http://libcom.org/history/peter-linebaughs-new-introduction-works-thomas-paine#comment-455940
Thank you.
Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000016240 StartFragment:0000000484 EndFragment:0000016224
Thomas Paine Song Material
This is simply Brilliant I have read Common Sense and thought it wonderful i have also Read unto this Last by John Ruskin who must have read Paine I am sure.this is brilliant . I read The invention of capitalism ( Michael perleman)and have started reading into the enclosures land clearances primitive accumulation and such but this is a tour de force. I found the article from wacthing the Author on a Tour of the city of london posted on ian bones Blog.
Thank you.
Here lies the body of John Crow,
Who once was high but now is low;Ye brother Crows take warning allFor as you rise, so must you fall.
ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| <[For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| places. (King James version)]> t404
Of flute & harp & drum & trumpet horn & clarion
Who once was high but now is low;Ye brother Crows take warning allFor as you rise, so must you fall.
ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| <[For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high ED-FZepigraphGktrans; E300| places. (King James version)]> t404
Of flute & harp & drum & trumpet horn & clarion
The cell doors along the prison corridor of those to be guillotined were chalked the night before, but Paine’s door was not yet closed. Swung open against the wall, in the dim light it was chalked on the wrong side. When closed at the end of the evening it displayed the unchalked side the following morning, when the executioners came calling. The angel of death had passed him by.
His first articles written in Philadelphia were on India, the focus for British imperialism, and against slavery. Britain has, he stated, done little but “rip up the bowels of whole countries for what she could get;—like Alexander she has made war her sport, and inflicted misery for prodigality’s sake. The blood of India is not yet repaid, nor the wretchedness of Africa yet requited. Of late she has enlarged her list of national cruelties by her butcherly destruction of the Caribbs of St. Vincent’s.” The reduction of India was “an extermination of mankind,” and England’s “cruelties in the East-Indies will never, never be forgotten….”
“the least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.”
By conducting experiments using saucepans and soup bowls to extract from the soils of the stable, barn, and cellar, a treasure could be collected which “to a free people [is] more valuable than the mines of Peru or Mexico,” namely potassium nitrate
While in London in 1758 Paine had bought a pair of globes, one terrestrial, the other celestial. He took lessons on their use from the Scottish astronomer and mechanic James Ferguson. Paine’s six months at sea had contributed to his knowledge of the stars. He knew the difference between the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the earth, and never wrote far from his globes, or far from their science.
in his 1772 The Case of the Officers of Excise: “The rich, in ease and affluence, may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait, but could they descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate.” In Crisis No. 5 (March 21, 1778) he writes: “Had it not been for America there had been no such thing as freedom left throughout the whole universe.”
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good”
the FBI ordered the removal from public libraries of Howard Fast’s influential wartime biographical novel, Citizen Tom Paine, as well as his one-volume selection of Paine’s Works.
During this aggressive formation of capitalist laissez-faire, William Ogilvie in Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781) argued that the commons and wastes should be distributed to the poor, while James Murray’s Sermons to Asses (1768) renewed the redistribution theory of jubilee, and Richard Price’s Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771) opposed enclosure.
Blake believed that Paine’s “Energetic Genius” led him to perform miracles: “Is it a greater miracle to feed five thousand men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies of Europe with a small pamphlet?”
Cornwallis instigated the “Great Gleaning Case” of 1788, in which the court in Steel v. Houghton (Mary Houghton, an agricultural laborer, gleaned on his lands in Timworth, a few miles south of Thetford) declared unequivocally against the law of Moses and centuries of customary practice by declaring that “no person has, at common law, a right to glean in the harvest field.” It was such criminalizing of customary access to the means of production and subsistence that played a decisive role in the creation of the proletariat.
Were that pillar to sink into the earth, the same landed property would continue, and the same ploughing, sowing, and reaping would go on. The aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent; and when compared to the active world are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collected the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment.
4 lines of Greek text; Ephesians 6: 12> Blake.
