‘Levellers’ and ‘Diggers’ were derogatory labels first applied to participants in the 1607 Midlands Revolt—
levellers because they tore down fences and hedges,
diggers because they were poor farmers who worked the soil.”

–"The War Against the Commons," by Ian Angus

“Men that would have all in their own hands;
men that would leave nothing for others;
men that would be alone on the earth;
men that be never satisfied....

Cormorants, greedy gulls;
yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children…

They take our houses over our heads,
they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents…
they enclose our commons!”

–London-based printer & poet Robert Crowley, explaining the 1549 peasant rebellions. (As quoted in "The War Against the Commons")

“Through force and fraud, common land was privatized.

Formerly shared fields were split into private plots bounded by fences and hedges, and commoners became laborers who could only survive by working for the owners.”

– From "The War Against the Commons," by Ian Angus

In 2009, ten years after the Bolivarian Process began, Hugo Chávez proposed the communal path to socialism in a historic television program. As it turned out, self-organized communities around the country seized on the communal project, which resonated both with values shaped over the longue durée in Venezuela...

Read more here: https://monthlyreview.org/press/new-commune-or-nothing-venezuelas-communal-movement-and-its-socialist-project/

‘The possessor of labour-power, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labour has been objectified...[is] compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power which exists only in his living body.’

– MARX, as quoted in "The War Against the Commons"