[rad-green] Capitalism and Robbery: The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life

https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/

*Monthly Review  Volume 71, Issue 07 (December 2019)
<https://monthlyreview.org/archives/2019/volume-71-issue-07-december/>*

REVIEW OF THE MONTH <https://monthlyreview.org/section/review-of-the-month/>
Capitalism and RobberyThe Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life
*by John Bellamy Foster
<https://monthlyreview.org/author/johnbellamyfoster/>, Brett Clark
<https://monthlyreview.org/author/brettclark/> and Hannah Holleman
<https://monthlyreview.org/author/hannahholleman/>*
[image: Daytime in Indian Creek, the Sixshooter Peaks in Bears Ears
National Monument]
<https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1620px-Day_Time_in_Indian_Creek.jpg>

Daytime in Indian Creek, the Sixshooter Peaks in Bears Ears National
Monument. By US Bureau of Land Management
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Bureau_of_Land_Management>  - Tumblr
<http://mypubliclands.tumblr.com/>, Public Domain, Link
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55715127>.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of *Monthly Review* and a professor of
sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor
of *Monthly
Review* and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. Hannah
Holleman is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation and an associate
professor of sociology at Amherst College.

The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil constitutes the
basis of the capitalist mode of production.
—Karl Marx1
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en1>

“The power of abstraction,” Karl Marx noted, is absolutely crucial to the
theoretical analysis of historical systems, as exemplified by his critique
of capitalist political economy.2
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en2> But
while the force of abstraction is indispensable to any attempt to grasp the
inner character of capital, also implicit in Marx’s historical materialism
is the notion that capitalism can never be reduced simply to its internal
logic.3 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en3>
Rather,
it is also the product of numerous contingent historical conditions that
form the empirical boundaries and limits within which the system operates
and are integral to its functioning. Thus, historical capitalism cannot be
understood aside from its existence as a colonial/imperialist world system
in which the violent exercise of power is an ever-present reality. In order
to uncover the material conditions governing concrete capitalism, including
its interface with land, nonwage labor, and corporeal life, it is therefore
necessary to go beyond the inner reality of *exploitation*, and address
*expropriation*, or the process of appropriation without equivalent (or
without reciprocity) through which capital has sought to determine its
wider parameters.

The concept of expropriation is commonly seen on the left as a mere synonym
for the notion of primary accumulation—a category derived from classical
liberal political economy that Marx subjected to ruthless critique.4
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en4> In fact,
even in those instances where he referred to “so-called primitive [primary]
accumulation”—taking this concept directly from Adam Smith, who had
introduced the notion of previous accumulation (or previous stock)—Marx
immediately sought to transform this into the altogether different question
of expropriation, seeing this as constituting the essential precondition of
capitalism, as well as its continuous reality.5
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en5>

For Marx, the expropriation on which capitalism was based had nothing to do
with “so-called” previous *accumulation*, or the “nursery tale,” propounded
by classical political economy, that the capitalist system had its origin
in abstinence and the consequent buildup of savings.6
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en6> Indeed,
Marx, as Marxian political economist Michael Perelman writes, adamantly
“dismissed Smith’s mythical ‘previous’ accumulation, in order to call
attention to the actual historical experience,” characterized by rampant
expropriation.7
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en7> The
preconditions of capitalism, Marx explained, were to be found in a brutal
system of robbery, manifested in the form of enclosures, the usurpation of
the land, the dispossession of the peasantry, and the pillage of the
colonized world—giving rise to proletarianization, genocide, and slavery.
All of this involved the *transfer of claims* to existing property/wealth,
along with the wholesale expropriation of populations, who were subjected
to some of the worst forms of forcible oppression, removing them from the
land and ownership of the means of reproduction, and transforming them into
proletarians who had no way to live except by selling their labor power.
This extended as well to capitalism’s expropriation of the soil itself.
Such violent expropriation, characterizing the entire mercantilist era, was
not merely a predatory precursor to capitalism proper—as thinkers like Max
Weber and Joseph Schumpeter asserted in the twentieth century—but was
integral to historical capitalism and colonialism, determining the very
boundaries of the system, and carried forward into the modern era.8
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en8>

Thus “expropriation of the masses of the people from the soil,” the
dispossession of indigenous populations, and the pillage of the Americas,
Africa, and Asia by colonial conquest set the stage for the rise of
industrial capitalism and the new system of accumulation.9
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en9> It was
this, Marx stressed, not previous accumulation based on abstinence, that
led to “the genesis of the industrial capitalist.”10
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en10>
“Expropriation”
constituted “the starting point of the capitalist mode of production.”11
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en11> Such
ruthless expropriation did not end with the mercantilist era. Rather, the
bloody usurpations of land, labor, and corporeal life on a world scale has
continued to form the boundary conditions of capitalism up to the present
day.

Although Marx’s key concepts of exploitation and expropriation necessarily
overlapped to some extent, they were nonetheless analytically distinct,
forming an identity-in-difference and at the same time
difference-in-identity, or a dialectical relation. *Exploitation* related
primarily to the appropriation of surplus value through a formal process of
equal exchange in which surplus value was extracted from the direct
producers. Conversely, *expropriation* was directed at those conditions
where a *quid pro quo* did not operate, even formally, and where outright
robbery or “profit upon expropriation” occurred.12
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en12> In late
capitalism and late imperialism, equal exchange is increasingly a veil
concealing a robbery system—with widening spheres of unequal exchange. This
system of robbery, implemented by monopolistic multinational corporations,
encompasses natural conditions of production and life itself.

As Michael D. Yates argues in *Can the Working Class Change the World?*,
“there can be no [real historical] separation between exploitation and
expropriation.” While the former allows us to understand the specificities
of the appropriation of unpaid labor from workers in the production
process, the latter brings to the fore “racism, patriarchy, environmental
catastrophe,” and imperialism.13
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en13> Hence,
Marx’s concept of expropriation, seen in a complex dialectical and
historical relation to exploitation, is the key to understanding the
multiple oppressions that constitute capitalism as a historical system and
its overall relation to its material environment.

The concept of expropriation in Marx’s analysis had its *locus classicus *in
his critique of James Stewart’s eighteenth-century treatment of profit upon
expropriation (as opposed to profit upon accumulation), which was to
influence his two major discussions of *primary expropriation *in the
*Grundrisse* and *Capital*. For Marx, expropriation was appropriation
without equivalent or appropriation without reciprocity.14
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en14>

Although there is a vast literature on the concept of *primitive
accumulation*, the term *primitive* was a mistranslation, as Marx was
referring to what in classical political economy was designated as
*previous* or *primary* accumulation.15
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en15> Moreover,
Marx treated the phrase pejoratively, entitling his discussion “So-Called
Primitive [Primary] Accumulation,” and indicating in a number of places his
disdain for the term, which in classical political economy had been
designed to justify the current order.16
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en16>

For Marx, the inner logic of capital was explained as a product of
exploitation in a theoretical context that specified equal exchange. Yet,
he never failed to stress that the background conditions of the system,
along with its external development and expansion, were governed by force
and fraud.17
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en17> This
aspect of his critique was meant to be taken up systematically later on as
he moved from the abstract to the concrete, from the pure logic of capital
to the ground of the world economy and crisis (that is, imperialism).18
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en18> An
underlying perception of the role of expropriation in determining the
historical boundaries of capitalism informed his and Frederick Engels’s
discussions of slavery, patriarchy, and the metabolic rift, or the
“irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a
metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”19
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en19>

A renewed focus on expropriation is therefore essential today if we want to
understand the historical relation between the accumulative
society/processes associated with exchange value, and capital’s continuing
robbery of various nonaccumulative societies/processes related to use value.
20 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en20> The
issue here becomes not simply one of the exploitation of labor, but the
expropriation of household economies (and household/subsistence labor),
corporeal life, the periphery, and the planetary environment. Historically,
appropriation without equivalent is the most common form of
class-hierarchal relations, manifested in complex ways in various tributary
modes of production.21
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en21> However,
serving to distinguish capitalist society historically from its
precapitalist precursors, in this respect, is the greater systematization
and scale assumed by profits upon expropriation, beginning with the
mercantilist period, but extending into all the later stages of capitalist
development.

