On July 8th, 1549, in a quiet corner of the county of Norfolk, people witnessed a spectacle that would strike contemporary audiences as strange and reactionary, yet was both expected and appreciated in the mid sixteenth century: commoners filling ditches and uprooting fence posts in the countryside of Wymondham. This was no everyday affair nor annual occurrence, it was a protest, and foremost among the protesters grievances was enclosure, the appropriation of common land for private use, which was increasingly being perpetrated by landed gentry working in concert with lords of the manor, the aristocracy.
Robert Kett, a yeoman farmer who was granted right to freehold of common land, was among the first targets of the mob, but when they approached, he neither resisted, attacked nor fled. He spoke, listened and after consulting his conscience, filled his ditches, toppled his fences and lead the boisterous crowd to an oak atop Mousehold Heath overlooking the city of Norwich. There they formed a council. Word spread. Commoners, tradesmen and laborers from Norwich, Norfolk and neighboring counties joined the encampment, their numbers swelled, surpassed the population of Norwich and were rivaled only by the residents of London, yet they discussed their grievances, argued strategy and voted on reforms until they arrived at a consensus.
Beneath “The Oak of Reformation” they deliberated until they settled upon a list of 29 demands, which included the removal of all enclosures and restitution of The Commons, lower prices, a common system of weights and measures, employment instead of taxation, the right to keep their own livestock, freedom from corruption of the courts, separation of church and state, democracy and universal suffrage, liberty from wage labor and other forms of slavery, fishing rights, a prohibition on the purchasing of land, the abolishment of tithing, transparent use of taxpayer money, government transparency and an accounting, assessment and reform of every law of the land by a democratically elected commission representing the people. Their audacity, courage and ingenuity is comparable only to those colonists who would rather live free or die 227 years later in The American Revolutionary War. Their grievances were summarized eloquently by the English historian and scholar, Alexander Nevylle, who witnessed the uprising and recorded a facsimile of a speech he had heard by one of the protesters.
“Compare our respective positions: all power is in their hands, and they so use it as to make it unbearable; while nothing is left for us but the extreme of misery. As for them, they abound in luxuries; they are surrounded with all sorts of plenty; they, when they are jaded with pleasure, are roused from their state of weariness and languor by the violence of their avarice, and the fierceness of their lusts: while as for us, what is our condition? We are half dead with the length and severity of our labours; we have in deed and in truth to eat our bread in the sweat of our brow, and our whole lives are spent in nothing else than undergoing all the evils of hunger, cold, and thirst. And who will say that this is not a wretched and unworthy state of things? And most wretched and unworthy it undoubtedly is; but, bad as it may be, we could have endured it, if the gentry, besotted with pleasure and puffed up with pride, were not continually casting in our teeth, ‘What pitiful creatures these poor wretches are!’”
“This, then, is what we find fault with, and it is such treatment as this that we complain of. Urged on by their proud and haughty spirit, and either too idle or too careless to mind what they are doing, they actually make sport of our sufferings, a circumstance which, as indeed it ought to do, inflicts such pain upon our minds, and brings such disgrace upon our good name, that nothing worse can be mentioned, nothing more unfair can be endured. Again, take the conditions on which we may hold land: they are evidently of a shameful character, and more fit for slaves than for free men. We may hold it, it is true; but on what terms? Just as it suits the will and pleasure of some great man. But let an unhappy wretch offend one of these high and mighty folks, and what becomes of him then? Why, he is stripped, deprived, and turned out of everything. How long are we to submit to this? How long is so overbearing a spirit to remain unpunished?”
“Moreover, they have now arrived at such a height of cruelty and covetousness, that, not content with seizing everything, and getting all they can by fraud or force, to spend it in pleasure and effeminate indulgences, they have sucked the very blood out of our veins, and the marrow out of our bones. The Commons, which were left by our forefathers for the relief of ourselves and families, are taken from us; the lands, which within the remembrance of our fathers were open, are now surrounded with hedges and ditches; and the pastures are enclosed, so that no one can go upon them. The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and all the fruits so unsparingly brought forth by the earth, they look upon as their own, and consequently use them as such.”
