 CHAPTER XIII. THE GENESIS OF THE INDUSTRIAL CAPITALIST The genesis of the industrial capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer. Doubtless many small-guild masters, and yet more independent small artisans, or even wage laborers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and by gradually extending exploitation of wage labor and corresponding accumulation into full-blown capitalists. In the infancy of capitalist production things often happened, as in the infancy of medieval towns, where the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which servant, was in great part decided by the earlier or later date of their flight. The snail's pace of this method corresponded in no wise with the commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century created. But the Middle Ages had handed down two distinct forms of capital, which mature in the most different economic social formations, and which before the end of the capitalist mode of production are all considered as capital commem, all the same, usurpers capital and merchants capital. Industrial here in contradistinction to agricultural. In the categoric sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist as much as the manufacturer. At present all the wealth of society goes first into possession of the capitalist. He pays the landowner his rent, the laborer his wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, and keeps the large, indeed the largest, and a continually augmenting share of the annual produce of labor for himself. The capitalist may now be set to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no law has conferred on him the right to this property. This change has been affected by the taking of interest on capital, and it is not a little curious that all the law givers of Europe endeavour to prevent this by statutes, vis, statutes against usury. The power of the capitalist all over the wealth of the country is a complete change in the right of property, and by what law or series of laws was it affected? End quote. Footnote. The natural and artificial rights of property contrasted, London 1832, pages 98 through 99, author of the anonymous work, Theodore Hodgkin, end note. The authors should have remembered that revolutions are not made by laws. The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild organization. These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufacturers were established at weapons, or at inland points, beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds, hence in England an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries. Footnote. Even as late as 1794, the small cloth makers of Leeds sent a deputation to parliament with a petition for a law to forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. Dr. Akin first see, end note. 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, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moment of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations with the globe for a theater. 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 moan of taxation and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, for example the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized 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 in itself an economic power. Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howatt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says, the barbarians and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race throughout every region of the world, and not upon people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame in any age of the earth. Footnote. William Howatt, colonization and Christianity, a popular history of the treatment of the natives by the Europeans in all their colonies. London, 1838, page nine. On the treatment of the slaves, there is a good compilation in Charles Comte, Tritie de la Registration, Troisième Edition, Bruxelles, 1837. This subject one must study in detail to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the laborer, wherever it can without restraint, model the world after its own image. End note. The history of the colonial administration of Holland, and Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the seventeenth century, is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness. Footnote. Thomas Stamford Raffles, late lieutenant governor of that island, the history of Java, London, 1817. End note. Everything is more characteristic than their system of stealing men to get slaves for Java. The men's dealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller were the chief agents in this trade, native princes, the chief sellers. The young people stolen were thrown into the secret dungeons of the celebs until they were ready for sending to the slave ships. An official report says this one town of Macassar, for example, is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families. 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 twenty-one thousand eight hundred seventy-five pounds, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjewangi, a province of Java in 1750, numbered over eighty thousand inhabitants. In 1811, only eighteen thousand. 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. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employees of the country. The monopolies of salt, opium, bettle, and other commodities were inexhaustible minds of wealth. The employees themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The governor general took part in this private traffic. His favorites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day. Primitive accumulation went on with the advance of a shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a part of India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Ben for forty thousand pounds. Ben sold it the same day for sixty thousand pounds. And the ultimate purchaser who carried out the contract declared that after all he realized an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid before parliament, the company and its employees from 1757 to 1766 got six million pounds 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. Footnote. In the year 1866 more than a million Hindus died of hunger in the province of Orissa alone. Nevertheless the attempt was made to enrich the Indian treasury by the price at which the necessaries of life were sold to the starving people. Endnote. 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 forty pounds on every Indian scalp and every captured red skin. In 1720 a premium of one hundred pounds on every scalp. In 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices. For a male scalp of twelve years and upwards, one hundred pounds, new currency, for a male prisoner one hundred and five pounds. For women and children prisoners fifty pounds. For scalps of women and children fifty pounds. The colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked by redskins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as means that God and nature has given into its hand. The colonial system ripened like a hot-house trade and navigation. The society's monopolia of Luther were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufacturers and threw monopoly of the market and increased accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder floated back to the mother country and were turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system in 1648, stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. It was in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce between the Southeast and Northwest of Europe. Its fisheries, marine, manufacturers surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic was probably more than all of the rest of Europe put together. Gulik forgets to add that by 1648 the people of Holland were more overworked, poorer, and were brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together. Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture properly so-called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant role that the colonial system plays at that time. It was the strange God who purged himself on the altar by jowl with the old gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus value, making as the sole end and aim of humanity. The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages, took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial system, with its maritime trade and commercial wars, served as a forcing house for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state, whether despotic, constitutional, or republican, marked with its stamped the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence as a necessary consequence the modern doctrine that nation becomes the richer the more deeply indebted is. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven. William Cobbett remarks that in England all public institutions are designated royal. As compensation for this, however, there is the national debt. The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy and mutants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation, as also apart from the taxpayers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital, fallen from heaven, the national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage in a word to stock exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy. At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private spectators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to the state. Since the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stock of these banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began with lending its money to the government at eight percent. At the same time it was empowered by parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again to the public in the form of banknotes. It was allowed to use these notes for discounting bills, making advances on commodities, and for buying the precious metals. It was not long ere this credit money, made by the bank itself, became the coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to the state, and paid, on account of the state, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back more with the other. It remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal creditor of the nation down to the last shilling advanced. Gradually it became inevitably the receptacle of the metallic horde of the country, and the center of gravity of all commercial credit. What effect was produced on their contemporaries by the sudden uprising of this brood of bankocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, stock-jobbers, etc., is proved by the writings of that time, e.g., by bowling-brokes. If the Tartars were to flood into Europe today, it would be a difficult job to make them understand what a financier is with us. Montesquieu, Esprit de Lois, page 33, edition London, 1769. With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital wealth of Holland, to whom Venice, in her decadence, lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Dutch manufacturers were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701 to 1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival, England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday in England, the capitalized blood of children. As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue, which must cover the yearly payments for interest, the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national loans. The loans enabled the government to meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence, increased taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulations of debts contracted one after another compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for extraordinary expenses. Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of subsistence, thereby increasing their price, thus contains within itself the germ of automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an accident, but rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot, David, has in his maxims extolled it as the best system for making the wage laborer submissive, frugal, industrious, and overburdened with labor. The destructive influence that it exercises on the condition of the wage laborer concerns us less, however, here, than the forcible expropriation resulting from it of peasants, and in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not two opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy is still further heightened by the system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts. The great part that the public debt and the fiscal system corresponding with it has played in the capitalization of wealth and the expropriation of the masses has led many writers, like Cobbett, Doubleday, and others, to seek in this incorrectly the fundamental cause of the misery of the modern peoples. The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of expropriating independent laborers, of capitalizing the national means of production and subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of production. The European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention, and once entered into the service of the surplus value makers, did not merely lay under the contribution in the pursuit of this purpose, their own people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through export premiums. They also forcibly rooted out in their dependent countries, all industry, as, for example, England did with the Irish woolen manufacturer. On the continent of Europe, after Cobbett's example, the process was much simplified. The primitive industrial capital here came in part directly out of the state treasury. Why, cries Mirabeau, why go so far as to seek the cause of the manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? One hundred and eighty million of debts contracted by the sovereigns. Footnote. Mirabeau, page 101, end note. Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc. These children of the true manufacturing period increased gigantically during the infancy of modern industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the Royal Navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press gang. Blase, as Sir F. M. Eden is, to the horrors of the expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil, from the last third of the fifteenth century to his own time, with all the self-satisfaction with which he rejoices in this process, essential for establishing capitalistic agriculture and the due proportion between arable and pastureland. He does not show, however, the same economic insight in respect to the necessity of child-stealing and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing exploitation into factory exploitation, and the establishment of the true relation between capital and labor power. He says, it may perhaps be worthy the attention of the public to consider whether any manufacturer, which in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children, that they should be employed by turns during the greater part of the night, and robbed of that rest which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young, and that numbers of both sexes of different ages and dispositions should be collected together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead to profligacy and debauchery. He will add to the sum of individual or national felicity. Eden I. C. Volume 1, Book 2, Chapter 1, Page 421. In the counties of Darbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particular in Lancashire, says Fielding, the newly invented machinery was used in large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the waterwheel. Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, built from towns, and Lancashire, in particular, being till then comparatively thinly populated and barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small and nimble fingers of little children, being by far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices from the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many many thousands of these little, hapless creatures were sent down into the north, being from the age of seven to the age of thirteen or fourteen years old. The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to feed and lodge them in an apprentice house near the factory. Overseers were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence. In many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong, Lancashire, the most heart-rending were practiced upon the unoffending and friendless creatures, who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers. They were harassed to the brink of death, by excess of labor, were flogged, fettered, and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty. They were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their work, and even in some instances were driven to commit suicide. The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottingham and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture and of many a murder. The profits of manufacturers were enormous, but this only wedded the appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse to an expedient that seemed to secure them those profits without any possibility of limit. They began the practice of what is termed night-working, that is, having tired one set of hands by working them throughout the day. They had another set ready to go on working throughout the night. The day set getting into the beds that the night set had just quitted, the night set getting into the beds that the day set quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in Lancashire that the beds never get cold. With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalist accumulation. Read, for example, the naive annals of commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English state craft that at the peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Aciento Treaty, the privilege of being allowed to ply the Negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 Negroes yearly. This threw at the same time an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. And even to the present day Liverpool, respectively, is the pinder of the slave trade which, compare the work of Achan, in 1795, already quoted, has coincided with that spirit of bold adventure which has characterized the trade of Liverpool, and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity, has occasioned vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand for the manufacturers of the country. Page 339. Liverpool employed in the slave trade in 1730 fifteen ships, in 1751-53, in 1760-74, in 1770-96, and in 1772-132. In 1790 there were in the English West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen for one, in the Dutch twenty-three for one, Henry Braham, an inquiry into the colonial policy of the European powers. Edinburgh, 1803, volume two, page 74. End note. Whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed for its pedestal slavery, pure and simple, in the new world. Antimolis Erat, to establish the eternal laws of nature of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between laborers and conditions of labor, to transform at one pole the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole the mass of the population into wage laborers, into free laboring poor, that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Agier, comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every poor with blood and dirt. Footnote. The phrase, laboring poor, is found in English legislation from the moment when the class of wage laborers becomes noticeable. This term is used in opposition, on the one hand, to the idle poor, beggars, et cetera, on the other to those laborers who pigeons, not yet plucked, are still possessors of their own means of labor. From the statute book it passed into political economy, and was handed down by Culpeper, J. Child, et cetera, to Adam Smith and Eden. After this one can judge of the good faith of the excruble political cantmonger Edmund Burke, when he called the expression, laboring poor, excruble political cant. This sycophant, who, in the pay of the English oligarchy, played the romantic, lauditor temporis acti against the French Revolution, just as in the pay of the North American colonies, at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy, was an out and out, vulgar bourgeois. The laws of commerce and the laws of nature, and therefore the laws of God, Edmund Burke, pages 31 and 32. No wonder that, true to the laws of God and nature, he always sold himself in the best market. A very good portrait of this Edmund Burke, during his liberal time, is to be found in the writings of the reverend Mr. Tucker. Tucker was a parson and a tory, but for the rest an honorable man and a competent political economist. In face of the infamous cowardice of character that reigns today, and believes most devoutly in the laws of commerce, it is our bound in duty again and again to