Slaves, artisans, homesteaders, European peasants, small-town storekeepers, Southern hillbillies, and prairie sodbusters weren’t consigned to reservations. But they were the raw material, as were Native American buffalo hunters and subsistence agrarians, of a process of primitive accumulation which drove them to extinction and without which Klein’s miracle is inconceivable. If Native Americans ended up on reservations, all these other refugees from preindustrial ways of life and of making a living ended up as the proletarians of factory and field or as their near relations, toiling away as convict laborers, indebted tenants and sharecroppers, and contract laborers, comprising a whole menagerie of semifree peonage. The miracle of capital accumulation in the Gilded Age depended on a second miracle of disaccumulation happening outside the boundaries of capitalism proper. It proceeded relentlessly, appropriating land and resources both human and natural that had once been off limits because they were enmeshed in alternative forms of slave, petty, and subsistence economies: plantation monocultures, smallholder agriculture both in America and across southeastern and central Europe, handicraft production on both sides of the Atlantic, mercantile activities serving local markets, and an enormous variety of family businesses filling up the arteries of production and distribution. Liberated from these premodern systems of social reproduction, some of their denizens were free (or, rather, were compelled) to take on their fateful role as wage labor or its close facsimile; that is, they became the bone and sinew of the industrial capital accumulation [...]

Gilded Age industrialism was the irresistible and empyrean story of the forces of production in the hands of great men

Once in the United States, they joined their efforts with homegrown superannuated farmers and handicrafters displaced by the machine and the factory’s finely reticulated division of labor

It penetrates the lowest depths of proletarian life: that is, its seductions inveigle even the working poor