Stolen Wood, Stolen World

Forest Commons into Penal Colonies

The five “theft of wood” pieces appeared in Rheinische Zeitung between October 25 and November 1, 1842. In an economically soporific Prussia, industrial capital was finally stirring, decades behind its Manchester spearpoint. But what is on the table for Marx is not yet the horrors of the factory or even capitalized in-home labor, though within a few years the immiseration of Silesian weavers and other workers will burst into a desperate wave of strikes and machine-breaking. In 1842, however, the conflict he glimpses is rural, propelled by the commercialization of the agrarian economy. Prussia’s landlords—ancient aristocrats and nouveau-rich burgomasters alike—scenting the rich profits to be made from crops, vineyards, and wood lots, advance legislation criminalizing the customary rights of peasants to collect dead wood from forests. Marx discusses the debates of the Rhine Provincial Assembly, as they are reported in that august body’s official proceedings.

Still the young Hegelian idealist, Marx provides surprisingly little context about the convulsions of capital inciting the new laws. But what he does supply is an excoriating portrait of landowning greed and its corruption of government. A series of polemic thrusts skewer the legal and logical inconsistencies that result as a state power supposedly exercised in the public interest is weaponized by property owners against the rural poor. The landlords celebrate their own customary rights but criminalize those of the peasantry. They erase distinctions between naturally fallen wood and intentionally felled wood, even while taking the natural growth of trees on estates as a basis for their property claims. They arrogate to themselves the enforcement of the new law, delegating it to supposedly “trustworthy” underlings who they nevertheless suspiciously discipline to ensure merciless prosecution of offending peasants. They demand as penalties for wood theft not merely imprisonment but also fines, paid not to the public purse but directly to themselves—and, if unpaid, convertible into forced labor, so that “the wood thief has become capital for the forest owner” (Marx 2021, 86). They rhapsodize over their own freedoms even as they transform forest commons into penal colonies.

Marx uncovers these contradictions with dialectical panache in a devastating takedown of the Prussian state’s subordination to landowners’ class power: “All the organs of the state become ears, eyes, arms, legs with which the interests of the forest owner hears, observes, appraises, protects, grasps, and runs” (Marx 2021, 73). This Marx is still liberal enough to appeal to readers’ outrage against the abuse of the “universal” or even “spiritual” role of the state as an upholder of a public trust. Yet the very force of his exposé reveals such transcendental claims as a hollow shell for the incubating power of capital: “How could the selfish legislator be human, when something inhuman, an alien material essence, is his highest essence?” (Marx 2021, 73).

Later, in 1859, Marx remarked that the wood-theft issue was what, to his “embarrassment,” had forced him for the first time to confront material and economic questions. Engels’s corroborated the issue’s importance to the development of his friend’s thought. This is generally acknowledged in Marx’s many biographies; we can look forward to an in-depth, contextualizing study when Michael Heinrich’s eagerly awaited voluminous life of Marx eventually advances to 1842.2 Moreover, as Nichols documents, the wood-theft articles have attracted a modest body of detailed academic commentary. By and large, however, and with at least one notable exception that we discuss later, treatments of the wood-theft pieces regard them as juvenilia, noteworthy as a step in Marx’s radicalization, and as one of the causes for his exile from Prussia, but not for their own theoretical content. What is unusual in Bensaïd’s discussion is that he takes these articles as the basis for a reinterpretation of the Marxist canon, dramatically broadening its scope. This repositioning proceeds over the three central chapters of The Dispossessed.

Contending Concepts of Right

The first sets out the details of the legislation Marx indicted, and the context in which he did so—in the midst of a “full on fight” for the survival of a newspaper already in the crosshairs of Prussian censors. Bensaïd sees their composition as a watershed moment in Marx’s “shedding” of his liberalism, in which he “settles account” with Hegel’s idealization of the Prussian state and begins to formulate his concept of revolutionary class agency, an idea which appears in such works as On the Jewish Question and the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right published within the next two years (Nichols 2021, vii).

