Everywhere we look, it seems, we are faced with the human and environmental devastation caused by contemporary processes of dispossession. How we are to confront this is the urgent political question of the day. Not surprisingly, this question has reinvigorated scholarly interest in dispossession, much of it inspired by the work of David Harvey (2003) on accumulation by dispossession and Peter Linebaugh (2008) on an expanded understanding of what constitutes the commons. These conceptual interventions are clearly both welcome and important, yet their explications of dispossession and commons, in the end, do not adequately address the political question. In brief, Harvey’s assignment of different political logics to the dispossessed in the Global North and South and Linebaugh’s evocative juxtapositions of different various commoning practices do not enable us to bring these struggles into a common relational frame. I suggest that a more sustained focus on uneven proletarianization—the end result of dispossession—will better serve our goal of understanding present protests and political possibilities.
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