Guy Standing - Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth

1. CHAPTER 1 :
   The Charter of the Forest
2. CHAPTER 2 :
   The Commons, Commoners and Commoning
3. CHAPTER 3 :
   The Natural Commons
4. CHAPTER 4 :
   The Social Commons
5. CHAPTER 5 :
   The Civil Commons
6. CHAPTER 6 :
   The Cultural Commons
7. CHAPTER 7 :
   The Knowledge Commons
8. CHAPTER 8 :
   A Commons Fund for Common Dividends
9. APPENDIX :
   The Charter of 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.

As she basked in a landslide victory in the 1987 General Election that had followed a split in the opposition, albeit with only 42 per cent of the vote, Margaret Thatcher gave a rambling interview to Womans Own. During it, she made and repeated the revealing remark that summed up her ideology. There is no such thing as society, she said, adding there are only individuals and families. One senses that she would have made no objection had the tense been changed so as to read There should be no such thing as society.

What lay behind the remark? When elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, at the first meeting of her Shadow Cabinet, she took out from her bag a copy of Friedrich August von Hayeks The Constitution of Liberty and slammed it on the table, saying, This is what we believe! It must have crowded out other things, since it was a hefty tome of 576 pages. Hayek was Thatchers guru and was Ronald Reagans too.

The Austrian economist had set up a mostly right-wing group of economists and other scholars as the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. He was not a conservative in the traditional sense, but believed fervently in a free market economy. His mentor was Ludwig von Mises, another Austrian. What von Mises taught Hayek, and what Thatcher digested, was that economic value was measured only by price; what had no price had no value.

In the political hands of Thatcher and Reagan, this view was to evolve into a wholesale agenda of privatization nothing less than the dismantling of public institutions and bodies that stood against market forces. And if something has no value, it can be given away for free or abolished or converted into something that does have value, a price.

Thatcherism cannot be understood without understanding Hayek and von Mises. In 1976, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, reflecting the capture of the mainstream economics profession by neo-liberalism. In 1984, Thatcher arranged for Hayek to be given the rarely awarded Order of the Companion of Honour by the Queen, which Hayek described as the happiest day in his life. He presumably did not see the irony that the monarchy was hardly a testament to a free-market economy. Reagan said Hayek was one of the three people who most influenced him, and in 1991 George H. W. Bush awarded him the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Truly a prophet honoured in his lifetime.

Hayeks Mont Pelerin Society still meets regularly around the world and continues to influence mainstream economics. This book is about what is probably the most destructive aspect of the neo-liberals economic ideology. In their view society has no price and so has no value; therefore the institutions that make up society can be dismantled. For good measure, because only the market determines prices and value, anything that stands apart from or against the market is not just value-less but market-distorting.

Thus began a war and no other word captures what has been involved so well against all organizations and mechanisms of society embodying values of social solidarity, which have no price. The war has been conducted most vehemently and incessantly against what historically has been known as the commons. The commons has a lovely ancestry, as this book tries to remind us. But it is also vital today.

The commons refers to all our shared natural resources including the land, the forests, the moors and parks, the water, the minerals, the air and all the social, civic and cultural institutions that our ancestors have bequeathed to us, and that we may have helped to maintain or improve. It also includes the knowledge that we possess as society, built on an edifice of ideas and information constructed over the centuries. This book is about how the commons have been depleted by neglect, encroachment, enclosure, privatization and colonization. It is also about how appreciation of the commons leads to a rationale for a new progressive policy.

The devaluation of society and the disdain for the commons were at the heart of Thatcherism. She went on to become Baroness Thatcher and when she died in April 2013, she was given what amounted to a state funeral, costing the public (society) 3.6 million. It was attended by the Queen and all four of Thatchers successors as prime minister, most notably Tony Blair, often dubbed son of Thatcher. No such honour was given to her predecessors, such as Harold Wilson who had won four general elections, one more than she did. It signified that not only her own party but New Labour too had been converted to her doctrine. Those she had defeated were lining up to pay homage.

Her biggest economic decision had been to privatize North Sea oil operations and splurge the oil taxation revenue on income tax cuts and current spending. This was in contrast to Norway, which retained government stakes in its share of North Sea oil and invested the revenues from taxes and dividends in a national capital fund. By the time of Thatchers death, it was the biggest capital fund in the world, guaranteeing the welfare of every Norwegian today and of future generations. Meanwhile, much of Britains oil was in the hands of Chinese state (communist) enterprises, which is hardly what Thatcher had intended.

Thatchers successor as Prime Minister, John Major, privatized British Rail. One extraordinary aspect of the legislation was a clause ruling out just one possible operator, the British government. Profitable bits of the railways came to be owned by French and German state operators, acting on behalf of their societies. It should have been clear by then that privatization was little more than an invitation to foreign capital to colonize Britains commons. But worse was to follow. Thatcher began the privatization of the most precious part of Britains social commons, the National Health Service, through what her economic advisers called the micro-politics of privatization. The idea was that the government should gradually cut resources for a popular service so as to undermine faith in its capacity to deliver, leading to acceptance of privatization. But the Blair government did most to accelerate NHS privatization and colonization. By 2018, much of the NHS was in the hands of private providers, even though the pretence was preserved that it was still a public service and an embodiment of the traditions of universalism.

Finally, as this book will show, the Coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and the subsequent Conservative governments, accelerated the privatization and plunder of the commons under the umbrella of austerity. That has further devalued society and accentuated inequality. In discussing what has happened, why it has happened, and what impact it has had, there is one underlying message: We want our commons back!