Ocenti Sakowin No-DAPL prayer camp, Standing Rock, North Dakota, December 2016. License: Alamy

Gene Ray: Peter, I would like to begin with some beautiful lines you wrote on the “allure” of commoning, in Magna Carta Manifesto. “Many medlar trees are relics of orchards or parks. Others are the results of the practice that was once widespread of peasants planting orchard trees in the wild. The allure of commoning arises from the mutualism of shared resources. Everything is used, nothing is wasted. Reciprocity, sense of self, willingness to argue, long memory, collective celebration, and mutual aid are traits of the commoner.”[note]Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 103[/note] In these lines, a wonderful image emerges of food forests and non-commodified social enjoyment.

As we are trying to strike some sparks here from the contact between commoning and art, which has to do with sensuous experience and knowledge, I would like to ask how you see that connection. What does commoning “feel” like, to a commoner’s body? Your historical work recovers the concrete particulars and pulsing revolutionary imaginaries of commoners across the centuries. But our task, as you have noted, is to join ourselves to “the commoning and commons which lie in the future.” The present moment is a difficult and, let’s not mince words, a disastrous one in social, political and ecological terms. What is the courage, what are the sensuous attractors of commoning today?

Peter Linebaugh: What a powerful question! What is the relation between art and commoning, or art and the commons? Of course, inevitably, I look upon an answer historically. Yes, art combines sensuous experience and knowledge, and it does so with materials and tools and the hand.  Why not see this as a “mode of production”? Once it was considered in that light, as in the 19th century “Arts and Crafts.” Or we go back earlier and find that with the tensions, contradictions, emerging class relations associated with craft labor that occurred in Europe with the first centuries of capitalism, they took place in the home which might also be the work-shop: hence, the domestic system. Then “art and craft” were parts of a “mystery” and different crafts were named as such, the mystery of shoemaking, the mystery of the baker, etc. Art in other words had not yet been separated from what later would be called “the business enterprise” where the owner of tools and materials was different from the craft person, or artist, who worked with them. Mysteries became science as part of expropriation. I guess I’m driving at an alienation that took place within the gigantic expropriations of the commons that grabbed and enclosed the planet’s lands for the lords.  

To discover what the commoner’s body felt like, how the commoners’ senses perceived the world, we need to immerse ourselves in the materials and means of production and the ecologies of their different environments. The poet of that era, William Shakespeare, wrote, “my nature is subdu’d/ To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”[note]William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 111” (1609), in The Sonnets, ed. G.B. Harrison, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955, p. 80[/note] How does this pertain to our future?  My hypothesis is that we are going to be dealing with cobbling, finding new uses from discarded scraps, and we are going to be dealing with gleaning, making subsistence from what has been wasted or left over. These were commoning practices of old which will be scaled up with new material circumstances. 

There is no going back, true enough. How we shall common in our future will become clearer and clearer as privatization fails to meet human needs, and the sheer creativity and innate mutuality of human endeavor arise in response. Its material foundation rests on general repurposing or cobbling for use the scraps and detritus of capitalist “civilization.”

G. R.: There are so many lines to follow here. Maybe at this point we can attempt an overview of the big picture that emerges from your historical work. You remind us that we must not think only of the English and Irish agrarian commoners driven off their lands and severed from their means of subsistence (their “ancient liberties”). Both the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and the Africans seized and transported in the Atlantic slave trade were commoners whose practices enlarge and enrich our understanding of commoning.

In The Many-Headed Hydra, which you co-wrote with Marcus Rediker, you give life to Marx’s concept of “so-called primitive or original accumulation.”[note]See “Part Eight: So-Called Primitive Accumulation” in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books, 1977[/note] There, you lead us through four successive periods in which capitalists and imperialists worked together to enclose the commons, privatize land, and by violence and terror transform commoners into labor power for the accumulation of capital. Expropriation and exploitation, but also resistance and uprising, pass through the agrarian commons (1600-1640), the plantation (1640-1680), the ship and its hydrarchy (1680-1760), and the factory (1760-1835). You document the amazing movement of commoners’ experience and knowledge back and forth across the Atlantic on commercial ships, navies and the fleets of pirates. The radicalization of this experience – looking back to the Levellers and Diggers, informing the articles of pirates and maroon communities, elaborating visions of abolition and Jubilee – led to “a universalism from below” that ignited revolts in the prisons, mutinies in the ships, uprisings on the plantations and riots in the seaports. The verve and the power of your narrative lies in the great details of the telling and in your careful attention to the language these women and men used. Two examples are your tracing of the “many-headed hydra” and “the motley crew” and the link between these phrases and the Atlantic commoners.

