The Manifold of the Commons: A Masterclass with Peter Linebaugh

Peter Linabaugh on the Magna Carta

Police and Plunder

Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch

In December 2014 the discussion of “police” began to look at the roots of the institution. Peter Gelderloos concluded a three part study in CounterPunch flatly stating, “The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system.”[1] Sam Mitrani, a scholar of the Chicago police, concluded similarly, “The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it.” [2] Yet a physician in Ann Arbor, Catherine Wilkerson, caused a local stir when she stated “that neither racism nor racist police violence can be abolished under this economic system, i.e. under capitalism”.

Peter Linebaugh: Who Owns the Commons? An 800 Year Fight for Public Goods

The Untold History of Independence Day

Open Letter to James Nxumalo, Senzo Mchunu & Jacob Zuma on the Repression in Cato Crest, Durban

To:

James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa
Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal
Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

We are writing to you to express our grave concern at events unfolding in the Cato Crest shack settlement in Durban.

After an illegal eviction in Cato Crest by the eThekwini Municipality in March this year, shackdwellers occupied an adjacent piece of land. They named the settlement “Marikana”. Since then, two activists have been assassinated -Thembinkosi Qumbelo and Nkululeko Gwala. A third, Nkosinathi Mngomezulu, is in critical condition after being shot by the Land Invasions Unit. A number of activists have been seriously beaten by the police. Other activists, including Bandile Mdlalose and S’bu Zikode of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo who have been supporting the residents, have been threatened with death. 

Interview: Peter Linebaugh on the The Magna Carta Manifesto

Peter Linebaugh lecture on the commons and the Magna Carta

Midnight Notes: Discussion on The Commons

Peter Linebaugh at Occupy Ypsi, December 10, 2011

All Knees and Elbows Of Susceptibility and Refusal

by Tom Roberts and Anthony Iles

This pamphlet is a sketch of some elements of what might constitute a 'history from below'. In it we have assembled quotations from esteemed historians, their lowly subjects and sometimes even their critics. Here, Thompson's phrase, 'all knees and elbows of susceptibility and refusal', from which we have made our clumsy title will help us express the necessary awkwardness of affecting transformation by writing history. For there are many attractions for the would-be radical historian here, but also obstacles and 'traps' of interest too. Firstly, we will attempt to reconstruct what is 'history from below' before we explore some tensions inherent in such a project. The phrase 'history from below' is the product of a group of French historians known as the Annales school. It is their description of an approach to subjects and areas previously considered historically unimportant. In England this approach was taken up by a group of Marxist historians who developed a set of methodologies and a world view at odds with the existing Marxist and historiographical orthodoxies.

The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker 

"For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged."—David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. 

The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century

This groundbreaking history aids any understanding of the rise of capitalism.

Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.

Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a prvileged ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's Triple Tree.

Meandering on the Semantical-Historical Paths of Communism and Commons

by Peter Linebaugh, The Commoner

In the 1840s, then, ‘communism’ was the new name to express the revolutionary aspirations of proletarians . It pointed to the future, as in ‘historic tasks’. In contrast, the ‘commons’ belonged to the past, perhaps to the feudal era, when it was the last-ditch defense against extinction. Now in the 21st century the semantics of the two terms seems to be reversed with communism belonging to the past of Stalinism, industrialization of agriculture, and militarism, while the commons belongs to an international debate about the planetary future of land, water, and subsistence for all. What is sorely needed in this debate so far is allegiance to the actual movements of the common people who have been enclosed and foreclosed but are beginning to disclose an alternative, open future.

Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: Race, Slavery and the Commons

by Peter Linebaugh, Mute Magazine

The Magna Carta is renowned as the 'Charter of Liberty' which inspired modern constitutional safeguards against the power of the State. But its smaller companion, the Charter of the Forest, enshrining the customary rights of the commoners to land and resources, has been overlooked. Cutting between the political struggles of the early 1970s and the 1720s, Peter Linebaugh shows how the struggle against enclosures in the woods of England is inextricably linked with the struggle against slavery in the Atlantic.

An Amazing Disgrace

by Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch

W.E.B. DuBois taught us that the slave trade and the struggle against it were magnificent dramas superior even to the Greek tragedies. This year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade by the English Parliament, and the bicentennial is celebrated in the movie, Amazing Grace. Far from being a majestic human drama involving millions of human beings on three continents in the protracted and mighty struggle of greed and cruelty against liberation and dignity, Amazing Grace presents an English story of pretty people either having tedious tea-parties at various country estates or compromising with one another in boring rhetoric in that exclusive British men’s club, the House of Commons.

The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century

by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, LibCom

(This article is also available in pdf here.)

Introduction

Through the harsh winter of 1740-41, as food riots broke out all over Europe, a motley crew of workers met at John Hughson’s waterside tavern in the city of New York to plan a rising for St. Patrick’s Day. The conspirators included Irish, English, Hispanic, African, and Native American men and women; they spoke Gaelic, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Latin, Greek, and undoubtedly several African and Indian languages.