Most of us do not have unimpeded access to the means of laboring productively. This is because virtually everything in the world that could be used productively is already owned by someone else—a capitalist. Farmland, forests, mines, factories, and all the classical industrial “means of production,” but also everything from the schools in which we might learn how to labor to the very ideas about how to labor in particular ways, hidden being intellectual property claims.
And, of course, the production of money and credit, the process by which we might pool our resources together if we were free to do so.
So instead of laboring freely, we must gain permission from owners. Without that permission, we die—from hunger, or disease, or starvation. Or we live miserable lives of enforced precarity on the margins of society. In short, we are *sabotaged,* prevented from laboring and living as we might choose.
6/
