The law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the common
but leaves the greater villain loose
who steals the common from off the goose.
Anonymous
The English enclosure movement, which started in the fifteenth century and went on until the nineteenth, was a process of fencing off common land and turning it into private property. It is a story of consolidation of power by landowners with the help of the state, and was supported by political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. (Locke held that land became private property by the admixture of labor, which was the unquestionable property of the laborer -- in this case the capitalist.) Critics of that transformation have called it a state-supported "revolution of the rich against the poor" and "a plain enough case of class robbery." (eg. Michael Polanyi, The Great Transformation, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.) Following Marx, these historians see the process of enclosure as the forcible expropriation of the agricultural population, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital. (see Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, chapt. 27).
Economic historians sympathetic to the rise of capitalism have seen the enclosure movement as enabling the transformation of agricultural practice, resulting in increased production for a growing population, the expansion of cities, (and increased rents for the landowners). According to this latter interpretation, the new techniques and investments made possible by privatization offset the ecological instability of the open field system, and put resources to efficient use rather than leading to the inexorable exhaustion of the soil from overuse and underinvestment.
Read More