“Nature, with all her abundance and variety, is unable to satisfy them, and so they think of new sources of enjoyment, such as sauces and perfumes, surrounding themselves with delicious scents, mixing sweet with sweet, and seeking on all sides whatever may gratify their desires and lusts. But what is the condition of the poor all this time? What is our food? Herbs and roots, and thankful may we be if, by incessant labour, we can get even these.”
“Thankful! That we may, for they are vexed that we live and breathe without their leave; yes, they are vexed that we can breathe the common air, or look up at the glorious sky, without first asking and obtaining their permission. We cannot, any longer, endure injuries so great and so cruel; nor can we, without being moved by it, behold the insolence of the nobility and gentry: we will sooner betake ourselves to arms, and mix heaven and earth in confusion, than submit to such atrocities. Since nature has made the same provision for us as for them, and has given us also a soul and a body, we should like to know whether this is all that we are to expect at her hands.”
“Look at them, and look at us: have we not all the same form? are we not all born in the same way? Why, then, should their mode of life, why should their lot, be so vastly different from ours? We see plainly that matters are come to an extremity, and extremities we are determined to try. We will throw down hedges, fill up ditches, lay open The Commons, and level to the ground whatever enclosures they have put up, no less shamefully, than meanly and unfeelingly. We will not submit to be oppressed with burdens in spite of ourselves, nor undergo such disgrace as we should be labouring under, if, by growing old in suffering these evils, we left to our posterity the state full of wretchedness and misery, and in a much worse condition than we had found it.”
“We will, therefore, leave no stone unturned to obtain our rights, nor will we give over until things are settled as we wish them to be. What we want is liberty, and the power, in common with our so-called superiors, of enjoying the gifts of nature: it is true our wish may not be gratified, but this one thing is certain, our attempt to obtain it will end only with our lives.”
On July 21st, The Duke of Somerset, who served as Lord Protector of The Realm during King Edward The Sixth’s pubescence after Henry The Eighth’s death, sent a messenger to the encampment offering pardon, an offer Kett refused. Since he committed no act of treason, Kett argued, there was no need for pardon. His refusal, his insistence that peaceful dialogue with ones neighbors is inadequate grounds for treason, made him an enemy-of-the-state and those who stood beside him would be treated as enemy combatants. Instead of dispersing, Kett and about 12,000 commoners - many of whom were citizens of Norwich - bombarded the Royal Army with arrows and cannon fire, forded The River Wensum and claimed the city.
Ten days later, William Parr, The Marquess of Northhampton, sent 1500 reinforcements to quell the rebellion. Among them were Italian mercenaries. Instead of arming the ramparts, the rebels left open the city gates, waited until nightfall and decimated the opposition in two days of urban guerrilla warfare. The Marquess’ failure prompted The Duke to summon the aid of The Earl of Warwick, John Dudley, who sent 14,000 soldiers, including mercenaries from Wales, Germany and Spain, to fight the rebels, who resisted for a period of days before The Royal Army was replenished with 1500 German gunners and pike-men. On the 27th of August, the two armies faced one another on the field of battle in a dale beside the heath. Thousands of proud, common Englishmen were killed by their king, the nobility that served him and the landed gentry that worked in concert with them, and half the army summoned to dispense with the rebels were foreign mercenaries. Hundreds of rebels were lynched in the aftermath of battle at “The Oak of Reformation.” Kett was captured the following day and hung from the tower of Norwich on December 7th, 1549.
Thousands of men forfeited their lives and brought their country to the brink of revolution and the straw that broke the camel’s back was a fence post. 140 years later, John Locke, who once wrote an instruction manual on brainwashing and slavery entitled, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” published “Two Treatises of Government,” which celebrates private property at the expense of The Commons. Locke’s political essay would herald the beginning of the end for the common man, although the struggles of common folk would persist so long as there was injustice, inequality, slavery (including wage-slavery) and a lack of democratic reform and government transparency.
Locke begins in chapter 5 by paying lip-service to both Christianity and The Commons. “It is very clear,” he says, “That God, as king David says in Psalm 115:16, has given the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common.” He mentions Native Americans. “The fruit, or venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his, or a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his life.” Thus begins the narrative of private property.