In the ruling liberal ideology, such expropriation, whether in the form of
slavery, war, genocide, unequal exchange, or the exercise of monopoly
power, is treated as either an accident unrelated to the capitalist system
or as an inevitable product of human nature raised to the level of society
as a whole. Violence and robbery, despite their pervasiveness in global
capitalism, are thus commonly portrayed as disconnected from the inner
nature and logic of the economic system rooted in *quid pro quo*.
Nevertheless, the sordid history of capitalism is hard to pass off as a
series of accidents or anomalies. The last five centuries involve a dismal
chronology of colonialism/imperialism, racial capitalism, wars of
aggression, and patriarchal expropriation of household labor. These
particular social ills of capitalism are accompanied by the systematic
violation of what the great German chemist Justus von Liebig called the
“law of compensation,” or the need to replenish the constituent elements
taken from the earth.22
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en22>

While Marx devoted the greater part of his critique of political economy to
analyzing capital’s inner dynamic of exploitation, the wider reality of
expropriation was thus never far from his mind, and it was revealed in the
margins of his analysis. It was clearly slated to be taken up more fully in
his planned volumes on landed property, wage labor, the state,
international trade and the world market, and crises—all of which
represented successively more concrete levels of analysis. In Marx’s view,
colonization was never simply about the expropriation of the land, but also
encompassed the “extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the
indigenous population.”23
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en23> It was
this recognition of the role of expropriation of the land and people that
accounts for much of the extraordinary richness and power of Marx and
Engels’s historical observations. The revolution against capital
necessitated “the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the
people,” or, in other words, the expropriation of the expropriators.24
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en24>

Crucial investigations into the role expropriation played within Marx’s
critique of capitalism and the application of this to the historical
analysis of capitalist development have emerged recently in a number of
places, including: social reproduction theory (for example, the work of
Nancy Fraser), analyses of racial capitalism (as in the writings of Michael
Dawson and Sven Beckert), and Marxian ecological theory (particularly
treatments of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift).25
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en25> Glen
Sean Coulthard has argued in *Red Skin White Masks* that examination of the
violent expropriation of indigenous peoples requires that we see
“dispossession as a co-foundational feature of our understanding of and
critical engagement with capitalism, open[ing] up the possibility of
developing a more ecologically attentive critique of colonial capitalist
accumulation.”26
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en26>

Our analysis, in what follows, is designed to illustrate the crucial
importance of the theoretical insights stemming from activation of Marx’s
concept of expropriation. We focus on three historical moments of massive
expropriation of people and the earth: Moment I: The Industrialization of
Agriculture and the Metabolic Rift; Moment II: Dust Bowls of Empire; and
Moment III: Imperialism in the Anthropocene. The intention here is
obviously not to provide a detailed, much less comprehensive, analysis of
any of these critical phases of development, but rather to highlight in
each case how a historical-materialist method encompassing expropriation as
well as exploitation can help capture the various contradictions and
conflicts of capitalism within a wider lens.27
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en27> If Marx
famously said that the main (internal) barrier to capital was capital
itself, he also indicated that capital’s main external limit was its
refusal to accept any limits whatsoever, turning all boundaries into
barriers to be transgressed by the capitalist juggernaut. Faced with
capitalism’s destruction of the Irish ecology in the nineteenth century, he
raised the question of “ruin or revolution”—a question even more relevant
in the twenty-first century in the context of capitalism’s disruption of
the entire Earth System.28
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en28>
Moment I: The Industrialization of Agriculture and the Metabolic Rift

The industrialization of agriculture in the nineteenth century rested upon
the long historical emergence of capitalism as a distinct socioeconomic
order. As Beckert details in the *Empire of Cotton*, “imperial expansion,
expropriation, and slavery” were critical to its formation.29
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en29> Throughout
the age of mercantilism, from the mid–fifteenth to mid–eighteenth
centuries—a period Beckert refers to as “war capitalism”—earlier property
forms and productive relations were dissolved via the enclosure of the
commons and imperialism, formally transferring title of land to the
bourgeois class. The racialized characteristics of capitalism were embedded
from the start as Africa, Asia, and the Americas were colonized while
genocidal campaigns were waged against indigenous peoples and Africans were
enslaved to work on plantations.30
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en30> These
conditions contributed to the massive transfer of wealth to England and
other European nations. Marx explained that this process of primary
expropriation was pivotal to the English Industrial Revolution.31
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en31> Cotton
was associated with the robbery of nature and nonwaged labor, as well as
the exploitation of waged labor, providing the cheap materials essential to
the rising textile factories, where industrial laborers subsisted on
imported potatoes from the increasingly exhausted fields of Ireland.

The First Agricultural Revolution in the capitalist age coincided with the
enclosures, from the late fifteenth to early nineteenth centuries, and the
formal transfer of land titles. Peasants and small land holders were driven
from the land, pauperized, proletarianized, and forced to sell their labor
power for wages to purchase the means of subsistence. These changes ushered
in a heightened alienation from nature, a more distinct town-country
division, and specialized food and fiber production. The Second
Agricultural Revolution, from 1830 to 1880, was characterized by the
development of soil chemistry, the growth of the fertilizer trade and
industry, the increase in the scale and intensity of agricultural
production, and “land” improvements, such as imposing uniformity across
fields, making them easier to apply modern technologies. Additionally,
intensified agricultural production required massive fertilizer inputs in
order to enrich the soil.32
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en32> In
numerous ways, this period is the embodiment of appropriation without
equivalent and without reciprocity.

Liebig played a pioneering role in studying the changing soil chemistry in
relation to the advancing capitalist industrial agriculture. He noted that
the production of crops depended on the soil containing essential
nutrients—such as, but not limited to, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
He explained that a rational system of agriculture must be governed by the
“law of compensation” or the law of replacement.33
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en33> The
nutrients that are absorbed by plants as they grow must be restored to the
soil to support future crops. But this was far from the case in Western
Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. Liebig noted that
the British high-farming techniques constituted a “robbery system,” leading
to the despoliation of the soil.34
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en34> Marx,
who studied Liebig’s work, detailed how the application of industrial
practices to increase yields and the transportation of food and fiber to
distant markets in cities were generating a rift in the soil nutrient
cycle. In *Capital*, he famously observed that capitalist agriculture
progressively “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the
earth,” preventing the “return to the soil of its constituent elements
consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the
operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the
soil.” As a result, “all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress
in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all
progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is
progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility.”35
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en35>

Marx thus presented a systematic analysis of how industrialized agriculture
robbed the land of necessary nutrients. But he also recognized and provided
the basis for assessing the interlocking oppressions and processes of
expropriation that accompanied this soil crisis. As the nutrients from the
countryside accumulated as waste in the cities or were washed away to sea
as part of urban refuse, a variety of means were sought to replenish the
land.36 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en36> In
particular, between 1840 and 1880, an international fertilizer trade was
established, which involved shipping millions of tons of guano and nitrates
from Peru and Chile to the Global North. The mining of guano was largely
rooted in expropriation of land, labor, and corporeal life, all of which
were necessary to make this fertilizer so profitable. Initially male
convicts and slaves worked as forced labor on the guano islands, using
picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and sacks. As the availability of slaves
declined, Chinese workers were imported as part of the “coolie” labor
system.37
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en37>

