Liberties and Commons for All

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Linebaugh's chief works in this vein have been The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2003) ; and, with Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). Chapter 7 of The Magna Carta Manifesto was published in this journal as “The Law of the Jungle,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 18, No. 4, December, 2007, pp. 38–53.

²Among the most forceful statements of the Magna Carta in defense of the forest. The former states: “All forests which have been made forest in our time shall be immediately disafforested; and so it shall be done with riverbanks that have been made preserves by us in our time.” Note the construction: “forests which have been made forest …” These people knew well what has been widely forgotten today: that “nature” is a construct, and naming “matters.”

³Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy, trans. Patrick Camiller, Maria Mies, and Gerd Wieh (New York: Zed, 1999). The work “suggests a new world in the shell of the old,” Linebaugh writes on page 313.

⁴Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

⁵Linebaugh sees in Chapter 42, where this is laid out, a forerunner of the Palestinian Right of Return. [p. 277].