Plunder of the Commons

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 * 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 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 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 expose 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 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 has held professorships at the University of Bath and at SOAS, was programme director at the International Labour Organisation and has advised the UN, World Bank and governments around the world on labour and social policy. He is the author of the bestselling The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen was published in Pelican in 2017.