The Media Commons and Social Movements

Grassroots Mediations Against Neoliberal Politics

Jorge Saavedra Utman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429863158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does it mean to have a voice in a formal democracy operating under neoliberal guidelines and with an almost entirely private media system? How can the people gain their voice and engage in a dialogue with hegemonic actors and discourses?

In this book, Jorge Saavedra Utman examines the role of media and communicative practices during one of the largest social mobilizations in Latin America in the last 30 years: Chile's 2011 students' movement. Saavedra Utman observes the eye-catching, subversive, but also intimate practices that, in a country with a liberal democracy and neoliberal policies, allowed people to speak up and become political actors from grassroots positions. Presenting rich qualitative data that is sourced from interviews and focus groups with activists, he introduces a fresh perspective on the study of media and communications and social movements. Saavedra Utman paints a clearer picture of contentious events since 2011 - like the Arab Spring and Occupy – to understand the relevance of media and communications in contemporary quests for participation and democracy.

Promising to be an important book, The Media Commons and Social Movements represents a significant contribution to our understanding of communicative dimensions of protest and social change.

1 The Struggle for Voice in Times of Democracy and Neoliberalism

Introduction

In 2011, the Chilean students’ movement expressed its will to end the unequal, privatised, market-driven education system implemented during the period of military dictatorship (1973–1990) and deepened by the hand of successive social democrat and right-wing administrations (1990–2011). The events of 2011 were an expression of their determination to fight for what many people consider to be an inalienable human right to high-quality and free, public education for all, irrespective of ethnic background, household income, or geographical location.

This mobilisation took place in a country with a formal representative democracy ruled by technocratic political parties prone to neoliberal policies (Garretón, 2003; Feres, 2009), where it is claimed that political participation outside elections has been increasingly discouraged by political parties, and where a media system owned by few pro-neoliberal corporations has consistently criminalised social mobilisation. In this democracy, therefore, people campaigning for free, public, and equal education – a basic right they considered themselves to have been deprived of – demanded to be listened to and demanded that the government’s actions be fully accountable. In this regard, education was considered an expropriated commons – a concept that I will discuss later, but suffice it to say here, the commons is primarily understood as ‘resources that belong to the people as a matter of life necessity’ (Mattei, 2012: 37). However, was the commons, in the context of this mobilisation, only restricted to the demand for education? It does not seem so if the analysis goes beyond the main petition to observe the varied set of media and communicative practices of 2011 with regard to its different aspects and its diverse intentions.

Resistance through symbolic media and communicative practices has been part of what social movement scholars, media and communication researchers, and political scientists have been studying over past decades (della Porta and Diani, 2006; Melucci, 1996). But in the Chilean case, where democracy has been increasingly a matter for elites (Delamaza, 2013) and in which neoliberalism has privatised many aspects of life – from water to education, from healthcare to pensions – overcoming silence and lack of participation has more to do with an opening of ‘the political’¹ – understood as the conflictual and antagonistic dimension of human societies – than passing a claim to institutional representatives.

Upon this premise, the nature of the problem appears to be more elemental, relating to the basic foundations of political participation: the chance to speak and to be listened to when discussing issues that concern us all – the life in common – beyond the limitations of individualism and the strictures of privatisation and deregulation that prevail in democracies following neoliberal guidelines. The questions that arise, accordingly, are: what is the nature of the problem of not being able to enact one’s citizenship and participate in political debate in the context of a democracy within neoliberal frameworks, and how can it be overcome from grassroots positions like the one held by the Chilean students for claiming high-quality, free, public education?

To face these questions, I launch this chapter from the understanding that the opportunity to speak and to be listened to is an elemental commons for the political to exist, and I label that commons as ‘voice’. To anchor the concepts, firstly, I approach the primitive and more contemporary notion of the commons and its pertinence to observe beyond the constraints of certain political discussions, as well as its salience for understanding the minimum foundations for a more egalitarian, horizontal and participative political association. Secondly, I address the ways in which voice is understood by the literature on democracy and social movements, finding two major patterns – voice as a channel to pass claims towards mainstream democratic institutions, and voice as a way to bring the political to life through discussion and disagreement. As long as these communicative conditions remain unfulfilled and the impossibility of breaking the closures to political participation in neoliberal realms continues, this chapter contends that what occurs in neoliberal contexts like in the Chilean case is the expropriation of voice as a political commons.

