By Eliza Daley, By my solitary hearth
What the “property as investment” people never seem to learn is that you don’t need to earn money if you have a good life… Because investors? They’re only chasing after some future dollar that will never buy them a home.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book.
By Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Politically and intellectually, it seems like the idea of the commons is gaining traction – probably because the state and the market, its major rivals, have acquired something of an image problem in recent times. Politically, ‘the state’ has become associated with the unresponsive, centrally planned economies of communist regimes, and ‘the market’ with the flagrant inequalities and value-scouring short-termism of contemporary capitalism and/or neoliberalism.
By William deBuys, Tom Dispatch
It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
A recent article on Resilience.org proclaimed that ‘the commons is the future’, so let me state my thesis plainly at the outset: no it isn’t...
By Brian Davey, Feasta
There is often a potential for sharing and mutual accommodation that is being ignored.
By Charles Eisenstein, The new and ancient story
What is more relevant to me than the fiction of property is the precise nature of the social agreements that define and underlie property.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
“How come there’s no public dimension to natural resource law, and the public who uses these areas and actually owns most of them doesn’t have a say in what goes on?”
By David Graeber, Open Democracy
"Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes private property (dominium) of another, contrary to nature."'
By Peter Barnes, On The Commons
As a Republican Alaska governor Walter Hickel said, “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” In the beginning, the commons was everywhere. Humans roamed through it, hunting and gathering to meet their needs. Like other species, we had territories but these were communal to the tribe, not private to the person.