P. L.:  The tension between your reasonable desire for “an overview of the big picture” at the beginning of your questions and your gracious description of the “great details of the telling and careful attention to language” found in The Many-Headed Hydra at the end of your question has always been I suppose the source of having to try once again!  One wants to do both, that is, to tell a story and to paint a picture. The story will be singular, the picture representative. Yes, the main theme of that book I did with Marcus and my other books has required an Atlantic perspective, often called by others “intersectional” or even “multicultural” in which Irish, English, African, and indigenous people of Turtle Island learn from one another’s labors and resistances. This is necessarily history from below or “history by the neck” as I said in The London Hanged.[note]Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, London: Verso, 1993[/note] 

I like your impulse to describe “successive periods” in the Hydra as agrarian commons, plantation, hydrarchy, and jubilee, and give to these periods specific dates ending with 1835. I would want us to delve into the secondary literature and then the archives to investigate how at that time the screw propeller driven by gigantic steam engines, among other changes in design and infrastructure, began to bring an end to “the age of sail.” What we would be searching to describe is how technological change was the result of the capitalist imperative to drive the value of labor power to zero, or to massively reduce the size of the sailoring proletariat. That is the theme otherwise concealed in the ideological phrase, “industrial revolution.” I call it ideological because it inverts the meaning of industriousness - diligence and resourcefulness, assiduous and ingenious, skillful and intelligent – reducing these human qualities into exploitation unto death or slavery.  

In seeing “the industrial revolution” as counter-revolutionary we have to examine the mechanization of the arts, crafts, and trades. That was a project to which The London Hanged contributed, though nothing has surpassed the many volumes of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. So, I would add such technical changes in the labor process to the terror, genocide, and the divisions of white race supremacy which you name. One might say that “labor history” begins with the enclosure of the commons. The ship itself was a principle enclosure and was the paramount instrument, the sine qua non, of globalization, hence European imperialism. This was the remarkable contribution of Marcus Rediker’s first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, that is, to treat the sailing vessel as a site of specific labor process, and the sailor as proletarian.[note]Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989[/note]

G. R.: Your cogent remarks about the historical impacts of technology on the labor process make me think of artificial intelligence (AI). I’d like to ask how you see machine learning and AI in relation to labor and contemporary commoning. There has been a long debate about the possibilities of a “digital commons.” While there was no lack of advocates for the interconnectivity and collaboration made possible by the internet, there are also strong dissenters. Recently, Jonathan Crary has published a scathing critique of digital technology, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. There he argues that digital devices and infrastructures are inseparable from the globalized capitalism that is heating the planet and burning down the biosphere. He is unequivocal: “There never was or will be a ‘digital commons’.”[note]Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, London / New York: Verso, 2022, p. 10[/note]

And aside from the threat it poses to workers through redundancy and acceleration in the labor process, AI is poised to cross awful thresholds in automated weapons systems and powers of surveillance. What are your thoughts on these important aspects of contemporary modernity? Is it time for a new generation of strikers and machine breakers? To what extent should commoners use and perhaps become dependent on capital’s technics and supply chains? If we have largely become slaves to the requirements of dominant technologies (this would be one way to understand climate imperialism and the race for so-called critical minerals such as lithium and rare earths), then lines of flight out of social media and digital life would be a kind of political resistance and fugitivity. Off-grid commoning projects might then appear as today’s maroon communities.

