Notably, none of the three airports were constructed because the area needed an airport. In every case, “a fully functioning international airport already existed nearby.” The state converts communities into ecological dead zones, hubs for wealthy travelers that double as malls—not because local people are demanding a service but because their needs are at best irrelevant and often inimical to the accumulation of capital.
For Marx, this is how capitalism got started: in “primitive accumulation,” enclosure of the commons, the appropriation and privatization of land use. This form of state violence is ongoing, as the Marxist geographer David Harvey has shown. The commune form, Ross writes, “is actually nothing more than an attempt to gain ground in the historic fight against enclosure.” It is “territory as a praxis produced by space-based relations,” a defense of the commons, of space itself, as a site reserved for “everyday life” rather than the production of surplus value. Ross paraphrases Harvey: “farmland is either farmland or it has become something else—a mall, or an army training ground.” Stop Cop City comes to mind for Ross—“the Weelaunee Forest outside Atlanta will continue to be a forest, or it will become a militarized training ground for police”—as do the Black Panthers, the Zapatistas, Standing Rock, the gilets jaunes,and other groups who courageously refuse to comply. All are marked by a defense of territory and the creation of “an alternative ecological society . . . a fabric of lived solidarities . . . in which economic rationality does not prevail.”
Lefebvre wrote, in The Production of Space,“Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space . . . new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.” The commune is that appropriate space—the anti-airport, the anti-mall, not a space to pass through to get to other spaces, not a space in which to labor for someone else, but a space in which to fully live. The commune form says: this land belongs to you and me. {read}