The
analysis has shown how money arises out of commodity production, and
how money is transformed into capital. Capital in turn produces
Surplus Value, which, when accumulated again becomes capital. But,
for surplus value to arise, this presupposes the existence of
capital. So, there must be some process of primary Accumulation of
Capital that is not a product of surplus value. It is this process
that Marx next analyses.
“Its
origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of
the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one,
the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other,
lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.
The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man
came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but
the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are
people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it
came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter
sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from
this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that,
despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and
the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have
long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached
to us in the defence of property.” (p 667)
In
fact, the true history of this primary accumulation of capital, is
little different to the accumulation of other forms of property in
history, be they slaves, serfs or feudal domains. It is a history of
violence, robbery and deceit.
“In
themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the
means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into
capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under
certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very
different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and
into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of
production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum
of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on
the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour
power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the
double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the
means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor
do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of
peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by,
any means of production of their own.” (p 668)
Once
capitalist production has started, on this basis it is able to
continue to reproduce this separation on an ever expanded base.
Moreover, it is able to do so, not now on the basis of the need to
use force, but simply on the basis of what appear to be free and
equal, voluntary exchanges. This is no different from the way that
after the feudal lords had acquired their domains by force, they were
able to extract their rents and taxes apparently by Right, even
Divine Right, or the way the slave owner was entitled to the surplus
product of the slave based on some supposed superiority. The
difference between Capitalism and these previous forms of
exploitation is that they made no attempt to hide the real relations
of inequality, and indeed were based on it as some kind of natural
order, whereas the fundamental ideological basis of Capitalism is the
notion that everyone is free and equal.
But,
of course, this real history exposes the childish myth that property
accumulates in some hands rather than others because of the diligence
of some and laziness of others. It was never the case that property
arose on that basis. Land, for example, did not simply exist waiting
for entrepreneurial individuals to seize it. Human societies arose
out of the animal kingdom as collectives. Land was utilised by these
primitive communist societies on a collective not an individual
basis, be that in the form of hunter-gathering or settled
agriculture.
The
only way individual ownership can then arise, as Engels describes in
The Origin of The Family, Private Property and The State
is through the break up of these collectives, and for individuals to
seize for themselves what belongs to all.
Capital
is only able to meet with the wage labourer in the market, because
the worker has been previously deprived of their means of production.
Again, that has nothing to do with laziness. If we take Marx's
comments about the reason for high US wages, it was because workers
emigrating to America, as soon as they could, acquired land, and
turned themselves back into property owning peasants.
“The
so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the
historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of
production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric
stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.
The
economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the
economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter
set free the elements of the former.
 |
| The Duchess of Sutherland was one of those who stole what were collectively owned clan lands, from the thousands of her clansmen. She did so backed up by the violence of the British State, which drove them them from their own land. |
The
immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own
person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to
be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller
of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a
market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds,
their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of
their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which
changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as
their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds,
and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the
other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only
after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and
of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is
written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” (p
668-9)
This
transformation, therefore, conforms with the dialectic of history.
On the one hand, in freeing the worker of all those feudal
restrictions and monopolies it performs a revolutionising and
progressive role. At the same time, it does so only by establishing
new monopolies and restrictions, and replacing the exploitation of
the producers in one form with their exploitation in another.
“Although
we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early
as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the
Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century.
Wherever it appears, the abolition of serfdom has been long effected,
and the highest development of the middle ages, the existence of
sovereign towns, has been long on the wane.
In
the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are
epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of
formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are
suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and
hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the
labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the
peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The
history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes
different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different
orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone,
which we take as our example, has it the classic form.” (p 670)Back To Chapter 25
Forward To Chapter 27
No comments:
Post a Comment