We have seen how money is turned into capital, how capital makes surplus-value, and surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; and capitalist production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and labour-power already in the hands of commodity-producers. The whole movement therefore seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only escape by supposing a "primitive" accumulation — Adam Smith's "previous accumulation" — preceding capitalist accumulation: an accumulation that is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its starting point.

This primitive accumulation plays roughly the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and sin thereby came upon the human race; its origin is "explained" simply by telling it as an anecdote of the past. In some long-vanished age, the story goes, there was on one side a diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite, and on the other a lazy rabble squandering everything they had and more besides. The legend of theological original sin at least tells us how man was condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of this economic original sin reveals to us how it is that some people have no need to do any such thing. No matter — so it came about that the first sort accumulated wealth, while the others ended with nothing to sell but their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great mass, who still, for all their labour, have nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few, which goes on growing though they have long since ceased to work. Such stale childishness is trotted out daily, for instance by M. Thiers, with all the solemnity of a statesman, in defence of propriété before a French public once so witty; but the moment the question of property comes into play, it becomes a sacred duty to insist that the standpoint of the children's primer is the only one fit for every age and every stage of development. In actual history, as is well known, conquest, subjugation, robbery, murder — in short, force — play the great part. In the tender science of political economy the idyll has always reigned; right and "labour" have always been the sole means of enrichment, this year, naturally, always excepted. In fact the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

Money and commodities are no more capital from the outset than are the means of production and subsistence; they need to be transformed into capital. But that transformation can take place only under definite circumstances, which come down to this: two very different kinds of commodity-owner must come face to face and into contact — on one side, owners of money, means of production, and means of subsistence, eager to valorize the sum of value in their hands by buying other people's labour-power; on the other, free workers, sellers of their own labour-power and hence sellers of labour. Free workers in the double sense that they neither belong themselves directly to the means of production, as slaves or serfs do, nor do the means of production belong to them, as with the self-employed peasant — they are, rather, free of, released and clear of, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the commodity market, the basic conditions of capitalist production are given. The capital-relation presupposes the separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions under which their labour can be realized. Once capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation but reproduces it on a constantly growing scale. The process that creates the capital-relation can therefore be nothing other than the process that separates the worker from ownership of his conditions of labour, a process that turns the social means of subsistence and production into capital on the one hand, and the immediate producers into wage-labourers on the other. So-called primitive accumulation is thus nothing but the historical process of separating producer and means of production. It appears as "primitive" because it forms the prehistory of capital and of the mode of production corresponding to it.

The economic structure of capitalist society grew out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.

The immediate producer, the worker, could dispose of his own person only once he had ceased to be bound to the soil and to be the serf or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour-power, carrying his commodity wherever it can find a market, he also had to have escaped the rule of the guilds, their regulations for apprentices and journeymen, and their restrictive labour rules. So the historical movement that turns producers into wage-labourers appears, on one side, as their liberation from bondage and guild constraint — and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But on the other side, these newly freed people become sellers of themselves only once they have been robbed of all their means of production and of every guarantee of existence the old feudal institutions had offered them. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written into the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had for their part to displace not only the guild masters of handicraft but also the feudal lords who held the sources of wealth. Seen from this side, their rise appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle against feudal power and its outrageous privileges, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. Yet the knights of industry managed to displace the knights of the sword only by exploiting events in which they themselves were entirely innocent; they rose by means every bit as vile as those by which the Roman freedman once made himself master of his own patron.

The starting point of the development that produced both the wage-labourer and the capitalist was the servitude of the worker. Its progress consisted in a change of form of this servitude — the transformation of feudal into capitalist exploitation. To follow its course we need not reach back very far. Although the first beginnings of capitalist production already confront us sporadically as early as the 14th and 15th centuries in a few Mediterranean towns, the capitalist era dates only from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the abolition of serfdom has long been accomplished, and the high-water mark of the Middle Ages, the flourishing of sovereign towns, has long been on the wane.

Historically epoch-making in the history of primitive accumulation are all the revolutions that serve the forming capitalist class as a lever, but above all those moments in which great masses of people are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled onto the labour-market as vogelfrei — "free and unattached" — proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, the peasant, from the soil forms the basis of the whole process. Its history takes on a different colouring in different countries, and runs through its various phases in a different order and at different historical periods. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, does it possess the classic form (note 189; EN [1]). Note 189/[1]: In Italy, where capitalist production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earliest. The serf there was emancipated before he had secured any prescriptive right to the soil; his emancipation therefore transformed him at once into a vogelfrei — M-A's "free" — proletarian, who moreover found the new masters already installed in towns for the most part inherited from Roman times. When the revolution of the world market, from the end of the 15th century, destroyed Northern Italy's commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in: the workers of the towns were driven back onto the land in masses, giving the small, garden-style cultivation there an unprecedented upswing.

In England, serfdom had, in fact, disappeared by the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population — then, and still more so in the 15th century — consisted of free, self-managing peasants, whatever feudal signboard might always have concealed their ownership. On the larger seignorial estates the once-serf bailiff had been displaced by the free tenant. The wage-labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants who turned their spare time to account by working for the great landowners, partly of an independent class of genuine wage-labourers, relatively and absolutely small in number. Even the latter were in fact at the same time self-managing peasants, since besides their wages they were allotted arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with cottages. They also shared with the peasants proper the usufruct of the common land, which pastured their cattle and at the same time supplied them with fuel — wood, turf, and the like. In every country of Europe, feudal production is characterised by the division of the soil among the greatest possible number of sub-tenants. The power of the feudal lord, like that of every sovereign, rested not on the length of his rent-roll but on the number of his subjects, and that number in turn depended on the number of self-managing peasants. Although, therefore, the English soil was, after the Norman Conquest, parcelled out into gigantic baronies, one of which often included some 900 old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was strewn with small peasant holdings, broken here and there only by larger seignorial estates. Such conditions, together with the simultaneous flourishing of town life that marks the 15th century, permitted that popular wealth which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently describes in his "Laudibus Legum Angliae" — but they excluded capital-wealth. Note 190/[1]: quoting Macaulay on the petty proprietors: "The small landowners who tilled their own fields with their own hands and enjoyed a modest competence... then formed a far more important part of the nation than they do now. Not fewer than 160,000 proprietors, who with their families must have made up more than a seventh of the entire population, lived by the cultivation of their little freehold farms" (freehold being full free ownership). "The average income of these small landowners... is reckoned at between £60 and £70. It has been computed that the number of those who tilled their own land was greater than the number of tenants on others' soil." (Macaulay, History of England, 10th ed., London 1854, I, pp. 333-334.) Even in the last third of the 17th century, four-fifths of the English people were still agricultural (ibid., p. 413). Marx cites Macaulay precisely because, as a systematic falsifier of history, he "trims" facts of this kind as far as he possibly can. Note 191/[2]: One must never forget that even the serf was not merely the owner — a tribute-paying owner, but owner nonetheless — of the plot of ground attached to his house, but also a co-owner of the common land. "The peasant" in Silesia, Mirabeau notes, "is a serf." Nevertheless these serfs possess common lands: "it has not yet been possible to induce the Silesians to divide their commons, whereas in the Neumark there is scarcely a village in which this division has not been carried through with the greatest success." (Mirabeau, De la Monarchie Prussienne, Londres 1788, II, pp. 125-126.) Note 192/[3]: Japan, with its purely feudal organisation of landed property and its highly developed small-peasant cultivation, offers a far truer picture of the European Middle Ages than all our history books, dictated as they mostly are by bourgeois prejudice. It is altogether too convenient to play the "liberal" at the Middle Ages' expense.

The prelude to the revolution that laid capitalism's foundation plays out in the last third of the 15th and the first decades of the 16th century. A mass of vogelfrei — dispossessed and rightless — proletarians was hurled onto the labour market by the break-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart rightly observes, "everywhere uselessly filled house and castle." Although royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, forcibly hastened the dissolution of these retainer-bands in its own drive toward absolute sovereignty, it was by no means their sole cause. Rather, in the most defiant opposition to crown and parliament, the great feudal lord created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from land to which they held exactly the same feudal title he did, and by usurping their common land. The immediate impulse to this was given in England above all by the flourishing of Flemish wool manufacture and the corresponding rise in wool prices. The great feudal wars had devoured the old feudal nobility; the new nobility was a child of its own age, for which money was the power of all powers. Turning arable land into sheep-walk thus became its watchword. Harrison, in his "Description of England, Prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicles," describes how the expropriation of the small peasantry is ruining the country. "What care our great encroachers!" The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were violently torn down or left to fall into decay.

