Tag: politics

Oligarchy: the power of wealth

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on Oligarchy: the power of wealth
True wealth lies in the freedom to roam, and the freedom to leave—and survive. (Hike down from Nasukoin, near my home in northwest Montana)

“Oligarchy is based on the notion that those who are unequal in one respect are in all respects unequal; being unequal, that is, in property, they suppose themselves to be unequal absolutely.” –Aristotle, Politics, 350 BCE

My last year of college, I applied for a coveted internship at a relatively prestigious literary magazine in St. Paul, Minnesota. When the acceptance arrived, I was excited for all of a few hours.

Then it came home to me that the internship—as is the case for most internships—was unpaid. The editor who’d interviewed me seemed surprised when I called later to ask about the possibility of even a small stipend.

It was the final semester of my final undergraduate year. I’d taken the previous semester off of university and moved back to Montana to be an adult around for my younger sister, who, at fifteen, was in high school and living for the most part alone (long story). Before that, I’d been working up to five different jobs at a time to support myself through college.

The week I was offered the internship, I went for a long walk with someone I’d been friends with since our first confused, heady days of freshman year. He bought me a sandwich and listened to me angst about whether or not I could afford the money—and the time—to work at a job I’d probably enjoy but for which I wouldn’t be paid.

It wasn’t possible, I already knew that, and at the end of our walk we parted at the door of the family diner where I’d been working as a waitress the previous year—a job I took because making tips got me a lot more rent and grocery money than the coffee shop I’d worked at my first two years of college.

So I turned down the internship and waited tables instead. Every now and then another waitress and I got together at her apartment to paint our nails and watch Xena: Warrior Princess and I tried not to think about who got the assistant editing position I’d been so excited to be offered.

The advantages of wealth and privilege get mentioned a lot but not usually with much substance. I’m not sure how many of us truly understand how wealth accumulation turns into power, influence, and status—the literary world is only one small example of how the financial freedom to work for free gives a person entry and connections in all directions, from publishing opportunities to awards and grants to the strange situation that’s evolved in the past couple decades where “writer” is in many places equated with teaching workshops almost more than it is with publishing, or even with the act of writing itself.

But this isn’t only about the writing world. It’s about money, and power, and their feedback loop.

It took me months to even sit down to write a first draft of this essay because the subject bumps against one of my own failures of imagination: it’s very hard for me to understand how millions, or even billions, of people don’t understand how accumulation of wealth leads to accumulation of power, and how the combination leads inevitably to large-scale human oppressions, environmental degradation, and almost every kind of injustice and inequality.

The combination of power and wealth has always led to the failure of societies, and in their current iteration are leading quickly to the failure of the human species.

In the month or two before the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, I picked up David Herszenhorn’s book The Dissident: Alexei Navalny: Profile of a Political Prisoner, about the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.

Navalny became internationally known after surviving an attempted poisoning, likely ordered by Russia’s top leadership, and then running for president of Russia against Vladimir Putin. But the core of his work was always about corruption. His investigations and fiercely productive blogging activity focused on business deals that benefited government officials, their families, their friends, their friends’ families . . . almost always at the expense of the Russian people and Russian land, whose natural resource wealth of oil, timber, and minerals was not-so-quietly but very quickly privatized by those already in power, for their own gain, in the years following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who benefited most from the privatization were, largely, either those who had held power in the Soviet Union, or people connected to them.

Vladimir Zelensky, an actor and comedian who was elected president of Ukraine after starring in a very successful comedy show about a teacher whose anti-corruption rant went viral, resulting in him unintentionally becoming president, came to fight internal corruption and the influence of Russian wealth and power as the real-life leader of Ukraine.

Navalny was most likely murdered for his anti-corruption work. Zelensky’s country was invaded in 2022 and continues to battle an army of Putin’s soldiers, many of whom were forced into fighting. I’ve heard plenty of stories of disobedience turning into forced conscription that I can’t even share publicly.

And in January 2025, the U.S. government faced, and quickly folded to, a hostile corporate takeover in which the wealthiest person in the world for months wielded the power to fire anyone employed by the government, from wilderness trail crew workers, to people monitoring clean drinking water, to core staff running the power grid of the entire Pacific Northwest.

Everywhere you look, a combination of wealth and power seems to be battling to control more of the same—and winning.

Of course I want to burn it all down. Don’t you?

The problem with that is, as I’ve written here several times before, whenever entire systems and structures are burnt down, it is nearly always those most at risk, those who’ve suffered most, who end up suffering more.

The accumulation of wealth leads to rule by oligarchy, but it also provides those with power the means to protect themselves from inevitable resistance, even mass violence, the French Revolution notwithstanding.

A political cartoon showing Maximilien Robespierre guillotining the executioner after having already guillotined everyone else in France. A commentary on the Reign of Terror. Unknown author, c. 1794, care of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Whatever system arises from the rubble, those who’ve previously accumulated wealth usually have the means to maintain their power structures, or rebuild them all over again.

In his book Black Sea, Neal Acherson described the strange self-protective quality of wealth through the behavior of Polish nobles whose resistance to reform led to the Third Partition in the late 18th century and the dissolving of Poland as a country for 123 years:

“To the end of their lives, many of these Targowican barons failed to understand what they had done. They kept their vast estates, travelling now to St. Petersburg and Odessa rather than to Warsaw and Krakow. They had lost the political influence they had enjoyed in the old commonwealth, but to be appointed Marshal of Nobility in some Ukrainian county was not a bad substitute. . . . The fact that they themselves were secure and prospering could only mean that all was well with Poland too.”

To put it in more familiar terms: in the 18th century, the Polish nobles fucked around and everybody else got to find out.

In The Sociology of Freedom, co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan—who has been incarcerated in a Turkish prison since 1999, many of those years in isolation—tracked the question of power back at least 5,000 years, to the beginning of people’s ability to begin controlling and accumulating surplus “product”—food for the most part, but also other people’s labor.

Wealth, in his writing, is the ability to accumulate and hoard the resources that people need to survive, including food and work. Power comes from control over that wealth:

“The fundamental characteristics that have marked the central civilization from its very beginning and determined its character have remained essentially unchanged for five thousand years. . . . One characteristic that remains stable whatever the differences or forms adopted is the monopoly’s hegemonic control of surplus product. . . . We must take care to understand the monopoly. It is neither purely capital nor purely power. It is not the economy, either. It is the power to use organizations, technology, and violence to secure its extortion in the economic area.”

Much of the power in wealth is about who owns what, which translates into who controls and dominates what, especially land, water, food, and the right to pollute the commons we all need for survival. Vandana Shiva—who’s been working on seed and food sovereignty in India for decades—has in recent years reiterated what can never be said enough: “If you control food, you control people.”

The U.S. government’s determination to wipe out buffalo and destroy land relationships through iterations of theft so as to force people and Native Nations into dependence in recent history is proof enough of this (its goals in this respect are explicit and well documented); and if you read about enclosures of the commons over the past 800 years of British history, you’ll also run into plenty of examples of entire villages of people evicted and starving and forced into “jobs” for the first time because a few already-rich people wanted to get wealthier by raising sheep on land that was previously used and lived with in common.

To give just one example, Andro Linklater, in his sections on England’s enclosures of the commons in Owning the Earth, wrote:

“In a single day in 1567, Sir Thomas Gray of Chillingham in the north of England cleared off his manor no fewer than 340 villeins, cottagers, and laborers whose right to work their plots of land existed simply by tradition. Whole villages and townships were soon emptied—in Shakespeare’s county of Warwickshire alone, sixty-one villages were wiped out before the year 1500.”

These land thefts and evictions led to starvation and mass homelessness and criminalization of the same through anti-vagrancy laws and the right to enslave people found to be in violation. Those who were already wealthy had the power to take what they wanted, call it theirs, and justify the theft through philosophies and laws that placed rights of property—no matter how it was acquired—over the rights of people, and of life in general.

The long-term impacts of wealth—whether of land or wealth in other forms—accumulate intergenerationally, for far longer than most of us realize. A research paper co-authored by scholars with the Bank of Italy and the University of Bologna that tracked intergenerational wealth in family dynasties in Florence, Italy, from 1427 to 2011 challenged a common misconception that family wealth is usually wiped out within three generations. They found instead that the top earners of today are most often descendants of those “at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” families who had been lawyers or members of elite trade guilds in the year 1427:

“Intergenerational real wealth elasticity is significant too and the magnitude of its implied effect is even larger: the 10th-90th exercise entails more than a 10% difference today. Looking for non-linearities, we find, in particular, some evidence of the existence of a glass floor that protects the descendants of the upper class from falling down the economic ladder.

These results are new and remarkable and suggest that socioeconomic persistence is significant over six centuries.”

The authors pointed out that the results are particularly remarkable when you consider the enormous social, economic, and political upheavals that took place in that region over those centuries, “and that were not able to untie the Gordian knot of socioeconomic inheritance,” a reality that they felt comfortable extending to similar countries in western Europe.

Ownership and wealth are far stickier and more resilient over time, even over collapsing societies, than most of us would like to believe.

And of course what security of wealth both comes from and translates into, along with power, is ownership of property—land in particular.

A screenshot from a webinar I attended on the Doctrine of Discovery and its relation to capitalism’s entanglement with private property.

The weight of wealth and power is enormous. It sucks up life and resources, and seeks more of the same; it crushes people and feeds off their labor, and seeks more of the same. When it faces resistance, it responds by protecting itself. Maybe firing someone. Maybe abusing or even murdering them. Maybe invading an entire land.

The Roman Empire is one of the most well-known cases in point. “Empires entail ongoing costs,” political economist John Rapley wrote in Aeon about the Roman Empire. “The richer an empire becomes, the more it must spend to preserve that wealth,” spending more money on ever-shakier military campaigns and using up public funds to protect the security—and property—of the wealthy and powerful within its borders.

“Power,” wrote Abdullah Öcallan, “is not simply accumulated like capital; it is the most homogenous, refined, and historically accumulated form of capital.”

