Peter Linebaugh

The Commons, the Castle, the Witch, and the Lynx

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One day at Crottorf we eat mouthwatering strawberries and yogurt for our lunchtime sweet.

Crottorf is the name of a castle, or schloss, in Westphalia, Germany. Twenty­ one of us are assembled from around the world to discuss the commons. We come from India and Australia, Thailand and South Africa, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Austria, France, England, Greece, California and the Great Lakes. It is midsummer. Surrounded by green meadows and cool forests, the castle seems sprung from a German fairytale, a piece of paradise. Indeed the Italian plasterer said as much in 1661 carving onto the hallway ceiling the words,

Un pezzo del paradiso Caduto
de cielo in terra

For three days we sit in a circle, twenty-one of us, discussing, if not heaven on earth, then the commons.

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Frau Gertrude Kugelmann and the Five Gates of Marxism

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Open one of the gates to Marxism — “The Working Day” chapter in the first volume of Capital — and you’ll find paragraphs with equations (“As the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable quantity B—–C…”) Stones in your pass-way? Yup. Yet once you’re through the gate, you’ll see a path that leads to a life in struggle. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll be worthy. Not that you’ll feel a need to be (what Karl said he wasn’t) a Marxist, but you’ll always wish to come down on the commoners’ side of class conflicts. And the older you get, the more you’ll suspect the only regard that matters comes from militants with the brains to turn tears into controlled rage as Marx does throughout his “Day”…

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Preface to the Korean Edition of “The Magna Carta Manifesto”

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This chapter from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop Thief: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance opens with aristos’ charming spin on the human right to rest. But Linebaugh isn’t one to go on in defense of laziness. Near the end of this short piece, he invokes bookish Reds who once insisted a “Communist is a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his conscious­ness the whole inheritance of human knowledge.”[1] Linebaugh has surely put in work on that score. The fact that his essay is a preface to the Korean edition of one of his earlier books stands as a tribute to his worldliness. Linebaugh goes wide in this chapter (as ever) though he begins in bed…

Of the aristocratic and stylish Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks of English aristocracy to the Dickensian depths of the Rotherhithe docks in London in 1939. Unable to pay the rent she and her husband lived in fear of the process-server who they avoided by going in disguises which the process server soon came to recognize. “Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed.”[1] So they stayed in bed all day and then all night, and again all the next day, and all the next night under the covers, before deciding to immigrate to America. (Tom Paine, too, thought that independ­ent America was a realization of Magna Carta).

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Some Principles of the Commons

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Linebaugh’s principles made your editor rethink my attachment to “public happiness” — a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that I’ve leaned on to evoke the excitement of (small d) democratic politics with its imperfectly human meld of egotism and solidarity.  Linebaugh isn’t an Arendt man and he’s never been charmed by her hymns for the American Revolution. Aware our first Founding slipped slavery and the “Social Question” — all the challenges arising from mass poverty and de-skilled labor due to the Industrial Revolution — he’s unenthralled by America’s standard versions of democratic practice. Per Peter, public life/happiness in this country seems a straightened thing…  

We distinguish “the common” from “the public.” We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism.

While it’s probably wrongheaded to yearn for demos with no ego, Linebaugh’s distinction is coming through to me this morning. In my inbox today, there’s an announcement of the latest seminar aimed at (what one pale academic muckety-muck terms) “intellectual publics.” Like Linebaugh, I prefer more common things…

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The City and the Commons: A Story for Our Time

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The essay posted below is the one that brought Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! home to your editor (who morphed into a “New York City man” many years ago). Linebaugh’s case for “commonizing” the city seemed fresh and audacious, though he almost lost me when he invoked the panopticon. (Bentham? Again?) But Linebaugh wasn’t content to reheat Foucault’s leftovers.

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From the Foreword to E.P. Thompson’s “William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary”

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What follows below comes from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (PM Press, 2014). First of the Month will reprint pieces from Linebaugh’s collection of essays, which has been called a “Commonist Manifesto,” throughout 2024. The following text is an excerpt from a piece of Linebaugh’s that served as the foreword to a revised edition of E.P. Thompson’s biography of William Morris. (Thompson’s book was first published in 1955 — the year before his break with the Communist Party.) 

Thompson has been in the cultural conversation lately. (His huffy back-and-forth with Lesezk Kolakowski has been invoked here.)  Thompson may have always have been too full of himself. (Like most would-be vanguardists?) His duller certainties deserve skepticism. (I’m recalling just now Thompson’s dimness about a distinguished thing dear to Stuart Hall: “‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson once admonished me, with exasperation.”[1]) Thompson’s blankness about certain aspects of “high” intellection, though, deserve more than forbearance since it seems to have allowed him to focus on The Making of the English Working Class and his other histories from below.

Linebaugh has a near familial feeling for Thompson (who was his mentor), but he doesn’t do hagiography. He interrogates Thompson’s takes on Morris without being prosecutorial. Here he gets to what  Thompson missed in Morris’s essay “Under the Elm Tree” even as Thompson saluted Morris for… 

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The Age of Paine

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“Where liberty is, there is my country,” declared Benjamin Franklin, to which Thomas Paine replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine.”…

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