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miscalculations of sustained yield, industry captures of regulatory agencies, and the
continuation of colonial and imperial oppressions and extractions under the guises
of nationalism or development. Another, more pessimistic explanation is that the
recent popularity of commons is deeply structured by the neoliberal consensus their
advocates claim to reject. It is striking how often many of the examples above deploy
as self-evident truths major planks of the neoliberal consensus, such as that states
are ineffi cient and untrustworthy, markets have near-magical powers to which
people must defer, and communities are the most reliable sources of social innova-
tion and protection against market failures.
Recent debates within Marxist geography and related fi elds have also responded
to many of the foregoing developments, but from a more coherent and radical theo-
retical perspective. The more comprehensive and structural perspective provided by
Marxist analyses suggests that 'corporate globalization' is an inadequate explana-
tion of the origins of contemporary enclosures, and that the valorization of local
control and community governance characteristic of many activist programs is an
insuffi cient response. Where many 'progressive' or 'liberal' activists view the 'cor-
porate globalization' and market fundamentalism of recent years as an anomaly, an
excess within a fundamentally just and sustainable capitalist economy, radical geog-
raphers have been far more prone to seeing the neoliberal era as representing a
return to perennial capitalist dynamics of extreme inequality, exploitation, and
appropriation that were somewhat anomalously mitigated in some parts of the
world during the Cold War, by Keynesian policies in some countries and by state
socialism in others. They have interpreted the manifold enclosures above, as well
as countervailing calls for commons, largely in the context of enduring debates
within Marxism over the role of primitive accumulation in capitalist development.
For some, notably David Harvey (2003; 2005), neoliberalism is best understood as
a more or less conscious effort to pull back or create anew class power and privilege
that was reduced during the Keynesian era, a project motivated by a declining rate
of profi t; primitive accumulation, or 'accumulation by dispossession', has taken
centre stage during this era precisely because the global capitalist economy faces a
crisis of overaccumulation, making continued accumulation through productive
circuits of capital increasingly diffi cult. The resurgence of extra-economic forms of
accumulation as central strategies for some capitalists has been something of a sur-
prise for some theorists, particularly those in the global North: echoing the narrative
of enclosure rehearsed in the fi rst section above, many had viewed primitive accu-
mulation as well in the past of capitalist development. Radical geographers and
others more familiar with the global South, though, where the forcible separation
of producers from the means of production remains a highly visible fact of everyday
life in many places, have long emphasised the empirical existence and ontological
necessity of continual primitive accumulation to the expansion and reproduction
of global capitalism (see Perelman, 2000; De Angelis, 2004; Glassman, 2006; Hart,
2006).
Even from the latter perspective, however, important debates remain about con-
temporary primitive accumulation and the politics of the commons. One is over the
possible relationships between the enclosure of land and the proletarianization of
its residents; contrary to classical formulations that sometimes viewed these as two
facets of the same process, it has become clear that industrialization can occur
without workers being expelled from the land (see Hart, 2006), while some have
argued that contemporary enclosures are distinct inasmuch as land and other
