Ian Angus has published several books on eco-socialism and edits the online journal Climate & Capitalism. His work has consistently promoted and defended the eco-Marxist understanding that the climate crisis has resulted from capitalism’s internal contradictions, which cannot be overcome without radical change. While this was once a fringe position within climate activism, now even popular figures such as Greta Thunberg have acknowledged the necessity of anti-capitalism in different forms. Outside the context of Western climate politics, socialists, peasant movements, and indigenous peoples across the world have long been concerned with capitalism’s destructive impact on the earth. Given this political context, there may never have been a more urgent need for understanding the history of capitalism and its relationship with land and the environment. It is this need that Angus seeks to address in his latest book, The War Against the Commons.
In his book, Angus outlines the history of enclosure in England and Scotland from the Middle Ages until the modern period. During this period, commons (communally held lands) were privatized and peasant cultivators were expropriated on an increasingly large scale. Angus’s main argument is that the development of agrarian capitalism, and ultimately industrial capitalism, was facilitated by this expropriation and violence. Furthermore, these developments in England were partially dependent on colonial exploitation and slavery, as will be detailed below. To readers familiar with the work of Karl Marx, this line of argumentation might seem familiar. Indeed, Angus’s analysis is almost entirely based on Marx’s as presented in the chapter on “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital, Vol. 1. The contribution Angus seeks to make, therefore, is not to present an entirely original analysis of the enclosures, but to outline this important history in an accessible form while engaging with the wealth of scholarship and evidence which has become available since Marx’s death.
The book includes an introduction and three main sections consisting of four to five chapters each. Part One focuses on “the first great wave of enclosures”, which started in the fifteenth century, accelerated in the first half of the seventeenth century, and lasted up until the “English Revolution” of the 1640s (p. 12). Angus describes the commons-based agriculture of the Middle Ages while critiquing the traditional narrative of the “tragedy of the commons” and details the mechanisms and actors involved in the enclosures (ch. 1). He follows Marx’s analysis as he describes the creation of a large population of landless peasants in the early modern period who were forced to become proletarian workers in the growing urban industries or settlers and bonded labourers in the New World (ch. 3). Angus extensively discusses the different forms of resistance against these social upheavals: from the anti-enclosure Protestant intellectuals of the “commonwealth” discussed in Chapter Two to peasant resistance in Chapters Four and Five. Especially interesting in the latter chapter is the discussion of the Diggers, a short-lived peasant movement between 1649–1650, which sought the abolition of private property, and of the writings and ideas of one of the Diggers’ leaders, Gerrard Winstanley.
Part Two outlines the second wave of enclosure from the “misnamed Glorious Revolution” to the nineteenth century (p. 108). What distinguished the second wave from the first is that while the state had previously attempted, at times, to limit enclosures, Parliament became an active facilitator of them from 1689 onwards (ch. 7). In the second half of the eighteenth century, even those major parts of Scotland that had hitherto been largely untouched were subjected to large-scale clearances and capitalist “development” at rapid speed (ch. 8). These processes of expropriation were mirrored by increasingly restrictive Game Laws, which prevented peasants from pursuing poaching as a subsistence strategy at risk of imprisonment or worse (ch. 9). In Chapter Six, Angus reminds us that these developments in England and Scotland should not be viewed separately from the colonial exploitation of India or plantation slavery in the West Indies: the enclosures provided the surplus population necessary for large-scale colonial trade and settler colonialism while the colonies provided capital for industrial development in the metropole.
