 Y first thing that comes to mind about that statement is just how panicked the bourgeois are that they feel that they have to defend their own system, a system that they said won out after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also tells us something else. It's interesting when a representative of the ruling class actually talks about their own system, its historical role and its origin. One thing that I found, and perhaps you've found the same, is if you ever had the opportunity to look into what bourgeois historians what kind of bourgeois politicians say and theoreticians say about capitalism, how it evolved and its role in society. It's particularly interesting and the emphasis they always put is on freedom and liberty. Free trade. Free enterprise. Free markets. The famous neoliberal thinker, if you can call him that, Milton Freedman wrote a book called Capitalism and Freedom making a link to economic freedom a mae'r llwyddon economi gweithio'r llwyddon yn cael digwyddol i ddweud y llwyddon faf yma. Ond y gallu ei wneud yn ei pryd yn oedd gweithio'r llwyddon yn y syniadol fawr ffaith iawn yn y gwrthwyng yn ystod o'r llwyddon yn cymryd a'r llwyddon iawn yn cael digwyddol. Ond mae'n cael ei ddweud i'r cwestiynau yn y gallu cyfodol yma o'r hyn sydd, yn y cwestiynau'r llwyddon ymlaen o'r hynny, sy'n gweithio'r llwyddon, rwy'n gweithio'r llwyddon, ..soeddech chi'r cyllidau o hynny o yr Y Llyfrgell! Cyddech chi'n gyrfa cefnod ar gyfer Yuval Noah Harari... ..en allan yn ymweson nhw ymddwn ni wedi'i'r cyfitalism yma... ..eg er fydd yma sy'n ymweson y gallu adwsffydd mewn 1776. Yn yw iddiad ych chi'n ddiddigoch chi'n rhan o'ch ddynnu i fyf i hyncalledog, ..haith bod nhw'n addedi'n ddemi i byddwch ar symwylo'n ychydig... ..waith yma, ynddrill yn digwydd yng nghyd wrthie! Felly, y cyfnod lleolwyddu ymddangos ar y cyfnod ymddangos, y cyfnod gweld ymddangos, ac y byddwch chi'n gwybod i ddysgu'r ysgrifennu yn ymddangos. A rydych chi'n meddwl hynny i'r gilydd ysgrifennu, y dyfodill, y ddechrau, ac ychydig y byddwch chi'n gilydd eich newydd ar gyfer y prosparol. that's a very common idea that's linked to the origin of capitalism that really when the history the real history of capitalism is rarely talked about what's usually talked about is enterprising merchants who had this great idea of buying low and selling high making money making more money employing other people giving them money and everybody gets rich off it and the the main thing that I want to consider is first of all what exactly is capital gan ni'n siwr y Swyth simplified ta'r bobl mewn newid, ac yn reother rad콕, â',an fawr y ddechwashwedd. I dd sequences about le'r ythmeddyd yr ysgrif vo'r le. Ny voted outro yn arweinydd leuaeth mawr sy'n fawrLO surfin a meddybed y cycor fel ei bod hynny. Mae'r ysgrifennu mewn nodd pan gallwch gorffeu ond e'ch fel sy'n contracts beatiu'r bladion a fe bod yn fawrход cyfle yn y rhodd come i. Plant yn wyll ragu areg a'r bobl maadors i ni Time for the Capitalist and the Marks. Y capitalist is a relation between two polar opposites. One being the concentration of the means of production as private wealth, epitomised as money, but not exclusively estate by money and on the other hand free labour. So free capital, in other words free capital, Felly, llw'r sprwp cofnwyswt i'n gallu ei bod yn ei perifodol yn cael ei ddes, ac mae'r llwyddon wneud yn broses, ac roedd yn molygu hwnnw, yw'r llwyddon fod yn eu beth sydd yn bwysig. Mae'n ddes ond rydych chi'n llawer oiaeth mwy oherwydd y cyd- 저hold aes yn bwysig ar gyfer allan gweld. Felly, o ran, mae'r llwyddon mwy oherwydd. A llwyddon mewn llwyddon fwy oherwydd o cerddol ar gyfer llwyddon, ac mae'r fwy oherwydd yn bwysig ar gyfer llwyddon, Mae'n cyntaf i gynnal komal, rwy'n cyllid yndych. Mae'n rwy'n cyllid ym ddwy i saf yn y llwy dafodol bwrdd yn nhw'n cael y pethau yma, ez gyrtaeth o rhannod. Yr ynchod o'r ffrwng yw'r sleif yw'r ym mwyaf, mewn unrhyw ymddiadau, ac yn fwy o'r gyrtaeth masarfa maesarfa. mae'n byw'r gyrtaeth o'r rhannod. Pryddo'r hynny yn ôl cefnol o'r mewn, ..a meddwl â'r rhan o Romans yw slaw. Y Sirf yw ymdeithasodd ymddir i'r llyfr oedd. Felly rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r lleol yw yma i'r lleol... ..daw ymddir i'r llyfr o farn... ..yna fyddwch ymddir yw'r cyd-bryd ymddi... ..o'r llygio ychydig a'r llygio... ..yna'r llygio i'r llygio... ..on y pethau o'r llygio... ..dych chi'n meddwl i'r llygio... ..arian i ni i gyd... oedd yn gwybod ynghylch, roedd ymlaen i gael ychydig, ddyn nhw'n gweithio'r ddwylyg. Mae'n gwybod ychydig oedd yn ymlaen, dyn nhw'n gwybod ymlaen, ddyn nhw'n gwybod ymlaen, ddyn nhw'n gwybod ymlaen, ddyn nhw'n gwybod eich ddwyliadau. Mae'n gwybod ymlaen i'ch glwm hynny, dda wedi cyflogi, i ddoch chi eich ddwylai, i ddoch chi'n gyflogi'n cyflogi. maen nhw'r ffordd am ffraeg sy'n fawr oedd y cygeoniddau hyn yn ffordd i drefnu defnyddio yma, ymarried, ac mae hwn i'r ffordd am gwaith mwylaid, mae'r ffordd eich enghreifft yn llymau. Ym hyn oes i'w ffordd yn ffordd, yn y cyffredin iawn. Nawr hefyd yw mae'i cyffredin sy'n fforddd i ddechrau i gael ar bonesi ac mae'u sgwrs yn hynny oherwydd rydw i'ch i'w ei erbyn i'r ffaenwy. Wrth gwrs, mae'r ffordd yn cael eu sydd y mae'r meddwl yn ysgwrdd, felly mae'n olyg datblygu i ddiwylaethu ar y syll Thanos cyfryngwyr i'u gwir balancingau. Mae'n olyg, ac mae mae'n olygu i ddim yn unig o'r unig o arfer gweithlu. Y pressedur wrth y ffordd ei ddim yn ffeydd. Yw'r gwbeithio'r ffyrdd yn ei dda'r hyn, ac mae'r gwbeithio'r ydyn nhw eu cyfrifiadau ond mae'n ddiddordeb cyfaint ac mae'n rhaid i'r ffordd hyn ac mae'r gwir ffyrdd yn maith. Ydyn nhw'r ydyn nhw'n ysgrifennid. Mae'n ysgrifennid ar y pwyr, y ddiforcing y�ydiad o'r pandeir iawn, yr adrodd yn bwysig, oherwydd mae'r ardalau ar y gynhyrchu. Mae Mark yw'r hwn ystod, y hwn ystod y bydd ychydig o'r cysylltu yn ysgolio'w mangylchol o'r lluniau a'r ffordd. Mae'r hwn ystod o'r hwn ystod yn ystod o'r hystyried. Yn ymddangos iddyn nhw i fynd While we approach the kind of the liberation of the worker by capitalism and it is an expression from by Hegel Actually which says it's not so much from slavery but through slavery that mankind is freed and in this sense in the case of the origin of capitalism I think that this is doubly striking because what we see in the history of capitalism which I am about to run through admittedly in quite a potted way but hopefully i chi'n bywyd cymdeithasol mewn gweithio'r trwydd, yna y canonoedd gwybodaeth unig i'r wahanol i'r ddod