Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican Books)

Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican Books)

Guy Standing
$19.95
Publication Date: December 1st, 2019
Publisher:
Pelican
ISBN:
9780141990620
Pages:
432

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.

About the Author

Guy Standing has held professorships at the University of Bath and at SOAS, was program director at the International Labour Organisation and has advised the UN, World Bank and governments around the world on labor and social policy. He is the author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen.

Praise for Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican Books)

'One of the most important books I've read in years.' Brian Eno



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 -

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