The Rule of Property I and II, by Karen Coulter

I commend the entire post to your attention ... here is a snippet:

Bill Huston's Blog (Binghamton NY): The Rule of Property I and II, by Karen Coulter. On Sunday, April 1, 1649, a group of poor men gathered on St. George's Hill and began to dig – planting carrots, parsnips and beans as a way to claim ownership of the common lands and reject conventional piety by ignoring the Sabbath. A contemporary observer witnessed, "They invite all to come in and help them and promise them meat, drink and clothes... They will be four or five thousand within ten days... It is feared they have some design in hand." The Digger colony on St. George's Hill was just one well-documented example of many such undertakings by those in resistant occupations. The Diggers' ordered the lords of the manors to stop cutting down "our common woods and trees... for your private use" (as the U. S. National Forests are now cut down by corporations for private use). After Oliver Cromwell's reformist victory over the monarchy, the Diggers demanded in 1650 that "confiscated church, crown and royalists' land be turned over to the poor." Such statements deeply challenged existing property usurpations with the consequence that direct military intervention on behalf of private property was soon taken by the new English republic. The commoners were forced from St. George's Hill by the end of the year. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Property and rights deemed the domain of a ruling elite have long been protected by the armed military and police forces of a country. Whether we speak of people's claims to the commons in the seventeenth century, the American colonists' claims to fair governance in the eighteenth century, women's claims to voting rights and workers' claims to safety on the railroads in the nineteenth century, activist claims against corporate harms to our communities, environments and economic lives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the response is always the same. People acting in unison on behalf of equality, fairness, ecological sanity, worker and public health, or real democracy are brought to heel by the "Rule of Law" in service to property and backed by government force. The Diggers were accompanied in their rebellion against the elite's redefinition of property by many other common folk including the Anabaptists, Antinomians, Familists and Ranters, the Quakers, New Model Army and the broader Leveler movement. These resisters put forth schemes to limit wealth and land concentration in English society. They demanded that the property of the rich be shared among the poor and redivided yearly. The Levelers reality was the commons and so they called for changes in their society that are unrecognizable in today's dominant frame of reference. They advocated the abolition of buying and selling, with the resulting absence of property in a possessive, legal sense. This would greatly reduce the need for judges and lawyers – and by extension, for the coercive state. Like their counterparts in every generation, they established arrangements for everyday life that manifested vastly different values, that put in place commitments to collectivity and fairness.

Do people matter more than property?  Are property rights superior to human rights?   This is a useful summary of some of the history and thought.

Comments

[Saint George Realtor]

Long live the rule of law