comrade-of-my-heart

egunsinvenus:

westfailia:

i’ve said this before but imo criticisms of sex work that focus on the involuntary nature of the work and therefore the sex involved have touched on a larger problem and that’s that no work is truly voluntary when the choice is between working and starving.

targeting sex work for abolition divorced from the larger anticapitalist critique like it’s uniquely involuntary rather than working to improve the conditions in which sex workers work is going to ultimately hurt sex workers by worsening their working conditions by forcing them even further underground and further into the prison-industrial complex and not do much else.

!

(via yteicosanievilew)

we-are-rogue:

marzipanandminutiae:

dagwolf:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

–17th Century poem condemning enclosure

for background: this protested an act of Parliament in England that prevented people from grazing their livestock on the village common (an open area of green space) as they had for centuries. a later variant began with “They hang the man and flog the woman…”

I’ve reblogged this before, but context is always nice.

Enclosure wasn’t the result of a single Act of Parliament, it had been going on since ~1200, and little by little it grew worse, as the landlords became more powerful and the peasants did not.

The right to use the commons - lands, on a lord’s estate, where people could enter and forage for themselves, fish, herd, gather wood etc - was taken very seriously, and was often necessary for the peasants’ survival. Enclosure was basically the privatisation of a previously communal resource. It was landlords putting up hedges and digging ditches around common lands, and saying “nope, you can’t enter any more; IT’S ALL MINE, and if you pick a berry it’s now THEFT”, either because an Act of Parliament allowed them to do that (remember that Parliament was comprised of landlords…), or just because they could. In the tug-of-war between King and Parliament, the law occasionally attempted to limit enclosure… and generally failed.

And every time commons were taken away, by law or by force, at any point from the 13th to the ~19th century, you had misery and suffering, because people were unable to sustain themselves. And then of course you had unrest, you had masses of destitute vagrants and/or pissed off outlaws, you had riots and armed revolts, again and again.

For example, when Kett’s Rebellion erupted in Norfolk in 1549, this “Rebel’s Complaint” was issued:

“The pride of great men is now intolerable, but our condition miserable. These abound in delights; and compassed with the fullness of all things, and consumed with vain pleasures, thirst only after gain, inflamed with the burning delights of their desires. But ourselves, almost killed with labour and watching, do nothing all our life long but sweat, mourn, hunger, and thirst. […]

The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away. The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several [“severals” were hedged plots of privately controlled land]; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out. […]

We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury; neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness, excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms, and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty. […] We will rend down the hedges, fill up ditches, and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally, we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. […]

We desire liberty, and an indifferent (or equal) use of all things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our lives shall only be ended together.”

In the 17th century, enclosure was becoming rampant again, now with the full support of the law, and even more trouble was caused by disafforestation - the sale of royal forests (which were not necessarily woodland, mind you, they were just called that way, and at that point they included common lands), to new owners who enclosed them as soon as they got their hands on them. More suffering, more indignation, more unrest, more revolts.

…And that’s how that INCREDIBLE poem came to be. (Also that’s why we have today Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons and so on. They’re, like, commons.)

(via left-reminders)

sunotes:

princes-heels:

always remember that love will always come back to u. in a different form, different person, different hobby, different touch. but in any way, love will always come back.

“Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate.

Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met.

“Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll. The little girl was comforted.

When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: “my travels have changed me… “

Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said: “every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

-May Benatar, The Pervasiveness of Loss 

(via proletariangothic)