"If one wishes," says Harrison, "to compare the older inventories of any manor, one will find that countless houses and small farms have vanished, that the land now feeds far fewer people, that many towns have fallen to ruin, though a few new ones flourish... Of towns and villages that have been destroyed to make sheep-walks, in which nothing now stands but the manor-house, I could tell a good deal."

The complaints of those old chronicles are always exaggerated, but they record precisely the impression this revolution in the relations of production made on contemporaries themselves. A comparison between the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More illustrates the gulf between the 15th and 16th centuries. As Thornton rightly says, the English working class was hurled, without any intervening stage, out of its golden age and into its iron one.

Legislation took fright at this upheaval. It did not yet stand at that height of civilisation where "Wealth of the Nation" — that is, the formation of capital and the ruthless exploitation and impoverishment of the mass of the people — passes for the ultima

Thule of all statecraft. In his history of Henry VII, Bacon says:

"About this time" (1489) "complaints multiplied over the conversion of arable land into pasture" (for sheep-walks and the like), "easily managed by a few shepherds; and tenancies for years, for life, and at will (on which a large part of the yeomanry lived) were converted into demesne lands. This produced a decay of the people, and, in consequence, a decay of towns, churches, tithes... In curing this mischief, the wisdom of the king and of parliament at this time was admirable... They took measures against this depopulating usurpation of the common lands (depopulating inclosures) and the depopulating pasture-farming that followed on its heels."

An Act of Henry the Seventh, 1489, c. 19, forbade the destruction of all farmhouses to which at least 20 acres of land belonged. An Act of Henry VIII, 25 Hen. VIII, renewed the same law. It states, among other things, that

"many farms and great herds of cattle, sheep especially, are heaped up in a few hands, whereby rents have risen greatly and tillage has much decayed, churches and houses pulled down, and marvellous numbers of people rendered incapable of maintaining themselves and their families."

The law accordingly orders the rebuilding of the decayed farmsteads, and fixes the proportion between corn-land and pasture-land, and so on. An Act of 1533 complains that some owners possess 24,000 sheep, and limits their number to 2,000. The popular outcry and the legislation that continued for some 150 years after Henry VII against the expropriation of the small tenants and peasants were equally fruitless. The secret of their ineffectiveness is betrayed to us by Bacon, without his knowing it. Note 193/[4]: In his Utopia, Thomas More speaks of the strange land where "sheep devour men." (Utopia, transl. Robinson, ed. Arber, London 1869, p. 41.)

"The device of King Henry the Seventh," he says in his Essays, Civil and Moral, Essay 29, "was profound and admirable, in making farms and houses of husbandry of a standard — that is, keeping up such a proportion of land to them as might breed subjects able to live in convenient plenty and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners, and not of hirelings." Note 193a/[5]: Bacon spells out the connection between a free, well-to-do peasantry and a sound infantry: "It was wonderfully important to the might and bearing of the kingdom to have farms, as it were, of a standard, sufficient to maintain an able body free of want, and to bind a great part of the kingdom's soil to the holding and occupation of the yeomanry, or of people of a middling condition between gentlemen and cottagers and hired hands... For it is the general opinion of the ablest judges of war that the chief strength of an army lies in its infantry, its foot-soldiers. But to make good infantry requires men bred not in servile or needy fashion but in some free and fairly prosperous manner. So if a state runs mostly to gentlemen and fine lords, while the husbandmen and ploughmen are but their hired hands or labourers, or else mere cottagers — that is, housed beggars — you may have good cavalry, but never good, steady foot-soldiers... This is seen in France and Italy and some other foreign parts, where indeed all is nobility or wretched peasantry... so much so that they are forced to hire bands of Swiss and the like for their infantry battalions — whence it also comes that these nations have much people and few soldiers." (The Reign of Henry VII, etc., Verbatim Reprint from Kennet's England, ed. 1719, London 1870, p. 308.)

What the capitalist system required was, conversely, the servile condition of the mass of the people, their own transformation into hirelings, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital. During this transitional period, legislation also tried to preserve the 4 acres of land attached to the rural wage-labourer's cottage, and forbade him to take in lodgers. As late as 1627, under Charles I, Roger Crocker of Fontmill was convicted for building a cottage on the manor of Fontmill without 4 acres of land permanently attached to it; as late as 1638, under Charles I, a royal commission was appointed to enforce the old laws, including especially that on the 4 acres of land; even Cromwell forbade the building of a house within 4 miles of London unless it was furnished with 4 acres of land. As late as the first half of the 18th century, complaint is still made whenever the agricultural labourer's cottage lacks an adjunct of 1 to 2 acres. Today he counts himself lucky if it comes with a little garden, or if, far away from it, he can rent a couple of roods of land.

"Landlords and farmers," says Dr. Hunter, "work here hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the labourer too independent." Note 194/[6]: Dr. Hunter, l.c., p. 134. — "The quantity of land assigned" (in the old laws) "would today be judged too great for labourers, and more fit to turn them into small farmers." (George Roberts, The Social History of the People of the Southern Counties of England in Past Centuries, London 1856, p. 184.)

The forcible expropriation of the mass of the people received a new and frightful impulse in the 16th century from the Reformation and, in its wake, the colossal theft of church property. The Catholic Church, at the time of the Reformation, was the feudal owner of a great part of the English soil. The suppression of the monasteries and the like hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The church estates themselves were largely given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating tenant-farmers and town burghers, who drove out the old hereditary sub-tenants en masse and threw their holdings together. The legally guaranteed property of the impoverished country folk in a portion of the church tithes was tacitly confiscated. "Pauper ubique jacet" — "the poor man lies subjugated everywhere" — cried Queen Elizabeth after a tour through England. In the 43rd year of her reign the nation was at last compelled to recognise pauperism officially, by introducing the poor-rate. Note 195/[7]: "The right of the poor to a share in the church tithes is established by ancient statutes." (Tuckett, l.c., II, pp. 804-805.)

"The authors of this law were ashamed to state its grounds, and so sent it into the world, against all custom, without any preamble whatsoever." Note 196/[8]: William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation, § 471.

By the 16th of Charles I, c. 4, it was declared perpetual, and in fact only received a harsher new form in 1834. These immediate effects of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. Church property had formed the religious bulwark of the age-old relations of landed property. With its fall, those relations could no longer hold. Note 197/[9]: One may gauge the Protestant "spirit" from the following, among other things. In the south of England, various landowners and well-to-do farmers put their heads together and drew up ten questions on the correct interpretation of Elizabeth's poor-law, which they submitted for an opinion to a celebrated lawyer of the time, Sergeant Snigge (later a judge under James I). "Ninth question: some of the richer farmers of the parish have hit upon a clever scheme by which all the confusion in carrying out the Act might be removed. They propose building a prison in the parish. Any poor person unwilling to be locked up in the said prison shall be refused relief. Notice shall then be given to the neighbourhood that if anyone is inclined to farm out the poor of this parish, they should submit sealed proposals, by a set day, at the lowest price at which they will take them off our hands. The authors of this plan suppose that in the neighbouring counties there are persons unwilling to work, and without means or credit to acquire a farm or a ship, so that they could live without labour. Such persons might be inclined to make the parish a very advantageous offer. Should any of the poor perish under the contractor's care here and there, the sin will lie at his door, since the parish will have discharged its duties toward them. We fear, however, that the present Act does not permit a measure of prudence of this kind; but you should know that the rest of the freeholders of this county, and of the adjoining one, will join us in urging their members of parliament to bring in a bill allowing the confinement and forced labour of the poor, so that any person who resists confinement shall be entitled to no relief. This, we hope, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief." (R. Blakey, The History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times, London 1855, II, pp. 84-85.) — In Scotland the abolition of serfdom took place centuries later than in England. As late as 1698 Fletcher of Saltoun declared in the Scottish parliament: "The number of beggars in Scotland is reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy I, a republican on principle, can propose is to restore the old condition of serfdom, and make slaves of all those unable to provide for their own subsistence." So Eden, l.c., Book I, ch. I, pp. 60-61. — "From the freedom of the agricultural labourer dates pauperism... Manufactures and commerce are the true parents of our national poor." Eden, like that Scottish republican on principle, errs only in this: it was not the abolition of serfdom but the abolition of the agricultural labourer's property in the soil that made him a proletarian, and eventually a pauper. — To England's poor-laws correspond, in France, where expropriation proceeded by other means, the Ordonnance of Moulins, 1566, and the Edict of 1656. Note 198/[10]: Mr. Rogers, though at the time Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, that stronghold of Protestant orthodoxy, stresses in his preface to the History of Agriculture the pauperisation of the mass of the people brought about by the Reformation.

