Editor’s note: Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization. Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities. Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.
Derrick Jensen (2006): Endgame vol. 1, p. IX
SMITHERS, BC: On the morning of September 25, 2021, the access road to Coastal GasLink’s (CGL’s) drill site at the Wedzin Kwa river was destroyed. Blockades have been set up and sites have been occupied, to stop the drilling under the sacred headwaters that nourish the Wet’suwet’en Yintah and all those within its catchment area. Cas Yikh and supporters have gained control of the area and refuse to allow this destruction to continue.
Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs were denied access to their own lands, and there has been one arrest confirmed. The Hereditary Chiefs were read the injunction and threatened with arrest, but they held their ground. Despite heavy machinery and heavy RCMP presence, our relatives and supporters are standing strong holding the line, and so far no more arrests have been confirmed. As of Sunday, September 26, the individual arrested has been released and the chiefs and supporters continue to hold the line and successfully hold off any work by CGL.
Days ago, CGL destroyed our ancient village site, Ts’elkay Kwe. When Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ attempted to monitor the CGL archaeological team and contest the destruction of Wet’suwet’en cultural heritage, she was aggressively intimidated by CGL security guards. Tensions have continued to rise on the Yintah as CGL pushes a reckless and destructive construction schedule with the support of private security and the RCMP.
Now, CGL is ready to begin drilling beneath our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We know that this would be disastrous, not only for Wet’suwet’en people, but for all living beings supported by the Wedzin Kwa, and for the communities living downstream. Wedzin Kwa is a spawning ground for salmon and a critical source of pristine drinking water. States Sleydo’, Gidimt’en Checkpoint Spokesperson:
“Our way of life is at risk. […] Wedzin Kwa [is the] the river that feeds all of Wet’suwet’en territory and gives life to our nation.”
Coastal Gaslink has been evicted from our territories by the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs who have full jurisdiction over Wet’suwet’en lands. Coastal GasLink is pushing through a 670-kilometer fracked gas pipeline, but under ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law) all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en have unanimously opposed all pipeline proposals and have not provided free, prior, and informed consent to Coastal Gaslink to do work on Wet’suwet’en lands.
As Coastal GasLink continues to trespass, we will do everything in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws. Gidimt’en Checkpoint has issued a call for support, asking people to travel to Cas Yikh territory to stand with them.
For further information please go to: yintahaccess.com
Media backgrounder here
Photo Credit: Michael Toledano
Media contact:
Jennifer Wickham, Gidimt’en Checkpoint Media Coordinator
Email: Yintahaccess@gmail.com
Phone number: 778-210-0067
It’s common to feel a deep sense of injustice for what happened in history and to hunger to create a better future by doing good work today. But what does that good work look like? In an economy and legal system filled with structural injustice, how do groups of people build a better world?
In the lands commonly called Humboldt, Calif., the Wiyot tribe and settler-colonizer organizations are working together to do this. At the intersection of land justice, language justice, and ecological restoration they are creating a legal framework for how to give the land back to First Nations so that healing of, and on, the land can both happen.
Members of the Wiyot Tribe in Northern California’s Humboldt Bay region receive the deed to 200 acres of their native land after nearly 160 years of fighting to reclaim it, Oct 2019. Credit: Wiyot Tribe
To do this, the Wiyot Tribe and Cooperation Humboldt are working together to form a type of Community Land Trust (CLT), Dishgamu Humboldt, the first of its kind, to structurally ensure that the Wiyot tribe will maintain decision-making power in this land trust, forever.
An Indigenous-Led CLT
Property is often considered to be a ‘bundle of rights’ that defines who gets to use or alter a space. A CLT legally and financially separates the two bundles of property rights we usually think about together: the ownership of buildings and the ownership of the land that those buildings are on.
Under a CLT, buildings can be bought and sold based on their value. The difference is that the land beneath those buildings gets held by a type of nonprofit in perpetuity—which is as close to “forever” in legal terms as you can get. In this way, the financial value of the land gets separated from the buildings, effectively de-commodifying the land and preventing it from being bought up by those who only see it as a financial asset.
Wiyot Tribal Administrator Michelle Vassel and Cooperation Humboldt Co-founder and Executive Director David Cobb, Credit: Mark McKenna
Like other nonprofits, a CLT is governed by a board, which in this case ensures that control of land use stays in the hands of the Wiyot. The first of its kind, this CLT locks in a tribal majority to the structure itself: four of the seven board members will always be appointed by the Wiyot Tribal Council. Dishgamu won’t just exist to hold and manage land; it also aspires to foster cooperative ventures and solidarity economics. “We’re not just looking at projects. The projects are the building blocks. But we are committed to truly re-Indigenizing this place,” says David Cobb, a lawyer, activist, and former Green Party presidential candidate. Cobb has been working closely with Wiyot Tribal Administrator Michelle Vassel in forming the CLT.
Cobb is also on the board of Cooperation Humboldt, a solidarity economy organization that pays an honor tax (1% of their annual revenue) to the Wiyot Tribe as a tangible way of honoring the sovereignty of the Native Nations on whose land they operate.
Slow and Steady Healing
Like anything pioneering, re-tooling legal structures is not always clear-cut. “One of the things we’re struggling with is to [form the CLT] under Indian law, rather than California State law,” says Cobb. “That gets very tricky because there are all sorts of questions or conflicts of jurisdiction.”
“We’re not just looking at projects. The projects are the building blocks. But we are committed to truly re-Indigenizing this place.”-David Cobb
The process of re-Indigenizing land and healing has not been quick either. In a webinar, Vassel gave an overview of the decades-long struggle to have land returned. In the 1970s, one tribal chairman asked for the land back, but the city refused. About two decades later, another tribal chairwoman and three partners started hosting candlelight vigils, in honor of the Wiyot tribe’s sacred World Renewal Ceremony.
