Reclaiming the Commons

One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? The commons refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatised, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources