Sen Fetterman on gunman: "He's the asshole that's going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.

[Cirsium]

119. Cute poem?

That lyric is from the 1700s and refers to the Enclosure Acts in Great Britain that drove the common people off of their collective farming villages and into the cities, where they were an easily exploited labor force for the industrialists.

Much of our modern social, political and economic reality can be traced back to the global influence of the Enclosure movement; modern notions of "private property," wage labor, urbanization, industrialization, unsustainable agriculture, privatization and on and on. The movement is closely associated with colonialism and imperialism.

The Theft of the Commons

As a visitor from the age of private property, it seems remarkable to me that commoners held rights to land they did not own or rent, but, at the time, it was commonplace. In addition to common pasture, commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary—rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish. These were rights to subsistence, rights to live on what they could glean from the land. In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching. Commoners who continued to common were now criminals. An entire legal history is told in the four lines of one anonymous English poem:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

...
Commoners were “rough and savage,” according to eighteenth-century rhetoric. They were lazy. Their practice of sharing land was “barbarous,” and their economy was “primitive.” They had an inexplicable preference for using their free time for sport, rather than for paid labor. Their defenders argued that commoners were in fact industrious and self-sufficient. “What defenders saw as hard work and thrift,” the historian J. M. Neeson writes, “critics saw as squalor and desperation.” But everyone agreed that commoners were independent, in that they did not have to work for wages. And everyone understood that the enclosure of the commons would force commoners to become wage workers, and that this would cost them their independence.
...

What we do not still have—what we have lost—is common rights. These rights once limited the reach of private property, and when the balance of rights shifted toward those who owned property, this wrong was felt by both the common people and the land. In one poem, Clare writes in the voice of a plot of land, and the land itself is nostalgic. “There was a time my bit of ground / Made freemen of the slave,” it remembers. The land feels the loss of the people who lost their rights to the land.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/the-theft-of-the-commons

Enclosing the English Commons: Property, Productivity and the Making of Modern Capitalism

In a nutshell, enclosure was the legal mechanism which expropriated the commons (also known as common lands or waste lands) from England’s commoners, aggregated them and put them to new use. It revolutionised private property as a concept, largely introduced the concept of land as a commodity, and came to define the economic priorities of the last five hundred years. It catalysed the Industrial Revolution and English urbanisation. In terms of economic development, it was somewhat akin to the invention of the wheel, if rather more contentious.

Before enclosure, common land was the most common form in England: land on which anybody could grow food, graze cattle, sleep, eat and revel. After enclosure, more than half of the land in England fell under the control of single owners, who were free to do as they pleased with it. Other inhabitants had no other rights over it, besides in some (often interrupted) cases a right of way to move across it. There were two main ways in which enclosure was achieved. The first was informal enclosure, which occurred between 1450 and 1650 through a series of personal agreements within a village to consolidate plots of land. The second was formal enclosure by parliamentary act, not used until the 18th century. Parliament’s intervention was behind the majority of British land enclosed.

Enclosure does not strictly refer to the fencing off of territory, though it did almost always involve (and in many cases require) the introduction of a physical barrier, whether fence or hedge. Legally, what enclosure meant was that the rights over the land had changed. Commoners could not graze, draw water, or chop wood; landowners could consolidate, dictate, and develop.

https://globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk/files/case26-enclosingtheenglishcommonspdf

Enclosure, Anti-Vagrancy Laws, and the Rise of the Urban Poor

The Enclosure Acts, a series of laws passed by the British Parliament beginning in the 12th century and ending only in 1914, were one factor in the creation of a class of people who moved to the city for work, but found there was little or none. Many times, even when they found work, the wages were not enough to support themselves or their families. Through the Acts, open fields and "wastes," plots of land known as "Commons" and traditionally used by "commoners" were closed to use by the peasantry. Open fields were large agricultural areas to which a village population had certain rights of access and which they tended to divide into narrow strips for cultivation. The wastes were unproductive areas—for example, fens, marshes, rocky land, or moors—to which the peasantry had traditional and collective rights of access in order to pasture animals, harvest meadow grass, fish, hunt, collect firewood, or otherwise benefit. Rural laborers who lived on the margin depended on open fields and the wastes to fend off starvation.

In other words, enclosure consolidates the ownership of land, usually for the stated purpose of making it more productive. The British Enclosure Acts removed the prior rights of local people to rural land they had often used for generations. As compensation, the displaced people were commonly offered alternative land of smaller scope and inferior quality, sometimes with no access to water or wood. The lands seized by the acts were then consolidated into individual and privately owned farms, with large, politically connected farmers receiving the best land. Often, small landowners could not afford the legal and other associated costs of enclosure and so were forced out.

Forced to leave their homes, with nowhere else to go, the former "commoners" migrated to the cities and swelled the numbers of the urban poor who would later work in the factories that powered the industrial revolution. Others wandered the land as homeless beggars.

https://jpellegrino.com/teaching/enclosure.html

Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back

In Scotland, for example, enclosure didn’t begin until the mid-1700s, but then the drive to catch up with England ensured that it was much faster and particularly brutal. As Neil Davidson writes, the horrendous 19th century Highland Clearances that Marx so eloquently condemned in Capital involved not primitive accumulation by new capitalists, but the consolidation of “an existing, and thoroughly rapacious, capitalist landowning class … whose disregard for human life (and, indeed, ‘development’) marked it as having long passed the stage of contributing to social progress.”

And, of course, the growth of the British Empire, from Ireland to the Americas to India and Africa, was predicated on enclosure of colonized land and dispossession of indigenous peoples. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, extending the “blight of capitalist civilization” required

“the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development .… Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power.”

That remains true today, when one percent of the world’s population has 45% of all personal wealth and nearly three billion people own nothing at all. Every year, the rich enclose ever more of the world’s riches, and their corporations destroy more of the life support systems that should be our common heritage. Enclosures continue, strengthening an ever-richer ruling class and an ever-larger global working class.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/15/against-enclosure-the-commoners-fight-back/