Status Updates From Calibano e la strega. Le do...

the introduction of public assistance was a turning point in the state relation between workers and capital... It was the first recognition of the unsustainability of a capitalist system ruling exclusively by means of hunger and terror. It was also the first step in the reconstruction of the state as the guarantor of the class relation and as the chief supervisor of the reproduction and disciplining of the workforce.

Even the individual's relationship with God was privatized: in Protestant areas with the institution of a direct relationship [with God]; in the Catholic areas by individual confession. As a result, the physical enclosures [were] amplified by social enclosure, the reproduction of workers shifting from the openfield to the home, from the community to the family, from the public space (commons & church) to the private.

"That in the industrializing regions of Europe, by the 19 c., the most extreme forms of proletarian misery and rebellion had disappeared is not a proof against this claim. Proletarian misery and rebellions ... only lessened to the degree that the super-exploitation of workers had been exported, through the institutionalization of slavery, at first, and later through the continuing expansion of colonial domination."

"Today, these aspects of the transition to capitalism may seem (for Europe at least) things of the past... But the... new phase of globalization that we are witnessing tells us otherwise. Pauperization, rebellion, and the escalation of "crime" are structural elements of capitalist accumulation as capitalism must strip the work-force from its means of reproductions to impose its own rule."

"In the middle ages, migration, vagabondage, and the rise of "crimes against property" were part of the resistance to impoverishment and dispossession...Meanwhile, the crime rates also escalated, in such proportions that we can assume that a massive reclamation and reappropriation of the stolen communal wealth was underway. "