the primary contradiction under capital is not class, this cannot be the case if entire segments of global society are shackled with social death, defined out of humanity, and rendered classless.

the primary contradiction under capital is the land.

to explain briefly:

In ancient communism, labor (natural human endeavors that facilitate survival) was socialized, bc the natural situation of a world w/o generalized commodity production necessitated mutual aid. Healers protected the community, warriors gathered food, and hunters healed the sick.

That is: survival in a situation absent production required superb physical strength, mental capacities, and flexible skillsets in all fields from everybody.

But around 12,000 years ago, in multiple locations, humans developed agriculture.

As farming grew increasingly efficient, what we would now call civilization began as agriculture gave us a reliable and predicable source of food, which forced us to stay put.

Having to stay put bc our food stock required protection led to communities living closer together.

First, early defense structures like walls were built and so the need for organization to determine who was or wasn’t allowed behind those walls grew.

The more organized we got, the more efficient we became.

Villages became cities, cities turned into kingdoms, and kingdoms gave birth to empires.

Connections between locales exploded and not having to focus every ounce of energy on survival gave us the opportunity to expand knowledge.

So, with the rise of agriculture, we were given specialization, which allowed individuals to increasingly rely on the skills of others to survive. And it is due this specialization that labor was no longer social, but individual.

Understand that the individualization of labor necessitated capitalistic markets, because one was required to make an exchange with the person who made the thing one needed to survive. And because exchange doesn’t happen for free, you were required to either give up the thing you

specialized it making or give up the “stuff” you earned from exchanging that thing that you made with someone else (today, we call this “stuff” capital).

Now, we have feudalism; a system of individualized labor and individualized commodity production in a society dominated by

the controllers of the land (Landlords) that all our stuff is made on.

all this led to property.

folx aren’t so inclined to give up the stuff they earn, because — under capital — it was the only way to get “more stuff” (we call this “more stuff” personal property:

transpiration to the production site, a home to live in once production was done so you didn’t freeze death, food to make in the home so you didn’t starve, etc.).

folx didn’t want to give up their stuff, yet the capitalist mode of production requires the free movement of capital

Free movement of capital was incompatible w the general organization of feudal society as the lords only controlled the land on which products were made — products were made from start to finish on an individual basis using the land and tools (personal property) OWNED by laborers

So, the emerging capitalist class needed to figure out a way to own both the land (personal property), and the means of production (private property) within the land.

Thus, we were given the estates of the realm;

with the king at the head of the realm, the clergy in the First estate, the nobility in the Second Estate, and the peasants and artisans (the bourgeoisie) in the Third Estate.

The monarchy conquered the land, claiming everything behind its borders as its private property;

the church occupied all the land in the name of the monarchy in exchange for military service; the nobles ruled that land and everything on it in the name of the church, and everyone else simply had the pleasure of living there.

and because this process of land grabbing and dispossession rendered the peasants and bourgeoisie incapable of producing things for themselves, production became socialized and everything that was produced was, in effect, owned by two classes of people.

Put simply: zero production and socialized labor defines communism. This means that the emergence of production, and the individualization of it, marks the transition away from ancient communism and toward feudalism. Individual production and individual labor define feudalism.

This means that the socialization of production through individualized labor is what marks the transition away from feudalism into capitalism. And the organization that must exist to communicate and manage this exchange — & usurp everything produced by — it must transition from

from an interconnected community into a centralized apparatus, or a State.

Capitalism then is not the exchange of exchange of value, as value can be exchanged on an individual and consensual basis. Rather, capitalism is the organization and delivery of surplus value to the State

Unlike under feudalism, where the very existence of the prince (and thus the nonexistent upward mobility of the peasants) greatly enhanced the class consciousness of the third estate, the tenants of capitalism are not upheld by the church, or the divine right kings.

Rather, the peasant and merchant classes took up the only resource that allowed them the powers (or freedom) of a king: the land.

they “transformed themselves into small capitalists and then full blown capitalists” (Capital, Vol.1 Ch.31) by acquiring and controlling property.

All this made possible by the dispossession of the native people — of the taking of their lands and destruction of their ability to build homes and produce food and defend themselves and their communities.

“... all the wealth of society goes first into the possession of the capitalist... he pays the landlord his rent, the laborer his wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, & keeps... the largest and a continually augmenting share of the annual produce of labour for himself.

The capitalist may now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community... The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a compete change in the right of property.”

“The spoliation of the church’s property — the fraudulent alienation of the state domains; the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and it’s transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism...

[the capitalists] conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital.”

In this, we see very clearly how to obsession with “marxist class analysis” obfuscates the real issue: settler-colonialism.

Unlike under feudalism, capitalism is quite literally built on the bones and wombs of the colonized people. After all, how can you conquer land you intend to commodify without doing away with the people who live there in the first place?

More fundamentally, how can capitalism exist without the commodification of the land?

in the words of david harvey in The New Imperialism, which reworks the understand of “primitive accumulation”, capitalism begins necessarily with the commodification of the soil:

“...expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatised mainstream of capital accumulation.”

what we find is that the power of the state — again, the communication, management, and usurpation of all the productive forces of the land — starts to be utilized as a weapon of discipline against those who have been dispossessed.

without land, all the capitalists have are lofty ideals and delusions of kinghood. and with land, the people can get on with the business of existing; of doing to be, rather than doing to produce.

Return the land to those who steward the earth and the rest of it will fall into place naturally, as it did for millennia before men began positioning themselves as agents over nature.