10īut if capitalism thus came into being “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” in a violent process of expropriation that commercialized the soil, enslaved populations throughout the periphery, and created the modern working class, thereby making the systematic exploitation of labor possible, expropriation did not simply cease at that point. ![]() 9 Nature, or what Marx termed the “universal metabolism of nature,” was itself expropriated wherever possible by the emerging capitalist system, reduced to a mere “free gift….to capital” to be used and “abused” at will. 8 The re-enslavement of women in the transition to capitalism took various forms, including the burning of witches and wife selling, both of which enforced capitalist patriarchy. 7 The emerging “bourgeois order,” as Marx put it, was “a vampire that sucks out its blood and brains and throws into the alchemistic cauldron of capital,” imposing new private property relations. This historic transformation required the forcible dissolution of all earlier property forms and relations of production via the enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of small peasant holdings, enforced by the “gallows, pillory and whip,” and extended worldwide to the “extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines” of indigenous populations. Mercantilism was a period dominated by expropriation under the hegemony of merchant capital, including robbery, enslavement, and the outright seizure of the title to real property-a process misleadingly dubbed by the classical economists “previous accumulation”-whereby vast numbers of human beings were separated from the natural conditions of their existence, through the alienation of both land (nature) and labor. 5Ĭapitalism, or generalized commodity society, had its origins in the mercantilist age from the mid-fifteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. without exchange” or “without equivalent”). The inner dynamic of the system is governed by the process of exploitation of labor power, under the guise of equal exchange, while its primary relation to its external environment is one of expropriation (“appropriation…. Like any complex, dynamic system, capitalism has both an inner force that propels it and objective conditions outside itself that set its boundaries, the relations to which are forever changing. 4 Most important, because at the root of the problem, is the extreme expropriation of the earth itself and the consequent transformation in social relations. ![]() 3 To understand these rapidly changing conditions, it is necessary to dig much deeper than before into capital’s external logic of expropriation, as it was first delineated in Marx’s writings during the Industrial Revolution. 2 This historical shift and the deepening fissures that it has produced can be seen in the growth of what David Harvey has termed “anti-value politics,” directed at the boundaries of the system and visible in such forms as the ecological movement, growing conflicts over social reproduction in the household/family and gender/sexuality, and global resistance to the expansion of imperialism/racism. Instead, social conflicts are increasingly being fought over capitalism’s expropriation and spoliation of its wider social and natural environment. Hence, it is no longer realistic to treat-even by way of abstraction-the crucial political-economic struggles of our day as if they were confined primarily to the exploitation of labor within production. Twenty-first-century monopoly-finance capitalism constitutes what Karl Marx once called an “age of dissolution.” 1 All that is solid in the current mode of production is melting into air. The authors would like to thank Joseph Fracchia for his help developing the ideas presented in this article, and in particular for his assistance with issues of translation from German to English. They are coauthors, with Richard York, of The Ecological Rift (Monthly Review Press, 2010). ![]() Brett Clark is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah. John Bellamy Foster is the editor of MR and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
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