Given that the Chilean case is set in a specific place, in the second part of this chapter I move the discussion on to discover how this expropriation relates specifically to Latin America. Observing the politico-cultural foundations and the subsequent quests for independence, emancipation, and liberation in the continent, I conclude that the expropriation of voice finds fertile soil in Latin America, and specifically in Chile, where it occurs in a manner that is fundamental to the politics of the region. Mainstream politics, in this sense, appears unable to provide answers defeating the lack of voice. But social movements do seem to bring insights beyond the limitations of the institutional realm by giving relevance to non-mainstream actors and by underlining the main aim of those who are not permitted to have a voice: to overcome cultural patterns in which their voice is diminished or rendered useless.

The chapter ends with the affirmation that the commons of voice has been expropriated in neoliberal democracies, that this expropriation is deeply rooted in Latin America, and that an expropriated voice undermines the chance of active citizen participation, a more dialogical democracy and basic political rights. In this sense, the chapter gives a step forward to the idea that overcoming this expropriation implies overcoming a cultural hegemony beyond the limitations of institutional politics. Chapter 2 will follow the previous step through an enquiry into the broad spaces in which voice – as a commons involving resources, relationships, and placements to convey those relationships – has been accepted, contested, and challenged. I argue that only once the latter has been observed and understood is it possible to understand the nature of the problem and what is needed to generate the minimal resources and relationships required for a political commons. But let’s start with the idea of voice as a commons.

Voice as Commons: Speaking and Being Listened to beyond Institutional Politics

Why the commons? The notion of the commons has been gaining in popularity among theorists (Ostrom, 2011; Mattei, 2012; Dardot and Laval, 2014), activists, and intellectuals, with the continuous emergence of social movements following the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the subsequent demonstrations claiming that another world is possible, as expressed by the World Social Forum since its first meetings in Portoalegre, Brazil (2001, 2002, 2003). But the commons is far from being a new concept. As the organisation, On the Commons (onthecommons.org) expresses, it is a new way to express an old idea: that some elemental resources for life belong to us all and that they should be accessible and open to all with no one being able to claim them as their individual property (Dolcerocca and Coriat, 2015).

This definition of the commons has been expanded in the last 30 years. Originally centred on land property, natural resources, and land management, today it is applied to diverse issues such as the collective management of resources (Ostrom, 2011); the overexploitation of natural resources (Linebaugh, 2014; Amin and Howell, 2016); the creation, use, and distribution of knowledge and information against legal and technical barriers for the free flow of information and creativity (Lessig, 2001); new collective and horizontal political organisation (Hardt and Negri, 2009); the critique of private enclosures on urban spaces (Stavrides, 2016); and revolutionary attempts contesting neoliberal globalisation (Dardot and Laval, 2014).

In this sense, the revival of the commons is linked to the awareness of inhabiting a common world where living conditions have been impoverished and where people increasingly perceive their lack of decision-making power over collective life through institutional political processes (PNUD, 2010). This is quite evident in the case of Chile, as expressed by the report of the United Nations Development Programme in 2004. The report said that whereas the distance between political parties and citizenship grows and elections attracts less interest, the political discourses of mainstream politicians do not respond in an adequate way to people claims, making grow the distance between public deliberation and political decisions. In sum, says the report, ‘there is an increasing distance between society and the way democracy is conveyed’ (PNUD, 2004: 247).

In these conditions, the question about the commons relates to basic resources not only for physical survival but to enact a more egalitarian relationship and collective engagement in which everybody could take part in the discussion and decision-making process about the life in common (Linebaugh, 2008, 2014). In this quest, voice appears as a foundational resource and as a basic relationship – to speak and to be heard – that students and people living in Chile have tried to render through non-institutional means. As Camila Vallejo, spokesperson for the Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) and one of the most salient leaders of the movement in 2011, stated in her explanation of the means used throughout the student mobilisation, pressure mechanisms like marches and occupations were the only way for them to be heard by the government and other political institutions (2012).

To understand why voice is understood as a commons I will analyse the evolution of the commons as a concept connected to resources and, then, set the actual understanding of the commons as a type of collective, horizontal, and inclusive political engagement.

The origin of the commons as a concept goes back to discussions about land property and the management of goods coming from the land (Linebaugh, 2008). In this discussion there have been two distinct sides: on one side, those in favour of individual and private property; on the other, those in favour of communal property. The cause for private property goes back as far as the 4th century BC, with Aristotle’s belief that goods and properties owned in common receive less care than those in the hands of a single person. Accordingly, for Aristotle, the prevalence of private ownership was not only a rational concept, but also a natural condition: ‘People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected’ (1981: 108).