As late as the last decades of the 17th century, the Yeomanry, an independent peasantry, was still more numerous than the class of tenant-farmers. It had formed Cromwell's chief strength, and stood, even by Macaulay's own admission, in favourable contrast to the drunken squires and their servants the country parsons, who had to marry off their masters' cast-off favourite maids. Rural wage-labourers themselves were still co-possessors of the common land. By about 1750 the Yeomanry had vanished, and by the last decades of the 18th century so had the last trace of the agricultural labourer's common property. We set aside here the purely economic motive-forces of the agricultural revolution; we ask instead after its violent levers. Note 199/[11]: A Letter to Sir T. C. Bunbury, Bart.: On the High Price of Provisions. By a Suffolk Gentleman, Ipswich 1795, p. 4. Even the fanatical defender of the large-farm system, the author [J. Arbuthnot] of An Inquiry into the Connection of Large Farms, etc., London 1773, p. 139, says: "I most lament the loss of our yeomanry, that set of men who really kept up the independence of this nation; and sorry I am to see their lands now in the hands of monopolising lords, tenanted out to small farmers, who hold their leases on such conditions as to be little better than vassals ready to attend a summons on every mischievous occasion."

Under the Restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried through by law a usurpation that on the Continent was accomplished everywhere without any such legal ceremony. They abolished the feudal constitution of the land — that is, they shook off its obligations to the state — "indemnified" the state by taxes levied on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated modern private property in estates to which they held only feudal title, and finally imposed those laws of settlement which, mutatis mutandis, worked on the English agricultural labourer as the Tartar Boris Godunov's edict worked on the Russian peasantry.

The "glorious Revolution" brought the landlord and capitalist profit-makers to power along with William of Orange. They inaugurated the new era by practising, on a colossal scale, the theft of the state domains that had until then been carried on only modestly. These lands were given away, sold at ridiculous prices, or even annexed to private estates by outright usurpation. All this took place without the slightest observance of legal Note 200/[12]: On the private morals of this bourgeois hero, among other things: "The great grants of land to Lady Orkney in Ireland in 1695 are a public proof of the king's affection, and of the lady's influence... the lady's endearing offices are supposed to have consisted in — foeda labiorum ministeria" ("filthy services of the lips"). (In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, British Museum, No. 4224. The manuscript is entitled: "The Character and Behaviour of King William, Sunderland, etc., as Represented in Original Letters to the Duke of Shrewsbury from Somers, Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc." It is full of curiosities.) Note 201/[13]: "The illegal alienation of the Crown lands, partly by sale and partly by gift, forms a scandalous chapter of English history... a gigantic fraud on the nation." (F. W. Newman, Lectures on Political Economy, London 1851, pp. 129-130.) — {How today's great English landowners came by their possessions may be traced in detail in [N. H. Evans,] Our Old Nobility, By Noblesse Oblige, London 1879. — F.E.}

formality. The state property thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the church spoliation, insofar as it was not lost again during the republican revolution, forms the basis of today's princely domains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois capitalists favoured this operation, among other things, in order to turn land into a pure article of commerce, extend the domain of large-scale agriculture, and swell their supply of vogelfrei — dispossessed and rightless — proletarians off the land. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bank-ocracy, of high finance freshly hatched from the egg, and of the great manufacturers then leaning on protective tariffs. The English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest exactly as wisely as the Swedish burghers did, who conversely, hand in hand with their own economic bulwark, the peasantry, helped their kings forcibly resume the crown lands from the oligarchy (from 1604 onward, and later under Charles X and Charles XI). Note 202/[14]: One may read, for instance, E. Burke's pamphlet on the ducal house of Bedford, whose offshoot, Lord John Russell, was "the tomtit of liberalism."

Communal property — quite distinct from the state property just considered — was an old Germanic institution that lived on under the cover of feudalism. We have seen how its violent usurpation, generally accompanied by the conversion of arable land into pasture, begins at the end of the 15th century and continues through the 16th. But at that time the process was carried out as individual acts of violence, against which legislation fought in vain for 150 years. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this: the law itself now becomes the vehicle for the theft of the people's land, although the great tenant-farmers also go on applying their own small independent private methods besides. The parliamentary form of this robbery is that of the "Bills for Inclosures of Note 203/[15]: "The farmers forbid the cottagers to keep any living creature besides themselves, on the pretext that if they kept cattle or poultry they would steal fodder from the barns. They also say: keep the cottagers poor, and you keep them industrious. But the real fact is that the farmers thereby usurp the whole right to the common lands." ("A Political Enquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste Lands," London 1785, p. 75.)

Commons" (laws for the enclosure of the common land) — in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people's land as private property, decrees of the people's expropriation. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty piece of advocacy, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landowners who stepped into the feudal lords' place, by himself demanding a "general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of the common lands" — thereby admitting that a parliamentary coup is required to turn it into private property — while, on the other hand, calling on the legislature for "compensation" for the expropriated poor. Note 204 (DE only; no attached M-A note): Eden, l.c., Preface, [pp. XVII, XIX].

While tenants-at-will took the place of the independent Yeomen — smaller farmers on yearly notice, a servile mob dependent on the landlords' whim — it was, alongside the robbery of the state domains, above all the systematically pursued theft of communal property that helped swell those great holdings which the 18th century called capital-farms or merchant-farms, and "set free" the rural population as a proletariat for industry. Note 205/[17]: "Capital farms." (Two Letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By a Person in Business, London 1767, pp. 19-20.) Note 206/[18]: "Merchant farms." (An Inquiry into the Present High Prices of Provisions, London 1767, p. 111, note.) This excellent work, published anonymously, was written by the Rev. Nathaniel Forster.

The 18th century, however, did not yet grasp, to the same degree as the 19th, the identity between national wealth and popular poverty. Hence the fiercest polemics in the economic literature of that time over the "inclosure of commons." From the mass of material before me I give a few passages, since they vividly illustrate the conditions.

"In many parishes of Hertfordshire," writes one indignant pen, "24 farms, averaging 50-150 acres, have been melted into 3 farms." "In Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire the enclosure of communal lands has very much prevailed, and most of the new lordships arising from the enclosures have been converted into pasture; as a result many lordships now have not 50 acres under the plough where 1,500 were formerly ploughed ... Ruins of former dwelling-houses, barns, stables, and the like" are the sole traces of the former inhabitants. "A hundred houses and families have, in some places, dwindled ... to 8 or 10 ... The landowners, in most parishes where enclosure has taken place only these last 15 or 20 years, are very few compared with the numbers by whom the land was cultivated in its open-field state. It is nothing unusual to see 4 or 5 wealthy graziers usurping a large, newly enclosed lordship that was formerly in the hands of 20-30 farmers and as many smaller owners and occupants. All of these, together with their families, have been thrown out of their livelihood, along with the many other families whom they employed and supported." Note 207/[19]: Thomas Wright, A Short Address to the Public on the Monopoly of Large Farms, 1779, pp. 2-3. Note 208/[20]: Rev. Addington, Enquiry into the Reasons for or against Enclosing Open Fields, London 1772, pp. 37-43 passim.

It was not only waste ground but often land under cultivation — held under a fixed payment to the community, or farmed in common — that was annexed by the neighbouring landlord under the pretext of enclosure.

