mp->> What kind of world are you fighting for?

Tony->> Well, first of all it doesn't involve ownership of land. Many people in history have identified this as an issue, and given extremely good reasons for saying that land should never be property. Property is something that an individual puts his time and effort into having some part in creating, whether he buys it or sells it, or whatever. Land is not anything like that. Land is a free gift to mankind, whether you look at it in a sort of religious point of view or just from a practical point of view, not to any one individual above anyone else. In Britain, which was the first country to go for mass urbanization, they very cleverly chose land as the first main thing to privatize. Up until then it was a shared common natural resource which people organized amongst themselves basically how to use. It was privatized by enclosure acts which were, for the most part, private acts of Parliament brought by lords of the manor in the feudal system and large farmers through Parliament, which only land-owners, the larger land-owners, were able to elect MPs to. So basically they were giving themselves the land. If you actually look at what happened on the ground, you find that there was massive resistance on the ground. The only reason that this isn't very well documented is because most of the people that were resisting enclosure couldn't read or write. Very little records left of the actual details. But you can see, for instance, on one occasion in Oxfordshire where the land there was enclosed, as a notice was being pinned to the parish church door, between the time it took the guy to enter the village, to get to the parish church, there was a massive throng of people in between him and the parish church door saying "This land will not be enclosed!" And that was a battle which went on over about a hundred years or more in Oxfordshire. Finally the land was enclosed by the Duke of Marlborough, but the local people, massive amount of resistance just in that one area. If you look at the whole process of enclosure, the only way it happened was by doing it piecemeal, a little bit here, a little bit there, get away with it here, we can get away with it there. And slowly but surely over several hundred years from about the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, pretty much all the land in the country now is privatized or enclosed.

Brendan->> I would endorse everything he said, and I would also add a point that I think this land enclosure was the first example of massive resources being concentrated in a few hands, it's the beginning the corporatism. And if you look at corporatism, its monopolistic nature takes over more and more and more of the economy, of the world. You can equate the enclosure of rights over all sorts of goods and services as being equivalent to the enclosure of land. We even have rights over genetic material that we contain within our own bodies. Our own genetic material is being privatized and put into the ownership of corporate interests, which is just fucking unbelievable! Where will it all end? If they could find a way of enclosing the air we breathe and selling it back to us they would. The land enclosure is the most fundamental resource, but it's the beginning of a massive process where everything we have we become consumers of from corporate business.

Tony->> We've also been brought up with this concept of left-wing and right-wing, certainly here in Britain. I'm becoming increasingly aware that this is a bit of a bogus polarization. 'Cause actually what the left believes in is not entirely opposite to what the right believes in. One of the things that we've identified is that actually one of the most fundamental differences between people is their attitude to private property rights, whether people are interested in having things in common ownership or whether they're interested in protecting private ownership rights. And of course, if you're really obsessed with and interested in private property rights, one of the people that's pushing forward that agenda, what you're doing is you're actually extending the criteria of what is private property. And that is being extended and extended further and further in what I feel is an extremely dangerous way towards people basically owning people. That's what we're moving towards. And our belief is that private property is something that should be kept to a minimum and that most things are much better when they're used and shared. For example, we've seen the privatization of transport, public transport being sold off to private interests, and also the rising power of private cars. That's one example of something which would be far, far better if it was a community resource, which is being privatized.

Brendan->> Personally I would say we want a socially equitable, spiritually enriching, and sustainable way of life for everyone, no one left out.

Tony->> And I think practically, that means this whole term subsidiarity, which means that decisions are made at the lowest appropriate level. In other words, at the moment we have some people in Somerset who've just successfully fought a planning battle over five years to get planning permission for an eco-village, just west of Yeoville at Tinker's Bubble. And those decisions have had to be made from Westminster. What on earth is going on? The only people that are really affected by this are the people who live in the local village. So, that kind of decision needs to be made locally. We're talking about really devolving decision-making to the lowest appropriate level. It's really, really simple. And also communities that function, not large numbers of people coming under one decision-making system. At the moment we've got local authorities that have hundreds of thousands of constituents, all decisions being made in just one place. What we're talking about really is devolved decision-making, something like the village in the manorial system, that kind of level, where basically you know everybody that you're making decisions for and about. And also that there's some kind of local system of justice as well. These are the kind of positive visions that actually come out when you can get reclaimed bits of land and collectivize them.

Brendan->> I think this question of scale of decision-making, knowing everyone, being able to reach consensus, is absolutely key. I think the moment you get to a certain size, you have to have politicians, and media, and all the shit starts again. Yeah, I think, historically, we don't live in nuclear families, that's an artificial creation to keep us in our place. We live in tribes, and I think the optimum size is something like two to four hundred people. You get bigger than that and you start getting into politics again.

Tony->> One of the important things is systems of land tenure. Obviously if we're not into the idea of private ownership of land, you have to come up with some other system. It's really simple, what you do is you look back at what the system was before land was enclosed. Which was essentially that every family could keep their own particular plot of land where they had their house, and their house itself, and pass it on through the family. And they also had shared rights in all the local land as well, local woodland, local pasture, local fields. So, the idea was to have a balance, where you got one place which was your family's and always your family's and you have private rights to that, although you don't necessarily own the land. What you do is you have absolute rights and security of tenure on that land, and also shared rights as well. And all you have to do to look at a living example of that is to look at the crofting system in Scotland. And the only reason that the crofting system happened was because of direct action in the Isle of Skye in 1882 to stop enclosure, to stop the Highland Clearances.

mp->> One of the things we've been really impressed with is the sense of history and the historical tradition, and especially the Diggers 350th as being a huge sense of history that in the U.S. not many people really have. And we were curious as to the differences between the present day and then. Specifically, the Diggers used very religious language and were motivated by their religious beliefs. All of their arguments were theological and based on the Bible, and we were wondering how people today feel about this.

Brendan->> It's interesting, if you analyze Winstanley's religious language carefully, he uses phrases like "the great god of Reason." He's not into any kind of fundamentalist unthinking religion, which to a large extent I think has been in the nature of organized religion as a control methodology. He's saying "Yeah, be spiritual, but also keep your brain." It's interesting that the Anabaptist movement, which originated in the era, has developed into the modern Quaker movement, which I'm not part of but Tony is, and they're quite an interesting group in that they don't have hierarchies and priests.

Tony->> Another sort of religious connection is Jubilee 2000 which is a campaign that we've been part of, which is campaigning for an end to Third World debt, based on the biblical ideas of the Jubilee, where everything is shared out every 50 years, re-distributed. We're certainly not into any kind of religious dogmatism, but some of the these ideas, for me anyway, you just can't get away from, they're right there through history.

mk->> So, do you find that the political and the spiritual are just part of the same sort of motivation?

Tony->> Well, in a way, because certainly my view of spirituality is where you speak from your own sense of conscience and your own consciousness, and that you don't have to go to somebody else to ask them how to interpret what spirituality is.

Brendan->> I think in the whole sort of alternative movement in this country, you'll find there's a massive variation in the religious view of the world. There's Christians, there's pagans, there's hard line atheist anarchists. And my view is that whatever your belief system, if it's the basis for reasonable action, then fine.

Tony->> Well, I think one really important thing is that people get organized. If you have a vision for the way that you want things to be, then actually organize around that. And time and time again we find that what we do has hit the nail on the head, we touched the pulse, and when we organize an action of some kind with a small core of people sort of putting things in place, there's a wealth of people that turn up on the day. So be organized!

Brendan->> I agree. If there's one lesson, it's don't wait for charismatic figures. Do it yourself.

 

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