The major American civilisations, like the Aztecs (in territories where today we find Mexico and Guatemala) and the Incas (in a region where today we have Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile) believed otherwise. Whereas there was some private property owned by those at the top of hierarchies of the empires, most of the land was communal (Wall, 2014). The calpullis and ayllus, in the Aztec and Inca cultures respectively, were communal properties on which communities settled to live off the land. The land, however, was not only for collecting goods to survive, but was also the headquarters of an economic, social, political, and religious system. Every ayllu or calpulli was a small state which, along with other states, created a confederation (Martínez Estrada, 1990). In this sense, land was linked to the provision of resources for eating and acquiring shelter, but also for political existence. The Spanish conquest however changed the previous logic and – in the name of the Spanish crown – distributed land to private lords who granted varied access to soil and goods. After the independence of Chile that practice was continued such that native communal lands progressively disappeared to create haciendas – economic and political regimes similar to European feudal systems.

This logic of lords owning land and granting different degrees of access to its goods was present in Europe through feudal systems of governance. But during the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, common land became private territory in which neighbours and farmers held common rights only for using that land (Wall, 2014). From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, English common lands were enclosed and ‘the previously common land was simply converted into private property, generally controlled by a single landholder’ (Boyle, 2008: 43). In these enclosures, a certain number of people – the commoners – had the right to access, use and/or to exploit the resources within those enclosures but the property remained private. As Silvia Federici (2009) underlines, ‘in the 16th century, “enclosure” was a technical term, indicating a set of strategies the English lords and rich farmers used to eliminate communal land property and expand their holdings’ (69). A key supporter of this progressive privatisation was liberal English thinker John Locke (1632–1704). Taking a similar position to Aristotle, Locke strongly believed that the most rational type of land occupation and exploitation was that of private ownership. In one of his most notorious statements on private property, Locke expressed:

God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience … he gave it to the use of the industrious and rational; not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.

(Locke, 1980: 18)

In this way, the modern liberal approach implied a turning point for the commons: it placed land and its resources at the service of an intensive private exploitation. But in a capitalist and more populated world, the idea of having unexploited land collided with alternative conceptions about land and the use of its resources, much like those of the Aztecs, Incas, and the North American natives. However, this trend towards privatisation was not limited to America or to England, and liberal thought continued to reject common enclosures even to a marginal degree (Dardot and Laval, 2014). As a consequence, and moreover in a capitalist context, ideas on common property and common use of land became regarded as ineffective – if not irresponsible – and outdated.

A defining position rejecting communal lands in the twentieth century was marked by Garrett Hardin’s article The Tragedy of the Commons (1968). Continuing Aristotle and Locke’s defence of individual property, Hardin criticised the concept of common enclosures as viable economic endeavours. His contempt of the commons was based upon the assumption that people – as part of their human condition – would pursue personal gain in an uncontrolled spiral that was detrimental to the long-term exploitation of the land as long as users, looking to satisfy their needs, were going to deplete the land’s resources. The most likely outcome of a common administration was, therefore, disastrous for land productivity and, ultimately, for human life. For this reason, Hardin and his supporters saw private property as ‘preferable to the “total ruin” imposed by the commons’ (Murdock, 2013: 159).

Hardin’s contribution in 1968 garnered sufficient support to ensure a landmark debate on nature, property, and common management of resources, especially amongst the defenders of private property (Borch and Kornberger, 2015). By centring the discussion on the best administration of land, Hardin rejected anything other than private ownership and private exploitation of the land and its resources. His position, in this sense, could be labelled as a pre-neoliberal argument but also as the post from which new approaches to the commons began to grow.

The most relevant approach to contest Hardin’s arguments came from Elinor Ostrom’s influential book Governing the Commons (first published in 1990). After the demise of state socialisms and the triumph of capitalism, Ostrom triggered a renewed interest in the commons, opening up a new alternative after economic models and grand narratives were no longer in a position to challenge capitalism. She did so by proving that common pool resources could be productive in the long term, empirically tackling the liberal idea that the commons signalled tragedy and that privatisation was the only possible way to manage it (Rogers, 2010). Interestingly, Ostrom also rejected an idea closer to state socialisms: that a big and strong control state – she used Hobbes’ notion of Leviathan to stress the point – was necessary to impede the overexploitation of communal land and to save the commons from tragedy. In this way, Ostrom demonstrated that it was possible to build a long-term sustainable environment through collective action based on certain principles².

In doing so, Ostrom opened up the concept of the commons in two wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Chile, 2011, and the Students’ Movement
• 1. The Struggle for Voice in Times of Democracy and Neoliberalism
• 2. The People and Their Eviction from Public Space
• 3. Knitting the Commons: Whispers and Trust in Walled Intimacy
• 4. Embodying the Commons: Occupying the Urban Realm
• 5. Imagining the Commons: Articulating ‘Us’ in Mainstream Media
• 6. Bursting the Commons: Internet and the Short Life of Solidarity
• 7. The Communicative (and Political) Quest for a Meaningful Democracy
• Index