> This is the basic principle underlying American law and our Constitution. So what? Can I call the idea "American colonialist" and dismiss it as categorically

> This is the basic principle underlying American law and our Constitution. So what? Can I call the idea "American colonialist" and dismiss it as categorically as labeling something "Marxist" allows you to do? In fact, the article doesn't push back against that idea in itself. It pushes back against its primacy, certainly, but it accepts the underlying premise of state power underwriting private ownership. You'll see this when you read the very next paragraph: > What is decisive is which private claims to property governments have been willing to underwrite with the force of the law... (emphasis in the original). Following that, the author explains how the legal constructs that define "property" in the privately enclosed sense are applied in the age of capital. But nowhere is the author arguing in favor of undoing enclosure and thereby killing tens of millions of people. You're so busy building that strawman that you miss the main point of the article, which follows next. Far from being a hamfisted argument against capitalism (it doesn't even suggest that there are any alternative frameworks that create wealth) the article turns to the "exceptions and reservations" that lawyers have managed to infuse "standard" capitalist frameworks with, to the point that bankruptcy (for example) may no longer actually be accomplishing the protection of capitalist interests that it's intended to under the enclosure model. And then in the last part of the article, the author criticizes the book, but also draws out how it specifically differentiates its arguments from Marxist ones. But I'm not convinced you even read that far.