Part II: Words killed by capitalism

At my landscaping job, it’s come up several times that a lot of people confuse nuts and bolts. And though I know the difference between a nut and a bolt, it wasn’t a difference I had to deal with most days, or weeks, or months, until I had to keep repairing these beat up wheelbarrows we use, so when my mouth is moving faster than my brain, I’ll often refer to a bolt as a nut.

This isn’t just semantic trivia, it’s one of the million unobserved footprints that capitalism leaves all over our lives. In this case, it’s evidence of deskilling, the way that capitalism successively disempowers workers by reorganizing work, our culture, and the ways we interface with the living world. The jobs we’re forced to work in order to survive become more and more specialized and at the same time more ambiguous.

Lost words are like a trail of bread crumbs leading the way back to some of the things capitalism has stolen from us! Read more, but first, here are a couple fundraisers that could use support, and at the bottom we have the next edition of 3TFs! This time, I swear, it’s not all about the Roman Empire! Sorry about that!

• These two Palestinian families trying to survive the war in Gaza still need a lot of support! (This is from a Palestinian friend so it’s a trusted fundraiser.) https://chuffed.org/project/too-crowdfunding-gaza

• Anarchist, direct action environmentalist, and trans advocate Marius Mason just got released after more than 17 years in prison for property destruction! Marius was one of many victims of the Green Scare, when the US government declared eco-anarchists who hadn’t killed anyone to be the number 1 domestic terrorism threat. Prison is torture, but often, reentry can be even harder and he needs support! Here’s the fundraiser: https://supportmariusmason.org/

• Here in Cleveland, a historic center of culture and resistance from the Black Liberation movement is reopening, a great example of the continuity of struggle from one generation to the next, but they need a lot of support. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-reopen-the-historic-afro-culture-shop-and-bookstore

Please, if you have anything to spare, all of these causes are really important.

Here’s how they’re specific: there are incredibly few jobs today that complete a productive process, as every process has been subdivided into a thousand different steps to complete a finished product. The means of production have been scattered all over the world. If we seized the means of production in the area where I currently live, we would be able to produce ball bearings, conveyor belts for a very specific type of production process, luminescent chemicals, injectrodes, partially assembled forklifts, hydraulic systems for machinery produced elsewhere, tuning pegs for mandolins, arc welders, applesauce, and paint. And this is one of the most industrial cities in the country. In most places these days, you couldn’t find the infrastructure to produce a single to produce a single, finished product, even if you had plenty of raw materials on hand!

Here’s how our jobs are ambiguous: in nearly all these cases where an actual physical product is produced, the humans involved are just overseeing machines following a program. Technique is removed, and the human operators, whether they’re telemarketers or industrial welders, are increasingly just pressing buttons. And as full automation shifts to AI, they’re increasingly just standing by, watching over a pre-programmed process, only hitting a switch if something goes wrong.

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The most pernicious result is that useful skills are stolen from us and we even lose the memory that those skills once existed. Losing the vocabulary to talk about those skills is an integral part of that loss. More and more people confuse nuts and bolts because they don’t use them. We no longer know how to build things or fix things. We forget about the amazingly beautiful, durable houses built all of wood, without a single nail, or the fences many people used to weave out of sticks, or the simple machines that could spin wool, or the techniques for sturdily stacking stones without any cement, creating walls that last for centuries.

Our lost and stolen words also reflect a loss of contact with the natural world, from our food supply to the ecosystems we used to be a healthy part of. How many of you know what a windfall is? The word is a reference to unexpected fortune, a resource that just falls into your lap. And the origin? Ripe fruit that would fall to the ground with a gust of wind. In the old days, when the Evil Ones were still trying to bury centuries or millennia of communal, ecological practices under violently enforced private property laws, there would often be a legal right for the commoners to eat the windfalls on “someone else’s land” or for the workers doing the actual harvest to also eat the windfalls.

Referring back to an interesting conversation I had in the first part of this three part series on language shifts, this is one of several reasons while the original signifier in a metaphor can be so important to remember, and why we should at least be conscious of changing meanings so we can strategically decide whether it makes sense to go along with that change or to resist it.

So… what the hell is an estover? This refers, again, to that period of time when the Masters of the Universe still hadn’t completely crushed the commons. Of course, the commons still exist and they will continue to do so as long as life exists, but nowadays they are almost completely criminalized or privatized (or made public, i.e. taken over by the State, which honestly is pretty similar to being privatized).

Estovers, traditionally, were an inalienable, lifelong allowance of wood that commoners in many parts of Europe were allowed to take from a forest that had been taken over by an aristocrat (private) or taken over by the State (public). They could gather as much as they needed for making tools, fences, and firewood. Estovers evolved over time and were eventually abolished once private/public property became a totalitarian regime, but for long periods of time estovers were associated with widows: for centuries widows had a special right to gather resources from the commons for their own support.

