A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

population which was then forced by means of brutal violence into workhouses,
forced labour on warships – a measure which Locke, too, proposes
a “plan” for the elimination of unemployment 96 – or into capitalist
wage labour.
Behind the reference to the communist heritage of the gift of speech
to humankind as a whole in the Old Testament, is a sharp class conflict.
And it is the bourgeois Locke who calls for a blatant breach of contract,
for he is fully aware that by right and by law, common land had to remain
open to common use. In the face of all historical fact, he assumed that
this common land “lay waste” 97 , and was hence worthless; he compares
it with the broad expanses of North America, and in both cases
derives from the fact of non-capitalist use of the land – which to him is
equivalent to non-use – the “right” of dispossession. He writes, “If we
will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several
expences [!!!] about them, what in them is purely owing to nature,
and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths
are wholly to be put on the account of labour.“ 98
What labour is meant here? That becomes clear if, starting from the
above quoted sentences, in which Locke uses the “we” of his class, in
whose interests he proclaims the dispossession of the commons, we
move on to those sentences where he then switches to the personal
and possessive pronouns in the first person singular, to “I” and “my”.
Here, it is clear what work is, for him real work, which is “rightly estimated”:
“Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut;
96 Among other things, Locke proposed to the King of England that the children of
women dependent upon public support be taken away from them at the age of
three and placed in “working schools”, where they might, for no pay, process that
very product, wool, which had robbed their parents of the foundations of their lives;
such work, he noted, would best “benefit the kingdom” (his essay Scheme of
Methods for the Employment of the Poor). For a history of these “workhouses”,
see Simon Fowler: Workhouse: The People: The Places: The Life Behind Closed
Doors, The National Archives 2008.
97 Locke, op. cit., ch. 5, Sec. 45.
98 Ibid, sec. 40.
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