# Origins Why did capitalism arise in Europe? [[European geography produced capitalism]] [[Capitalism and the body]] Capitalism has its roots in feudal Europe. [[We are still living in a feudal world]] # Enclosure The Enclosure movement began in the 15th century when nobles wanted to profit from the wool trade and decided to turn their land into sheep pasture. They also began to privatise common land that had supported peasants for centuries. The Reformation in the 16th century accelerated this process. When Henry VIII abolished Catholic monasteries, those lands were seized by nobles and the peasants who lived on it were evicted. Perhaps the biggest driver of enclosure was agriculture. Landlords realised they could make their peasants work harder by making them compete for leases, awarding leases only to the most productive of them. This new system was called "improvement". The monarchy tried to defend peasants' rights, but the English Civil War in the 1640s put limits on the Crown's power. The landlord class came to control Parliament, which passed acts between 1760 and 1870 that resulted in the enclosure of about 7 million acres of land, or about 1/6th of England. Source: The Divide --- ![[The Enclosure movement created artificial scarcity through theft]] In the 19th century, capital took over from land as the most important input for wealth creation. ![[The Enclosure movement changed the way land was used in England]] ![[The enclosure movement laid the basis for capitalism]] # Legal coding Capital was created out of laws. It borrowed laws that were used to regulate land. It was coded. The code grafts the following properties onto assets: - [[priority]] - [[durability]] - [[universality]] - [[convertibility]] ![[code]] Laws are simply rules of the game. They are seemingly rigid, but they are upheld by people. Change the mindsets of people, and the laws change. [[Law is the most definite type of rule]] Capital is the oxygen of neoliberalism. Without capital, the hallucination of neoliberalism would fall apart. To be good students of neoliberalism, we need to understand: - [[Capitalism has 8 essential characteristics]] - [[To understand capitalism, we must understand law]] Just as life made a switch from anaerobic to aerobic, we need to move away from capital. But first we need to replace capital with a different resource. Bitcoin is an early attempt to do this. As a medium of exchange, it has several improvements on capital. It has a linear growth curve, not exponential. It shows strict provenance, and so in theory produces trust. However, bitcoin is too rigid and efficient. We don't want things to be too predictable. A perfectly predictable market is a bad thing. Because then the person with the most powerful supercomputer wins. Power becomes entrenched. Perhaps some form of currency based on energy / carbon output. A manual laborer who uses physical energy might earn more than a machine that uses diesel, because he has a lower carbon denominator. A manual laborer who is vegan might earn even more, because his diet is less carbon-intensive. We need a far more sophisticated taxonomy of energy usage than the one we currently have. We need to have a system of energy audits / budgets. The accounting revolution that started with the double-entry system should be extended to energy. --- # Questions 1. There is a story that capitalism was driven by the enclosure movement, and that this led to privatisation and ownership rights, which is responsible for the current crisis of accumulation. Is this true? Is there a deeper story? Stephen Gallegos asserts that animals have a sense of their own territory, and that whether an animal is caught inside or outside their territory affects their behaviour. He says that the human mind and language is an extension of this territorial instinct. How do we manage this in a post-capitalist society? - Is this related to Essential Question 4, what are going to be the new forms of oppression? --- Other links: [[Three attitudes to wealth]]