The Second Enclosure
On witch-hunts, slavery, billionaires, and why the war against women has never truly ended
There is a pattern. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It moves through centuries like a slow fire, sometimes an open flame, sometimes a smoulder hidden beneath polished language and market ideology. It is the systematic removal of women’s sovereignty. Not by accident. Not as a by-product of progress. By design.
We are living through its latest iteration. And if we do not name it clearly, we will not survive it.
The Enclosures Capitalism’s First Act of Gendered Violence
Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Enclosure Acts progressively stripped England’s rural poor of their access to common land the fields, forests, and waterways that had sustained independent life for generations. But within this vast machinery of dispossession, there was a specific and targeted violence against women.
Before enclosure, women particularly widows and single women held meaningful economic agency through their relationship to common land. They kept animals, grew food, gathered herbs, brewed, midwifed, and healed. They did not depend on a husband for survival. This independence was intolerable to the emerging capitalist order.
Silvia Federici, in her landmark work Caliban and the Witch (2004), makes the argument with devastating clarity: the witch trials of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries were not medieval superstition. They were a coordinated campaign of terror against women who embodied pre-capitalist forms of communal life and bodily autonomy.
The witch-hunt was… an aspect of the transformation of the family and the redefinition of productive and reproductive work that accompanied the rise of capitalism.”
Silvia Federici
The women condemned at Pendle, at Chelmsford, at countless hearings across England and Europe the so-called “wise women,” the herbalists, the unmarried landholders, the midwives were overwhelmingly women who occupied economic space that the new order required for itself. They were accused of consorting with the Devil. The real accusation was independence.
The Witch Craze drove women from public and economic life. It made the male-headed household the only legitimate unit of social organisation. Unpaid domestic labour cooking, childbearing, nursing, weaving became women’s natural sphere, unrecognised and uncompensated. As Federici argues, this was not incidental to capitalism; it was foundational to it. The original accumulation of wealth required an accumulation of women’s bodies, time, and reproductive labour for free.
Primitive accumulation was not only the privatisation of land. It was the privatisation of the female body.
Slavery: When Dispossession Crossed the Atlantic
The logic that had enclosed the commons, burned the wise women, and imprisoned female labour within the home did not stop at European borders. It metastasised.
The transatlantic slave trade was the same logic amplified to its most monstrous scale: wealth cannot be built without coerced bodies. The plantation economy which underwrote the industrial revolution, the banking system, and the great merchant fortunes of Britain ran on the stolen labour of African men, women, and children. The profits flowed back to London, Bristol, Liverpool. They built Georgian townhouses. They endowed the universities. They seeded the insurance companies.
Angela Davis, in Women, Race and Class (1981), shows how enslaved Black women faced a doubled dispossession: racialised and gendered simultaneously. They were forced to produce both economic value and new enslaved bodies. Their reproductive labour belonged entirely to the enslaver. The home that supposed sanctuary, constructed for European women was denied them entirely. And yet it was their labour that made the bourgeois domestic ideal possible for others.
The slave woman was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother, and housewife.
Angela Y. Davis
Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism (1983), extends this: racial capitalism is not a corruption of capitalism but its essence. The system requires a category of people whose labour can be extracted without consent and whose humanity can be denied. First it was the peasant, the commoner, the witch. Then it was the enslaved African. The machinery does not change. Only the bodies fed into it.
Part Two: The Present A New Enclosure Is Being Built
We are forty years into the neoliberal settlement. The promise was freedom free markets, free movement, free individuals. What we received instead was a second round of primitive accumulation: the enclosure of public goods, the privatisation of health, housing, and education, the transfer of unprecedented wealth upward to a tiny class of global billionaires.
And now, in the 2020s, a new ideological superstructure is being constructed to manage and justify what is coming. Watch the pieces fall into place.
The Manosphere as Ideological Infrastructure
Andrew Tate is not an anomaly. He is a product, and he is a function. The manosphere, that sprawling digital ecosystem of incel forums, red-pill podcasts, tradwife, content, and alpha-male hustle culture has reached tens of millions of young men globally. It is not simply misogyny for its own sake. It is a political project.
Its core message is ancient: women’s independence is unnatural, dangerous, and to blame for male suffering. The solution is a return to traditional hierarchy men as breadwinners, women as domestic reproducers. This is the Enclosure logic rebranded in gym-selfie aesthetics.