"I speak here of the enclosure of open fields and lands already improved. Even the writers who defend the enclosures admit that they increase the monopoly of large farms, raise the price of provisions, and produce depopulation ... and even the enclosure of waste lands, as now carried on, robs the poor of part of their means of subsistence and swells farms already too large." "When," says Dr. Price, "this land falls into the hands of a few great farmers, the small farmers" (earlier described by him as "a multitude of small proprietors and tenants who maintain themselves and their families by the produce of the land they occupy, by sheep, poultry, pigs, and the like, which they send onto the common, so that they have little occasion to purchase means of subsistence") "will be converted into people who must earn their subsistence by working for others, and who are forced to go to market for everything they need ... Perhaps more labour will be performed, because there is more compulsion to it ... Towns and manufactures will grow, because more people are driven to them in search of employment. This is the way in which the concentration of farms naturally operates, and in which it has, for many years, actually operated in this kingdom." Note 209/[21]: Dr. R. Price, l.c., vol. II, pp. 155-156. Forster, Addington, Kent, Price, and James Anderson should be read, and compared with the wretched prattle of the sycophant MacCulloch in his catalogue, The Literature of Political Economy, London 1845. Note 210/[22]: l.c., pp. 147-148.

He sums up the overall effect of the inclosures thus:

"On the whole, the condition of the lower classes of the people has worsened in almost every respect; the smaller landowners and tenants have been reduced to the rank of day-labourers and hirelings, and at the same time earning a livelihood in that condition has become harder." Note 211/[23]: l.c., pp. 159-160. One is reminded of ancient Rome. "The rich had taken possession of the greater part of the undivided lands. Trusting that the circumstances of the time would not see these taken from them again, they therefore bought up the neighbouring plots belonging to the poor, partly with the latter's consent, partly by taking them by force, so that they now cultivated far-flung domains instead of separate fields. In doing so they employed slaves for tillage and stock-raising, since free men would have been taken from that labour for military service. The possession of slaves brought them great profit besides, in that these, being exempt from military service, could multiply without risk and produce a great number of children. Thus the powerful drew all wealth to themselves, and the whole countryside swarmed with slaves. The Italians, by contrast, grew ever fewer, worn down as they were by poverty, taxes, and military service. And even when times of peace came, they were condemned to complete idleness, because the rich held possession of the soil and employed slaves, not free men, for tillage." (Appian, Roman Civil Wars, I, 7.) This passage refers to the time before the Licinian law. Military service, which so greatly hastened the ruin of the Roman plebeians, was also a chief means by which Charlemagne, hot-house fashion, promoted the transformation of free German peasants into serfs and bondsmen.

In fact the usurpation of the common lands, and the revolution in agriculture that accompanied it, told so acutely on the agricultural labourers that, according to Eden himself, between 1765 and 1780 their wages began to fall below the minimum and to be supplemented by official poor relief. Their wages, he says, "were barely sufficient for the absolute necessities of life."

Let us listen a moment longer to a defender of the enclosures and an opponent of Dr. Price.

"It is no proper inference that depopulation exists merely because one no longer sees people wasting their labour in the open field ... If, by converting small farmers into people who must work for others, more labour is set flowing, that is surely an advantage which the nation" (to which, of course, the converted themselves do not belong) "must wish for ... The produce will be greater when their combined labour is applied on a single farm: thus a surplus product is formed for the manufactures, and manufactures, one of this nation's gold-mines, are thereby increased in proportion to the quantity of corn produced." Note 212/[24]: [J. Arbuthnot,] An Inquiry into the Connection between the Present Prices of Provisions, etc., pp. 124, 129. To like effect, but with the opposite tendency: "Working-men are driven from their cottages and forced to seek employment in the towns — but then a larger surplus is obtained, and capital is thereby increased." ([R. B. Seeley,] The Perils of the Nation, 2nd ed., London 1843, p. XIV.)

The stoical equanimity with which the political economist regards the most brazen violation of the "sacred right of property" and the grossest acts of violence against persons, the moment these are required to found the capitalist mode of production, is shown to us, among others, by the tory-tinged, "philanthropic" Sir F. M. Eden. The whole series of robberies, atrocities, and popular afflictions that accompany the forcible expropriation of the people from the last third of the 15th to the end of the 18th century drive him only to this "comfortable" closing reflection:

"The due — the 'right' — proportion between arable land and pasture had at last to be established. Through the whole of the 14th century and the greater part of the 15th, one acre of pasture stood to 2, 3, or even 4 acres of arable. About the middle of the 16th century that proportion changed to 2 acres of pasture to 2 of arable, later to 2 acres of pasture to 1 of arable, until at last the correct proportion of 3 acres of pasture to 1 of arable was reached."

In the 19th century, naturally, even the memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and communal property was lost. Not to speak of later times at all — what farthing of compensation did the rural population ever receive for the 3,511,770 acres of common land that were stolen from them between 1810 and 1831 and, by parliamentary contrivance, given by the landlords to the landlords? Source discrepancy (disclosed, not normalized): the German source printed here reads 1810-1831 for this acreage theft; Moore-Aveling's parallel English paragraph reads 1801-1831 for the same figure. Both dates are preserved as printed rather than reconciled.

The last great process of expropriating the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called Clearing of Estates — literally the sweeping of the people off them. All the English methods considered so far culminate in this "clearing." As we saw in describing modern conditions in the previous section, now that there are no more independent peasants left to sweep away, the "clearing" goes on to reach even the cottages, so that the agricultural labourers can no longer find, on the very soil they cultivate, the room they need for their own housing. But what "Clearing of Estates" means in its proper sense we learn only in the promised land of modern romance-literature, the Scottish Highlands. There the process is marked by its systematic character, by the scale on which it is carried out at a single stroke — in Ireland landlords have managed to sweep away several villages at once; in the Highlands it is a matter of tracts of land the size of German duchies — and, finally, by the peculiar form of the misappropriated landed property.

The Celts of the Scottish Highlands were organised into clans, each of which was the owner of the land it settled. The clan's representative, its chief or "great man," was only the titular owner of this land — exactly as the Queen of England is titular owner of the whole national soil. Once the English government had succeeded in suppressing these "great men's" internal wars and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the clan chiefs by no means abandoned their old trade of robbery; they only changed its form. On their own authority they turned their titular right of ownership into a right of private property, and, meeting resistance from their own clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force.

"A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea," says Professor Newman. This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the Pretender's followers, can be traced through its first phases in Sir James Steuart and James Anderson. In the 18th century, the Gaels driven from the land were forbidden to emigrate as well, so as to force them, by violence, toward Glasgow and other factory towns. As an example of the method prevailing in the 19th century, the "clearings" carried out by the Duchess of Sutherland will serve here. This economically schooled person resolved, on taking up her rule, to carry through a radical economic cure, and to turn the whole county — whose population earlier, similar processes had already reduced to 15,000 — into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted out and exterminated. All their villages were destroyed and burned down, all their fields turned into pasture. British soldiers were commanded to carry out the eviction and came to blows with the natives. One old woman burned to death in the flames of the hut she refused to leave. In this way the lady appropriated to herself 794,000 acres of land that had belonged to the clan since time immemorial. To the expelled natives she assigned about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore, 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until then lain waste and yielded their owners no income. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, went so far as to let this land out, at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre, to the clansmen who had shed their blood for her family for centuries. The whole of the stolen clan-land she divided into 29 great sheep-farms, each inhabited by a single family, mostly imported English farm-servants. By 1825 the 15,000 Gaels had already been replaced by 131,000 sheep. The portion of the aborigines flung onto the sea-shore tried to live by fishing. They became amphibious, and lived, as an English writer says, half on the land and half on the water, and for all that, only half from either. Note 213/[25]: Newman's own English, quoted verbatim by Marx: "A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea." (F. W. Newman, Lectures on Political Economy, London 1851, p. 132.) Note 214/[26]: Steuart says: "If you compare the rent of these lands" (he erroneously includes in this economic category the tribute of the taksmen to the clan chief) "with the extent, it appears very small. If you compare it with the numbers fed upon the farm, you will find that an estate in the Highlands maintains, perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same value in a good and fertile province." (l.c., vol. I, ch. XVI, p. 104.) Note 215/[27]: James Anderson, "Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry, &c.," Edinburgh 1777. Note 216/[28]: In 1860 the people expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false pretences. Some fled to the mountains and neighbouring islands. They were followed by the police, came to blows with them, and escaped. Note 217/[29]: "In the Highlands of Scotland," says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam Smith, 1814, "the ancient state of property is daily subverted.... The landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant" (a category used in error here) "now offers his land to the highest bidder, who, if he is an improver, instantly adopts a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread with small tenants or labourers, was peopled in proportion to its produce, but under the new system of improved cultivation and increased rents, the largest possible produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the useless hands being, with this view, removed, the population is reduced, not to what the land will maintain, but to what it will employ. The dispossessed tenants either seek a subsistence in the neighbouring towns," &c. (David Buchanan, Observations on... A. Smith's Wealth of Nations, Edinburgh 1814, vol. IV, p. 144.) "The Scotch grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a jungle with tigers.... Man is bartered for a fleece or a carcase of mutton, nay, held cheaper.... Why, how much worse is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had broken into the northern provinces of China, proposed in council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert the land into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have effected in their own country against their own countrymen." (George Ensor, An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations, London 1818, pp. 215-216.) Note 218/[30]: When the present Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe, authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with great magnificence in London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the American republic — a sympathy that she prudently forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war, in which every "noble" English heart beat for the slave-owner — I gave in the New-York Tribune the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part by Carey in The Slave Trade, Philadelphia 1853, pp. 203-204.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and led to a pretty polemic between the latter and the sycophants of the Sutherlands.