This is because Tuluwat Island—much of which had come into the ownership of the City of Eureka—was the site of a brutal massacre of women and children at the hand of white settlers in 1860. It took place during the Wiyot’s World Renewal Ceremony, and the island was, and still is, sacred to the Wiyot. By the 1990s, the vigils began, allowing Indigenous and settlers alike to come to terms with that history. “It was at these vigils that real change started happening in our community, because it wasn’t just Wiyot people, it wasn’t just Indian people. It was also people that were from all over Eureka and all over Humboldt County,” explains Vassel. “We were able to gather in this space at night by candlelight and look history in the eye.” The vigils continued for 20 more years.
Community members gather for the final Wiyot Candlelight Vigil, Feb. 2014. The discontinuation of the gathering coincided with the tribe’s resurrection of their World Renewal Ceremony. Credit: Nick Adams
Many years later, the tribe fundraised $200,000 to purchase 1.5 acres on Tuluwat Island. The area was environmentally degraded when they purchased it, so they began restoring the island by removing trash, debris, and hazardous chemicals, then remediated the soil, ultimately getting Environmental Protection Agency approval for human habitability. “We spent fourteen years doing that work. It began with a lot of people that had attended our vigils,” explained Vassel.
“Our tribal chairwoman in 2004 went back to the city of Eureka and she put in a request to transfer that land to the tribe. That time in 2004, the City of Eureka unanimously approved it,” added Vassel. It was the first time a municipality had returned land without being legally obligated to do so, largely in part because the City had understood the mutual benefit of giving the land back and ecological restoration.
Dishgamu Humboldt, with its Indigenous-led board structure, may be able to further the same spirit of cooperation between settlers and Indigenous peoples. By using existing legal structures to outline how to do something radical—giving the land back— this action can be replicated by many others from coast to coast. An important feature of this CLT is that it will be able to accept land donations, enabling tribes to gradually regain territory that was taken from them. Since the core innovation of Dishgamu is its structure, its founders see it as a pioneer that others can learn from. “We’re only doing projects in Wiyot Territory,” says Cobb, explaining that Dishgamu will refuse to take on development projects in areas historically stewarded by other tribes. “But what we will do is help other groups and other entities replicate this model.
“By using existing legal structures to outline how to do something radical—giving the land back— this action can be replicated by many others from coast to coast.”
Although many are familiar with how Indigenous land was stolen through violence or by the federal government signing hundreds of treaties with Indigenous nations, then failing to honor most of them, some are less familiar with how it was also stolen through legal trickery and by jeopardizing the finances of members of Indigenous nations so that they were forced to sell their land.
The 1887 Dawes Act kicked off the policy of allotment which broke up reservations into smaller parcels and transferred ownership to individual Indians instead of tribes holding land in common. Those parcels were then taxed, chopped up into physically disparate pieces, and declared ‘surplus’, allowing white settlers to buy, squat on, and claim the land when Indians were unable to access it. This resulted in a loss of approximately 90 million acres of tribal land.
Aerial view of Humboldt Bay and the City of Eureka, all once considered Wiyot land. Credit: Robert Campbell
This policy of law-based land theft continued in 1953 when the federal government began terminating the federally-recognized status of many tribes. Framing it as a way to assimilate American Indians into settler society, a real outcome of termination policies was the removal of the protected status of over a millions of acres of Indian land. This made it significantly easier to wrestle land out of the hands of individuals, rather than a recognized tribe. In fact, it was impossible before, as a Supreme Court case had ruled that private individuals were barred from buying land from federally-recognized tribes. By dissolving the federal recognition, settlers were then able to purchase or take land that was previously not available for sale.
This caused the Wiyot to lose their recognized tribal status in 1961. After suing the Federal Government for unlawful termination, the Wiyot won and had their status reinstated—20 years later.
Members of the Wiyot tribe kayak on Humboldt Bay. Credit: Nick Adams
In past centuries, legal tools have repeatedly been employed to transfer land ownership to settlers. Today, Dishgamu Humboldt is using similar legal structures to transfer land back to tribes. The CLT returns the land to communal ownership, and communal stewardship.
According to Cobb, “You have to build the new society within the shell of the old,” and Dishgamu Humboldt can provide a blueprint for what a better world—the one being born—might look like. As parts of the world flood and burn, perhaps projects like this can show us how the land and the people can heal from the wounds of the past, and grow a better future, together.
“Fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers, and biospheres that are essential to counteract unsustainable global warming.”
A record 227 environmental defenders were murdered last year—with over half of these killings perpetrated in Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines—according to a report published Monday by Global Witness.
“As the climate crisis intensifies, violence against those protecting their land and our planet also increases.”
—Global Witness
The international human rights group, which has been tracking and reporting lethal attacks on environmental activists since 2012, said it recorded an average of more than four such killings per week in 2020, “making it once again the most dangerous year on record for people defending their homes, land and livelihoods, and ecosystems vital for biodiversity and the climate.”
“A grim picture has come into focus—with the evidence suggesting that as the climate crisis intensifies, violence against those protecting their land and our planet also increases,” Global Witness said in an introduction to the report (pdf). “It has become clear that the unaccountable exploitation and greed driving the climate crisis is also driving violence against land and environmental defenders.”
