Enclosures briefly gave evicted serfs the economic choice they had lost

Evidence

Because of advances in shipping and navigation, international trade in things like wool, linen, silk and spices made them lucrative, thus giving British landlords an idea: why not evict en masse the serfs from land that produced worthless turnips and replace them with sheep whose backs produced precious wool for the international markets? The peasants’ eviction, which we now remember as the ‘enclosures’ – for it involved fencing them off from the land their ancestors had toiled for centuries – gave the majority of people something they had lost at the time that agriculture was invented: choice. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 99

Categorization

• XREF: The enclosure precedent maps onto how platforms fence off data/digital labour — a parallelism the reader’s surplus-platform thesis can deploy. — connects to: The enclosures created economic choice by commodifying land and labor. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 99; Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it; The enclosure movement destroyed rural community through theft of common land — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 101 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The enclosures created economic choice by commodifying land and labor. #expands (0.95) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 99
• The enclosure movement destroyed rural community through theft of common land #qualifies (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 101
• Capitalist economic choice was coercive, not genuinely free. #complicates (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 100
• Slaves were deliberately worked to death because replacement was cheaper than upkeep #qualifies (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 751
• Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it #corroborates (0.70)