From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry.
Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital
The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population, intermittent
but renewed again and again, supplied, as we saw, the town industries with a
mass of proletarians entirely connected with the corporate guilds and unfettered
by them; a fortunate circumstance that makes old A. Anderson (not to be
confounded with James Anderson), in his “History of Commerce,” believe in
the direct intervention of Providence. We must still pause a moment on this
element of primitive accumulation. The thinning-out of the independent,
self-supporting peasants not only brought about the crowding together of the
industrial proletariat, in the way that Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the
condensation of cosmical matter at one place, by its rarefaction at another. [1]
In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth as
much or more produce, after as before, because the revolution in the conditions
of landed property was accompanied by improved methods of culture, greater
co-operation, concentration of the means of production, &c., and because not
only were the agricultural wage-laborers put on the strain more intensely [2],
but the field of production on which they worked for themselves became more and
more contracted. With the setting free of a part of the agricultural population,
therefore, their former means of nourishment were also set free. They were now
transformed into material elements of variable capital. The peasant,
expropriated and cast adrift, must buy their value in the form of wages, from
his new master, the industrial capitalist. that which holds good of the means of
subsistence holds with the raw materials of industry dependent upon home
agriculture. They were transformed into an element of constant capital. Suppose,
e.g., a part of the Westphalian peasants, who, at the time of Frederick
II, all span flax, forcibly expropriated and hunted from the soil; and the other
part that remained, turned into day-laborers of large farmers. At the same time
arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in which the men
“set free” now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as before. Not a fibre
of it is changed, but a new social soul has popped into its body. It forms now a
part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer. Formerly divided among
a number of small producers, who cultivated it themselves and with their
families spun it in retail fashion, it is now concentrated in the hand of one
capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for him. The extra labor
expended in flax-spinning realized itself formerly in extra income to numerous
peasant families, or maybe, in Frederick II’s time, in taxes pour le roi de
Prusse. It realizes itself now in profit for a few capitalists.
the spindles and looms, formerly scattered over the face of the country, are now
crowded together in a few great labor-barracks, together with the laborers and
the raw material. And spindles, looms, raw material, are now transformed from
means of independent existence for the spinners and weavers, into means for
commanding them and sucking out of them unpaid labor. [3]
One does not perceive, when looking at the large manufactories and the large
farms, that they have originated from the throwing into one of many small
centres of production, and have been built up by the expropriation of many small
independent producers. Nevertheless, the popular intuition was not at fault. In
the time of Mirabeau, the lion of the Revolution, the great manufactories were
still called manufactures reunies, workshops thrown into one, as we speak of
field thrown into one. Says Mirabeau:
“We are only paying attention to the grand manufactories, in
which hundreds of men work under a director and which are commonly called manufactures
réunies. Those where a very large number of laborers work, each separately
and on his own account, are hardly considered; they are placed at an infinite
distance from the others. This is a great error, as the latter alone make a
really important object of national prosperity.... The large workshop
(manufacture réunie) will enrich prodigiously one or two entrepreneurs, but the
laborers will only be journeymen, paid more or less, and will not have any share
in the success of the undertaking. In the discrete workshop (manufacture separée),
on the contrary, no one will become rich, but many laborers will be comfortable;
the saving and the industrious will be able to amass a little capital, to put by
a little for a birth of a child, for an illness, for themselves or their
belongings. The number of saving and industrious laborers will increase, because
they will see in good conduct, in activity, a means of essentially bettering
their condition, and not of obtaining a small rise in wages that can never be of
any importance of the future, and whose sole result is to place men in the
position to live a little better, but only from day to day....
The large workshops, undertakings of certain private persons who pay laborers
from day to day to work for their gain, may be able to put these private
individuals at their ease, but they will never be an object worth the attention
of governments. Discrete workshops, for the most part combined with cultivation
of small holdings, are the only free ones.” [4]
The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only
set free for industrial capital, the laborers, their means of subsistence, and
material for labor; it also created the home-market.
In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage-laborers,
and their means of subsistence and of labor into material elements of capital,
created, at the same time, a home-market for the latter. Formerly, the peasant
family produced the means of subsistence and the raw materials, which they
themselves, for the most part, consumed. These raw materials and means of
subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer sells them, he finds
his market in manufactures. Yarn, inen, coarse woollen stuffs
— things whose raw materials had been within the reach of every peasant
family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use — were now transformed
into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts at once served for
markets. The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans until now had found
in the numerous small producers working on their own account, concentrate
themselves now into one great market provided for by industrial capital. [5]
Thus, hand in hand with the expropriation of the self-supporting peasants, with
their separation from their means of production, goes the destruction of rural
domestic industry, the process of separation between manufacture and
agriculture. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the
internal market of country that extension and consistence which the capitalist
mode of production requires. Still the manufacturing period, properly so called,
does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely.
It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers but
partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts
of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate
basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain
points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs them for the
preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore, a new
class of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of the soil as an
accessary calling, find their chief occupation in industrial
labor, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or through
the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the chief, cause of a
phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student of english history.[6]
From the last third of the 15th century he finds continually complaints, only
interrupted at certain intervals, about the encroachment of capitalist farming
in the country districts, and the progressive destruction of the peasantry. On
the other hand, he always finds this peasantry turning up again, although in
diminished number, and always under worse conditions. The chief reason is:
England is at one time chiefly a cultivator of corn, at another chiefly a
breeder of cattle, in alternate periods, and with these the extent, supplies, in
machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic agriculture, expropriates radically
the enormous majority of the agricultural population, and completes the
separation between agriculture and rural domestic industry, whose roots —
spinning and weaving — it tears up. [7]
It therefore also, for the first tie, conquers for industrial capital the entire
home-market. [8]
Footnotes
1.
In his “Notions de Philosophie Naturelle.” Paris, 1838.
2.
A point that Sir James Steuart emphasizes.
3.
“Je permettrai,” says the capitalist, “que vous ayez l’honneur de me
servir, à condition que vous me donnez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que
je prends de vous commander.” [I will allow you ... to
have the honour of serving me, on condition that, in return for the pains I take
in commanding you, you give me the little that remains to you] (J. J.
Rousseau: “Discours sur l’Economie Politique.”)
4.
Mirabeau, l.c., t.III, pp.20-109 passim. That Mirabeau considers the separate
workshops more economical and productive than the “combined,” and sees in
the latter merely artificial exotics under government cultivation, is explained
by the position at that time of a great part of the continental manufactures.
5.
“Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into yearly clothing of a
laborer’s family by its own industry in the intervals of other works — this
makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to the factory, thence to the
broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have great commercial operations, and
nominal capital engaged to the amount of twenty times its value.... The
working-class is thus emersed to support a wretched factory population, a
parastical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious commercial, monetary, and
financial system.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.120.)
6.
Cromwell’s time forms an exception. So long as the Republic lasted, the mass
of the English people of all grades rose from the degradation into which they
had sunk under the Tudors.
7.
Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen industry has sprung, with the
introduction of machinery, from manufacture proper and from the destruction of
rural and domestic industries.
“The plough, the yoke, were
‘the invention of gods, and the occupation of heroes’; are the loom, the
spindle, the distaff, of less noble parentage. You sever the distaff and the
plough, the spindle and the yoke, and you get factories and poor-houses, credit
and panics, two hostile nations, agriculture and commercial.” (David Urquhart,
l.c., p.122.)
But now comes Carey, and cries out upon England, surely
not with unreason, that it is trying to turn every other country into a mere
agricultural nation, whose manufacturer is to be England. He pretends that in
this way Turkey has been ruined, because “the owners and occupants of land
have never been permitted by England to strengthen themselves by the formation
of that natural alliance between the plough and the loom, the hammer and the
harrow.” (“The Slave Trade,” p.125.) According to him, Urquhart himself is
one of the chief agents in the ruin of Turkey, where he had made Free-trade
propaganda in the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great
Russophile by the way, wants to prevent the process of separation by that very
system of protection which accelerates it.
8.
Philanthropic English economists, like Mill, Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett,
&c., and liberal manufacturers like John Bright & Co., ask the English
landed proprietors, as God asked Cain after Abel, Where are our thousands of
freeholders gone? But where do you come from, then? From the
destruction of those freeholders. Why don’t you ask further, where are the
independent weavers, spinners, and artisans gone?
Transcribed by Zodiac
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
|