Power, in other words, is a manifestation of wealth itself. It is what wealth is for.

Given the resilience of wealth, the protective quality it gives to those who have it, what are we meant to do about the power it wields, power that causes an immense amount of damage and limits everyone else’s freedoms? What’s the answer, the solution?

There are two that I can see: the first and most urgent is to tax wealth, obviously. Prevent the kinds of massive accumulation of resources that lead to accumulation of power. Pretending that one doesn’t lead to the other, and that their combined strength don’t lead to oppression of most of the human population as well as destruction of much of the rest of the living world, is a fairy tale.

David Wengrow and David Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything is partly directed at this problem, detailing societies across the planet over several thousand years and how they rose and fell and shaped themselves—or didn’t—around an awareness of the dangers of wealth and property accumulation. Those shapings, the authors wrote, determine everyday people’s security of three essential freedoms: “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.” Wealth accumulation—especially in landed property over the last near-millenium—leads to the kind of power accumulation that erodes or outright prohibits these freedoms.

“The freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.”

“Progress” is never a clear path; it’s a messy, tangled walk through an overgrown forest that often leads in circles. The benefits of whatever we call progress are only fully realized when they come hand in hand with an awareness of wealth’s downfalls.

The second response is to pay serious attention to building parallel systems that not only show the viability of, for example, commons management of land and life, water and work, but have the resilience to keep going even when shit does hit the fan—which systems run by and for wealth and power are generally too fragile to withstand.

There are plenty of examples of these systems being built right now, probably all around each of us, that we might be unaware of because they aren’t the stories that grab national and international headlines. But the podcasts Frontiers of Commoning and Building Local Power, for example, both focus on efforts around cooperative farms, community broadband, watershed citizenship and bioregional activism, Rights of Nature, tenants’ rights, composting and food security, and more.

The more a society is designed to crush you, though, the harder it can be to make these efforts successful. In my book A Walking Life, I wrote about the St. Paul, Minnesota, area of Rondo, a majority Black community of thriving businesses and neighborhoods, which was largely destroyed, losing over 700 homes and 300 businesses and the community split in half, to build a now 8-lane freeway during the U.S.’s highway-building craze in the middle decades of the 1900s. It’s a far too typical story. Most of the U.S.’s major highways, where they run through cities, were built by destroying mostly majority-Black and poor communities, along with any equity they’d built in those businesses and homes, and largely to serve more affluent suburbs.

Wealth gets its resources, including power, by extracting from everyone else in any way legally possible and many illegal.

Screenshot of a Twitter account with a map from Bill Bunge’s 1971 book Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, showing how equity is extracted from poverty and precarity to benefit wealth

You can’t separate injustices from one another without power weaponizing that separation to eradicate resistance—or attempting to.

The right to vote, for example, has long been entwined with wealth, specifically wealth of land. In 1819, a peaceful rally of nearly 60,000 unarmed working class people in Manchester, England, was organized to advocate for the right to vote for those who did not own property (the U.S. Constitution, too, originally limited voting rights to property owners in addition to requiring that they be male, white, and over the age of 21). Land enclosures—theft of the commons—going back as early as the 13th century meant that very few people owned land, but laws they had no opportunity to participate in writing affected them anyway.

Government forces attacked the peaceful rally, resulting in 18 dead and over 650 injured in what is called the Peterloo massacre. Those who didn’t own property wouldn’t get the right to vote until the late 1800s.

Self-taught American economist Henry George spent most of his 1879 book Progress & Poverty writing about the ways that land ownership leads to wealth inequality and accumulation of political power by a few, and resistance to the same:

“Absolute political equality does not in itself prevent the tendency to inequality involved in the private ownership of land, and it is further evident that political equality, coexisting with an increasing tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth, must ultimately beget either the despotism of organized tyranny or the worst despotism of anarchy.”

If normal, everyday people understood the reality that all wealth comes from land, from nature, as well as from the labor of others, human and non-human alike, they wouldn’t vote for a system that gives yet more wealth and power to those who already have it, that hands power to those who control land and are therefore able to accumulate wealth.

But as should be painfully obvious by a simple glance at the daily news, mass understanding of that reality requires more than education; it requires imagination and insight. It requires that those who do the storytelling—journalists, reporters, novelists, and poets—share experience with the bulk of humanity, at least enough to access some empathy, to be able to put themselves in other people’s shoes. To understand that what they’re being told by those in power might simply be a story benefiting and protecting the same—power, and wealth.

It takes a lot of imagination and intention to see where our own privileges have blinkered our vision. If I had come from a family with even middle-class income, if my parents or grandparents had money and I weren’t working more than one job at a time just to support myself and be able to finish college, I could have taken that internship with a prestigious literary journal. I could have started climbing some kind of literary ladder, become an editor at an equally prestigious publisher maybe. And I maybe would have assumed that it was only my hard work and talent that got me there, not seeing the ways the trail was cleared and the path smoothed before I ever stepped on it.

We all need self-awareness to be able to see how power is actually structured, how it is shaped around the interests of wealth and property. That there is no “trickle-down,” that enormous accumulation of wealth is detrimental, actually, to life and freedom at every level you can think of, including the individual lives shaped and softened by wealth itself. All of this requires an understanding of propaganda and Story and how deep attachment to identity—both individual and shared—runs through every human being.

It requires a shift in consciousness, you might say, as well as changes in tax codes and societal priorities.

Or there’s a third option, which is to wait for the incompetence and nepotism inherent in oligarchy to eat their own power structures from the inside out.

The philosopher Aristotle, who made an extensive study of the rise and fall of city-states, rulers, and power structures in his book Politics, written over 2300 years ago, warned that oligarchies are inherently unstable. They can’t meet the needs of the regular population, they can’t abide competition in business or culture, and they can’t be bothered to follow the laws they write, even those that benefit themselves.

In a video summation of oligarchies, how to fight them, and Aristotle’s Politics, the narrators of the YouTube channel Legendary Lore1 said that,

“Aristotle observed that while a state can handle many types of protest, the real danger comes when people stop believing the state serves its proper end: the good life and virtue of its citizens,” resulting in an erosion of legitimacy.

“Aristotle warned against the wealthy treating common things as their own, like when public spaces become effectively private, when shared infrastructure serves only elite interests, when common goods like water and, in our times airwaves and digital networks, become de facto personal property of the economic political class.”

Oligarchies tend toward nepotism and its ruling members live openly in opposition to the laws imposed on the rest of the population. Their networks become brittle, and the systems often succumb to infighting among oligarchs themselves.

“Many oligarchies,” Aristotle wrote in Politics, “have been destroyed by some members of the ruling class taking offense at their excessive despotism; for example, the oligarchy at Cnidus and at Chios.”

We can wait it out, knowing that not only does everyone else suffer in the process—and it’s a long process; some form of oligarchy has been in charge of Russia going on decades now, culminating in the theft of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022—but the reality of wealth will likely, in the long run, still protect many of those who caused the damage. And then the cycle can start all over again.

One of the biggest things I learned while writing my book about walking was that connection, care, and community are just as core to our evolution, just as ancient if not more so, as any of our worst tendencies. If humans were all despotic, greedy, and evil, our species wouldn’t still be around. There are hundreds of thousands of years of archaeological evidence showing us capable of greed but even more of cooperation, and we have the opportunity, in every generation, to choose which of those tendencies we reward, strengthen, and build societies upon. Likewise, that reality inevitably gives something to build hope upon.

“If mutual aid,” wrote Wengrow and Graeber in The Dawn of Everything,

“social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kinds of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.”

My own energies tend toward helping to build, support, and research and write about those parallel systems, usually hyperlocal, that go under the radar but that provide examples for lifeways that make societies life-supportive, locally adaptable, self-aware, and achievable. St. Paul’s Rondo, for example, has never stopped working to repair the damage done by the building of a freeway, and restore its community.

It’s not sexy or loud or charismatic, and it’s not going to topple globally powerful and corrupt international criminals hell-bent on making everyone else suffer. It certainly won’t make me or anyone else whose attention is directed that way famous or rich, nor will it save us all from authoritarians and murderous dictators next week or feed all the children tomorrow.

But it’s still work that’s needed, and in the long run, with enough people, its own power might surprise us.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

—from 17th-century protests against English enclosures

Border control

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Border control

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons!

Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia?

I live in a train town with a gorgeous sky. It’s endlessly interesting. Came across these cars full of crushed scrap metal while on a walk with a friend.

I used to love crossing borders. When I was young, they smelled of adventure and exploration, of languages I hadn’t learned and could tune my ear to, of foods like a book to be tasted instead of read. I still remember the first time I managed to say “thank you” correctly in a small town in Turkey; and plunging my wrists one summer day under freezing cold fountain water on a hill outside of Budapest, where the heat felt like it might crush me and our friends woke us daily with tiny glasses of espresso and brandy.

To hand my passport over to a border agent once brought a tiny thrill. To a person brought up in a small Montana town where daily rhythms were determined by the train howling nightly as it passed by the Con Agra grain tower and the church bells I sometimes got to pull after Sunday school, borders were to enter a world unknown, a world made large.

Borders haven’t felt like that in a long time. When my spouse and I prepared to move to Australia from Austria, I was 22 years old. We spent exhausting hours at the Australian embassy in Vienna filling out forms and answering questions and submitting to lung X-rays to check for tuberculosis and compiling massive customs forms in two languages for our scant two boxes of belongings. We flew out on my 23rd birthday, which in Australia time had already passed. My spouse had a job in Sydney, which was why we were moving; my first three months in the country were a slog of employment applications and residency requirements and trying to find out how to get a birth control prescription. Living there had its wonderful moments—most of them spent in the ocean, though I maybe wouldn’t count the ocean moments trying to avoid bluebottle jellyfish—but those were wonderful despite the border and residency struggles, not because of them.

