OMNI

COMMONS, PUBLIC PROPERTY  FOR THE PEOPLE, #1

1-23-2022

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

Omnicenter.org/donate/

Contents Commons Newsletter #1, 1-23-22

Ian Angus
  Robbing the Soil, 1, “Commons and Classes before Capitalism.”

  Robbing the Soil, 2, “Systematic Theft of Communal Property.”

  “Agricultural Enclosure: Commoners Fight Back.”

John Bellamy Foster.  “Capitalism and Ecological Theft.”

Peter Linebaugh.  Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance.

Coulthard, Indigenous Resistance, Blockades.

Lolly, “Commons Actions.”

Tittle, “Community Development and the Commons.”

Linebaugh.  “The Commons as the Fulcrum for Social Regeneration.”

Robbing the Soil, 2: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’

Ian Angus.  Mronline.org (9-4-21).

“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)

Against enclosure: The commoners fight back

Ian Angus.  Mronline.org (1-20-22).

Articles in this series: Commons and classes before capitalism ‘Systematic theft of communal property’ Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back  by Ian Angus In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a […]

“Capitalism and ecological theft.”  Mronline.org (2-23-20). 

Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift from Monthly Review.  Source   

Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance.   PM, 2014 by Peter Linebaugh.

Publisher’s Description 
In this majestic tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh takes aim at the thieves of land, the polluters of the seas, the ravagers of the forests, the despoilers of rivers, and the removers of mountaintops. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth that has not had commoning at its heart. "Neither the state nor the market," say the planetary commoners. These essays kindle the embers of memory to ignite our future commons.

From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx—who concluded his great study of capitalism with the enclosure of commons—to the practical dreamer William Morris—who made communism into a verb and advocated communizing industry and agriculture—to the 20th-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital commonist tradition. He traces the red thread from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African-American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensable collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, "STOP, THIEF!"

Praise:

"There is not a more important historian living today. Period."
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"E.P. Thompson, you may rest now. Linebaugh restores the dignity of the despised luddites with a poetic grace worthy of the master… [A] commonist manifesto for the 21st century."
—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

"Peter Linebaugh's great act of historical imagination… takes the cliché of 'globalization' and makes it live. The local and the global are once again shown to be inseparable—as they are, at present, for the machine-breakers of the new world crisis."
—T.J. Clark, author of Farewell to an Idea

About Peter Linebaugh:

Peter Linebaugh is a child of empire, schooled in London, Cattaraugus (NY), Washington, D.C., Bonn, and Karachi. He went to Swarthmore College during the civil rights days. He has taught at Harvard University and Attica Penitentiary, at New York University and the Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. He used to edit Zerowork and was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He coauthored Albion's Fatal Tree, and is the author of The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra (with Marcus Rediker), The Magna Carta Manifesto, and introductions to Verso's selection of Thomas Paine's writings and PM's new edition of E.P. Thompson's William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. He lives in the region of the Great Lakes and works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

See and hear author interviews, book reviews, and other news on Peter Linebaugh’s page HERE

INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE: DECOLONIZE

For our Nations to live, capitalism must die

Editor. Mronline.org (10-1-21). 

What the recent actions of the Mi’kmaq land and water defenders at Elsipogtog demonstrate is that direct actions in the form of Indigenous blockades are both a negation and an affirmation.   
Originally“Unsettling America” by Glen Coulthard (November 5, 2013 ) - Posted Sep 30, 2021.

COMMONS concept for action from  LOLLY,   3-14-15

SIDEWALKS

The possibilities of Commons as a coherent, unifying concept for action is expanding in my imagination.   Do you take the Democrat-Gazette?  Yesterday's 3-13 guest editorial, "Jaywalking's early days," is about commercialization of public space," especially the diminishing of public places by intruding cars.  I wrote an essay once about what still seems to me the enormous loss of sidewalks as public fora (gained in 1943 by SCOTUS vote) by the encroachment of private malls where you can walk but not with a sign.

OMNI

I include COMMONS as one area of potential action for OMNI in my comprehensive glass-half full account of OMNI's work, sent out yesterday. You had received a draft of it earlier.  

I hope you will stay with COMMONS and list-- help us here get our minds in and around-- all the places that I. are and II. should be the people's.  And then let's ask our Book Forum to sponsor a public rally with the mayor and county judge.  Our goal will be to open their eyes and gain their active commitment to the COMMONS.

Yeah, I want to see it as it grows; Resilience is put out by Post Carbon Institute, R. Heinberg who did the Big Energy Book that I reviewed two years ago. Resilience has a lot of articles on the commons in its many variations.

Community Development and the Commons

By Chris Tittle on Mar 09, 2016 05:06 am
The commons offers a framework and a process for effectively and equitably stewarding the resources communities need to live in dignity. If we have a collective right to a resource, we should be able to democratically participate in decisions about that resource’s use.

The commons as the fulcrum for social regeneration.  Karl Marx’s1875 critique of the German Social Democratic Party provides a withering examination of capitalism’s ‘wicked ways’ and a guide to what the commons is and how to bring it about.  | more…

Originally published: New Frame by Peter Linebaugh (November 12, 2020 )  |  - Posted Nov 20, 2020.

Historian Peter Linebaugh has written an afterword to the new edition and translation of Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program,  PM Press. 
https://mronline.org/2020/11/20/the-commons-as-the-fulcrum-for-social-regeneration/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-commons-as-the-fulcrum-for-social-regeneration&utm_source=MR+Email+List&utm_campaign=c9ce418992-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_MRONLINE_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4f879628ac-c9ce418992-295821469&mc_cid=c9ce418992&mc_eid=[ab2f7bf95e]

STRUGGLE AHEAD:  ROBBERS COMMODIFYING AND  PRIVATIZING THE COMMONS IN OUTER SPACE

LYNDA WILLIAMS.  “FATEFUL GOLD RUSH IN SPACE GIVEN ‘GO-AHEAD.’”  SPACE ALERT! (Winter/Spring 2016).

     This magazine edited by Bruce Gagnon, the founder of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (Global Network) is one of the best sources of this most important under-reported information.  This article is an outstanding example.   The US has been arming, that is taking, the commons once called the heavens, for decades, and now the US government has made it legal for corporations and wealthy individuals to join the gold rush in flagrant violation of international law/i.e. treaty.

     Williams discloses that Pres. Obama last November 25 signed into law the U.S. Space Act of 2015, “granting property rights to materials that U.S. companies mine from asteroids, the moon, and other celestial bodies. . . .the act unilaterally promotes and empowers the private U.S. space industry. . .for exploration and extraction of space resources with tax payer economic incentives and little regulatory oversight.”

     The legality of the act is being debated, but Williams argues:  The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST)“does not allow any nation to claim territorial sovereignty in space and establishes space as a global commons to be shared by all humankind.”  “…the industry celebrated the passing of the Space Act as a green light to start staking claims in space with the backing and protection of the U.S. government and military which is expanding its pace war fighting capabilities through the U.S. Space Command.”  The head of an asteroid mining startup declared: “’This is the single greatest recognition of property rights in history.’” 

     I have been reading and discussing the US “arming the heavens,” the expansion of our empire and its global bases into space.   So I am glad to see the COMMONS concept by which to understand and resist this enormously dangerous potential for future nuclear conflict on earth and in space.   Think global, act local, act global for the human future through international law, between terrestrial and celestial war or peace.  SHUN ELON MUSK.   --Dick

END COMMONS NEWSLETTER #1