Radical critics later pointed out the ahistoricity — as ahistorical as the Social Contract — of the myth of primitive accumulation. Karl Marx referred to it as the “nursery tale of primitive accumulation.” In fact, as Marx pointed out, the actual process of original accumulation, by which property was concentrated in a few hands, was carried out through massive robbery — a history, as he put it, “written in letters of blood and fire.”

In Britain, the original home of the Industrial Revolution, it involved the expropriation of peasant land from late medieval times on through the enclosure of the Open Fields for sheep pasturage and later Parliamentary Enclosure of pasture, waste and marshland to which the peasantry had had rights. It involved social controls like the Combination Laws (which prohibited free association) and the Laws of Settlement (which functioned as an internal passport system much like those of the USSR and the South African Apartheid state). It involved mercantilist wars and colonialism, by which the European powers forcibly concentrated control of world trade in their fleets, conquered most of the Third World, stamped out competing native industry, enslaved millions, evicted natives from their land on the same pattern as the Enclosures, and looted entire continents of mineral wealth.

But the words “primitive” and “original” don’t mean this was a once-upon-a-time process of the distant past, after which “free market capitalism” began its normal functioning. In fact it continues to the present. All forms of economic exploitation, all forms of rent extracted through state-enforced monopolies, artificial scarcities and artificial scarcity rights, serve to accumulate more capital in the hands of them what already gots.

We need only read the news to be reminded, on a weekly basis, that primitive accumulation is still happening. A good example is the TransCanada corporation, which is seizing the lands of sovereign Indian peoples to construct the southern stretch of the Keystone XL Pipeline. TransCanada’s claim that “there is no legal obligation to work with the tribes” directly contradicts a large body of treaty law. Almost 200 years after the Trail of Tears resettled the surviving minorities of Indian tribes in Oklahoma, Keystone is condemning land inhabited by the Sac and Fox Nations. As Sandra Massey, aide to the Chairman of the Sac and Fox Nation, asked: “How many times do we have to move? Our dead are never at rest.”

Bear in mind that this isn’t TransCanada’s first abuse of eminent domain; the entire history of the pipeline’s construction is a sorry record of one theft after another. This is just one of the rare occasions when there’s some legal ground for fighting back. TransCanada was also embroiled, back in February, in legal conflict with the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council.

Meanwhile, in Namibia, communal village lands — like the common woodland, marsh and waste of England 300 years ago — are being illegally fenced off and “privatized,” with the connivance of the state. The same has been done in recent years with communal lands in Russia and China, with village authorities colluding with transnational corporations to rob the peasants of their land.

In 1649, in England, a band of landless peasants — “the Diggers” — tore down an enclosure at St. George’s Hill in Surrey and began cultivating the land in common. Although their cottages and crops were eventually burned by soldiers in service to the local landlords, their heroic stand survives as an example for people in similar circumstances today. From the landless peasant movement in Brazil, to villagers at Wukan in China’s Guangdong province who blockaded their village in protest against the selling of common lands to a factory hog-farming operation, spiritual descendants of Winstanley and the Diggers take their stand again, again, and again.

And unlike the repression at St. George’s Hill, every such stand is recorded on video to inspire other heroes around the world. For the first time in recorded history, the rentiers and owners of the entire planet live in fear that their days are numbered. In Oakland, Spain and Greece, we see scene after scene of cops in black uniforms and riot gear abandoning the pretense of legality and assaulting peaceful protestors with rubber bullets, clubs and teargas. Why are they doing it? Because they’re afraid of us.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx mocked the idea — common in classical political economy — of a “primitive accumulation” by which abstemious capitalists had painstakingly saved up capital to found industrial enterprises and hire labor. Against this “fairy tale,” he juxtaposed the real story of primitive accumulation: Massive robbery including wholesale abrogation of peasant property rights in land in early modern Europe, the imposition of mercantilist empire around the world, enslavement of millions, and expropriation of land and mass colonization in the colonial world.