Last year, I spent a few days in Canada cross-country skiing and cooking with some longtime friends. I have lived in proximity to this border, between America and Canada, for almost the whole of my life. The closest crossing to me is an hour’s drive from my home, and I’ve driven over it so many times it’s as familiar as the footbridge I usually take to walk into town.

It wasn’t that long ago—only decades, and what is that in geological time? not even a fingernail’s worth—that other friends and I would get the idea to go to Canada at some stupid hour of the night just to jump into a lake we liked visiting. We didn’t need passports back then, and the border guards were mostly bored.

Going to and coming back from Canada with my friends last year involved little stress. We presented our passports or passport cards. I, as the driver, answered questions about alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons in the negative or semi-negative as not all of us were non-smokers. Our carful of mothers in their forties was waved through easily.

And yet there was nothing about that interaction that didn’t put me on edge, nothing about it that didn’t remind me of threat, of what can be denied. If not denied to me personally, to plenty of other people who have just as much right to traverse this man-made barrier as I do.

The entire interaction of crossing the border, beginning with the slowdown to the border gates and the scramble of finding passports, and through the questioning that brings up vivid memories of previous border crossings involving full-on stripped-out car searches and quizzes split between me and college boyfriends about what color our toothbrushes were, makes obvious the crushing power of borders. They are arbitrary yet all-powerful creations of nation-states, creations that have no recognition from water, air, rock, wildlife, or human relationship, yet maintain the say of life, death, and the birthright of wandering that belongs to every human being even if it’s denied.

Borders have the power to strangle our travel, our relationships, our communities, and our work. They impart the conviction that anyone on one side of a border or another has the power to judge, to condemn, to dispense death.

My friends and I were just going cross-country skiing as part of a tradition to celebrate one person’s birthday. What if we’d been fleeing genocide? What if our entire personhood were suddenly made illegal?

My paternal grandparents were Jewish people in the Russian empire, subject to strict rules about religious and cultural practices, limited work opportunities, male children’s compulsory conscription into the military (as young as the age of 9 depending on the tsar), and, like in much of Europe, forbidden from owning land. Not to mention being confined to living in shtetls within the borders of what was called the Pale of Settlement. My immediate family history is defined by who is allowed to live, work, travel, and wander, where.

To show my passport and be waved through a border says everything about the kinds of freedoms I have, and how easily they can be taken.

When I published the original version of this piece, Kristin DeMarr left a comment that included a link to an essay on borders I hadn’t read before, by Leslie Marmon Silko, whom I’d always only known as a fiction writer.

“I will never forget that night beside the highway,” Silko wrote.

“There was an awful feeling of menace and violence straining to break loose. It was clear the uniformed men would be only too happy to drag us out of the car if we did not speedily comply with their request (asking a question is tantamount to resistance, it seems).”

Silko wrote that essay in 1994, of a border—in the U.S.’s southwest—that has been increasingly militarized since at least the 1980s. Over half of U.S. citizens live within the jurisdiction of border patrol—which was extended in the early 2000s to cover 100 miles within any land or maritime border. Consciousness of that barrier’s power pervades how all of us behave and perceive ourselves and our freedom to varying degrees.

Shaina Fisher Galvas wrote a small poetry collection on borders last year, partly in response to that borders essay but unfolding out into ideas of perception and belonging, the way that borders of the mind and body spill into each other.

“The mind
constructs
borders
but bodies
cross them.”

she wrote in the poem “Border stories.”

Borders are physical, but they are also psychological and emotional. There is a great deal about my life and myself that I don’t include in this newsletter because doing so could have consequences that would make my life at best difficult. I don’t include yet others because they are not my stories to tell. Those are borders I mostly created and maintain myself. I will dismantle them when I feel ready, which is probably never.

Borders are social and cultural. When I enter a mosque or a Russian Orthodox Church, I cover my hair. When certain people come into my home, I take down and hide the sign above the coffee grinder that reads “Keep Your Fucking Shit Together” because I know it would offend them. I don’t walk through other people’s yards even though I don’t believe that private property boundaries should exist.

My views on the importance of free speech are boundaried by the reality of its lack for the half of my family living in Russia, but also by an understanding that words can cause just as much harm as physical violence, a perspective that puts me strongly at odds with an absolutist view of free speech. (I wrote about my town’s experience with neo-Nazi troll storms, including some of the messages I received personally and what effect it had on me, here.)

My stepbrother and his family weren’t able to come camping with us the past couple summers because they are Russian and can’t readily leave a country that’s been waging war on a neighboring one. They, and my cousins, friends, and other relatives in Russia, can disagree with the war all they want, but the border created by geopolitics doesn’t care what they think, or desire, and it’s illegal for them to say anything about it publicly.

These are very different kinds of borders with vastly different consequences. Not all of them require a passport; many of them still require a form of passing, or of shaping oneself to accepted expectations.

One of the books that I’ve learned most from over the past few years is Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule. Since reading it, I’ve watched several of her online presentations and webinars, and am often inspired by her expansive view of what borders are, what they do to us, and how dismantling them requires also dismantling the systems of oppression that they enable, as she wrote about in this interview:

“A no border politics is expansive. It includes the freedom to stay and the freedom to move, meaning that no one should be forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, and that people should have the freedom to move with safety and dignity. Those two freedoms may seem contradictory, but actually they are necessary corollaries. The crux of a no border politics is nestled in the broader politics of home. How do we create a world where we all have a home?”

It’s an answer to something brought up repeatedly in Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall’s book The Prehistory of Private Property. The essence of freedom is contained in the answer to one question: Can you leave?

Can you? Can I? Could I just pick up and walk north until I reach the border and then, like the rivers that run down from Canada full of selenium pollution from coal mining, ignore it?

The answer is no, obviously, and it might serve us all to ask more frequently why not. What borders constrict our lives and how much of a choice we have in their construction and enforcement.

When I lived in Austria, I had to apply for a meldetzetl, a residency visa for foreigners. To get it, I had to go to a special foreigners’ police station. I had lived in the country for two months and had been taking intensive German lessons for two weeks. I arrived in good time for my appointment, only to find that nobody there spoke English, or in fact any language other than German. At the foreigners’ police station. The officers ridiculed and belittled me in words I barely grasped, and told me to come back with a translator.

I was 22 years old and had used my last speck of savings from waiting tables to pay for a root canal at the dentist. I was scared and sad, but had a multi-lingual friend who worked for the BBC and came back with me to translate and also threaten the police with press exposure if they didn’t follow their own damn rules. I got my residency visa purely because of her.

Within a couple years after the September 11th, 2001, attacks in New York City and elsewhere, my spouse and I were stopped by border patrol about 70 miles from the Canadian border. My spouse, who only became a U.S. citizen a few years ago, is English. Our friends who were going hiking with us were also stopped. The wife was American, while her spouse—one of my husband’s oldest friends—was from Northern Ireland. We were taken to an immigration center, sat down with a whole lot of other people, and told in no uncertain terms that the males of our parties, the non-American spouses, could be deported immediately because they weren’t carrying their identification and green card papers.

The border agents were dead serious and it was scary as hell. Close to that time period, a colleague of my spouse’s avoided her own husband’s deportation by moving back to her country of birth—she was Japanese and her spouse was Italian; the renewal of his U.S. residency visa had been denied and for neither of them, suddenly, was it possible to live and work on land where cranberries grow and turkeys roam wild and where they had employment.

The land had no judgment of them, but the political regime most certainly did. He had to leave the country within ten days of his visa denial, and so they did. Permanently.

I look back on all of these interactions, and more, like the innumerable run-ins I’ve had with the police in Russia trying to get a bribe out of me, and see a world laced with borders. Borders are not, as Harsha Walia wrote, “fixed lines simply demarcating territory. They are productive regimes firmly embedded in global imperialism, and border controls exist far beyond the territorial border itself.”

Coming back from Canada last year, my friends and I passed several herds of grazing bighorn sheep, and slowed for a flock of pine grosbeaks reluctant to leave the road. We got through border security easily, drove forward, and then paused to debate if we were allowed to go back and ask the guard about using the bathroom. We were allowed, but sat there for a minute literally asking one another, “Do you think we’re allowed to go back and ask him?” with an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear created on purpose by the psychological architecture of the place.

My younger kid and I recently spent a few days in Canada for their spring break, in a small town similar to our own where we did little but walk by the river in between sitting in a coffee shop reading books. Our border crossings were uneventful and took seconds. That same week, my kids’ father and our son were crossing the border with Canada by train and bus north of Seattle; their experience in both directions was harsher.

Borders are physical, social, cultural, and emotional, but what they are most is a form of power. When I hand my passport over, it’s with the knowledge that my freedom to go, to wander this Earth and love it freely, can always be denied.

I encourage people to go back and read the comments in the original version of this piece from last year, the range of chilling and threatening experiences people have had crossing, or trying to cross, borders. Share your own here. Read one another’s. This is an experience that affects everyone, even those of us who think we have the privilege to remain unaware until something happens.

This is a reality I’ve lived with my entire life—my father grew up in the Soviet Union, a country he was not allowed to leave for a long time. When he was finally given permission to emigrate with my mother and older sister, both American, he was given 3 days to leave the country and told not to return. He was almost 30 years old. He lived in exile for 17 years and never saw his own father again.

The original version of this essay probably had the most comments of any I’ve written on this platform, which longtime subscribers know is saying a lot, and it’s not without reason. The experience of borders is like air pollution full of poisons and invisible heavy metals, seeping into every aspect of our being.

A world of boundaries and respect, but no borders, could truly be one where traveling smells of freedom, a way of being in a world that can be read and known through our footsteps, this shared planet the only true book, one to be experienced rather than read, and whose air shifts like poetry as we traverse every curve of her spine.

Wealth knows best

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Wealth knows best

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons!

Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia?

Resistance often starts with property

My first semester of college, I had a neighbor who had a nice stereo system. I don’t know anything about stereo systems so I had to take her word for it that it was nice, or at least expensive.

