A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in
common with others, become my property, without the assignation or
consent of any body.” 99 The horse and the servant, being “his”, are pronounced
as equivalent to his own body as instruments of work, and are
likewise organs for the appropriation of common goods. In this manner,
capitalist wage labour is identified by sleight-of-hand as the individual
labour of the person performed on his or her own behalf, and by the way
also naturalized by way of identification with one of the subjugated
forces of nature (the horse). Everything subject to the will of the owner
and which carries out his purpose, can be “estimated” and brings a
profit – be it the forces of nature, a wage labourer or a slave (wives and
prostitutes are ignored; machines are not yet at issue), or one’s own
physical efforts – is classed as “one’s own work”, for the purpose of
justifying private, exclusive property, be it dispossession in the form of
“enclosures” or colonial conquests, or be it the appropriation of surplus
value in capitalist enterprises. The people put the situation to verse:
They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
Thus there was not only the bourgeois justification of this primal and permanent
dispossession of the people, but also an equally theoretical and
practical protest against it. One prominent example is the communist
movement of the “Diggers”, which emerged during the real English Revolution
of the seventeenth century – not the coup d’état of 1688-‘ 89,
which was then euphemistically titled the “Glorious Revolution”. Like Taoism
as the “sub-dominant” tradition of thought of ancient China, communism
is the suppressed flip side of western European liberalism. 100
Several months after the English King Charles I had been sentenced to
99 Ibid., Sec. 28.
100 Cf: Omnia sunt communia – Von der Möglichkeit des Kommunismus nach seinem
Scheitern. Eine Skizze – Lothar Kühne gewidmet. In: Klaus Kinner (ed.): DIE
LINKE – Erbe und Tradition. part 1: Kommunistische und sozialdemokratische Wurzeln.
Berlin 2010, pp. 19 – 58.
140