Tralee: Informal Talk "Commons: communal ownership of social resources"

international | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Wednesday October 14, 2009 00:07 by sean - swp earthsoulrocknroll at gmail dot com

"They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose".
—English folk poem, circa 1764

Abdurahman (Socialist Workers' Party/ Tralee branch)
will give an informal talk about "Commons: Communal ownership of social resources"

8PM Imperial Bar (basement), Thursday 15th October.
All Welcome

"One of the great questions of contemporary political economy is, who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that vast range of resources that people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources.

Such enclosures are troubling because they disproportionately benefit the corporate class and effectively deprive ordinary citizens of access to resources that they legally or morally own.

The commons and enclosure are archaic, unfamiliar terms. But this strangeness is appropriate. We currently lack a vocabulary for identifying a wide range of abuses that harm public assets and social ecology".
-- David Boiller