A vital and incisive solution to many of the problems society faces today- we must reclaim the commons.
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.
A vital and incisive solution to many of the problems society faces today- we must reclaim the commons.
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.
A vital and incisive solution to many of the problems society
faces today- we must reclaim the commons.
Guy Standing has held professorships at Bath, London and Monash universities, was a programme director in the UN's International Labour Organization and has advised many international bodies and governments on social and economic policies. He co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network and is now its co-president. He is author of the bestselling The Precariat- The New Dangerous Class (2011), Basic Income- And How We Can Make It Happen (2017) and Plunder of the Commons- A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019).
Brilliant, insightful, terse, apposite, daring, and transformative.
A must read to understand both the past and the future
*Danny Dorling, author of All That Is Solid*
Guy Standing brings great historical knowledge, political insight,
and passion to documenting the market enclosures of our common
wealth: the great unacknowledged scourge of our time. Plunder of
the Commons is both a troubling exposé and a practical-minded call
to reclaim the commons for ourselves and posterity. Sitting
politicians will ignore this stirring book at their peril. Incoming
reformers will learn how we might transform our predatory system of
economics and the complicit political culture.
*David Bollier, Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at
the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and author of Free, Fair
and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons*
In an era of intensifying privatisation, we're rapidly losing sight
of the idea that there are things that can be shared communally
without being owned by anybody, things that stand outside of the
market system - for example rivers, forests, and other natural
resources. Many of them have already been sold off to private
interests, and most of the rest are being pursued. This incendiary
book exposes this process and explores its corrosive effect on
society and resource maintenance.
This clear and radical exposition is a call for the defence of the
commons, and one of the most important books I've read in
years.
*Brian Eno*
In this majestic work, Guy Standing not only chronicles the
historic plundering of our common wealth. More importantly, he
shows how we can reclaim that wealth to address our most urgent
contemporary problems: economic insecurity and ecological
destruction. This is history, analysis and vision, all at their
very best.
*Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0*
Standing not only wants to remind us how much common land in
Britain has been enclosed by the wealthy few. His vision of the
commons is extremely capacious...his provocation could hardly be
timelier
*Financial Times*
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