"You poor take courage, you rich take care"
"In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another."
- Gerrard Winstanley, "The New Law of Righteousness", 1649
Here I've been thinking about April 4 and the Lorraine Motel, and I almost forgot about April 3 and St George's Hill.
I suppose I have a lot of heroes, but Gerrard Winstanley holds a special place. On this day in 1649 he and about 30 Levellers, or "Diggers," marched on the commons of St George's Hill in Surrey and "sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots and beans." Other Digger groups reclaimed land from the gentry in Kent, Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. The gentry was, let's say, nonplussed.
Oliver Cromwell reportedly said, "What is the purport of the levelling principle but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces."
Response was swift: the Diggers were ordered beaten; their homes, crops and tools destroyed. Within a year, the Diggers were finished. Or maybe, just biding their time. And you know what? That time may be now.
Because if things really are this bad, then the Diggers' philosophy may be humanity's best last chance to salvage something like a sustainable culture, even on a local level.
Here is an account of the march to St George's Hill, now a private golf course, on the 350th anniversary in 1999:
If you don't know Leon Rosselson's song, "The World Turned Upside Down," you really ought to. And you can here, as interpreted by a number of artists. It's a versatile little number. Attila the Stockbroker's version is a bloody operetta, and incorporates Winstanley's own "Diggers Song" ("With spades and hoes and plowes, stand up now, stand up now...")
In 1649
To St George's Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers
Came to show the people' s will
They defied the landlords
They defied the laws
They were the dispossessed
Reclaiming what was theirs
We come in peace, they said
To dig and sow
We come to work the land in common
And to make the waste land grow
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it can be
A common treasury for all.
The sin of property
We do disdain
No one has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Rise up at their command.
They make the laws
To chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven
Or they damn us into hell
We will not worship
The God they serve
The God of greed who feeds the rich
While poor men starve
We work, we eat together
We need no swords
We will not bow to masters
Or pay rent to the lords
We are free men
Though we are poor
You Diggers all stand up for glory
Stand up now
From the men of property
The orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers' claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn
They were dispersed -
Only the vision lingers on
You poor take courage
You rich take care
The earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share
All things in common
All people one
We come in peace
The order came to cut them down
posted by Jeff Wells at 4:10 a.m.
12 Comments:
check Billy Bragg's version of The World Turned Upside Down. It's great.
'nother good one:
Between the wars
by Billy Bragg (Oyster Band)
I was a miner, I was a docker
I was a railwayman between the wars
I raised a family in time of austerity
With sweat at the foundry, between the wars
I paid the union and as times got harder
I looked to the government to help the working man
They brought prosperity, down at the armoury
We're arming for peace, my boys, between the wars
I kept the faith and I kept voting,
Not for the iron fist, but for the helping hand
Theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
Mine is the peace we knew between the wars
Call up the craftsmen, bring me a draughtsman
Build me a path from cradle to grave
And I'll give my consent to any government
That does not deny a man a living wage
Go find the young men, never to fight again
Call up the banners from the days gone by
Sweet moderation, the heart of this nation,
Desert us not, we are between the wars
(the mumbling is said to be And behold when they opened the sixth door
there was a great earthquake,
and the sun became black as sackcloth)
Does anyone else have something like this?
I was very young when I "participated" in the child sex ring in Omaha. I have a blanket from back then that I have always kept in a special "box" full of my special things. It was not actually a blanket but a half blanket half bear that I would hold. I am going to have it DNA tested. I may stand alone, but I have my blanket which I think was used to "clean up" after a serviceing by Bush 41. I always thought it was mean that he used my special bubbie. He did it to be mean. Maybe that cruel act is the piece that will save me.
You are my hero Jeff. It is sad when you are the only one giving me hope. The Billy Bragg version has been my favorite song for 20 years. Everytime I listen to it, I feel that it is possible to take to survive and take the world back. Keep up the fight! Here's another one from Billy's WIlliam Bloke CD- a poem by Rudyard Kippling
The Pict Song
Rome never looks where she treads
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts and our heads
And Rome never hears when we bawl
Her sentries pass on -- that is all
And we gather behind them in hordes
And plot to reconquer the Wall
With only our tongues for our swords
For we are the little folk -- we!
