Still in Mutiny

The big theme of Mutiny -at least as far as I've read to this point (about a third of the way through) is about the conflict between two views of the world; on one hand there are those who seek to extract maximum economic value from what they own and to own more property from which to extract value even if that means exploiting people and reducing them to machine-like servitude. On the other hand are those who suffer the consequences of those ways of conducting oneself who fight back to preserve, regain or protest their dignity, rights to life and livelihood.
This then influences how we define 'pirate': 

"This, then, is what we can take 'pirate' to mean: one who emerges to defend the commons wherever homes, cultures or economies become 'blocked' by the rich. Be it land that is being enclosed, or monopolies that are excluding and censoring, or wealth that has been hoarded, blockages to what should be shared freely and equitably create the conditions in which pirates well be found. Moreover, ... we can conclude that when they rise up, they tend to do so from places of poverty and need, partly because it is the poor and needy who fell the effects of enclosure more immediately ...." (p.50)

In effect, we could see the paradigm characterising as commons vs enclosure. It is interesting and helpful to see that paradigmatic dynamic being worked out in more modern kinds of piracy such as radio stations playing music, for example.


Kester's not blind to the criminal potential and makes a distinction between piracy in these 'fighting back' terms and "criminal gangs". And I think he makes a case, in a sense, for seeing some of the state-sponsored enclosure as not much better morally than the action of criminal gangs. In other times and places we sometimes use the term kleptocracy. That said, I would like to see the difference between the TAZ and a criminal gang more fully explored, because, of course, the kleptocratic state tends to paint the former in terms of the latter and thus seeks to neutralise the threat ideologically (largely successfully).


And, of course, we should be reminded that in the 17th and 18th centuries the official religion of the captains and lieutenants who were acting oppressively in the name of the king is the religion that, for the English, the king himself was the temporal head: the Christian religion in the form of the Church of England, or for others Roman Catholicism or Reformed Christianity (Spain, France and the Netherlands were the other main powers involved). It is ironic and I find bitterly sad and angrifying that following Jesus the Christ had been co-opted by state authority and made-over in such a way as to have made enemies of those who really ought to be Jesus's most natural friends by becoming the ideological support for social control of a brutal and egregiously unjust sort. Thus Kester includes the church an the dynamic of the blocked. So retelling the legend of Captain Mission and Fr Caraccioli inspired in me a wistful hope that it might have been true. It turns out to have been written up by Daniel Defoe (available freely here).


More later, I hope ....