After the good life: squatting and the politics of the commons in The good terrorist

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the representation of squatting as a form of ‘commoning’ in Doris Lessing’s The good terrorist (1985). It argues that the text’s centring of the act of squatting suggests a starting point for a politics rooted in everyday actions of home/making and community building, a model that relies on the power of the common – defined, following Raymond Williams, as what is ordinary and what is shared. Even as it posits the radical potential of squatting, the narrative’s imagining of gender politics, together with its ‘temporality of despair’, undermines the legitimacy of commoning as a sustainable form of social organisation. The article seeks to understand the conditions under which everyday life in Lessing’s London is brought about and sustained through a marking off of the possible and finds its historical analogue in the Thatcher-era slogan ‘There is no alternative’. The good terrorist is a narrative of ‘enclosure’ in which tragedies occur as the logical outcome of trying to find alternatives to the exigencies of the world as it is. It asks, if Lessing’s novel is one of ‘enclosure’, what might a novel look like that performs its opposite? Can we conceive a literature of the commons?

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s writing
• commons
• housing
• squatting
• demunicipalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Margaret Scanlan’s 1990 essay addresses The good terrorist’s despair about language and action together.

² Here I draw on Stavrides’s definition of politics as ‘an open process through which dominant forms of living together are questioned and potentially transformed’ (2016: 55).

³ Federici, in her landmark essay ‘Wages against housework’, originally published in 1975, makes the case that Capital has transformed housework into a natural feminine attribute so that it can avoid recognising it as labour in order to and better exploit women. She argues that the struggle for wages ‘against’ housework is not a ‘struggle to enter capitalist relations, because we have never been out of them’ (Federici 2012: 18). Rather, it is a struggle that seeks to ‘break capital’s plan for women’ by attacking ‘Capital and forc[ing] it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us’ (ibid.). She writes, ‘[t]o say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it’ (ibid.).

⁴ Pedram Lalbaksh & Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya (2012) have previously described the ways in which Alice’s position within the squat is at once exploited and undermined by a male-dominated social order, although they read the narrative as one of liberation, which I do not.