Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth

Guy Standing chronicles the historic plundering of our common wealth and exposes the detrimental effect of an era of austerity and privatisation.

Standing leads us through a new appraisal of the commons, stemming from the medieval concept of common land reserved in ancient law from marauding barons, to his modern reappraisal of the resources we all hold in common. He urges us to understand just how much public wealth has been redirected to the 1% in recent decades through the state-approved exploitation of everything from our land to our state housing, health and benefit systems, to our justice system, schools, newspapers and even the air we breathe. Plunder of the Commons proposes a charter for a new form of commoning, of remembering, guarding and sharing that which belongs to us all, to slash inequality and soothe our current political instability.

Guy Standing has held professorships at Bath, London and Monash Universities and was a programme director in the UN's International Labour Organisation. He co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network and is now its co-president. He is author of the bestselling The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) and Basic Income: And How We Can Make it Happen (2017).

• Dimensions 11 x 18.1 x 2.3 cm
• Author Guy Standing
• ISBN 9780141990620
• Paperback Yes
• Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
• No of pages 432