Involuntary Enclosure For All

The Background and History of Enclosure

“Enclosure” is one of the most powerful ideas to ever emerge from the political left. Its explanatory power has stood the test of time and it can help us understand our present crisis as well.

Enclosure basically works like this: Agriculture does not generate much wealth. A subsistence farmer using the power of his/her own body can generate about $4,000 (in today’s dollars) of economic activity per year. If one domesticates animals or enslaves others, agricultural output increases (from the power of the stolen energy). Addictive substances — tobacco, coffee, and sugarcane that is turned into rum — can fetch a higher price. But if a country really wants to get rich, it has to industrialize — that is, it has to make things with machines.

At the end of the 15^th century, once European countries had gunpowder and developed ships that could cross the oceans, they established colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This generated tremendous wealth back home which created additional leisure time that led to technological advances such as the steam engine. Wars between colonial powers led to improved manufacturing techniques for metals. And improved metals led to bigger, better, stronger, and faster machines.

In order to have a factory that can manufacture great quantities of things the industrialist requires one more essential ingredient: a reserve army of labor — throngs of people willing to do dangerous work for low wages because they don’t have any better options. If farmers are happy on their land, there is no reason to move to the cities to work in factories. So every country that has ever industrialized has enclosed the common lands to force peasants to move to the cities.

In an earlier era, the land was held in common (no one person owned it) or distributed through a tribal or feudal system. As the name suggests, under enclosure, the ruling party puts a fence (literal or metaphorical, doesn’t matter) around formerly common land and says “this land now belongs to the king (or prince or other member of the ruling class).”

The rulers generally have a monopoly on guns and the “legal” use of deadly force, so the peasants cannot make a living from farming or hunting anymore and they are forced to migrate to the cities where they are put to work in factories.

Enclosure Happens Under Any System that Wants to Industrialize

What’s wild about enclosure is that it happens under both Capitalist and Communist systems — any nation that wants to industrialize has done this. In England, Parliament passed thousands of enclosure laws from the 1600s all the way through the start of World War I!  As a result, England became one of the greatest industrial empires in the world.

Collective agriculture in the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam accomplished the same goal. Under collective agriculture, land, livestock, and farm equipment were seized by the state in the name of increasing crop yields. In the process, crop yields decreased (for a decade or more), people starved, and many of those who survived migrated to the cities where they were put to work in factories.

If you want to have your mind blown, check out “The Soviet Union: A Regime of Capitalist Development”, by Matthew Crossin on substack. From the article: The [Soviet] policy known as “collectivization,” combined with a project of rapid industrialization, replicated the violent and dislocating process of capitalist enclosure. Control over agricultural production, and its subsequent modernization, was secured through violent requisitions and the transfer of ownership to the State. Impoverished and hungry peasants found themselves driven into the USSR’s swelling urban centers and worked in the growing industrial sectors. The seemingly historically unique level of violence which accompanied Soviet industrialization can, to an extent, be explained by the fact that it ruthlessly condensed into just a few decades what had occurred elsewhere over multiple generations.”

As a dear political economy colleague observed: The most important first step of capitalism is not getting yourself some capitalists. It’s turning the peasantry into a proletariat by forcing them off the land. Then you can have capitalists to employ them, but not before. So the first stage of capitalism is always proletarianization, whether under the name of socialism or [capitalist] liberalism.

And the way to create a proletariat is enclosure, thus stealing the ordinary means of production (land and hunting) used by the peasants to survive.

Pharma Captures the State

As I have written previously, the U.S., Oceania, Europe, and most of Asia are fully industrialized. After 500 years of colonialism there are no new lands left to conquer. World War II created a pause as all of the leading industrialized powers except the United States were reduced to rubble that took decades to rebuild.

But the global economy stalled in the early 1970s and has not recovered since (as Robert Reich observes, we’ve just hidden that fact by sending more women into the workforce and taking on massive amounts of debt.

In 1971 soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, Jr. wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled, “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” in which he urged American corporations to actively engage with the political system to reshape it to be more friendly to business.

Perhaps no industry embraced this new call to arms more than the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma profited handsomely from the 1976 “swine flu pandemic” that began at Fort Dix (fascinating history here). Pharma took advantage of the deep recession during the Carter administration to pass the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that allowed federal officials and recipients of taxpayer-funded scientific grants to patent their research. 

Suddenly a healthy system of scientific checks and balances — regulators, “bench science” academic researchers, and corporate research — was transformed into a gold rush as now everyone was on the same team looking to get rich from their intellectual property.

Pharma realized that the real money is in selling drugs to healthy people — at the time, the population of sick people in the U.S. wasn’t very large. So they medicalized various unpleasant aspects of the human condition (e.g. childhood rashes, sadness, and aging) and developed profitable drugs to give to as many people as possible — ever-more vaccines, antidepressants, and statins.

Vaccines were so dangerous that they could not exist in the regular capitalist marketplace, so Pharma got Congress to pass the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to give themselves and their minions liability protection.

