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Plunder of the Commons
Plunder of the Commons
Oct 5, 2024 9:13 AM

Author:Guy Standing

Plunder of the Commons

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

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.

Reviews

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

—— Duncan Kelly , Financial Times

Praise for Byron's War: Indispensable

—— Literary Review

The Windrush generation’s voices are rarely heard, but Grant’s anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a vanished world.

—— Sarah Hughes , i

[An] impressive work of oral history.

—— BBC History

Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from [the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and fascists. It's quite a feat.

—— Bernardine Evaristo , i Newspaper

The structure of Homecoming gives its subjects space to speak for themselves, with each vignette providing a glimpse into little known history… Grant’s collection of voice…exposes effectively the cruel logic of Britain’s legacy of domination.

—— Renni Eddo-Lodge , Guardian

Interesting and nuanced.

—— Literary Review

[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography.

—— Ian Thomson , Tablet

In Homecoming… Colin Grant collates fragments from several hundred interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of immigrant experience… A fascinatingly varied tapestry emerges of why people came, what they made of it when they got here, and how they related both their Caribbeanness and their blackness.

—— Lloyd Bradley , Times Literary Supplement

Homecoming is an important book which records the voice of a generation as they fade into history... here we can listen to that generation telling its story in its own words.

—— Richard Hopton , Country & Town House

[Homecoming] artfully break the silence surrounding these unheralded lives [of the Windrush generation] and is essential reading for those who wish to know and honour them

—— Sara Collins, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON , Guardian

An extraordinarily detailed and diverse portrait of the Windrush generation through oral histories

—— Reader's Digest

Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers

—— Maira Kalman, American illustrator, artist and writer

To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin

—— Timothy Snyder , author of On Tyranny and Black Earth

As the Jewish heir of grandparents who themselves had to flee the upsurge of fascism in their German homelands, I found granddaughter Nora Krug's heartrending investigation of her own family's painstakingly occluded history through those years especially moving. But as an American living through these, our very own years of a seemingly inexorable drift into one's still not quite sure what, I found Krug's achingly realized graphic memoir downright unsettling, for what will our own grandchildren one day make of us and our own everyday compromises and failures to attend?

—— Lawrence Weschler , author of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers

Nora Krug's book Heimat is a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it

—— Hava Beller, Director of 'The Restless Conscience'
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