The 227 lethal attacks represent a 7% increase over the 212 deaths recorded by Global Witness in last year’s report. As in 2019, Colombia witnessed the highest number of slain land defenders, with 65 murders reported, followed by Mexico with 30 killings—a 67% increase from 2019—and the Philippines, where 29 activists were murdered.
Brazil, with 20 slain land defenders, and Honduras, which saw 17 such killings, rounded out the top five deadliest countries for environmental activists. On a per capita basis, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Guatemala, and the Philippines were the five deadliest nations for land defenders last year.
According to the report, “over a third of the attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation—logging, mining, and large-scale agribusiness—and hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure,” although “this figure is likely to be higher as the reasons behind these attacks are often not properly investigated nor reported on.”
Once again, native land defenders were disproportionately targeted, “with over a third of all fatal attacks targeting Indigenous people, despite only making up 5% of the world’s population.”
“Indigenous peoples were the target of five of the seven mass killings recorded in 2020,” the publication added. “In the most shocking of these, nine Tumandok Indigenous people were killed and a further 17 arrested in raids by the military and police on the 30th of December on the island of Panay in the Philippines. Numerous reports state that these communities were targeted for their opposition to a mega-dam project on the Jalaur river.”
Additionally, “28 of the victims killed in 2020 were state officials or park rangers, attacked whilst working to protect the environment.” Such attacks were documented in eight countries: Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Uganda.
Global Witness partially blames rapacious corporations, which are “operating with almost complete impunity,” for lethal attacks on land defenders.
“Because the balance of power is stacked in the favor of corporations, and against communities and individuals, these companies are seldom held to account for the consequences of their commercial activities,” the report states. “It’s rare that anyone is arrested or brought to court for killing defenders. When they are it’s usually the trigger-men—the ones holding the guns, not those who might be otherwise implicated, directly or indirectly, in the crime.”
The report recommends that governments pass laws to “hold corporations accountable for their actions and profits.” It also urges the United Nations, through its member states, to “formally recognize the human right to a safe, healthy, and sustainable environment.”
Additionally, countries should “protect land and environmental defenders in the context of business by ensuring effective and robust regulatory protection of the environment, labor rights, land rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, livelihoods, and cultures,” while “any legislation used to criminalize defenders should be declared null and void.”
The report also calls on businesses “to ensure they are not contributing to or profiting from human rights and land rights harms across their supply chains and operations.”
Global Witness senior campaigner Chris Madden said in a statement that governments must “get serious about protecting defenders,” and that companies must start “putting people and planet before profit.”
Madden called the new report “another stark reminder that fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers, and biospheres that are essential to counteract unsustainable global warming.”
Meanwhile, land defenders fight on—and instead of deterring activism, the attacks often motivate even greater action.
“People sometimes ask me what I’m going to do, whether I’m going to stay here and keep my mother’s fight alive,” said Malungelo Xhakaza, the daughter of South African activist Fikile Ntshangase, who was shot dead in her home in front of her family last October after helping lead the campaign against the Tendele Coal Mine.
“I’m too proud of her to let it die,” Xhakaza added. “I know the dangers—we all know the dangers. But I’ve decided to stay. I’m going to join the fight.”
Editor’s note: In order for the planet to survive, we must act in its defense. We can not rely on governments or corporations to do it. This is why Deep Green Resistance is organizing actions to confront the power structures—patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and civilization—largely responsible for the plunder of land and people.
This is a story of victory for the earth and of the end of the Keystone XL pipeline. It also involves the Dakota Access pipeline and the Standing Rock Lakota reservation, indeed the entire world, all of which is threatened by our desperate last burst of fossil fuel exploitation. It is a story of what the dogged persistence and creativity of indigenous people and their allies can do against the kind of power we’ve been told is impossible to resist. But it’s a story without a guaranteed ending. The ending depends on us.
In 2004, small indigenous nations living near the Alberta Tar Sands project, the largest unconventional oil extraction effort in the world, began reaching out for help. Not only was the project interfering with their water, fishing, and hunting infrastructure, but rare and unusual cancers were appearing. They contacted policy experts at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington, D.C., who met with them in 2005 and saw photographic documentation of the devastation. These experts began to gather data and to raise awareness in the United States, on whose special refineries the project relied. Experts focused on the unique risks posed by tar sands at every stage of production, including extraction, transportation, and refinement. It wasn’t enough, but without the testimony and photographs supplied by indigenous people, experts would not have noticed for some time.
In 2008, approximately two dozen people from indigenous nations and environmental activist groups met to develop an overall strategy. The groups decided that the most promising activist target was the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, proposed by the giant TransCanada (now TC Energy) corporation to move the tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Stopping the pipeline would rob the Tar Sands project of financial justification. The unusually expensive techniques required for extracting, transporting, and refining tar sands made them unusable when the global barrel price was low, and any increases in the cost of production would make investors flee.
This small group of people had almost no support. Going up against the Keystone XL pipeline meant taking on the Republican Party, half the Democratic Party, the U.S. government, the Canadian government, and the entire oil industry. But with the presence of indigenous organizers in this group, they soon discovered they had something far more important.
