that particular land so to some extent these really cannot be formalised and in fact informality it seems to me has to be a persistent element of that kind of commons and therefore the way in which the law might function but also micro systems of monitoring and punishing people who break the rules of commoning could probably function much better if they were to remain informal on the question of violence I think all kinds of exclusion require some degree of violence or the threat of violence and perhaps that goes against the sensibilities of a radical democracy that seems to be a kind of a background to some of what you are talking so how does one reconcile the need for exclusion in the commons perhaps with the threat of violence that will make that exclusion happen in exceptional circumstances while at the same time thinking about the egalitarian commons that you are mentioning reference to the village green preservation obviously brought to mind the North London 60s rock band the kings which have a record called the kings of the village green preservation society and therefore the point of mentioning that is that there is a streak of conservatism which also John Major famously for example talked about the England of his dreams with a very vibrant village green on which people played cricket on the Saturday afternoon so how do you distinguish a kind of a romantic traditional appeal of the commons which is present in many kinds of including fairly conservative forms of decolonial thinking with a very progressive agenda for the commons that you have laid out Thank you very much Thanks very much Sibiu, I think that's an excellent start to the discussion so Shall we open up the floor and then we continue? Okay, so maybe we'll take two or three questions from the floor and then we can, severe in guy, continue this conversation Yes, over here and one at the back as well Just over here I was just wondering, my question is for Mr Standing, good evening sir I was just wondering if you could elaborate on what you meant by the colonisation of the commons in the UK specifically because I think historically the term colonisation has been associated not only with the capturing and exploitation of resources but also cultural repression, long term plunder of resources and also genocide so maybe I was just wondering if that, it's a very strong word so I was just wondering what you maybe meant by that Thanks Okay, one at the back In regards to the natural commons our conception of that with climate change is broadening and in terms of a protection of the commons essentially if you're going to formalise it, it must come under some legal framework so how do you relate that to the limitations between international cooperation on climate change and if we're going to regard a global commons in terms of the oceans and air quality and the atmosphere how are we going to, where can there be authority can come from that and whether this kind of global movement is kind of like an arising of a global commons perhaps Great, thanks and over here Yes, I just wanted to ask if Go ahead I just wanted to ask if you could talk about how the enclosures of commons has had an effect on the seclusion of women from the common sphere and how they have been secluded to the household and how, well, I think Sylvia Federici in her work on the caliban and the witch really makes a good point but I don't know how that relates to your book Do you want to take that one? Let me respond first of all, thank you Sylvia Federici's very useful comments very perceptive comments I want to respond to all of them we can take up some of that afterwards I think it's important and probably I didn't give it enough attention in my presentation to differentiate between the commons and commoning and commoning was a very respected word and to common was actually a verb in the medieval times and it basically was about sharing activity in a collective way and sharing the output and the process of production in a commons environment so there is no private property and there is no state property in it so inherent to that, commoning is an informality because it's about respect for rules and traditions and customs and social memory that have been built up now I don't think it makes sense to idealise that in any way it has certain contradictions which lead to relating to your particular point because there have always been paternalistic tendencies within commons particularly in things like the occupational guilds which were commons for a particular community and also I think that it is important and I try to do that in the book to differentiate between what are national commons and what are, if you like, subnational or particular groups like occupational guilds, like a particular park or a cooperative or something like that and when I was looking through the literature in Ostrum and all of the American literature in particular I found there was a dearth of respect for the need for what I've called in the book gatekeepers in commons if you look back historically commons have had stewards the stewards are accountable for preserving and reproducing the sharing mechanisms and the common structures and so on about preserving resources, preserving sharing things and so on gatekeepers are the people or institutions which hold the stewards to account and that is a very important aspect of the governance of any commons and what the book does which I didn't get time to thanks to the way I presented it but it presents a charter of the commons for Britain today in the spirit of the charter of the forest of 1217 and in that 44 article charter that I've proposed some of the articles about reviving commonane and that's vitally important and some are about the response to the plunder of the commons where we get compensation and revival and that needs to be a bit of the answer to part of your question at the back I talk about the Lauderdale Paradox which is a fascinating piece of thinking from 1804 and the Earl of Lauderdale said that as private riches increase public wealth declines and as