My neighbor set up her CD player and speakers inside her closet, against the interior wall that separated it from my closet, and when she played music loudly, which she liked to do, especially at night, it thumped right into my room. Sometimes I asked her to turn it down, and at one point asked if, in general, she could not turn the volume so high because it was just as loud in my room as it was in hers. Or if she could even just keep it off at night.

Her response was one of my first encounters with the particular kind of entitlement that comes with having money: “What’s the point of having a nice stereo system if you can’t play it?”

I remember struggling with a vague feeling of injustice, of thinking about shared space and why her right to play her pricey stereo system shouldn’t come at the expense of my right to quiet, or sleep. I didn’t have vocabulary for that feeling until many years later, not until I’d lived overseas for a while, gotten married, and moved back to the U.S. to bumble around inarticulately and angrily liberal during the entirety of the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. I’m still liberal and often angrily so, but I hope more articulate.

Entitlement is a vague thing to try to pin down, an unvocalized feeling that one person, or group of people, has more of a right to exist, to take up space and air and attention, than other people. It is often accompanied by an expansive idea of ownership, a feeling that the fact of possession, whether of property or money or achievement or identity, implies a right to the unconstrained use of the thing possessed, no matter how the possession was gained or at whose expense it’s employed.

Being wealthy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for entitlement—some of the people I know who act most entitled do so due to their status, professional success, identity, or sense of grievance—but they do often seem to correlate. Wealth entitlement infects our civic and social life and the functions of our political and social systems at every level. Why buy an expensive car if you’re not allowed to drive as fast as possible wherever you like? Why own land if you can’t mine it, or build a plastics factory on it, or claim ownership of all wildlife who happen to live on it? Why finance a politician’s political campaign if you can’t use their influence to forward your own interests?

Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History podcast and related newsletter, was on an episode of TrashFuture a few years ago talking about some of these issues, and he said quite a few things about wealth entitlement that have stuck with me:

“It’s very hard for them to accept the fact that the system that produced them and made them people who matter, people whose needs and whims are catered to and who feel like they have some positive role to play in society—the idea that the systems that put them where they are might somehow be bad or might have negative consequences . . . it’s very hard to wrap their heads around.”

Wyman and the podcast hosts were discussing a kind of capitalism divide prevalent in the January 6, 2021, attempted U.S. insurrection and the movements leading up to it, which they said were partly a result of two different kinds of wealth opposed to each other: “the Davos guys versus the boat dealership guys,” a “revolt of the regional elites, the regional gentry.” An opposition that seems to have dissolved in the past couple of years in favor of shared purpose and the acquisition of unbelievable political power.

Who comprises regional gentry rather than the international über-wealthy is something Wyman got into in a newsletter he wrote about the kinds of wealth you see in the power players of small North American towns and mid-sized cities—not the ilk of the Koch and Mercer families, or the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but people who run McDonald’s franchises or large local construction companies. People who are much better off than you’d think but who also work hard. People like car dealership owners, which made sense to me—the owner of the local Subaru and Chevy dealership where I live seems to be incredibly well off, and there’s no other place within hours to buy a Subaru. He’s also the former head of the Montana Republican Party, which I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t become more vocally right-wing and anti-democracy over the past several years.

These are people, Wyman pointed out, who derive their wealth from ownership of actual, physical assets rather than from salaries like a doctor or lawyer or hedge fund manager would. Their wealth is still more tied, if with thin and fraying threads, to their local communities than that of the billionaire class.

“Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. . . . We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. . . . It’s not hard to spot vast apple orchards or sprawling vineyards and figure out that the person who owns them is probably wealthy; it’s harder to intuitively grasp that a single family might own seventeen McDonald’s franchises in eastern Tennessee, or the kind of riches the ownership of the third-biggest construction company in Bakersfield might generate.”

It’s ownership, Wyman said, that creates the basic divide between the two kinds of ruling capital. “To what extent is ownership central to your identity? The more central ownership is, the more likely you are to fall on the right side of that spectrum.”

Wyman drew a solid line between different kinds of ownership—physical assets like an orchard versus, say, savings in a Swiss bank account—but that line has never really existed. Wealth and ownership morph into each other, both feeding the possessor’s sense of entitlement. Of deserving more than, being more than, other people, much less the rest of life.

I’m reminded of 19th-century British novels, Jane Austen in particular, and the class divide that the landed nobility tried to make between themselves and those who’d become wealthy through “trade.” It’s a line drawn through socioeconomic class that tries to maintain entitlement only for certain types of wealth: inherited wealth. But the truth is that all kinds of wealth provide opportunities to purchase and hoard power.

A real-life example of ownership, wealth and entitlement closer to the Davos end of the capital class was covered in a feature in High Country News in 2021: When Gunnison County, Colorado, tried to exile non-resident homeowners in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, those property owners (who tend to extreme wealth; David Koch owns a vacation home there) fought back with a breathtaking display of entitlement, rather than relying on either the law or a cooperative attempt to address the community’s concerns.

Whether banning non-resident homeowners from staying in their homes was a wise or legal choice for the county isn’t something I know enough about to comment on, but the homeowners’ responses reflected not arguments for what would be best for the community or even what their own legal rights were but what they personally felt entitled to no matter the consequences to anyone else.

In addition to setting up a PAC (political action committee, a non-profit created to fund political campaigns) to raise money to unseat county commissioners and replace them with more congenial candidates, a group of non-resident owners set up a private Facebook group as they worked against the ban, and some of the comments that have become public were . . . telling.

“‘People who rely on others for their livelihoods should not bite the hand that feeds them,’ wrote one second-home owner.”

“‘Where is the appreciation and gratitude for the decades of generosity?’ wrote another.”

“‘Maybe don’t run your mouth so much on social media when you depend on those people to help pay your bills,’ one Facebook commenter wrote.”

“According to the second-home owners,” wrote the author of the article, Nick Bowlin, “Gunnison County’s economic survival and most of its residents’ livelihoods depend on their economic contributions and continued goodwill.”

It’s easy to see the logic of this thinking, but it also shouldn’t take that much work to pause, for a moment, and comprehend more fully the expectations of those who see themselves not as integrated members of a community, but as generous and gracious people of means to whom local residents should be grateful—but also for whom the health of that community itself is a matter of choice and leisure rather than necessity. People who have no bonds to the community but still feel it owes them something.

When I buy books from the local bookstore, I don’t expect the clerks or owner to be grateful to me. I am part of my community, interdependent with it; the continued existence of the bookstore and the coffee shops and the library and all the small downtown businesses also make my life whole. I am grateful to them. It is their existence that makes our community thrive, along with the hard work and many non-monetary contributions of people who live here. When the non-resident homeowners of Gunnison County lambasted a local restaurant server who’d publicly disagreed with them—“One of those big mouths is slinging drinks for tips—I’ll be sure to leave her a little tip,” wrote one of the Facebook group’s members—it was clear that what those residents expected was not service but subservience.

Escaping this kind of landed gentry vs. villein, serf, or tenuous and beholden tenant relationship was exactly what originally drove so many people like my ancestors out of Europe and into North America.

We’ve been recreating feudalism under the guise of property rights right here, and it’s only getting worse.

Bowlin tried to talk about the wealth divide in Gunnison County with Jim Moran, who launched the PAC to attempt a takeover of the county commission and whose vacation home in Crested Butte was worth, according to Zillow (referenced in the article) at the time, $4.3 million:

“I pointed out Gunnison County’s housing shortage to Moran, who, from 2008-2011, was an advisor of the private equity firm Lone Star Funds—the biggest buyer of distressed mortgage securities in the world after the 2008 financial crisis. After the crash, the firm acquired billions in bad mortgages and aggressively foreclosed on thousands of homes, according to The New York Times. I asked Moran if, compared to locals who struggle to pay rent, people who own two or more properties should be considered wealthy. ‘I think that’s wrong,’ he replied.”

Once you’re in a position of wealth and power and mostly surrounded by people who are the same, it can be very, very difficult to see yourself as wealthy, or powerful, much less to understand how your position affects the lives of everyone around you. “These people exist in a world that caters to them,” Wyman has said.

That characterization applies to both types of capital classes and most of the spectrum in between. I don’t think my former neighbor in college was from serious wealth, but from my vantage as someone who grew up on food stamps and who was in college by the grace of that institution’s generous financial aid program, she was pretty well off. She had a bank account. With savings in it. Nobody in my life had ever come near such a thing. Maybe it’s ungenerous of me, but I could easily see her going from insisting she had a right to turn up her music to becoming one of those non-resident homeowners making disparaging comments on Facebook.

“So what do we know about them, these vocal second-home owners?” wrote Bowlin in High Country News. “They worked hard for everything they own. They are clear on this. Their critics, they believe, are often motivated by jealousy. “‘I’m certainly not ‘rich.’ I’ve worked for my entire life to have the properties I own,’ wrote one group member.”

Properties. First of all, owning more than one property of the type described in the article, in a country where millions of children go hungry every day is, yes, rich, no matter how hard you’ve worked. Secondly, we have a problem when the very fact of ownership becomes its own justification. How is that wealth gained? At whose expense? And what impact is one’s ownership having on the local community?

As someone who also lives in a resort town with a high percentage of non-resident homeowners, these are not a minor questions to me. Wealth that translates into property ownership frequently has a terrible and nearly immediate downstream effect on the affordability of homes for people who live and work in that community full-time. Those effects cannot be counterbalanced by tipping generously when you go out to dinner.

Ownership in and of itself is not a value-neutral position. Its injustices compound over time, as the wealthy gain power, influence policy, and use both to acquire yet more wealth. My state’s current multi-millionaire governor, Greg Gianforte, not only used his millions to fund his several political campaigns but last year, with the conservative-dominated state legislature’s help, quietly lowered taxes on the wealthy and raised them on the poor and middle class—a direct wealth transfer from those who have the least, to those who already have the most and are now guaranteed to have more.

