Connections: Neoliberal Edition

 “Before the Market Was God”

The Origin of the Operating System

Episode –1: Fences in Eden

How a Wooden Gate, a Royal Decree, and a Peasant’s Lost Pig Created Capitalism

Long before stock markets, credit default swaps, or hustle culture, there was the commons—vast stretches of shared land where peasants grazed animals, gathered wood, and lived rough but collectively.

Then came the fences.

Beginning in the late Middle Ages but accelerating in the 16th and 17th centuries, enclosure acts in England—legal, state-backed, and incredibly violent—took communal land and turned it into private property. Just like that, subsistence living was redefined as trespassing.

The people didn’t become richer. But a few landlords certainly did.

And here’s the kicker: those dispossessed peasants didn’t just vanish. They became the working class. Stripped of land, they had only one thing left to sell: their labor. Capitalism wasn’t born in markets—it was born in the dispossession of alternatives.

This is what Marx called primitive accumulation. But there's nothing primitive about it—it’s the ongoing theft at the heart of every “free” market.

From stolen commons to colonized continents, enclosure set the logic: first take, then sell.

Episode –2: The Invisible Boot

How a Grain Riot, a Tax Rebellion, and a Philosopher in a Wig Justified Empire

Once private property became the organizing principle of life, it needed to be protected—by courts, armies, and, most of all, ideas.

Enter John Locke, 17th-century philosopher and father of liberalism, who argued that mixing your labor with nature gave you a right to own it. Lovely, right? Except it became the intellectual permission slip for stealing land from people who didn’t define property that way—like Indigenous peoples across the Americas.

Locke's famous line: “In the beginning, all the world was America.”
Translation: land without fences is land up for grabs.

Meanwhile, the British state used its expanding power not to empower the masses, but to crush them—through workhouses, poor laws, and grain price controls designed not to feed the hungry, but to keep markets stable.

The Enlightenment wasn’t just reason and science. It was the weaponization of reason in service of markets.

Freedom, but only if you could pay rent.

Episode –3: Steam, Steel, and Surveillance

How a Factory Bell, a Pocket Watch, and a Bent Spoon Forged the Working Class

By the 19th century, dispossession had become discipline.

The factory didn’t just reshape the economy—it reprogrammed the human body. Wake up by the bell, eat by the whistle, live by the clock. Time was no longer just cosmic—it was now billable.

Children worked in coal mines. Adults slept next to their machines. Labor became abstract, interchangeable, and increasingly measured.

And when workers began organizing? The state responded with troops, tear gas, and eventually: HR departments.

Capitalism learned early that control didn’t always require violence. Sometimes it just needed spreadsheets and shame.

Episode –4: Liberalism’s Shadow

How a Colonial Ledger, a Gold Coin, and a Handshake in a London Club Created the Global South

While Europe industrialized, it extracted—from India, from Africa, from the Caribbean.

Colonialism wasn’t a side project. It was core infrastructure for capitalism. Railroads, plantations, taxation systems—all designed to siphon value out and push ideology in.

Colonial administrators brought ideas like free trade and rule of law—just not for the people being ruled.

This is the era when the Global North was constructed, not geographically, but economically, on a foundation of deliberate underdevelopment elsewhere.

And then came the IMF. But we’ll get there.

Episode –5: The Birth of the Manager

How a Time Clock, a Diploma, and a Grey Suit Built the Corporate State

In the early 20th century, capitalism hit a snag: markets were chaotic, monopolies formed, and the poor kept organizing.

The solution? Managerial capitalism.

Corporations grew massive. Decisions moved from owners to professional managers—scientific, rational, allegedly neutral. They built org charts, annual reviews, pensions. Stability... for some.

The government did the same—welfare states, regulation, infrastructure. Keynesianism reigned.

And for a while, it worked. Sort of.

But the seeds of backlash were already planted—in boardrooms, in think tanks, in quiet whispers that the state was too powerful, that democracy was inefficient, and that the market should be set free.

Free to do what, exactly? 

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