From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its
historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate
transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-laborers, and therefore a 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 agricultural,
manufacturing, or 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: the
peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he
handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling 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 co-operation,
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 a system
of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive
bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree
universal mediocrity". 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. Its
annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of
production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many
into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the
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
the 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 meanly odious. 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. [1]
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 immanent 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 co-operative 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 integument. Thus integument 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 re-establish private
property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the
acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation 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. [2]
Footnotes
1.
“Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait nouvelle de la societé... nous
tendons a séparer toute espèce de propriété d’avec toute espèce de
travail.” [We are in a situation which is entirely new
for society ... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every
kind of labour] (Sismondi: “Nouveaux Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t.II,
p.434.)
2.
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 grave-diggers. 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. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der
Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.
Transcribed by Zodiac
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