“Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers, where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome of all visitors.”

—  Timothy Thomas Fortune

On the phenomenon that would come to be called primitive accumulation of capital, in Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (1884)

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Timothy Thomas Fortune 1
American writer and activist 1856–1928

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