The Jolly Roger Against Capital: Golden Age Piracy as a Prefigurative Commoning Movement

Focusing on the Golden Age of Piracy (1716–1726) in the Atlantic, this paper conceptualizes piracy as a prefigurative commoning movement against primitive accumulation. It argues that piracy as a movement not only resisted against the separation of producers from the means of production and against the process of commodification but also instituted egalitarian and autonomous social relations that prefigured an alternative way of life to that of capitalism. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of the commons and prefigurative politics, and engaging in comparative historical research, this study demonstrates that the pirate movement had enacted, albeit temporarily, the ideals of the commons onboard the pirate ship by abolishing the wage labor, distributing the wealth equally, establishing a democratic and collective government, and creating new subjectivities. In this regard, the study contributes to understanding the way that historical acts of commoning can inform contemporary struggles for post-capitalist futures by presenting the pirate movement as both a rupture in capitalist social relations and a resource for reimagining collective and alternative social relations.