The End Of The World Began A Long Time Ago

What is the plan? What is the project?

There is nothing but greed.

Nothing but accumulation.

There is nothing but death.

Capitalism is not a singular thing but a process. A process of greed refinement. A process borne out of, at least initially, the ruling class’s desire and lust to own everything.

I mean everything.

And to subjugate everyone. And also everything.

I mean everything.

Everything that exists in nature, everything on the face of the green Earth, a God’s or not.

I mean all of this quite literally.

It began, of course, in Britain. The zygote, the progenitor, the physical and spiritual home of what we now consider ‘western civilisation.’

In the early 1600s the ruling class, tired of the commoners breeding wherever they wanted and growing their food wherever they wanted, not entrapped by producer-consumer relationships, decided enough was enough.

The ‘open field’ system had to go.

This system had for hundreds of years supported the lives and livelihoods of the majority of people, enabling them to rent from a landowner, for a token price, a small patch of land within an open field.

Despite the fact land was often rented from landowners, people had long-standing rights to this land and could not be easily moved, or even moved at all. The same strips of land had therefore been farmed for generations. Skills passed down. Legends passed down. Communities built. A deep, physical and spiritual bond with the land had been forged.

The open field system however was seen as a handbrake on modernity. Which at the time meant a handbrake on the economies and profits of scale that could be sluiced by a landowning family growing 50 acres of one crop, rather than 25 families growing 10 crops over 50 subsistence acres.

This informal ‘open field’ system had been subjected to some level of enclosure since the 1200s, but rarely directed by law.

That began to change in the early 1500s and the process of enclosure by law continued for the next three hundred and fifty years.

This thing took time, energy, and effort. It had to crush commoner rebellions and disappear entire villages of people.

The Enclosure Acts, which went through various phases and ended around 1860, did exactly what they said on the tin. They enclosed the formerly common land within the open field system in Britain, robbing people of everything they had ever known, redistributing the land among the Lords and others within the ruling class.

Commoners, their autonomy of life and livelihood stripped away, began working for the landowners, growing their crops, following their commands, their lives now subject to the whims of another.

The process of enclosure didn’t just end the system of common land dwelling that had been the bedrock of the farming and food system for hundreds of years, it ended an entire civilisational construct.

It completely bastardised the relations between people, and between people and nature.

It was an apocalypse.

A centuries-long process, committed to by successive generations of the ruling class to take away from ordinary people an autonomous mode of living and their means of survival.

It almost sounds too cartoon-baddie evil to be true.

That’s how you know it happened.

A tiny group of people took away everyone’s means of life and forced them to survive by doing what they commanded them to do.

Not everyone stood for this of course.

Some fought and died.

A rebellion in 1549 in response to enclosure around Norwich, a town in the east of England, saw commoners defeat a royal army before their ultimate defeat and the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands. The rebellion leaders were hanged after being convicted of treason. Because enclosure was a national and patriotic cause.

A protest song against enclosure endures:

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose

The law locks up the hapless felon
who steals the goose from off the common
but lets the greater felon loose
who steals the common from the goose

The fault is great in man or woman
Who steals a goose from off a common
But what can plead that man's excuse
Who steals a common from a goose

Many had no choice but to move out of the countryside and to the mills and factories, first water powered and then coal powered, of the fledging towns and cities.

There would have been no industrial revolution without enclosure.

Descendants of those kicked off the land in some places in England were living an average age of 16 or 18 in the filthy cities that enclosure spawned.

Average ages in the countryside remained, during the industrial revolution, in the 40s or 50s.

Such death and misery in the name of progress.

Some fled to the new world.

Many that fled however often simply re-enacted this ownership model, replete with its violence and subjugation, in new lands, against other ‘uncivilised’ people who were utilising their own form of open field systems.

The British also attempted to export this model of modernity to the outmost reaches of its empire, with varying degrees of success.

The logic of monopoly ownership and rent has of course now been extended to everything, everywhere. The logic of industrialisation, extraction and monopoly agriculture has marched definitively and remorselessly across the globe.

The world is hotter than it has ever been.

Summer heat in April winks its eye to us.

We fear of hell fire.

Or of submergence.

The crops are failing.

Olive oil today, everything else tomorrow.

Genocidal states purge people still from the land.

Flayed bodies hang from rubble on Instagram stories.

Brown bones shrunken by another white colonial famine, TikToked.

A new communicable disease stalks the wards, gobbled down eagerly, illness blooming, a pact of silence.

The chickens and their shit are fed to the cows who are fed to us by a red-nosed clown under plastic yellow arches.

For this is modernity, and it has sprouted a new flu.

This one waits for now in the wings, ready to fly, eager to prey on our ravaged husks.

This may feel like the end of the world.

But the end of the world began a long time ago.

Ecocide and genocide, an easy and casual violence against people and nature in service of profit, of capitalism, in service of modernity, is a tick fully dug in, its poison pumped into the planetary body and human mind for hundreds of years.

By now it has diseased so much.

They say things rot from the head down.

Take the head, defeat the body, change the system.

But what if the head broke off into us?

Is there anything but greed?

Anything but death?

This is all I have for today.