Many people today know the metaphorical meaning of gleaning: it’s what you can take of value or of insight from a situation. Literally, it comes from another significant right to the commons that European peasants held onto in the face of growing state power: the right to go through a field after it had been harvested (and they were usually the ones who had to do the harvesting) to pick up all the fallen grain for their own use.

These aspects of the peasant economy were so important, they were codified in the forgotten half of the Magna Carta. In 1215, the aristocracy of England, led by the barons, forced King John to sign a Charter of Liberties, on a battlefield, basically implying he could sign it or lose his throne and possibly his head. The monarchy, aristocracy, Church, and (removed from most of the histories) the commoners kept fighting over it for the next few years until the Magna Carta—guarantees of the political rights that liberals are so thirsty for, even though they tend to be a weapon against the lower classes and at the best haven’t actually improved our quality of life here in the bottom chunk of the social pyramid—was separated from the Charter of the Forest, which focused on peasant rights to the forests, grasslands, wetlands, heath, and streams they depended on for survival. Both were ratified, but subsequently governments both monarchic and democratic, together with bourgeois historians, have made the Charter of the Forest disappear, even applying the death penalty at times to activities that had been common rights for hundreds or thousands of years.

This war against the commons was at a critical point when European countries began colonizing other parts of the world. Thanks to their war against their own peasant classes, European aristocrats and merchants knew they could become much more powerful and wealthy in the colonies if they waged a genocidal, scorched earth campaign against the cultures of commoning in the lands they conquered. And in the new plantations and cities, labored by enslaved-for-life Africans or Indigenous people, and temporarily enslaved Europeans from the lower classes, the first law was enclosure (public or private) from the very beginning.

Losing words like “estover” and “glean,” together with the (attempted) intentional extermination of entire Indigenous languages rich with vocabulary and grammar that express a completely different relationship with the land and the water and our other (nonhuman) relations all make it easier for us to be suckered by the false promises of liberalism and democracy or of authoritarian communism. They represent an adherence to false histories that turn us into our own worst enemies.

You can read more about some of these histories in “Speaking of Nature” or Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Whigs and Hunters by EP Thompson, and The Magna Carta Manifesto by Peter Linebaugh. You might also be interested in exploring the difference between private, public, and communal in my very short book, Organization, Continuity, Community, or the historical study as mythmaking, The Witch’s Child.

Ooh, and in my image search I came across this short article on the loss of common land in England, and resistance, from the Middle Ages to the present. And for anyone who likes sheep, or present day solutions to the ecological crisis, there’s still my article, “Dams, Forest Fires, and the Hidden Commons.”

Here’s Part I of this language series:

A War for Words

Peter Gelderloos

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Apr 11

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell makes the argument that authoritarians seek to control language and reduce its complexity, to limit the tools people can access to express critical thoughts and to simplify language overall, winnowing a multi-hued palette of expression down to good and evil, or in Newspeak, the fictional language he …

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And now, everybody’s favorite game, 3TFs!

I think you’ll like the variety of questions this time much better than that weird Roman kick in game 2.

• There are giant holes in Mozambique, South Africa, and Madagascar so global capitalism can make things whiter

• The country name “Brazil,” which comes from the Portuguese word for ember, is a reference to all the fires set by the invaders to clear the dense forests

• The root meaning of the word “decadence” is a reference to the end of the world

What are the answers from last time?

FTT. More people got it right, and a lot fewer people played, because clearly it was easy, and a boringly narrow focus.

• False. Tarraco, modern day Tarragona, was never the capital of the Roman Empire. However, Augustus did reside there for a few years starting in 27 BCE, the same year he created the Empire from the disoriented remains of a Republic that had become increasingly dominated by the military. He was there to direct his forces during the Cantabrian Wars, a campaign of conquest against three autonomous Celtic peoples resisting Roman rule from the mountains along the north coast of Iberia. He also used his stay there to temporarily move the center of power away from the Senate, in Rome, to help cement his own power as Emperor.

• True. Salary and salt are cognates because salt was often a form of payment for soldiers.

• True. Though the lines on a map tell a story of continental domination, many subjects of the Roman Empire might not have even known they were a part of that Empire or even that the empire existed. Along the frontiers of the Danuvius and the Rhenus, in the provinces of northern Africa, and the forests and plains of the British isles, away from the cities and trade routes, many people’s lives changed little or not at all as they entered or left the Empire. They continued paying tribute to the local authorities, and may have noticed an increase or decrease in certain trade goods without knowing the reasons why. Meanwhile, in the mountains and swamps from the Pyrenees to the Balkans to the Italic Peninsula or the deltas of the Rhenus and the Ems, many people who lived within the putative borders of the Empire were actually completely free of it, living beyond the reach of the legions and tax collectors and existing within a fugitive state of low intensity war with the Romans and their proxies.