The arguments in favor of these kinds of tax policies—that somehow the benefits will “trickle down” to everybody else—wore thin decades ago, as real wages and salaries declined while the wealthy bought more vacation homes. And yet the mindset persists: making the wealthy wealthier will eventually be good for everyone. Someone with wealth can use those assets to benefit the community, if they desire.

But they often don’t desire, and if they do, it often comes with demands that reflect the power wealth has bought. My own community saw this play out less than two years ago, when a billionaire who’d built what looks like a literal palace overlooking the town objected to a zoning adjustment that would have allowed a new development to include affordable housing. The intricacies of that development’s proposal are less important here than the fact that that billionaire went to the town’s community foundation and told them that if the proposal passed city council, the local housing non-profit would never see another dime from him. His wealth, he thought, gave him the right to decide what was best for the community as well as for himself.

“Equating wealth,” wrote Wyman,

“especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class. They stand at the apex of the social order throughout huge swathes of the country, and shape our economic and political world thanks to their resources and comparatively large numbers, yet they’re practically invisible in our popular understanding of these things.”

Entitlement whitewashes wealth’s questionable values within the owner’s own mind. It makes all that one does and thinks automatically valuable. It grants people, they believe, the absolute right to do whatever they like with their property regardless of the consequences to others. And just like the problems of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, entitlement isn’t the sole province of high-profile stories located in a few specific enclaves. It’s everywhere.

The fact that there exist wealthy people who don’t buy into the sense of entitlement in a way proves the point: it’s not a requirement of wealth. It is at some level a choice. There are plenty of examples of people with wealth who would prefer less of it in favor of a society where everybody thrives. Musician Brian Eno, for example, has recently spoken out and advocated for higher wealth taxes in Britain, saying,

“I don’t like the thought that half of the population are struggling, and I don’t think there’s any need that they should be struggling. . . . wealth doesn’t trickle down to anybody. I trickles up, actually. . . . Rich people really piss me off.”

People like Eno, and others who quietly do whatever they can with their money to benefit the rest of life, are far outnumbered by, say, those covered in the High Country News article, those who believe that nobody should tell them what they should or can do with their wealth, and very definitely that their wealth shouldn’t be taxed, no matter how detrimental extreme wealth is to a society or how ethically questionable the accumulation of that wealth has been. Only those who own the wealth are entitled to determine what they’re allowed to do with it.

And if the rest of us do benefit from the choices the entitled make in how to employ their wealth and property? Well, we should be grateful that they’re willing to share—or, at the very least, grateful that they’re begrudgingly willing to turn down their music once in a while and throw a few tips our direction.

Maclay Flats just outside Missoula, Montana. I sat right here to record the audio version of this essay. Nothing like running water for some much-needed restoration. I forgot to mention in the audio that it’s a place with a tremendous number of ponderosa pine trees, just behind where I was sitting. My part of Montana further north is not rich in ponderosas and I always like spending time with those big-shouldered relatives when I’m down there.

Fox Owns Herself

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Fox Owns Herself

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons!

Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: What is the difference between attention that fractures us and attention that restores? What role have three 15th-century papal bulls served in the “claiming” of land worldwide by Christian peoples of European descent, and how have those claims evolved?

New writing! Elementals, a new anthology from the Center for Humans & Nature, is out now: “The Elementals series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?”

I have an essay titled “Trespassing” in Air, alongside stellar writers like Báyò Akómoláfé, Ross Gay, and Roy Scranton. Other volumes include writing from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Andreas Weber, Tyson Yunkaporta, Sophie Strand, Joy Harjo, and many more. As with their previous series Kinship, this anthology brings healing and guidance to a world sorely in need of both.

This essay, on the legal question of where ownership originates, and the perspective gained by thinking in geological time, was originally published November 11, 2022.

One mid-morning on a bitterly cold November day, I was sitting at a table with my younger sister, her two little girls, and my younger kid. We were staying at a rented Forest Service cabin in Montana’s North Fork valley, no internet or electricity or running water, having recently cleaned up from breakfast and playing an interminable game of Unstable Unicorns.

I glanced up from my hand with the two “Neigh” cards I kept forgetting to use, when I lost control of words and patted my kid on the arm enthusiastically several times before managing to say, “There’s a fox on the porch!”

My kid had been hoping to see a fox in person for ages and thought I was joking, but no. She was right there looking at us through the window. I’ve seen a number of foxes around our town, but my kid somehow always misses out.

We all put our cards down and padded from window to window as the fox tracked around the cabin, watching her until she disappeared back into the woods.

One of the most famous and pivotal property law cases in U.S. history, the 1805 case Pierson v. Post, involves the hunting of a fox. The legalities of that particular case have staying power for a reason. They hinge on the question of what grants ownership: labor or possession? Was it Post, who was hunting the fox, or Pierson, who actually killed it, who owned the animal in the end? New York State Supreme Court reversed a lower-court decision in Post’s favor and granted ownership to Pierson. The written decision reached back through centuries of legal thinking, drawing even from the Byzantine emperor Justinian I.

Law students—and people like me who study too much about this stuff—can get hung up for ages arguing about the ownership philosophies of William Blackstone and John Locke and whether it was the labor of the hunt, or the person who had physical possession in the end, that determined ownership. Labor and possession being two keystones of property law.

Yet rarely is it asked: What about the fox herself?

How can ownership really be debated or discussed without considering whether every entity has rights in and of themselves? To exist, to wander freely, to sniff around a porch for food humans might have neglected to store. To decide they don’t want to hang out and watch those said humans play Unstable Unicorns.

The five of us were staying at this cabin in my usual run-away-from-election-news routine. I have an unfortunate emotional reaction to elections. I’m sure it’s not uncommon, but it’s exhausting and also completely useless to be refreshing news every few seconds, tracking outcomes to events that I have zero control over. A few years ago I started renting cold, electricity-free, mouse- and packrat-loved cabins far away from internet service over election days. It’s something I hope I can keep doing as long as Montana, where I live, still has early absentee voting widely available. Which might not be long.

When we drove up to the cabin, my sister said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” in response to the stunning view, and I said, “When do they light the beacon fires?” because it really did look like the beacon-lighting scene in the movie version of Lord of the Rings. This is from two people who live barely an hour’s drive away and grew up here. You’d think we’d be used to the beauty. You’d be wrong.

But I don’t just engage in this ritual so that I can get away from it all and admire the view. I persist in it because I want to spend that day reminding myself of why I care. I’m not interested in politics because I’m into politics. I’m interested, and emotionally invested, because I care about this world we all share, these ecological and social and spiritual commons. Going away to a silent river valley, spending all night feeding the wood stove every hour because it’s well below freezing, watching Sun rise over the mountains, being surprised by a fox—these things remind me why I volunteer in my community, why I encourage people to attend school board and city council meetings now and then, why keeping places like the North Fork free from too much human development is important, why the political bent of my home county breaks my heart all the time, and has done since I was a teenager.

It also reminds me that my heartbreak isn’t even a noticeable microbe in the span of geological time.

A few years ago we visited Zion National Park in Utah, another place of surreal beauty. I stopped on a trail to observe the facing cliff for a while, so tall it felt unreal. All that orange- and red-tinted rock, and somewhere deep down in the face, a single, narrow band of black. How much time did that band represent in the hundreds of feet of stone surrounding it? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Everything that happened in a span of time far beyond humans’ ability to grasp, pressed into that one bit of different-colored rock, a tiny note for future observers to see: Something happened here. For millennia. And yet in the vastness of geological time it barely left a mark.

Several hours after the fox left us, alpenglow from the sunset hit the snow-covered peaks of Glacier National Park (pictured below), looking deceptively like a sunrise, and barely forty-five minutes later full Moon rose behind them (pictured at the top of this post), covering the entire valley with the kind of unfiltered indigo sky-light I sometimes forget exists, and we all stood in our pajamas and watched it, our breath spilling out into the frozen air.

I thought about the fox’s visit, and Pierson v. Post and the question of property, and how long ago it was that some humans decided to claim ownership over others—water, women, wildlife, and seeds; our relationship with those contain the ancient genesis of ownership, I continue to believe—and then create justifications for such claims through centuries of philosophical, religious, and legal argument.

What could change if we inverted that relationship? If we started from an assumption that all beings own themselves, that every being has agency and choice?

Our lives are so short. The events that shake our worlds so brief, against the timespan of stone. No matter what is forgotten of these times—eventually, everything will be, and everything for hundreds and thousands of years on either side of us, even foxes and Unstable Unicorns—it still matters how we care for one another. How we practice kindness, how we love, how we watch Moon rise and whom we share it with.

The joys and the pains are not everything, but they are not nothing.

In the comments on the original essay, Charlotte Hand Greeson shared a link to law professor Ann Tweedy’s then-recently published poem from the point of view of the fox, “Pierson v. Post’s Unheard Voice.” You can download the full poem from that link—it’s beautiful—but here’s a taste:

“I learned since that the man on the horse and the man on foot quarreled
about the right to kill me, had a third person decide. . . . 

. . . Students still study the story
but give me not a moment of their time. I am the invisible focal point. . . .

. . . You are right to think that, alive, no one could own me.
That’s the only true part of your story.”

Sunset’s alpenglow on the peaks of Glacier National Park

Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history

by Antonia Malchik3 Comments on Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history
Church of the Transfiguration, Peredelkino, Russia, midwinter

At the age of nineteen my grandfather, Jacob Davidovich Malchik, flipped an electric switch, saw a working light bulb for the first time, and knew his future waited somewhere outside his muddy Ukrainian village. In post-Revolution Russia, he left the Pale of Settlement’s shtetls, where Jews had been confined to living for generations, for proletarian Leningrad. With the tsar gone and the Bolsheviks promising equality for all, he had the chance to discard centuries-old restrictive laws that had been attached to him more closely than clothing, ground into his skin like a tattoo.