merthyn llwygraf ysgol i'r biwydl amser ffjodsion i wneud y gallu llwygraf. Ond, dwi'n ôl i'r llyfrfyn, i'r llyfrfyn i therwcio llyfrfaol, ac yn ddiddos i'r llyfrfyn ychydig yn deillad yn gallu'n gwbl i'r llyfrfyn o'r byd o'r mwyaf o bobl yn ymdweithiol a hwnnw, ac o'r slawm yn ymddiol, oedd yma'r hollwch arall yn y cyllid hynny. Rydych chi'n dweud o amser i'r cyfnodau hefyd, ac sy'n golygu ei ddechrau i gael eu cyfnodau. Felly, ryn ni'n ddetrwch i'w ddechrau'n ddysgu'n hyfforddius. Yn hyfforddius y llun, byddwn ni'n gwybod o'r 40 munud, rwy'n mynd i'n cael ei wneud i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddechrau'n gwybod, a'i wedi gweld i'n gwneud y ddweud o'r dysgu. Rwy'n gweithio'n ddweud yn y proses ar gyfer yng Nghylch yn yng nghylch o'r 13 ysgwyr yma. Felly, mae'r dysgu yng Nghylch yn tio ei ddweud. yw'r gynllun yn cael cael cael argynwethaeth ei wneud i dweud yn y ddweud y cyfrifoladell yn gyfathes o'r enghreifedd y cyfrifoladell yn y sylwg. Yn gweithio'r cyfrifoladell ar ynglyn, ac mae'n gweld i'r cyfrifoladell yma, mae yna'r ystod o'i'r gweithio'r cyfrifoladell yn cyfrifoladell, ac mae'n hoffa fwy rhai ffyrdd ffyrdd o'r funud. A yna, mae'r ffaithiau i'r cyfrifoladell yma yn y proses, mae'r cyfrifoladell yn cael arno'i dynyn, Rydych chi'n gム am y Roiorydd Bwrddise i'r Rywyngor yn Ffrancaf, fel y Facebook, rwyf ni'n gwybod anghof gwangmod combineir ar yr Ysgrifianyd rhaid i'n wneud fewn yr Ysgrifiand, ac i'r Rhaid Ifr Orthoedd yn Ffrancaf, rhowch gweithio arall, y Gweithbrydau Llywodraeth, y Rhaid Ysgrifiand ysgrifiand, a i gweithio ar� am y rhaid i wneud am y chymde i ddechrau, sydd adegwyd i'r bobi cyffrifiad byddiaeth Rywodraeth gyda'r cyfnwysbeth o'r un genon. Mae'n ei wneud, ac yn Ynglŷn, ymgylch yw'r cyfnod yn gyfnod ac yn ymgylch yn ei ffordd yma, a'r cyfnod yma yma, ac yn y cyfnod ar y cyfnod arall. Wrath ydych chi ddweud ymdilynedd yn ymgylch yn Ynglŷ o'r cyfnod, ond, yw'n ddweud ymgylch yn y cyfnod ymgylch yn y cyfnod yma a'r ddiweddol yn y cydweud i gyfnod yn y cyfnod, ac y fawr yw'r dyfodol yw'r market ar y cyfnodd yw'r cyfnod yn y ddechrau'r Llanxig Slaidol yn ymweld yn ymddi'r cyd-dweithio. Yn ymddych chi'n dweud o'r llwgau ymddydd ar y cyfnodd a'r Llyfr. Mae'r llwgau'r llwgau ymddydd yn ymddir i'r llwgau'r llwgau'r llwgau'r llwgau. Fy fydd ystod yn ymddi'r llwgau ymddydd r diffodol ymddydd mewn hyd feminism. Elhr codef pas cyfnoddниna. stands o fudol eisted innocniadu a dr credits y da sydd washedau pleirio. Felly iawn maen nhw dy'n neill i'r llywydd diwrnain a amser i'r dyfodol i ddiffodol yw ateb o dispute. E RPM sydd wedi werth Mary. shaftio medaf marle. gymaint o'r hyn y byddwyr, am oed yn Gymru gydag hwnnw, ond, wrth i am fathod yn ystod fiddol, mae byddo i'r godiadau y mae'n gwaith o ddegwydrachol. Felly mae'r ddweud ffwrdd y ddweud ffwrdd. A mae'r ddweud y bod yn cyfwyd yn cyfwyd ddegwydrachol, fe yna ffwrdd i dderbyn o'r dweud. Mae'n ddech chi'n ddweud o ffwrdd i ddegwydrachol. Ond y gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddegwydrachol Chynau Sorfunys Gwerthioedd mewn yng Nghymru o'r ffordd yn dda i'r lleidion i ddweud y ffordd, fe ddweud a cymdeithasio ddechrau â'i'r bulwyrau am lŵr. Bydd y nifer. Exiliadwch, mae'n ddweud y ffordd yn ddweud a'r ddim am y bydd yr ydydd y bwyd, mae'r ffordd yn y ddweud o'i'r lluio ar yr oed, yn gallu bwyd yn ei ddweud? Mae左, mae'n ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud. Mae'n ddweud i ddweud i ddweud? Ieithaeth y分alu y modd arall wedi dwy gynnwys. Ond ydy, ar heta sydd am ymhylch gwrs, yma'r gweithio gwrdd, ac mae'r hyn ac mae'r swain yn fydd yn y dda iawn ar y bydd. Mae'n bryd eisiau, e wedi gwneud, buddalaeth ein bwrdd a ni'n bryd agor, mae'n bryd eisiau, mae'r cyflwyaf ar y gweithiau ac y bydd yn eu hans. Mae'r cyflwyaf sy'n cyflwyaf a'r cyflwyaf â'r cyflwyaf ond mae'r cyflwyaf ystyried a'r gwasanaeth yn ei fyf yn fydd ac landau i fydd. was effectively a form of slavery. The word surf is actually French of the Time. I mean the same thing, and really it was slavery attached to the land and attached to the Lord. Even Pope Innocent the Third, who I remember correctly was kicking about in the 13th century, described it as as an extreme condition of bondage. And even the Pope was taking notice of it it must have been pretty awful. People make a mistake when they talk about feudalism they think it's a completely static state of affairs yn fawr i ddweud, a gynedd y llifion o'rmerchynu benchyn yn oes iawn i'r mwyloedd arall. Yn hynny'n gwybod, mae gennyn nhw'n fawr yn dynonau yn gweithio o'r ffordd. Byddai'r ddwylyg yn gweithio'r ysgolwysus, ac mae'n ddiweddau'r llyfrgyntau, oedd yma'n gwneud hynny'n meddwl i'r cysylltu i'r wneud ei wneud yn ymgylched. A y cwnghwlet wedi ddim yn gweithio'r ffórm fel y cwnghwlet yw y gwaith yw'r ffawr. Mae'r bobl yn cael ei ddweud y byd yn rhan o'r cyd-dweithgau, eich cyd-dweithgau, oherwydd fawr yn ni'n gwybod. Ond mae'n ffordd o'r enghreifft ar gyfer y gyflawn yr ysgol, ond mae'r cyrchoddau fel y Llywodraethau i gael ar y Llywodraethau, a'r cyd-dweithgau i'r gwell yn Llywodraethau, yn Llywodraethau i Gweithio, Mae'r peisant er mwynhau'r cyfan o'r freimsaeth. If he managed to escape to one of the few towns, like London for example, and live there for a year and a day, he would be granted freedom. The Lord could no longer come and take him by force. If he's caught between that time, before that time, sorry, he could be physically taken and dragged back to the land to work, similar to a slave and a scape slave. That obviously was quite an attractive proposition for many serfs, although it's not as easy as it sounds. ac mae'r proses yw'r cyflwyno'r ffaith. Yr hyn mae'r cyfrwsau yn ystafell o'r effeithio. Rwy'n credu, ac yn y cwysig o'r England, Richard the Lionheart, Richard I, sy'n ffansiwch i'r cyfrwsau, mae'n mynd i'r cyfrwsau arall o'r ffordd o'r gwrsau, ac rwy'n rhaid i siaradau cyfrwsau arall o'r cyfrwsau, byddai'n cael eu cyfrwsau. Rwy'n credu i'r cyfrwsau a'r cyfrwsau, a'r cyfrwsau a'r cyfrwsau i'r cyfrwsau i ddau cyfrwsau a'r cyfrwsau. A'r cyfrwsau o'r first-bawsio. Yn y bwysig o'r cyfrwsau, mae'n cyfrwsau arall o'r ysgrifau. A'r cyfrwsau o'r cyfrwsau sy'n dda'r maen nhw'n cynrychi'r cyfrwsau o'r 18 o'r 19 yma. Felly, we're really talking about glorified villages at this point, but within these villages you start to have a new form of organisation, a more new form of social organisation. The towns were organised almost like a kind of bourgeois trade union, if that's not a contradiction in terms, that they had certain obligations towards each other. They took the form of guilds eventually. You had all sorts of guilds, you had merchants guilds, you then had guilds for various craftsmen. You also had guilds for journeymen who were the kind of lower level of the guild artisans effectively. You tended to be exploited by the masters, and actually the one guild that tended to be cracked down on those was the journeyman's guild, because they effectively saw it as a primordial trade union. And so with the origin of this bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie doesn't suddenly announce itself as the revolutionary class and start waging war on the feudal aristocracy. In reality, for pretty much the entirety of the life of feudalism, the real class struggle is going on between the peasants and the lords. Marx himself even says that actually the rise of the bourgeoisie, he says this in capital volume one, the rise of the bourgeoisie was in essence the bourgeois taking advantage of victories won by other people effectively on their behalf. And we can see this as early as Magna Carta. Magna Carta is not a bourgeois constitutional document. Magna Carta is a load of landowning barons, military nobles, dictating to the king how they want him to behave. The king at that time was primus into parties, first among equals. Really he was a lord himself that was invested with this special power, but it didn't stretch all that far. So they're telling him this is how things are going to be. But if you look into Magna Carta there's one clause that doesn't really help the feudal aristocracy very much and that's a tax exemption for merchants in the city of London. So first of all from that we can see that there was the presence of merchants in the city of London, but also that their interests temporarily in this case coincided with the feudal aristocracy in limiting the powers of the arbitrary monarchy. Later on in absolutism, which I'll come to, we see a bit of a reversal of that trend. But having to skip on a little bit, basically by another incident that accelerates this process a great deal is the black death actually. And one interesting and kind of contradictory aspect to the black death is despite the fact it devastated more than a third of the European population perhaps even more and it hit England as hard as many other places. That actually accelerated the decline of feudalism rather than putting a stop on any further development. It shows that history is never static actually, it's always moving in one direction or another. The incidental factors can often be really the expression of an underlying necessity as Hegel and Marxist have often said. One effect that it had was there was a shortage of labour as you can probably imagine. And what that meant was that kind of temporary wage labourers, and again these wage labourers are not workers in the modern sense, they often had their own lands and what they do is it was seasonal labour, they worked their own lands and in their own free time if you can call it that, they go and work on someone else's land for a wage. They were able to dictate very high wages, it also lessened the power of the lords meaning that more serfs were able to escape into the towns. And so this had two effects really talking in general. One was that by really the end of the 14th century serfdom no longer exists in England. That's not the case everywhere on earth, it's certainly not the case in places like France for example, but in England serfdom was dead by the end of the 14th century. One other thing that kind of sounded the death knell of serfdom was the peasants' revolt, very famous peasants' revolt in 1381. And one of the key demands of that revolt was the end of serfdom. But in reality what they were doing was they were landing the death blow to a form of exploitation that had already dwindled to a minority of the population. I might mention that at the time of the doomsday book in the 1080s people who had categorised as serfs by Norman lawyers constituted about 75% of the English population. By the end of the 14th century, by the peasants' revolt, we're talking much, much less, really a small minority of the population. And one other interesting factor in this, so we have the liberation of the peasantry, one by their own struggle as well as other outside factors by the end of the 14th century. But you also have the state cracking down increasingly on these free workers. Again, these are more like peasants who are doing wage work. But it's in this era that you have English kings passing laws setting the working day at a certain length of time because they thought that workers were too lazy. And they also have legislation fixing a maximum wage. That's something interesting. It's kind of the antithesis of what we see today. The rather than having to set a minimum wage in an attempt to kind of modify the class struggle and protect workers, we see a maximum wage being set because they thought that workers' bargaining power was too strong basically due to the shortage of labour. This is the kind of, when we think of neoliberal philosophers talking about the need to avoid state intervention, they didn't take into account the enormous amounts of state intervention needed to even create capitalism in the first place. Although we're not quite talking about capitalism at this point, this is really the precursor to it. Later, in the 15th century, we have the Wars of the Roses, which are epoch-making in the sense that really it was the neutral exhaustion of the remaining kind of feudal aristocracy. They basically fought themselves to a standstill. And what arose, of course, was the beginnings of absolutism in England with Henry Tudor and the Tudor monarchy. Now, what's interesting about that is not just that it came off the back of really the defeat of the lords. They'd lost, if you like, their social basis. The power of the lords really came from the serfs, the labour of the serfs. Just as the modern Baws rod, just as the power of Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, sorry, comes from his exploitation of thousands upon thousands of workers. Once they lost that, and they were basically just taking Wren, and basically had a few bans of retainers, basically like a mafia organisation really, they extinguished themselves and exhausted themselves with a number of fratricidal wars with the Wars of the Roses being a great example of that, and left the field open for effectively another wing of their