Enclosing common lands converted capital into a commanding power that subordinated the old aristocracy.

Evidence

By restricting access to land, the enclosures helped capital to transcend its original productivity-enhancing role and to grow exponentially in commanding power. Before long, the worldwide commodification of previously common lands had enabled capital to achieve supremacy in all corners of the globe. With the magnification of capital’s commanding power over labour, capital’s owners amassed great wealth. As their wealth accumulated, their social power proliferated. They graduated from being employers to agenda setters wherever big decisions were being made. Soon, capitalists could boss everyone around, including the landed gentry – even the royals. Indeed, the only way the aristocracy managed to hang on in some countries was by joining the capitalist class or, at least, deferring to it. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s platform/attention reading list: the enclosure of the commons is the template for platform appropriation of digital space. — connects to: Industrialization transferred economic and political power from aristocrats to the bourgeois. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 311; England’s nobility absorbed bourgeois functions to preserve the ruling system; Peasant cooperatives were converted from voluntary bodies into administrative instruments. (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 258

Broader Connections

• Industrialization transferred economic and political power from aristocrats to the bourgeois. #corroborates (0.85) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 311
• England’s nobility absorbed bourgeois functions to preserve the ruling system #complicates (0.80)
• Peasant cooperatives were converted from voluntary bodies into administrative instruments. #epitomizes (0.75)
• Traditional capitalists have become vassals to cloud capital’s feudal overlords #epitomizes (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 17