Review of The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism by Ian Angus, reviewed by Steve Leigh in Firebrand, republished by Monthly Review Online, 22 May 2024
In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the stage of history during which the ruling class took wealth from the lower classes–unjustly, usually by force or by theft–in order to accumulate the capital they would need to become the capitalist class.
The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism, by Ian Angus
The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is an excellent new book on this history from Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus. It is a beautifully written examination of the rise of capitalism and the destruction of peasant livelihoods as the centuries-old social relations of feudalism were abandoned for a new mode of production. Though it largely focuses on the transformation of feudalism into capitalism in England and Scotland, it has many implications for socialist organizing and for environmentalism today.
Angus’s book is especially valuable for the way it sharply refutes the reactionary thesis of “the tragedy of the commons.” It also provides substantial clarity on Marx’s views of, as he put it, “so-called primitive accumulation”.
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