Locke did not, of course, think that what native peoples did with their land constituted ‘use.’ Nor did he mean that the people who actually worked the land owned it; he meant the employers of those people. Once again, the premises are carefully chosen to lead to the correct conclusion. And in this case, the conclusion was the moral justification for black chattel slavery and the appropriation of land from natives by white imperialists. The dirty truth about Locke is, in essence, the dirty truth about classical liberalism: it arose from capitalism, and its project was to help create and
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