Interchange – At the Crossroads of Commons and Closure with Historian Peter Linebaugh

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The current uprisings, which are beginning to threaten the status quo of policing in the United States and bringing the demands of abolition into the broad daylight of public debate, have created an unprecedented potential for radical change in the US.

But these threats and demands upon the carceral logic of state violence are not simply the spontaneous products of this current moment, and instead echo a long history of struggle against the racial encroachment of policing and the enclosure of human life.

We are joined today by historian and author Peter Linebaugh to talk to us about this long history of struggle, based both on his own experiences of resistance to enclosure and on the historical examples that motivate his work.

Linebaugh is most notably an historian of the Revolutionary Atlantic – a current in historical studies that trains a focus on the revolutionary and world-changing upheaval that engulfed the whole Atlantic system in the 18th and 19th centuries, giving way to the Industrial Revolution, the formation of new nation-states, and the expansion of a capitalist economic system.

But beneath the veneer of these world-historical events lie the struggles of those who fought on many fronts for a common humanity and for a livelihood held in common that became increasingly chiseled away at the hands of social, political, and economic exploitation. This is most persistent through-line in Linebaugh’s many works, from The Many-Headed Hydra, coauthored with Marcus Rediker, to his most recent book Red Round Globe Hot Burning: the transnational struggle to preserve, protect, and produce the commons against the looming threat of enclosure.

This struggle developed through the encounter between different sectors of the Atlantic working class – the enslaved, sailors, indentured servants, and others – who then had to resolve contradictions in order to assemble themselves into new “class compositions” capable of facing their exploiters. This process of composition is instructive for participants in today’s uprisings, who must also confront differential risks and stakes, and figure out creative ways to come together.

We begin our conversation with Linebaugh by asking him about his life and labor and the ideas and influences that have animated his work.

GUEST
Peter Linebaugh is a historian and the author of The Magna Carta Manifesto,The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, and Stop, Thief!, among many others, and the co-author, with Marcus Rediker, of The Many-Headed Hydra. His articles have appeared in publications that include CounterPunch, the New Left Review, and Radical History Review.

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MUSIC
“Atlantic Black” Makaya McCraven
“Three Fifths a Man” Makaya McCraven
“The Digger’s Song” performed by Chumbawumba
“Prosperity’s Fear” Makaya McCraven
“Wise Man, Wiser Woman” Makaya McCraven
Host track- “Turtle Tricks” by Makaya McCraven

CREDITS
Host: Doug Storm
Episode Producer: Cole Nelson
Production Assistance: Hugh Farrell
Audio Editor/Mixer: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young