With antidepressants and statins liability protection is less pressing because harms can be hidden with the blanket excuses “s/he was depressed” and “s/he was just old.” For Pharma, the added benefit of the widespread proliferation of these “medicines” is that they cause more harms than benefits. The number of people in the U.S. with one or more chronic illnesses increased from 12% in the 1980s to over 54% in the mid 2000s.   

Instead of selling just one vaccine or treatment, now people were dependent on additional medicines for life. So for example, vaccines cause autism, ADHD, childhood cancers, diabetes, eczema, and epilepsy. While Pharma, pre-Covid, made about $50 billion a year from vaccines, it made $500 billion a year from the treatments for these vaccine injuries (Risperdal, Ritalin, chemo drugs, Metformin, Dupixent, Depakote, respectively).

In the early 1990s Pharma used the AIDS epidemic and the activism of ACT UP to pass the Prescription Drug User Fees Act. Now about half of the FDA budget comes from Pharma, not the taxpayers, and new drug applications are reviewed in less than a year.

They also passed laws to set up side foundations at the FDA, CDC, and NIH so Pharma can buy regulators directly and embed their employees in these government agencies. So by the mid 1990s Pharma knew that they can get any drugs they want through the FDA regulatory process.

Harm — poisoning the previously healthy population for profit — became Pharma’s business model. And like the Spanish Conquistadors looting the palaces of the Aztecs and Incas, Pharma’s lust for profitable harm became insatiable.

SARS-CoV-2 (and the ridiculous Covid response) • Enclosure of the Human Body for the Purpose of Profi

At some point, drugs for healthy people and the medicalization of the human condition were not enough to keep the profits rolling at Pharma. A number of blockbuster drugs were coming off of patents in the early 2000s with no new drugs in the pipeline (actual R&D is expensive and scientific breakthroughs are rare). So Pharma needed new sources of disease to create the market for new patentable drugs. 

Enter gain-of-function research.

The U.S. has a vast chemical and biological weapons program going back to World War I. It accelerated and expanded during the Cold War. As science writer Kris Newby explains in her book Bitten, Lyme disease was a U.S. bioweapon that escaped the lab. The invention of CRISPR/Cas9 enabled researchers to cut and paste pieces of genetic material just like we cut and paste sentences in Microsoft Word.

And because of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, the regulators who could theoretically put a stop to gain-of-function research now have financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that will profit from any pandemics.

So it was only a matter of time before the temptation to create and release a gain-of-function virus became too great for the corrupted souls of the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex to bear. In the early 2000s Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina and others began experimenting with splicing pieces of HIV into bat coronaviruses. And in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 was released into the population together with a worldwide program to block access to effective treatments and censor anyone who asked any questions.

What’s significant about Covid is that it represents the most extreme form of enclosure in human history.

Six feet social distancing is a form of enclosure — putting a magical six foot fence (twelve feet in diameter since it goes in all directions) around everyone who complies. For the first time in history, this magical enclosure follows you whenever you are in a public space.

Lockdowns are a form of enclosure — putting an imagined fence around your home and turning it into your own personal ghetto.  As I wrote previously, the entire idea of vaccine mandates stems from Democrats’ desire to enclose the air itself. Under this logic, the air is theirs and the unvaccinated are potentially contaminating it just by breathing. Needless to say, Democrats don’t believe that vaccines actually provide protection for the vaccinated (hence the need to enclose the air as well).

Covid vaccines and Covid vaccine mandates are perhaps the most egregious form of enclosure of all. mRNA shots turn millions of your own cells into factories, the machines inside these factories are your own RNA, and what they produce are spike proteins.

One of the reasons that so many vaccinated people are getting so sick is because these spike protein factories have no off switch — in some people they just keep producing spike proteins until the person dies. This hacked biological system works to produce profits for Pharma.  Vaccine mandates are the state seizing your body by eminent domain and transferring it to the ruling class for their further enrichment.

There’s a reason why the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, Pharma, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation absolutely love mRNA shots in spite of the fact that they are the deadliest vaccines in history and cannot be made safe. To them, this new form of enclosure represents, potentially, the most profitable enterprise in human history — more profitable than the Atlantic slave trade, gold mines, or oil. This is especially attractive to the ruling class given that other forms of capital accumulation have stalled out.

I previously explained the mechanism by which this happens — vaccines cause chronic illness that leads families to transfer all of their wealth to hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies in order to pay for treatments until the person is bankrupt and then allowed to expire at which point the cycle starts all over again with the next person.

If the ruling class can enclose our bodies and turn our cells into mRNA factories, they will be able to enslave most humans on the planet via chronic illness. The ruling class already owns about half of all global wealth; the Covid enclosure of our bodies has the potential to transfer the $246 trillion that they don’t already own into their pockets.

This is the world’s largest smash and grab job and the way that the ruling class does this is through enclosure. The only way to resist this enclosure is to reject allopathic medicine in general.

Blessings to the warriors.  Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. Huzzah for the people building the parallel economy our hearts know is possible.

As always, I welcome any corrections.

You can read more of Toby’s work on his blog at uTobian, which currently has over 32,000 subscribers, and can also read his columns on Substack.