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Title: The Expropriation Continues Author: Kevin Carson Date: August 13, 2015 Language: en Topics: capitalism Source: https://c4ss.org/content/39713
Contrary to mainstream classical political economy, which treated the
“original accumulation of capital” as the result of thrift, saving and
reinvestment on the part of the capitalist, Marx argued in the first
volume of Capital that capitalism — as opposed to simple market exchange
— was founded on the separation of the peasantry from their customary
property rights in the land and their transformation into a propertyless
working class. The history of their dispossession, he wrote, “was
written in letters of blood and fire.” Marx’s account included the
enclosure of the European open fields in late medieval times, the
Parliamentary Enclosure of common pasture and waste, as well as the
enslavement of much of the population of the colonial world and the
nullification of customary land rights (for example Hastings’s
“Permanent Settlement” in Bengal). But as Danielle Nierenberg reminds us
(“The Land Battle: 15 Organizations Defending Land Rights,” Food Tank,
July 29), this robbery isn’t just a matter of history. It continues
right up to the present day.
Of course it’s obvious that the theft of Third World land and natural
resources continued long after Marx’s day. When Marx wrote his brief
survey of primitive accumulation, the colonial division of the interior
of Africa had not yet even begun. As just one example of that robbery,
the native population was driven off the most fertile fifth of the land
in the highlands of British East Africa and the land was given to
settlers for cash crop production, and the colonial authorities imposed
a poll tax on the evicted peasantry to compel them to earn wages working
their own stolen land. Under neocolonialism, much of the mineral wealth
of Africa and the rest of the developing world remains in the hands of
the heirs and assigns of the Western capitalists who looted it in the
first place. In the 20th century, a major part of U.S. foreign policy
was invading or overthrowing any government that tried to restore these
stolen land and minerals to their rightful owners. In Latin America, the
United States trained and funded death squads or installed military
dictatorships in most countries in order to protect the hacienda system
there.
But it’s going on right now, too. According to the Food Tank article
mentioned above, some 130 million hectares of land (or 500,000 square
miles) in the developing world has been bought by foreign investors over
the past fifteen years, most of it to produce cash crops for export and
a great deal of it involving the dispossession of people previously
cultivating it to feed themselves. For example, the Prosavala land grab
in Mozambique will evict 500,000 people.
And some of it is promoted by self-described “progressives” like the
folks at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For example, the
gigantic Kilombero rice plantation in Tanzania, a corporate undertaking
which takes up 20% of the Kilombero Valley, celebrated as a “model
investment project” by the Gates Foundation and USAID, forced evicted
peasants to choose between either $6 per acre (compared to $17/acre
promised) or a maximum of three acres of far less fertile land
elsewhere.
Of course this should come as no surprise. What’s variously called
“cognitive,” “progressive” or “green capitalism,” celebrated in Paul
Romer’s “New Growth Theory” and heavily promoted by the Gateses, Warren
Buffett, and faux-left carpetbaggers like Bono, amounts to a scheme to
give capitalism a new lease on life by enclosing new technologies of
abundance for rent through “intellectual property” rather than
socializing their benefits through competitive markets and commons-based
peer production. So it’s only logical for those greenwashed parasites to
move on to literally, physically enclosing land just like the gentry of
England 250 years ago.
What it comes down to is that enormous fortunes are made, not by
producing things, but by controlling the circumstances under which other
people are allowed to make things. Henry George, Jr. described it as
“controlling access to natural opportunities.” But it basically boils
down to enclosure of one kind or another and the extraction of rent. And
they can’t do it without government to enforce their patents and land
titles. It’s time to smash the state, and with it the parasitic
capitalists it serves.