Thread by @WatTylerRising

The enclosure movement in England that produced capitalist social relations was in a sense a dual dispossession, alienating people from both their homes and their ability to produce the means of their subsistence, rendering them homeless and unemployed. 1/

https://twitter.com/WatTylerRising/status/1475128631785578497

However, the Tudor government made a deliberate decision to exempt a certain size of property from small producers from enclosure, allowing these property owners to increase their holdings through enclosing neighboring smallholder land. 2/

This policy cleaved the producing class apart - rending most of its members landless and "masterless", while creating a small class of property owners protected by the same laws that destroyed small holder property. 3/

This protection only extended insofar as these small proprietors could increase the productivity of their expanded property to meet the increasing rent. These producers existed in a constant state of competition to maintain holdings.4/

To increase productivity, these proprietors hired wage workers - often members of families whose land they had enclosed. The Tudors passed a series of laws in the 1530s and 1540s essentially enslaving anyone deemed unemployed to provide free labor to local proprietors. 5/

The purpose of this was obviously to provide a material need for small proprietors - a low cost and disciplinable labor force to ensure economic production- but I think this obfuscates the ways the motivation was to institute social control. 6/

The research I've gone through indicates that royal officials and aristocratic landlords were frustrated by frequent non-compliance in village-level policing from the middling peasants against poorer or unfree peasants after the Black Death and into the Tudor era. 7/

This had an impact on both rents and tax returns. Of course, a royal credibility hinged on its ability to collect taxes (though not on the returns themselves) and this producer class solidarity had to be overcome. 8/

The property protection was then designed to distinguish whose property was protected by the new land laws and whose property was outlawed and to improve the lot of more prosperous producers at the expense of the less prosperous. But prosperous producers needed to hire workers 9/

to make their expanded holdings productive and profitable, and though they were prosperous, they did not have the same accumulation of wealth (nor customary sources of unfree labor) that the aristocracy had. Many could not afford the labor needed to remain productive. 10/

The vagabond acts then were designed to 1) provide a low-cost labor force to middling proprietors, ensuring their ability stay competitive, 2) set disciplinary measures to refusing to work for low wages, and 3) tie the success of one to the degradation of the other. 11/

The acts were only in effect for about 15 years, but that's an entire generation of localized violence and dispossession of lands and property once worked and held in commons. It put customary rights and mutual obligations through a meatgrinder of capitalist social relations. 12/

Competition amongst middling proprietors was ensured by enforcing workers to compete amongst themselves for low paying jobs under threat of bondage and servitude. This increased intra-class frictions while insulating the cost of rent from political debate or action. 13/

The contradictions of capitalist social relations have been eased for short periods of time by expanding political and social rights through access to property rights created and protected by the law, as you know. However, the contradictions and their frictions remain. 14/

There's more to tie in, like Louis Blanc's critique that competition is destructive to both the workers' and the bourgeoisie capitalists' interests and only benefits monopolists and how that relates to small local businesses and landlords with 3 or fewer units. But its late now.