Then, however, Bensaïd widens his optic. He argues that at the root of Marx’s critique of the Prussian legislation lies his perception of two contending concepts of right—the landowners’ right to property, and the peasants’ right to existence. Feudalism, with its complex observances of “custom,” had held these rival claims in a state of pragmatic indeterminacy. The arrival of capitalism precipitated out the elements of this “uncertain” and “hybrid” compromise into distinct and irresolvable antagonistic principles (Bensaïd 2021, 12). Here Bensaïd links the Prussian wood-theft issue to related but earlier conflicts elsewhere in Europe. These include the termination of England’s Speenhamland poor-relief system in the late eighteenth century, and its replacement by nightmarish workhouses for the pauperized, a shift extensively analyzed by historians such as Karl Polyani and E.P. Thompson. They also include struggles within the French Revolution as the idea of “popular economy” based on the “right to existence” of the poor, championed by ultra-left Jacobins, is extinguished by a counterrevolution that preserves bourgeois property rights. Marx, in Prussia, takes the side of customary rights of the poor, but Bensaïd stresses, not to idealize a passing feudal order, but rather to point to the intensifying conflict between privatized, possessive individualism and the collective claims to socially generated wealth that resist the rise of capital. In doing so, Bensaïd says, Marx starts on the route that will eventually lead Capital to summarize the encounter of industrial owners and proletarians with the famous “between equal rights, force decides” (Marx 1976, 344). For Bensaïd, however, the path to this famous aphorism begins in a moment and a place prior to Marxism’s familiar factory matrix—the Rhineland woods—and involves a proletariat constituted not just by the wage relation, but by dispossession from the land.

After this dramatic opening, the second section seems more conventional. It initially continues the discussion of conflicting rights, ranging back to the doctrines of seventeenth century English Levellers, then forward into Hegel’s mention of “rights of necessity.” Eventually Bensaïd finds his focus in the “critique of property,” an issue “at the very birth and heart of all variants of socialism that arose in the nineteenth century in resistance to triumphant capitalism” (2021, 20). He concentrates on relatively well-known exchanges between Marx and Proudhon. In his What is Property? of 1845, Proudhon dissects Locke’s notion of property rights based on the investment of labor in the transformation of nature. He rejects it because designation of a private owner excludes those who this singular figure employs. “You have labored? Have you never made others labor?” begins the peroration that culminates in the famous slogan “Property is Theft, seemingly the perfect retort to Prussian landowners and their like. And indeed, as Bensaïd emphasizes, Marx initially applauds Proudhon’s essay.

Then, however, the two thinkers diverge. Proudhon, in The Philosophy of Poverty, drifts into advocacy for schemes of “fair exchange” between capital and labor. But the steel is entering Marx’s thought; he attacks such notions as utopian, insisting “questions of property cannot be detached from the extraction of surplus labor.” Since expropriation of the worker is normalized within the wage relation, moral critiques of unfairness or even accusations of theft, which imply possible remedy or reparation within the existing system, are beside the point. Confrontation between two incompatible codes of justice can only be resolved by victory for one side or another. Marx thus repudiates the moralist outrage not only of Proudhon, but also of his own younger self, in favor a fully revolutionary political perspective. Bensaïd gives Proudhon a sympathetic hearing, pointing to some prescient passages criticizing speculative financialization. But unsurprisingly, he ultimately backs Marx. Indeed, now we seem back on familiar Marxist ground: Marx is superior to Proudhon, the mature Marx better than early Marx. But things will change again.

Market Globalization and Widespread Privatization

In the third section of Bensaïd’s essay, The Dispossessed detonates. Suddenly, we are no longer in the 1840s but in the first decade of the twenty first century, “in a period of market globalization and widespread privatization of the world” (Bensaïd 2021, 37). The scene is certainly no longer the Rhine forests, but nor is it industrial factory. It is the gleaming “campuses” of Big Tech, the plantations of world-spanning agribusiness supply-chains and the biosphere of a profoundly polluted planet. The argument does not so much unfold continuously, but rather proceeds by leaps; points are stabbed out like multiple lightning strikes across a dark horizon. Where do these bolts descend?

First strike: denunciation of the privatization of knowledge by the patent-based monopolies of the giant software, pharmaceutical and biotechnological corporations, sequestering research generated in universities and public education systems, commodifying algorithms and formulae as intellectual property.

Second strike: the devastation of terrestrial commons such as water supplies, arable land, and breathable air by unbridled commercial development, and the destruction of cultures dependent on these resources, emerges as a major sphere of anti-capitalist struggle.

Third strike: a sudden disquisition on the distinction between individual and private property, proposing that abolition of private property would still allow individual usage of communal goods, shared in new ways and informed by new concepts of personhood.

Fourth strike: a rapid reduction to ash of Jeremy Rifkin and other pundits whose visions of information-age plenitude bypass the problem of capitalism.

Fifth strike: the climate crisis, and the implausibility of seeking to solve it with “green markets” and “sermons on changing consumer behaviors” rather than confronting capitalist property rights (Bensaïd 2021, 55).