In chapter 5, section 27, Locke argues that since a man’s body is his property, anything he alters with the use of his body is - by extension - also his property. “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” In section 28, Locke employs a combination of circular reasoning and anecdote in support his argument. If a man is walking through the forest and picks up a fruit, when is it his? After he has plucked it or eaten it? he asks. “We see in commons, which remain so by compact, that it is the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in, which begins the property; without which the common is of no use.”
If The Commons is of no use when left unaltered by man, then why if I pluck several apples, eat them, then discard them, do the seeds yield new life? Don’t the offspring bear fruit and doesn’t that fruit remain common to all? Unless someone prevents me from taking the fruit and eating it, it absolutely remains common to all. Locke employs the same rationale using different examples (water and fish) before anticipating a counter-argument. “It will perhaps be objected to this, that if gathering the acorns, or other fruits of the earth, makes a right to them, then any one may engross as much as he will. To which I answer, ‘Not so.’” Man is limited by spoilage, he answers, which he defines as “As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life.” He assumes two things: 1) once laws protecting private property are established, cultivation of the land will remain requisite for holding that property; 2) He assumes man’s ability to “use” Nature is limited in size and scope. He also neglects to define “make use of” or “to any advantage of life.” The combination of Locke’s rationale and ill-defined terminology provides adequate rhetoric for those who would defend the extraction of shale gas to fuel our consumer society despite its destruction of the water supply.
In section 32, Locke dispenses with the chicanery and reveals his biases. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of,” he writes, “So much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common...” He then proceeds to quote the Bible to defend enclosure (“privatization” or “The Tragedy of The Commons”) after having quoted The Good Book in section 25 to acknowledge a right to common: “God and his reason commanded [man] to subdue the earth . . . and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour.” In seven short steps, Locke’s rhetoric has evolved from an acknowledgment of a right to Nature, The Commons, which equally provides for the sustenance of all mankind, into a rallying cry to “subdue the earth” and “inclose it from the common.”
In section 33, Locke extends the definition of private property to include “improvements.” “Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land,” he writes, “By improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. . . . No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst . . .” But what if someone builds a damn upstream, depriving those downstream of water, or what if someone builds a damn downstream and floods the lands of those who live upstream?
In section 34, Locke’s sophistry verges on absurdity. All that is common isn’t common, he argues, then proceeds in section 35 to dispense with niceties. He admits that private property would hurt commoners yet has the gall to rationalize their suffering by inserting a belief, the belief that god instructed man to appropriation: “. . . the remainder, after such enclosure, would not be as good to the rest of the commoners, as the whole was when they could all make use of the whole; whereas in the beginning and first peopling of the great common of the world, it was quite otherwise. The law man was under, was rather for appropriating.” In section 36, Locke assumes there will never be any shortage of land to appropriate, an assumption he follows with a rationalization for the appropriation of land from America’s native inhabitants, who he describes as “needy and wretched.”
In section 38, Locke includes the idea of permanence in his definition of property, and since Locke’s definition of property is predicated upon an alteration of Nature, if Nature is permanently altered, or destroyed, property is permanently established. In subsequent sections, he quantifies value according to a thing’s usefulness, emphasizing the usefulness of labor, which he purports to be 99 times greater than Nature. He never once considers the state of labor in the absence of nature, or the usefulness of fresh air, fresh water and a healthy ecosystem. He even dares to suggest that the Native Americans lack conveniences because they don’t adhere to the concept of private property, yet what’s more convenient? An increase in food production leads to an increase in population and an increase in population requires us to expend our finite resources. In other words, any increase in population increases the likelihood of poverty, which is among the most humiliating of conditions in which to live. Today’s working poor are lucky if they can afford to pay rent, bills, clothes and food while working two part-time minimum-wage jobs despite the modicum of welfare benefits that may be available to them, which are currently being eroded by a political and financial elite. Native Americans knew nothing of poverty. They enjoyed the convenience of abundant game and countless sources of wild fruit.