P. L.: The settlement of the second Jamaican maroon wars in the 1740s points to the compromise that autonomy required, namely the return of fugitive slaves or runaways from the plantations. Commoning projects cannot be isolated from the surrounding commodity relations (alienation, hierarchy, exploitation) as some kind of pure exception. They must be simultaneously sites of resistance as well as recuperation. I remember organizers against the American war in Vietnam reminding us that every time we dropped a dime in a public phone we were using “the man’s technology” and its corporation. Again this was a warning against the belief that an absolute withdrawal from capitalism was possible without extinguishing its values and practices, that is, revolution. Furthermore, it is a reminder that the AT&T, the phone company, consisted of workers too, just as some successes by maroons could not alone be a substitute for the struggle on the plantation.  

In the struggle, even in our commons, we still live within as well as beyond capitalist institutions. The followers of captain Ned Ludd were highly intelligent weavers who attacked the steam engine that will power their looms. The most advanced of such looms, the Jacquard loom, was the progenitor of the computer and digital “intelligence.” Knowledge of the hand worker (weaver, cobbler, spinner, etc.) was in the hand. Intelligence could not easily be abstracted from the body. Machines will always recast what it means to be human, because of their capacity to reduce the value of human beings to zero. But what is called AI today as a force of weapons systems and surveillance is nothing more than an advanced extraction of planetary water and fossil fuels. Its “data centers” are vast concentrations of mechanized pattern recognition dependent on these planetary resources and Boolean algebra. That George Boole was the grandson of a Jacobin shoemaker of the 1790s and thus a class ally of the Luddites reminds us once again, as Big Bill Haywood used to say, “the bosses brains are under the worker’s cap.”  

Just as the Jacquard loom underlay the demise of the handloom weaver, and his Jacobin powers, so AI will degrade, diminish, and deform large categories of workers necessary to social reproduction – schools, hospitals, retired folk, service industries, and do this globally. I have not read Jonathan Crary’s critique, Scorched Earth, thanks for suggesting it. Those with a minimum of historical consciousness, and with the human intelligence to do their own thinking, will sense that the danger of AI at present is the intensification of existing forced labor and the reintroduction of slavery and apartheid. Going back, once again to the first great revolution of our era, the French Revolution with its Haitian corollary (so to speak), the introduction of machines and the expansion of the slave system went hand in hand.

G. R.: In this Arts of Commoning project we feel that it is vital, urgent and necessary to think or rethink commoning together with planetary heating, climate chaos and biospheric meltdown. These are all driven by capitalist modernity, which seems unable to get out of its economic and geopolitical iron cage. We need a rupture with business-as-usual and a repatterning based on biospheric realism, planetary habitability and indeed a more-than-human mutuality. Instead we are getting the insanity of intensified extractivism and drill-baby-drill, an accelerationist embrace of disruptive technologies such as AI and gene editing, and a general renewed arms race. Climate imperialism, in short.

In Stop, Thief!, you noted that “Militarism and money do not safeguard us […]. Our protection is our mutuality.” Could you share your thoughts and feelings about the socio-ecological predicaments that capitalism has landed us in? Considered in the grounded historical perspective of your work, what does commoning offer us in this conjuncture? What openings toward the commons and pathways to reach it are hiding in this mess? How might a political strategy for commoners emerge and get traction at this moment? Is it important to distinguish between commoning and what is called eco-socialism? These are large questions, but there is no avoiding them.

P. L.: I’ve been reading Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, the poetic manifesto by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and I was re-assured to find an emphasis within the undercommons on study.[note]Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013[/note] At the same time I read the account of the man who threw the Molotov cocktail that initiated the great Detroit Rebellion of 1967.  He was William Walter Scott, III, who wrote Hurt, Baby, Hurt, shortly after, and then his book disappeared until republished last month by the University of Michigan Press.[note]William Walter Scott III, Hurt, Baby, Hurt, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2025[/note] It reminded me of the importance of study among the militants of the Detroit proletariat, from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to the comrades of Marty Glaberman, Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, Jimmy Boggs, and Grace Lee Boggs.  