Too little to love or to hate
Leave us alone and you'll see
That we can bring down the state
Mistletoe killing an oak
Rats gnawing cables in two
Moths making holes in a cloak
How they must love what they do!
Yes -- and we little folk too
We are as busy as they
Working our works out of view
Watch, and you'll see it some day
No indeed! We are not strong
But we know of Peoples that are
Yes and we'll guide them along
To smash and destroy you in war
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves
But you -- you will die of the shame
And then we will dance on your graves
We are the worm in the wood!
We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!
Rudyard Kipling
How funny! I am at a state university campus right now. As I was walking here, I was reading an underground Chicago 'zine (http://www.lumpen.com) where they had an article promoting an anti-Wal-Mart campaign, and one reason was because: "When entire town marketplaces are taken over by a mall or a Wal-Mart, the space where people meet is no longer public or under the governance of the municipal government, rather it is under the control of the corporate owner. The only sanctioned activity on the premises is buying ... The Wal-Marting of America has disabled the public forums for citizens to interact."
And as I walked up to this university campus, which is actually quite beautiful and a nice place to hang out, I was thinking how fortunate it is to have public spaces such as this one.
--Freddy Fingers
.
Sep 20, 1966 (Tuesday) SF Oracle First Issue. More Info
The premier issue (vol. 1, no.1) of the San Francisco Oracle published. It features an article by the editor John Brownson entitled, "Anarchy 66 Provo" [on p. 3] which describes the activities of the Dutch Provos. Emmett Grogan, who helped to organize the Diggers in San Francisco two weeks later, acknowledged being influenced by contemporary news stories of "the 'Beatnik-Anarchist Provos' in Holland."
Sep 29, 1966 (Thursday) Diggers defy curfew orders, beginnings of Free Food. More Info
Billy Murcott and Emmett Grogan defy the curfew but avoid a confrontation. This evening led to the inspiration for Free Food in the Panhandle.
http://www.diggers.org/asp/chrono_diggers.asp
http://www.diggers.org/
..
And speaking of the Levellers. I was once a rock-ribbed conservative, yes I was--I was one of the people who'd carry on about "private property rights" and so on. And I have always been and still am very skeptical about any government control of people's property or wealth distribution schemes. Then I became acquainted with the ideas of Henry George:
http://www.henrygeorgeschool.org/whowashg.htm
Until reading George, it had never occured to me that man did not create the land, and thus has no claim to "ownership" of it, any more than we can claim to own the air. The land was here before us and it will be here after we're gone. At most, we are stewards and caretakers of the land. The dogma of "private property" is used to justify land monopoly instead of fair distribution, land speculation instead of wise use, and ever-rising rent. These are the chief causes of homelessness and all sorts of economic misery. And it's all based on a myth.
Henry George proposed common ownership of land, but in a way that allowed private control. His recommendation was to heavily tax land, and land only--no other taxes, tariffs, "fees," etc. This would have the effect of discouraging land speculation and accumulation and keep land value (and therefore, all costs and all prices of goods and services) affordable for everyone, not to mention that dumping the myriad of taxes and fees on income, investment, etc., for one simple tax on land ownership would give an immense boost to any economy.
--Freddy
I take particular comfort in Ewan MacColl's Ballad of Accounting:
In the morning we built the city,
In the afternoon walked through its streets
Evening saw us leaving...
We wandered through our days as if they would never end
All of us imagined we had endless time to spend
We hardly saw the crossroads and small attention gave
To landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave, cradle to the grave
Did you learn to dream in the morning?
Abandon dreams in the afternoon?
Wait without hope in the evening?
Did you stand there in the traces, and let 'em feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born, act of being born?
Did you alter the face of the city?
Make any change in the world you found?
Or did you observe all the warnings?
Did you read the trespass notices, did you keep off the grass?
Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass?
Did you learn to keep your mouth shut, were you seen and never heard?
Did you learn to be obedient, and jump to at a word, jump to at a word?
Did you ever demand any answers?
The who and the what and the reason why?
Did you ever question the set-up?
Did you stand aside and let 'em choose while you took second best?
Did you let 'em skim the cream off, and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy, and did you think it right
To let 'em rob you right and left, and never make a fight, never make a fight?
What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool?
Did the place where you were living enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men, all your fellow men?