Attendees at the meeting began spreading the word. Clayton Thomas-Muller, a climate activist belonging to the Columb Cree Nation of Manitoba and an attendee, noticed that the pipeline would be running through the Oglala aquifer, a route that, in addition to being an environmental scourge, also threatened indigenous sovereignty. He began using his existing connections from previous anti-pipeline campaigns in indigenous nations to persuade tribal councils to pass resolutions opposing KXL, which they took directly to President Obama in 2011. He continued to work on tribal organizing throughout the effort to stop KXL. By 2010, Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska became aware of the Keystone XL threat. She attended the first State Department hearing on the pipeline in York, Nebraska in May out of curiosity without even knowing what tar sands were. At the hearing, she noticed that over 100 farmers and ranchers spoke out individually against the pipeline project and the only person speaking for it represented a union of construction workers on the pipeline. Kleeb thought the pipeline could be stopped if she could persuade Nebraska’s increasingly resistant farmers and ranchers to join indigenous people and environmentalists. To do this, she relied on indigenous support, including Muller’s. As a result, 150 tribes from the United States and Canada met in her state to sign an agreement opposing pipeline construction. The indigenous people she worked with also gave her good organizing and spiritual advice. First, stay rooted in real, concrete stories, not abstract principles. Second, never give up. The latter was remarkable guidance, especially coming from people who have endured what indigenous people in North America have endured.
The pipeline rose to national awareness in 2011, when former NASA climate scientist James Hansen wrote an essay arguing that it would be “game over for the climate” if the Alberta tar sands were fully developed. After this, 350.org got involved. They arranged for scores of celebrities to engage in civil disobedience in front of the White House. Here in Texas, Cindy Spoon, a graduate student at the University of North Texas, co-founded the Tar Sands Blockade after the White House protests and, following Kleeb’s lead, began organizing local pipeline resistance in communities along the Texas portion of the planned route. The Tar Sands Blockade, and the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance that grew out of it, used bold, theatrical, and courageous tactics to block construction of the pipeline. Cindy also followed the guidance Kleeb had received from indigenous people in Nebraska, to stay rooted in stories and never give up. Tar Sands Blockade kept the issue in the news in Texas and Oklahoma, and occasionally in the national news, long after President Obama had already approved construction of the southern half. And we cost TC Energy a lot of money.
Cindy Spoon personally recruited a friend of mine and fellow activist for an arrest-risking direct action effort. I attended a training camp she organized and eventually got myself arrested at a KXL pumping station under construction in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Indigenous people were crucial agents in this experience. I and my colleague were thrown into what turned out to be the “Indian tank” at the county jail. The local Seminole men in jail with us that day were neither surprised to hear about the utterly unprincipled way power works in the United States, nor surprised to find us to be relatively naïve about it. But the men who spoke most freely with us also insisted on another kind of power. One guy wanted to form a circle and have each of us read something from the Bible that meant something to us and explain what it meant. During one of his turns, he quoted a verse from Matthew 19 about all things being possible with God. He looked at us and said, “this means you keep going, no matter what.” Stay rooted in real stories, and never give up.
For years after the intense efforts of 2011 and 2012, the fight against the KXL remained precarious. President Obama temporarily delayed it, but Trump attempted to accelerate it. Indigenous groups continued to resist, leading efforts against the northern half of the pipeline. And then indigenous people broadened the fight, linking it to the Dakota Pipeline resistance on the Standing Rock reservation, where the effort took on a more explicit indigenous spiritual context. In the morning, Lakota women walked to Cannonball River for a water ceremony. At dawn, local people chanted in the Lakota language. At night, Lakota elders tended a sacred fire, saying “Water is life. Defend the sacred.” In December 2016, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, visited the camp where his son was a leader. Reminding those present of the millions of attacks on the integrity of the earth community, he insisted that power lies in the common indigenous commitment to the sacredness of the physical world. He gave the same guidance Jane Kleeb had received from indigenous activists. Our struggle, he said, must be tireless and “prayer-filled,” rooted in stories drawn from experience, and we must never give up. He reassured them they would be victorious because, though people may believe this isn’t their fight, “Standing Rock is everywhere.” This sentence was, I have heard from friends who were present, the missing piece of the puzzle, exposing the unreality of indifference. Yes. It is everywhere. Nowhere on earth is safe from this threat, and we are all in the midst of it.
In January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order revoking the permit for the last phase of the KXL pipeline. By this time, investors had already been fleeing. The efforts of Clayton Thomas-Muller, Jane Kleeb, Cindy Spoon and indigenous activists across the pipeline route were bearing fruit. On June 9, TC Energy (TransCanada) abandoned the project. With the Keystone XL dead, the Alberta Tar Sands is likely to follow.
The Dakota Access pipeline, however, remains active. The sacred water on which the people of Standing Rock depend remains threatened. We can celebrate a genuine victory with the end of the KXL and it is appropriate to be grateful for the indigenous guidance responsible for this victory. Nevertheless, the struggle continues and it is our struggle, not just someone else’s. We may be afraid to feel ourselves in the midst of it, but we are. The guidance remains true:
Stay rooted in real stories. Never give up. Standing Rock is everywhere.
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley
Many people stand with a torch and a sword defending against The Beast feasting on freedom – freedom in its truest sense. Against The Beast eating away kindness and love, putting great trenches between us. Enslaving us with constant entertainment, fleeting meaningless joys and pathetic pleasures. These are the revolutionaries, who can see through the veil or at least through some parts of it.
Socrates was hated and sentenced to death because of his revolutionary thinking. Galileo was imprisoned. The Middle Ages were a period when the Church established a brutal form of dictatorship – anyone disagreeing with the dictator, even with proof or undeniable truth, indicated that the dictator’s thought system has some flaws, which could not be tolerated. And in any age, anyone going against those who enslave or control the population is an enemy. Attacked even by those who are enslaved.
“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” – Plato
And because of the hatred and violence that he will inevitably experience, a revolutionary should be defended at all costs. Just as a genius, a true revolutionary is as the rarest wonderful diamond hidden in a pile of rocks, thus should be protected and belongs to the whole world, destined to saving it. He who performs the art of a revolutionary should be guarded from forces crafted to steal our freedom away.