Former slavers used coercion, deceit, kidnapping, and questionable
contracts to set up this new racialized regime of bonded labor, which
supplied workers for colonies and former colonies throughout the world.
Over ninety thousand Chinese workers were shipped to Peru during the heyday
of the guano trade—approximately 10 percent died in passage due mainly to
poor treatment and malnourishment. The most unfortunate unfree laborers
were sent to the guano islands, where the total workforce fluctuated
between two hundred to eight hundred workers at any given moment, but where
lives were used up rapidly—considered of less value than the guano that
they dug up.38
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en38> Only
men were sent to these islands, where over “one hundred armed soldiers”
kept guard, preventing workers from committing suicide by running into the
ocean.39 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en39>
Marx
described this “coolie” system as a form of “disguised slavery.”40
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en40> Eye-witness
accounts noted that these Chinese workers were treated as expendable,
regularly flogged and whipped if they did not fulfill the demanding work
expectations. They labored in the hot sun, filling sacks and wheelbarrows
with guano, which they then transported to a chute that loaded the boats.
Guano dust coated their bodies and filled their lungs. The smell was
overwhelming. One account described the conditions as “the infernal art of
using up human life to the very last inch,” as the lives of the workers
were very short.41
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en41> Several
British shipmasters were “horrified at the cruelties…inflicted on the
Chinese, whose dead bodies they described as floating round the islands.”42
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en42>

Here we see how expropriation works at the boundaries of the capitalist
system. Guano, which had been used for thousands of years to enrich the
fields of Peru, was quickly being exhausted to replenish the fields of the
Global North. The sea birds that deposited hundreds of feet of guano on the
islands were often killed, as they were deemed a nuisance to extractive
operations. Guano was being removed at a much faster rate than it
accumulated. The new racialized labor system that was imposed was largely
predicated on brutally expropriated bonded labor, enhancing accumulation at
the core of the system. The conditions resulted in a corporeal rift, which
undermined living conditions, leading to poor health and an early death for
many of the workers, who were simply replaced by other imported laborers.
All of this, moreover, was meant to make possible a continuation of a
robbery system where the soil in Europe and North America was being
systematically robbed of its nutrients.

These conditions of expropriation were a central component of supporting
the Second Agricultural Revolution accompanying the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution, in which cotton was so integral, had been based
on the triangular slave trade. It was after the Slavery Abolition Act of
1833, which formally abolished slavery within most British colonies, that
the British turned to the “coolies” from Asia, a disguised form of slavery
as a way of replacing open slavery, with new forms of bonded labor. Guano,
in this sense, was part of a second triangular trade, geared to the
industrialization of agriculture, British high farming, and the need to
restore the impoverished soil by means of an imperial system, involving the
worst extremes of labor exploitation and the expropriation of corporeal
life.

In the nineteenth century, women were at the center of the Industrial
Revolution, constituting the majority of the core industrial workforce in
England, especially in the cotton, silk, wool, and lace sectors of textile
production.43
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en43> Marx
took detailed notes regarding their positions within the workforce and the
conditions under which they labored. Along with Engels, he documented the
specific types of hazards that these women were exposed to, which created
an array of health problems that shortened their lives, such as respiratory
issues from inhaling fibers. Both working-class men and women experienced
forms of corporeal degradation associated with their working conditions,
but the specifics varied according to the types of work in which they were
concentrated.44
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en44>
Additionally,
women received much lower wages than men and had a disproportionate
responsibility for social reproductive work to support whole families, to
the extent that this additional activity was possible, given the long
working hours.45
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en45>

Women in this period were superexploited in the industrial workforce,
producing a large share of surplus value in factories, while at the same
time they were compelled to produce use values, which served as a free gift
to capital, through their work in the home in the process of reproducing
labor.46 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en46>
Under
these conditions, which threatened the very existence of the working-class
family, women, though responsible for the social reproduction of the family
and the labor force, could scarcely maintain their own existence. The
double day was not a creation of late capitalism, but rather was present at
the very birth of industrial capitalism—at a time when the working day
(including the time necessary to get to and from work) for women was often
twelve hours or longer, six days a week.

For the working classes, wage exploitation was also in a sense nutritional
exploitation, as wages were mainly expended on the most basic foods
necessary for survival. Intensive agricultural production in England, which
was supported by imported fertilizer, contributed to the creation of a new
international food regime after the Irish potato famine and the end of the
Corn Laws in 1845–46. What Marx himself called the new food regime involved
a shift toward more of a meat-based system, in which additional land was
being devoted to animal production, geared to serving the upper classes.47
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en47> In
contrast, as Marx and Engels detailed, the working class subsisted on
poor-quality and inadequate diets, consisting largely of bread and very few
vegetables.48
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en48> To make
matters worse, the food, drink, and medicine that was available was
adulterated, containing a vast array of contaminates, such as mercury,
chalk, sand, feces, and strychnine. Regular consumption of these materials
contributed to various health ailments, chronic gastritis, and death. Women
tended to be the most malnourished, as they consumed less food and ate last
within families. Conditions were worse in England’s colony of Ireland,
which was forced to export its soil (nutrients) and its capital to England.
49 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en49>

The industrialization of agriculture was intimately connected to the
transgression of natural limits, given the interlocking expropriation of
land, labor, and corporeal life that shaped the social metabolism and that
constantly expanded capitalism’s intensive creative destruction. The new
system required the exponential growth of external inputs from the
environment. Metabolic rifts, the imperial draining of wealth from the
Global South, and a system of exploitation that had expropriation as its
background condition defined the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth
century.
Moment II: Dust Bowls of Empire

The age of “so-called primitive accumulation” or primary expropriation was
the era of early colonialism, including the development of white settler
colonialism, of which the United States was a prime example. The United
States was seen from the beginning, in the words of George Washington, as a
“rising empire.” The American Revolution was induced in part by the British
Proclamation of 1763, which limited the movement of settlers into the Ohio
Valley to the West. With the victory of the thirteen colonies, the land in
the Ohio Valley was opened to land speculators and settlers. The Iroquois
Confederacy, so admired by Marx and Engels, was swept aside in around a
dozen years. Almost all of their land was expropriated and they were forced
onto a few small reserves. Washington termed the Indians “beasts of prey”
and ordered his troops during the American Revolution to invade the
Iroquois villages, killing men, women, and children, and destroying their
crops in a war of absolute extermination.50
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en50>

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the demand for U.S. cotton
boomed to feed the textile industries of England, giving new life to the
slave system. As Marx emphasized, plantation slavery with its monocrops and
brutalized slave labor was ecologically inefficient (however successful it
was in terms of capital accumulation). It rapidly exhausted the soil,
generating a westward movement as plantation owners sought to bring virgin
land into cultivation.51
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en51> Agriculture
in New England was only marginally less destructive to the soil and
forests, pushing populations and capital ever further to the West, while
much of the grain produced (following the abolition of the Corn Laws in
Britain in 1846) was being exported to England in a global environmental
rift.52 <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en52> In
his excerpts from agricultural chemist J. W. Johnston’s *Notes on North
America*, Marx emphasized the former’s observation with respect to “the
common system…of North America of selling everything for which a market can
be got [hay, corn, potatoes, etc.]; and taking no trouble to put anything
into the soil in return.”53
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en53>

The building of railroads, the Industrial Revolution in the United States
in the 1830s and ’40s, and the opening up of the far West (partly through
the seizure of lands from Mexico), all went hand in hand with a process of
genocide and displacement of Native Americans, while coupling ecological
destruction with capitalist development. In 1890, the Bureau of Census
declared the frontier closed (while the Indian Wars were declared over with
the massacre at Wounded Knee that same year), after which figures such as
Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt argued for the extension of
the U.S. frontier abroad, leading to the Spanish-American War.54
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en54> The
coming of monopoly capitalism and the age of the giant corporation only
expanded the realm of expropriation of people and nature into entirely new
spheres.