private riches increase the private owners create contrived scarcity and then creating contrived scarcity drive up the price and therefore in my way I'm looking at it leads to a tragedy of decombining as opposed to Hardin's analysis and when you come to the extinction issues what I'm proposing in the final chapter is that we should shift our fiscal system from taxation on income and consumption to levies to compensate the commoners for the illegitimate use and extraction of our commons and that leads to an ethical justification for carbon tax for example and land value tax and frequent flyer levies and all of the things because these are incursions into our commons and we need to tackle that from climate change and other reasons but that will only work if we recycle the proceeds back to the commoners which I'm using as a justification for common dividends from a commons fund and the payment of a basic income Macron made the mistake of not having to recycle the higher fuel duty etc and then he got the gilet jaune for his pains but if you actually see it as recycling the revenue to give commoners a share of public wealth if you like then you have a very systematic approach which I think is part of a new progressive politics but for me the ecological issues are absolutely the core of what's all about I mean for me just to add to what he said a lot of what you're saying will require trans boundary commenting in fact would basically require the dilution of the authority of nation states and the dilution of the notion of national sovereignty and that has implications for therefore as you asked what kind of authority are we talking about when we are talking about commenting given that there are rules to be made and to be implemented I mean obviously mountain ranges, forests, river systems I mean you know on a semi daily basis we have the Indian Prime Minister who says I will shut off all river waters from going into Pakistan so I mean especially in a scenario of heightened national populism of a far right wing variety that we see now and by the way I don't think that it is entirely incompatible with forms of commenting I think there can be forms of commenting which are compatible with authoritarian right wing populism On colonisation I think the danger of the word colonisation is it obviously has historical and emotional baggage but if you wanted to define it simply as the ownership and acquisition by foreign interests which are extracting from the country and running the country then I think you can make a very good case that there has been a 21st century form of colonisation of Britain if you think that all our rivers now are foreign owned and they have the capacity to poison and kill people as a result of that ownership and they have done so with impunity then you're getting pretty close to some historical analogies I mean obviously it's not anything like as bad as the colonial period but it's a certain phenomenon which is a lack of accountability to the people of the country at the commoners The thing I was alarmed about was that you said owned and controlled by foreign capital when you were talking about privatisation and my question to you is there is also British capital which is as deeply embedded in this whole process and my worry is that the concentration on foreign capital means that it's almost like a little England of position it'd be fine if they were all British but in fact we know perfectly well no it's just the form in which you said it and the way you argued it implied almost that it and just this conversation you just had about colonisation is exactly the same British capital is here as well and is doing exactly the same certainly for example the thing you didn't mention in schools the whole way that privatisation is beginning to affect all forms of education it's not just universities it's prior to that nurseries, primary schools, secondary schools a lot they are mainly British capitalists who are actually involved in it small capitalists many of them but it is something that is a very different thing from just implying that almost everything is going abroad it isn't hi I want to ask as far as I've understood basically the state has a role in to defend these kind of commons we've discussed about and I want to ask you whether how can we talk about the commons in the ever-growing urban set of messages as lamps around the world so South Asia and Latin America and most parts of Africa where the state is totally detached from the day-to-day administration of people's lives and jobs and in these kind of settlements people don't rely on the state at all and most of the people in slums especially actually settle down illegally and in a lot of cases especially I've read something in India that land is usually public but the settlers don't pay the state to occupy the land but they instead some other private illegal improvised land owners that manages this kind of land which is actually owned by the state so I want to ask you this one side of the question the other side is how can we in a democracy relating to the recover of the commons that we kind of lost over time but also relating to the fact that people forgot what it used to be to actually own these kind of commons how can we in democracies recover these commons given that democracies are based on consensus and nowadays political consensus are highly influenced on private companies and these private companies hire people so lots of individuals are employees that have ultimately an influence toward government decision making and how can we see a recover of commons in democracies as we know them and as we understand it is democracy the best way to think of recovering these commons paradoxical Okay, thanks and over here These issues involve fundamental questions of authority and legitimacy the earlier guy standing referred to stewards and who holds them accountable well a community of some kind in the literature and comments there's great emphasis on communities as the basis for commons to exist at all they can take many forms but then Suvia raised