Part Three grapples with the social consequences and legacy of enclosure from the eighteenth century until the present day. Following historians such as Robert Allen, Angus criticizes the traditional narrative surrounding the English “agricultural revolution” of the eighteenth century, which was supposedly facilitated by the enclosures. In contradiction to this narrative, he argues that widespread adoption of the technological and agricultural innovations typically attributed to the “revolution” actually predate the latter. Furthermore, domestic food production did not increase but stagnated and the growing urban populations of the metropole became increasingly dependent on food imports from abroad, including from Ireland and other colonies (ch. 10). The fact that the newly created proletariat had to be forced to work for wages, by circumstances and state coercion is strongly suggested by a brief survey of contemporary writers such as Thomas Malthus and Arthur Young (ch. 11). In the final two chapters, Angus departs from early modern England. In Chapter Twelve, he outlines Marx’s understanding of the divide between town and country and the “metabolic rift” which underlies capitalism. He argues that if we truly want to overcome the climate crisis and capitalism in the long term we will be forced to abolish the town–country divide, which was partly created, in its modern form, by the enclosures (ch. 12). In his concluding chapter, Angus describes how the enclosures in England and Scotland were mirrored and continued in many forms all over the world, including colonialism/neocolonialism and, more recently, the Green Revolution and the Global Land Grab. However, if expropriation and coercion have proved ceaseless, so has resistance: the struggle is carried on today by indigenous peoples and peasants all over the world (ch. 13). Angus concludes with a call to action:
In Marxist terms, we need to expropriate the expropriators. Today’s movements of the oppressed and dispossessed to steal back the commons offer real hope that capitalism’s five-century war against the commons can be defeated and reversed in our time. Supporting them is an elementary responsibility for all partisans of social justice. (p. 202)
The book has four appendices. The first is a brief Marxological essay, first published in Climate & Capitalism in 2022, on the term and concept of “primitive accumulation”. Angus points out that Marx only ever used the term “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” ironically when criticizing the bourgeois assumptions underlying Adam Smith’s concept of “previous accumulation”. Angus proposes the term “original expropriation” as a replacement, originally used by Marx in his English-language lecture series “Value, Price, and Profit” (1865). The second appendix contains an analysis of Marx and Engels’ views on the Russian peasant communities or mir, first published in Monthly Review in 2022. The third contains the 2007 declaration of the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, which calls for food sovereignty, mirroring the countless peasant movements that preceded it. The final appendix is a chronology of major events from the Middle Ages until the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867.
The War Against the Commons makes a convincing, though not entirely original, case against triumphalist narratives of the history of capitalism. The rise of capitalism and wage labour was not accompanied by freedom and wealth for all, nor were they enthusiastically embraced by peasants. In fact, the social upheavals which would ultimately lead to industrialization worsened living conditions for the majority of the population, both within and outside the imperial core. These processes of “original expropriation” continued until the present day, separating local populations from their land and commons through large-scale land acquisitions or land grabs. Despite the book’s aversion to historical optimism, the reader is left with anything but feelings of political pessimism. Angus writes extensively and enthusiastically about the many forms of peasant resistance against expropriation, from large-scale riots and revolutions to autonomous communes to everyday forms of resistance. Furthermore, the writings of Gerrard Winstanley prove that peasant movements could have radical ambitions which far surpassed merely reactionary efforts to resist capitalist development. The final chapter of the book links these insights from history to the climate crisis and peasant movements of today, serving as an effective call to action.
Though Angus’s outline of the history of enclosures is extensive, it has some unfortunate shortcomings. Most significantly, the relationship of women to the commons and women’s resistance to enclosure remain unexplored. It might have been inspiring to engage with Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch,Footnote 1 which analyses the roles of women in peasant resistance as well as the reconfiguration of social-reproductive relations which accompanied the enclosures and the rise of capitalism. Addressing these important topics could have enriched not only Angus’s historical narrative but also the analysis and theorization of this narrative, which sadly remains almost as blind to gender and social reproduction as Marx’s. This might also have allowed for an exploration of continuities and changes in women’s roles in medieval and contemporary peasant movements – interestingly, the very second demand listed in the 2007 declaration by La Via Campesina concerns women’s roles in food production and representative bodies. Furthermore, it is not just Federici’s historical work that remains unaddressed: for instance, Briony McDonagh’s and Jane Whittle’s work on the enclosures, the commons, and women is also largely absent.Footnote 2 Finally, it should be noted that the book engages little with the contemporary historiographical context and debates, which means it is best approached as a historical introduction or popular outline rather than as a novel contribution to the historiography.
Despite these shortcomings, The War Against the Commons remains more than worthwhile reading for students and activists alike. It is an immensely accessible and informative outline of the history of expropriation which underlies our economic system and of the parallel history of resistance from below. Finally, perhaps the biggest compliment for Angus’s book is that it is equally valuable to those who seek to understand the world as it is to those who seek to change it.
