It just so happens this week I’m teaching, in both Topics in Political Economy and Marxian Economic Theory, the consequences of the British enclosure movements. These were the movements, beginning in the thirteenth century and lasting into the nineteenth, whereby communal fields, meadows, pastures, and other arable lands were consolidated into individually owned plots, thereby creating a massive group of landless, impoverished workers. Much the same process of enclosing communal lands occurred across Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues to take place today across the Global South.
Today, of course, there is little common land left. But other commons, especially in the United States—for example, national monuments and the internet—are now under threat from the various twenty-first century versions of the enclosure movements.
It’s time then to remember an anonymous seventeenth-century folk poem [ht: sm], which is one of the pithiest condemnations of the English enclosure movement:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Here are a couple of later variations:
They hang the man and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common,
Yet let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
The fault is great in man or woman
Who steals a goose from off a common;
But what can plead that man’s excuse
Who steals a common from a goose?
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