But the good Gaels were to atone still more bitterly for their romantic, mountain-bred idolatry of the clan's "great men." The smell of fish rose into the great men's nostrils. They scented something profitable in it, and leased out the sea-shore to the great fish-merchants of London. The Gaels were driven out a second time. Note 219/[31]: Interesting details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. David Urquhart's Portfolio, new series. — Nassau W. Senior, in his posthumous work already quoted, terms "the proceedings in Sutherlandshire one of the most beneficent clearings since the memory of man." (l.c.)

But finally part of the sheep-walks is turned back again into hunting-ground. Everyone knows that there are no real forests left in England. The game in the parks of the great is constitutionally domestic livestock, fat as London aldermen. Scotland is therefore the last refuge of the "noble passion."

"In the Highlands," says Somers in 1848, "the forests have been greatly extended. Here on one side of Gaick you have the new forest of Glenfeshie, and there on the other the new forest of Ardverikie; in the same line you have the Bleak-Mount, an immense waste recently created. From east to west, from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to the cliffs of Oban, you now have a continuous line of forest, while in other parts of the Highlands lie the new forests of Loch Archaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, and so on... The conversion of their land into sheep-walk... drove the Gaels onto more barren ground. Now red deer are beginning to replace the sheep, and are driving them into still more crushing misery... Deer-forests and the people cannot exist side by side. One or the other must, in any case, give way. Let the hunting-grounds grow in number and extent over the next quarter-century as they have over the last, and you will find no more Gaels on their native soil. This movement among the Highland proprietors is due partly to fashion, to aristocratic caprice, to the love of sport, and so on; but partly they pursue the game-trade with an eye solely to profit. For it is a fact that a stretch of mountain land, laid out as a deer-forest, is in many cases far more profitable than the same ground let as sheep-walk... The sportsman who wants a hunting-ground limits his offer only by the depth of his purse... Sufferings have been inflicted on the Note 219a/[32]: The "deer forests" of Scotland contain not a single tree. Sheep are driven out and deer driven in onto the bare hills, and this is called a "deer forest." So not even forest cultivation!

Highlands, no less cruelly than the policy of the Norman kings once inflicted them on England. Red deer have been given ever freer range, while men have been hunted into an ever narrower and narrower circle... One liberty of the people after another has been taken from it... And the oppression grows daily still. Clearing and driving out of the people are pursued by the proprietors as a settled principle, as an agricultural necessity, exactly as trees and brushwood are swept away in the wildernesses of America and Australia, and the operation proceeds along its quiet, businesslike course." Note 220 (DE only; no attached M-A note): Robert Somers, Letters from the Highlands; or, the Famine of 1847, London 1848, pp. 12-28 passim. These letters originally appeared in the Times. The English economists naturally explained the Gaelic famine of 1847 by their — over-population. In any case, they "pressed" on their means of subsistence. — The "Clearing of Estates," or, as it was called in Germany, "Bauernlegen" (laying peasants low), asserted itself here above all after the Thirty Years' War, and as late as 1790 provoked peasant uprisings in Electoral Saxony. It prevailed chiefly in eastern Germany. In most of the Prussian provinces it was only Frederick II who first secured the peasants' right of property. After the conquest of Silesia he compelled the landlords to rebuild the huts, barns, and so on, and to furnish the peasant holdings with livestock and implements. He needed soldiers for his army and taxpayers for his treasury. What a pleasant life the peasant led, meanwhile, under Frederick's financial misrule and his government's jumble of despotism, bureaucracy, and feudalism, may be gathered from the following passage in his admirer Mirabeau: "Flax thus represents one of the greatest sources of wealth for the peasant of northern Germany. Unhappily for humankind, it is only a remedy against misery, not a road to prosperity. Direct taxes, forced labour, and compulsory services of every kind ruin the German peasant, all the more because he must also pay indirect taxes on everything he buys... and, to complete his ruin, he dares not sell his produce where and how he pleases, nor dares he buy what he needs from the merchants who could supply it more cheaply. All these causes ruin him slowly but surely, and without spinning he would be unable to pay his direct taxes when they fall due; it offers him a resource, by usefully occupying his wife, his children, his servants, his farm-hands, and himself. Yet, despite this resource, what a toilsome life! In summer he labours like a convict at ploughing and harvest; he goes to bed at nine and rises at two, so as to get through his work; in winter he ought to renew his strength with longer rest, but he would then lack the grain for bread and seed, if he disposed of the produce of the soil he must sell to pay his taxes. To stop this gap, he must therefore spin... and with the utmost persistence. So the peasant, in winter, goes to rest at midnight or one o'clock and rises at five or six; or else he lies down at nine and rises at two, and so every day of his life, Sundays excepted. This excess of waking and labour wears the person out, so that in the countryside men and women grow old much sooner than in the town." (Mirabeau, l.c., III, p. 212 sqq.) Addition to the 2nd edition. In March 1866 — eighteen years after the publication of Robert Somers's work cited above — Professor Leone Levi delivered a lecture at the Society of Arts on the conversion of sheep-walks into deer-forests, in which he described the progress of this devastation in the Scottish Highlands. Among other things he said: "Depopulation and conversion into mere sheep-walk offered the most convenient means of an income without outlay... In place of the sheep-walk, a deer forest became the ordinary change in the Highlands. The sheep are driven out by wild animals, just as men were earlier driven out to make room for the sheep... One can march from the estates of the Earl of Dalhousie in Forfarshire to John o' Groats without ever leaving forest-land. In many of these forests the fox, the wild cat, the marten, the polecat, the weasel, and the mountain hare have become established, while the rabbit, the squirrel, and the rat have lately found their way there too. Vast tracts of land, which figured in the statistics of Scotland as pastures of exceptional fertility and extent, are now excluded from all cultivation and improvement and devoted solely to the pleasure of the chase for a handful of people — and this only for a short period of the year." The London Economist of 2 June 1866 says: "A Scottish paper reports, among other news last week: 'One of the best sheep-farms in Sutherlandshire, for which, on the recent expiry of the current lease, an annual rent of £1,200 was lately offered, is being converted into a deer-forest!' The feudal instincts are asserting themselves... just as at the time when the Norman conqueror destroyed 36 townships to create the New Forest... Two million acres, embracing some of the most fertile land in Scotland, have been laid utterly waste. The natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nourishing in the county of Perth; the deer-forest of Ben Aulder was the best grazing-ground in the wide district of Badenoch; part of the Black Mount forest was the finest Scottish pasture for black-faced sheep. Some idea of the extent of land laid waste for the pleasure of the chase may be formed from the fact that it embraces a much larger area than the whole county of Perth. The loss to the land as a source of production through this violent devastation may be estimated from the fact that the ground of the forest of Ben Aulder could feed 15,000 sheep, and that it amounts to only 1/30 of the whole hunting-ground of Scotland... All this hunting-land is thoroughly unproductive... it might just as well have been sunk beneath the waves of the North Sea. Such improvised solitudes or deserts ought to be put an end to by the strong hand of legislation."

