The Crow's Eye: Enclosure

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jun 12, 2011

Enclosure

I don't really care much for government.

But, I think it's not only possible but necessary to separate public property, conceptually, from the sort of states we have, and which claim to manage and administer the Commons. These Commons, we should continually remind ourselves, our produced, maintained and often enough leased away using the capitalized receipts of our labor. This is labor which is doubly appropriated, first as wages which alienate our work from its products, and second as taxation.

I don't have a much in the way in developed thought on the subject, except to point out that privatization is a new phase of Enclosure:

"NEW YORK (Reuters) – New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced a pilot program on Thursday that would allow private companies to run public schools in some of the state's chronically underperforming school districts.

The public-private partnership would authorize school management organizations to operate five schools, and would target some of the 100,000 New Jersey students now enrolled in 200 chronically failing schools, the governor's office said..."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: It's not the correct response (Christie's) but it has to happen in order for people to see what's wrong in their assumptions about the value of public education as currently operated. Sorta like I said about unions: they must be destroyed in order to be remade as the things they pretend to be.

The sick thing is the profiteering off the collapse of education, but then America's always been about clever ways to profit off others' misery or loss of personal power.

At least we have a smooth, intelligent, post-racism biracial president.; June 12, 2011 at 11:44 AM
Soma said...: Disgusting. They're trying to do that in the bible belt, as well-- with private school vouchers that suck away public school funding, in the name of educational balance and allowing people to have "choice in education."

...Where it ends up going, is to enrich the administration of said schools, and bypassing separation of church and state, as down here a majority of these charter schools are church run. But you can fool the blinded masses, as they think they want that anyway.; June 14, 2011 at 3:33 PM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.