The Commoner

Issue 04: May 2002

‘Enclosures, Power, Commons’

Each of the articles in this number of The Commoner addresses one particular facet of the strategic and theoretical nodes we need to tackle in order to change the world: the polarity between enclosures and commons and their link, power.


  • Introduction by the Editors: Enclosures, Power, Commons [PDF]
  • John Holloway: Beyond Power. Chapter 3 from “Change the world without taking power” [PDF]
  • John Holloway: Twelve theses [PDF]
  • Ruth Rikowski: The Capitalisation of Libraries [PDF]
  • Richard Barbrook: The Regulation of Liberty: free speech, free trade and free gifts on the Net [PDF]

‘What makes the constitution of a state really strong and durable is such a close observance of [social] conventions that natural relations and laws come to be in harmony on all points, so that the law…seems only to ensure, accompany and correct what is natural.’
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]

We start from the scream, not from the word.
Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism,
a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO.
[John Holloway]

All that is solid melts into air…the need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
(Marx and Engels, 1848)