Golden Age Piracy as a Social Movement: Prefigurative Commoning against Primitive Accumulation

Date

2023-8-24

Author

Örküp, Aykut

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This study aims to analyze the golden age of piracy as a movement that resisted against and constituted an alternative to capitalist social relations. In this sense, the study analyzes the emergence of capitalism and the economic, legal, cultural, and political transformations that have accompanied it with a special emphasis on primitive accumulation not just as a historical phenomenon but also as an ongoing process inherent to capitalism. In connection, the study posits that the struggle for the commons is as relevant as primitive accumulation for contemporary movements. The pirate movement in the golden age constituted a commoning movement in the sense that the pirates could do in common by way of collectively owning the pirate ship and abolishing wage labor, could govern the ship collectively by way of a nonhierarchical organization and a decision-making process based on direct and horizontal democracy, and could constitute a new subjectivity as the pirate as commoner. Furthermore, insofar as the commoning movement in question did not only reject capitalist social relations but also constituted an alternative society as the actualization of the ideals in the present based on direct action and means-ends equivalence, it was a prefigurative movement. The analysis of the golden age piracy as a prefigurative commoning movement shows that the movement is an inspiration for the contemporary movements and represents a crack on the surface of capitalism that was closed in time yet produced a memory to look upon to as well as offering some lessons for contemporary movements.

Subject Keywords

Golden Age of Piracy, Primitive Accumulation, Commons, Commoning, Prefiguration

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105111

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis