only by understanding how we’re made use of can we start to distinguish our selves from our situations. How can you know what you want or feel or think—who you are—if you don’t know which way history’s marionette strings are tugging?

If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it’s necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board.

They wanted to sell as much as possible at as high a price as possible. But if all the producers in a marketplace try to grow and harvest as much as possible, they will oversupply the market, tank the price, and kill their profits. If a group of producers agree to restrain output in order to maintain a profitable level of scarcity, on the other

Instead of cycling with the seasons, mining moved linearly, exponentially, cumulatively. There is no such thing as enough gold.

At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives

What haunts are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.

Capital hit California like a meteor, alien tendrils surging from the crash site.

People aren’t puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion.

mutualistic relationship of belonging between humans and the rest of the ecology.