Raoul Peck’s 2017 biographical film The Young Karl Marx opens in a beautiful sun-dappled forest. Peasants are gathering sticks to heat themselves with — dead wood from the forest floor, nothing that’s still growing. Suddenly they are attacked by police on horseback. Some are killed. We see their bodies in close-up, on the forest floor, eyes open.

The scene is historically accurate in at least two senses: in the 1830s, landowners in the wine-growing area of Trier, where Marx was born, were asserting exclusive ownership over common lands where tradition had afforded villagers limited but important rights, like the gathering of firewood. And it was this local experience of enclosure, rather than any of the usual isms or abstractions, that first crystallized the young Marx’s sense that he was living in a place and a time of unbearable injustice. His analysis of what was happening, the subject of one of his early journalistic pieces, is pronounced, sentence by outraged sentence, in the film’s opening voiceover.

It’s a brilliant way for the director of Exterminate All the Brutes! to suggest that Marx and Marxism have lost none of their pertinence to the study of colonialism, at whose dark heart lies the theft of other people’s land. For students of the nineteenth century, it is also a way of refreshing the sense of how Marx belongs to the context of the nineteenth century — an expanded and newly imagined nineteenth century, with less reference than usual to European revolutions or to the satanic mills that for residents of the developed, largely vaccinated metropolis now seem quite distant in space as well as in time. This is much the same brilliance that leads Carolyn Lesjak to organize her uncompromisingly nineteenth-century book around enclosure. We think of enclosure, considered literally rather than metaphorically, as centered in the previous century or even earlier. We think of it, structurally, as belonging to pre-capitalist society, which is to say as part of the process of so-called primitive accumulation that made industrial capitalism possible. But as Lesjak insists, enclosure is also a later and indeed an ongoing phenomenon. She reminds us of the ongoing displacement of indigenous populations around the world by extractive industries and the servile governments who do their dirty work for them. And to complicate the politics, I would add that indigenous peoples are also displaced by conservationists,who have been complicit in removing the inhabitants from their traditional homelands and traditional ways of life for what are supposed to be the noblest of motives.1

Admirers of Working Fictions will no doubt be struck in The Afterlife of Enclosure, as I was, by Lesjak’s boldness in dealing with genre. In Working Fictions, she aims her argument at William Morris and Oscar Wilde, neither of whom wrote in a genre that is usually understood as even proximate to classical realism. Claiming them for the genre of realism is crucial, however, to her assertion of a synthesis or reconciliation between the (masculine) concern with work and the (feminine) concern with pleasure. It’s quite a dazzling reconfiguration of the nineteenth-century canon. She makes a related move, equally startling, at the beginning of The Afterlife of Enclosure. In the literal sense, enclosure is a political and legal process imposed on the land. It happens in the countryside. So, after an obligatory stop at the poetry of John Clare, where does Lesjak begin her revision of the nineteenth-century fictional canon? With Dickens, who as she says is known as the quintessentially urbannovelist. It’s pretty daring — much like including Morris, writer of Icelandic sagas as well as utopian romances, in the canon of classical realism.

This suggests that it’s after all notthe literal enclosure of the land that is most important to her. And that is a reasonable position. When Marx put the section on primitive accumulation at the tail end of the first volume of Capital, he gave the impression that the physical violence of tactics like slavery, colonization, and enclosure was a pre-condition for capitalism, not a description of processes on which capitalism would continue to depend. He made it seem that commodification — where Capital does start — is capitalism’s key, meaning that exploitation —the seizure of surplus value through the formal, seemingly non-violent means of wage labor — is enough to make the system work smoothly. For some time, however, the tendency has been to insist that exploitation has always been supplemented by expropriation — that capitalism never graduates from directly coercive tactics like the enclosure of land to a “mature” form in which surplus value is seized, without physical violence, by wage labor alone. The prevalence of racialized incarceration in the U.S. is one body of obvious and significant evidence. Cedric Robinson’s “racial capitalism” is the go-to concept. Enclosure is, among other things, a useful way of keeping this issue in the spotlight. Those seeking a lucid and open-minded introduction to the subject can do worse that start with Nancy Fraser’s “Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?”2

To see the book from this angle is to suggest that the book’s real center is not enclosure itself but the target at which enclosure aims: the commons. Lesjak attaches the adjective “utopian” to the commons, but I prefer to think of it not as utopia, a free-floating figure of desire, but rather as grounded, very literally and very firmly, in the history of the seizure of the land and in the moral sensibility that has been and continues to be offended by that violation. In other words, Lesjak offers us the commons as the base for an ongoing global resistance to global capitalism. The implicit polemic here argues that the commons is truly “common” in two senses — that it stands up for the low and the vulgar as opposed to the unique and distinctive, and that it overrides the differences with which criticism has been so overwhelmingly concerned for some decades. This concern was an entirely natural and no doubt necessary correction to the false and frequently arrogant universalisms that preceded the 60s movements. Without it, we would not have achieved what Stuart Hall calls the “theoretical gains” that have been made in the name of gender, race, and sexuality. But the concern with difference makes it hard to agree with Hall that there havebeen “gains” — that political progress of any sort is possible. The so-called “new social movements” of the 60s entertained, at least intermittently, the goal of uniting as “the Movement.” That unifying impulse of the 60s-movement legacy has not always seemed as clear to its inheritors as the concern with difference, particularity, identity. Lesjak helps us take a step back, or forward, and feel that coalitional energy as our own. She does not call it sameness, and would perhaps object to that polemical note. But I can hear it all through the book, especially when she makes her eloquent case for character “types” as figures of collective existence.

1. See the report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 July 2016, item 66.
2. FromThe Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 92 (November 2018): 21-42.