brand the Berks, who only differ from their successors in one thing, talent. Footnote, Marie-Angier du Crédit Publique, Paris, 1842, end note. Footnote, capital is said by a quarterly review to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true, but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit or very small profit, just as nature was formally said to abhor a vacuum. With an adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain ten percent will insure its employment anywhere. Twenty percent certainly will produce eagerness, fifty percent positive audacity, one hundred percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws. Three hundred percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is here stated. T. J. Dunning, I. C. pages thirty-five and thirty-six, end note. End of part eight, chapter thirty-one. Chapter thirty-two of Capital volume one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume one, by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Eveling, and edited by Frederick Engels. Part eight, the so-called primitive accumulation. Chapter thirty-two, historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e. its historical genesis, resolve itself in two? Then so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage laborers, and therefore mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are laborers or not laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades that it at first sight presents correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agriculture or industrial manufacturing are both. Petty industry again is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself, peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production presupposes parceling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over and the productive application of the forces of nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with the system of production and the society moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecur rightly says, quote, to decree universal mediocrity, end of quote. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society. But the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated. It is annihilated. It's annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pygmy property of the many, into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor. This fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms a prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless vandalism. And under the stimulus of passions, the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most mean leodious, self-earned private property that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated independent laboring individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage labor. We are in a completely new condition of society. We tend to separate all kinds of properties with all kinds of labor. We are in a situation which is entirely new for society. We are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labor. Cizmandi, new principle of political economy, second volume, page 434, and the footnote one. As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the imminent laws of capitalistic production itself by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop on an ever-extending scale the cooperative form of the labor process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined socialized labor. The entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market and with this the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation. But with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist entanglement. Thus, entanglement is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds, the expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets with the inexorability of a law of nature its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era, i.e. on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property arising from individual labor 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 socialized production into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers. In the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people, footnote two. The advance of industry whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie replaces the isolation of the laborers due to competition by their revolutionary combination due to association. The development of modern industry therefore cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of modern industry. The proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are reactionary for they try to roll back the wheel of history. From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesta, Communistician Partei, London, 1848, Pages 9 and 11, End of Footnote 2, End of Chapter 32 of Capital Volume 1. Chapter 33 of Capital Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production. Volume 1 by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Eveling and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part 8, The So-called Primitive Accumulation. Chapter 33, The Modern Theory of Colonization. Chapter 33, The Modern Theory of Colonization. Footnote 1. We treat here of real colonies, virgin soils, colonized by free immigrants. The United States are, speaking economically, still only a colony of Europe. Besides, in this category belong such old plantations as those in which the abolition of slavery has completely altered the earlier conditions. End of Footnote 1. Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producer's own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others. It forgets that the latter, not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of political economy, the process of primitive accumulation is more or less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly conquered the whole domain of national production, or where economic conditions are less developed, it at least indirectly controls those strata of society, which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this radio-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre-capitalistic world. With all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It's otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who as owner of his own conditions of labor, employs that labor to enrich himself instead of the capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems manifests itself here practically in a struggle between them. Where the capitalist has at his back the power of the mother country, he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and appropriation based on the independent labor of the producer. The same interest which compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist in the mother country, to proclaim the theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production with its contrary, that same interest compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of the two modes of production. To this end he proves how the development of the social productive power of labor, cooperation, division of labor, use of machinery on a large scale, et cetera, are impossible without the expropriation of the laborers and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic armor crumbles off bit by bit like rotten touchwood. It's a great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered not anything new about the colonies, but to have discovered in the colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. Footnote two, Wakefield's few glimpses on the subject of modern colonization are fully anticipated by Mirable Pair, the physiocrat, and even much earlier by English economists, end of footnote two. