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).