Bensaïd swiftly links each successive problematic to issues raised in Marx’s “theft of wood” articles, but only at the end does he close the circle of his thought: “Marx debarked in 1842 on a steep path” leading “from the customary rights of the poor, passing through the principle of a ‘public domain’ to the common heritage of humanity” (2016, 57). He concludes with an audacious reformulation of Marx’s famous summons to the “workers of the world,” one which reaffirms its spirit, even as it redefines the agent of the revolution, expanding its collective membership well beyond conventional concepts of the working class: “Our lives are worth more than their profits. Rise up, dispossessed of the world!”

In his “Introduction,” Nichols contextualizes this formulation, both in its historical moment, and in Bensaïd’s personal trajectory. The Dispossessed was amongst Bensaïd’s final works, coming at the end of an extraordinary political career that extended from his youthful opposition to France’s Algerian wars; to his role as a student organizer on the Paris barricades of 1968; his emergence as an ecumenical and generous thinker in France’s increasingly marginalized and fractious Marxism; his eventual professorship of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII.; and, in the 1980s and 1990s, his engagement with revolutionary movements in Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America.3 From 1989 on, as intellectuals everywhere fled a Marxism apparently discredited by the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bensaïd was amongst the handful who, in the face of general contumely and dismissal, committed themselves to rethinking and reshaping its revolutionary tradition. By the time of the publication of Les Dépossédés, he was dying of AIDS, and of the side effect of its drug treatment. It is impossible not to hear in the book, and especially in its incandescent, fragmentary final section, an expression of summative urgency as a life of communist commitment burns to its end.

Land Grabs and Commoning

As Nichols observes, the text is prescient, appearing just before the global convulsion of the Wall Street crash in 2008. This would violently corroborate Bensaïd’s portrait of a world-market penetrating and expropriating life well beyond the immediate point of production. The millions losing homes as toxic mortgages melted down were unmistakably amongst the “dispossessed”, as were those who within a few years would be driven by unemployment, precarity and debt to seize city squares around the world in the wave of Occupy movements. At the time of writing, however, Bensaïd was channeling the intellectual and political energies of an earlier cycle of struggle, the alter-globalism that had erupted from Chiapas to Seattle and Genoa in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Alter-globalism took up issues of land grabs, debt bondage, digital extraction, and ecological disaster. It generated a wave of intellectual work seeking theories of anti-capitalist resistance that included, but went beyond, Marxism’s traditional emphasis on workplace struggles. These included Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s controversial positing of a “multitudinous” revolutionary subject, but also the Midnight Notes collective’s account of capitalism’s “new enclosures” and David Harvey’s formulation of “accumulation by dispossession,” both of which situate eviction and expropriation not as a past phase of capitalism’s “primitive accumulation” but rather as its ongoing modus operandi (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Midnight Notes, 1990; Harvey, 2004).

Bensaïd’s Latin American connections, particularly those in Brazil, location of the World Social Forum’s initial meetings in Porto Allegre and home of iconic organizations such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Movement of Workers Without Land), connected him to one of the international hubs of alter-globalism, and he drew deeply on its lexicon. By 2007, however, alter-globalism, sucker punched by 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq wars, had all but collapsed. The Dispossessed thus, as Nichols suggests, stands as a transitional text, situated on the cusp between the fading of one wave of struggles and the beginning of another.

Nichols, whose excellent introduction is backed by his own critical theorization of kleptocracy (2020), remarks that one criticism of Bensaïd’s work is that, while it illuminates the philosophic and political economic logics of dispossession, it contains little about the dispossessed themselves. This is a fair comment. In this regard, it can be compared and contrasted with one of the few other texts to take Marx’s wood-theft articles as a serious theoretical resource, Peter Linebaugh’s “Karl Marx, The Theft of Wood and Working-Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate.” Linebaugh, a student of E.P. Thompson and member of the Midnight Notes collective, wrote it, remarkably, in 1976, but then republished it his 2014 Stop, Thief!, a collection of essays strongly rooted in the logic of alter-globalism, devoted to reinterpreting revolutionary thought around themes of commoning, commonism, enclosure, and capitalist theft.

