Today, our Commons are mostly invisible in life in the United States, but about two billion people around the world depend on Commons for their livelihood, like water, fisheries, farmland, roadways, air and other natural resources vulnerable to theft and seizure by corporations that want to do fracking, privatizing, or monetizing every aspect of these resources.
The push for privatization is a way for corporations to plunder our commonwealth and life blood ends up with such results as our groundwater sold for brand-label bottled water, the patenting of the human genome, and the replacement of shareable agricultural seeds with proprietary GMO (genetic modified organisms) that must be bought year after year.
The word Commons was termed in the 16th-19th centuries by the English gentry. They would seize the village pastures, forests, and waterways for their private use. These seizures were called “enclosures.” This drove the people who now were dispossessed from their Commons to the cities, like London and Manchester, where they became beggars and workers in the new industrial order.
The concept of “enclosures” was repeated in Asia, Africa, Latin America and it is still going on today in those countries and our own country. Investors and hedge funds are buying up forests, farmland, and water rights. How can the free-riding abuse of the oligarchies, like the Koch brothers, be put in check when they keep getting laws passed by using the American Legislative Exchange Council (A.L.E.C.), which ensures their grip on the Commons to do with what they want for profit?
Maybe the downfall of the people who plunder the Commons will be the Internet Commons/Digital Commons, which is free now once the access is purchased. This information puts light on the importance of the Commons and ways to protect them. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of corporations trying to take over a Common, the Internet. This would be third revolution and it is coming.
We must understand how the takeover of the Commons occurs, and how it will play out in the third industrial revolution, which is coming in what will be called “Zero Marginal Cost,” a hybrid economic system of zero profit enabled by social commons, which is a throwback to how civilization began.
The world and its people are changing, and the Internet with all the social media sites are informing people to what’s really happening with our earth’s resources. Examples of this can be seen in New York and San Francisco where younger people are not buying cars or houses and, instead, are sharing cars and houses. Living this way, a person doesn’t need as much money. Is this worth fighting for? It is the only way to save the planet and the workers of the world?
In the meantime, the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage (had the minimum wage kept up with inflation it would be around $24 an hour). An increase in wages would help tide the low-wage people over until … a solution is found, the world ends, or we all learn to get along and share.
To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant.
Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?”
This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their job…