Britain was the first industrialised country, and so it was here that the first working class developed. The Enclosure Acts from 1750 onwards evicted the peasantry from traditional common land and turned them into rural wage labourers or landless vagabonds. Meanwhile, the need for large numbers of workers to staff the burgeoning manufacturing industries created an intense wave of urbanisation. Rural migrants were joined by former craft workers thrown into unemployment by the competition of industry. The labouring population of town and country were completely dispossessed, having nothing to sell but their labour power, They were the first members of a class which today accounts for the majority of humanity – the proletariat.
Fighting For Ourselves
Anarcho-syndicalism And The Class Struggle
Solidarity Federation, 2012
Are the present definitions and distribution of property justified, if the conditions for their acquisition are provenly based on coercion, violence and invasion?
