The Plunder of the Commons as Viewed by Quadrants of the U.S. Political Compass
Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, by British author Guy Standing, was published in 2019. A main argument is as follows:
National shared resources have been plundered by wealthy elites who privatize profits while socializing losses.
This has led to massive inequality, social unrest, and environmental degradation.
Key points for understanding the argument:
The commons includes both physical resources such as land and water, as well as intangible resources such as knowledge, culture, and institutional structures.
The plunder of the commons began in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism, which emphasizes privatization, deregulation, and free markets.
This has led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, while the majority has been left worse off. State control of common goods by elites and unaccountable government figures is not the same as public control. True democratic consensus is needed to preserve the common goods.
This is not to say the description below is all the parties are about, but in relation to plundering the commons, the quadrants below describe how it plays out.
A Pew Research Center survey of the U.S. general public, in 2021, showed nine clusters of political beliefs and values. Four of these Pew types are included in the quadrants below. The other types and a larger list of descriptors is included in in an earlier post.
Here’s a related podcast interview of author Guy Standing.
Repeat of Content in First Image of Quadrants
This section repeats the writing in the quadrants, for any who have difficulty reading in that format. Quadrants are presented in order of political party size.
Auth-Left Quadrant
Democrat politicians provide political favors
Auth-Right Quadrant
Republican politicians help business profiteers
Lib-Right Quadrant
Reactionary populists angry at left-leaning elites
Lib-left (Green) Quadrant
Progressive populists angry at right-leaning elites
Repeat of Content in Second Image of Quadrants
Only four of the Pew types are represented here.
Auth-Left Quadrant
Pew type: Establishment liberals
Among this group are the governing elite and much of higher education. Pew researchers note this group to have the characteristics in the first three bullets:
• Political compromise is a strong point of this group, but could unfortunately include a full participation in plunder by giving sweetheart deals to exploitative business interests including patent extensions, tax breaks, and other affordances to maximize profit.
• This Pew type is “generally optimistic about politics,” and why wouldn’t they be, because as long as the duopoly is in power, they have about half of that advantage and receive campaign donations from corporations.
• Revolving door between political office and industry. Industry subsidies include public university research and infrastructure funded by taxpayers.
• Policy of “compensate the losers” of economic competition to placate.
Auth-Right Quadrant
Pew type: Committed conservatives
These champions of business-friendly policy participate in plunder while congratulating themselves as “job creators,” privatizing profits while socializing losses.
• Private equity firms plunder by liquidating the value built up in businesses by employees. They ostensibly profit by buying companies they believe have value and can be improved. Yet many, instead of improving a company, squeeze out profits by manipulating stocks, overcompensate the C-suite, then declare bankruptcy.
• Large agribusiness gets subsidies that put small farmers out of business as they can’t compete; agribusiness plunders by failing to restore topsoil, over-watering, over-fertilizing so nitrogen runoff kills. habitat of streams and Gulf of Mexico
• Oil and gas extraction on public land is a plunder of a public resource used for private profit, with government subsidy.
Lib-Right Quadrant
Pew type: Populist right
This group complains about the following:
· Common cultural “goods” that have been devalued include institutions of marriage, religion, justice systems, and civic clubs.
· These institutions supported the generating of values that created orderly conduct and enabled creation of national wealth: hard work, fairness, service, respect of law, child rearing, protecting the vulnerable. As economic pressures increase, those who hold these values above status and high-earning careers fall behind, as exploiters of them profit.
Lib-left (Green) Quadrant
Pew type: Outsider left
This group complains about the following:
• Community bonds are weakened as the economic model incentivizes greed and competition, and permits exploitation.
• Commodification of spirituality
• Plunder of natural resources includes: overfishing, pollution (deposited far from the residences of those who generate it), the privatizing of access to wilderness, the degradation of wilderness by over-grazing, extraction of oil and gas thru fracking that injects neurotoxins that leak into aquifers.
References
Standing, G. (2019). Plunder of the commons: A manifesto for sharing public wealth. Pelican Books.