In Capital I, Marx notes the words of the anonymous author of “An Essay on Trade and Commerce, containing Observations on Taxes etc.” 1770, who comments,
“That mankind in general are naturally inclined to ease and indolence, we fatally experience to be true, from the conduct of our manufacturing populace, who do not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week, unless provisions happen to be very dear.”
He goes on demonstrating the link between this ability of the worker to work only that time he finds necessary to his liberty.
“But our populace have adopted a notion, that as Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege of being more free and independent than in any country in Europe. (Such notions he can never support amongst the workers in practice) …The labouring people should never think themselves independent of their superiors… It is extremely dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps seven parts out of 8 of the whole, are people of little or no property. The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.”
Why was it that, even as late as 1770, these labourers only needed to work for four days in exchange for wages? It was precisely because they continued to be able to derive a large part of their subsistence from working their own plot of land. This is precisely, the same condition that Lenin describes in relation to the labouring peasants in Russia, who derived part of their income from selling labour – often not even selling labour-power as a commodity, as a wage labourer does, but only their labour as a labour-service. In fact, as Lenin describes, those peasants who sold their labour, as the primary source of income, rather than selling the commodities produced on their land, often had a higher net income than did even those middle peasants that depended entirely on selling the commodities they produced.
But another change was taking place. Just as in industry the individual craftsman was being replaced by small scale capitalists who put work out to workers, so capitalist farmers were entering agriculture, and employing wage labour there. As early as 1724, Daniel Defoe had noted that, on estates near London, families of local gentry were being displaced by families enriched in business; and Cobbett, the writer who admired Squire Coke of Holkham, felt very differently about the people from London whom he termed “the Squires of Change Alley”. Parliament passed a series of so called Enclosure Acts. A few such Acts had been obtained under Queen Anne and George I, and over two hundred during George II’s reign, but even at the accession of George III in 1760, the open field system still existed in half the counties of England mostly in the Eastern counties bounded by the East Riding in Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Wiltshire. During George III’s reign, some 3,200 Enclosure Acts were obtained including, in 1801, a General Enclosure Act, which simplified the procedure.
In other words, all of this change in agriculture comes long after the development of industrial capitalism in the towns, which began in the 15th century, and is, in fact, the necessary condition for the later transfer of capital into agricultural production.
Robert's theory, as a combination of objectivism and subjectivism, is rather like the bad men theory of history. It basically posits history not as one of class struggle, in which changes in material conditions create new forms of property, which, in turn give rise to the development of new social classes, and the disappearance of old classes, but one of a struggle of good versus evil, with the evil exploiters simply assuming new garb, as part of the process of change. So, in his account, evil feudal landlord's, for some reason, having been content to extract rent from peasant's, overnight get it into their heads to become evil capitalist landlord's, and so decide to evict peasants off the land, so that these peasants can no longer produce their own subsistence, and instead have to become wage workers. This then enables the landlord to now extract profits by selling the means of subsistence, produced by the peasants, back to the peasants, while retaining the surplus product to consume themselves. As Lenin points out, in actual fact this represents no different real condition than exists under feudalism. The wages that Roberts sees paid to the peasants, are only equal to the products they previously produced themselves, and directly consumed, whilst the surplus product/value/profit, now in the hands of the capitalist landlord, is the same as the surplus product/rent formerly in the hands of the feudal landlord.
It is hard to see how any change in material condition has arisen, here, then, that would have driven any such change in social relations, or the ideas that derive from them. We have to believe that the feudal landlord just overnight decides to become a capitalist landlord, which is the very opposite of the theory of historical materialism. It is consciousness determining reality, not vice versa. But, Roberts requires this version, because it overcomes his problem of asserting that The Law of Value, and with it the categories of value and surplus value are specific to capitalism, and spring into existence, like Minerva from the head of Zeus, simultaneously with the creation of capitalism.
If that is true, then he has a problem accounting for the exchange of commodities (and products) at their value outside of capitalism, as well as the fact that the value of all commodities whether capitalistically produced or not, contains a quantity of surplus value, as Adam Smith had demonstrated, because, in all societies beyond the most primitive, the labour undertaken to produce them consists of both necessary labour and surplus labour. Without that surplus labour/value, it would be impossible for any mode of production, to accumulate means of production, so as to raise productivity, or indeed to expand at all to meet the needs of a growing population. What varies in each mode of production, is merely the different means by which the exploiters appropriate that surplus labour/value. It does not spring magically into existence with capitalism, capitalism simply ensures that the surplus value created by the producer - which goes into the pocket of the producer themselves as an independent commodity producer - has to be handed over to the capitalist as the price of the producer being able to work.
Marx's account of the development of capitalism as a gradual process, occurring over centuries, beginning with industrial production in the towns, was an analysis of a process that took place over a period of four hundred years prior to the time he was writing about it. But, this process was concentrated into just a few decades in Russia. It begins essentially immediately after the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs, when commodity production and exchange takes off. Lenin is able to view, and analyse this process not centuries after it takes place, but in front of his eyes, writing about it in the early 1890's, whilst it is still going on. What Lenin sees and analyses is the same process that Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, and Capital, whereby this growth of commodity production, occurs first in the towns, leading to some of the independent commodity producers, there, growing into capitalist producers, whilst others are ruined, and become wage workers. It creates the conditions of a growing market, and the ruined producers, now, as full time wage workers, also have to acquire their food from the market too. It creates a growing market for agricultural products.
As Lenin describes, the Emancipation does not lead to an immediate dispossession of land from the peasants, just as no such thing occurred in England or Western Europe. Instead, these peasant producers are led to have to devote an increasing proportion of their output to meeting the needs of the market, not as capitalist farmers, but still as peasant commodity producers. It is only as a consequence of this process, that some of them in more favoured positions are enabled to accumulate capital, whilst others go under, and must become wage labourers. In other words a process in which it is not a matter of evil feudal landlords becoming evil capitalist landlords, and creating a condition in which they spawn evil industrial capitalists in the towns, but one in which a section of the formerly exploited peasants, and artisans, themselves become the best adapted to the new conditions, and consequently become the new ruling bourgeois class.
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