own class to come to power. But what has the bourgeoisie got to do with this? It just so happens that Henry Tudor took a lot of money from the city of London in particular, Golsmiths, the city of London. In fact, he rarely called a parliament Henry VII, and the main reason for that is he didn't need to call... The main reason for calling a parliament in feudal times was to get money to raise taxes, for example. He didn't feel the need to do that because he tended to just take loans from the city of London. What we effectively had was an alliance with the rising absolutist monarchy against the kind of remaining wing, the reactionary wing, if you like, of the feudal aristocracy. Again, this shows the kind of intermediary role, if you like, of the bourgeoisie at this time. By the beginning of the Tudor period, what we have is the vast majority of the population are relatively free property-owning peasants, small land-owning peasants. You then have a bourgeoisie concentrated in the cities. Remember that the word bourgeoisie literally just means city dweller. These were not made up of top-hat-wearing factory owners, they were made up of merchants, artisans, lawyers, and then what remains really of the feudal aristocracy. That, on its own, does not create capitalism. One of the development which spurred this on, and is going on parallel but also interlinked with this development, is the origin of the world market, which I'll talk about now. Trade and the production exchange of commodities is something that has been present to one extent or another throughout the history of civilisation, as I mentioned earlier. What we see from the so-called medieval boom onwards, and arguably even earlier really, is increased connections between the west, the barbarian Europe, and the east, particularly with the unification of the ancient east, or what was the ancient east, by the Arab empire. We start to see more interaction and commerce between these two wings of the Mediterranean. That's where we see the rise of things like Venice, for example. Huge, important trading city in the Middle Ages, and through that we also see the rise of the Hanseatic League, see these German city-states based again on trading, linking the Baltic with the Mediterranean, very important trade route, and this also has an effect on sleepy old England, that it raises demand for wool. Places like Ghent in Flanders were big wool manufacturing centres, and it just so happened that England had almost a monopoly really on wool production. That's one of the reasons, incidentally, you might have known, I don't know if you know this, but in the English Parliament in the House of Commons, the speaker sits on a sack of wool, on a pile of wool. That's kind of establishing the importance, really, of the wool trade to British capitalism from its earliest ever inklings, really. They understood where they came from. And what effect did this have, was first of all with, and if you go to the session on money and bitcoin, you'll learn a bit more about this, with the increased need and the increased preponderance of commodity production and exchange, you have an increasing need for a means, a circulating medium, a medium of exchange, that is money, a universal commodity. So with that, the demand for money and precious metals increases, and also the general demand for products such as wool increase. Now one effect, one way that the feudal lords, and again these are not capitalists, these are feudal lords, or what's left of them, is that they defended themselves against the liberation of the peasants, because the ruling class is never just going to say, okay, fair is fair, you beat me fair and square. One way that they managed to get around this problem is by turfing peasants off their land, encroaching more and more onto common land, and turning what was arable land, in other words growing wheat for example, into pasture land for sheep to produce more wool to then sell in a raw form to the merchants in Ghent. And this started a process which would eventually snowball into what Marx called the robbery of the people, and the enclosures and the clearings. But I'm going to come on to that later. First I want to talk a bit more about the world market. What we have by the 15th century is a very well established mini world market, if you like, concentrated around the Mediterranean, where many of the business practices that constitute capitalism today, things like double entry accounts, things like companies, the beginnings kind of the primordial form of joint stock companies have already been created in places like Italy, also like places like Egypt interestingly. And obviously you probably already know, in 1492, Columbus discovered America. And before that Vasco de Gama also set sail on his famous voyages. What is the context behind this? It's put forward as basically a big accident. Really the growth of capitalist Europe was the result of one bloke who landed in Cuba, wasn't it the first time, or Hispaniola, and thought it was India. It wasn't, but it didn't matter because he became extremely wealthy anyway. America, sorry, Europe suddenly rocketed up. There's an element of that because the wealth that was sucked out of the new world produced, it gave the fuel to the flames of developing what would become capitalism in Europe. The context of this, why did this happen? There's an element of accident here, but let's not forget that Columbus wasn't Spanish, he was Italian, and he went around the various courts of Europe asking someone to sponsor his journey. Travelling the Atlantic was extremely costly, pretty difficult, and so it required a rich person to basically give it backing. The Portuguese monarch, who I can't remember, became a footnote in history I suppose, maybe they should have taken a different decision, decided it was too risky, not worth the outlay, because of course if the ship goes down it's nothing back. The Spanish monarch decided to have a punt on this, this chance, effectively. One of the reasons for this was that in the intervening centuries, the rising commodity production exchange and also the increasing penetration of the money economy into the European economy had increased the amount of dependence, well, on various sections of society, but particularly the monarchy on money lending and basically the commodity economy. The Spanish monarchy was already heavily in debt and saw this as an opportunity to really break the trade blockade represented by the Ottomans in the East before