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother country, so Wakefield's colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by acts of parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage workers in the colonies. Footnote three, later it became a temporary necessity in the international competitive struggle, but whatever its motive, the consequences remain the same. End of footnote three. This Wakefield calls systematic colonization. First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the colonies property and money means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative, the wage worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established by the instrumentality of things. Footnote four, quote, a negro is a negro. In certain circumstances, he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar. Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production. End of quote, Karl Marx, Lone Arbite and Capitale, Neuer Rheinische Zeitung, number 266, April 7th, 1849, end of footnote four. Mr. Peale, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of 50,000 pounds sterling. Mr. Peale had the foresight to bring with him besides 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, quote, Mr. Peale was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river. End of quote, footnote five, E.G. Wakefield, England and America, volume two, page 33, and the footnote five. Unhappy Mr. Peale, who provided for everything, except the export of English modes of production to Swan River. For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks. We know that the means of production and subsistence while they remain the property of the immediate producer are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the laborer. But this capitalist's soul of theirs is so intimately wedded in the head of the political economist to their material substance that he christened them capital under all circumstances even when they are its exact opposite. Thus it is with Wakefield. Further, the splitting up of the means of production into the individual property of many independent laborers working on their own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter is stuck on to pure monetary relations the label supplied by feudal law. If says Wakefield quote, if all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital, no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of laborers for hire end of quote, footnote six, location sided, page 17, end of footnote six. So long therefore as the laborer can accumulate for himself, and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production, capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production are impossible. The class of wage laborers essential to these is wanting. How then in old Europe was the expropriation of the laborer from his conditions of labor, i.e. the coexistence of capital and wage labor brought about by a social contract of a quite original kind quote. Mankind have adopted a simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital, end of quote, which of course since the time of Adam floated in their imagination, floated in their imagination as the soul and final end of their existence quote, they have divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labor. The division was the result of concert and combination. End of quote, footnote seven, location sided, volume one, page 18, end of footnote seven. In one word, the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honor of quote, the accumulation of capital, end of quote. Now one would think that this instinct of self denying fanaticism would give itself full fling especially in the colonies where alone exists the men in conditions that could turn a social contract from a dream to a reality. But why then should quote, systematic colonization, end quote, be called in to replace its opposite, spontaneous unregulated colonization, but quote, in the northern states of the American Union, it may be doubted whether so many as a 10th of the people would fall under the description of hired laborers. In England, the laboring class composed the bulk of the people, end of quote, footnote eight, location sided, pages 42, 43, 44, end of footnote eight. Nay, the impulse to self expropriation on the part of laboring humanity for the glory of capital exists so little that slavery according to Wakefield himself is the sole natural basis of colonial wealth. His systematic colonization is a mere pialet since he unfortunately has to do with free men, not with slaves. The first Spanish settlers in San Domingo did not obtain laborers from Spain. But without laborers, their capital must have perished, or at least must soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands. This has actually occurred in the last colony founded by England, the Swan River settlement, where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements and cattle has perished for want of laborers to use it and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands, end of quote, footnote nine, location sided, volume two, page five, end of footnote nine. We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this, that the bulk of the soil is still public property and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. Footnote 10, quote, land to be an element of colonization must not only be waste, but it must be public property liable to be converted into private property, end of quote, location sided, volume two, page 125, end of footnote 10. This is the secret, both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice, opposition to the establishment of capital, quote, where land is very cheap and all men are free, where everyone who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labor very dear as respects the laborer's share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labor at any price, end of quote, footnote 11, location sided, volume one, page 247, end of footnote 11. As in the colonies, a separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor and their root to soil does not exist or only sporadically or on too limited a scale. So neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Wens then is to come the internal market for capital, quote, no part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, accepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labor