Notes
227 Notes Preface Epigraph from Dowie 2009: xv. 1 The largest is Petén’s Maya Biosphere Reserve (at 1.6 million hectares, roughly twice the size of Yellowstone), connecting an arc of parks in Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala known as the Maya Forest (La Selva Maya). With other smaller parks established in the mid-1990s in southern Petén, roughly half the department falls under some kind of protected status. 2 The Peace Accords do have a clause stipulating that by 1999 the government was to turn over one hundred thousand hectares within multiple-use zones to small and medium-size peasant groups (Hernández Alarcón 1998a). This apparently referred to community forest concessions already under negotiation and not to new settlements . 3 These concessions (called “agricultural polygons”) are a hybrid tenure category awarding families private parcels in usufruct, with renewal depending on all the families conserving 20 percent of the forests on their land and collectively protecting nearby forests from other squatters. 4 Perhaps, too, my ambitious research plan of participant observation in six communities across two countries was meant to defy the common mispronunciation of my first name in Q’eqchi’—“Laizi,” sounding like “lazy.” Introduction 1 The Midnight Notes Collective (www.midnightnotes.org) published some of the earliest writings on other fictions associated with the “new enclosures” (1990s). Along with many others among the netroots, David Bollier has produced a fascinating stream of commentary on the Internet commons (2002a) and other forms of “silent theft” (2001, 2002b). Vandana Shiva writes prolifically on the privatization of water, genes, and biotechnology. The ETC Group (formally Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration) warns that new patents on nanotechnology may create cross-sectoral monopolies never before possible. Building 228 Notes to Introduction and page 30 on his previous studies in political economy (1983, 2000), Michael Perelman now writes on the enclosure of popular culture (2005). Massimo De Angelis edits a lively online journal, The Commoner, which offers perhaps the most innovative interpretations of enclosure and privatization today. The Tomales Bay Institute also manages a blog, onthecommons.org, featuring many of the aforementioned writers. 2 Polanyi (1944) argues that the creation of three “fictitious” commodities was critical to the ideological success of industrial capitalism. He refers to the idea (1) that money could represent economic power and value, (2) that the labor of human beings could be ethically bought and sold, and (3) that nature could be enclosed as land or private property. For Polanyi, these commodities are fictitious, not in the sense of being fake, but rather as socially contrived—having not been originally produced for sale. More important than their thingness as commodities were how they became equated with progress and the changes they wrought in human relations (see also Edelman and Haugerud 2005; Rasmussen 2001: 57). 3 Of 1,554 land conflicts registered with Guatemala’s official human rights division in 2008, one-third were in the Q’eqchi’ area (Alonso, Alonzo, and Dürr 2008). 4 Unless otherwise indicated, all currency is in U.S. dollars (Q7.75 = $1). 5 Hannah Arendt notes in The Human Condition that the etymological root of the word “deprive” is “prive,” which means to forbid someone from having a public life (Hyde 2008). 6 Most orthodox Marxists tend not to draw attention to such extra-economic forces, perhaps to avoid diverting attention from the task of uniting the workers of the world against capitalism. In order to demonstrate the necessity for class revolution , Marx’s main concern was to unveil how the inherent structural violence of capitalist wage relations exploited workers as much as overt, physical violence did. He assumed that after capitalism had taken hold, in the “ordinary run of things,” businessmen would discover that the “silent compulsion” of market pressures was more effective than violence in exploiting labor (Perelman 2000) and capitalism would continue to spread by the force of its own internal logic (E. M. Wood 1999). 1. Liberal Plunder 1 In modern Guatemalan Spanish, the word “colonización” is understood as a specialized form of resettlement on unused or underused lands assumed to be unoccupied (see Morrissey 1978). 2 J. Eric Thompson (1972) emphasized that the Mopán, Manché Ch’ol, and Q’eqchi’ were all distinct groups, but other lowland groups, such as the Chiapas Lacandón, the Belizean Succotz Maya, and the Guatemalan Itzá, are really a single ethnic group, separated only by artificial colonial and, later, national boundaries. James Nations (1979), however...
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