Abstract
The documentary film This Land Is Our Land describes the distinction between the capitalist market and the commons. The commons, according to the film’s narrator and social activist, David Bollier, consists of all of the things we collectively own and have an obligation to pass on to other generations. In the commons, people share and use resources for the public good. In contrast, in the market, capitalists turn resources into products to be bought and sold in order to accumulate profit for individual capitalists and corporations.
The notion of the commons is an old one; ancient societies formally set aside resources, mostly land, for the common people to use. In an increasingly global capitalist economy we, the common people, have forgotten about the importance of the commons while capitalists have or have attempted to turn the commons into commodities.
One of the most striking examples of the commodification of the commons comes in the first five minutes of the film. The film compares the development and ownership of the polio vaccine in the 1950s to development and ownership of drugs to extend the lives of people with AIDS in the 1990s. The public funded the efforts of researchers in the 1950s, among them Jonas Salk, to develop a polio vaccine. Salk did not seek a patent for the vaccine. When famed journalist Edwards R. Murrow asked Salk who should own the patent on the vaccine, Salk said haltingly, “Well, the people I’d say; there is no patent. This is . . . could you patent the sun?” In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies developed medicine that could extend the lives of people with AIDS. The companies owned the patents and charged a lot of money for the drugs. During this time 20,000 people with AIDS in South Africa died each month. Most could not afford the $240 per month to buy the life-extending drugs. Faced with this crisis, the government of South Africa encouraged local manufacturers to produce the drugs and allowed the import of cheap generic versions. The drug companies demanded that the government of South Africa stop and argued that national governments intervening to provide affordable medicine for their citizens set a bad precedent. The pharmaceutical companies called the actions of the South African government piracy. This historical turn of events shows the difference between research and development in medicine for the sake of the public good and research and development for the sake of private profit.
The rise of global capitalism has increasingly commodified the commons. Commodification started occurring during the enclosure movement from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in England. The elite took over land previously considered part of the commons. They wanted exclusively to graze their own sheep in what had been considered common land in order to take advantage of the booming export market for wool. While this made the elite even richer, it impoverished the masses who no longer had access to the land. The film uses the concept of enclosure—the takeover of public property—to describe what has happened and is happening on publicly owned lands in the United States. The federal government has allowed logging companies to log and even clear-cut in National Forests and mining and oil companies to extract minerals and oil from publicly owned property. The logging, mining, and oil companies have not properly paid for the right to extract these resources, either, because of “sweetheart deals,” lax enforcement, and/or opaque accounting practices. Some estimate that the American public has lost $245 billion in unpaid remuneration on resources taken from public lands by private companies. Using not public lands, but public water systems, bottled water companies such as Coca-Cola have made huge profits selling bottled water from publicly owned water systems. Meanwhile, many local public water systems deteriorate from lack of funds for repair and maintenance.
The film opens with a quote from the Interior Secretary under Richard Nixon, Walter J. Hickel: “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight. But if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” This quote alerts viewers to the gradual and sometimes unnoticed takeover of the commons. We can hope it does not read as instructions about how to use stealth to steal from the public. That the statement comes from the head of the agency charged with “protecting America’s great outdoors and powering our future” introduces viewers to different roles played by the federal government. In a capitalist democracy the federal government acts as both a protector of the commons and a developer of markets. At times the federal government has leaned more toward protecting the commons: for example, land grant colleges under Lincoln and social security, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, and the GI bill under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These acts placed the federal government in service of the commons. At other times the federal government has leaned more toward promoting the interests of the market, such as when it gave away resources located on public lands and deregulated the broadcast airwaves, and the current support that it is providing to corral the Internet for private profit. The film uses these last two commons to exemplify the shift in allegiance of the federal government from protecting the commons to protecting the market.
The federal government formed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934 to help manage the public airwaves in a time where overlapping broadcasts hurt the quality of all transmissions. Because the airwaves are public space, the FCC saw to it that broadcasters lived up to their responsibility to deliver programming with collective social benefit, not just private profit. This orientation changed in the 1980s and 1990s when Congress struck down laws meant to protect the public interest and passed laws meant to increase corporate profit. This resulted in less programming with social benefit and more titillating programming meant to draw viewers to commercials. This same move, transforming public space for commercial space, is underway on the Internet. Internet companies want to curtail the ability of the public to surf where they want. These companies also want to limit the arenas where the public can share their creativity and knowledge as opposed to selling it. Big companies police the Internet to make sure that the public does not make “unauthorized use” of its products. Blocking off the public’s ability to use, reuse, remix, and remake existing cultural statements goes against the age-old tradition in music and art, in which artists freely borrow from and reinterpret the work of others to develop their own creative contribution. The folk singer Woody Guthrie fully acknowledged his debt to other musicians and encouraged up-and-coming musicians to do the same with his music. The title of the documentary, This Land Is Our Land, is taken from a Guthrie song of the same title in which the lyrics proclaim the primacy of the commons over private property.
Instructors may find this film useful in identifying the threads of thinking that correspond to the Tea Party philosophy about the evils of big government. According to this logic, explained in a segment featuring Glenn Beck, commitment to the common good or talk about social justice is socialism. Socialism is totalitarianism. So, anytime the federal government acts to protect what we all collectively own instead of protecting private property, the nation inches closer to socialism and totalitarianism. Capitalists appreciate this argument because it paves the way for a world in which everything would be for sale and only those who could pay for products could have them.
A weakness of the film is that it moves very quickly, hardly allowing time for the information to sink in, especially for students new to these sorts of arguments. In an attempt to be comprehensive, the film includes examples of commodification in a wide variety of contexts, which comes across as somewhat disjointed. The film may also make some assumptions about the kind of background viewers have. For example, students might not know who Adam Smith is and why we are still talking about his ideas about markets even now. Fortunately, the website for the film provides a study guide, with key points, discussion questions, and assignments. The study guide can help instructors to slow the flow of information down into manageable parts so that the argument of the film becomes clearer. The film would be useful in a variety of courses to spark discussions about the commons, the economy, commercialization, power, norms, and values. Instructors will find this film useful in environmental sociology, social stratification, political sociology, and social change courses as well as other more narrowly defined courses in these general areas.
The film ends on an upbeat note with brief examples of movements underway to protect or to take back the commons. These efforts include not only taking back or protecting natural resources like water, air, and land but also protecting newly developed commons made possible by the Internet like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and the blogosphere. The film highlights efforts to protect knowledge produced at public universities for the benefit of the public, not corporations, and applauds open-source software, open-access academic journals, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s practice of open-courseware. Instructors and students who work with This Land Is Our Land will find themselves better informed about the importance of the commons and inspired by the local and international movements to reclaim and to protect it.