Land

[Alan Durant]

For those of you who missed this Monbiot article I thought it was worth adding here. It found me through RSN, no not the Royal Society of Nurses but Reader Supported News.

Alan

After 800 Years, the Barons Are Back in Control of Britain

By George Monbiot, Guardian UK

17 July 12

 

The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce

ounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede campus. It's a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus - pressed, as if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land. Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived, on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for the company which now owns the land came slithering through the mud in his suit and patent leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Already the crops the settlers had planted had been destroyed once; the day after my visit they were destroyed again. But the repeated destruction, removals and arrests have not deterred them. As one of their number, Gareth Newnham, told me: "If we go to prison we'll just come back … I'm not saying that this is the only way. But at least we're creating an opportunity for young people to step out of the system."

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class holds the nation's children to ransom. Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative?

But the alternatives have also been shut down: you are excluded yet you cannot opt out. The land - even disused land - is guarded as fiercely as the rest of the economy. Its ownership is scarcely less concentrated than it was when the Magna Carta was written. But today there is no Charter of the Forest (the document appended to the Magna Carta in 1217, granting the common people rights to use the royal estates). As Simon Moore, an articulate, well-read 27-year-old, explained, "those who control the land have enjoyed massive economic and political privileges. The relationship between land and democracy is a strong one, which is not widely understood."

As we sat in the wooden house the diggers have built, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, the latest attempt to reform the House of Lords was collapsing in parliament. Almost 800 years after the Magna Carta was approved, unrepresentative power of the kind familiar to King John and his barons still holds sway. Even in the House of Commons, most seats are pocket boroughs, controlled by those who fund the major parties and establish the limits of political action.

Through such ancient powers, our illegitimate rulers sustain a system of ancient injustices, which curtail alternatives and lock the poor into rent and debt. This spring, the government dropped a clause into an unrelated bill so late that it could not be properly scrutinised by the House of Commons, criminalising the squatting of abandoned residential buildings.

The House of Lords, among whom the landowning class is still well-represented, approved the measure. Thousands of people who have solved their own housing crises will now be evicted, just as housing benefit payments are being cut back. I remember a political postcard from the early 1990s titled "Britain in 2020", which depicted the police rounding up some scruffy-looking people with the words, "you're under arrest for not owning or renting property". It was funny then; it's less funny today.

The young men and women camping at Runnymede are trying to revive a different tradition, largely forgotten in the new age of robber barons. They are seeking, in the words of the Diggers of 1649, to make "the Earth a common treasury for all … not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in the creation". The tradition of resistance, the assertion of independence from the laws devised to protect the landlords' ill-gotten property, long pre-date and long post-date the Magna Carta. But today they scarcely feature in national consciousness.

I set off in lashing rain to catch a train home from Egham, on the other side of the hill. As I walked into the town, I found the pavements packed with people. The rain bounced off their umbrellas, forming a silver mist. The front passed and the sun came out, and a few minutes later everyone began to cheer and wave their flags as the Olympic torch was carried down the road. The sense of common purpose was tangible, the readiness for sacrifice (in the form of a thorough soaking) just as evident. Half of what we need is here already. Now how do we recruit it to the fight for democracy?

 

[Graham Hill]

Maybe better luck setting up camp in the abandoned olympic venues.

[L. S. Heatherly]

Beautiful article by Monbiot!

The most true and real phenomena in the civilized world are the most beautiful!

The purity of wild flowers and berries surprisingly re-appearing just

beyond the artificialized, hybridized, genetically engineered, artificialized

vegitable and flowers in rows! And citizens of the artificial city-nations,

surprisingly re-naturalizing their lives and souls by reappearing

in the countryside, returning closer the the land, rebecoming

terrestrial human beings of the Earth!

 

Back to the Land, Love, Children and natural Freedom!

This springs from the original, impulse of the human spirit,

authentic to Earth's natural humanity! Before civilization's

occupation of all natural, living balances, all naturals, all ecologies!

L.S. Heatherly

[Albert Pierce Bales]

Lovely, lovely, yes, yes, but the article is not about frolicking in the heather, it's about social collapse and the desperate measures of oppressed people trying to survive.  The agendas of the political oligarchs on both sides of the pond are identical; privatization, disenfranchising the working classes, total surveylance, monopoly economies, suppression of any and all solidarity, seizing control at every level of existence, dumbing down the educational system and inserting the newspeak of propaganda into every medium of communication.  I don't get around much but it seems to me that Americans are, by and large the most politically ignorant people in the developed world.  It would be astounding to see such a thing as this happening in the U.S.

Over here the media mentions class war but only as a complaint of the rich who believe that the unrest is caused by envy.  And the irony, if that is what you want to call it, is that the the privileged are blind to any other reality other than that which suits their capacity to understand, for they too are propagandized.  I can say with absolute certainty that no class of poor people ever started a class war.

It is not practical or realistic for people to organize for violent revolution in the U.S. or the U.K. because if there were the slightest chance of popular success there would be a police state in force within days.  There are elements in both governments who wait and hope for such an event.  We can fight globalization, however, by organizing and demonstrating and disseminating the truth.  Eventually there will be change, the question is at what cost and when?   

[L. S. Heatherly]

Mr Bales,

Inserting ideas into another writer's writings is against the rules of reason, literature

 and human compassion.

Your inserted "frolicking in the heather" is not to be found nor implied in my comment.

Monbiot:

"..to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land..."

This is an instance of returning "back to the land", which my comment applaudes and

rejoices in. Back to LIVE and "build a communty"-- not to be " frolicking in."

This Back to the Land Movement was the heart of the Counterculture in the USA

during the 60s and 70s. And continues today, largely unreported by the media.

