The Dispossessed: Karl Marx's Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor PDF
Preview The Dispossessed: Karl Marx's Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE DISPOSSESSED This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This page intentionally left blank This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE DISPOSSESSED KARL MARX’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor DANIEL BENSAÏD TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT NICHOLS UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS MINNEAPOLIS LONDON This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial support for the publication of this book from the Centre national du livre. The Dispossessed was originally published in French as Les dépossédés: Karl Marx, les voleurs de bois et le droit des pauvres. Copyright La fabrique éditions, 2007. “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, Third Article” by Karl Marx was originally published in German in the supplement to Rheinische Zeitung, nos. 298, 300, 303, 305, and 307 (October 25, 27, and 30, November 1 and 3, 1842). Copyright 2021 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0384-8 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0385-5 (pb) Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048338 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2021 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Contents CRISIS AND KLEPTOCRACY: Bensaïd for Our Times VII ROBERT NICHOLS NOTES ON TRANSLATION XXXV THE DISPOSSESSED: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor 1 I. The Law on the Theft of Wood and the Right of the Poor 5 “Rural Pauperism” and “Forest Malfeasance”— Hybrid and Uncertain Property— Market versus Popular Economy II. A Social War of Properties 21 The Right of Necessity versus the Right of Property— “Property Is Theft!”— Possession and Property— Theft or Exploitation III. The Customary Right of the Poor to the Communal Goods of Humanity 37 The Privatization of Knowledge— The Privatization of Life— The Common Good and the Freely Given— Inappropriable Goods— Individual and Private Property— The Age of Access?— Enforcing Rights (against Existence)— Who Will Win? This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PROCEEDINGS OF THE SIXTH RHINE PROVINCE ASSEMBLY, THIRD ARTICLE: Debates on the Law Concerning the Theft of Wood 59 KARL MARX Selected Works by Daniel Bensaïd 107 Notes 111 Index 129 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Crisis and Kleptocracy Bensaïd for Our Times ROBERT NICHOLS We wanted a world in which the right to existence prevailed over the right to property, popular power over commodity dictatorship, the logic of needs over that of profits, public good over private egoism. Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life This volume offers readers an unusual constellation of texts. In it, an essay from 2007 by the French philosopher Daniel Bensaïd is ar- ranged alongside five short journalistic pieces by Karl Marx from the 1840s. While not exactly concentric to one another, these writings treat similar themes. In his journalism, we see Marx working through a clutch of concepts that would long occupy his intellectual and political agenda: property, theft, law, publicity, and the commons. Bensaïd’s essay echoes these thematic con- cerns, explicitly building on Marx. At the same time, because the texts in question were originally written in different languages and composed more than a century and a half apart, a sequence of gulfs divides them in space, time, culture, and idiom. Therefore, in presenting these together here, this volume is intended as an experiment in arranging a series of reflections that share more than an overlapping set of substantive concerns; they might also be thought to model a mode of intervening into their respective eras. If the texts relate to one another effectively, it will not be because Bensaïd simply builds on Marx in the linear manner of layering or incrustation but rather because each thinker’s writing vii This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms works to perform an analogous function for its own period and context. Accordingly, they are offered here together not merely as a “collection” conventionally understood but as a deliberately asynchronic juxtaposition. This introductory essay is intended to facilitate this critical juxtaposition. It is organized into three parts. I first provide a preliminary sketch of the major themes and lines of inquiry con- tained within these works. Second, because Daniel Bensaïd has only recently become well known to English- speaking audiences, I offer an overview of those details of his life and works that, in my estimation, will be most helpful to the uninitiated (including a list of translated and untranslated writings). Finally, I reflect more generally on this constellation of texts in terms of their critical utility for apprehending key features of our own time, with particular reference to what I will term crises of kleptocracy. Context and Contributions Daniel Bensaïd’s essay “The Dispossessed” is succinct and clear enough to demand little by way of secondary exegesis. Even if this were not the case, it would be entirely unsuitable to offer commentary on the piece as if it were simply a contribution to political philosophy traditionally understood. After all, Bensaïd’s essay— much like his oeuvre more generally— is not motivated by abstract speculation for its own sake. Rather, it emerges as a practical intervention into a concrete context, one in which the author is already situated and engaged. Accordingly, this section offers less an explication of meaning than a study of the essay’s function as an intervention. To understand this requires grasp- ing something of the political and intellectual context into which the essay is intervening, which is in turn facilitated by familiarity with the author and his times. viii Crisis and Kleptocracy This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bensaïd’s essay was originally published in 2007, arriving just on the cusp of the largest global recession since the 1930s. In the years since, critical commentators have struggled to stabilize this chaotic period. Consider just some of the frequently cited nar- rative plot points: As the U.S. subprime mortgage bubble burst in mid-2 007, it led to the rapid devaluation of mortgage-b acked securities, a liquidity crisis among major U.S. banks, and a major drop in stock markets around the world. The U.S. federal govern- ment tried to stop the hemorrhaging by using public funds as a tourniquet. The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) were directly taken over, while trillions of dollars— which might have been otherwise used for public goods and infrastruc- ture projects— were employed to bail out major corporations such as Merrill Lynch and AIG. By 2009, problems had spread to the European Union, adding fuel to the sovereign debt crisis there. Once again, huge quantities of public funds were used to prop up the failing investment and banking firms that had sparked the crisis in the first place. Unemployment in some European coun- tries exceeded 25 percent during this period. Beyond Europe and North America, the crisis manifested differently. In an attempt to shield themselves from the mercurial caprices of financial cap- ital, transnational corporations and sovereign wealth funds alike went abroad in search of more stable investments in food and fuel. While massive spikes in prices on the consumer side of both commodities over the previous decade had already been press- ing hard on the most vulnerable in the Global South, the global financial collapse did little to improve their plight. Even more ominously, the convergent effect of these processes fed into a wave of land grabs as powerful global actors sought an anchor in primary resource production. The impact on Africa was most dra- matic. As the World Bank noted, the average annual expansion of land-a cquisition projects by major corporations accelerated dramatically between 2008 and 2009, going from 4 to 56 mil- lion hectares. Moreover, “more than 70 percent of such demand has been in Africa; countries such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Crisis and Kleptocracy ix This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 03 May 2021 14:14:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
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