In section 42, Locke describes Nature as “waste.” In section 43, he writes that “Nature and the earth [furnish] only the almost worthless materials.” In section 44, he references the “iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dying drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes . . .” in section 43 and uses them as a rationale for private property because the “invention and arts had improved the conveniences of life, [therefore they do] not belong in common to others.” Property now includes all trades, crafts and arts. All of industry must be owned by someone or something.
In section 45, Locke says those who own private property abdicate their common rights, then reveals - in contradiction to his prior statements - that a combination of money and stock have lead to an increase in people and a depletion of available land, “yet,” he reminds us, “There are still great tracts of ground to be found, which (the inhabitants thereof not having joined with the rest of mankind, in the consent of the use of their common money) lie waste, and are more than the people who dwell on it do, or can make use of, and so still lie in common; tho' this can scarce happen amongst that part of mankind that have consented to the use of money.” Locke encourages the reader to invite common folk, who trade peacefully amongst themselves, to forfeit fiscal autonomy, local commerce and right to common in exchange for a foreign system of trade: coin.
The hoarding of money, Locke argues, is a completely worthy enterprise because money (unlike food) doesn’t spoil, and since money naturally leads to an increase in possessions, the hoarding of it and its capacity - when combined with private property - to alter, cultivate and excavate nature, is a positive good, yet he conveniently omits any mention of those who lack money. Such an outcome seems not to have occurred to the sage, august and moneyed gentleman. “Find out something that hath the use and value of money amongst his neighbours,” he writes, “[and] you shall see the same man will begin presently to enlarge his possessions.” According to Locke’s liberal ideology, everything has the use and value of money. Everything is to be possessed, everything is property, and all of it has a price tag, therefore all of it should be hoarded. Locke even recognizes the reality of the unequal, unjust and self-serving situation he has proposed.
“But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.”
John Locke acknowledges that money can be abused and that property can fashion the means for making willing subjects out of men, yet he offers the reader little in the form of indemnity besides a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders, and with that he concludes his treatise on property. The paragon of Liberalism petitions his readers to appropriate land, subdue the earth, ravage nature, hoard money and dispossess common people of local trade, common property and common rights. He has written a program of appropriation and enslavement that provides the ideological foundation required for an elite group of landed gentry to slowly enclose (privatize and commodify) all things under the sun, including all of life, with the inevitable goal of total usurpation of power. He sets up the board for a brutal game of possession predicated upon nothing short of self-interest and the capacity for man to screw over his fellow man. His ideology is one of cruelty, yet he is widely cited as one of the foremost inspirations for The American Revolution. They call him “The Father of Modern Democracy,” yet he never once advocated for democracy.
In “Two Treatises of Government” Locke is concerned with the state of “The Common-wealth,” which he specifically defines as “not a democracy,” or a government that includes “subordinate communities.”
“By common-wealth, I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, or any form of government, but any independent community, which the Latines signified by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language, is common-wealth, and most properly expresses such a society of men, which community or city in English does not; for there may be subordinate communities in a government . . .”
Locke does provide a worthy analysis of the conditions for the dissolution of government, which include the imposition of law that undermines the consent of the governed, the interdiction of a legislature’s right to assemble, the corruption of the legislature, the forfeiture of the country to foreign rule and a breach of trust between the people and their law-makers. The problem is Locke’s definition of political power, or “[The] right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property.” Property is the basis of Locke’s ideology. It moderates all aspects of life and is requisite for membership in society.
“The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they [choose] and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making . . .”
Approximateley 180,000 Britons owned land during Locke’s lifetime. The remaining 5,870,000 Britons were without property. According to Locke, those people, the commoners, laborers and tradesmen, were persona non grata and entitled to none of the rights granted to landowners, including the right to dissolve tyrannical governments. If The United States were to employ this standard tomorrow, 110 million Americans would be dispossessed of the right to vote or challenge authority. If The United States were transformed into a Lockean utopia tomorrow and only 3 percent of Americans owned property, approximately 304 million Americans would be dispossessed of the right to vote or challenge authority.
