Summary
Contents
Subject index
The present crisis of capitalism has a history. A history of the private accumulation of wealth through property regimes which allow increasing commodification and the privatisation of resources: from land to knowledge and even to life itself. Understanding that history may allow us to imagine alternatives after Capital which are no longer private but common. After Capital explores this history, showing how the economy is linked to environmental damage, climate change, resource depletion, and to massive inequality. It takes the reader from liberalism to neoliberalism, from climate change to the Anthropocene, and shows how this history is inextricably the history of colonialism. It is a rich and detailed narrative of capitalism over the last 200 years, that explains its texture and its neoliberal endgame. This discussion frames speculation on what postcapitalist societies could be, with regimes of private accumulation replaced by a politics and ethics of a democratic and ecologically- grounded Commons.
Chapter 3: Colonialism, Dispossession and Capitalist Accumulation: A Decolonial History of the Present
I have been arguing in previous chapters that there are crucial features to the developments underlying the merging of the crises I have been examining which are decisive from the point of view of understanding why they have happened and what can be done to avert the spread of despotic regimes as social and environmental conditions become unmanageable. Following many analyses, I have emphasised the perspective that this merging, far from being a matter of unfortunate coincidence, relates to the fact that the crises are both dynamically interconnected and are anthropogenic, implying that we can interrogate ...
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