Not only are we in need of revolution in order to maintain freedom but we also find ourselves in the most dangerous form of totalitarianism. Dangerous mainly because we proudly call it democracy.
But what is freedom? No one explained this concept better than Immanuel Kant did, saying: “Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another.”
Are we truly independent? If yes, why is mindless consumerism imposed on us exactly at a time when we’re most sensitive and influenceable, during our early childhood? Why are we being taught to depend on cheap entertainment, disarming us and erasing our ability to truly entertain ourselves with our own intellect? Why is it so rare to find a professor who teaches you how to think and helps you to strive towards critical thinking, rather than what to think? The freedom that every country is so foolishly proud of is truly apparent and false. We are dependent on senseless consumption. We are becoming tied to cheap dopamine we receive from technology, advertisement, plasticized food and drinks.
The importance of discussing and resisting against this dynamic is that without revolution, the capitalist totalitarianism and greed will most likely lead into dystopia and absence of the natural world. With constant pleasures and technology, just as Huxley predicted it in his Brave New World and later admitted that his prophecy is coming true much sooner than he initially thought.
And if mankind is lucky enough, perhaps this will lead to the extinction of our species, so that the coming generations will be spared of the unimaginable period of capitalist enslavement.
If we would travel from the past to the present without knowing anything about it, it’s very likely that we would not believe the terrible, isolating dystopia we see. Dystopia where soothing blindness is the norm. Where following the system means to be chained. And where being chained means to love one’s chains.
Everything about this suits the capitalists, because it distracts us. We are being led to hate by the mainstream media. We’re too busy fighting each other, rather than joining each other in solidarity and fighting against the real enemy. War on drugs is a great example of a capitalist tool because it’s clearly a complete failure that only supports drug use. Yet there’s nothing being done about it because it’s convenient for the capitalists: an addict won’t resist against the treacherous social, political, economical and environmental catastrophe.
We tend to blame ourselves, yet we should blame the ones who chained us. Freedom does not mean individual plenitude, freedom does not mean that you can travel around the world. We are being led to thinking this, and on top of that, we are being led to not see. To not see the women’s dreadful pain during rape and violence. Knowing that their rapists do not receive punishment is agonizing. We do not see the beautiful organizations of ecosystems, trees that hold bird nests with babies in safety being murdered to make space for human progress. Too many species will not see the light of tomorrow, for they went extinct today. We do not see the hospitals filled with dying mothers and children, who are not ready yet to disappear from this world.
Pleasure and convenience is available and far more accessible than in any time. It blinds us, we seek to feel better immediately, we seek comfort, creating an illusion of luxury and well-being of the world. We lose the ability to think with the help of our intellect. We lose the ability to love just with the help of our hearts. Yet we’re being told that it’s okay, so we’re smiling.
It is almost as if a person places a special fantoccini in front of a child, whilst others murder the parents and rob the house. The child remains enchanted, unaware of the screams of his parents. The plight is a well-constructed theatre, the director laughs with the screenwriter yet the actors do not know they’re in a play. That’s why their suffering is genuine. A revolutionary strives to see through the veil and dismantle the whole set, burn it down.
The enslaving dominant culture must fall.
Capitalist totalitarianism is the enemy, for it exploits our freedom.
This article originally appeared in Climate & Capitalism. It is part 2 of a series, read part 1 here.
Featured image: Tenants harvest the landlord’s grain
“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)
by Ian Angus
“The ground of the parish is gotten up into a few men’s hands, yea sometimes into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled either to be hired servants unto the other or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door.” (William Harrison, 1577)[1]
In 1549, tens of thousands of English peasants fought — and thousands died — to halt and reverse the spread of capitalist farming that was destroying their way of life. The largest action, known as Kett’s Rebellion, has been called “the greatest practical utopian project of Tudor England and the greatest anticapitalist rising in English history.”[2]
On July 6, peasants from Wymondham, a market town in Norfolk, set out across country to tear down hedges and fences that divided formerly common land into private farms and pastures. By the time they reached Norwich, the second-largest city in England, they had been joined by farmers, farmworkers and artisans from many other towns and villages. On July 12, as many as 16,000 rebels set up camp on Mousehold Heath, near the city. They established a governing council with representatives from each community, requisitioned food and other supplies from nearby landowners, and drew up a list of demands addressed to the king.
Over the next six weeks, they twice invaded and captured Norwich, repeatedly rejected Royal pardons on the grounds that they had done nothing wrong, and defeated a force of 1,500 men sent from London to suppress them. They held out until late August, when they were attacked by some 4,000 professional soldiers, mostly German and Italian mercenaries, who were ordered by the Duke of Warwick to “take the company of rebels which they saw, not for men, but for brute beasts imbued with all cruelty.”[3] Over 3,500 rebels were massacred, and their leaders were tortured and beheaded.
The Norwich uprising is the best documented and lasted longest, but what contemporaries called the Rebellions of Commonwealth involved camps, petitions and mass assemblies in at least 25 counties, showing “unmistakable signs of coordination and planning right across lowland England.”[4] The best surviving statement of their objectives is the 29 articles adopted at Mousehold Heath. They were listed in no particular order, but, as historian Andy Wood writes, “a strong logic underlay them.”