the question what kind of global system even the evil system would be necessary to protect natural resources including climate as a commons but we can make the question more specific by looking at the actually existing system mainly the United Nations which has implemented many conventions on environmental issues especially forests, the red program the climate convention all of which depend on carbon credits or forest credits and trading them as a global market supposedly as the means to protect the resources according to the people who are at the sharp end of these programs people who have been communities trying to protect their resources according to them this system simply manages and legitimizes plunder and undermines their role as communities protecting commons so how do you see this? That's a very good question I just want to quickly respond to you on that I totally agree with you I merely said that what I found interesting was the extent to which this colonization has taken place but as an example of schooling it's increasingly actually being owned by multinational capital I mean it is, I mean I give some examples of some bizarre circumstances of how that's happened and I won't repeat that but what interesting not only is it about capital as per se the interesting thing for example when they privatized North Sea oil a privatized it it went to multinational corporations and ended up being largely owned by Chinese state enterprises a railway system has been privatized the only entity not allowed to own anything is the British government and as a result the German government and the French government and the Dutch government all have large parts of the share of British railway system so I think it is with your general sense on the big question here I give you an example of the blue commons which I find really fascinating the blue commons is meant to be regulated by Anglos the law of the sea and yet we've seen an ongoing privatization of the high seas and the 200 nautical mile limit that every country is meant to have and it's an extraordinary development that's been orchestrated largely by WIPO because WIPO has legitimized the taking out of intellectual property rights in the ocean and the situation is that you're going to be following this in a much bigger way than I've been able to do so far in the book which is that with the privatization and the commodification of the oceans what's been happening is that companies have been taking out patents on marine processes and marine species and all sorts of things but what is extraordinary is that one company globally owns 47% of all the patents in the oceans and that company now has a guarantee that for 20 years monopoly profits from producing anything related to what those patents cover and three countries own 76% of all intellectual property rights on the oceans the implications for that that they've orchestrated is absolutely frightening to Clive Lewis saying if you become environment secretary this is going to be one of your biggest challenges because Britain is not one of those three countries and it's not a British company that has 47% it's a German company but it's an extraordinary allowing of this erosion of our blue commons if you can't have more blue you can't have more of something that is commons than the high seas and yet they're being privateers it's an extraordinary story just a couple of points one is to do with your question which is about urban commons and are there forms of urban commons and do poor people depend on them and if so how there are experiments that one could talk about like for example urban farming in Nairobi etc where people are using untold public lands to grow fruits and vegetables for their own consumption partly for sale they're much bigger ones if you were to go to Calcutta for example near the eastern bypass you could see a massive body of water again to grow vegetables but also to fish and then to sell in the market now what that also points out that there is a connection sometimes we hear that commodification and the commons are eventually exclusive and to me that is not necessarily the case there are many examples I could come up with where commoning is very much a part of producing value from nature like for example you are allowed to collect minor forest produce in India for example to make berries the leaves in which they are rolled and those are done almost entirely by acts of commoning families, people from villages not in collecting the leaves but then at a further point sell it to a contractor who will then sell it to the beauty manufacturer so you could still have common rights in the forest for collecting what they call minor forest products but that it will end up in commodity production at some point in time so to me commodification and the commons can coexist under certain circumstances you also find new kind of movements for the commons, another example from Mumbai where recently there is a large and so far unsuccessful attempt to stop the cutting down of forests on a large public land just outside of the city for the construction of a shed for the local train system over there and so on obviously one could think of successful attempts to reverse privatisation of water like in Cochabamba and Bolivia and things like that so there's a whole range of examples in which the urban poor again to give an example from Mumbai of a right wing movement by traditional coley fishermen who otherwise are quite xenophobic in their politics who are making demands for control over coastal areas of Mumbai by making an argument of traditional commons so you've got all of these kinds of intricate and complicated politics some of which progressive, some of which not some of which tied in with commodity production some of it looking for autonomy from that kind of thing so that's my brief response to you and to Les, there are those moves where at the level of international law if you go back to the late 1980s and the demand for a convention of indigenous peoples rights which started off from Central America where among other