Economic growth can get constituted in diverse ways with diverse distributive effects. Today we are seeing a resurgence of what we referred to, in a much earlier era, as primitive accumulation. The format is no longer the enclosure of farmers’ fields in early England, which took place so that the sheep could deliver their wool to satisfy the emergent manufacture economy rather than provide an all around resource to farmers' households. [1]
Today, enormous technical and legal complexities are needed to execute what are ultimately equally elementary and brutal extractions. It is, among others, financial firms that enclose a country’s resources and citizens’ taxes. What they are doing is repositioning expanding stretches of developed countries, and increasingly much of the rest of the world, as sites for the extraction of resources. What we see alongside this is the regearing of government budgets in liberal democracies away from social and workers’ needs.
Today, both of these practices take their own specific forms in the parties (still) in power in Greece and Spain. Both countries have secured various advantages for their upper sectors, along with the active shrinking of the incomes and social services for the middle and working classes. They have done so, especially Greece, to a point we would not have thought possible in the developed world only a few years ago.