
"Resolution on the Antiwar Congress of the London Bureau" (July 1936)
Source: Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002), Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 69
"Resolution on the Antiwar Congress of the London Bureau" (July 1936)
Silence is a Commons (1982)
Context: The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order: Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the environment. Before, in any juridical system, most of the environment had been considered as commons from which most people could draw most of their sustenance without needing to take recourse to the market. After enclosure, the environment became primarily a resource at the service of "enterprises" which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed nature into the goods and services on which the satisfaction of basic needs by consumers depends. This transformation is in the blind spot of political economy.
As quoted in “Charles Coughlin, 30's ‘Radio Priest,’” Albin Krebsoct, New York Times, Oct. 28, 1979. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/28/archives/charles-coughlin-30s-radio-priest-dies-fiery-sermons-stirred-furor.html
2010s, Markets, Governments, and the Common Good
Concurring in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Co., 157 U. S. 429, 607 (1895).
¶ 19
State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ (1888)
1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)
Context: To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who profit by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra pro-slavery men finally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery.