Commons, piracy and property : crisis, conflict and resistance

In his first month in office, Donald Trump approved a law allowing states to dispose of federal land to private actors. In practice this meant that state parks could be sold to private companies who want to exploit their natural resources for almost no cost. It is significant that one of the first actions that Donald Trump took as a newly inaugurated president was to enable a large-scale enclosure of the commons. This tells of the priority that private property holds and how it can be used to impose a new regime. What we see here is not only a transferral of resources, but a process of property creation: something that used to be a community resource is transformed into a privately owned commodity. While property has always been taken for granted and often seen as a precondition for human civilisation , under the emergence of neoliberalism we have seen a shift from the balance that has long existed between private and common resources. Be it in the material or immaterial world, property creation is now the driving force and rational of progress. This is why we need to pay extra attention to these particular moments where that act of property creation is exposed.