February 20, 2024
Protests against enclosure began as far back as 1450, when “tens of thousands of English peasants fought, and thousands died, to halt the spread of capitalist farming that was destroying their way of life.”
February 20, 2024
As Marx wrote, the common rights “were simply redefined as crimes: poaching, wood-theft, trespass”. The war against the commons removed the rights for people to hunt, forage, collect firewood and more. Game laws put restrictions on the poor, where you were criminalised even “if you took one hare when your family was starving”. The rich enclosed lands to hunt for sport, while the poor could be sentenced to death for hunting deer…
February 20, 2024
The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
by Ian Angus
$26.00 / 246 pages / 978-1-68590-016-8
FOR ALMOST ALL OF HUMAN existence, almost all of us were self-provisioning. Together with our neighbors, we lived and worked on the land, obtained and prepared our own food, and made our own homes, tools and clothing. After our ancestors invented agriculture, most of us lived in small communities where the land was held and farmed in common, and most production was consumed locally.
Today, almost all of us have to work for others.
Our lives depend on, and are largely defined by, our jobs. All the productive wealth is owned by a tiny minority of individuals and corporations, and most of us cannot eat unless we sell them our ability to work.
That’s how capitalism works, and we are so used to it that it seems natural and obvious….
February 20, 2024
One anonymous 17th century poet quoted by Angus in his conclusion put it best of all: “The law locks up the man and woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ And geese will still a common lack/ Till they go and steal it back.”
February 20, 2024
Capital’s war against the commons continues today in the Global South, as does resistance to it. The removal of the people from the land to work in industrial cities is also part of the mechanism which creates the metabolic rift, one of the reasons for capitalism’s inherent environmental destructiveness. The route to overcoming this does not lie in individuals or communities returning to an idealised communal past. As Angus says, this has been the expectation of utopian communal groups since the Diggers established themselves on St George’s Hill in 1649…
February 20, 2024
Angus’s new book stands out for the refreshing candidness of his worldview, his obvious mastery of the topic and his gift for poignant summary.
February 20, 2024
It is a promising thing when a book titled Can the Working Class Change the World? feels current amid national and global upheaval, despite having been published two years ago….
