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“In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labor on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labor code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labor in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labor power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange ... such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.” — Gilles Dauvé
In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labor on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labor code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labor in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labor power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange ... such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.