Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth

⌘ This event is part of the UNRISD-FES Series Insights into Inequalities

How much public wealth has been redirected to the 1% in recent decades, and what can we do to get it back? These are the central questions which Guy Standing will address in this seminar, the latest in the UNRISD-FES series Insights into Inequalities.

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Based on analysis from his recent book Plunder of the Commons Guy Standing introduces a new appraisal of the commons and how much of it has been privatized, from land and state housing, health and benefit systems, to justice systems, schools, newspapers and even the air we breathe. He proposes a charter for a new form of commoning, of remembering, guarding and sharing that which belongs to us all, to slash inequality and soothe our current political instability.

The speaker

Guy Standing is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. An economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, he is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society of Arts, co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), and Council member of the Progressive Economy Forum. He is an economic adviser to the UK Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell.

He was previously a professor at SOAS, the University of Bath, and Monash University, and Director of the ILO’s Socio-Economic Security Programme. He has been a consultant for many international bodies, including UNICEF, UNCTAD, UNDP, the European Commission and the World Bank. He has worked with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India, and was Director of Research for President Mandela’s Labour Market Policy Commission. His books include The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury, 2011), published in 23 languages; Basic Income: And how we can make it happen (Pelican, 2017), and Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican, 2019).

About the series

This event is part of the series "Insights into Inequalities", generously supported by the Geneva office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, which will invite top-level speakers to share their cutting-edge research on inequalities, elites and social mobilization in various contexts. The series picks up the conversation from UNRISD's international conference, Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilization.