Enclosure Acts: How privatisation of communal lands birthed wage labor and systemic inequality under capitalism
Original framing: “Capitalism was built on the ruins of the commons” — startpage news
The Enclosure Acts in 18th-century England were preceded by centuries of legal and violent dispossession, including the Highland Clearances and the privatization of Indian village commons under British rule. These precedents reveal enclosure as a colonial export, not a European anomaly. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was not linear but punctuated by state-sponsored violence, as Marx documented in *Capital*. Historical amnesia about these ruptures enables contemporary austerity and privatization policies.
The enclosure of the commons was not an economic inevitability but a violent project of capitalist expansion, one that dispossessed millions and created the modern proletariat.
This process was racialized and gendered, targeting Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and women who managed communal lands, while serving the interests of a capitalist class that profited from privatization. The historical parallels—from the Highland Clearances to the Zapatista autonomous zones—reveal enclosure as a recurring tactic of dispossession, not a relic of the past. Indigenous land tenure systems, which governed land as a living ancestor, offer a radical alternative to the extractive logic of capitalism, yet their erasure persists in legal and economic frameworks. The path forward requires legal recognition of communal rights, economic democratization through cooperatives, and a reckoning with the spiritual and material violence of enclosure, all while centering the voices of those who have resisted it for centuries.