In visiting Indian Territory in Oklahoma at the very beginning of the
twentieth century, where the extractive petroleum industry was booming next
door to expropriative farming practices, Weber documented some of the
destruction wrought on the earth and the indigenous populations. “With
almost lightning speed,” he observed, “everything that stands in the way of
capitalistic culture is being crushed.”55
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en55> The
subjection of the land along with the indigenous population pointed to the
socioecological catastrophe that was to ensue.

The Dust Bowl in the 1930s is known as the drought of record in the United
States, in many ways symbolizing ecological crisis in the twentieth
century. As environmental historian Donald Worster wrote in the 1970s: “In
no other instance was there greater or more sustained damage to American
land, and there have been few times when so much tragedy was visited on its
inhabitants. Not even the depression was more damaging, economically. And
in ecological terms we have nothing in the nation’s past…that compares.”56
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en56> Almost
everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl and can picture the billowing dust
storms on the Great Plains and the mass migration of the Okies. Millions of
acres were affected and some counties in the heart of the region lost a
third of their population, while in Oklahoma almost a third of the farmers
were dislodged from their farms.57
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en57> The
plight of the Dust Bowl region became emblematic of the enormous hardship
associated with the Great Depression and rapacious capitalism.

The Dust Bowl Era, despite its vast impact, remains in some contemporary
accounts a localized, unforeseeable, and even purely *natural* disaster—one
that occurred at a particular time and that is unlikely to ever happen
again, as it was simply an event irrevocably of the past. Nothing, however,
could be further from the truth. The Dust Bowl was the social-historical
product of expanding capitalism, empire, and white settler colonialism, all
of which contributed to the destruction of land cover and soil erosion. It
arose out of the expropriation of indigenous lands, the indigenous peoples
themselves, and the fertile soils. Every aspect of the Dust Bowl Era was
connected to imperial advance. It was international in nature—the result of
a widespread rift in the metabolism between human beings and nature,
brought on by capitalist production and culminating in the age of monopoly
capital. Today, similar conditions are emerging on a more planetary level,
with the result that the Dust Bowl is becoming a prominent historical
referent of the climate change era.

To get a concrete sense of the historical underpinnings of the Dust Bowl,
it is useful to turn to Thorstein Veblen, whom C. Wright Mills called “the
best critic of America that America has produced.”58
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en58> For
Veblen, writing in 1923 in *Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in
Recent Times*, the United States was built on “the seizure of the fertile
soil and its conversion to private gain.” There was no question whom it had
been seized from, since it was a product of the “debauchery and
manslaughter entailed on the Indian population of the country.” Aligned
with this was the turning of people into “assets” to be held in usufruct
through the practice of systematic slavery. In all, “the American plan or
policy [as implemented on the frontier],” Veblen wrote, was “a settled
practice of converting all public wealth to private gain on a plan of
legalised seizure.”59
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en59>

A key element in this rapacious advance was the destruction of forests and
land cover. “Capitalizing on natural resources by treating them as a source
of free income,” Veblen argued, encouraged waste and destruction on a vast
scale, constituting the normal practice of colonization and empire. For
instance, the wasted timber associated with logging and land-clearing
practices was so great “that this enterprise of lumber-men during the
period since the middle of the nineteenth century has destroyed very
appreciably more timber than it has utilised.”60
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en60> Most
important of all was “the sclerosis of the soil” brought on by processes of
expropriation of the earth, without the least attention to conservation.61
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en61> In this
respect, developments in the United States were similar to other white
settler colonies, where indigenous populations were displaced and a process
of unlimited ecological destruction was unleashed, resulting in the
detachment of people from any form of ecological culture related to being
settled *inhabitants of a place*. Veblen stressed that this problem stemmed
from *absentee ownership*, which was endemic to capitalism.

The Dust Bowl crisis in the 1930s was a product of the historical factors
raised by Veblen. The seizure of the land, the genocidal approach to Native
Americans, the effects of slavery, the denudation of the land, the
“sclerosis of the soil” due to soil exhaustion and soil erosion, and the
devastating effects of all this on the working population were all evident.
In their 1930s book, *The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion*,
Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr White wrote:

The history of erosion in the United States is bound up with the pioneer
phase in the nation’s development, through the stages of deforestation for
agricultural land, timber, fuel, and potash in the east, the development of
the monoculture system of agriculture for maize in the Corn Belt and cotton
to the south, overstocking and ploughing of the natural grassland areas of
the Great Plains, gross overstocking and maltreatment of the range country,
overgrazing and over-cultivation on the Pacific coast, and deforestation in
the Pacific north-west.62
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en62>

Hence, it is abundantly clear that dust storms on the plains “were not
freaks of Nature” but products of conditions that had long been developing
as a result of the robbery and abuse of the land, exacerbated by a shift
from subsistence to commercial cash-crop agriculture.63
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en63>

The colonial history that shaped and propelled these developments also
determined their differential effects across communities in the Dust Bowl
region and elsewhere. On top of previous losses, including repeated
dispossessions and forced relocation, Native American communities in the
Great Plains Dust Bowl region lost some 90 percent of their remaining
landholdings between 1890 and 1933 and had among the highest poverty rates
in the country. In the Oklahoma region with its historic Indian Territory,
whites were doing everything they could to wrest the better part of the
lands originally set aside for Native Americans. As the new era of crisis
descended, appeals for relief went unanswered and then inadequately
answered. Black and Latinx farmers too were hit particularly hard by the
Dust Bowl and Depression, and New Deal programs were intentionally
discriminatory with the result being that black and Latinx farmers did not
receive the same relief as white farmers, and migrant farmworkers were
often the targets of racist deportation laws and other forms of abuse.64
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en64> This
led to further concentration of the land, primarily in the hands of white
inhabitants and wealthy absentee landlords.

Oklahoma had been the epicenter of a powerful, and in some parts,
multiracial and multiethnic progressive movement in the southeast and
southwest. The movement pushed for economic, social, and land reform. Some
called for revolution. Significant multiracial alliances were sustained
into the 1930s, even in the face of organized and violent forces of
reaction. Yet, despite the movements’ significant accomplishments and all
the relief measures associated with the New Deal, economic and
environmental *injustice* prevailed given the racialized structure of power
in the U.S. political economy.65
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en65>

In all, the efforts to engineer more stable relations between human beings
and the environment on the Great Plains following the Dust Bowl were
plagued by the persistent, fundamental problem: a voracious system of
expropriation of the earth for profit, rooted in “the progressive seizure
of natural resources and their conversion to private gain.”66
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en66> Its
operations widened the rift between human beings and nature, accumulating
in a potential for larger catastrophes. The social relations of
expropriation that lay behind the economic and ecological contradictions of
the period were extended rather than transcended in the decades that
followed.

Dust Bowl-like conditions, or what is now sometimes called
*dustbowlification*, did not occur only in the United States in the 1930s,
but also in other colonial frontier regions. In 1923, the South African
Drought Commission reported “that, as a result of conditions created by the
white civilization in South Africa, the power of the land, as a whole, to
hold up and absorb water has been diminished.… Herein lies the secret of
our ‘drought losses.’”67
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en67> A
leading South African botanist and critic of the destruction of South
Africa’s soil, as well as a leading opponent of apartheid, was the South
African Marxist ecologist Edward Roux, author of both *The Veld and the
Future: A Book on Soil Erosion for South Africans* (1946) and *Time Longer
than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South
Africa* (1948). In *The Veld and the Future*, he wrote: “To save the soil
we must all work together, the black man and the white man, the man and the
woman.… The soil does not really belong to this person or that who has the
right to use a bit of land. It belongs to the nation,” that is, the people
as a whole, especially, he insisted, the indigenous African population
struggling for freedom “and the children who are yet unborn.”68
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en68> Yet,
Roux’s ecosocialist vision dominated neither in South Africa nor in the
United States. Racial and class divisions, as well as the metabolic rift,
continued to reinforce each other within capitalist relations of production.