in particular works. Free Americans who cultivate the soil follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses and carry to market at whatever distance their produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers. They make soap and candles as well as in many cases shoes and clothes for their own use. In America, the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper. End of quote, footnote 12, location cited, pages 21 and 22, end of footnote 12. With such queer people as these, where is the quote field of abstinence? End of quote for the capitalists. The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this. That it not only constantly reproduces the wage worker as wage worker, but produces always in production to the accumulation of capital a relative surplus population of wage workers. Thus, the law of supply and demand of labor is kept in the right rut. The oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation. And lastly, the social dependence of the laborer on the capitalist that indispensable requisite is secured. An unmistakable relation of dependence which the smug political economist at home in the mother country can transmogrify into one a free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labor. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother country because many laborers enter this world as ready-made adults. And yet the labor market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labor falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital thirsting after exploitation and so-called abstinence. On the other, the regular reproduction of the wage laborer as wage laborer comes into collision with impediments, the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage laborers into independent producers who work for themselves instead of for capital and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry react in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labor market. Not only does a degree of exploitation of the wage laborer remain indecently low, the wage laborer loses into the bargain along with a relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstinence as capitalist. Hence, all the inconveniences that our E.G. Wakefield pictures so dotally, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage laborer, he complains, is neither constant nor regular nor sufficient. Quote, the supply of laborer is always not only small but uncertain. End of quote, footnote 13, location cited volume two, page 116, end of footnote 13. Quote, though the produce divided between the capitalist and the laborer be large, the laborer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist. Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth. End of quote, footnote 14, location cited volume one, page 131, end of footnote 14. The laborers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labor. It avails him nothing. He is so cunning as to import from Europe with his own capital, his own wage workers. They soon quote, cease to be laborers for hire. They become independent landowners, if not competitors, with their former masters in the labor market. End of quote, footnote 15, location cited volume two, page five, end of footnote 15. Think of the horror. The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe with his own good money, his own competitors. The end of the world has come. No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple Mary Vail, there is in the colonies, quote, the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient laborers for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms instead of being dictated to by them. In ancient civilized countries, the laborer though free is by a law of nature dependent on capitalists. In colonies, this dependence must be created by artificial means, end of quote, footnote 16. Mary Vail, location cited volume two, pages 235 to 314, pass him. Even the mild free trade vulgar economist Molinari says, quote, dans les colonies où l'esclavage a été abolie sans que le travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par une quantité équivalente de travail libre, on a vu s'opérer la contrepartie du fait que se réalise tous les jours sous nos yeux. On a vu les simples travailleurs exploiter à leur tour les entrepreneurs d'industrie exiger d'eux des salaires hors de toute proportion avec la part légitime qui leur revenait dans le produit. Les planteurs nous pouvant obtenir de leur sucre un prix suffisant pour couvrir la hausse de salaires ont été obligés de fournir l'excédent d'abord sur leur profit, ensuite sur leur capital même. Une foule de planteurs ont été ruinées de la sorte, d'autres ont fermé leurs ateliers pour échapper à une ruine imminente. Sans doute, il vaut mieux voir périr des accumulations de capitaux que des générations d'hommes in brackets, how generous, Mr. Molinari, end of brackets. Mais ne vaut-il pas mieux que ni les uns ni les autres périsses? End of quote, translation. In the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory labor being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labor, there's occurred the opposite of what happens every day before our eyes. Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the legitimate share in the product which they are to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar a force of fish and price to cover the increase in wages and were obliged to furnish the extra amount at first out of their profits and then out of their very capital. A considerable amount of planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid the ruin which threatened them. It is doubtless better that these accumulations of capital should be destroyed than that generations of men should perish. But would it not be better if both survived? End of quote, Molinari, location cited, pages 51, 52. Mr. Molinari, Mr. Molinari. What then becomes of the 10 commandments of Moses and the prophets of the law of supply and demand if in Europe the quote entrepreneur can cut down the laborer's legitimate part and in the West Indies the laborer can cut down the entrepreneurs? And what if you please is this so-called legitimate part which on your own showing the capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder in the colonies where the laborers are so quote simple unquote as to quote exploit unquote the capitalist, Mr. Molinari feels a strong itching to set the law of supply and demand that works elsewhere automatically on the right road by means of the police. End of footnote 16. What is now according to Wakefield the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A quote, Barberizing Tendency of Dispersion, end of quote, of producers and national wealth. Footnote 17, Wakefield location cited, volume 2, page 52, end of footnote 17. The parceling out of the means of production among innumerable owners working on their own account annihilates along with the centralization of capital all the foundation of combined labor. Every long-winded undertaking extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment for the working class constitutes its living appurtenance always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies, Wakefield tells an extremely doful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of so-called supernumerary laborers. Quote, our capital, says one of the characters in the melodrama, was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for the completion. But we could not begin such operations with labor which we knew would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retaining the labor of such immigrants, we should have been glad to have it engaged at once and for a high price. And we should have engaged it even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it. End of quote, footnote 18. Location cited pages 191 and 192. End of footnote 18. After Wakefield has contrasted the English capitalist agriculture and its so-called combined labor with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well to do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured. Wills quote, the English agricultural laborer is a miserable wretch, a pauper. In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labor employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the laborer? Undoubtedly, farm horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants. End of quote, footnote 19. Location cited, volume one, pages 47 and 246. End of footnote 19. But never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people. How then to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing at a blow to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land and turn himself into an independent peasant. Footnote 20. Quote. C'est ajouter vous grâce à l'appropriation du sol et des capitaux que l'homme qui n'a que ses bras trouve l'occupation et s'est fait un revenu. C'est au contraire, grâce à l'appropriation individuelle du sol qui se trouve des hommes n'ayant que leurs bras. Quand vous mettez un homme dans le vide, vous vous emparrez de l'atmosphère. Ainsi faites-vous quand vous vous emparrez du sol. C'est le maître dans le vide richesse pour ne la laisser vivre qu'à votre volonté. End of quote. Translation. It is you add a result of the appropriation of the soil and of capital that the man who has nothing but the strength of his arms finds employment and creates an income for himself, but the opposite is true. It is thanks to the individual appropriation of the soil that there exist men who only possess the strength of their arms. When you put a man in a vacuum, you rob him of the air. You do the same when you take away the soil from him, for you are putting him in a space void of wealth so as to leave him no way of living except according to your wishes. Collins, location cited, volume three, pages 268 to 71. Passam, end of footnote 20. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage workers. This fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand. The government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows, to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies and thus keep the wage labor market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of the so-called systematic colonization. By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, quote, the supply of labor must be constant and regular because first, as no laborer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant laborers working for time for wages and in combination would produce capital for the employment of more laborers. Secondly, because every laborer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would by purchasing land provide a fund for bringing fresh labor to the colony. End of quote, footnote 21. Wakefield location site at volume two, page 192, end of footnote 21. The price of the soil imposed by the state must of course be, quote, a sufficient price, end of quote, i.e. so high, quote, as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place. End of quote, footnote 22. Location site at page 45, end of footnote 22. This, quote, sufficient price for the land, end of quote, is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist, quote, capital end, quote, with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers. Then he must place at his own expense a locum tenants, a placeholder on the labor market, whom the government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist. It is very characteristic that the English government for years practiced this method of, quote, primitive accumulation, unquote, prescribed by Mr. Wakefield, expressly for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was of course as complete as that of Sir Robert Peel's bank act. The stream of immigration was only diverted from the English colonies to the United States. Meanwhile, the advance of capitalistic production in Europe, accompanied by increasing government pressure, has rendered Wakefield's recipe superfluous. On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men year after year driven upon America leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe, throwing men on the labor market there more rapidly than the wave of immigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, et cetera, in brief, the most rapid centralization of capital. The great republic has therefore ceased to be the promised land for immigrant laborers. 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. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the government so loudly denounced even by Wakefield has produced especially in Australia in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and with the competition that the importation of English commodities causes, even to the smallest artisan, an ample, quote, relative surplus laboring population, end quote, so that almost every male brings the Job's news of a, quote, glut of the Australia labor market, end of quote, and the prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly as in the London hay market, footnote 23. As soon as Australia became her own law giver, she passed, of course, laws favorable to the settlers, but the squandering of the land already accomplished by the English government stands in the way, quote, the first and main object at which the new land act of 1862 aims is to give increased facilities for the settlement of the people, end of quote, the land law of Victoria by the Honorable C.G. Duffy, minister of public lands, London, 1862, end of footnote 23. However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the political economy of the old world and proclaimed on the housetops that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation and therefore capitalist private property have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property in other words, the expropriation of the laborer. End of chapter 33 of capital volume one. End of capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume one by Karl Marx, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels.