Reclaiming the Commons
"The Commons" is a historical concept that views certain property, material goods and intangibles (such as the air people breathe and the public airwaves) as belonging to the community, to be managed in a way that benefits the public interest, rather than that of a particular individual or group. The eighteenth century (British) Enclosure Act is considered the watershed event enabling individual and corporate interests to take precedence over the pubic good. Under the Enclosure Act, the landed gentry banned peasant farmers from raising crops or grazing on the "village commons," which now became "enclosed" as the gentry's private property. Subsequent enclosure laws enabled early capitalists to drive even more farmers off communal land to build factories.
Many communities around the world have already made a good start in reclaiming "the Commons" from the corporate elite. In some American towns and cities, this entails taking over functions state and local government have ceased to perform, owing to major budget difficulties. Examples include local citizens groups who have successfully fought corporate infringement on their communities (for example, protecting their water supply against bottled water companies seeking to drain their aquifers or giant agricultural conglomerates who threaten to pollute their ground water by building massive factory farms -- see http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/programs_factoryfarms.html and http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/water/). Other examples include citizen groups who have opted out of the corporate banking and food production system by taking responsibility for these services themselves -- by creating community and state banks, local currencies and bartering systems, as well as community gardens and orchards, farmers markets and community supported agriculture schemes.
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