These problems persist today as a consequence of agribusiness production
and hence society is increasingly vulnerable in the face of climate change
and land degradation. This is especially evident in the original Dust Bowl
region, prompting questions regarding what was learned by the crisis. In
2016, scientists from the University of Chicago and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration published a study in *Nature
Plants* entitled
“Simulating Agriculture in a Modern Dust Bowl Drought,” investigating the
potential for drought-induced agricultural losses from global warming. They
concluded that the advent of conditions similar to those in the 1930s Dust
Bowl would have “unprecedented consequences” despite the growth of
ecological science. Joshua Elliott, a research scientist and coauthor of
the article, declared in an interview: “We expected to find the system much
more resilient because 30 percent of production is now irrigated in the
United States, and because we’ve abandoned corn production in more severely
drought-stricken places such as Oklahoma and west Texas.… But we found the
opposite: The system was just as sensitive to drought and heat as it was in
the 1930s.” Today, both the scale of production and the field for the
accumulation of catastrophe are much vaster, intensifying the expropriation
of land, labor, and corporeal life, without any regard for reciprocity.69
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en69>
Moment III: Imperialism in the Anthropocene

The Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s was the culmination of a series of
ecological crises associated with the era of early monopoly capitalism,
assuming particularly acute forms in white settler colonies and colonial
frontier regions around the globe.70
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en70> Today
in the era of monopoly-finance capital and late imperialism, vast regions
of the planet are being converted into dust bowls, not through the action
of the climate itself, but as a result of the logic of a global economic
system that promotes the “conquest” of nature as a means to the
exploitation and superexploitation of the world’s population. The global
commons are being destroyed everywhere, as reflected in the burning of the
Amazon, the bleaching of coral reefs, the depletion of the oceans, the mass
extinction of species, and the drying up and contamination of the world’s
freshwater sources. The reality is thus one of a growing planetary
ecological holocaust, bearing down especially on the most vulnerable
populations, particularly frontline communities and in the Global South.

Nearly half a century ago, in 1971, Barry Commoner warned that

Human beings have broken out of the circle of life, driven not by
biological need, but by the social organization which they have devised to
“conquer” nature: means of gaining wealth that are governed by requirements
that conflict with those which govern nature. The end result is the
environmental crisis, a crisis of survival. Once more, to survive, we must
close the circle. We must learn to restore to nature the wealth that we
borrow from it…. The world is being carried to the brink of ecological
disaster not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but
by the phalanx of powerful economic, political and social forces that
constitute the march of history. Anyone who proposes to cure the
environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history.71
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en71>

The contemporary rift between humanity and the earth’s metabolism, to which
Commoner alluded, is signified by the designation of the new geological
epoch, the Anthropocene, which represents a quantitative and qualitative
break with all previous epochs.72
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en72> A
scientific consensus is emerging that the Anthropocene began around 1950,
marked by the introduction of artificial radionuclides from thermonuclear
bomb testing, mass production of plastics, and, in particular, the Great
Acceleration of capitalist development. The ferocious growth imperative of
capital, which recognizes no limits, has led to the socioeconomic system
transgressing an array of planetary boundaries, associated with climate
change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity,
freshwater depletion, pollution, the disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus
cycles, and chemical pollution.73
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en73> The
very operations of late capitalism and imperialism are today generating a
global ecological crisis, undermining the conditions that support life,
raising the issue of omnicide: the destruction of life in general.

Under the dominant economic order, the earth is merely the source of “free
gifts of Nature to capital,” justifying what amounts to a robbery economy.74
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en74> In this
system of generalized commodity production, “quantity rules absolute” as
exchange value is deemed the universal measure.75
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en75> “The
essence of capitalism,” Michael Parenti explained, “is to convert nature
into commodities and commodities into capital, transforming the living
earth into inanimate wealth. This capital accumulation process wreaks havoc
upon the global ecological system. It treats the planet’s life-sustaining
resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests, fisheries, oceans,
rivers, air quality) as dispensable ingredients of limitless supply, to be
consumed or toxified at will.”76
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en76> The
ongoing growth of this system is predicated on expanding and deepening the
scope of expropriation of the environment, labor, and the corporeal life of
all species. These lethal contradictions are clearly evident throughout the
Earth System, including the world ocean.

Following the Second World War, industrial fishing fleets underwent a major
transformation, as part of the great acceleration of capitalist operations.
Over time, massive ships, equipped with state-of-the-art technologies such
as sonar and GPS systems for locating fish, became the norm for industrial
fishing operations. Trawlers and longlines are able to capture a record
number of target fish (those species that are desired for the market).
Using lines that are miles long with hundreds of hooks, as well as nets
that are over a mile in circumference, these ships harvest tons of fish in
a single haul—a third of which are unwanted species, including marine
mammals, which are killed and discarded.77
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en77> On
large ships, which are really factories at sea, the fish are processed
onboard. Despite the effects of overfishing in all ocean systems in
reducing fish populations, global captures of marine fish, by means of this
new technology of expropriation, increased from twenty million tons in 1950
to about ninety million tons in 2000.78
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en78> While
there are currently 3.5 million fishing vessels, only 1 percent of these
ships account for 60 percent of seafood catch, highlighting the significant
role of monopoly capital in this sector.79
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en79>

These operations are extremely efficient at capturing fish, leading to
widespread depletion of fish populations, as they are harvested at rates
faster than they can reproduce. The scope of these actions has only
worsened oceanic conditions, because as one species is fished out, firms
simply move onto the next species in a process known as “fishing down the
marine food webs.”80
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en80> Combined
with habitat destruction due to the Earth System crisis as a whole,
fisheries scientists are predicting a collapse of all marine species
currently being fished by the middle of the century.81
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en81>

Despite these natural limits, imperial nations are engaged in aggressive
“ocean-grabbing” campaigns to expropriate as much as possible from the
oceans. Through a variety of management arrangements and trade agreements,
the Global North is progressively enclosing the oceans, gaining access to
fisheries around the world, including those within the exclusive economic
zones of nations in the South. Increasingly small-scale fishers are being
blocked from access to traditional fisheries, undermining the subsistence
of their families and communities.82
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en82>

For many nations in the Global South, seafood is a major export to the
North, supplying food for people and pets, as well as valued fertilizer to
enrich depleted soils.83
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en83> For
example, Thailand is the third largest global exporter of seafood
commodities, which amount to over $7 billion per year.84
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en84> In
order to keep costs low, especially given the additional expenses
associated with ships, such as the equipment and fuel required to chase
depleted fish stocks, many fishing operations in Thailand use slave labor,
which is estimated to be between 145,000 to 200,000 people.85
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en85> These
enslaved workers are forced to work long hours, sleep very little, receive
minimal nourishment, and are bound in chains and restraints to the ships.
Like the Chinese workers on the guano islands in the nineteenth century,
they are physically beaten if they are working too slowly or make mistakes
handling the fish. From time to time, they are sold to other fishing
operations. Many of these workers migrated from places such as the
Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia, searching for employment, but
ended up being trafficked into slave labor.86
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en86>

Some of the fish being captured on these ships are being directed to shrimp
aquaculture operations in order to supply needed feed for this thriving
industry, which is leading to widespread marine pollution and
contamination. These conditions are undermining small-scale fishers,
creating a situation where the “shrimp eat better” than they do.87
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en87>

The commodity fetishism associated with seafood obscures not only the
expropriation of fish and the slave labor used to capture them, but also
the superexploitation in the processing plants. In Thailand, these
extensively Taylorized plants increase profits through the employment of
low-wage children and women who head, gut, skin, fillet, peel, clean, and
sort the fish. International organizations have documented the poor working
conditions, the injuries, and the lack of schooling that thousands of
children are receiving while employed in this industry.88
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en88>