trade with the East was carried over land, so many European nations were desperate to find some kind of Western route to be able to break that. In other words, what they were expressing was the developing market, the developing market economy, the pressure of all of this basically social force was pushing them in the direction of the West. A charming description of how this isn't actually Columbus, but Pizarro's men, when they landed in Incoland, this is what one of the locals described them as. He said, they lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys with expressions of joy as if it put new life into them and lit their hearts, as if it were certainly something for which they yearn with great thirst, their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine. What was the way in which they sought this gold and silver? First, on Hispaniola, going back to Columbus, he forced the local inhabitants, who were called Arawaks, to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so would have their hands chopped off or hunted down and killed. From 1494 to foot 1508, a fellow called Bartolome de las Casas, at the time, a witness to these events, he wrote, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? My self writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it. It is unbelievable and yet, living in capitalism today, maybe not so unbelievable. Bear in mind that bourgeois, when this is raised, when the crimes of the Spanish and others in America are raised, they often say, oh that was before, that was kind of a feudal monarchy, that's not our fault. But at the beginning of the 20th century, the Belgian monarch, Leopold II, did exactly the same thing in the Congo. He chopped off people's hands, he executed people for not doing enough. When it wasn't gold, it was rubber. What was the reason for that? Rubber isn't quite as glamorous as gold. It shows that it's not something specific to gold as a commodity that makes it so desirable. It was actually an expression of the value being produced in this market economy. In reality, these monkeys, these murderers, these thieves were the personification of the power of this developing market. That's not absolving them of guilt of course, but I think it offers an explanation to the devastating effects of this world market as it's spread. It reminds me of what the poet Virgil said, that no wickedness is beyond a man whom that accursed goldlust drives. He wasn't to know that later on under Leopold II it would also constitute rubberlust, but it still has exactly the same effect socially. I want to bring in a quote from Marx here because I think it epitomises really the situation. He says it's a very famous one from Capital. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation enslavement and entombment in minds 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 signolised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief mementa of primitive accumulation. It wasn't just in the Americas, it wasn't just in Africa, and I'll mention the transatlantic slave trade a bit later as well. The Dutch in the East Indies used exactly the same means. In Indonesia, they hired people who were literally called man-stealers to get, well, you can probably gather what they were employed to do. And then they would sell those slaves on the market. Now, what's going on? Why did chapel slaves become such a sought-after commodity? What you tend to do with a slave is put them to work. And at that time, the rising commodity economy and the money economy demanded increased production. We're seeing the origins, really, of the capitalist economy coming into being, and it demanded constant production. However, at that time, there was no working class, and I'm going to come on to the creation of the working class, which is another sordid tale. It required a working class, it didn't exist. So what do you do in the meantime? You purchase commodified labour in another form, or you take it by force, of course. And this creates an insatiable demand for this human labour. That's why when the Europeans first arrive on the coast of Western Africa and places like the Kingdom of the Congo, they would have no chance whatsoever of conquering these kingdoms. In fact, they didn't even attempt it. What they started doing was they established trade posts. Again, in India, the Portuguese arrived in India, did not conquer India. They did do some charming things like massacre the entire mobs of the population of Goa because they didn't let them in in the first place. But in terms of conquering the entire subcontinent, it wasn't even on the agenda. They wouldn't have been able to do it. The trade posts, and then those trade posts, if you like, became an opening into this power of the world market. Again, thinking about it dialectically, it's almost like the relationship between the part and the whole. It's like one corner of the world being opened up to the entirety of the world's commodity production and wealth. And the power of that is capable of breaking down all, well, Marx refers to it in the Communist Manifesto, breaking down all Chinese walls. And of course, with the opium walls, which admittedly came much later, the Brits did. So I've mentioned, it must be also mentioned that in this period of the developing world market, we not only have the global enslavement of much of the world's population, really, but also in the 16th century some of the institutions of British capitalism come into being. The London Stock Exchange is founded in 1571, under a feudal monarchy, obviously. Also the first ever national bank in the world, the Bank of England was founded on December 31, 1600, by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I. Again, not by a bourgeois republic or some kind of bourgeois constitutional monarchy, by the absolutist monarchy. And the significance of this shows, first of all, that the merchant bourgeoisie is becoming increasingly powerful. It also shows the relationship between that class and the state, which is what I'm going to come on to a little bit later. But I mentioned earlier that Labour was required, in a sense, a working class was required. People didn't necessarily think of it in those terms, but a working class was required. How do you create a working class? Again, when people today, and maybe you've encountered this in seminars, when people today raise the question of wage slavery and exploitation, a response I've heard is that this fictitious idea that really a bourgeoisie is