Linebaugh details the political economic transformations in Prussia that propelled the criminalization of rural customs, thus filling an omission not only in Bensaïd’s account, but also in Marx’s articles! He also provides a portrait of the resistance these measures met, making the Rhineland forests the site of low-level insurgency against landlord policing. Linebaugh takes this resistance by rural populations as illustrative of the need for Marxist class analysis to extend its optic beyond a fixation on waged workers to include “surplus populations,” whose immediate encounter with capitalist power is not so much in terms of exploitation as of expropriation—that is to say, dispossession. Linebaugh’s 1976 article does not fully take account of the gendered dimensions of commoning and the degree to which the burden of “wood gathering” both in the past and still today, falls on women—a point that would be powerfully made by Silvia Federici in her Caliban and the Witch and other writings. Nonetheless Linebaugh’s writings and Federici’s analysis converge on in their identification of commons rebellions as a crucial component of the revolutionary tradition.

Bensaïd does not seem to have been aware of Linebaugh’s article, nor does Nichols mention it in his list scholarly writings on Marx’s wood theft articles, though he includes Stop, Thief! in a footnote reviewing literature on “commons.” The convergence of two intellectuals from very different Marxist schools—Linebaugh from the “autonomist Marxist,” Bensaïd from Trotskyism—is, however, indicative of how deep-flowing historical currents are widely rewriting concepts of capital and class struggle.

From Planetary Victory to Contemporary Catastrophe

How does such analysis now stand? To read The Dispossessed is to glimpse, in a brilliant intellectual’s final flares, the extraordinary speed of capitalism’s ascent and decline over the course of a mere two hundred years. This dizzying sense of velocity is generated by the tripartite, time-traveling structure of the volume, with its three parts: Nichols’s introduction, Bensaïd’s essay, and Marx’s articles. The arrangement of superimposed layers of commentary, each in a distinct voice, each composed at a different moment in capitalism’s parabolic trajectory—from its emergence to its apparent planetary victory to the contemporary catastrophe—generates a vertiginous reading experience.

This is surely what Bensaïd intended. After the collapse of the Soviet Union had sabotaged Marxism’s linear historical teleology, including that of its Trotskyist branch, Bensaïd increasingly turned to the work of Walter Benjamin to rethink revolutionary theory. He adopted Benjamin’s somber sense of “progress” as catastrophe, with the outcome of the contest between “socialism or barbarism” very far from preordained. And he also turned towards Benjamin’s torqued temporalities, in which history “does not follow linear and mechanical successions, but attractions and gravitations . . . past and future are under the condition of the present” (Bensaïd 2016, 45). In this “gravitational history,” current events could produce sudden openings to images and texts from the past, so that apparently lost possibilities might resonate and be reactualized in the present (Bensaïd 2016, 45).4 Such an eruption of past into present is what Bensaid achieved in the juxtaposition of his essay with Marx’s articles of 1842 in the 2007 publication of Les Dépossédés. It is amplified and enriched, now, in the English edition, by the addition of Nichols’s exegesis from a contemporary vantage point.

In many respects, the cogency of Bensaïd’s account of capital’s planetary enclosure has only intensified in the decade and a half since he wrote The Dispossessed. Let us focus for a moment just on the woodlands that are the book’s starting point. The world’s forests continue to be subjected to a commercial assault that makes the Prussian landowners’ concern for protection of their fallen trees seem frankly quaint. Massive deforestation has become a defining practice of contemporary accumulation. The applicability of Marx’s thought to this process also has become increasingly clear. Marx was interested in forests not just at the start but at the end of his life; he alludes to deforestation in Volume 3 of Capital (Marx 1981, 902–3). But as Kohei Saito (2017) has now established, Marx also was centrally concerned with this issue in his late “ecological notebooks”, where deforestation, alongside capitalism’s fertilizer-boosted “exhaustion of the soil”, became a major theme in his anatomization of capital’s environmental depredations.

The Making of a Green Marx

The creation of an “eco-Marxism” linking commodification and biospheric crisis in the work of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore, and many others, has been an important recent development in leftist thought. Bensaïd’s observations in the third chapter of The Dispossessed show him as a participant in this current. But the degree to which he was one of its pioneers is apparent in his earlier Marx l’intempestif: grandeurs and et misère d’une aventure critique, published in France in 1995, and appearing in English in 2002 as Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique. The last section of this book deals with the relation of Marxism and natural science. In its final chapter, “The Torment of Matter: Contribution to the Critique of Political Ecology,” Bensaïd raises the question of what might have happened if Soviet Marxism had established a rapprochement with ecological thought espoused by Russian scientists such as Vernadsky, Gause, Stanchisky and Gause (2002, 312–360). In this exploration he emerges as an important thinker in the making of a green Marx.