The current Earth System crisis extends from oceans to freshwater and
beyond. The dynamic of imperialism and omnicide in the Anthropocene is
associated with alterations in the earth’s hydrological cycle, including
changes in precipitation, the drying up (and contamination) of freshwater
sources, and the melting of mountain glaciers with their indispensable
“water towers.”89
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en89> As
climatologist James Hansen indicates, under a continuation of business as
usual over the next several decades, “low latitudes during the warm seasons
could become so hot and inhospitable to human livelihood as to generate an
unstoppable drive for emigration. That potential future is emerging into
view for regions as populated as India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia and huge
swaths of Africa.”90
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en90> Under
these conditions, sea-level rise, dustbowlification, and extreme weather in
general will force hundreds of millions of people in low latitudes in the
Global South to migrate from their homes, either in the form of internal
migration within countries or mass emigration abroad. In 2017, 68.5 million
people were forcibly displaced from their homes, approximately one third of
these due to extreme weather. According to a World Bank study, internal
migration alone in the three regions of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa,
and Southeast Asia—accounting for a little more than half the population of
the Global South—will rise to 143 million by 2050.91
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en91> Meanwhile,
wealthy countries, while frequently superexploiting populations in the
Global South via multinational corporations, are already building walls,
enhancing the militarization of borders to keep refugees (including climate
refugees) out.

We live in an era of capitalist globalization without end where the
struggle for diminishing freshwater runs parallel to the search for new
sources of fossil fuels, which in turn heighten the carbon emissions behind
climate change, resulting in the rapid heating up of the earth and
increasing drought. In a kind of frenzy driven by a capitalist system that
knows no restraint, there is a desperate worldwide competition to control
the last remaining sources of freshwater and fossil fuels along with other
scarce resources.92
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en92>
Conclusion: Beyond the Robbery System

*Profit upon expropriation* was the key economic category that Marx used in
his critique of Smith’s notion of previous stock/accumulation.93
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en93> “Smith’s
theology of previous accumulation,” Perelman writes, “suggested that
capitalists’ commanding position was due to their past savings”—a view that
Marx debunked.94
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en94> “So-called”
previous accumulation was thus for Marx simply an ideological device of
classical political economy meant to disguise the reality of “the
expropriation of the immediate producers.”95
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en95> From
this perspective, capitalism was only possible due to the alienation or
expropriation of nature, and the self-alienation or expropriation of human
powers and corporeal life. Expropriation was characteristic of all previous
class civilizations, but it took on a far more systematic character and
assumed a vastly greater scale under capitalism, where it became part of a
dyad, together with exploitation, giving rise to the capitalist juggernaut
as a whole, the drive to endless exponential expansion, and finally the
movement toward socialism, the negation of the negation.

In the new capitalist bourgeois society, expropriation was not the essence
of the system as in tributary modes of production. Instead, it was to give
rise to a whole new inner dynamic of exploitation that had its own
self-propelling logic, manifested in the accumulation of capital.
Exploitation in turn created the demand for ever-wider circles of
expropriation, expanding the boundaries of the system. The dialectic of
exploitation and expropriation that constituted capitalism was thus all the
more a vicious spiral, associated with the logic of the accumulation of
capital. Arising in the early modern era, capitalism led to the most brutal
systems of expropriation the world has ever seen: slavery, misogyny (wife
selling, burning of witches, the superexploitation of women and children),
land grabbing, genocide, and the destruction of the earth, extending to the
entire planet. Acutely aware of these contradictions, Marx wrote: “If
money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital
blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to toe, from
every pore, with blood and dirt.”96
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en96>

It is customary in mainstream political circles (as well for some further
to the left) to treat these horrors associated with the development of
capitalism on a world scale as mere “birth pains,” if they are acknowledged
at all. Too often, they are treated as phenomena of the distant past to be
forgotten, to be papered over by a triumphalist story of capital’s
inevitable rise, or to be hidden away by the “nursery tale” of so-called
primitive accumulation, whereby individual capitalists rose to riches by
virtue of their own abstinence, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.97
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en97>

Yet, the horrors of the expropriation of the direct producers (including
nonwaged workers) and the earth are not simply an “original sin,” but a
constant reality of capitalism, by which it establishes its earthly
domination and “polices the suffering on its borders.”98
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en98> In
twenty-first-century late capitalism and late imperialism, this
expropriation is in some ways going further than ever before with the
deepening of imperialist value chains, whereby much of the surplus value of
the entire world is siphoned off via a process of value capture, to feed
the coffers of multinational corporations and the wealthy at the center of
the system.99
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en99> This is
accompanied by renewed battles over the misogynistic basis of private
property, involving the control of women’s bodies; the resurgence of racial
capitalism; and the destruction of the planet as a place of human
habitation, breaking the “chain of human generations.”100
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en100>

Many attempts to advance theory and practice on the left have sought to
connect the Marxian theory of exploitation to other intersecting
oppressions that are integral parts of the reality of historical
capitalism. Our analysis suggests that making these connections requires
understanding both the significance of the concept of expropriation in
classical historical materialism, and the dialectic of expropriation and
exploitation. In saying that the patriarchal family was the basis of all
class development and of private property institutions, Engels was not
going against the critique of exploitation at the center of the theory of
capitalism, but recognizing that the entire development of oppression in
history was rooted in the subjugation of women, which gave rise via private
property to what he called “three basic forms of slavery” of slaves, serfs,
and wage slaves.101
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en101> This
was a history of expropriation of land, labor, and corporeal life, of which
the capitalist system of exploitation was to be the most developed and most
barbaric form. The various historical moments of expropriation that we have
described—the industrialization of agriculture and the global metabolic
rift, the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, and the imperialism of the
Anthropocene—are all particular historical moments reflecting the “barbaric
heart” of the system.102
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en102>

“The Justice of nature,” Epicurus wrote in antiquity, “is a pledge of
reciprocal usefulness [i.e.,] neither to harm one another nor be harmed.”103
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en103> Capitalism
in its pursuit of abstract value destroys such reciprocity and justice at
every level, going so far as to threaten the very basis of planetary
existence. In fact, behind capitalist exploitation lies a wider set of
inequities, consisting of various forms of expropriation or robbery that
establish the boundary conditions of the system. It is here in multiple
hidden abodes that we discover the secret not only of capitalist
exploitation, but also of racial capitalism, misogynistic capitalism, and
the creative destruction of nature.104
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en104>

All of this highlights the fact that it is impossible to understand the
totality of capitalist relations apart from the conditions of both
exploitation and expropriation, which together generate the ensemble of
oppressions that characterize the system. It is here too that we begin to
understand the various interlocking aspects of capitalist domination, which
require a corevolutionary praxis in response. As Henri Lefebvre pointed
out, given the scope and scale of the planetary ecological crisis, it is
now a matter of “revolution or death.”105
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en105>

Epicurus’s “justice of nature,” requiring genuine reciprocity, is nowhere
to be found within the logic of the capitalist system, despite its pretense
to *quid pro quo* or equal exchange, which merely disguises the extremes of
exploitation and expropriation that lie within it and that define its
historical boundaries. In the twenty-first century, this dialectic of
exploitation and expropriation without end, striving to intensify the rate
of exploitation, while treating the boundaries of life as mere barriers (or
frontiers) to be transgressed by capital, has led to the creative
destruction of the earth, the basis of life itself. For the chain of human
generations, there is only one possible response: the expropriation of the
expropriators and the corevolutionary creation of a new epoch of
sustainable human development—ecological socialism.106
<https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en106>
Notes

