From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
The genesis of the industrial [1]
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-labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and (by
gradually extending exploitation of wage-labour 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 15th 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 era of the
capitalist mode of production, are considered as capital quand même — [all
the same] usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital.
“At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the
possession of the capitalist ... he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer
his wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed
the largest, and a continually augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour
for himself. The capitalist may now be said 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 effected by the taking of interest on capital
... and it is not a little curious that all the law-givers of Europe endeavoured
to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes against usury.... The power of the
capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a complete change in the right
of property, and
by what law, or series of laws, was it effected?” [2]
The author 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 organisation. [3]
These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the
expropriation and partial eviction of the country population. The new
manufactures 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.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines 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, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of
primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European
nations, with the globe for a theatre. 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, &c.
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
mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on
brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power
of the State, the concentrated and organised 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 itself an economic
power.
Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of
Christianity, says:
“The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called
Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every 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.” [4]
The history of the colonial administration of Holland — and Holland was the
head capitalistic nation of the 17th century —
“is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery,
bribery, massacre, and meanness” [5]
Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get
slaves for Java. The men stealers 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 Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official
report says:
“This one town of Macassar, e.g., 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 £21,875, the price of his treason.
Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a
province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000.
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 employés of the company. The
monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines
of wealth. The employés themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the
unhappy Hindus. The Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His
favourites 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 without 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 Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000,
and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the contract declared that after all
he realised an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid before
Parliament, the Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 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. [6]
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 £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured
red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after
Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following
prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a
male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women
and children £50. Some decades later, 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
red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as
“means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”
The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation. The
“societies Monopolia” of Luther were powerful levers for concentration of
capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and,
through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The treasures
captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated
back to the mother-country and were there 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 south-east and north-west of Europe. Its fisheries,
marine, manufactures, surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of
the Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put
together.” Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were
more over-worked, poorer and
more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.
To-day 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 rôle that
the colonial system plays at that time. It was “the strange God” who perched
himself on the altar cheek 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 stamp 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.
[7] Hence, as a necessary
consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more
deeply it is in debt. 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.
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 annuitants thus created, and
from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government
and the nation-as also apart from the tax-farmers, 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 speculators, 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. Hence 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 8%; 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 hoard of the country, and the
centre 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, &c., is proved by the writings of that
time, e.g., by Bolingbroke’s. [8]
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 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had
ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main
lines of business, therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous
amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same thing is
going on to-day between England and the United States. A great deal of capital,
which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was
yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.
As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue, which must
cover the yearly payments for interest, &c., the modern system of taxation
was the necessary complement of the system of national loans. The loans enable
the government to meet extraordinary expenses,
without the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as. a
consequence, increased taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused
by the accumulation of debts contracted one after another, compels the
government always to have recourse to new loans for new 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. Over-taxation is not an incident, but rather a
principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the
great patriot, DeWitt, has in his “Maxims” extolled it as the best system
for making the wage-labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and overburdened
with labour. The destructive influence that it exercises on the condition of the
wage-labourer concerns us less however, here, than the forcible expropriation,
resulting from it, of peasants, artisans, 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 capitalisation 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 labourers, of capitalising 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
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, e.g., England did.
with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the continent of Europe, after
Colbert’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 to seek the cause of the manufacturing glory of
Saxony before the war? 180,000,000 of debts contracted by the sovereigns!” [9]
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars,
&c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically
during the infancy of Modem 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. Blasé as Sir F. M. Eden is as to the
horrors of the expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil, from
the last third of the 15th 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 pasture land” — 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 labour-power. He
says:
“It may, perhaps, be worthy the attention of the public to
consider, whether any manufacture, 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; will add to the sum of
individual or national felicity?” [10]
“In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more
particularly in Lancashire,” says Fielden, “the newly-invented machinery was
used in large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the
water-wheel. Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote
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 very 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 7 to the age of 13 or 14 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], cruelties the
most heart-rending were practised 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 labour ... 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,
Nottinghamshire 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 whetted the appetite that it should
have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse to an expedient
that seemed to secure to 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 quilted, and in their turn again, the night-set
getting into the beds that the day-set quilted 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 capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the naïve Annals of
Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of
English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the
Spaniards by the Asiento 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 “respectability” is the Pindar of
the slave-trade which — compare the work of Aikin [1795] already quoted —
“has coincided with that spirit of bold adventure which has characterised 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 manufactures of the country” (p. 339). Liverpool employed
in the slave-trade, in 1730, 15 ships; in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96;
and in 1792, 132.[12]
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.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the
capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between
labourers and conditions of labour, 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-labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that
artificial product of modern society. [13]
If money, According to Augier, [14]
“comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital
comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. [15]
Footnotes
1.
