CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Criminalization of Gleaning

A Man Gleaning, George Seurat. (British Museum).

This essay was published as the Afterword to “Who Gets the Remainder? The Ethics and Politics of Gleaning,” edited by Amiel Bize and Xenia Cherkaev, in History & Anthropology.

The whole history of capitalism begins with the expropriation of people from the land, turning it into money and them into nothings. The passage from nothing to money is conducted by work, and yet people will cling on and find a way out of no way, because no expropriation is ever total. This is the evidence of remainders, or broadly speaking, the evidence of gleaning.

The essays in Who Gets the Remainder? The Ethics and Politics of Gleaning,  have an amazing range of subjects from roadside exchanges of siphoned fuel in East Africa, to the ‘three stalks’ rule of the Hebrew Mishnah, to the scrap metal dealings in Tbilisi, Georgia and Nairobi, Kenya, to artisanal gold mining in Burkina Faso, to Danish ‘fusk’, or Soviet ‘homers’, to the repurposing of beams, joists, and bannisters of abandoned houses in the American rust belt. Xenia Cherkaev and Amiel Bize provide an introduction to these exceptions to the usus, fructus, and abusus of private property. Indeed, such exceptions are the basis of another world of creativity, moral or ethical value, and belonging. What is waste or wild, what is tacitly whispered, what is illicit, sometimes criminalized, and often winked at, all take what was abused and put it to use, even fructifying it as forms of the commons.

It is an encyclopedic project gathered brilliantly and told not without a touch of humour. It rests on investigation and practice, not theory or utopia, helping us see that another world is possible. To this scholarly project we want to sound a religious, a Marxist, and an English note.

Religion. The religious note offers values of human agency and faith in history

The Book of Ruth is at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. Ruth is a gleaner as well as an outsider. The heart of the story is gleaning, that is, the activity of gathering the stalks and ears of grain left on the ground after the reapers had done harvesting. Gleaning enables her to cross tribal borders, to become accepted by harvesters and proprietors alike, and to marry Boaz, a landlord.

The Book of John is the last of the Gospels in the Christian Bible. Chapter six, verse twelve expresses the aftermath of a ‘miracle’, or clean-up time, time to glean, where, after five loaves and two fishes fed 5,000 people contentedly, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘collect the pieces left over so that nothing may be lost’. This they did and filled twelve baskets of left-overs from the original five barley loaves. Ever since, workers, on hearing how Jesus led his disciples in gleaning, could relate to their own experiences in shop, field, and home with the remainders or what’s left over after production. What had formerly belonged to the craftsmen and craftswomen as part of their customary compensation package will be criminalized.

The history of the commons has a semantics of its own – pannage, chiminage, wainage, estovers, etc. Every craft and trade had its ‘usages’ or ‘perquisites’ or ‘customs’ or ‘fat’ to use the general colloquial term. Servants received vails; shoemakers received clickings; hatters received buggings; the tanner took rumps and birrs; the forester took lops and tops; watchmakers received scrapings; tailors took cabbage; silk weavers took ends; wool weavers took fents and thrums; shipwrights chips; dockers took spillings or scrapings; lumpers took sweepings; coopers waxers; pinions and noils for the wool and silk comber, and on and on in the usually hidden contest across the length and breadth of homo faber, man the maker. These many customary usages were deemed legally criminal and economically inefficient. They are the semantic expression of the incomplete separation of the worker from his or her tools and materials of production. They belonged to the worker’s common.

Taking them away entirely led to immiseration of the craftsperson, the criminalization by police, and technological innovation. It might lead to revolution. In the summer of 1789 in France, the peasants rose up during the grand peur, stating their grievances in cahiers de doléance. The historian, George Lefebvre, provides an important clue. The sickle, he says, was a friendly instrument to the gleaners, as bending over required more frequent standing up for relief than did the swaying scythe, which cut closer to the ground. The commons has a user-friendly technology of its own. The sickle left more behind.

That was France. During the English Revolution of the 1640s, Abiezer Coppe advocated neither ‘sword levelling’ nor ‘digger levelling’, yet he prophesized how ‘the substantiality of levelling is coming’. So, against the great ones of the earth, he wrote

Well! Do what you will or can, know you have been warned. It is not for nothing, that I the Lord with a strong wind cut off (as with a........

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