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"For five centuries, the development of capitalism has been inextricably connected to the expropriation of working people from the land they depended on for subsistence. Through ruling class assaults known as enclosures or clearances, shared common land became privately-owned capital, and peasant farmers became propertyless laborers who could only survive by working for the owners of land or capital. As Ian Angus documents in The War Against the Commons, mass opposition to dispossession has never ceased. His dramatic account provides new insights into an opposition that ranged from stubborn non-compliance to open rebellion, including eyewitness accounts of campaigns in which thousands of protestors tore down fences and restored common access to pastures and forests. Contrary to many accounts that treat the reorganization of agriculture as a purely domestic matter, Angus shows that there were close connections between the enclosures in Britain and imperial expansion"--

Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Abbreviations -- Preface -- PART ONE: A NO-ANALOG STATE -- 1. A Second Copernican Revolution -- 2. The Great Acceleration -- 3. When Did the Anthropocene Begin? -- 4. Tipping Points, Climate Chaos, and Planetary Boundaries -- 5. The First Near-Catastrophe -- 6. A New (and Deadly) Climate Regime -- PART TWO: FOSSIL CAPITALISM -- 7. Capital's Time vs. Nature's Time -- 8. The Making of Fossil Capitalism -- 9. War, Class Struggle, and Cheap Oil -- 10. Accelerating into the Anthropocene -- 11. We Are Not All in This Together -- PART THREE: THE ALTERNATIVE

What did Marx mean in his discussion of "so-called primitive accumulation" in Capital? Here, Ian Angus argues that the term is widely misunderstood—but its illumination reveals great insight to the conditions of exploitation and expropriation.

AbstractThe beginnings of social forms are shrouded in, and justified by, myths which establish both the manifest content of stories and religion. The replacement of myth by logic is never total and the role of logic depends upon the mythic origin that it partially replaces. The form of heritage is constituted in large part by the manner in which intertwining between mythos and logos is structured. Taking the measure of humanitas today means noting, not only the internal articulation of a heritage but those elements of a given heritage which resonate with other heritages. The proximity of Socrates and Protagoras, in Plato's dialogue of the same name, allows us to glimpse a possibility not visible in any other confrontation between Socrates and the sophists: a unity of philosophy and rhetoric in the constitution and heritage of humanism. George Lukács' late, unfinished work, The Ontology of Social Labour, aimed to establish an ontological foundation for the relation between science and religion. In this way, the ontology of labour introduces a new twist into the relation between mythos and logos. One critical comment about Lukács' ontology of labour pertinent to the relation between mythos and logos is that the experience of nature in labour may be more affirmative than the trajectory of classical Marxism allows. The productivity of labour, which increases with social organization and division of labour, is based upon natural fecundity. A human being lives a necessary paradox of seeing human excellence and good in distinction from nature and as part of the nature that surpasses it. The humanities are charged with investigating this paradox in all its forms. Even while inhabiting a given tradition, the mythos/logos complexes of other societies may be approached, listened to, and even understood.

The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the past and in his own time, Marx has been portrayed as endorsing the enclosure of the commons as a necessary historical stage on the path to socialism. However, a more accurate account, one that is critical of the enclosure movement, can be found in his response to the destruction of commons-based peasant communities in Russia—while it was actually happening.

Scientific knowledge and debates in Anthropoene science have developed over the years, particularly in the two main fields involved: geology, which has mainly been concerned with formally defining the new epoch; and Earth System science, which studies the global biological, chemical, and physical changes that are reshaping the conditions of life on this planet.

November 5, 2019, is the 225th anniversary of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy on charges of High Treason. Hardy is nearly forgotten today, but for decades workers and democrats in England celebrated November 5 as the anniversary of a major victory, a triumph over a powerful state that had deployed immense resources to crush working-class organizations and suppress popular demands for democratic rights.

The promise of a world without disease has been replaced by warnings of evermore virulent pathogens, created by the very drugs that were supposed to save us. Scarcely a day passes without more news of people contracting infections or infectious diseases that cannot be cured by the strongest medicines available. Antimicrobial Resistance is a global health crisis driven by two major factors: the spectacular ability of bacteria to adapt to threats, and a pharmaceutical industry and health care system that puts profit before people. In addition to devastating climate change, the Anthropocene may be defined by epidemics that medicine cannot cure.

The accumulation of human excrement in nineteenth-century cities, particularly London, precipitated a historic environmental crisis—an aspect of the metabolic rift mostly overlooked in ecosocialist analysis. The solution that was finally adopted only shifted the problem out of sight, setting the stage for even greater crises in our time.