A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

A few more attempts are known in greater detail, in which communist
“diggers” attempted to communally cultivate wasteland. Repeated false
accusations in court, arbitrary arrests, attacks, arson and expulsion destroyed
these communist settlements. By 1651, the movement had
been crushed. Gerrard Winstanley drew the conclusion that “There is
but bondage and freedom, particular interest or common interest; and
he who pleads to bring in particular interest into a free commonwealth
will presently be seen and cast out, as one bringing in kingly slavery
again.” 105 The battle against these experiments, and the appropriation
of the common lands, paid off for the landlords. In 2007, real estate
prices in this area had reached £3,000,000 per property. 106 The Song of
the Diggers is both true and current:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging does disdain, and persons all defame
Stand up now, stand up now.
So, to get back to the original question, what is missing from the Human
Rights Declarations in its various versions, where they obviously proclaim
all necessary rights indispensable for a life in freedom, security
and self-determination, at least to the extent that the state of the societal
debate current at any given point is rooted in the general consciousness?
107 While they receive their justification only from the real struggles
of people against their experience of deprivation of rights, their exploitation,
their oppression and their discrimination, against hunger and un-
105 Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Ch. 4,
http://www.bilderberg.org/land/lawofree.htm.
106 More than 350 years after the Diggers, the Land is Ours movement in England
tried to occupy until the land again; like their predecessors they were repeatedly
driven away (http://www.tlio.org.uk/).
107 Cf. Jürgen Habermas: Das utopische Gefälle. Das Konzept der Menschenwürde
und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte [The utopian gap: The concept of
human dignity and the realistic utopia of human rights], in: Blätter für deutsche und
internationale Politik, no. 8, 2010, pp. 43 - 53.
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