STUDYING DAS KAPITAL, Part 8 (of 8)
Summarizing, mostly defending and, at times, critiquing Volume 1
Part 8 is the last part of Das Kapital Volume 1: “The Secret of the so-called Primitive Accumulation”. It consists of chapters 26 - 33. Some translations call it simply “Primitive Accumulation”. Ian Angus has argued, citing a lecture Marx gave in English in 1965, that what Marx would have preferred as a title in English was “Original Expropriation”. If you prefer to download a PDF with all eight parts of my study notes combined into a single document, click the button below to do that.
Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
According to Marx, capitalists and their apologists (political economists), offer an origin story for capitalism that claims it liberated the serfs from feudalism. Then, after liberation, the most hardworking, intelligent and frugal accumulated capital and became the capitalist elite. The majority didn’t have the qualities required to become capitalists and therefore had to survive by selling their labour-power. Marx calls this story “insipid childishness”. He counters that “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.”
Feudalism was destroyed violently and ruthlessly. It left the “liberated” former serfs with no other choice but to sell their labour-power. Marx stresses that depriving workers of any other choice is the most essential requirement for capitalism. The violent expropriations in Europe took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The process eventually ended up with capitalists also expropriating most of the feudal lords who had brutally cast their former serfs into the labour market.
Chapter 27: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population From the Land
He says that in England, by the end of the fourteenth century, most people were “free peasant proprietors” even if their legal claim to property was “hidden” by a feudal title. Even agricultural wage workers worked small plots of their own and, along with the peasant proprietors, worked commonly held land.
By the later part of the fifteenth century, wars, including the feudal lords’ strife with the King and parliament, made them look to cut costs and get more money. They threw servants out of their castles and therefore out into the labour market. Also, brazenly violating their feudal obligations, they kicked peasants off land - including the commons - so the lords could use it as pasture for sheep. This was driven by the booming Flemish wool manufacture that the lords wanted to supply with raw material. For 150 years, the king and parliament tried but failed to stall the destruction of the peasantry.
The Reformation also drove the expropriation of the Catholic Church’s land which resulted in more evictions of peasants.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, capitalists still thought the process had not gone far enough, that land holdings of a few acres made workers too independent.
Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament
A huge proportion of the expropriated peasants could not be employed. They often turned to begging and crime. Under English monarchs Henry VII and VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth and James I, barbaric laws were passed against vagabondage that included whipping, mutilation and even execution for repeat offenders. Under Edward VI, in 1547, outright slavery was legalized for anyone who “refused to work”. The legislation specified offences for which the slaves could be tortured. Marx notes that a form of slavery for citizens in England continued to exist until the nineteenth century under the “roundsman” system.
Marx says that when capitalism is finally established, workers largely come to see the work or starve option they face as natural (I.e. not the product of a bloody process that deprived them of the option of working for themselves). Unemployment, the industrial reserve army, is usually all that is required to keep workers obedient. The state will avoid intervening in a ham fisted way to support bosses. But this is not the case while “primitive accumulation” is going on to entrench capitalism.
In the mid fourteenth century, since most people worked for themselves as farmers, English workers were small in number, skilled, and protected from competition by guilds. But even then, the government stepped in to outlaw the paying of what it defined as excessively high wages. There was a legally enforced maximum wage, but a minimum wage was not even proposed until hundres of years later, in 1796.
ASIDE: Britain did not get its first statutory minimum wage until 1999, more than 500 years after it had first enforced a maximum wage. It should be noted that Denmark, which has more than 70% unionization and other strong labour legislation that keeps wages high, still has no statutory minimum wage. Similar comments apply to Norway and a few other European countries today.
In 1825, fearful of worker revolts, parliament finally, but only partially, ended the outlawing of trades unions. But even when unions won full legal recognition in 1871 the state used laws against “violence, threats and molestation” to suppress them.
Marx notes that, at the time he was writing, employers faced only civil penalties for violating contracts with workers, but workers faced criminal penalties.
He then turns to France to say that during the French Revolution, in 1791, the bourgeois revolutionaries outlawed unions. Even Robespierre, during the “Reign of Terror”, kept them outlawed.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer
Marx says that by the end of the sixteenth century a class of capitalist farmers had emerged through a gradual process that took place during which most independent peasants were expropriated. The process greatly sped up during the fifteenth century as the “usurpation of the common lands allowed him [rising capitalist farmer] to augment greatly his stock of cattle, almost without cost, whilst they yielded him a richer supply of manure…”. There was also a long period where relative prices favored this group of rising capitalist farmers. A drop in the price of precious metals lowered both the wages the up-and-coming capitalists paid to workers and the rent they paid to big landowners. At the same time the price of agricultural produce rose which increased their revenues.
