In precapitalist England, a person could gather wood from the forest for fuel and shelter, graze cattle on common pasture, or glean the fields after harvest to gather what the reapers left behind. These uses of the land are hard to imagine from today’s vantage point, where our movement is constrained by private property. But up until the early nineteenth century, these were customary rights for many, built into the fabric of daily life. Their destruction through enclosure, criminalization, and violence was the precondition for capitalism. Indeed, the purpose of the Industrial Revolution was to create a new class of factory laborers by removing their means of subsistence, which was only possible through enclosing the commons.Peter Linebaugh has spent more than five decades tracing this history, following the commons and their destruction across the Atlantic world: from the forests of the Rhineland that drew the young Karl Marx into political economy, to the London dockyards where customary takings were rebranded as theft, to Yorkshire factories where Luddites smashed the industrial looms that would eventually develop into computers.A student of E. P. Thompson, Linebaugh is among the foremost historians of the commons, enclosure, and the making of the Atlantic working class. He is the author of many books, including The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century; The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All; Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance; and Red Round Globe Hot Burning. With Marcus Rediker, he coauthored The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, and he is currently finishing a book titled Thanatocracy: Capital Punishment and the Punishment of Capital.This conversation between Peter Linebaugh and Daniel Denvir was recorded for the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig over the course of two episodes, edited and condensed here for brevity and clarity. In it, Linebaugh ranges across…