If this is not ample evidence of Locke’s iniquity, allow me to regale you with a few more details of the man’s character. Although Locke inveighs his readers to raise arms against despotic regimes, he’s quick to “ensure” that “civil society,” the monarch, nobility and landed gentry, be “excluded from war.” Locke also profited directly from slavery in more than one way: he held stock in The Royal African Trading Company and was a member of Carolina’s nobility, a colony founded upon a charter he had written, a charter that established a confederacy of oligarchic slave plantations in The Americas.
It should be obvious to all but the most dense, deluded and privileged personalities that John Locke was a cruel, self-serving, deceitful son-of-a-bitch, a con-man who represents the most vile of human traits, and although the chicanery, meanness and egotism of his fellow liberals pales in comparison, with few exceptions, their programs of thought fail to meet common standards of moral rectitude by a wide margin, and even fewer were proponents of actual democracy. In his “Philosophical Dictionary,” Voltaire distracts the reader with false analogies, comparing democracy to a dragon with too many heads or too many tails. “The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.” He then goes on to quip that slavery and slaughter were good for the Jews because it transformed them into a physically attractive people. In Leviathan, Hobbes libels democracy with appeals to fear, quoting “rapine,” “civil war” and “revenge,” then goes on to suggest that men forfeit all their rights to their law-makers, the most venerable of which he believes to be the monarch. Immanuel Kant offers us the absurd claim that democracy is inherently despotic, then goes on to suggest that republicanism, which he considers to be the best of all possible governments, is contingent upon having the fewest number of possible representatives, thereby implying that the perfect republic is a monarchy, or tyranny. Spinoza claims to support democracy, yet his definition of democracy is de facto plutocracy.
Spinoza’s “democracy” is a society in which “elder men only, who have reached a certain year of their age, or the first-born only, as soon as their age allows, or those who contribute to the republic a certain sum of money, shall have the right of voting in the supreme council and managing the business of the dominion.” This “council” of “patricians” “would be composed of fewer citizens than that of [an] aristocracy.” It would be a society where “not the best, but those who happen by chance to be rich, or who are born eldest, are destined to govern,” and - Spinoza reassures us - society would exclude children, women, wards and slaves, a category that includes common serfs, or wage-laborers, so 98 percent of the total population would be given neither suffrage nor rights in Spinoza’s “democracy.” He actually says this in no uncertain terms in his political treatise, “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.”
“. . . if each individual hands over the whole of his power to the body politic, the latter will then possess sovereign natural right over all things; that is, it will have sole and unquestioned dominion, and everyone will be bound to obey, under pain of the severest punishment. A body politic of this kind is called a Democracy, which may be defined as a society which wields all its power as a whole. The sovereign power is not restrained by any laws, but everyone is bound to obey it in all things; such is the state of things implied when men either tacitly or expressly handed over to it all their power of self-defense, or in other words, all their right. For if they had wished to retain any right for themselves, they ought to have taken precautions for its defense and preservation; as they have not done so, and indeed could not have done so without dividing and consequently ruining the state, they placed themselves absolutely at the mercy of the sovereign power; and, therefore, having acted . . . as reason and necessity demanded, they are obliged to fulfil the commands of the sovereign power, however absurd these may be, else they will be public enemies, and will act against reason, which urges the preservation of the state as a primary duty.”
Spinoza equates reason with the will of the sovereign, which we know to be a plutocracy “[unrestrained] by any laws,” and those who act unreasonably, Spinoza cautions, in contravention of the sovereign will, “however absurd [it] may be,” should be deemed enemies of the state. Spinoza’s sovereign power is not only unrestrained by law, its subjects are required to obey it in all things. They’re “obliged,” he says, to sacrifice all their rights, including the right to self-defense, to the plutocracy, “for if they had wished to retain any right for themselves, they ought to have taken precautions for its defense and preservation.” And what if we were to take precautions for our defense and preservation? What then? You can’t, he responds, without evoking the right of the sovereign to “compel men by force, or restrain them by threats of the universally feared punishment of death.”
Today, this paragon of liberalism is widely regarded as one of the foremost proponents of democracy, a fact that should add to everyone’s distress.
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