someone with a bit more money who offers it to someone else and they go, yeah, I'll work for you. But let's not forget that in the past, hundreds of years ago, people tended to work the land. And if they didn't work the land, they tended to work with their own means of production, in their own workshop, for example, in their own tools if they're a travelling craftsman. They had their own way of working and producing their own living. The idea of going and being completely dependent on someone else was completely alien. Actually, it wasn't a very good idea because of the instability of that existence. What you had to do is force people to do it. Now, I mentioned earlier the encroachment onto common land of the feudal aristocracy. This developed at a much more rapid pace, partly because the discovery of all this gold alongside this rising commodity economy increased prices. And you had an inflation crisis actually in Tudor England at one point. Now, one effect of that is it made the kind of production of commodities on the land much more profitable and much more sought after. And so we have an increasing rate, these enclosures of common lands, and the turfing out of people who lived on those lands in order to turn them into sheetwalks. We actually have an eyewitness, Thomas Moore himself, who famously wrote the book Utopia, his Utopia, he himself says, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, leave no ground for tillers. They enclose all into pastures. They throw down houses. They pluck down towns and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep house. In essence, there was a revolution going on in the countryside. The first revolution that gave birth to capitalism in England was not the English Civil War, which was a revolution. It wasn't the Industrial Revolution. That was really the fruit of all these changes. It was the agrarian revolution in the countryside. And sadly, it wasn't a revolution that took kind of nice democratic form, the kind of revolutions that had freed the peasantry had already taken place. It was a revolution waged by landowners, a mixture of I suppose what you might call capitalist farmers at this time, speculators who come into good times and bought land off the waning feudal aristocracy and feudal landlords themselves, forcibly making people homeless to turn their homes into wool-producing sheep walks. What happened to these people? These people were literally left to wander the countryside, like the Jews in the desert in the Bible. They were basically persona non grata, surplus to requirements. Actually people at the time even talked about overpopulation, which again I find very interesting considering the crisis of overpopulation that the bourgeois talk about today, when people like Emmanuel Macron talk about African mothers having too many babies. It's the same problem. But what was happening, the social problem that was created by this was so great that the state, the absolute state actually had to step in. One of the things it did was first of all, Henry VIII actually forbade the destruction of houses of husbandry, so like farmsteads over 20 acres. It tried to put a check on this development because think of the social chaos, migratory population just wandering around the countryside was causing. The state had a bit of an issue with that. But the main way the state dealt with it is as follows. In 1530 an act was passed in which homeless vagabonds, that's basically these people, these families have been served off the land, they were to be whipped and imprisoned well that's in the case of sturdy vagabonds and on a second offence they'd be whipped again and half their ear would be cut off. If they were caught a third time they'd be killed and executed as a criminal. In 1547 that was modified. If anyone refused to work, so if any vagabond captured and told you have to go work X he was to be condemned as a slave to the person who denounced him as an idler. If he missed work for more than two weeks he's to be made a slave for life and branded with an S on the forehead. If he runs away three times so in fairness they do give him three chances he's to be executed as a felon. He can be sold by his master so he's a chattel slave at this point. His children are to be taken away and made into apprentices until the age of 24 for boys and 20 for girls. If they run away they are to become slaves of their masters. These slaves and actually these slaves still existed up until the 19th century. It was banned in the 19th century but they still continue to live and they were known as roundsmen. First of all this is very interesting that at this same time when manufacturing is starting to develop in the earliest forms you could be considered able to work as early as the age of about 9 or 10 if you're an apprenticeship until the age of 24. It shows that the definition of what is and isn't a child is always determined really by the interest of the ruling class. Mark talks about that a lot in capital but I don't have time to go into that. Also 7200, actually Hume said that it was 72000 but other sources have said that maybe that's too big. It is absolutely enormous but let's say at least 7200 people were executed as thieves during the reign of Henry VII. I compared that to today. That would be more than the total prison population of England today being executed for the crime of thievery. You can see what kind of social problem was developing here. Similar laws were also passed in Holland and France so this isn't a unique development. Another development that I want to talk about is the Reformation. The Reformation is pretty unique to England so this isn't the determining force that created capitalism but again similar to things like the Black Death similar to the accidental discovery of the Americas it's another huge shot in the arm for the English bourgeoisie. The reason for that is because the church was one of the most powerful wings of the feudal ruling class. It was one of the biggest landowners in the world probably, certainly in Europe. The expropriation of those lands by the state and then those lands being sold on at knockdown prices to speculators to merchant farmers and to royal favourites and other feudal aristocrats created the agrarian capitalism which characterised England or helped spur on the development of that capitalism which characterised England in this era. Again, it reminds me of neoliberal governments selling off things like the post office at a knockdown price to speculators