But Jacob hadn’t counted on the damage a dictator’s paranoia would do to that dream. As a Jew and the son of a moneylender he struggled even to gain admission to the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in the 1930s, despite his top score each year on the entrance exam. It took him years to finally become an engineer, and only his intelligence, work ethic, and sheer luck pushed him against the later current of Stalin’s deeply anti-Semitic Soviet Union.

Those very qualities endangered his life in a Soviet state that required thinking and acting only in absolutes.

In 1937, the year Stalin’s first great purge of “undesirables” began, a popular Party boss summoned Jacob to his office and ordered him to denounce a man who was suspected of being an “enemy of the people.”

Hard words, those: denounce, enemy of the people, the Party. Concepts that in that world, at that time, had punitive, harsh meanings, a black hole of language dwindling into singularities, hostile to nuance or texture.

Jacob replied that he didn’t believe the man was an enemy of the people. In doing so, he knew the risk he was taking. To be denounced in 1937—and, equally, to refuse to denounce someone—meant a surprise visit in the middle of the night followed by a show trial, possibly torture, and either a bullet or exile to Siberia. Denunciations were anonymous, required no proof, and more often than not led to the victim’s death.

Two million people died during Stalin’s first purge, known as the Great Terror, an average of a thousand executions per week.

The Party boss tried again to convince Jacob to write a denunciation, but he refused to comply. Jacob went home that night, told my grandmother Anna Davidovna what had happened, and together they packed a small suitcase and waited for the KGB’s midnight knock.        

Jacob knew what was being asked of him. He also knew that his own morality—for which the words justice and honor and honesty are only brushstrokes—would not allow him to sacrifice an innocent man’s life for the sake of his own, innocent, life.

My grandparents were not active dissenters against Stalin. But they retained hold of their sense of self, of who they knew themselves to be and the difference between right and wrong. They read forbidden Solzhenitsyn with their children at night, sitting around the table passing each illegally copied page to the next person as they finished. My grandmother listened to banned Voice of America and Voice of Israel—though I imagine that these days she would feel about the Israeli government the way most of my family in Russia does: absolutely opposed.

In the last few years, my cousins in Russia have spoken up against the invasion in Ukraine and found themselves silenced in the face of mass arrests. Relatives reported years ago of watching ballot boxes stuffed with pre-filled forms during sham presidential elections. Nobody in my family takes democratic freedoms for granted, but perhaps it takes living under dictatorship or oppression to realize that even the right to fight for something better can be stripped away.

The Church on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg, Russia, the sky rose-gold under a midnight Sun in June

Most of what I know about being a good ancestor comes from grandparents I never knew. To do what is right without expecting recognition for it, without even expecting to survive. They taught me that in good times and bad, being a good ancestor entails treating all your relationships with respect, no matter how intimate or how distant. To live with integrity, whether you’re ever recognized for it or not, and whether or not the world around you seeks to shatter all that you value as good and right and moral.

Being a good ancestor begins with how we treat those beings closest to us. That’s a minimum but not the totality.

The KGB never came for my grandfather. The next morning Jacob found out that the Party boss whose orders he refused had been arrested, with a letter in his vest denouncing Jacob as an enemy of the people. The man was shot a few days later. His letter, his “right answer,” gave my grandfather some immunity from further accusations; if Jacob had given the answer he knew was expected, I would not be here.

Jacob and Anna never saw the end of the Soviet Union—or barely did, in my grandmother’s case. They had no expectation that their world would shift to meet their values, but they likewise refused to abandon their values to meet that world.

When my father was finally given permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union with my mother and older sister in 1974, he was given three days to leave the country. Three days to say goodbye to his family, his friends, his job, Leningrad with her endless canals and pastel light under a midnight Sun, ice skating on the Neva River in the depth of that far northern winter that I crave returning to the way I crave water drunk from cold mountain streams, or walking this world barefoot.

Three days, and he was told not to return. He didn’t even speak English when he came to Seattle at nearly 30 years old.

And he never saw his father again. Jacob died a few years before Mikhail Gorbachev began loosening the restrictive borders of the Iron Curtain. Anna Davidovna, my grandmother, died shortly after the Soviet Union fell, less than a year after I met her for the first time. I was 14 years old.

My grandparents left me some small understanding of the complexities we live with when daily routines and adhering to one’s higher values are riddled with life-or-death pitfalls. They also left me with a question I wake and walk with every day of my life: how do I make choices and exist in a world that seems intent on destroying everything I care about? How does anyone?

The work I do is aimed at exploring these questions, and on reviving and strengthening truths like those left me by my grandparents, at bringing us back to the good in the world, to reminders that we are all alive, interwoven with all of life, and that how we treat one another and non-human life alike matters. Interconnection, relationship, kinship—they’re a mosaic that presents the opposite of individual ownership and private property.

Under authoritarianism, my father told me shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, you have to find your red line—like his father did when asked to denounce another innocent man, the line you will not cross, even at risk of your own life.

No matter who wins or loses elections large and small, these truths have been under assault for thousands of years. They need repair, just as the wild, breathing, beautiful living world needs our attention and care.

No matter what times we live in, no matter who holds power or who is being oppressed, we all have to hang onto ourselves, to what we know to be right and good, to not sacrifice those values even for our own skin, much less our own power, success, or status.

The moral codes we live by do not have to be immaculate. They do not have to check every box of what we think is expected of us, or what we expect of ourselves. All they must be—and this is harder than it sounds—is sturdy enough to withstand the wreckage of history.

True Believers and Mass Movements

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on True Believers and Mass Movements

Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the ancient roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.

After nearly a year of collaborative work, High Country News has published my essay on the transition from land relationship to land ownership through the theft of the commons. I’m a longtime reader and sometime contributor to HCN, and am thrilled that an essay about this idea made its way to their readers. You can read “The theft of the commons” here.

The following essay, about mass movements and true believers, was first published nearly two years ago. Like Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer itself, the ideas within are unfortunately relevant again. The commons include land, water, and air, but also ideas and imagination. As Ijeoma Oluo wrote recently, “we have the power to effectively fight this.” But as with the stories of ownership that keep us entangled in systems of domination, knowing how we got here—and what keeps us stuck—is key to knowing how to get out.

Thirty years ago I had a high school history and government teacher who forever changed the way I think about the power of identity, especially group identity, in affecting human behavior. In my senior year of high school, in the early 1990s, he taught a section on Nazi propaganda that I’m sure these days would be posted to social media in a hot minute, for good or ill. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if on some level he hoped through this course to inoculate his students against the kind of groupthink that characterizes movements like Nazism.

In addition to having us watch and analyze Nazi propaganda videos to learn about the power of dehumanization along with the lure of group identity and belonging, one of the books he assigned to us was Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer.

Hoffer, for those who haven’t heard of him, was a lot of things. Born, he said, in 1902 in the Bronx to German immigrants who died young, he worked as a migrant farm laborer and spent time on Los Angeles’s Skid Row before ending up working as a longshoreman after being rejected from Army enlistment in 1940 due to a hernia.

All of this information comes from Hoffer himself, and there remain some questions bordering on controversy about how much of his early life is true and what he might have fabricated.

He definitely did write ten books, however, and spent a few years as an adjunct professor at Berkeley. The True Believer became a bestseller after President Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned it in a press conference and it remains Hoffer’s most well-known and widely read book.

The True Believer has cropped up here and there over the past several years in mass media mentions of seemingly inexplicable or out-of-nowhere mass movements and political forces. One of the intriguing things about the book is that one’s interpretation of who constitutes a “true believer” can be bent according to perspective or ideology. But no matter how readily its characterizations are construed to serve any political interpretation, the main messages regarding the appeal of mass movements remain the same. They’re lessons that have stuck with me for three decades. 

Mass movements are more, and less, than what we think they are. Fostered and promoted by what Hoffer calls “men of words” (Hoffer’s “men of words” are people who prime the populace for radical change through language, but who are not leaders of change themselves—pundits, maybe, or, these days, social media influencers), these movements rely on charismatic leaders with little need for truth or integrity, but who have, among other qualities:

“. . . audacity and joy in defiance; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; . . .”

along with

“a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. . . . The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men.”

All of which sounds awfully familiar.

Mass movements, when presented with the right kind of leader, catch fire with a populace that is bored and somewhat self-disgusted, possibly angry but not completely downtrodden. Pointing to examples like the French Revolution, Hoffer posits that mass movements are far more likely to occur when people have seen small improvements in their life conditions than when they have very little and expectations of less. These movements also rely heavily on “inventing memories of past greatness” to persuade true believers that the present is a miserable state of existence. The movement must then go beyond the mirage to “make a misery of the present” in order to keep followers fixed on a prize that is always just a little out of reach.

To get there, though, mass movements need to rely on unifying forces and unifying messages. Hatred is the obvious choice, “the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents.”  

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

There is nothing so easy as shared hatred unless it is shared contempt.

Hoffer has a lot to say on the subject of hatred. Reading his assessment struck me in particular because in the year I reread The True Believer, Montana’s legislative session saw the characterization of people as “mean” mentioned more than once. Never in recent memory, I heard both privately and publicly, have people seen a group of lawmakers so bent on cruelty, so eager to use their power to punish those they deem an enemy, or just plain abhorrent. Never so desirous of finding an outlet for an emotion that gets as close to hatred as you can without saying it out loud.

This essay was originally published in 2021, and I can only say that 2023’s legislative session (Montana’s legislature meets every two years) was far worse.

Where, Hoffer asks, does this hatred come from? My own thoughts had landed on a general fear of and resistance to change, but Hoffer’s ideas are perhaps ahead of his time, a kind of gut-thrust into the human psyche:

“They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others—and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch. . . . Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice.”

The unifying force of the mass movement, then, realizes itself eventually in its vilification of the present, mirages of past and future greatness, shared hatred of a manufactured enemy, and, finally, a leader’s ability to control the movement, its members, and its loyalties.