Yes, you ask large questions and by virtue of the fact that we have no answer, they are therefore good questions. Investigation and inquiry are required. Remember how Karl Marx in Das Kapital quotes Mr. Moneybags regarding the factory, “Let None Enter Here Except on Business”!  Our struggle now includes other capitalist enclosures - the prison, the campus, the detention centers, the border, what you call capital’s iron cage - where equally Mr. Moneybags carries on his business. What is that business and how is it conducted?  They may be the locations where answers to your questions will be found, for when we say “no business as usual” we have in mind the creation of something else and the confidence to bring it to pass.  

Study, of course, is collective, that is conducted with and in and through a group. Planetary perturbations, imperial extractivism, machine “intelligence,” strategic genocide, and the political and cultural production of ignorance can crumble as we accept the equalizing qualities suggested by William Morris, “intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, and power enough to compel.”[note]William Morris, Communism (Fabian Tract 113), London: The Fabian Society, 1903, p. 8[/note]

G. R.: As you have noted, law and criminality – what counts as crime and who, as a result, is deemed a criminal – go inseparably together, for law constructs the criminal. From this direction, your celebrated historical studies can be seen as an ongoing interrogation of the dialectic of “law and class struggle,” or to put it differently, the old and ongoing civil war of “statute and commoning.” Both of these phrasings come from your introduction to Stop, Thief!, where you note that there are two conceptions of law: “one is state law or law of the state, and the other is the rules of the commons.”[note]Peter Linebaugh, Stop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance, Oakland: PM Press, 2014, p. 2[/note]

In The Magna Carta Manifesto, you point out that the great thirteenth-century English charter of liberties was accompanied by a later repressed and nearly forgotten Charter of the Forest. While the liberties of the Magna Carta – “no torture, habeas corpus, due process of law, trial by jury” – are under threat and remain hugely pertinent today, so also are the common principles of the Forest Charter: “subsistence, no enclosure, neighborhood, travel, and reparations.” To return to your introduction to Stop, Thief!, you pose four questions there that remain crucial and urgent today: “Is there a higher law? Is there a revolutionary law, a restorative requisitioning? Who makes law? Who upholds that law?” I find the notion of “higher law” especially urgent but also a bit elusive. I sense it has to do with the old concept of moral economy, with mutuality and human solidarity.  Could you expound a bit on this notion of higher law and how it might empower us today?

P. L.: Here is something I wrote after Trump was inaugurated president. I didn't publish it apart from sharing with a few friends. Now, I think perhaps it might find a place in our dialogue because, for some, the meaning of “higher law” is found in the life and death of Jesus.  Marxist atheists, such as myself, may read Christian scripture for overall backup, as I have done since I was a kid! In case you didn't know Mariann Budde made this plea to the face of Trump at the National Cathedral.

Mariann Edgar Budde, Washington National Cathedral, January 21, 2025

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you, and as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families. There are some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops, who clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat-packing plants who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, [… ?], and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecutions in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger for we were all once strangers in this land.”

Mariann Edgar Budde graduated in history from the University of Rochester, a couple years after I was booted out of that department as a “reductionist.” Her first job after seminary was as an assistant priest at Trinity Episcopal Church in Toledo, Ohio, where I taught for years. There she may have studied “family systems theory” with a friend of mine, Bill Jones. Our paths have twice converged, Rochester and Toledo. I also find the National Cathedral itself a place of convergence because I grew up in its neighborhood. Its herb garden was a special place of renewal and solace to a mothers’ sorrows. Its basement in a neighboring sanctuary, St. Albans, was the meeting place of my Troop 5 of the Washington D.C. Boy Scouts. After my father’s death he was commemorated by his children and colleagues in a service in the Cathedral’s crypt.

I salute her courage in speaking truth to power, and the truth is a truth of the working class. Her plea of mercy is one among many, many such pleas across the sands of time. We look upon them with the eyes of that Florentine advisor to princes, Machiavelli, for mercy has its politics too. Of the three hundred and three Lakota people sentenced to death shall we remember Abe Lincoln’s mercy in pardoning two hundred sixty-five or the thirty-eight he caused to be hanged in the largest mass execution of U.S. history which took place in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862 on the day after Christmas? As an historian of hangings in England I have studied the cruelty, caprice, and cunning practiced by those deciding who was to swing and who wasn’t. Mercy seems to depend on a premise of powerlessness in the face of sovereign power; on defeat.  