Yet there are ways in which Bensaïd’s work has been overtaken by the very crises he predicted. The wind blowing out of Paradise that blasts Benjamin’s “angel of history” into the future never stops (Benjamin 1968). And today that wind is a firestorm. Even over the last year, the consequences of global heating, to which Bensaïd alluded in 2007, but did not expatiate upon, have become manifest as never before. What is at stake now are not only the commons of the living forest, but the planetary commons of dead forests’ fossilized remains, on whose subterranean dormancy our planetary future rests. And as those fossil fuels continue to be burned, forests too are burning, blazing as never before. Amazonian jungles, Californian sequoias and Siberian pines go up in smoke, thrown into the positive feedback loop of a meteorological incinerator that is both consequence and cause of global heating. Dispossession, deforestation, and destruction of the climatic norms sustaining human civilization converge.Marx in 1842 could quip about the rights of trees superseding the rights of people who lived among them. But it is now clear that the rights of trees are a necessary, inseparable foundation for any survivable human future. Capital is dispossessing both whole segments of humanity and the entire species in a universal crisis fabricated from brutally particularized class expropriations and property entitlements.

To recover Bensaïd recovering Marx, a task that this 2021 translation of The Dispossessed admirably achieves, is to grasp the thought of its protagonists as at once perennial and ephemeral. It is to see Marx and Bensaïd as both urgent interveners in the present and figures potentially vanishing into the maw of history. The scale and stakes of social conflict on this burning planet will soon make the Marxist theory of the mid- 2000s as or more distant than the young Marx was to Bensaïd in 2007. Bensaïd quotes Benjamin’s aphorism “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (Bensaïd 2016, 36). It is only to follow this logic through to its implacable conclusion to say that, in the face of capital’s ever-escalating and planet-devastating trajectory, Bensaïd’s writings will themselves only be redeemed by new revolutions.

Author Profile

Nick Dyer-Witheford is a Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999) and, with Svitlana Matviyenko, Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press 2019).

Notes

1. The familial aspect of this commitment, important in Peck’s film, is a central thesis of Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution.

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2. The first volume, Heinrich (2019), covers Marx’s life up to 1841.

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3. For a detailed account of situation within French and international Marxism, see Sebastian Budgen, “The Red Hussar: Daniel Bensaïd, 1946–2010.”

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4. On this point see David McNally’s “Night Lights: Daniel Bensaïd’s Times of Disaster and Redemption.” Historical Materialism 24, no. 4 (2016): 107–12.

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Works Cited

1. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.

2. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2002. Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso.

3. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2007. Les Dépossédés. Paris: La fabrique.

4. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2016. “Utopia and Messianism: Bloch, Benjamin, and the Sense of the Virtual.” Historical Materialism 24, no. 4: 36–50.

5. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2021. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Rights of the Poor. Trans. Robert Nichols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

6. Budgen, Sebastian. 2013. “The Red Hussar: Daniel Bensaïd, 1946–2010”, Marxismo Critico, 16 January, https://marxismocritico.com/2013/01/16/the-red-hussar-daniel-bensaid/

7. Gabriel, Mary. 2011. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. New York: Littlebrown.

8. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Boston: Harvard University Press.

9. Harvey, David. 2004. “The ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession.” Socialist Register 40: 63–87.

10. Heinrich, Marx. 2019. Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work. New York: Monthly Review Press.

11. Le Guin, Ursula. 1974. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper and Row.

12. Midnight Notes. 1990. “The New Enclosures”, Midnight Notes 10, http://www.midnightnotes.org/newenclos.html

13. Linebaugh, Peter. 1976. “Karl Marx, The Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate.” Crime and Social Justice 6: 5–16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29765987

14. Linebaugh, Peter. 2014. Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosure and Resistance. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

15. Linebaugh, Peter/Flynn, John. 2020. “Peter Linebaugh Interview.” Independent Left. 22 Oct. https://independentleft.ie/peter-linebaugh-interview/

16. Malm, Andreas. 2020. Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Verso.

17. Marx, Karl. 2021. “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province: Third Article”. In The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Rights of the Poor. Trans. Robert Nichols, 59–105. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

18. Marx, Karl. 1981. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 3. New York: Vintage.

19. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1. New York: Vintage.

20. McNally, David. 2016. “Night Lights: Daniel Bensaïd’s Times of Disaster and Redemption.” Historical Materialism 24, no. 4 (2016): 107–12.

21. Nichols, Robert. 2021. “Crisis and Kleptocracy: Bensaïd For Our Times.” Introduction to Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Rights of the Poor, vi–xxxiv. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

22. Nichols, Roberts. 2020. Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

23. Peck, Raoul (Director). 2018. The Young Karl Marx [Film]. Agat Films & Cie.

24. Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.