   1. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en1backlink>
Karl
   Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 934.
   2. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en2backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 90.
   3. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en3backlink>
This
   issue is perhaps best taken up in Kozo Uno, Principles of Political
   Economy: Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society (Brighton: Harvester,
   1980).
   4. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en4backlink>
The
   term primitive in Marx’s reference to “so-called primitive [primary]
   accumulation” was a mistranslation from German into English. Marx was
   referring to original or primary accumulation, as this was understood in
   British political economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
   Through a process of translation into German and then translation from the
   German back into English, the term original, previous, or primary was
   rendered incorrectly into primitive. Moreover, Marx himself explicitly
   referred to “so-called primitive [primary] accumulation” of classical
   political economy—with the “so-called” here signaling his recognition that
   what was involved in reality was expropriation, and not accumulation
   (capital formation) at all—a crucial point of his whole analysis. These
   theoretical subtleties have been lost in most later analyses, though
   recognized by as important a Marxian economist as Maurice Dobb. See Maurice
   Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International
   Publishers, 1947), 178.
       Ironically, Marx has been frequently criticized in English language
   literature for use of the term *primitive*, in this respect, and for
   denying that these relations existed throughout the history of
   capitalism—criticisms that are completely at odds with his own analysis, as
   opposed to bourgeois political economy. David Harvey’s “accumulation by
   dispossession” introduced in his book *The New Imperialism*, was
   therefore intended to get around this criticism by providing a substitute
   for the notion of “primitive accumulation,” so as to avoid this common
   criticism that “primitive accumulation,” for Marx, related only to the
   early modern era in Europe in the Americas. But since Marx himself in his
   critique had indicated his objection to the notion of original or primary
   accumulation, and was concerned rather with the primary *expropriation* that
   made industrial capitalism possible—and since there is no difficulty in
   seeing this as related to expropriation more generally—far less confusion
   is generated, we believe, by utilizing Marx’s own historically concrete and
   theoretically incisive terminology, focusing on expropriation. This is
   especially the case insofar as Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”
   (like the term *primitive accumulation* itself) confuses dispossession
   or expropriation with actual accumulation, while for Marx they were
   separate categories—so much so that capitalism’s confusion of primary
   expropriation with primary accumulation was for him the subject of his
   critique in this part of *Capital*. See David Harvey, *The New
   Imperialism* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–82.
   5. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en5backlink>
Adam
   Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 260;
   Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 873–75; Michael Perelman, The Invention of
   Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret of Primitive
   Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 26. On the fact that
   Marx’s “so-called primitive accumulation” was a continuous reality of
   capitalism for Marx, requiring that the preconditions of the system be
   constantly remade through renewed expropriation or separation of workers
   from the means of production, see Massimo De Angelis, “Marx and
   Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures
   <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268411539_Marx_and_primitive_accumulation_The_continuous_character_of_capital's_enclosures>
   ,’” The Commoner 2 (2001): 1–22. The version used for this article was
   available on ResearchGate.
   6. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en6backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 874. Marx explicitly criticized such views as
   constituting “the abstinence theory.” See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 298–99.
   The essence of “so-called primitive accumulation” for Marx was
   expropriation. It was, as Dobb says, not accumulation proper, but “an
   accumulation of capital claims” related to the “ownership of assets,” and
   thus a “transfer of ownership,” and did not involve capital formation or an
   increase in “the quantity of tangible instruments of production in
   existence.” See Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 178.
   7. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en7backlink>
    Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 26.
   8. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en8backlink>
Max
   Weber, General Economic History (New York: Collier, 1961), 221–24;
   Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Augustus
   M. Kelley, 1951). On Marx’s argument that such expropriation of laborers
   and the land was an ongoing reality of capitalism, see Perelman, The
   Invention of Capitalism, 28–32.
   9. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en9backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 873, 934.
   10. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en10backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 914–15.
   11. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en11backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 571.
   12. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en12backlink>
Karl
   Marx and Fredrick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 33 (New York:
   International Publishers, 1975), 11, 14.
   13. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en13backlink>
Michael
   D. Yates, Can the Working Class Change the World?
   <https://monthlyreview.org/product/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/>
(New
   York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 55–56; John Bellamy Foster and Brett
   Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature
   <https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-069-10-2018-03_1>,” Monthly Review 69, no.
   10 (2018): 1–27.
   14. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en14backlink>
On
   expropriation defined as appropriation without equivalent or without
   reciprocity, as conceived in the work of Marx and Karl Polanyi, see Foster
   and Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature,” 3–11. Marx often used the
term appropriation
   without exchange, by which he meant appropriation without equivalent (a
   term also employed by him), as all exchange was by definition equal,
   otherwise it was a form of robbery. Today, however, we sometimes
refer to unequal
   exchange, understanding this as a form of expropriation.
   15. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en15backlink>
Marx
   had translated Adam Smith’s “previous” as ursprünglich (original), which
   was then translated back into English by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling as
   “primitive,” forgetting that the German was simply a rendering of an
   English term. Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 25. Marx wrote that
   “it may be called primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation],
   because it is the historical basis, instead of the historical result, of
   specifically capitalist production”—however, he later explained that such
   “so-called primitive accumulation” was in fact (primary) expropriation
   rather than accumulation proper. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 775.
   16. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en16backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 871, 873, 939.
   17. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en17backlink>
Commenting
   on Benjamin Franklin’s statement that “war is robbery, commerce is
   cheating,” Marx, insisted that this of course could not be taken literally
   to mean all was fraud and robbery; rather even under mercantilism the
   “intermediate steps” in commodity production had to be taken into account
   and a wider theory of profit upon expropriation had to be developed.
   Nevertheless, the distinction between mercantilism and the era of free
   competition based on exploitation within the context of equal exchange was
   vital to the understanding of capitalism’s industrial take-off. Marx,
   Capital, vol. 1, 267.
   18. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en18backlink>
Ernest
   Mandel, introduction to Capital, vol. 1, by Marx, 27–28.
   19. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en19backlink>
Karl
   Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949.
   20. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en20backlink>
On
   accumulative versus nonaccumulative societies/processes and the relation of
   this to exchange value versus use value, see Henri Lefebvre, Critique of
   Everyday Life, one-volume ed. (London: Verso, 2014), 609–33; Henri
   Lefebvre, Toward Architecture of Enjoyment (Minneapolis: University of
   Minnesota Press, 2014), 128–35.
   21. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en21backlink>
Samir
   Amin, Eurocentrism <https://monthlyreview.org/product/eurocentrism/> (New
   York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
   22. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en22backlink>
Justus
   von Liebig, Letters on Modern Agriculture (London: Walton and Maberly,
   1859), 179, 254–55; Justus von Liebig, The Natural Laws of Husbandry (New
   York: Appleton, 1863), 233.
   23. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en23backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 915.
   24. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en24backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 930.
   25. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en25backlink>
Nancy
   Fraser, “Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—From Exploitation to
   Expropriation: Historic Geographies of Racialized Capitalism,” Economic
   Geography 94, no. 1 (2018): 10; Michael C. Dawson, “Hidden in Plain
   Sight,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 149; Sven
Beckert, Empire
   of Cotton (New York: Vintage, 2014), xviii, 37–39; Peter Linebaugh, Stop,
   Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Oakland: PM, 2014), 73;
   John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism
   and the Metabolic Rift
<https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_1>,” Monthly
   Review 70, no. 3 (July–August 2018): 1–20.
   26. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en26backlink>
Glen
   Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks (Minneapolis: University of
   Minnesota Press, 2014), 14.
   27. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en27backlink>
David
   Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
   228–32.
   28. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en28backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 358; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin,
   1973), 409–10; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish
   Question (Moscow: Progress, 1971), 142.
   29. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en29backlink>
    Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 32–39.
   30. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en30backlink>
Dawson,
   “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 149; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous
   Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014); Marx,
