“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, June 25, 2010

Primitive Accumulation

A very interesting interview about the old Marxist concept of “primitive accumulation”—summed up well by Marx in the easy to memorize aphorism, “First the workers are cleared off the land. Then the sheep arrive.” One of the interlocutors argues that primitive accumulation is structural to capitalism, i.e. it's happening all the time—it's not just a one off event.

What does this have to do with ecology? Well it has to do with the commons (however we think of them: common land, and nowadays, the genome, and the very nanostuff we're made of).

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