When widespread commodity production invaded Russian agriculture, the landlords sought to devote more of their own output to the market.
“This gave rise to intensified exploitation of peasant labour and then to difficulties with the allotment system, since it had become unprofitable for the landlord to supply members of the rising generation of peasants with allotments, and it was possible to settle accounts in money. It became more convenient to separate the peasants’ land once and for all from that of the landlord (particularly if in the process part of the allotments were cut off and if they were redeemed at a “fair” price) and to use the labour of the very same peasants, placed in materially worse conditions and forced to compete with former manor serfs, “gift-landers,” the more prosperous former state, appanage peasants, etc.” (p 491)
As a result, serfdom collapsed. A similar thing can be said about the collapse of colonialism, which also became economically unsustainable. Colonialism arose in the 16th and 17th century, at a time when merchant capitalism was on the rise. This merchant capital, along with interest-bearing capital, forms a symbiotic relation with the old landed aristocracy. All three types of property extract surplus value via unequal exchange – rent, commercial profit, interest.
Merchant adventurers, pirates and privateers like Drake, Raleigh and Colombus go out to find, new, faster routes, and, in the process, begin to develop colonies, as protected markets, and sources of supply. The landed aristocracy consumes the exotic products brought back from such trade, and they extend their own form of landed property into those colonies, establishing for themselves vast new potential rents from plantations. They use their financial resources to become part of the financial oligarchy that finances the trade, and appropriates large revenues from interest and dividends from the companies established, such as the East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company, South Sea Company, and so on. It requires them to also have large, overseas, colonial administrations, and large armies to defend these colonies not only against revolt, but also the ambitions of other colonial powers, as witnessed by the repeated conflicts between Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands.
But, when industrial capital becomes dominant, in the latter part of the 19th century, these old forms of extracting surplus value, on the basis of unequal exchange, become outdated, and a constraint. All of the overheads of colonialism represent an unnecessary cost that detracts from the potential profit that can be produced by the accumulation of productive-capital. This is similar to the way, industrial capital reached a point, whereby, existing forms of agriculture could no longer meet its needs, and became a constraint, requiring capital to invade the agricultural economy itself. The industrial capital appropriates surplus value in production, directly, from wage labour, and requires completely different forms of social relations than those existing under Mercantilism and Colonialism.
It requires the potential to accumulate productive-capital, and to employ increasing amounts of free, wage labour. Commercial profit, rent and interest are a detraction from profits, and the accumulation of capital, and the unfree nature of labour, arising from colonialism, is not what industrial capital requires. The bourgeois revolution was characterised by its abolition of all those old monopolies, and now, as industrial capital expands globally, it undertakes the same war on them, as it seeks to create a world in its own image. The monopolised colonial markets are also what capital had had to destroy as vestiges of feudal production at home, and now as imperialist, multinational capital, it has to destroy those colonial monopolies too, so as to create the conditions for an open, global economy, and the freedom for all capital to accumulate within it.
Colonialism, like serfdom, does not collapse all at once. For a while, colonialism exists alongside imperialism, just as feudal economy exists alongside bourgeois economy.
“The system of economy—now serving the market (and this is very important)—changed, but did not do so at once. New features and “principles” were added to the old. These new features consisted of the following: the supplying of the peasant with means of production was no longer made the basis of Plusmacherei, but, on the contrary, it was his “separation” from the means of production, his need of money; the basis was no longer natural economy, natural exchange of “services” (the landlord gives the peasant land, while the peasant provides the products of his surplus labour, grain, linen, etc.), but commodity, “free” money contract. It was this form of economy, which combined old and new features, that has been predominant in Russia since the Reform.” (p 491)
Some of these methods have been described earlier, in relation to the example of Madame K. So, as well as lending out land, in return for work, was supplemented by “Winter hire”, so that money was lent in return for work, when the peasant was most in need of money, an sold their labour cheap, the lending of grain in exchange for labour service and so on.
“The social-economic relations in the former “patriarchal estate” were reduced, as you see, to the most ordinary usurer’s deal: they consisted of operations quite analogous to the operations of the buyer-up in relation to the handicraftsmen.” (p 492)
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