The philosopher Kate Manne, in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), offers a framework for understanding this not as random hatred but as a policing mechanism. Misogyny, she argues, is the enforcement arm of patriarchy it punishes women who deviate from expected roles. What we are witnessing online is the deployment of that mechanism at industrial scale, algorithmically amplified, and politically coordinated with electoral movements across the West.
Misogyny is the law enforcement branch of a patriarchal order. It maintains the norms that sexism establishes.”
Kate Manne
The rollback of abortion rights in the United States was not a cultural accident. It was decades of organised strategy. The language is new. The logic is Tudor.
The Immigration Discourse as a New Architecture of the Other
The immigration discourse must be read alongside the gender question, not separately.
Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), described how the creation of stateless persons, people stripped of legal protection and political belonging was central to the machinery of totalitarian control. The logic of “chosen ones and others,” of deserving citizens and disposable non-citizens, is not a response to genuine crisis. It is the creation of a new labouring class without rights.
A person who cannot claim rights, who fears deportation, who exists in legal precarity, will accept wages and conditions no citizen would tolerate. This is not a theory. It is the demonstrated practice of labour markets across Europe and North America. The demonisation of migrants, the language of invasion, of replacement, of contamination is the ideological preparation for a new form of coerced labour. Statelessness is the new slavery’s waiting room.
“The stateless person exposes what citizenship really is: a privilege rather than a right.”
Hannah Arendt
Giorgio Agamben calls this the creation of “bare life” homo sacer the human being reduced to biological existence, stripped of political protection, who can be worked and harmed with impunity. The refugee camp, the detention centre, the precarious gig worker without papers: these are not failures of the system. They are products of it.
The Billionaire Project
None of this is coincidental. And it is not sufficient to explain it through individual bad actors. We must follow the money.
Elon Musk posts manosphere content to hundreds of millions of followers and calls for European women to have more children specifically, the right European women. Peter Thiel funds far-right political movements across Europe and the United States. The alignment of tech-billionaire capital with ethnonationalist politics and anti-feminist cultural production is not a coincidence of personal taste. It is a convergent interest.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) demonstrated with rigorous data that we are returning to levels of wealth concentration last seen in the Belle Époque the period that ended in the catastrophe of the First World War. Extreme inequality, historically, does not resolve itself peacefully. It reaches for the control of bodies when it runs out of other tools.
Part Three: Artificial Intelligence The New Enclosure of the Mind
And now there is AI.
The enthusiasts will tell you it is neutral. A tool. An accelerant of human potential. But tools are never neutral. They are built by someone, owned by someone, and deployed in the service of someone’s interests.
The first casualties of large-scale AI automation are already visible: they are disproportionately women. Administrative work, care coordination, paralegal research, customer service, content creation the sectors where women were finally finding professional footing after centuries of exclusion are precisely the sectors most rapidly being automated. Meanwhile, the ownership of the AI infrastructure is concentrated among the same small group of techno-billionaires already funding the political projects described above.
Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), names what is being built: a new form of power that does not merely sell products to human beings but harvests human experience as raw material for behavioural prediction and modification. The attention economy’s most sophisticated tool yet is being deployed during a period of deliberate democratic regression. This is not timing. This is strategy.
Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Shoshana Zuboff
bell hooks, in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), argued that any feminism that does not also address class and race is incomplete, it liberates only the privileged and leaves the rest further behind. As AI reshapes the economy, we must ask: who controls it, who benefits from it, and whose labour as always, disproportionately the labour of women and the Global South is being invisibilised inside the machine?
What Is To Be Done
The pattern is five centuries old. The names change. The technologies change. The language changes, from witchcraft to welfare dependency, from slave to undocumented, from hysteria to emotional labour. But the underlying mechanism remains: the removal of women’s economic independence, bodily sovereignty, and political visibility, in service of the accumulation of wealth by a small, largely male, largely racialised-as-white elite.
What is different now is the speed. The enclosure of minds is faster than the enclosure of land. The spread of manosphere ideology to a fourteen-year-old in Birmingham or Bratislava happens in an afternoon. The rollback of rights that took decades to secure can be achieved in a single legislative session, under cover of manufactured outrage.
But what is also different is us. We have the analysis. We have the history. We have Federici and Davis and hooks and Manne and Zuboff and Arendt and a hundred other thinkers who have mapped this terrain with precision and courage. We have our own voices, our own networks, our own refusal to be enclosed again.
The wise women were burned because they were healers and they were free. They carried knowledge in their hands and their bodies. They would not be moved from the common land without a fight.
Neither will we.
Feminism is for everybody but it must begin by telling the truth about what is being done to everybody.
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