The theft of church property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the robbery of the common lands, and the usurpatory, ruthlessly terroristic conversion of feudal and clan property into modern private property — these were so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for urban industry the necessary supply of vogelfrei — dispossessed and rightless — proletariat.

Those driven off the land by the dissolution of the feudal retinues and by the sudden, violent expropriation of the soil — this vogelfrei proletariat — could not possibly be absorbed by the rising manufacture as fast as it was thrown into the world. Nor could those suddenly hurled out of their accustomed way of life adapt themselves just as suddenly to the discipline of their new condition. They turned en masse into beggars, robbers, and vagabonds — partly from inclination, but in most cases from the compulsion of circumstance. Hence, from the end of the 15th century and through the whole of the 16th, a bloody legislation against vagabondage spread across the whole of Western Europe. The fathers of today's working class were first whipped into shape for the very transformation into vagabonds and paupers that had been forced on them. The legislation treated them as "voluntary" criminals and assumed that it depended on their own good will to keep working under the old conditions that no longer existed.

In England this legislation began under Henry VII.

Henry VIII, 1530: old and disabled beggars receive a licence to beg. Sturdy vagabonds, by contrast, are whipped and imprisoned. They are to be bound to the tail of a cart and flogged until the blood streams from their bodies, then made to swear an oath to return to their birthplace, or to wherever they have lived these last three years, and "to put themselves to labour." What savage irony! Under 27 Henry VIII the earlier statute is repeated, but sharpened with new additions.

On a second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is repeated and half the ear is cut off; on a third relapse, the offender is executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the commonwealth.

Edward VI: a statute of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that anyone who refuses to work is to be condemned as the slave of the person who denounced him as an idler. The master is to feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth, and such scraps of meat as he sees fit, and has the right to drive him to any labour, however disgusting, by whip and chain. If the slave absents himself for fourteen days he is condemned to slavery for life and branded on forehead or cheek with the letter S; if he runs away a third time he is executed as a traitor to the state. The master may sell him, bequeath him, or hire him out as a slave, exactly like any other chattel or head of cattle. Should the slaves attempt anything against their masters, they too are to be executed. Justices of the peace are to hunt the fellows down on information received. If a vagrant is found to have loitered for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded on the breast with the letter V by a red-hot iron, and set to work there in chains, on the roads or at other labour. If the vagabond gives a false birthplace he is to be punished by becoming the lifelong slave of that place, its inhabitants, or its corporation, and branded with S. All persons have the right to take away vagabonds' children and keep them as apprentices — boys until the age of 24, girls until 20. If the children run away, they are to remain, until that age, the slaves of their masters, who may put them in irons, whip them, and so on, as they please. Every master may put an iron ring around his slave's neck, arms, or legs, so as to know him better and hold him more securely (note 221; EN [1]). The last part of this statute provides that certain of the poor are to be employed by the place, or by individuals, willing to give them food and drink and find them work. This class of parish slaves survived in England, under the name of "roundsmen," well into the 19th century.

Elizabeth, 1572: unlicensed beggars over 14 years old are to be severely whipped and branded on the left ear, unless someone takes them into service for two years; on a repeat offence, if over 18, they are to be executed unless someone takes them into service for two years; and on a third offence they are to be executed without mercy as traitors to the state. Similar statutes: 18 Elizabeth c. 13, and one of 1597 (note 221a).

James I: any person wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond. Justices of the peace in petty sessions are empowered to have them publicly whipped and, on first arrest, imprisoned for six months, on the second for two years; while in prison they are to be whipped as often and as much as the justices see fit... The incorrigible and dangerous vagrants are to be branded on the left shoulder with an R and set to forced labour, and if caught begging again, executed without mercy. These provisions, in force until early in the 18th century, were repealed only by 12 Anne c. 23.

Similar laws existed in France, where by the middle of the 17th century a kingdom of vagabonds (royaume des truands) had established itself in Paris. Even at the start of Louis XVI's reign (Ordinance of 13 July 1777), every able-bodied person between 16 and 60, if without means of subsistence and without a trade, was to be sent to the galleys. Comparable are the statute of Charles V for the Netherlands of October 1537, the first edict of the States and Towns of Holland of 19 March 1614, and the placard of the United Provinces of 25 June 1649, among others.

In this way the rural people, violently expropriated from the soil, driven off, and turned into vagabonds, were whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into the discipline necessary to the system of wage-labour.

It is not enough that the conditions of labour confront one pole as capital and the other pole as people who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough to compel them to sell themselves voluntarily. As capitalist production advances, a working class develops that, through upbringing, tradition, and habit, comes to recognize the demands of that mode of production as self-evident laws of nature. The organization of the fully developed capitalist process of production breaks down all resistance; the constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply of and demand for labour, and therefore wages, within a groove corresponding to capital's valorization needs; the silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the capitalist's rule over the worker. Extra-economic, direct force is of course still used, but only as an exception. In the ordinary run of things the worker can be left to the "natural laws of production" — that is, to a dependence on capital that arises from, is guaranteed by, and is perpetuated by the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs and uses state power to "regulate" wages — that is, to force them within the limits suitable to money-making, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at the normal degree of dependence.

This is an essential element of so-called primitive accumulation.

The class of wage-labourers that arose in the second half of the 14th century formed then, and in the following century, only a very small part of the population, one strongly protected in its position by the independent peasant economy in the countryside and by the guild organization of the town. In country and town, masters and workers stood socially close to one another. The subordination of labour to capital was only formal — that is, the mode of production itself did not yet possess a specifically capitalist character. The variable element of capital greatly outweighed its constant element. The demand for wage-labour therefore grew rapidly with every accumulation of capital, while the supply of wage-labour followed only slowly. A large part of the national product, later transformed into capital's accumulation fund, still went at that time into the worker's own fund of consumption.

Legislation on wage-labour — from the outset aimed at the exploitation of the worker, and just as hostile to him at every later stage (note 222; EN [3]) — is opened in England by the Statute of Labourers of Edward III, 1349. Its counterpart in France is the ordinance of 1350, issued in the name of King John. English and French legislation run parallel and are identical in content. Insofar as the labour statutes seek to enforce a lengthening of the working day, I will not return to that point here, since it was discussed earlier (Chapter 8, §5).

The Statute of Labourers was passed at the urgent instance of the House of Commons.

"Formerly," a Tory naively says, "the poor demanded wages so high that they threatened industry and wealth. Now their wages are so low that they threaten industry and wealth just as much — though differently, and perhaps more dangerously than before" (note 223; EN [4]).

A legal wage tariff was fixed for town and country, for piece-work and day-work. Rural workers are to hire themselves out by the year, town workers "in the open market." It is forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, to pay more than the statutory wage — but receiving higher wages is punished more severely than paying it. So too, even in Sections 18 and 19 of Elizabeth's Statute of Apprentices, ten days' imprisonment is decreed for the one who pays higher wages, but twenty-one days' imprisonment for the one who takes them. A statute of 1360 sharpened the penalties and even empowered the master to extort labour at the legal wage tariff by bodily coercion. All combinations, contracts, oaths, and the like, by which masons and carpenters bound themselves to one another, are declared null and void. Workers' coalition is treated as a grave crime from the 14th century until 1825, the year the anti-combination laws were abolished. The spirit of the Statute of Labourers of 1349, and of its offshoots, shines through clearly in this: a maximum wage is dictated by the state — but never, under any circumstances, a minimum.

In the 16th century, as is known, the workers' condition worsened considerably. Money wages rose, but not in proportion to the depreciation of money and the corresponding rise in the price of goods. Wages, in fact, fell. Yet the laws for pushing them down persisted, alongside the ear-clipping and branding of those "whom no one would take into service." The Statute of Apprentices, 5 Elizabeth c. 3, empowered justices of the peace to fix certain wages and adjust them by season and by the price of goods. James I extended this labour regulation to weavers, spinners, and every possible category of worker (note 224; EN [5]); George II extended the laws against workers' coalition to all manufactures.