I advocated and praised all back to the land moves (living with

a closer, more autonomous relationship with the rest of Earth-life)  many times in

my major 446 page work, praised, for one, by Gary Snyder as "Amazing and truly

ground-breaking...I acknowledge the vision.. hope the book is widely read."

My words.."returning closer to the land... rebecoming terrestrial human

being[as opposed to citified and corporatized]:

there is nothing about my comment on Monbiot's article  that can be, in context,

 reasonably mistaken for "frolicking" in the countryside.

 

Your sracastic, attacking comment  "Lovely, lovely, yes yes," has nothing to say

about my ACTUAL comment on Monbiot's article. You have mischaracterized my comment.

YOUR comment is from your ego, and is Unlovely, Unlovely.

My comment is from and about love-- love is more

flowing when people are in a closer relationship with Earth's

land, its diverse plants and animals, with their children,  with

organic communty, and the eons-old freedoms freely flowing

in this natural, sociocultural matrix-medium-environment-lifeway.

(that's my philosophy, do not reply with yours. I have better use

for my time and being upon this abused Earth.)

 

Continue the good nonviolent fight you have chosen; you should  be

glad to know we are allies (with philosophies that should be allied),

and Best Wishes,

L. S. Heatherly

 

 

[Albert Pierce Bales]

I didn't mean to put anyone's nose out of joint by agreeing with the import of the article, and I agree that to live in harmony with nature is a noble and beautiful thing.  However Mr. Monbiot speaks of a "fight for democracy", by people who are,..." excluded from jobs...from hopes for a better world...from self ownership."  People who, while they might like to live in a mutually nurturing relationship with nature are being run across the countryside by the police and are ready to go to jail for their beliefs.  The jist of the article is oppression, resistance and the acts of "illegitimate rulers".

Even though I, as someone who is against human compassion and reason, would never insert ideas into another's writing simply because I cannot see the point of doing so.  Frankly I am taken aback by your extreme sensitivity since I think it is clear that you commented upon an ideal implied in the article and I commented on the substance of it.  Actually, it seemed to me that your comment missed the whole point of the article and as far as  that goes a little sarcasm never hurt anyone.  

Please note that I have expressed no philosophy here nor do I intend to take up your time which is better spent abusing the earth.  Just kidding. 

[Graham Hill]

In this locale blackberries and mussels are available hunter-gatherer food. 99% of what we ate came from shops. Lovely slugs and snails take the rest as we have killed nearly all the birds; but for the curse-ed seagulls that quit hunting for dwindling fish to break our rubbish bags. The machinery of oppression today ;energy supplier EDF has promised to bill us for electricity even though we buy it as we need it on a key meter. On the bumpf with the letter they have promised the UK at least 2 nuclear power stations.

If we are fighting over the scraps of this website, then I am with Monbiot in his analysis but like you Mr Bales I think most people are too mired to see their way out and if I am wrong then too wise to 'stick their neck out'to do anything. Big brother is incompetent but he rules nevertheless.

I did find Mr Bales characterisation of L.S.Heatherly's contribution harsh but fair.

A frolic is possible in the sea but the land is grim.

 

 

[L. S. Heatherly]

Since when is harshness fair?
Mr Hill must think my comment on Monbiot's Land was harsh to deserve
harhness in return! That's both cold and false.

I was positive and even applauded Monbiot
I managed to end positively with Bale-- with "Keep up the good nonviolent fight "
and "Best wishes" to him.

Nothing but harshness and negitivity from Hill and Bale.

Nor do either of these two cite the sentence or passage in my comment
that can be accurately portaryed as advocating "frolicking" in the countryside!!

Excerpts from MY comment on Monbiot's article:

..the purity of wildflowers and berries.. reappearing.. just beyond the
.. genetically engineered flowers and vegetables [ this is frolicking? Oh
perhaps you refer to the wild plants.]

"...citizens of the artificial city-nations renaturalizing their
lives and souls[ -- to speak of human lives and souls
returning to the countryside to live and build community: how can that
be called an advocacy of country frolicking!! ]
...reappearing in the countryside, closer to the land, rebecoming
terrestrial human beings.." [how is this to be called by Bale and Hill, " frolicking"?]

.."Back to the Land, Love, Children, and natural Freedom!..
[how is this portrayed as advocating "frolicking"?

Perhaps Alan Durant will weigh in here on the side of truth and goodwill!

Best wishes to Hill also,
(no one is perfect; but, sometimes can be helped by an example of goodwill)

Toward Earth-life's and Humanity's Natural Fulfillment,
L. S. Heatherly

[Albert Pierce Bales]

I, for one, will be assuming the fetal position on the living room rug until Spring to insure  that any mongrel witticisms shall self castrate themselves and prevent unfair ejaculations of aimless euridition.

[L. S. Heatherly]

Ah, goodwill in the form of brillaint humor! Thanks.

(I said ego, not libido; but they do have a close, interactive relationship.)

In a Hollywood cowboy's words,

Happy Trails

[Alan Durant]

I don't really get why theses discussions seem so often to end up as, "you said this", "no I didn't,""yes you did", " I meant this or that". It shouldn't end up as a who can piss highest contest or look how clever I am. I'm sure we can agree more than we disagree. I keep waiting for a killer idea on what we might try and do next, preferably expressed in straightforward English.

Just as an aside, the price of Maize locally has gone up by 150% in the last few weeks. This is as a result of drought and profiteering. Its long been uneconomical to keep pigs unless you have the land and ability to grow your own cereals and the new hike in prices will make keeping  laying chickens unfordable. People will be forced into the arms of the likes of Tesco buying their third rate eggs produced in cruel conditions. If your poor you have to have the cheapest option.

Alan