The mobilization of space … begins …with the land…. The mobilization is next extended to space, including space beneath the ground and volumes above it. The entirety of space must be endowed with exchange value. And exchange implies interchangeability: the exchangeability of a good makes that good into a commodity, just like a quantity of sugar or coal; to be exchangeable, it must be comparable with other goods, and indeed with all goods of the same type. The ‘commodity world’ and its characteristics, which formerly encompassed only goods and things produced in space, their circulation and flow, now govern space as a whole, which thus attains the autonomous (or seemingly autonomous) reality of things, of money.

In the historical struggle over property rights, the antagonists on either side of the barricades have used the weapons that most suited them. Elites, controlling the lawmaking machinery of the state, have deployed bills of enclosure, paper titles, and freehold tenure, not to mention the police, gamekeepers, forest guards, the courts, and the gibbet to establish and defend their property rights. Peasants and subaltern groups, having no access to such heavy weaponry, have instead relied on techniques such as poaching, pilfering, and squatting to contest those claims and assert their own.