“The demands drawn up at the Mousehold camp articulated a desire to limit the power of the gentry, exclude them from the world of the village, constrain rapid economic change, prevent the over-exploitation of communal resources, and remodel the values of the clergy. … Lords were to be excluded from common land and prevented from dealing in land. The Crown was asked to take over some of the powers exercised by lords, and to act as a neutral arbiter between lord and commoner. Rents were to be fixed at their 1485 level. In the most evocative phrase of the Norfolk complaints, the rebels required that the servile bondmen who still performed humiliating services upon the estates of the Duchy of Lancaster and the former estates of the Duke of Norfolk be freed: ‘We pray that all bonde men may be made Free, for god made all Free with his precious blode sheddyng’.”[5]
The scope and power of the rebellions of 1549 demonstrate, as nothing else can, the devastating impact of capitalism on the lives of the people who worked the land in early modern England. The radical changes known to history by the innocuous label enclosure peaked in two long waves: during the rise of agrarian capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and during the consolidation of agrarian capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
This article discusses the sixteenth century origins of what Marx called “the systematic theft of communal property.”[6]
Sheep devour people
In part one we saw that organized resistance and reduced population allowed English peasants to win lower rents and greater freedom in the 1400s. But they didn’t win every fight — rather than cutting rents and easing conditions to attract tenants, some landlords forcibly evicted their smaller tenants and leased larger farms, at increased rents, to well-off farmers or commercial sheep graziers. Caring for sheep required far less labor than growing grain, and the growing Flemish cloth industry was eager to buy English wool.
Local populations declined as a result, and many villages disappeared entirely. As Sir Thomas More famously wrote in 1516, sheep had “become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses and towns.”[7]
For more than a century, enclosure and depopulation — the words were almost always used together — were major social and political concerns for England’s rulers. As early as 1483, Edward V’s Lord Chancellor, John Russell, criticized “enclosures and emparking … [for] driving away of tenants and letting down of tenantries.”[8] In the same decade, the priest and historian John Rous condemned enclosure and depopulation, and identified 62 villages and hamlets within 12 miles of his home in Warwickshire that were “either destroyed or shrunken,” because “lovers or inducers of avarice” had “ignominiously and violently driven out the inhabitants.” He called for “justice under heavy penalties” against the landlords responsible.[9]
Thirty years later, Henry VIII’s advisor Sir Thomas More condemned the same activity, in more detail.
“The tenants are ejected; and some are stripped of their belongings by trickery or brute force, or, wearied by constant harassment, are driven to sell them. One way or another, these wretched people — men, women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with little children and entire families (poor but numerous, since farming requires many hands) — are forced to move out. They leave the only homes familiar to them, and can find no place to go. Since they must have at once without waiting for a proper buyer, they sell for a pittance all their household goods, which would not bring much in any case. When that little money is gone (and it’s soon spent in wandering from place to place), what finally remains for them but to steal, and so be hanged — justly, no doubt — or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are jailed as idle vagrants. They would be glad to work, but they can find no one who will hire them. There is no need for farm labor, in which they have been trained, when there is no land left to be planted. One herdsman or shepherd can look after a flock of beasts large enough to stock an area at used to require many hands to make it grow crops.”[10]
Many accounts of the destruction of commons-based agriculture assume that that enclosure simply meant the consolidation of open-field strips into compact farms, and planting hedges or building fences to demark the now-private property. In fact, as the great social historian R.H. Tawney pointed out in his classic study of The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, in medieval and early modern England the word enclosure “covered many different kinds of action and has a somewhat delusive appearance of simplicity.”[11] Enclosure might refer to farmers trading strips of manor land to create more compact farms, or to a landlord unilaterally adding common land to his demesne, or to the violent expulsion of an entire village from land their families had worked for centuries.
Even in the middle ages, tenant farmers had traded or combined strips of land for local or personal reasons. That was called enclosure, but the spatial rearrangement of property as such didn’t affect common rights or alter the local economy.[12] In the sixteenth century, opponents of enclosure were careful to exempt such activity from criticism. For example, the commissioners appointed to investigate illegal enclosure in 1549 received this instruction:
“You shall enquire what towns, villages, and hamlets have been decayed and laid down by enclosures into pastures, within the shire contained in your instructions …
“But first, to declare unto you what is meant by the word enclosure. It is not taken where a man encloses and hedges his own proper ground, where no man has commons, for such enclosure is very beneficial to the commonwealth; it is a cause of great increase of wood: but it is meant thereby, when any man has taken away and enclosed any other men’s commons, or has pulled down houses of husbandry, and converted the lands from tillage to pasture. This is the meaning of this word, and so we pray you to remember it.”[13]
As R.H. Tawney wrote, “What damaged the smaller tenants, and produced the popular revolts against enclosure, was not merely enclosing, but enclosing accompanied by either eviction and conversion to pasture, or by the monopolizing of common rights. … It is over the absorption of commons and the eviction of tenants that agrarian warfare — the expression is not too modern or too strong — is waged in the sixteenth century.”[14]
An unsuccessful crusade
Tudor Monarchs
Henry VII
1485–1509
Henry VIII
1509–1547
Edward VI
1547–1553
Mary I
1553–1558
Elizabeth I
1558–1603
The Tudor monarchs who ruled England from 1485 to 1603 were unable to halt the destruction of the commons and the spread of agrarian capitalism, but they didn’t fail for lack of trying. A general Act Against Pulling Down of Towns was enacted in 1489, just four years after Henry VII came to power. Declaring that “in some towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours [but] now two or three herdsmen work there and the rest are fallen in idleness,”[15] the Act forbade conversion of farms of 20 acres or more to pasture, and ordered landlords to maintain the existing houses and buildings on all such farms.
