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LATVIA
News, views and comment on people, parapolitics and the planet
TRZY KORONY Rural Pension
with micro-farm
in beautiful S.W. Poland
with micro-farm
in beautiful S.W. Poland
| POLAND |
| The Bigos Family welcomes you |
CELENIEKI FARM
Enjoy the splendour of remote
Latvia on our lovely traditional
working farm!
Latvia on our lovely traditional
working farm!
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| Mark Pickard Editor |
| ...to our 7th Vox Pop podcast. In this show we talk to Tony Benn, the 'enfant terrible' of the mainstream political establishment and hero of the left for...well, as long as anyone can remember, actually! |
| Radio Free Radical should be up and running shortly...just as soon as we can allocate a computer for the purpose (the lumbering old hulk we planned to use couldn't be satisfactorily upgraded)! We'll keep you posted! |
The Acts of Enclosure were a series of acts of Parliament - more than five thousand in all - enacted over a 200-year period between the early 1,600s and early 1,800s, in which the landed aristocracy of the day, dissatisfied with even the vast amount of land that they had acquired (most of it seized after the Normal Conquest and handed out to Norman supporters...to the larger part, the ancestors of today's 'Upper Class'), conspired to rob the peasantry of even the meagre portion of land to which they held rights. It has to be probably one of the biggest 'land-grabs' in history, and gave rise to the existence of the modern day dispossessed (in any meaningful sense), disenfranchised (also in any meaningful sense), and utterly subjugated 'industrial' 'working class'. It was also clearly the prelude to modern-day capitalism and power-politics, and yet it is something that goes essentially ignored in the both the modern-day "educational system" and political consciousness. To sum up the Acts of Enclosure as briefly as I can: In the early 1,600s the price of wool came to greatly increase over the price of grain, so the 'powers that be' of the time decided to turn almost all arable land over to grazing sheep. Ancient rights afforded to villages for collective subsistence farming and the use of 'common land' for grazing and the gathering of fuel were revoked and, as Dr Gilbert Slater described in his 1913 "The Land: The Report of The Land Enquiry Committee" report to the government at the time; "…evictions took place on a wholesale scale, and where once there had been thriving villages and a sturdy population of hard-working peasantry, nothing was left but waste and ruined cottages…". This initiative happened to coincide with the dissolution of the monasteries. Although Henry VIII was keen to grab their "vast estates" for himself, he was unable to do so. In an observation that so eerily smacks of today, Slater notes that "Nearly all the monastic lands fell into the hands of private owners, men of the type least likely to allow humanitarian scruples to hinder them in the pursuit of wealth". How resonant that is of today's 'neo-cons' and 'corporate captains'!!! And as Slater goes on to note, "[The] revolution enormously increased the wealth of the landed aristocracy. It altered the distribution of wealth won from the soil in such a way that the cultivator received a [proportionately] much smaller share, and the rent-receiver a much larger share; while the personal services rendered by the latter to the state disappeared, and the taxation paid by him became relatively trifling". Hmmm…Bush/ Blair/Reagan/ Thatcher-omics if ever there were any!!! The large landowners, as peers, came to dominate the upper house of Parliament and given the democratic defects of the time, came also to dom- inate the House of Commons. They wielded inordinate power through patronage, setting themselves up as 'Justices of the Peace' (judges, to you and I) and, literally, 'lording' it over the church, local government, education…just about anything you can point a stick at! Whereas primary taxation had up until this time been levied on land ownership, this venerable band of villains, as Slater notes, shifted primary taxation to "an excise duty on the drinks like beer and cyder, consumed by the poorest classes of the population" (well, it is interesting to note that today fully one-third of all British companies pay no tax at all!). Destitute peasants were forced to take to the road en masse in search of whatever work they could find, yet if that were not enough, a 'game law' was added to the odious Poor Law Code, by which this band of plunderers laid claim not only to all the land to speak of, but also all the creatures that crept or crawled upon it and whatever flew above it! Yet things got worse, however, in the early 1800s, when an even more draconian and iniquitous expansion of the Enclosures occurred, whereby fully some 4000 Acts of Enclosure, covering some 7 million acres (ca. 3 million hectares), were passed prior to the General Enclosure Act of 1845. Yet this represents only the enclosures for which 'legal' applications were submitted before Parliament; easily the same amount of land again, Slater estimates, was 'illegally' 'enclosed' by Landowners employing unscrupulous, underhand methods. Thus, some 14 million acres, or ca. 6 million hectares of land was usurped by the