Plunder of the Commons
* Book: Plunder of the Commons. A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth. By Guy Standing. Pelican, 2019
URL = https://pagesofhackney.co.uk/product/plunder-of-the-commons/
Description
"We are losing the commons. Austerity and neoliberal policies have depleted our shared wealth; our national utilities have been sold off to foreign conglomerates, social housing is almost non-existent, our parks are cordoned off for private events and our national art galleries are sponsored by banks and oil companies. This plunder deprives us all of our common rights, recognized as far back as the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest of 1217, to share fairly and equitably in our public wealth.
Guy Standing leads us through a new appraisal of the commons, stemming from the medieval concept of common land reserved in ancient law from marauding barons, to his modern reappraisal of the resources we all hold in common – a brilliant new synthesis that crystallises quite how much public wealth has been redirected to the 1% in recent decades through the state-approved exploitation of everything from our land to our state housing, health and benefit systems, to our justice system, schools, newspapers and even the air we breathe. Plunder of the Commons proposes a charter for a new form of commoning, of remembering, guarding and sharing that which belongs to us all, to slash inequality and soothe our current political instability."
Discussion
David Bollier:
"In his recent book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, Guy Standing, an economist at SOAS in London, brings together both end-points of this history. The focus is on enclosures, but the point of the book, its manifesto, is to reclaim the commons, chiefly understood, in this context, as public assets and services.
The commons has had a recurring role in the “deep history” of the United Kingdom, but generally it has been treated as something over and done with. It is not generally regarded as a timely political issue that affects everyone. A big salute, then, to Standing for finally providing us with a full-bodied treatment of British commons in both their grand historical sweep and their importance in contemporary politics. He has synthesized so many diverse strands that have made (and unmade) the commons over the centuries – law, land, property rights, economics, culture, knowledge. It all helps illuminate how vital commons are to a fair, well-functioning society.
Appropriately, Standing begins his account with a chapter on the Charter of the Forest, the first legal guarantee of commoners' right to subsistence. Standing’s history of the Charter of the Forest is surely one of the most succinct and vivid that I’ve read of this near-forgotten portion of the Magna Carta. The account is not a dry history of strange people who lived a long time ago; it’s a compelling account of the first instances of many patterns of law, human rights, and political struggle that define our politics today.
Standing writes:
“To a certain extent, the Charter can be regarded as an outcome of the first class-based set of demands on the state made by, and on behalf of, the common man (and woman), asserting the common or customary rights of ‘freemen.’…It was a truly radical document, guaranteeing freemen the right to the means of subsistence, the right to raw materials, and to a limited but substantive extent, a right to the means of production.”