Further anti-enclosure laws were enacted in 1515, 1516, 1517, 1519, 1526, 1534, 1536, 1548, 1552, 1555, 1563, 1589, 1593, and 1597. In the same period, commissions were repeatedly appointed to investigate and punish violators of those laws. The fact that so many anti-enclosure laws were enacted shows that while the Tudor government wanted to prevent depopulating enclosure, it was consistently unable to do so. From the beginning, landlords simply disobeyed the laws. The first Commission of Enquiry, appointed in 1517 by Henry VIII’s chief advisor Thomas Wolsey, identified 1,361 illegal enclosures that occurred after the 1489 Act was passed.[16] Undoubtedly more were hidden from the investigators, and even more were omitted because landlords successfully argued that they were formally legal.[17]
The central government had multiple reasons for opposing depopulating enclosure. Paternalist feudal ideology played a role — those whose wealth and position depended on the labor of the poor were supposed to protect the poor in return. More practically, England had no standing army, so the king’s wars were fought by peasant soldiers assembled and led by the nobility, but evicted tenants would not be available to fight. At the most basic level, fewer people working the land meant less money collected in taxes and tithes. And, as we’ll discuss in Part Three, enclosures caused social unrest, which the Tudors were determined to prevent.
Important as those issues were, for a growing number of landlords they were outweighed by their desire to maintain their income in a time of unprecedented inflation, driven by debasement of the currency and the influx of plundered new world silver. “During the price revolution of the period 1500-1640, in which agricultural prices rose by over 600 per cent, the only way for landlords to protect their income was to introduce new forms of tenure and rent and to invest in production for the market.”[18]
Smaller gentry and well-off tenant farmers did the same, in many cases more quickly than the large landlords. The changes they made shifted income from small farmers and farmworkers to capitalist farmers, and deepened class divisions in the countryside.
“Throughout the sixteenth century the number of smaller lessees shrank, while large leaseholding, for which accumulated capital was a prerequisite, became increasingly important. The sixteenth century also saw the rise of the capitalist lessee who was prepared to invest capital in land and stock. The increasing divergence of agricultural prices and wages resulted in a ‘profit inflation’ for capitalist farmers prepared and able to respond to market trends and who hired agricultural labor.”[19]
As we’ve seen, the Tudor government repeatedly outlawed enclosures that removed tenant farmers from the land. The laws failed because enforcement depended on justices of the peace, typically local gentry who, even if they weren’t enclosers themselves, wouldn’t betray neighbors and friends who were. Occasional Commissions of Enquiry were more effective — and so were hated by landlords — but their orders to remove enclosures and reinstate former tenants were rarely obeyed, and fines could be treated as a cost of doing business.
From monks to investors
The Tudors didn’t just fail to halt the advance of capitalist agriculture, they unintentionally gave it a major boost. As Marx wrote, “the process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century from the Reformation, and the consequent colossal spoliation of church property.”[20]
Between 1536 and 1541, seeking to reform religious practice and increase royal income, Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell disbanded nearly 900 monasteries and related institutions, retired their occupants, and confiscated their lands and income.
This was no small matter — together, the monasteries’ estates comprised between a quarter and a third of all cultivated land in England and Wales. If he had kept it, the existing rents and tithes would have tripled the king’s annual income. But in 1543 Henry, a small-country king who wanted to be a European emperor, launched a pointless and very expensive war against Scotland and France, and paid for it by selling off the properties he had just acquired. When Henry died in 1547, only a third of the confiscated monastery property remained in royal hands; almost all that remained was sold later in the century, to finance Elizabeth’s wars with Spain.[21]
The sale of so much land in a short time transformed the land market and reshaped classes. As Christopher Hill writes, “In the century and a quarter after 1530, more land was bought and sold in England than ever before.”
“There was relatively cheap land to be bought by anyone who had capital to invest and social aspirations to satisfy…. By 1600 gentlemen, new and old, owned a far greater proportion of the land of England than in 1530 — to the disadvantage of crown, aristocracy and peasantry alike.
“Those who acquired land in significant quantity became gentlemen, if they were not such already … Gentlemen leased land — from the king, from bishops, from deans and chapters, from Oxford and Cambridge colleges — often in order to sub-let at a profit. Leases and reversions sometimes lay two deep. It was a form of investment…. The smaller gentry gained where big landlords lost, gained as tenants what others lost as lords.”[22]
As early as 1515, there were complaints that farmland was being acquired by men not from the traditional landowning classes — “merchant adventurers, clothmakers, goldsmiths, butchers, tanners and other artificers who held sometimes ten to sixteen farms apiece.”[23] When monastery land came available, owning or leasing multiple farms, known as engrossing, became even more attractive to urban businessmen with capital to spare. Some no doubt just wanted the prestige of a country estate, but others, used to profiting from their investments, moved to impose shorter leases and higher rents, and to make private profit from common land.
A popular ballad of the time expressed the change concisely:
“We have shut away all cloisters,
But still we keep extortioners.
We have taken their land for their abuse,
But we have converted them to a worse use.”[24]
Hysterical exaggeration?