Yet Mariann Budde was not on her knees. She spoke sweetly to mean people. She stood in the Canterbury pulpit whose Caen limestone is carved to depict the Magna Carta, eight centuries old, prohibiting torture, asserting habeas corpus, requiring the jury, recognizing widow’s estovers, expressed in language that will be used in the U.S. Constitution and its Fourteenth Amendment, due process and law of the land, and whose full potential – the commons – remains to be realized. The bishop stood surrounded by that representation which supported her. It contributed to the dignity that she called for.

In an Autobiographical Statement she writes “the miracle of the loaves and fishes is the spiritual foundation upon which I depend daily.”[note]“Mariann Edgar Budde: Autobiographical Statement,” http://www.episcopalelections.com/elections/minnesota/nominees/BuddeBio.pdf[/note] This brings me to my second comment.  In the book of John (6:12-13) a boy brings five loaves and two fishes which then feed five thousand. “When everyone had had enough, [Jesus] said to his disciples, ‘Collect the pieces left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ This they did, and filled twelve baskets with the pieces left uneaten of the five barley loaves.” It is the notion of “left overs” or the “remainder” that will for a couple of thousand years remain part of the commons despite the steady violent encroachments of private property against land, things, and people. This story has great powers too as a material foundation.

G. R.: I wonder if we could think of commoning as community-making practices that ground and are the original condition of all law. Historically, these practices were established custom everywhere, but were extinguished by waves of violent enclosure, displacement and criminalization. We now recognize these historical land grabs and dispossessions as genocide and ecocide - and we see the same violence today in Israel’s brutal attacks and “annexations” in Gaza and the West Bank.

Last year, you wrote a beautiful and impassioned piece for Counterpunch called “Palestine & the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a” There, you relayed some important research on the musha’a, the Palestinian tradition of communally-owned agricultural land, and discussed how Zionist settler colonialism has attempted to obliterate it. And it is impossible not to see that international laws against genocide and torture are flouted with impunity by settler-colonial states like Israel (and the U.S.).

Where commoning still exists as established practice, it might make sense to appeal to customary or common law to defend it. But calls for “reclaiming the commons” today are more often calls to establish zones of commoning in defiance of law, the state and indeed capitalist modernity. How does that happen? Could you comment on the constitution or institution of new commons? The inspiring Zapatista uprising of 1994 was an attempt to defend ancient liberties of commoning written into the Mexican Revolution. But the ZAD (Zone to Defend) in France and perhaps the confederated communes of Rojava seem to be new commons constructed and defended from below. How far can we consider commoning and its higher law as a generalizable form – one that must be adapted to local particularities and histories but which may be seen as, in your nice phrase, “a ‘universalism’ from below.”

P. L.: Before trying to answer these questions more directly I want to revert to the story of the loaves and the fishes which gave the bishop her spiritual foundation. I had commented that the issue of left-overs or remainders might also be a materialist foundation, that is, there is a history of the commons that is nearly invisible. The notion of the undercommons is relevant to this because as the commons is criminalized by capitalist encroachments it often disappears from sight, at least the sight of the market and the state, and continues to provide sustenance “from below” and for below.  

Many of my historical investigations have attempted to recover the social relations despite that loss. My ‘period’ could be deemed what Marx calls “the system of manufacture,” namely that point in the transition of modes of production from handicraft where the craft persons owned and controlled the materials and means of production to that system of manufacture where the craft person did not. Depending on the craft this transition might take centuries to accomplish. During that time memory of the commons might find material presence in what were variously called usages, custom, or perquisites.  

Resistance to such expropriation has left semantic traces which may be found in dialect and craft dictionaries and dictionaries of the “underworld.” The history of the commons has a semantics of its own – pannage, chiminage, wainage, estovers, as we find in the Charters of Liberty. Servants received vails; shoemakers received clickings; hatters received buggings; the tanner took rumps and birrs; the forester took lops and tops; watchmakers received scrapings; tailors took cabbage; silk weavers took ends; wool weavers took fents and thrums; shipwrights chips; dockers took spillings or scrapings; lumpers took sweepings; coopers waxers; pinions and noils for the wool and silk comber, and on and on in the usually hidden contest across the length and breadth of homo faber.  

