Introduction: New Enclosures

Abstract

But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England. 'What is that?' said the Cardinal: The increase of pasture, said I, by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even these holy men, the abbots!, not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; by which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell, almost for nothing, their household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay for a buyer. When that little money is at an end (for it soon will be spent), what is left for them to do but either to steal, and so to be hanged (God knows how justly!), or to go about and beg? Thomas More, Utopia1 So Raphael Hythloday, the protagonist of Thomas More's Utopia, describes the corruption and avarice that has infected the Church in the early-sixteenth century. Not content with the income gained from tithes and rack-rents, the clerisy set about enclosing their lands, turning their sheep into devourers of men, ousting both tenants and owners from their homes, and transforming farmers into brigands and beggars. More's indictment of this unpeopling of the countryside resonates powerfully today, at the end of what Eric Hobsbawm calls 'the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of the twentieth century: the death of the global peasantry.2 Capital requires a constitutive outside, and the history of the modern era is one of waves of enclosure and the production of vast floating populations of landless and often illegal people.3 Our present historical moment is characterised by hitherto unparalleled acts of enclosure. Compare More's account of enclosure with that of Lee Kyung-hae, a South Korean farmer and peasant organiser who climbed atop a truck near the barbed wire surrounding the 2003 World Trade Organization Ministerial Meeting in Cancun, Mexico, flipped open a small pocketknife, and stabbed himself in the heart. Before his death, Lee handed out a pamphlet in which he wrote: My warning goes out to all citizens that human beings are in an endangered situation. That uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO Members are leading an undesirable globalization that is inhumane, environmentally degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic. It should be stopped immediately. Otherwise the false logic of neoliberalism will wipe out the diversity of global agriculture and be disastrous to all human beings.4 As Lee's statement makes clear, we live in a new age of globe-girdling enclosures, one in which the unpeopling of the English countryside described by Thomas More has been magnified dramatically, as part of a process which, as will become clear, no longer affects family farmers alone. Given this continuity and intensification across the ages, it behooves us to turn back to the historical record to examine the ways in which these original acts of enclosure, which Marx famously termed 'primitive accumulation,' were legitimated. …