Early in the 1900s, conservative economist E.F. Gay — later the first president of the Harvard Business School — wrote that 16th century accounts of enclosure were wildly exaggerated. Under the influence of “contemporary hysterics” and “the excited sixteenth century imagination,” a small number of depopulating enclosures were “magnified into a menacing social evil, a national calamity responsible for dearth and distress, and calling for drastic legislative remedy.” Popular opposition reflected not widespread hardship, but “the ignorance and hide-bound conservatism of the English peasant,” who combined “sturdy, admirable qualities with a large admixture of suspicion, cunning and deceit.”[25]
Gay argued that the reports produced by two major commissions to investigate enclosures show that the percentage of enclosed land in the counties investigated was just 1.72% in 1517 and 2.46% in 1607. Those small numbers “warn against exaggeration of the actual extent of the movement, against an uncritical acceptance of the contemporary estimate both of the greatness and the evil of the first century and a half of the ‘Agrarian Revolution.’”[26]
Ever since, Gay’s argument has been accepted and repeated by right-wing historians eager to debunk anything resembling a materialist, class-struggle analysis of capitalism. The most prominent was Cambridge University professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, whose bestselling book England Under the Tudors dismissed critics of enclosure as “moralists and amateur economists” for whom landlords were convenient scapegoats. Despite the complaints of such “false prophets,” enclosers were just good businessmen who “succeeded in sharing the advantages which the inflation offered to the enterprising and lucky.” And even then, “the whole amount of enclosure was astonishingly small.”[27]
The claim that enclosure was an imaginary problem is improbable, to say the least. R.H. Tawney’s 1912 response to Gay applies with full force to Elton and his conservative co-thinkers.
“To suppose that contemporaries were mistaken as to the general nature of the movement is to accuse them of an imbecility which is really incredible. Governments do not go out of their way to offend powerful classes out of mere lightheartedness, nor do large bodies of men revolt because they have mistaken a ploughed field for a sheep pasture.”[28]
The reports that Gay analyzed were important, but far from complete. They didn’t cover the whole country (only six counties in 1607), and their information came from local “jurors” who were easily intimidated by their landlords. Despite the dedication of the commissioners, it is virtually certain that their reports understated the number and extent of illegal enclosures.
And, as Tawney pointed out, enclosure as a percentage of all land doesn’t tell us much about its economic and social impact — the real issue is how much farmed land was enclosed.
In 1979, John Martin reanalysed Gay’s figures for the most intensely farmed areas of England, the ten Midlands counties where 80% of all enclosures took place. He concluded that in those counties over a fifth of cultivated land had been enclosed by 1607, and that in two counties enclosure exceeded 40%. Contrary to Elton’s claim, those are not “astonishingly small” figures — they support Martin’s conclusion that “the enclosure movement must have had a fundamental impact upon the agrarian organization of the Midlands peasantry in this period.”[29]
It’s important to bear in mind that enclosure, as narrowly defined by Tudor legislation and Inquiry commissions, was only part of the restructuring that was transforming rural life. W.G, Hoskins emphasizes that in The Age of Plunder:
“The importance of engrossing of farms by bigger men was possibly a greater social problem than the much more noisy controversy over enclosures, if only because it was more general. The enclosure problem was largely confined to the Midlands … but the engrossing of farms was going on all the time all over the country.”[30]
George Yerby elaborates.
“Enclosure was one manifestation of a broader and less formal development that was working in exactly the same direction. The essential basis of the change, and of the new economic balance, was the consolidation of larger individual farms, and this could take place with or without the technical enclosure of the fields. This also serves to underline the force of commercialization as the leading trend in changes in the use and occupation of the land during this period, for the achievement of a substantial marketable surplus was the incentive to consolidate, and it did not always require the considerable expense of hedging.”[31]
More large farms meant fewer small farms, and more people who had no choice but to work for others. The twin transformations of primitive accumulation — stolen land becoming capital and landless producers becoming wage workers — were well underway.
Notes
[1] William Harrison, The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account of Tudor Social Life, ed. Georges Edelen (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994), 217.
[2] Jim Holstun, “Utopia Pre-Empted: Ketts Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime,” Historical Materialism 16, no. 3 (2008), 5.
[3] Quoted in Martin Empson, Kill All the Gentlemen: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside (Bookmarks Publications, 2018), 162.
[4] Diarmaid MacCulloch and Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, 6th ed. (Routledge, 2016), 70.
[5] Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2002), 66-7.
[6] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 886.
[7] Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, ed. George M. Logan, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 19.
[8] A. R. Myers, ed., English Historical Documents, 1327-1485, vol. 4 (Routledge, 1996), 1031. “Emparking” meant converting farmland into private forests or parks, where landlords could hunt.
[9] Ibid., 1029.
[10] More, Utopia, 19-20.
[11] R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (Lector House, 2021 [1912]), 7.
[12] Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 110.
[13] R. H. Tawney and E. E. Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents, Vol. 1. (Longmans, Green, 1924), 39, 41. Spelling modernized.
[14] Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 124, 175.
[15] Quoted in M. W. Beresford, “The Lost Villages of Medieval England,” The Geographical Journal 117, no. 2 (June 1951), 132. Spelling modernized.
[16] Spencer Dimmock, “Expropriation and the Political Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in England,” in Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, ed. Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 52.
[17] The Statute of Merton, enacted in 1235, allowed landlords to take possession of and enclose common land, so long as sufficient remained to meet customary tenants’ rights. In the 1500s that long-disused law provided a loophole for enclosing landlords who defined “sufficient” as narrowly as possible.
[18] Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 131.
[19] Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 133.
[20] Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 883.
[21] Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (Verso, 1979), 124-5.
[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 47-8.
[23] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 69.
[24] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 73.
[25] Edwin F. Gay, “Inclosures in England in the Sixteenth Century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 17, no. 4 (August 1903), 576-97; “The Inclosure Movement in England,” Publications of the American Economic Association 6, no. 2 (May 1905), 146-159.
[26] Edwin F. Gay, “The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of Depopulation of 1607,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (1904), 234, 237.
[27] G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (Methuen, 1962), 78-80.
[28] Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 166.
[29] John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (Macmillan Press, 1986), 132-38.
[30] W. G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII 1500-1547, Kindle ed. (Sapere Books, 2020 [1976]), loc. 1256.
[31] George Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War (Routledge, 2020), 48.