things demanded were rights to traditional homelands and practices of using nature you can also think in terms of the current move in many countries to give legal rights to inanimate nature like to mountains or to rivers and the like so that they can be protected so you've got a bunch of things which are in the air some of them can have rather authoritarian implications so that goes back to your question of how much democracy and the like this is not to me there's no direct connection either between the commons and democracy or the commons and commodity production or not so there is a degree of contingency built in as to what other factors will be in play and particularly what kind of powerful politics for the commons comes from below to push the formation of law and institutions in certain directions OK, over here My question relates to the social and perhaps cultural aspect of exclusion when it comes to access to resources perhaps a good example would be the structure of land ownership in India where the access to land depends on your social position even gender and the historical context of your family so how do you think that might affect the scope of policy when it comes to redistribution and what threats does it pose to how much this they can actually do to influence these factors which are obviously a bit politically sensitive Great, thanks, and over here Well, thanks very much indeed, Gwya for those interesting talks and subiors and enlightening comments I just want to pose a bit louder Sorry, a big one Can you hear me now? Yeah, yeah Right, just as devil's advocate you're mentioning in fact the railways in Britain being owed in fact by foreign state governments people who are in favour of capitalism are going to use that presumably as an example to say that shows you actually how bad it is to have state-owned resources and it should be left in fact to the private markets It has been Other questions? Yeah, over here I was interested in what you're saying about the ethical justice or your ideas that you introduced of like not taxing the income or consumer but rather the well, don't know how to summarise it but so carbon emissions actually being then taxed as in the bad things you put into the work being taxed in a way but then again that sort of depends on the knowledge that is out there on how bad things are for the environment for example and then I think it sort of relates back again to who has the power of knowledge so I was wondering how you think that would do you understand what I am saying? Not quite, but I'm trying to work at it Ok, so for example the one who holds the knowledge has the power of how to organise a society or how to for example base those carbon emissions for example and then there has again leeway for well the same situation as we have now the rich actually owning our world in a way so I was wondering what you think on that Ok, if it's not clear then Well, just a quick answer to Paul the fundamental issue is that the railways and other forms of transport have been privatised but some state interests have been making big profits as well that was my key point in response to here I'm not quite sure I follow the gist of this but let me see if I can add some value added by saying that I think if we say that and it relates partly to the other question from you at the front if we think of the commons as our ecological landscape and we think that people who are causing pollution, using the commons in one way or the other are illegitimately taking from us then you have an ethical justification for saying Ok, we will demand compensation from them it's a fairer system of taxing but it also combats the ecological destruction and one of the reasons I support a basic income is that in fact this is the ideal way of funding it if we had a land value tax and a carbon tax in this country we would easily generate enough money to pay everybody a decent basic income and what we found in where we've done basic income pilots is that you actually you empower the least powerful commoners in the process of giving a basic income and our basic income pilots in India were the classic example of that the enormous emancipatory value for women and people with disabilities and the lower castes and so on indicate that the systemic changes that take place and what you get I think and this is a hypothesis but I would be interested to hear Swabia's take on this is that when you alter the structures in a democratic way and the common's emphasis you induce more commoning which increases the empowerment of groups who are excluded or marginalised they're denizens, not citizens and they acquire through struggle and through legitimation a sense of sharing ownership of the commons without it being private property but the danger of the examples which are replicated in British history and others of allowing gleaning for example is that at a certain point it becomes commodifiable in the sense that somebody has a commercial interest in that particular activity they can make a profit and others want to proletarianise or whatever the people who are living in the commons and therefore you get that process what we need in the 21st century is a strategy which revives the sense of commoning and has a redistribution which enables people to common more if you like and in the process as I'm just trying to articulate in a sense we need to get a new vocabulary to enable us to explore the dynamics of this because it's different from state property in the old socialism model somebody abraded me the other day for not mentioning the word socialism in my talk and I said well there are different ways of looking at this and for me this is about restructuring empowering and increasing democracy but also dealing with the ecological threat and I find this avenue is a potentially productive one Yeah I mean it's interesting you mentioned gleaning because in one of the other lectures in one of the courses I teach I used the painting by Jean-François Millet called The Gleaners and that's a very interesting painting because you do have in