In England this took the form first of enclosure of Open Fields (the arable land worked in common by villagers) and later the Parliamentary Enclosure of pasture, forest and waste. One heroic act of resistance to this robbery survives in legend — the band of so-called Diggers under Winstanley in the mid-17th century, who broke down the enclosures and attempted to cultivate the waste at St. George’s Hill in Surrey before their crops and cottages were burned by soldiers. If you’re looking for a stirring anthem for the global justice movement, you could do worse than Billy Bragg’s cover of the Digger’s Song: “We work we eat together, we need no sword; we will not bow down to the masters nor pay rent unto the lord.”

But as Marx pointed out, this real-world primitive accumulation wasn’t just a one-time thing at the dawn of capitalism, after which the capitalists instituted bourgeois legality and said “OK, no more robbery, starting … now!” This primitive accumulation, this robbery, is an ongoing phenomenon without which capitalism — a system of state-enforced privilege and rent extraction, as opposed to the free market — would cease to exist.

Primitive accumulation continued in the full-scale colonial partition of the Third World in the 19th century, which peaked after Marx’s death. It went on in the neocolonial period of the 20th century, with Third World landed oligarchies dispossessing peasant cultivators of their remaining traditional rights in the land in order to consolidate their plots for cash-crop export agriculture. Western extractive industries, like mining and oil, operate on concessions previously extracted by such means, or continue to work through local governments to obtain access to il and mineral reserves by similar means.

I’ve got a whole string of open browser tabs on examples of this phenomenon that just came to my attention just over the last few weeks. In Cambodia, the government has handed around a quarter of the country’s land area over to private corporations — including pristine forests, national parks and farmland cultivated by many thousands of people. In recent weeks numerous reports have surfaced of government authorities murdering peasants trying to return to their land.

Ethiopia plans to lease three million hectares to foreign investors. As Center for a Stateless Society Media Director Tom Knapp pointed out (“Zenawi: The Ethiopian Marriage of Marxism-Leninism and Capitalism,” August 21, 2012), this has already been the policy of a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist land-reforming regime for some time:

“At first, many of the previously state-operated ‘parastatal’ farms were retitled not to those who actually worked them, but to functionaries of Zenawi’s party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. Starting in 2008, the state began leasing ‘empty’ (read: Inhabited and worked by the same serfs who had worked it under the monarchy and the ‘people’s republic’) farmland to foreign ‘investors’ (read: Multinational corporations looking for cheap land and cheap labor, courtesy of political connections).”

In Tanzania, the state may force up to 48,000 Masai nomads from their traditional lands to create luxury game preserves for Middle Eastern monarchs.

At the Daily Mail, Fred Pearce writes of an assortment of “land-grabbers” (“Chinese billionaires, Saudi sheiks, Wall Street whizzkids and a motley array of British adventurers who agree with the financial guru George Soros that ‘farmland is one of the best investments of our time’”) who’ve taken control of African land equivalent to ten times the area of Britain. That land seizure, as with every other from the eviction of English cottagers to the tractoring off of Okie sharecroppers, has entailed the dispossession of village cultivators from land they naively regarded as their own.

In Canada, the federal government is attempting to “privatize” First Nations land (i.e. abrogate traditional common titles to the land and convert it into individual parcels that can be bought up by fossil fuels and mining companies). You can be sure this will be attended by the same kind of skulduggery and collusion between the state and local First Nations elites that characterized the “privatization” of the Open Fields and commons in England three centures ago.

In the United States the GOP, together with so-called “sagebrush rebels” out West, calls for “privatizing” tens upon tens of millions of acres of federal land. Of course what they call “privatization” means funny auctions, closed to outsiders, involving a handful of major industry players, with mining or timber companies buying the land at fire sale prices. And then, with title to millions of acres of rightfully unowned land, they can exclude homesteaders until they’re ready to develop the whole ball of wax in one giant blockbuster project — without the hassle and transaction costs of buying out or working around the homesteaders who already would’ve settled it in a just world.

Such land robbery serves two purposes, under capitalism: First, it separates the laboring classes from the means of subsistence, making them increasingly dependent on wage labor and reducing their bargaining power in the labor market. And second, since it is stolen land, it carries no capital outlay cost to be amortized; hence, it increases the average rate of profit at a time when corporate capitalism is plagued by chronic tendencies toward overaccumulation and stagnation.

Yet another reminder that corporate capitalism has nothing to do with a free market. It’s a system of state-assisted robbery by the rich and powerful.