Barbed Wire

<p>A call to transform the way we think about property this book examines how capitalism has from its origins sought to enclose or privatize the commons or land and other forms of property that had been viewed as communally owned and argues that neoliberal economic policies and the corporate takeovers of urban spaces prisons schools the mass media farms and natural resources have failed to serve the public interest. A study of corporate globalization and the continuation of empire after the era of political decolonization it begins with the fencing of the West starting in the 1870s and moves to examine recent phenomena such as urbanization mass incarceration financialization and the treatment of people as commodities in the context of the longue durée of land enclosures empire and capitalism. Highlighting the threatened elimination of the public domain as a result of corporate efforts to privatize public utilities prisons schools forests seeds and just about everything else that can yield a profit <i>Barbed Wire: Capitalism and the Enclosure of the Commons </i>asks what it would mean if instead of either private or public property our most fundamental conception of property were communal. Would a redefinition of property from a community perspective lead us beyond the military-industrial complex?</p>