the emergence of the extraordinary productive capacity that characterises capitalism depended on creating and maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity. Scarcity – and the threat of hunger – served as the engine of capitalist growth. The scarcity was artificial in the sense that there was no actual deficit of resources: all the same land and forests and waters remained, just as they always had, but people’s access to them was suddenly restricted. Scarcity was created, then, in the very process of elite accumulation. And it was enforced by state violence, with peasants massacred wherever
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