Enclosure

The process of "enclosure" in the English countryside used to be a definite multiple-choice question in any high school level course in European history.  The very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry for enclosure says: "In English social and economic history, enclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land formerly held in the open field system."

Capitalist theory frowns on common land.  The so-called "tragedy of the commons" is that, since nobody owns it, everybody can abuse it.  Moreover, it can't be converted into capital so the present owners could do something different with its cash value.  It is stuck in the hands of those who have the rights to use it so new people can't come along with a "higher" use for it.  The phrase they use for this kind of perpetual ownership is "mortmain", or "dead hands."

Before the Supreme Court seized the common lands of the Spanish and Mexican community grants of the American Southwest, especially Sandoval v. US (167 US 278) the common lands of each community were used mainly for grazing livestock and cutting timber for construction, furniture and fuel.  Stones from the Creek addresses this again and again.  I wrote a paper on this subject twenty-five years ago.  The people of those community grants are still dealing with the consequences 100 years later.

But the seizure of common lands is only one tool in the hands of those who would proletarianize an independent group of people.  In the story "Turning Water Into Gold" the federal Newlands water project wasn't just a way of enriching speculators in the desert.  It was also a way of denying the Pyramid Lake Paiute people their ducks, kuzavi, tule… let's just say their entire livelihood.  And it was a way of driving them into the wage economy.  Water projects today do the same thing by privatizing the very essence of life.  So do chemical spills like the one in West Virginia and "fracking"(which makes injecting the chemicals into ground water a normal part of the process) by poisoning the people's water instead of privatizing it.

In "Scars" the industrialists of the "New South" simply criminalized young Black men by arresting them on specious charges and then leased these "convicts" to work for them: in this case in phosphate mining.  It was also done in the coal mines of Tennessee and Alabama, in steel plants, and on private plantations, too.  There were no wages, but the point is still to take independent people and get them working for you.  The difference is that it was slavery long after the adoption of the 13th Amendment.

In the story "The Sun Shone So Brightly," the protagonist thinks of himself as a kind of free spirit who has traveled across the country and across oceans because he doesn't want to follow the traditional path of farming his parents' land.  But he finds all his childhood friends working in a copper mine not far from their home.  It was never a matter of choice for them; perhaps his own choice is just his imagination.