to make as much money as possible and with this widespread in other words you have more and more property being concentrated and alienated and alienable in other words land is no longer tied to personal relationships between vassals it is sold on a market that land is then let out for money rents to people and of course the person you want to let your land to is the person who is going to pay the best rent. In this context people like John Locke start talking about improvement if you have read the theories of John Locke you can see the influence of the discovery of the Americas and of developing capitalist agriculture on his ideas he talks about his labour theory of value is that everything I mix my labour with is mine by rights and what he counts as labour if I've improved it and what he meant by improvement was basically making it more profitable making it more productive we can see the logic of capitalism behind this he also said interestingly not just labour that he did but labour that his servants in quotation marks did counts as his labour this is basically an early expression of the capitalist attitude towards agriculture and in answer to poor prism one very early pioneer I guess you'd have to call him in the court of King James I put forward the idea Elizabeth I introduced the poor rate in other words trying to modify trying to change the situation by giving out charity effectively well this pioneering and surprising bourgeois in James's court in the parliament suggested they create what he called prisons where the parish could force people who refused to work there and receive food those would eventually become work houses receiving the development of the work house and the purpose of the work house was not so much to force people to work it was to force people into being proletarians one thing that we have to understand is simply kicking people off their land does not immediately make them prepared to work in the early days seven days a week for about 12 hours a day even 14 hours a day for someone else that has to be hammered into them and marks actually makes the point that under capitalism in his day and certainly in our day capitalist exploitation presents itself as a worker like a natural law so often and I've seen Marxist historians talk about this and there is an element of truth in it they say capitalism is based solely on economic coercion in other words fear of starvation makes the worker work he doesn't have to be forced into work whereas all previous forms of society were based on non economic coercion but what we have to understand with the development of capitalism that economic solely economic coercion comes about only after centuries of literally forcing and enslaving people to teach them to hammer them into the shape of proletarians this took the form of stealing stealing their children to make them apprentices until the age of 20 years old where they can be confined into the early manufacturers incidentally the first manufacturer was founded in Norwich in the 16th century later factories founded in the 18th century these people were thrown into the factories in order to raise a generation of workers this class had to be created forged if you like in the fires of exploitation and I've already gone on longer than I wanted but there are a couple of important points that I wanted to raise before I finish this actually raises a very interesting question about the nature of the state I've talked a lot about absolutism when people talk about the bourgeois state they don't tend to think of an absolutist feudal monarchy and it's not the ideal form of a bourgeois state the ideal bourgeois state is some form of constitutional either republic or monarchy but a bourgeois liberal democracy it allows for basically the most efficient form of bourgeois rule so what was the role of absolutism? and to understand this we need to go back to the classics really Engels describes, he explains that the origin of the state comes from the splitting up of society into classes these classes with conflicting economic interests so they don't consume themselves in society into fruitless struggle it becomes necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of order and this power risen out of society to make itself more and more from it is the state Marx on Bonapartism in his 18th Brumair explains that in certain periods where the class struggle is at its highest pitch the state can actually gain an element of autonomy and actually raise itself above the class struggle in order to impose order seemingly from without I'd say we see this under absolutism that's not to say that absolutism is Bonapartism they're different phenomena but what we do see in the period that I've just described is a period in which you have a powerful but waning feudal class a large but diffuse peasantry with its own class interests although the extent to which peasantry is a class is another question and of course the bourgeoisies start to assert their interests that is a very chaotic cocktail of class interests and what we see in the absolutist monarchy is a section of the ruling class basically lifting itself up and sometimes leaning on the bourgeois to strike blows against its feudal risels sometimes leaning on the feudal aristocracy to strike blows against the bourgeoisies less often in England's case but sometimes leaning on the peasantry to strike blows against both for example I mentioned that the absolutist monarchy actually limited, it limited the number of looms you could have in a workshop it limited the number of farms that could be destroyed ultimately it was powerless against this developing economic tide but the overall effect of absolutism this kind of mutual subjugation of all classes to the state actually gave the bourgeoisie the developing bourgeoisie what it needed in order to develop it did this abroad as well as at home so at home it gave them a certain amount of protection abroad the developing policy of protection and of securing markets by force either by shooting down for example Dutch ships, competitors or going into previously uncolonised territories and forcing them under the English flag this was a great way of securing markets and as well as resources for developing manufacture in this period you really see kind of maybe in the womb being fed and the absolutist state is almost like the mother feeding it through all this relentless kind of exploitation and slavery and colonialism so this baby can finally emerge from the womb and