There are many roads to understanding the root process of capitalist criminalization, but one of the most direct is surprisingly the classic women’s novelist, Jane Austen.
This article, first published as a chapter in the book , uses Jane Austen’s writing and her own personal world as a closer doorway into the intense transformation and dangers of the English capitalist countryside of the late 1700s and early 1800s. The goal is to better understand in a whole-world context, how formerly self-supporting communities were remade in that time into—in part—a destitute homeless proletariat, and the remainder a mass criminalized lumpen/proletariat.
This is not literary criticism, but the analysis of the birth of a demi-class in the practical context of capitalism’s savage real-life circumstances. So we are better prepared for our own onrushing future.