A few years ago a leader in my state’s legislature published an editorial complaining about members of what at the time was called the Common Sense Caucus—a group of a particular party, say Party A, of legislators willing to vote with the other party, Party B, over what they saw as common sense legislation that benefited Montanans. I wish I could remember what the exact wording of the letter was, but it boiled down to the idea that Party A members were not doing their job unless they voted in lockstep with the nationwide Party A’s priorities. Nevermind what legislators’ local constituents wanted of them; what mattered was following the Party line.

The merging of individual identity with Party identity—and a subsequent leader’s control over that group identity—is an early characteristic of mass movements: 

“Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringing cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses. These old Bolsheviks had long ago cut themselves off from humanity outside Russia. . . . There was for them neither past nor future, neither memory nor glory outside the confines of holy Russia and the Communist party—and both these were now wholly and irrevocably in Stalin’s hands.” (Emphasis added.)

The submersion of an individual’s identity into the mass, into a group identity, is the main thrust of Hoffer’s thesis. He repeatedly makes the point that people do not turn to mass movements because they are inspired or because they are stupid, but because they are bored, searching for a way to exist that allows them to escape an unsatisfactory or unfulfilling “self”—to escape themselves. The particular ideology doesn’t always matter—Hoffer points out that there was plenty of ship-jumping between Nazism and communism during World War II, a common theme among adherents to hardline or extremist ideologies that is no less true today. It’s not the movement itself but the sense of belonging that matters.

In other words, any of us could fall in with a mass movement, an understanding that I believe might have been the purpose of my high school teacher’s lesson on Nazi propaganda. The attraction of escaping yourself and being part of something bigger, grander, could lure anyone, given the right time of life or right circumstances. 

Interestingly, Hoffer also makes the repeated but less emphasized point that creative people—fulfilled creative people; Hitler was not alone among Nazi leadership in being a failed, frustrated artist—are less prone to subsume themselves in mass movements. Not because fulfilled creative people are smarter or more successful or wiser, but because they have a way of being secure with themselves, within themselves, and their work that negates the need for finding an outside identity. I would at that creativity in general can do much to undermine the attraction of a mass movement, through fostering imaginations and increasing empathy.

Sadly, he doesn’t provide a method of cultivating this kind of groundedness among the greater populace. But it was in fact Ijeoma Oluo’s recent essay on the social and political futures staring America in the face that reminded me of The True Believer, due not to the dire facts she rightfully set forth, but to her inclusion of joy and strong relationships as necessary for getting through what is to come:

“Cultivate joy. Remember, we’re not just fighting against fascism, colonialism, and oppression. We’re fighting for us. We’re fighting for our lives, for our freedom, for our communities, for our children. There are so many ways in which our lives can be taken from us, and they can be taken from us while we are still living. How we live matters.”

I often talk and write about my Russian grandparents. They were born during the Russian Empire, were as Jews confined to living in the Pale of Settlement and had limited rights. They married and raised children during Stalin’s purges (during which millions died) and under increasing anti-Semitism. Not to mention surviving the Siege of Leningrad. Through lives that never had much of what we might call hope for a better future, they stayed true to values of honesty, ethics, and integrity. They laughed, they loved, they lived, even when they had much to fear. 

My grandparents didn’t escape the Soviet Union or overthrow authoritarianism. Most of us don’t. And still, how they lived mattered. I can only hope to be as good an ancestor to others as they have been to me.

Once someone has fallen in with a mass movement, facts cease to become persuasive, if they ever were in the first place. It is the certainty of belief that matters, never reality:

“The effectiveness of doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is. . . . the effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.”

In an effective mass movement, the true believer’s yearning for identity finds a place. A sense of belonging is fulfilled, and individual responsibility is then taken out of one’s hands. The movement, and its leader, decide what’s right and wrong. All one needs to do is stay with the movement and the whole gnawing existential issue of what is the point of this life; what am I doing here? is lifted blissfully off of one’s shoulders.

That’s what I got from those long-ago lessons on Nazi propaganda, anyway. It’s hard to get my mind around the fact that millions of people are able to find belonging and hatred compatible, even easy, but then I think of The True Believer and remember that the question is how many people are capable of releasing their own moral responsibility.

Though the last sections of the book talk a bit about Gandhi and Lincoln and other mass movement leaders who managed to channel the energy of true believers into change for good, The True Believer spends more time on Nazism and Soviet communism (it was published only a few years after World War II ended) and isn’t what I’d call a hopeful book. I was left feeling that there is little anyone can do to stop a mass movement once it has gathered enough true believers, even if the movement hasn’t yet reached a point of no return. The minds are locked away and there’s little anyone can do but try to survive it.

I really don’t want to live that way, much less think that way.

There are a few things to consider here that make me feel a little less hopeless. One is research I did a few years ago for an essay on riots in Aeon magazine. I suspect, though I don’t know for certain, that Hoffer took some understanding about human nature from late-1800s theories about common people, riots, and the thought that people (commoners, that is) lose their individuality when in a crowd, acting as a destructive mass. More recent scholarship (much of which I wrote about in that essay on riots) undermines this understanding. Even when I asked one of the researchers in Britain about the phenomenon of football hooliganism, he pushed back: alcohol and euphoria are at play there, but many football riots have been found to have outside actors prodding violence. Where the line is between manufactured violence and “real” violence I don’t know, but much of what we believe about crowd groupthink is both incorrect—this is backed by research going back decades—and, seemingly, intractable.

While lacking or despising one’s sense of self, and the unifying force of hatred, certainly ring true as foundation stones for mass movements—the early-1990s genocide in Rwanda comes to mind—I don’t know that the inevitability of them is as certain as the book left me feeling. Maybe that’s just me; maybe it’s part of my belief that we have to change the narratives of what we think humans are capable of in order to change our societies and our future, but I remain persuaded that humanity is capable of more, and better, even if we don’t always know how.

One of the essays I share and recommend more than just about any other is also from Aeon, on echo chambers and epistemic bubbles by philosophy professor C Thi Nguyen. I keep returning to it because it gives me an in-depth understanding of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers—and the differences between them—but also of what works and what doesn’t in escaping them, or trying to help someone else escape them. “We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed,” wrote Nguyen. “But echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.”

“Does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber. . . . Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things.”

These needn’t be purely socio-political-religious phenomena. Nguyen uses Crossfit exercise devotees and adherents to the Paleo diet as brief examples. But the researchers he discussed also use the late right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh as an example of an effective echo chamber:

“Limbaugh uses methods to actively transfigure whom his listeners trust. His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view. And outsiders are not simply mistaken—they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers.  . . . The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination.”

As with Hoffer’s description of mass movements, facts cease to matter. What matters is what the echo chamber or movement’s leaders make of those facts. Unlike an epistemic bubble, “an echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth,” wrote Nguyen; “it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.” 

That sounds a lot like the kind of mass movement that Hoffer detailed. And while Nguyen doesn’t offer a cure or a fix for these phenomena, there are at least ways to think about them that might be helpful. 

The main method is through what Nguyen describes as a “social-epistemic reboot”: Whether you’re following René Descartes’s arguments in Meditations on First Philosophy or imagining a “hapless teenager” who’s grown up in a cult, what’s required is abandoning what they believe about pretty much everything and starting from scratch. Which honestly sounds terrifying for the average person and is probably why these positions are so hard for people to shift out of.

What makes the difference is having at least one person outside of the echo chamber whom you can trust. Nguyen brings in the example of Derek Black, who was raised by a neo-Nazi family to be a neo-Nazi leader. He wasn’t looking for a way out of his indoctrination—he was in fact hosting a neo-Nazi radio show while in college—but a way found him in the form of a Jewish student at his undergraduate college who began inviting Black over for Shabbat dinners.

“In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval—a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled. Black went through a years-long personal transformation, and is now an anti-Nazi spokesperson. . . .

“Why is trust so important? Baier suggests one key facet: trust is unified. We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field—we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept. Reliability can be domain-specific. The fact, for example, that somebody is a reliable mechanic sheds no light on whether or not their political or economic beliefs are worth anything. But goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.”

People do leave cults and exit echo chambers, and although Hoffer didn’t talk in The True Believer about what could prompt people to leave mass movements, I don’t think it’s impossible for a movement to dissolve for various reasons—whether members come to terms with the harm that’s being caused, or trusted family members or friends leave some room for welcome, or some other inexplicable tipping point is reached.

I don’t necessarily know how to do this. I’m just as angry and frustrated and exhausted as anyone else, especially recently as a variety of forces and factors seem hell-bent on proving just how selfish humans can be, just how hell-bent an entire society can make itself on causing others suffering if enough people persuade themselves that there’s an enemy to defeat, even when that enemy is your neighbor or your family.

But I’ve got a lot of influences in my life, including my Russian grandparents, to remind me that self-protection doesn’t have to be one’s only driving force.

And I had this teacher, close to three decades ago, whose parents had, if I remember correctly, been German scientists brought over during World War II to work for the U.S. government, and he used his life to teach adolescent minds what it looks like when a society becomes mindless.

That teacher, and writers like Eric Hoffer who see much (though not all) with clarity, and researchers and thinkers who continue to work on compassion and cognitive empathy, remind us, once again, that we are not alone. Our resources are strained, our compassion is constantly challenged, and yet as a species humanity has been through far, far worse and has still not given up trying to be human.

In the spirit of anti-enclosure movements and the reality of our interconnectedness with life, On the Commons remains unpaywalled. These essays are informed by years of scholarship and research, and the practice of writing. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one to support this work.

The East India Company and the power of corporate stories

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on The East India Company and the power of corporate stories

Welcome back to On the Commons! For those of you who are new here, On the Commons is a newsletter exploring ownership and its inevitable injustices, investigating centuries of philosophical and legal arguments made in defense of private property for a much simpler explanation: theft. Or in other words, “I took it; now it’s mine,” and the consequences both large and small for our shared world. 

This is an updated, slightly revised version of a post first published on 31 December 2021. This is the third in a series of essays republished from earlier years. The previous one was on the Doctrine of Discovery.