These usages were deemed legally criminal and economically inefficient. They are the semantic expression of the incomplete separation of the worker from his or her tools and materials of production. They belonged to the worker’s common. Now, how does this relate to “higher law”? We must distinguish law from custom.  While the former seeks to define the latter, in practice it is the custom and power of the working class to question or evade the law, or in the case of religious hegemony to appeal to “higher law.” Historically, many craft traditions are embedded with specific religious references among stories of angels and saints, and the miracle of the loaves and fishes is one of these.

G. R.: Going back now to the common principles of the Forest Charter: “subsistence, no enclosure, neighborhood, travel, and reparations,” I would like to close by asking you about the reparative justice of the jubilee. Discussing Robert Wedderburn and the “Atlantic Jubilee” in The Many-Headed Hydra, you and Marcus Rediker write: “A plan for liberation, jubilee appeared both in the Old Testament, as a legal practice of land redistribution, and in the New Testament, as part of the fulfillment of a prophecy in Isiah. The concept comprised six elements: First, jubilee happened every fifty years. Second, it restored land to its original owners. Third, it canceled debt. Fourth, it freed slaves and bond servants. Fifth, it was a year of fallow. Six, it was a year of no work.”[note]Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000, p. 290[/note]

Some of these elements resonate strongly today and have contemporary forms: Land Back, abolitionism and fugitivity, the cancelation of debt, Leave It in the Ground. Could you remind us how this reparative notion of jubilee is grounded historically in commoning? Do you think its invocation could be an attractor or igniter of resistance from below today? Where do you see that happening? In the end, it seems, it is always about the land, the source of sustenance and survivance (Gerald Vizenor[note]Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999[/note]), and about the forms of land tenure, commons or else capitalist private property. No land, no justice; no justice, no peace?

P. L.: Your last line, posed as a question – “No land, no justice; no justice, no peace” – strikes the target, hits the bull’s eye, because it makes land or the territory essential to the commons and to commoning. It is also the first characteristic of the jubilee. The notion of extractivism includes the soil, the oceans, and the sub-surface or underground. Capital requires not just energy from the fossil fuels but the extracted ores that provide the iron and steel of automobilism, not to mention the elements named “rare earths,” the phrase that brings the mind to the biosphere (how much “rarer” can you get?) as well as a potential casus belli among the Great Powers for Africa, for Asia.  

Now, the notion of jubilee brings together land and labor, production and reproduction, so for that reason it’s anti-capitalist. Its discursive origin are in monotheistic scriptures originating several millennia in the past. Historically speaking, its practices have been preserved by custom not law. Thus, there is an empirical foundation in the customs, or self-activity of the commoners themselves. That foundation need not require us to enter theological dispute, or even to appeal to “higher law,” but only to see that the wisdom of our ancestors may be preserved in those activities whose sanction may be need or which rely on practices “when the memory runneth not.”  

A generation of historians of English capitalism have wrestled with this problem as they have lifted their spades to dig in the archives of local customs in common. Modern French history, let’s say, starts not with the commons but with the commune. The historian, Kristin Ross, has described, renewed, and developed it in several of her books, recently in The Commune Form.[note]Kristin Ross, The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life, London / New York: Verso, 2024[/note] As we know one of its forms inspired Lenin who more directly related it to the state and the nation. The commons, like the commune, has a profound history that expresses immense capacities for creative, revolutionary practice. The struggle for common rights in the forests of the Rhine led the young man, Karl Marx, to his enduring critique of capitalism and formation of communist party.  

Writing as I do on May Day I remember that the day became a day of celebration for workers of the world after the Haymarket demonstration in Chicago in 1886, a demonstration that was sparked by the police shooting of iron molders at the McComick works for the production of reapers. These were the machines that shaved the grasses so close that gleaners had nothing left to gather in their aprons. Hence, we need to see the day as resistance to the technological attack on one of the oldest practices of commoning, going back to the fifth century BCE (before the common era) and the Book of Ruth.

This interview was conducted by email in April and May 2025.