Industrial here in contradistinction to agricultural. In the “categoric”
sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist as much as the manufacturer.
2.
“The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted.” Lond., 1832, pp.
98-99. Author of the anonymous work: “Th. Hodgskin.”
3.
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. Aikin, l. c.)
4.
William Howitt: “Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the
Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies.” London,
1838, p. 9. On the treatment of the slaves there is a good compilation in
Charles Comte, “Traité de la Législation.” 3me éd. Bruxelles, 1837. This
subject one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself
and of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after
its own image.
5.
Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut-Gov. of that island: “The History of
Java,” Lond., 1817.
6.
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.
7.
William Cobbett remarks that in England all public institutions are designated
“royal;” as compensation for this, however, there is the “national”
debt.
8.
“Si les Tartares inondaient l’Europe aujourd’hui, il faudrait bien des
affaires pour leur faire entendre ce que c’est qu’un financier parmi nous.”
[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 des lois,” t. iv., p. 33, ed. Londres, 1769.
9.
Mirabeau, l. c., t. vi., p. 101.
10.
Eden, l. c., Vol. I., Book II., Ch. 1., p. 421.
11.
John Fielden, l. c., pp. 5, 6. On the earlier infamies of the factory system,
cf. Dr. Aikin (I 795), l. c., p. 219. and Gisbome: “Enquiry into the Duties of
Men,” 1795 Vol. II. When the steam-engine transplanted the factories from the
country waterfalls to the middle of towns, the “abstemious” surplus-value
maker found the child-material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek
slaves from the workhouses. When Sir R. Peel (father of the “minister of
plausibility"), brought in his bill for the protection of children, in
1815, Francis Homer, lumen of the Billion Committee and intimate friend of
Ricardo, said in the House of Commons: “It is notorious, that with a
bankrupt’s effects, a gang, if he might use the word, of these children had
been put up to sale, and were advertised publicly as part of the property. A
most atrocious instance had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench two
years before, in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London
to one manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some
benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible had
come to his knowledge while on a [Parliamentary] Committee ... that not many
years ago, an agreement had been made between a London parish and a Lancashire
manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every 20 sound children one
idiot should be taken.”
12.
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 Brougham:
“An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers.” Edin. 1803,
vol. II., p. 74.)
13.
The phrase, “labouring poor,” is found in English legislation from the
moment when the class of wage-labourers becomes noticeable. This term is used in
opposition, on the one hand, to the “idle poor,” beggars, etc., on the other
to those labourers, who, pigeons not yet plucked, are still possessors of their
own means of labour. From the Statute Book it passed into Political Economy, and
was handed down by Culpeper, J. Child, etc., to Adam Smith and Eden. After this,
one can judge of the good faith of the “execrable political cant-monger,”
Edmund Burke, when he called the expression, “labouring poor,” —
“execrable political cant.” This sycophant who, in the pay of the English
oligarchy, played the romantic laudator 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 are the
laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke, l. c., pp. 31, 32.)
No wonder that, true to the laws of God and of 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 Rev. Mr. Tucker. Tucker was a parson
and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent political
economist. In face of the infamous cowardice of character that reigns to-day,
and believes most devoutly in “the laws of commerce,” it is our bounden duty
again and again to brand the Burkes, who only differ from their successors in
one thing — talent.
14.
Marie Angier: “Du Crédit Public.” Paris, 1842.
15.
“Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer 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
formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A
certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain
will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make
it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., 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, l. c., pp. 35, 36.)
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