By the manufacturing period proper, the capitalist mode of production had grown strong enough to make legal regulation of wages as unworkable as it was superfluous — but no one wished to be without the old arsenal's weapons in case of need. As late as 8 George II, tailors' journeymen in and around London were forbidden more than 2s. 7½d. a day, except in times of general mourning; as late as 13 George III c. 68, the regulation of silk-weavers' wages was handed to the justices of the peace; as late as 1796, it took two rulings of the higher courts to decide whether justices' orders on wages also held for non-agricultural workers; as late as 1799, an act of Parliament confirmed that the wages of Scottish miners were regulated by a statute of Elizabeth and two Scottish acts of 1661 and 1671. How completely circumstances had meanwhile been overturned was shown by an event unheard of in the English House of Commons. Here, where for more than 400 years laws had been made fixing a maximum which wages must on no account exceed, Whitbread proposed in 1796 a legal minimum wage for agricultural day-labourers. Pitt opposed it, but admitted that "the condition of the poor was cruel." Finally, in 1813, the laws regulating wages were abolished. They had become a ridiculous anomaly, now that the capitalist regulated his factory through his own private legislation and let the poor-rate top up the agricultural labourer's wage to the indispensable minimum. The provisions of the labour statutes concerning contracts between master and wage-worker, concerning notice of termination and the like — which allow only a civil action against the master who breaks the contract, but a criminal action against the worker who breaks it — remain, to this hour, in full force.

The cruel laws against coalitions fell in 1825 before the threatening bearing of the proletariat. Even so, they fell only in part. Some fine remnants of the old statutes disappeared only in 1859. At last the Act of Parliament of 29 June 1871 claimed to remove the last traces of this class legislation through the legal recognition of Trades' Unions. But an Act of Parliament of the very same date (An Act to Amend the Criminal Law Relating to Violence, Threats, and Molestation) in fact restored the former state of things in a new form. Through this parliamentary sleight of hand, the means available to workers in a strike or lock-out (a strike of allied manufacturers through the simultaneous closing of their factories) were withdrawn from the common law and placed under an exceptional penal legislation whose interpretation fell to the manufacturers themselves, in their capacity as justices of the peace. Two years earlier, the very same House of Commons and the very same Mr. Gladstone had, in a well-known show of honesty, introduced a bill to abolish all exceptional penal laws against the working class. But it was never allowed to go beyond a second reading, and the matter was dragged out until, at last, the "great Liberal party," through an alliance with the Tories, found the courage to turn decisively against the very proletariat that had brought it to power. Not content with this betrayal, the "great Liberal party" allowed the English judges — ever fawning in the service of the ruling classes — to dig up the long-obsolete laws on "conspiracy" and apply them to workers' coalitions. One sees that only reluctantly, and under pressure from the masses, did the English Parliament give up the laws against strikes and Trades' Unions — after it had itself, for five centuries, with shameless self-interest, occupied the position of a permanent Trades' Union of the capitalists against the workers.

Right at the outset of the revolutionary storm, the French bourgeoisie dared to take back from the workers the right of association they had only just won. By the decree of 14 June 1791 it declared all workers' coalition an "attack on liberty and the Declaration of the Rights of Man," punishable by 500 livres and a year's deprivation of active citizenship (note 225; EN [6]). This law, which confines the competitive struggle between capital and labour, by means of state policing, within limits comfortable for capital, outlived revolutions and changes of dynasty. Even the Terror left it untouched. It was struck from the Code Pénal only quite recently. Nothing is more characteristic than the pretext for this bourgeois coup. "Although," says Le Chapelier, the rapporteur, "it is desirable that wages should rise higher than they now stand, so that the one who receives them may be free of that absolute dependence, born of the want of the necessities of life, which is almost the dependence of slavery" — the workers must nonetheless not be allowed to come to an understanding about their own interests, to act in common, and thereby moderate their "absolute dependence, which is almost slavery," because in doing so they would violate "the freedom of their ci-devant masters, the present entrepreneurs" (the freedom to keep the workers in slavery!) — and because a coalition against the despotism of the former masters of the guilds is — one may guess it! — a restoration of the guilds abolished by the French constitution (note 226; EN [7]).

Having considered the violent creation of vogelfrei proletarians, the bloody discipline that turns them into wage-labourers, and the filthy, state-backed action that raises capital's accumulation by police methods in step with labour's degree of exploitation, the question arises: where do the capitalists originally come from? For the expropriation of the rural population creates, directly, only great landed proprietors. As for the genesis of the farmer, we can trace it almost with our own hands, since it is a slow process rolling forward over many centuries. Serfs themselves, alongside free small landowners, were in very different relations of possession, and were accordingly emancipated under very different economic conditions.

In England the farmer's first form is the bailiff, himself a serf, in a position resembling the ancient Roman villicus, only within a narrower sphere of action. During the second half of the 14th century the landlord replaces him with a tenant supplied with seed, cattle, and implements, whose condition is not very different from the peasant's — except that he exploits more wage-labour. He soon becomes a metayer, a half-farmer, contributing part of the agricultural capital while the landlord supplies the rest, the two dividing the total product in a proportion fixed by contract. This form quickly disappears in England, to make way for the farmer proper, who valorizes his own capital by employing wage-labourers and pays the landlord a part of the surplus-product, in money or in kind, as ground-rent.

Through the 15th century, so long as the independent peasant and the farm-servant who, alongside his wage-service, still works his own plot go on enriching themselves by their own labour, the farmer's circumstances and his field of production remain equally middling. The agricultural revolution of the last third of the 15th century, continuing through almost the whole of the 16th (though not its final decades), enriches him exactly as fast as it impoverishes the rural population (note 227; EN [1]). The usurpation of common pastures and the like lets him increase his livestock enormously at almost no cost, while that livestock in turn supplies richer manure for working the soil.

A decisive new factor enters in the 16th century. Leases then ran long, often for 99 years, and the continuing fall in the value of the precious metals — and so of money — bore the farmers golden fruit. Apart from all the other circumstances already discussed, it lowered wages; a fragment of that fall was diverted into farming profit. The continual rise in the price of corn, wool, meat, and every other agricultural product swelled the farmer's money-capital without any effort of his own, even as the ground-rent he owed remained fixed in the old, depreciated money-value (note 228; EN [2]). Thus he enriched himself at one and the same time at the expense of his wage-labourers and of his landlord — small wonder, then, that by the end of the 16th century England possessed a class of, for the conditions of the time, wealthy "capitalist farmers" (note 229; EN [3]).

The repeated, ever-renewed expropriation and eviction of the rural population kept supplying town industry, as we have seen, with fresh masses of proletarians standing entirely outside the guild system — a fortunate circumstance that leads old A. Anderson (not to be confused with James Anderson), in his history of commerce, to believe in the direct intervention of Providence. We should linger a moment longer on this element of primitive accumulation. The thinning of the independent, self-managing rural population matched not only the thickening of the industrial proletariat, much as Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire explains the condensation of cosmic matter in one place by its rarefaction in another. Despite the diminished number of its cultivators, the soil went on yielding as much or more produce as before, because the revolution in landed-property relations came together with improved methods of cultivation, greater cooperation, and concentration of the means of production, and because the rural wage-labourers were not only worked more intensively but also saw the ground on which they worked for themselves shrink further and further. With the released part of the rural population, then, their former food is released too. It now turns into a material element of variable capital. The peasant turned out into thin air must buy back their value from his new master, the industrial capitalist, in the form of wages. As with the Note 230/[1]: In his "Notions de Philosophie Naturelle." Paris, 1838. Note 231/[2]: A point that Sir James Steuart emphasises.

food, so it was with industry's home-grown agricultural raw material. It turned into an element of constant capital.