Chapter 30: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home Market for Industrial Capital
Marx cites historian Adam Anderson, who was so delighted with the expulsion of self-supporting peasants from the land they worked that he thought it was an act of God. What Anderson loved was that the evicted peasants fled to the towns creating a workforce that was untied to guilds that capitalists hated. Also, basic materials like yarn which the peasants had once made for themselves were now made by capitalist firms. Rural manufacturing atrophied as it was slowly shifted to the cities.
Chapter 31 : The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
Marx says that the industrial capitalist developed faster than the capitalist farmer. Feudal laws in the country, and guilds in the towns, stunted the transformation of money into industrial capital. But the pace of capitalist development picked up (along with peasant evictions) after the discovery of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century. I will quote Marx at length. He details the horrors - anticipating Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti- Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China,
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power…
To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641 . They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to "abstain" from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce!
The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe….
According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the Company and its employes from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.
The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50.
He sums it up “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital”.
Marx then talks about how public debts are placed at the service of capitalists along with the credit system both nationally and internationally. He includes this as part of “primitive accumulation” thereby showing that he regards plunder and theft as part of a fairly advanced capitalism, not just its early origin story. Given how often he has documented the atrocities of child labor in England, Marx reminds us that the capital that poured into the United States from England was the “capitalized blood of children”. But he reiterates that the conversion of atrocities into capital flowed also from the colonies to the mother country: “the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”
Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
Marx says that formal slavery as exists under feudalism holds production back. Capitalism, he repeats yet again, requires a labour market of “free” workers who have only two options: work for capitalists or starve. Once this labour market is established capitalists thrive as production achieves a scale it never could before. Primitive accumulation he defines as lawless violence and brutality required to establish and maintain capitalism: evicting peasants from lands they worked with a high degree of independence even though formally dependent on a feudal lord. As he said in the last chapter, primitive accumulation is also the plunder and literal enslavement of peoples around the world, as well as the scams perpetrated through the credit system.
But as capitalism develops it centralizes capital into fewer hands: “one capitalist always kills many” as Marx puts it in this chapter. But by bringing workers out of the relative isolation they lived under during feudal times, and worsening their conditions, capitalists set the stage for a revolt of the working class: “the negation of the negation” as monopoly capitalism eventually holds production back.
ASIDE: Indeed one of the many contrived scarcities capitalism produces is a scarcity of jobs for people who want to work. That obviously holds production back. Capitalists abhor full employment, but even if it were allowed, other ways are found to hold production back. For example, patents maintain a lethal scarcity of prescription drugs and health care services.
Marx says that eventually capitalists bring about their own expropriation by workers who will then own in common the land and the means of production. He adds that the process will be less violent and protracted than the one which led to capitalism because capitalism was established by expropriating the majority while communism will involve expropriating only a small minority.
ASIDE: I’d estimate the victims of capitalism at 443 million since 1914 alone.
Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation
Marx says “In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive accumulation is more of less accomplished. It is otherwise in the colonies.“ In the colonies, capitalists complained that too many European settlers did not face the work-for-capitalists-or-starve option because too much cheap (stolen) land was available. He reminds us that, until most people have only options (work for capitalists or starve) all the money, machines, buildings and raw materials in the world will not become capital: “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.“
Slavery partially solved the problem for capitalists in the colonies, but they still wanted European settlers to be driven off the stolen land and into the labour market.
Marx singles out the scheme promoted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a convicted kidnapper (and a pedophile) who, after he was out of prison, went on to spend decades as a parliamentarian in New Zealand and Canada. Wakefield’s idea (a “primitive accumulation” scheme as Marx called it) was tried by the British government. It involved the government selling stolen land to settlers but at prices high enough to force them to work for years as wage earners to get it. Marx ridiculed the government’s brazen intervention to ensure that the “law of supply and demand” did what capitalists’ wanted. It didn't work, Marx says, because British immigration was merely diverted to a former colony, the United States, instead of Australia and New Zealand.
As for the United States, after its Civil War, capitalist development made schemes like Wakefield’s “superfluous” Marx said as “Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down to the normal European level.”
ASIDE: In New Zealand, the Māori people are struggling to this day to remove statues and change street names that honor the likes of Edward Wakefield.