Did you ever demand any answers?
Kurt in Portland
I just read (and highly recommend) Stirling Newberry's "American Thermidor" - a superbly parsed explanation of how the Right have stayed in power despite their overtly criminal actions, and why no Progressive has been able to counter the damage they have wrought since the Reagan Presidency.
Excerpt:
How the cycle of deficits has kept the right in power in America.
Many people have become worried about the hard limits to the current world economy, and particularly the place of America in it: global warming,[1] which is the limit of how much carbon we can sink into the earth's atmosphere and waters, and Hubert's theory of "Peak Oil,"[2] which predicts that production of oil will plateau and then enter a decline. Many have also become worried about the seemingly inexorable growth of America's trade[3] and budget deficits,[4] as well as the ever-spiraling imports of energy from abroad. Finally, many have become concerned about the growing inequality of the distribution of wealth [5] and the decline in real wages. [6] It makes many angry that, in a time when America seems to be strip-mining its environment, its credit and its people, we are ruled by the most reactionary American political party to take power since the days when strikers were shot by state militia units, a party that has chosen not to address any of these problems, but instead, tells us that all will be well.
For many, the theory of why this is happening centers around the top-down media system and its vitriolic faux populism that is used to cover an agenda of concentration of power and economic elitism, and an American public that is enthralled by the political machinations of the Republican Party. For others, the root cause is corporate-driven globalization, which sets the workers of different states and different nations against each other in a grim race to the bottom. It seems inconceivable to many writers that, in an era in which so much is headed in the wrong direction, the Republicans have been in the White House 6 of the last 9 terms, and have not lost control of Congress since the elections of 1994, except during a very brief period when the Democrats wrangled the Senate based on a party switch by a Republican. Not only this, but they have controlled the debate, pushing the Democratic Party farther and farther to the right. Even while the approval numbers of both Republican President and Republican Party are below 50% in recent polls, the media treats them with kid gloves, and the Democrats defer to Bush on what the agenda of the nation should be.
There has been an American Thermidor,[7] a counter-revolution, one which is based on the way money and energy relate to one another. The key is not only oil, nor only money, nor only corporate concentration, but how each of these pushes the other along a cycle. Each one maintains the others in place. To understand how, it is important to look at the deficits that America faces.
The reality is that all of the deficit problems, the energy deficit, the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and the wages and wealth deficit, are connected, each one reinforcing the others. They cannot be solved piecemeal: increasing real wages will mean that Americans will burn more oil, and import more, which means a higher trade deficit. In an environment in which other nations have energy deficits of their own, America cannot export its way to material prosperity, and so it votes for budget deficits to keep the economy propped up. This is the centerpiece of why the Republicans hold power: to undo what they have done requires a broad mandate to attack, not one deficit, but all simultaneously.
The root of problem is that the American economy has become a giant "paper-for-oil" deal. We buy energy, both directly as energy, and indirectly by importing goods made more cheaply in other nations where people command a smaller bundle of energy.[8] Goods from China cost less, not because Chinese factories are more efficient, but because Chinese workers have a smaller claim on resources than American workers. America prints paper - in the form of Treasury debt and US assets such as stocks - to buy energy from abroad.
Because America runs an energy deficit, and must import it, and we cannot export other goods to others to pay for it, we run a trade deficit. It is a problem because there is one scarce commodity which all others are denominated in: oil. Oil is scarce, not because there is not enough energy in the world, but because it is so much cheaper to extract energy from oil than from other sources, and oil can be used to transport goods and people.
The competition is not over scarce energy in itself, but over a particular form of energy which can be used to substitute for everything else. There is nothing in this world that one cannot get more cheaply by using more oil to get it - whether by importing it, mechanizing its production, or using more energy to extract it. This is not only true of industry, but of people as well: Americans moved to the suburbs because it was cheaper to drive farther than to work through the problems of urbanization, and one could get a larger house with a larger yard in the bargain. As long as it was cheaper to pay rent to Saudi Arabia for the oil, because that is what we are doing, than to pay rent to the government for a working city, people chose to pay rent to OPEC rather than taxes to the government. This ability of oil to be used in place of almost everything else, and not whether there is "enough" oil, is the special property that makes it the basic scarcity of the world economy.
Read it:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040305A.shtml
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