There was still no money about. People seemed to live without it. They also lived without the Church. I’m sorry about this but it is true … The holy time was the harvest. “Tell me your harvest bargain,” the farmer said to the harvesters. So the men chose a harvest lord who told the farmer how much they wanted to get the harvest in … We reaped by hand. You could count thirty mowers in the same field, each followed by his partner, who did the sheaving … The lord sat atop of the last load to leave the field and then the women and children came to glean the stubble … we all went shouting home. Shouting in the empty fields—I don’t know why. But that’s what we did. We’d shout so loud that the boys in the next village would shout back.
Blake, some two centuries before, had heard something similar and in 1797 added an instrumental arrangement
They took [the sheaves] into the wide barns with loud rejoicings & triumph
John Thelwall compared the “gigantic mind of Thomas Paine” to Licinius and Gracchus, authors of the agrarian law of ancient Rome. In Agrarian Justice, Paine develops the argument that “all individuals have legitimate birthrights in a certain species of property.” Here is where he distinguishes natural from artificial property, personal property from capital. Paine asks us to consider the Indians of North America, because among them “those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe” do not exist. Poverty, he deduces, is man-made, created by civilization. Paine relies on his own empirical encounters with American Indians. In 1777 he led a diplomatic delegation to Easton, Pennsylvania, to meet with scores of members of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy led by Chief Last Night. The earth is “the common property of the human race,” he writes. Its cultivation without indemnification has created poverty and wretchedness. The landed interest took the property of the dispossessed, partly by “the agrarian law of the sword.”
“Uncivilization,” as he called it, produced such atrocities. “When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.” He finds that the number of poor people actually increases with the advance of so-called civilization; they are becoming “an hereditary race.”
This is simply Brilliant I have read Common Sense and thought it wonderful i have also Read unto this Last by John Ruskin who must have read paine I am sure.this is brilliant . I read The invention of capitalism ( Michael perleman)and have started reading into the enclosures land clearances primitive accumulation and such but this is a tour de force. I found the article from wacthing the Author on a Tour of the city of london posted on ian bones Blog.
Thank you.
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good”…..
Thomas Paine ?
The older I get, the more I see that what WE call good and evil are inextricably caught up together.
If we listened to the proverbs we would hear… “the way to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Imagine for a minute all the HELL we have created on earth with the best of intentions ?
In the end, Voltaire advocated cultivating one's garden.
I agree with him… the AMBITION to save the world, the poor, the downtrodden has brought down a lot of suffering on the world.
As I sometimes say on a blog where I get a lot of flak, voluntary servitude is one of the most powerful forces in the human world, and it is a big mistake to not take it into account by idealizing… the poor and the downtrodden, for example. They too… ARE MEN AND WOMEN, and participate in our COMMON HUMANITY.
The Western world continues to try to understand freedom…
Can you be a slave AND STILL BE FREE ??
I think so. Because in the long run, probably the only thing that we can REALLY control in our experience IS OUR ATTITUDE towards the cards we are dealt in life…
That's already A LOT OF FREEDOM.
But trying to find freedom on the OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE leads to some pretty heady perversion, in my book.
I do agree though… that fences are NO FUN.
I am with you on the Attitude question Debra, all anyone can really change is their own attitude and hope that it is recognised and acknowledged and followed as an example if it does good.
I like Toby's German example ( Theory) that if 5% adopted a resource based attitude and led by example the accepted orthodoxies would crumble for the constructs which they are.
I'm not a great believer in re inventing the wheel, it seems that we do not have too for Me Ruskin and Ghandi already pointed that out and of course Paine before that and back for 5000 years according the David Griever another of Toby's Lamps and mine too.
I started reading here today.
http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/revolutionary-change-new-ebook/
There really is something to the love of Money being the root of all evil I think.
By the way this blog was some notes for a Song or maybe a poem I have started writing also taking in the Mango tree concepts of paulo friere, his ideas of Teaching and Learning I think have a lot to do with attitudes I am very into Plurality both as a metaphor and a scientific concept, your binary thought objection I am interested to learn more of.