February 20, 2024
With the exception of slavery and the genocide against Native Americans, the endless holocausts associated with the American empire are rarely discussed in high school or even college courses, and are not very well known by the public—despite a rich scholarly literature about them.
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
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
Horne’s book is primarily a synthesis of information found in secondary sources, but it is a masterful blend of the interrelated events happening in Europe, Africa, West Asia, North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean in the critical centuries before and after 1492.
