Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, And Resistance

Description

In this tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh takes aim at the thieves of land, the polluters of the seas, the ravagers of the forests, the despoilers of rivers and the removers of mountaintops. Scarcely a society has existed that has not had commoning at its heart. These essays kindle the embers of memory to ignite our future commons. From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, to the 20th-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital commonist tradition.

Peter Linebaugh is a historian, a professor at the University of Toledo, the coauthor of Albion's Fatal Tree and The Many Headed Hydra, and the author of The London Hanged and The Magna Carta Manifesto. His articles have appeared in publications that include CounterPunch, the New Left Review, New York University Law Review, Radical History Review, and Social History. He lives in Toledo, Ohio.

"There is not a more important historian living today. Period." --Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "E.P. Thompson, you may rest now. Linebaugh restores the dignity of the despised luddites with a poetic grace worthy of the master... [A] commonist manifesto for the 21st century." --Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums "Peter Linebaugh's great act of historical imagination... takes the cliche of 'globalization' and makes it live. The local and the global are once again shown to be inseparable--as they are, at present, for the machine-breakers of the new world crisis." --T.J. Clark, author of Farewell to an Idea