Saturday, 15 January 2022 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
CAPITAL VERSUS COMMONS, 5
Three centuries of mass resistance to privatization and dispossession
Articles in this series:
- Commons and classes before capitalism
- ‘Systematic theft of communal property’
- Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men
- Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class
- Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back
by Ian Angus
In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a dissolved monastery, Wilton Abbey near Salisbury. Herbert didn’t need farmland, so he had the buildings torn down, expelled the monastery’s tenants, and physically destroyed an entire village. In their place he built a large mansion, and fenced off the surrounding lands as a private park for hunting.
Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.
Tenants harvest the landlord’s grain
This important article by Colin Todhunter published more than five years ago (on January 21, 2016) analyses how the Gates Foundation had contributed to exacerbating social inequalities and “uprooting indigenous agriculture for the benefit of global agribusiness”.
Tea workers in colonial India
A 
Camilla Cavendish promotes false and misleading narratives to warm up the public to deregulated GMOs.
The New Dark Age 