Both top and bottom photos are of No Trespassing signs on the fence of land owned in my town by the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe railway company.

The Boston Tea Party is one of the defining stories of America’s founding as a nation. I remember learning about it year after year in school in the 1980s. Probably every American kid does. What was never said in those scrappy little classrooms across Montana is that the story of the Boston Tea Party is also one of the sharpest tools wielded in defense of the mythologies that make up the American ideal. The fact that it was an illegal riot that destroyed private property doesn’t just get glossed over; it’s never presented that way, not in the U.S. anyway. To present it that way would fly in the face of the American ideology that private property is bedrock. Instead, the story is presented as noble: the little nation that could refusing injustice imposed by a far-off monarchy. 

What also gets glossed over is that the impetus for the riot wasn’t simply taxes; it was taxes imposed by government in order to benefit a private corporation.

The struggle over taxes in the British colonies of North America had been ongoing for years. The tax on tea, however, had a second purpose besides enriching King George III: the British Parliament wanted to keep the tea tax as a symbolic acknowledgment that the government maintained its right to tax the colonies, but they also wanted to help the East India Company claw its way out of debt. The story of the Boston Tea Party, the real one, points to the longer history of government enabling corporate power and profit until it essentially becomes an arm of the corporation itself.

The East India Company had its own private army. It in effect controlled all of India at one point, nominally representing Britain’s interests but serving its own. 

Swarnali Mukherjee has written extensively in Berkana about what the British Crown and the East India Company’s actions meant for the economy of India. I encourage you to read the entirety of her essay on this subject, to understand the importance of the point she makes:

“The construction of railways was funded by Indian taxpayers, and the economic benefits often flowed back to Britain in the form of profits pocketed by British shareholders. The total wealth drain of India under British rule, in today’s value is an estimated $45 trillion.”

As with many of our modern corporate-government revolving doors and mutual back-scratching habits, the interests of the corporation often enveloped, or became, those of the state, as noted in this Financial Times article on the East India Company and its implications for modern capitalism: 

“The EIC remains history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power — and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state. . . .

For just as the lobbying of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was able to bring down the government in Iran and United Fruit that of Guatemala in the 1950s; just as ITT lobbied to bring down Salvador Allende’s Chile in the 1970s and just as ExxonMobil has lobbied the US more recently to protect its interests in Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan, so the EIC was able to call in the British navy to enhance its power in India in the 18th century. And just as Facebook today can employ Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, so the EIC was able to buy the services of Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered Yorktown to Washington.”

It’s a long but excellent article (and unfortunately I think now paywalled), detailing the Company’s permission to wage war, and instances of forced privatization across the world at the Company’s behest. It also points to England having isolated itself from the rest of Europe due to wars over religion (I assume the author was referring to the abandonment of Catholicism and establishment of the Church of England) as a factor prompting the country to look for markets outside of Europe, a vital ingredient for colonialism: 

“The English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield, and to do so they had no compunction but to use, for the first time in history, unbridled corporate violence.” 

One of the questions I keep asking myself is if government, of almost any form but particularly of the nation-state, has always existed to serve private interests. Its main claim to enforcement of law is a monopoly on state violence, most often employed in the name of protecting private property, rather than protecting citizens from harm.

This is obvious when you look at laws and police actions against something like constructing an oil pipeline. The pipeline is private property built in pursuit of profit; therefore, it qualifies for legal protection from the state even though it threatens clean air, water, and soil—even if it takes others’ private property in turn. The U.S. government’s power of eminent domain, after all, was first used for private gain when railroads were being built across the continent, and has continued to be wielded in the name of private profit ever since—the Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) and the Pennsylvania District Court case granting eminent domain to a pipeline builder over the objections of a family of maple tree farmers in 2016 are only very recent examples of a longstanding pattern.

What to do about it is another question. Even democratically elected representatives are eager, as we see all too clearly every day, to promote corporate interests over that of their constituents if it assures them a safer and longer place in a seat of power. We need democracy and the right to vote, but those tools aren’t enough to assure a livable planet and lives of dignity. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient.

There’s a tendency to just say, f— it, burn it all down and start over. But that’s been done more than once throughout history, in several places within living memory, and all it results in is a lot of suffering and the same cycles starting over again. It’s as if there’s something broken at the center of humanity, or at least a sizable portion of humanity, and we’re never going to find a better way to live together until we clearly define the shape and scope of that brokenness. As long as we* accept structures that prioritize private profits over life and health, pollution and structural injustice is all we’ll get. 

If I believed in the devil, it would be someone in a sharp suit promising me two or three generations of decent jobs in exchange for the water, soil, and air I depend on, with the added bonus of sacrificing my kids’ health and senses of themselves as free human beings. It is the purest kind of evil to smile and hand out some cash while snipping the threads that link us to life.

The stories we tell and accept about ourselves and others have tremendous power. If we can change the stories, maybe we can begin to change something about our lives.

Instead of trying to burn it all down, plenty of people focus on building from the ground up—better systems, better ways of doing and being and living: this profile of a local food and farm co-op in Washington is a reminder that even when things feel like they’re falling apart, there are people and networks all over the world trying to piece them back together. Montana’s Alternative Energy Resource Organization (AERO) has been working against corporate agriculture for decades, from lobbying for a different kind of Farm Bill that works for people and food rather than commodities, to producing the bulk of the country’s organic lentils and heirloom grains like kamut. Oakland’s Unity Council has also been working for decades on affordable housing, higher-quality food access, and integrated public transportation in Fruitvale, one of the city’s poorest areas.

There are plenty more. I’m reminded of these organizations and people every time I work on a story about urban planning, affordable housing, or pedestrian advocacy. They are everywhere. They just never get featured on cable news or the podcasts of so-called “thought leaders.”

Changing our systems to serve people involves all of these efforts. And they don’t have to be scaled up—they have most power and efficacy when they stay connected to a particular place and community. Instead of scaling up small, workable, place-based systems, we need to take out the support systems that keep oppressive conglomerations afloat, from tax subsidies to weak interpretation of anti-monopoly laws (which should always include what monopolies truly cost life). And of course to change the way a large percentage of human beings see themselves as co-existing with the rest of life, which is no small task after millennia of negating and oppressing this reality.

During a recent U.S. election cycle, my state elected a governor who ran on the tired trope of lowering taxes, “creating jobs,” and being a successful businessman. People in my state are actually very good at “creating jobs.” Small business owners sometimes feel as common as pine trees. Many of those jobs—upwards of 70,000—are dependent on a healthy commons in the form of clean rivers full of fish and public lands that provide the kind of solace and clean air that no job could touch. 

It’s often hard to get people to acknowledge the existence of these jobs and the kind of healthy shared commons that make them possible because our idea of a “job” is so starved of meaning and hamstrung by identity and self-perception. (Journalism jobs have fallen by 65% in the last 20 years, for example, while coal jobs have fallen by 61%, but we don’t hear much about the former.) Working in a lumber mill is a job; working as a fishing guide is, too, but also somehow isn’t the kind of job you’re talking about when you’re voting for “job creators.” Real jobs means lumber mills, slaughterhouses, car factories, oil pipelines, tech engineers. It means hundreds of people, massive profits for the bosses, and a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to environmental destruction. Maybe it’s the type of job or maybe it’s the number of people employed at each operation, but there are plenty of small businesses that somehow don’t count when it comes to political rhetoric.

This is just a story we’ve been told, one that people then tell one another. But we are capable of telling different stories. We just need more people doing so, and then acting on them. 

The East India Company and various colonial governments were very effective at telling stories. They’ve left legacies of imperial pride that still resonate and warp people’s thinking today, and blind us to the dangers of corporate power. As that Financial Times article pointed out:

“We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. For it was not the British government that began seizing chunks of India in the mid-18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London.”

The company did so with the support of the British Crown, and when the EIC was facing further debts from their activities and obligations worldwide, the Crown stepped in once again to help them recoup losses through a monopoly and tax on tea in what they saw as their “possessions” in America. To quote from the Boston Tea Party’s own museum:

“The British East India Company was suffering from massive amounts of debts incurred primarily from annual contractual payments due to the British government totaling £400,000 per year. Additionally, the British East India Company was suffering financially as a result of unstable political and economic issues in India, and European markets were weak due to debts from the French and Indian War among other things. Besides the tax on tea which had been in place since 1767, what fundamentally angered the American colonists about the Tea Act was the British East India Company’s government sanctioned monopoly on tea.”

The East India Company is one of many lessons throughout history of the dangers inherent in encouraging the mutual support of corporate and state power. There are countless examples to explore, like the land stolen throughout North America and given by the U.S. government to railway companies, with profits for the railway and timber industries continuing even to the present day. The timber company Weyerhaeuser, for example, first bought 900,000 acres from the Northern Pacific Railway in 1900, and now profits off of not just the trees grown on land they own, but on the land itself, which the combination of state and corporate power has turned into “real estate.” 

Phrases like that—“real estate”—carry their own stories, their own burials of what land has been, could be, and is. 

We can change what we believe, starting with what we think we know about history and the real, live world around us. We can tell better stories about what is possible and what we’re capable of. We need to, because corporate growth and greed will not stop taking and commodifying and destroying all that makes life worthwhile, nor will it stop fabricating stories that make vast numbers of people believe it’s inevitable, unstoppable, and probably for the best. We need more stories, better stories, and we need them everywhere in hopes that those stories can, over time, change what is.

Change takes a lot of time and a lot of work. We can start by finding and amplifying as many instances as possible of people doing real work in real communities to make their worlds better. We can commit to finding, and believing in, different stories—the ones that make us realize a different world is possible, and then making it probable.

*“We” is a word I frequently stumble over and have begun to specify more clearly since this piece was first published. Fundamentally, I think English just needs a different word, or a few different words, to bring about more nuance when talking about societal thinking that shouldn’t be characterized as “us vs. them” while also finding ways to make it clear who is meant by every varied instance of “we.”