that painting people who are trying to pick up the grain from the ground women and interestingly there is one black woman in that painting which I could not fully comprehend because it's a painting from the middle of the 19th century in France and among other things the gleaning stops within decades of that painting because the land that would have been left fallow is now being used to grow vegetables as the urban population of France increases and also for grazing by cattle for the meat market so perhaps one thing that is good for the commons to remain as commons is for things on the commons to not acquire commercial values and in fact one of the things therefore you find that a lot of kinds of commons are referred to as waste or wasteland because the activities that happen on that for example I mean anyone who comes to my office will see a strange photograph of a lot of cow done on many different fields and what is going on is that people who have pulled in their cattle will take all the cattle to crap on some piece of land so that there is a commoning and a sharing of manure and as you say one kind of commoning leads to another kind of commoning and likewise the unraveling of one kind of commoning leads to the unraveling of other kinds of commonings so there are for example interesting cultural or let's say economic anthropologists who wrote on the commons in the 1980s who document these kinds of cultural things and it sort of comes back to your point about Fedirici and women in commoning and so on that a number of elements of commoning where women are doing work together for example tending to agricultural plots for much of the with the arrival of farm machinery that basically disintegrates it leads to a disintegration of a whole range of other kinds of commoning that women were involved in migration which breaks down community but at the same time is very much a part of social capitalist any kind of development these are ways in which previously existing commons and forms of commoning not only through violent actions such as exclusions or evictions but a more kind of organic evolution of society in which those ways of living and doing things basically you know sees to exist so I think Fedirici in my view over states the degree of violence and of deaths that she's talking about in the book but I fully agree with her in terms of the gender connotations of the loss of the commons that she's describing there I should say speaking of which we tried to get I wanted to get a woman on the panel here four different people and they couldn't make it unfortunately so we'll take a few more questions and then get Guy and Sabir to give their final comments Not really Guy, I mean I'm just seeing her as a biker No, not at all part of the panel we have one at the back there so my question is that in developing countries privatisation is perceived as something which will bring in more growth and development and it will it can lead to better maintenance of some places so is it necessarily always a bad thing for the commons to be privatised? Like beaches or any other places where privatisation makes that place a better maintained place My question was to Guy Just you spoke a bit about foreign capital owning utilities and things like that in the UK and how would any future I wonder if you had any thoughts about how any future government future more radical government in the UK would face would take up challenges which would be brought through any recombining of these utilities by for example investor state arbitration or things more financial and legal pressures that would come and if you could speak about some of these challenges Quite good question Thank you So follow up you're saying indeed that for example that should be a fair compensation to the ones who actually or put emissions out there and then my question I think would be who defines this fair compensation and I think you answer that by through a democratic way but then through a democratic way would in my vision be that everybody has perfect information and that would be a very challenging goal I think so how to overcome that? Or indeed why can't we ban the pollution instead of Any last question over here Thank you for your talk I've done quite a lot of work with a group of commons in the north west of England which looks at so there's a mountain range in the north west of England which is the biggest in the UK and there's still a commoning network which encompasses the whole mountains where people have ancient rights which were set down in law which means that even though the mountains can change hands in terms of ownership the right to run sheep or cattle or horses on the fell will remain with the people who've held those rights and so it's all preempt to the first question which came about whether privatising the commons is potentially a good idea there's two big barriers which I have experienced to that the first one is that the commons aren't desired by private institutions because there isn't profit from the farming which maintains them and the private entities which would buy them don't have an appreciation of the history and culture and customs which you referenced earlier which makes them desirable to the farmers and commoners who do farm them so then on the other side you have the desire to still continue the traditions which have gone on for well now thousands of years for the individuals who are part of it and then you have the benefit of the knowledge which those people have in terms of maintaining the landscape and based on that balance of lack of desire to capitalise and then the expertise of the individuals who currently run it how do you see the future of traditional commons like that thank you great question any last final question I really like the idea of funding a universal basic income from tax on use of the commons and you've specifically talked about the carbon into the atmosphere but of course the IPCC is saying that we can't afford to put any carbon into the atmosphere so in an ideal world your carbon tax isn't going to be generating