that's where the kind of political and social bourgeois revolutions came from we're dialecticians, we don't believe that one form of state is permanently sufficient for any form of class rule the absolutist monarchy was absolutely necessary I would say for the development of the bourgeoisie in England for example and other places in France, especially France in some ways but it eventually turns into a fetter it becomes a block actually and the absolutist monarchy and its own interests start constantly knocking against the developing bourgeoisie at a certain point when the bourgeois are strong enough they are able to overthrow it but they do so using the power of the rest of the so-called nation for example the power of the peasantry in the case of the French Revolution there would have been no successful French Revolution without the intervention of the peasants again as Mark says taking advantage of the victories of other classes you might say they put themselves at the head of the nation in order to secure their own benefit does that mean just because based on what I'm saying that means that development predates the bourgeois revolutions in England, France and so on does that mean that bourgeois revolutions are almost like an extravagance that they weren't necessary and that all was necessary was the absolutist monarchy to reform itself out of existence far from it I'd recommend people go to the talk of the English Revolution to find out more I've already gone over time so I can't go into detail but what I'll say is after after this revolution takes place even though monarchy was restored in England and the revolution that the bourgeois celebrate is called the Glorious Revolution in 1688 which was actually just a coup replacing one monarch with a Dutch adventurer by the name of William of Orange what happens after is enclosure acts enclosures and encrogements on common land had actually been illegal previously they were just happening without the state being passed by parliament the clearing of entire populations like the Scottish clearings later on becomes an act of the state itself the lands expropriated from the royalists again, like the church lands were sold off at a knockdown rate it was like giving an immense injection finally the bourgeois find themselves in the saddle even if they're not in the palace it doesn't really matter in parliament and in the country they have control of the state and having taken control of the state first they modify the form of the state is not the same in 1688 as it is in 1911 for example there's a number of modifications for example extending the franchise and so on they modify the state to their own interests and they use it as a weapon to yes conquer the world but also conquer British society for their own exploitation there's much much more that could be said about that one thing I'd mention one other thing I'd mention about the role of the state is I mention all these enclosures let's see if I can find a statistic without running over too long I better can't now between 1801 and 1831 so obviously the bourgeoisia fully in control at this point 3.5 million acres of common land were enclosed by parliament that's the latter stages of enclosure the golden age of enclosure was in the 18th century I'm afraid I can't tell you how much think of all the people who were expropriated kicked off their own land and reduced to homelessness this is the age of prosperity by the way of course now at similar time in 1853 no in 1833 the British government abolished slavery which is nice and decided to make up for its crimes it would compensate the slave owners by a princely sum of 20 million pounds it paid 3,000 families 20 million pounds which in today's money is 16.5 billion and it constituted 40% of the treasury at that time they didn't think to compensate the peasants that they'd just thrown off the land we can see the role of class and class struggle in the state here that in reality it was a struggle of the slave owners against the people of the world that was the British state at that time and so what does that answer conclude because I'm well Dan would be kicking me under the chair if I was close enough to him what does this tell us A about capitalism but also about B how to overthrow it first of all we see in the development of capitalism that first it comes yes from a struggle against the kind of the natural economy and the bondage of feudalism it does come from a struggle for liberation but it was out of really the bitter fruits of that struggle for liberation was itself the enslavement of the world on an even higher level on an even greater scale than ever before that the freedom of capital is necessarily the slavery whether that be the wage slavery or the chattel slavery of the masses of the earth but that shows us a pattern actually of this constant clash between if you like capital and labour of freedom for capital freedom for labour gives us the opportunity to abolish and annihilate slavery the world over for good unfortunately the peasants that fought in the peasants' revolt due to the period they were in the development of the productive forces they could not have created the kind of peasant communism that some of them dreamt for unfortunately the levelers in the English Civil War unfortunately were not able to do it we can do it because of the productive forces unleashed by this development of capitalism that's the only way what Theresa May said is remotely correct that the only progressive aspects of capitalism is the concentration of the means of production which formerly had been scattered throughout the countryside in the villages could not be used to produce wealth for the whole of humanity on a necessary scale they've been concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires effectively a few monopolies and I want to finish on a quote from Marx I always like to finish on Marx because he's pretty good and he says he tends to say things better than me so again from Capital Volume 1 the transformation of scattered private property arising from individual labour into capitalist private property is naturally a process incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property already practically resting on socialised production into socialised property in the former case we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers in the latter we had the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people that is our cause, that is our fight let's finish it, thank you