   Capital, vol. 1, 914–36.
   31. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en31backlink>
Karl
   Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Foreign Languages, no
   date).
   32. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en32backlink>
M.
   L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815–1880,” Economic
   History Review 21, no. 1 (1968): 62–77. We have narrowed the time frame
   of the second agricultural revolution, which captures the specific
   transformations listed, especially those associated with soil chemistry.
   33. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en33backlink>
    Liebig, Letters on Modern Agriculture, 179, 254–55; Liebig, The Natural
   Laws of Husbandry, 233.
   34. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en34backlink>
Justus
   von Liebig, “1862 Preface to Agricultural Chemistry
   <https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_8>,” Monthly Review 70, no.
   3 (July–August 2018): 146–50.
   35. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en35backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637–38.
   36. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en36backlink>
Ian
   Angus, “Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder: Ecological Crisis and
   Metabolic Rift in Nineteenth-Century London
   <https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_3>,” Monthly Review 70, no.
   3 (July–August 2018): 33–69; Brett Clark and Stefano B. Longo, “Land-Sea
   Ecological Rifts: A Metabolic Analysis of Nutrient Loading
   <https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_5>,” Monthly Review 70, no.
   3 (July–August 2018): 106–121.
   37. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en37backlink>
Brett
   Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Imperialism and the Global
   Metabolic Rift <https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0020715209105144>,” International
   Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, no. 3–4 (2009): 311–34; Brett
   Clark, Daniel Auerbach, and Karen Xuan Zhang, “The Du Bois Nexus:
   Intersectionality, Political Economy, and Environmental Injustice in the
   Peruvian Guano Trade in the 1800s
   <https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2017.1381899>,” Environmental Sociology 4,
   no. 1 (2018): 54–66.
   38. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en38backlink>
Charles
   Wingfield, The China Coolie Traffic from Macao to Peru and Cuba (London:
   British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1873), 3–5; Michael J. Gonzales,
   “Chinese Plantation Workers and Social Conflict in Peru in the Late
   Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21 (1955):
   385–424; Peter Blanchard, “The ‘Transitional Man’ in Nineteenth–Century
   Latin America,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 15, no. 2 (1996):
   157–76; Stephen M. Gorman, “The State, Elite, and Export in Nineteenth
   Century Peru,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 21,
   no. 3 (1979): 395–418; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers,
Pioneers,” Amerasia
   Journal 15, no. 2 (1989): 91–116; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Huagong and
   Huashang,” Amerasia Journal 28, no. 2 (2002): 64–90; Gregory T.
Cushman, Guano
   and the Opening of the Pacific World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
   Press, 2013), 55.
   39. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en39backlink>
Alanson
   Nash, “Peruvian Guano,” Plough, the Loom and the Anvil 10, no. 2 (1857):
   73.
   40. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en40backlink>
Karl
   Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers,
   1963), 112.
   41. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en41backlink>
“Chinese
   Coolie Trade,” Christian Review (1862); George W. Peck, Melbourne and
   the Chincha Islands (New York: Charles Scribner, 1854), 207; Jimmy M.
   Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).
   42. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en42backlink>
    Wingfield, The China Coolie Traffic, 5.
   43. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en43backlink>
Maxine
   Berg, “What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial
   Revolution?,” History Workshop 35 (1993): 29; Maxine Berg, “Women’s Work
   and the Industrial Revolution,” ReFresh 12 (1991): 3; Joyce Burnette,
   “Women Workers in the British Industrial Revolution,” Economic History
   Association, March 26, 2008, available at http://eh.net.
   44. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en44backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 364–66, 574–75, 595–99, 796–97.
   45. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en45backlink>
Nancy
   Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of
   Contemporary Capitalism,” in Social Reproduction Theory, ed. Tithi
   Bhattacharya (London: Pluto, 2017); Martha Gimenez, “Capitalism and the
   Oppression of Women: Marx Revisited,” Science and Society 69, no. 1
   (2005): 11–32; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Women, Nature, and
   Capital in the Industrial Revolution
   <https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-069-08-2018-01_1>,” Monthly Review 69, no.
   8 (January 2018): 1–24.
   46. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en46backlink>
Berg,
   “What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?”;
   Berg, “Women’s Work and the Industrial Revolution.”
   47. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en47backlink>
John
   Bellamy Foster, “Marx as a Food Theorist
   <https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-068-07-2016-11_1>,” Monthly Review 68, no.
   7 (December 2016): 12–14.
   48. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en48backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 750, 809–11; Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
   vol. 4, 370; Foster, “Marx as a Food Theorist.”
   49. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en49backlink>
    Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 860. See also Eamonn Slater, “Marx on Colonial
   Ireland,” History of Political Thought 39, no. 4 (2018): 719–48; Eamonn
   Slater, “Marx on the Colonization of Irish Soil,” Maynooth University
   Social Science Institute Working Paper Series no. 3, January 2018.
   50. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en50backlink>
Richard
   Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; repr., New York: W. W.
   Norton, 1974), 1–27, 69, 78; John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet
   <https://monthlyreview.org/product/vulnerable_planet/> (New York:
   Monthly Review Press, 1994), 46–49. On Engels and the Iroquois, see
   Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
   State (Moscow: Progress, 1948), 88–93.
   51. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en51backlink>
See
   Foster and Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature,” 15–16; Anthony F. C.
   Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage, 1969),
   114–15; Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York:
   Vintage, 1967), 89; Daniel D. Richter Jr. and Daniel Markewitz,
Understanding
   Soil Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43-48..
   52. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en52backlink>
Carolyn
   Merchant, Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North
   Carolina Press, 1989), 186–88, 196–97.
   53. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en53backlink>
Karl
   Marx, “J. W. Johnston. Notes on North America,” in Marx/Engels
   Gesamtausgabe, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Berlin: Walter De
   Gruyter, 2019), 311.
   54. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en54backlink>
    Foster, The Vulnerable Planet, 70–72.
   55. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en55backlink>
See
   John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, “Max Weber and the
Environment,” American
   Journal of Sociology 117, no. 6 (2012): 1653–55.
   56. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en56backlink>
Donald
   Worster, Dust Bowl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24.
   57. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en57backlink>
Hannah
   Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018),
   113.
   58. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en58backlink>
Wright
   Mills, introduction to The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein
   Veblen (New York: New American Library, 1953), vi.
   59. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en59backlink>
Thorstein
   Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The
   Case of America (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1923), 168–71. Veblen
   here was referring to the famous Lauderdale Paradox. See John Bellamy
   Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift
   <https://monthlyreview.org/product/ecological_rift/> (New York: Monthly
   Review Press, 2010), 53–72.
   60. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en60backlink>
    Veblen, Absentee Ownership, 186–91.
   61. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en61backlink>
    Veblen, Absentee Ownership, 169.
   62. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en62backlink>
Graham
   Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey
   of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 17. Jacks and Whyte,
   while recognizing the devastation wrought on indigenous populations,
   nonetheless argued somewhat along “white man’s burden” lines as to the
   necessary tasks for the future. See Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire, 52.
   63. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en63backlink>
Jacks
   and Whyte, The Rape of the Earth, 36.
   64. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en64backlink>
    Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire, 113–16.
   65. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en65backlink>
    Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire, 113–16.
   66. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en66backlink>
    Veblen, Absentee Ownership, 171.
   67. ↩
   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en67backlink>
South
   Africa Drought Investigation Commission, Final Report of the Drought
   Investigation Commission (Cape Town: Cape Times Limited, Government
   Printer, 1923), 5.
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   80. ↩
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   Global Marine Fisheries,” in Ecologically Unequal Exchange:
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   84. ↩
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United
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   85. ↩
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   Irvine, Saima Mohsin, and Kocha Olarn, “Seafood from Slavery: Can
   Thailand Tackle the Crisis in its Fishing Industry?
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International
   Labour Organization, Caught at Sea: Forced Labour and Trafficking in
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   <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/world/asia/philippines-fishing-ships-illegal-manning-agencies.html?_r=0>
   ,” New York Times, November 9, 2015; Ian Urbina, “‘Sea Slaves’: The
   Human Misery that Feeds Pets and Livestock
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   87. ↩
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Wilma
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   <https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/#en88backlink>
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John
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James
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John
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Foster,
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