any income at all because there isn't going to be any carbon so you've obviously thought about that let me start I've dealt with this in the book and there are a few copies available if anybody is interested but to answer this point about it what I was saying is that you can argue that the recursions into the commons are illegitimate and therefore they should be taxed to compensate the commons I didn't say that there's any ideal level but for me if you have a carbon tax I would put it this high as sensible and you say that revenue is going to be you should recycle because if you don't do that it's going to be politically unsellable because people who are poorer will be hit more than the wealthier so you've got to recycle that if what you say is correct I would be the first to cheer but it's certainly in the first few years where if you had a high carbon tax you would be mobilising billions of pounds in revenue from that tax in this country but of course and you would hope that it would act as a powerful disincentive for people to be using fossil fuels etc but you put the money into a commons fund and the book argues that we have to follow the Hartwick rule what's called the Hartwick rule of intergenerational equity which is that it says that any rents taken from a revenue from the commons should only be redistributed if it preserves the value of the asset for future generations and therefore what the Norwegians have worked out for example is if you get a big levy on oil and you put it into the fund and the fund is investing in ecological advantages it gets a net return of 4% per year so you can distribute the 4% as dividends but in other forms of commons that are renewable and replaceable like land for example you don't actually see a depletion that's taking place with oil you do see a depletion and with the carbon tax you hope that the revenue is going to decline because there's a smaller number of people causing fossil fuel emissions but in the meantime you've built up the fund and I have 17 levis all of which are about incursions into our commons for example digital data we all know now that when we ever use the computer Google and the rest of them are making phenomenal sums of money from our free work creating data on ourselves that they are turning into advertising revenue now clearly that is an incursion into our commons our information commons I don't sell them that labour I don't want them to buy it but they've done it so we should have a fairly high digital data levy that goes into this fund and that is reproducible and there are lots of other forms of dividends so for me it's a different way of looking at it shifting the fiscal system I hope I've given it on the other thing I was really interested and I'm sure we all were in your stuff on North West England and I hope you're working on this and producing some good stuff out of it it reminded me in listening to you of what's been happening to the Lake District the Lake District is a classic British commons and it goes back it goes back into our history but what's been happening to the Lake District is increasingly the big sheep farmers have become the dominant actors in the Lake District and they've effectively converted the commons with its biodiversity into an enclosure for big scale sheep farming and they've eaten most of the vegetation and destroyed biodiversity in the process and it's a classic loss of the commons through commercialisation by stealth if you like but I thought I think preserving traditional commons is a wonderful challenge for us today reviving the allotments reviving greens reviving the things, the sort of things that Subir has been talking about and there are good stories but it requires the state to actually be active in facilitating that and combating the privatisation and commodification and I think that's part of the politics that I've tried to put into this chart I just want to address your question in the back as the last thing you know there's a lot of literature on is privatisation better or not and in fact if you some of the big examples that people give is the Australian Outback and the American Midwest and the river systems of Europe now these are all located within private property systems the Australian Outback you can see the absolute destruction of nature as a result of privatisation of the Outback for large scale cattle farming one you know if you look at the American Midwest particularly the drying up of the world's largest aquifer as a result of intensive mechanised industrial farming for producing large amounts of food and if you look at European river systems they were declared toxic a long time back and it took them decades to bounce back from that degree of environmental catastrophe so to me it is not necessarily the case that private property systems are better in terms of looking after things that could be looked after as commons or nature in general the kind of private property systems that would be required for that kind of an outcome to happen would have to be so heavily specified and so closely monitored that you would actually require a totalitarian system altogether because otherwise private property in nature normally results in someone else who is not the owner of that private property having to suffer the externalities of your use of that private property so unless you have a completely closed system where you also suffer from the misuse of your private property so that it is not the case that your farms run off begins to destroy someone else's lake or pond and that would require heavy surveillance, heavy punishment and that is what I mean by the totalitarian side of things there is some evidence to show that some kinds of commons and better specified kinds of commons result in better kinds of other kinds of nature like forests or local river bodies or canals and things like that but I don't think that there is a straightforward causality between one kind of property rights and some kind of an environmental outcome so thank you to Guy and thank you to Sabir for a fascinating presentation.