From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through
capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more capital. But the
accumulation of capital pre-supposes surplus-value; surplus-value pre-supposes
capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence
of considerable masses of capital and of labour-power in the hands of producers
of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious
circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation
(previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an
accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its
starting point.
This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as
original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the
human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an
anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one,
the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy
rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of
theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat
his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin
reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never
mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the
latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this
original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its
labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that
increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid
childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g.,
had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the
French people, once so spirituel. But as soon as the question of
property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of
the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development.
In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,
briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy,
the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and “labour” were from all
time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted.
As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but
idyllic.
In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of
production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this
transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that
centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must
come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means
of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values
they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free
labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of
labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form
part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen,
&c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of
peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means
of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for
commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The
capitalist system pre-supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all
property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as
capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this
separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process,
therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than
the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of
production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of
subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate
producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore,
is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the
means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic
stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.
The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic
structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements
of the former.
The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person
after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf,
or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour-power, who carries his
commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the
regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the
impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which
changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their
emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side
alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new
freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all
their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded
by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is
written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.
The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only
to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the
possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social
power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship
and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid
on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man.
The chevaliers d’industrie, however, only succeeded in supplanting the
chevaliers of the sword by making use of events of which they themselves were
wholly innocent. They have risen by means as vile as those by which the Roman
freedman once on a time made himself the master of his patronus.
The starting-point of the development that gave rise to the wage-labourer as
well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. The advance
consisted in a change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal
exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To understand its march, we need not
go back very far. Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist
production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns
of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century. Wherever
it appears, the abolition of serfdom has been long effected, and the highest
development of the middle ages, the existence of sovereign towns, has been long
on the wane.
In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making
that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all,
those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their
means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on
the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the
peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this
expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs
through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different
periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic
form. [1]
Footnotes
1.
In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest, the dissolution of
serfdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that
country before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His
emancipation at once transformed him into a free proletarian, who, moreover,
found his master ready waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed
down as legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the world-market,
about the end of the 15th century, annihilated Northern Italy’s commercial
supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The labourers of the
towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave an impulse, never
before seen, to the petite culture, carried on in the form of
gardening.
Transcribed by Zodiac
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
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