From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation [1]
Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private
property, of which one rests on the producers’ 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 of 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 ready-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 is 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, manifest 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,
co-operation, division of labor, use of machinery on a large scale, &c., 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 is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not
anything new about the Colonies [2],
but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of
capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its
origin [3] 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. This he
calls “systematic colonization.”
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in 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. [4]
Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia,
means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had
the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working-class, men,
women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left
without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” [5]
Unhappy Mr. Peel 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 soul of
theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their
material substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even
when they are its exact opposite. Thus is it 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 stuck on to pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law.
“If,” says Wakefield, “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.” [6]
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 capitalistic 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
co-existence of capital and wage-labor, brought about? By a social contract of a
quite original kind. “Mankind have adopted a... simple contrivance for
promoting the accumulation of capital,” which, of course, since the time of
Adam, floated in their imagination, floated in their imagination as the sole and
final end of their existence: “they have divided themselves into owners of
capital and owners of labor.... The division was the result of concert and
combination.” [7] In one
word: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honor of the
“accumulation of capital.” Now, one would think that this instinct of
self-denying fanaticism would give itself full fling especially in the Colonies,
where alone exist the men and conditions that could turn a social contract from
a dream to a reality. But why, then, should “systematic colonization” be
called in to replace its opposite, spontaneous, unregulated colonization? But -
but - “In the Northern States of the American Union; it may be doubted whether
so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired
laborers.... In England... the laboring class compose the bulk of the people.”
[8] 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 pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do with free men, not
with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint 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.” [9]
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.[10]
This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their
inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is
very cheap and all men are free, where every one 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.” [11]
As in the colonies the separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor
and their root, the 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. Whence
then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of
America is exclusively agricultural, excepting 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, the 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.” [12] With such queer
people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” 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 of 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 “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, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the
labor-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-laborer
remain indecently low. The wage-laborer loses into the bargain, along with the
relation of dependence, also the sentiment of
dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our
E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The
supply of wage-labor, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor
sufficient. “The supply of labor is always not only small but uncertain.” [13]
“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.” [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, is he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his
own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be laborers for hire; they... become
independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the
labor-market.” [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, Merivale, there is in the colonies “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.” [16]
What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate
state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of
producers and national wealth.[17]
The parcelling-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 appurtennce, always in excess, always at
disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful 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
“supernumerary” laborers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in
the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which
require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not
begin such operations with labor which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had
been sure of retraining the labor of such emigrants, we should have been glad to
have engaged it 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.” [18]
After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its
“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, whilst “the English agricultural laborer is 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.” [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.[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 “systematic colonization.”
By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “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 a 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.” [21] The
price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient
price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming
independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” [22]
This “sufficient price for the land” 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 “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more
laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [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 practised
this method of “primitive accumulation” 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 emigration was only diverted
from the English colonies to the Untied 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 emigration 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, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralization of capital.
The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant
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 [23], 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 “relative surplus laboring population,” so that almost every mail
brings the Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia labor-market,” and the
prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly as in the London Heymarket.
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.
Footnotes
1.
We treat here of real Colonies, virgins soils, colonized by free immigrants. The
United States are, speaking economically, still only a Colony of Europe.
Besides, to this category belong such old plantations as those in which the
abolition of slavery has completely altered the earlier conditions.
2.
Wakefield’s few glimpses on the subject of Modern Colonization are fully
anticipated by Mirabeau Pere, the physiocrat, and even much earlier by English
economists.
3.
Later, it became a temporary necessity in the international competititve
struggle. But, whatever its motive, the consequences remain the same.
4.
“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.” (Karl
Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)
5.
E. G. Wakefield: “England and America,” vol.ii. p.33.
6.
l.c., p.17.
7.
l.c., vol.i, p.18.
8.
l.c., pp.42, 43, 44.
9.
l.c., vol.ii, p.5.
10.
“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.” (l.c.,
Vol.II, p.125.)
11.
l.c., Vol.I, p.247.
12.
l.c., pp.21, 22.
13.
l.c., Vol.II, p.116.
14.
l.c., Vol.I, p.131.
15.
l.c., Vol.II, p.5.
16.
Merivale, l.c., Vol.II, pp.235-314 passim. Even the mild, Free-trade, vulgar
economist, Molinari, says: “Dans les colonies où l’esclavage a été aboli
sans que le travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par une quantité équivalente
de travail libre, on a vu s’opérer la contre-partie du fait qui 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, ne pouvant obtenir de leurs sucres un prix suffisant pour couvrir la
hausse de salaire, ont été obligés de fournir l’excédant, d’abord sur
leurs profits, ensuite sur leurs capitaux mêmes. Une foule de planteurs ont été
ruinés 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 [how generous Mr. Molinari!]: mais ne
vaudrait-il pas mieux que ni les uns ni les autres périssent? [In
the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory labour
being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labour, there has 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 ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar
for a sufficent 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 survibed?] (Molinari, l.c., pp.51,52.) Mr. Molinari,
Mr. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments, of Moses and the
prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the “entrepreneur”
can cut down the laborer’s legitimate part, and in the West Indies, the
laborer can cut down the entrepreneur’s? And what, if you please, is this
“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
“simple” as to “exploit” 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.
17.
Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.52.
18.
l.c., pp.191, 192.
19.
l.c., Vol.I, p.47, 246.
20.
“C’est, ajoutez-vous, grâce à l’appropriation du sol et des capitaux que
l’homme, qui n’a que ses bras, trouve de l’occupation et se fait un revenu...
c’est au contraire, grâce à l’appropriation individuelle du sol qu’il se
trouve des hommes n’ayant que leurs bras.... Quand vous mettez un homme dans
le vide, vous vous emparez de l’atmosphère. Ainsi faites-vous, quand vous
vous emparez du sol.... C’est le mettre dans le vide le richesses, pour ne la
laisser vivre qu’à votre volonté.” [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
thier 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, l.c. t.III, pp.268-71, passim.)
21.
Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.192.
22.
l.c., p.45.
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. “The first and main object at
which new Land Act of 1862 aims is to give increased facilities for the
settlement of the people.” (“The Land Law of Victoria,” by the Hon. C. G.
Duffy, Minister of Public Lands, Lond., 1862.)
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