A vital and incisive solution to many of the problems society
faces today- we must reclaim the commons.
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.
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 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
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.
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