forebears of today's 'landed aristocracy' in the first part of the 19th century alone! The grasping landlord of the time was bent, as Slater notes, on the eradication of any last vestiges of ancient village customs that may have survived all the previous Enclosures, the driving of his small tenant farmers to 'maximum efficiency' through the jacking up of rents (as much as 7- fold!), and assumption of absolute authority over the agriculture under his control. As Slater adds; "He wanted no independent freeholders with bits of land in the midst of his estate…or in possession of cottages or cultivated patches won out of the waste, entitled to keep cows on the open commons, and to go here and there to exercise their right of taking fuel with a chance, perhaps, of taking a hare or pheasant as well". Yet even this was not enough! Having brought the rural working population - almost the entire working population at the time - to about as low a level of misery as humanly possible, efforts were made, as Slater describes, to "…induce the labourer to subsist upon some cheaper fare than the wheaten bread and occasional glass of small beer or thin cyder to which he had become accustomed, and to a considerable extent potatoes began to take the place of bread, particularly in the dietary of children". During the course of these latter Enclosures, tens of thousands of destitute and entirely dispossessed agricultural workers were forced from the land and, as is now well known, became fodder for the grim, inhuman sweatshops of the 'Industrial Revolution'. As I have already noted, it was this massive human exodus and the abominable, greed-driven circumstances that gave rise to the modern day, still essentially 'dispossessed' (in any meaningful sense), 'disenfranchised' (also in any meaningful sense), and utterly subjugated 'industrial' 'working class', as well as laying the foundation stone of modern- day capitalism and power- politics, As a friend of mine - a journalist and erstwhile farmer himself - has noted; "The Acts of Enclosure were illegal then and would certainly be considered illegal now". It seems entirely natural to me, therefore, that they should be repealed and the stolen land returned...at least to those at the 'bottom end' of the iniquitous and exploitative economic system we now endure Anyone interested in organising, or becoming involved in a campaign seeking the abolition of the Acts of Enclosure and the redistribution of land to any of the latter-day 'landless and dispossessed' who wish to stake a claim to it , please contact us here at Vox Pop. edit@voxpopuli-online.org. Many Thanks! Mark Pickard |
| ARTS |
| Voice of the Intenational Solidarity Organistion, dedicated |
to the destruction of
capitalism and the state.
capitalism and the state.
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| TONY BENN... |
| VOX POP # 7 |
| REAL PLAYER |
| VOX POP 8 |
| her own inspiring, not-for- profit, conscience- driven project...organising holidays Naturally, we also feature Sebastiaan's usual round up |
| EXCLUSIVE! |
| ...'political 'enfant terrible', 'bane of the establishment' and hero of the political left for decades... talks to Vox Pop about the Acts of Enclosure, the iniquity of land ownership and globalised capitalism |
| webcasting and brings it all to you in an 8-hour webstream;all content broadcast to a schedule and rolled over three times in a 24-hour period so as to suit you wherever in the world you may be listening. What's more, the entire webstream will be available as a compressed download, and all content 'tracked', so as to allow you to skip from 'show' to 'show', listen to whatever interests you and skip the stuff that doesn't. Nifty! |
| his reckless adventures having taken him from the wilds of Nova Scotia, to getting 'up front and personal' with whales on the raging Atlantic, and ending up in the heady coffee shops of Amsterdam (well, he denies the latter, but no-one believes him!). We are continuing to work towards our Radio Free Radical webstream, but we must prevail upon your patiance for just a little longer! What is the Radio FreeRadical webstream? Radio Free Radical is an innovative project, which gathers together some of the best material from Indymedia, radio4all, radio.indymedia and elsewhere in the world of alternative, radical |
| Armed Israeli "settlers" attack Palestinian homes |
| (Contact Elaine at: |
| In keeping with our 'Campaign of the Moment', Tony discusses the Acts of Enclosure (see panel left) and their legacy...the iniquity of modern land ownership in Britain and the creation of a modern-day 'landless, urbanised/ industrialised, wage- |
in theWest Bank.
| In Vox Pox 8 we will be talking to Anti-Flag band member Pat on the art and ideology of this legendary, parapolitically- engaged, anarchist band. We'll also be taking a look at the Freegans movement - a loose grouping of people committed to undermining capitalism by the simple expedient of 'not buying'; preferring instead to scrounge supermarket rubbish bins, living off and redistributing what they find. COMING UP, EARLY MAY! |
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of news and stuff from Indymedia - yes,
the degenerate itinerant is back with us;
the degenerate itinerant is back with us;
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