Palestine and the Commons

Or, Marx and the Musha’a

Bibliographic Data

ID12433647
AuthorsPeter Linebaugh (corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume30
Issue1
Pages499-513
Publication date2024-04-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of World-Systems Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1076-156X • E-ISSN: 1076-156X
PublisherUniversity Library System, University of Pittsburgh (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5195/jwsr.2024.1263
OpenAlexW4394875414
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited6

became an historian of all the above with particular interest in the commons.As Marcus Rediker and I said in the introduction to the Arabic translation of our Many-Headed Hydra, Herodotus, "the grandfather of history," explained that Palestine lay between Phoenicia and Egypt.Besides going to Athens, a home of philosophy (philia = love, Sophia = goddess of wisdom), Paul went to gatherings where they had "everything in common" (Acts 4:32).Jubilee was another Biblical thing I could cotton on to because I love its principles of land back, freedom now, no work, debt forgiveness, and rest for revered mother Earth.It all seems to me a beautiful combination of revolution and relaxation.Paul became a follower of Jesus who was thrown out of his hometown and almost killed for proclaiming jubilee right now.He called for rest and forgiveness.The only economic basis of such a thing is the commons.The struggle in Palestine helps us see this.I believe that the musha'a (community-owned agricultural lands), like similar practices anywhere else in the world, can help us realize a world based on just conditions of mutuality, name it as is your wont: true communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the commons.The renewed thinking of the commons was born of struggles against the new enclosures of the neoliberal era and inspired by the commoning practices of autonomist Zapatista communes in Chiapas and its defense of the ejido.The commons is now understood as a key conceptual breakthrough in orienting visions and pathways to postcapitalist futures.The commons also marks the radical escape from the paralyzing misfires and legacies of modernist state socialisms (Ray 2024, see especially Federici 2019).I must write about the musha'a, a Palestinian form of land tenure, or the commons, which the Ottomans, the Brits, and the Israelis attempted to destroy.It includes collective ownership, cooperative labor, and periodic redistribution.These are principles also found in the earliest promulgation of debt cancellation, freedom from servitude, and restoration of land tenures.In addition to jubilee, it was espoused by Enmetena, a ruler of Lagash, around 2400 BC and evolved into general proclamations of amnesty (Hudson 1993).The musha'a was a defensive institution against the fear of taxation and military recruitment by the Ottoman authorities.Palestine's planetary significance is threefold: first, there is its geography at the conjunction of three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the waters among them.Second, there are the extractions from the soil of Palestine, as well as from under it (grains, minerals, oil, and gas).And third, there is Palestine's significance concerning Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.Three big religions, three big continents, and original economies of cultivating the earth, mining the earth, and drilling the earth, making modes of production from the "fertile crescent" to the petroleum present with its terrible planetary perturbations.The struggle for the liberation of Palestine has geographic breadth and historical depth, which explains why it is considered the "soul of the souls of all our struggles."The whole world has awakened to it

Ancient history · Commons · Palestine · Political science · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access