Suppose, for example, that part of the Westphalian peasants who, in Frederick II's time, all spun flax — though not silk — are violently expropriated and driven from the soil, while the remaining part is turned into day-labourers for large tenant-farmers. At the same time great flax-spinning mills and weaving-sheds spring up, in which the "released" now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as it did before; not a fibre of it has changed, but a new social soul has entered its body. It now forms part of the manufacturer's constant capital. Formerly distributed among a vast number of small producers, who grew it themselves and spun it in small portions with their families, it is now concentrated in the hand of one capitalist, who has others spin and weave it for him. The extra labour once spent on flax-spinning used to realize itself as extra income for countless peasant families, or, in Frederick II's time, as taxes for the King of Prussia; it now realizes itself as profit for a few capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over the flat countryside, are now crowded together, along with the workers and the raw material, into a few great labour-barracks. And spindles, looms, and raw material are, from now on, transformed from means of independent existence for spinners and weavers into means of commanding them and sucking unpaid labour out of them. One cannot tell, by looking, that the great manufactories, like the great tenant-farms, were thrown together out of many small production-sites through the expropriation of many small independent producers — yet unprejudiced observation is not to be misled. In the time of Mirabeau, the lion of the Revolution, the great manufactories were still called manufactures réunies, workshops thrown into one, as we speak of fields thrown into one. Note 232/[3]: "I will allow you," says the capitalist, "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'Économie Politique, Genève 1760, p. 70.)

"One sees only," says Mirabeau, "the great manufactories, where hundreds of people work under one director and which people commonly call united manufactories (manufactures réunies); those, on the other hand, where a very great number of workers are scattered and each works on his own account, are scarcely honoured with a glance — they are placed entirely in the background. This is a very great mistake, for they alone form a truly important part of the nation's wealth… The united factory (fabrique réunie) will enrich one or two entrepreneurs wonderfully, but the workers are merely better- or worse-paid day-labourers, sharing in none of the entrepreneur's prosperity. In the separate factory (fabrique séparée), by contrast, no one grows rich, but a great many workers live in comfort… The number of industrious and thrifty workers will grow, because they see in a wise way of life, in activity, a means of substantially bettering their condition, rather than gaining a small rise in wages that can never be an important object for the future, but at most enables people to live a little better from hand to mouth. The separate, individual manufactories, mostly joined with a little farming, are the free ones." Note 233/[4]: Mirabeau, l.c., t. III, pp. 20-109 passim. That Mirabeau considers the separate workshops more economical and productive than the "united" ones, and sees in the latter mere artificial hothouse plants cultivated under government care, is explained by the condition, at that time, of a great part of the continental manufactories.

The expropriation and eviction of part of the rural population sets free for industrial capital, along with the workers themselves, their food and their material of labour; it creates the home market.

Indeed, the very same events that turn small peasants into wage-labourers, and their means of subsistence and labour into material elements of capital, simultaneously create for that capital its own home market. Formerly the peasant family produced and worked up the food and raw materials that it afterward, for the most part, consumed itself. These raw materials and food have now become commodities; the large tenant-farmer sells them, and finds his market in the manufactories. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen goods — things whose raw material every peasant family once found within its own reach, and spun and wove for its own use — now turn into manufactured articles, whose market is precisely the rural districts themselves. The numerous scattered customers, once supplied by a mass of small producers working on their own account, now concentrate into one great market, supplied by industrial capital. Note 234/[5]: "Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into a labourer's family's yearly clothing, through its own industry in the pauses between its other work — that attracts no notice. But bring the wool to market, send it to the factory, then to the broker, then to the dealer, and you have great commercial operations and nominal capital employed to twenty times its value… The working class is thus exploited to sustain an impoverished factory population, a parasite class of shopkeepers, and a fictitious system of commerce, money, and finance." (David Urquhart, l.c., p. 120.)

So, hand in hand with the expropriation of formerly self-managing peasants and their severance from their means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic industry — the process that splits manufacture apart from agriculture. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give a country's home market the extent and the firm foundation that the capitalist mode of production requires.

Manufacture proper, however, brings about no radical transformation. It seizes hold of national production, we may recall, only piecemeal, and always rests on urban handicraft and rural domestic industry as its broad background. If it destroys that domestic industry in one form, in particular branches, at particular points, it calls it back to life in others, because up to a certain point it still needs it for working up the raw material. It therefore produces a new class of small country-people, who treat tilling the soil as a side occupation and industrial labour — selling the product to the manufactory, directly or by way of the merchant — as their main business. This is one reason, though not the main one, for a phenomenon that at first puzzles the student of English history: from the last third of the 15th century on he finds a running complaint, broken only at certain intervals, about the growing capitalist farming on the land and the progressive destruction of the peasantry; and yet, on the other hand, he always finds that peasantry turning up again, though in diminished numbers and in an ever-worsened form. The main reason is this: England is, in alternating periods, now chiefly a grower of corn, now chiefly a breeder of cattle, and the extent of peasant farming fluctuates with these swings. Only large-scale industry supplies, with machinery, the constant basis of capitalist agriculture, expropriates radically the immense majority of the rural population, and completes the separation between agriculture and rural domestic industry, tearing up its roots — spinning and weaving. It is large-scale industry, therefore, that for the first time conquers the whole home market for industrial capital. Note 235/[6]: Cromwell's time forms an exception here. So long as the Republic lasted, the mass of the English people, in every rank, rose out of the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors. Note 236/[7]: Tuckett knows that the great woollen industry emerges, with the introduction of machinery, from manufacture proper and the destruction of rural or domestic manufacture. "The plough and the yoke were the invention of gods and the occupation of heroes: are the loom, the spindle, and the spinning-wheel of less noble descent? You sever the spinning-wheel and the plough, the spindle and the yoke, and you get factories and poor-houses, credit and panics, two hostile nations, agricultural and commercial." (David Urquhart, l.c., p. 122.) But now comes Carey, and accuses England — surely not without reason — of striving to turn every other country into a mere agricultural people, whose manufacturer is to be England. He claims that Turkey has been ruined in this way, because "the owners and cultivators of the soil were never permitted" by England "to strengthen themselves through the 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 Turkey's ruin, where he carried on free-trade propaganda in England's interest. The best of it is that Carey — himself, incidentally, a notorious Russophile — wants to prevent, through protectionism, the very process of separation that it accelerates. Note 237/[8]: The philanthropic English economists — Mill, Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett, and the rest — and liberal manufacturers like John Bright and company, ask the English landed aristocracy, as God asked Cain about his brother Abel: where have our thousands of freeholders gone? But where, then, did you yourselves come from? From the destruction of those very freeholders. Why do you not ask further: where have the independent weavers, spinners, and artisans gone?

The genesis of the industrial capitalist did not proceed as gradually as that of the tenant farmer. Doubtless many small guild-masters, and far more independent small artisans, or even wage-labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and, through the gradually widening exploitation of wage-labour and the corresponding accumulation, into capitalists sans phrase [pure and simple]. In the childhood period of capitalist production, things often went on much as in the childhood period of the medieval Note 238: 'Industrial' here as against 'agricultural.' In the 'categorical' sense, the tenant farmer is as much an industrial capitalist as the manufacturer is.

system of towns, where the question of which of the escaped serfs was to be master and which servant was decided, in large part, by the earlier or later date of their flight. Yet the snail's pace of this method corresponded in no way to the commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century had created. But the Middle Ages had handed down two distinct forms of capital, forms that mature within the most different economic formations of society and, before the era of the capitalist mode of production, count 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?" Note 239/[2]: "The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted." London, 1832, pp. 98-99. Author of the anonymous work: Th. Hodgskin.

The author ought to have told himself that revolutions are not made by laws.

The money-capital formed by usury and trade was prevented, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild constitution, from turning into industrial capital. These barriers fell with the dissolution of the feudal retinues, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population. The new manufactures were set up in sea-export towns, or at points in the open countryside, beyond the control of the old system of towns and its guild constitution. Hence, in England, an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries. Note 240/[3]: Even as late as 1794 the small cloth-makers of Leeds sent a deputation to Parliament, petitioning for a law that would forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. (Dr. Aikin, l.c.)

The discovery of the gold- and silver-lands in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the native population, the incipient conquest and plunder of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins — these mark the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, with the surface of the globe as its theatre. It opens with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, takes on gigantic dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still being played out in the opium wars against China, and so on.

The various moments of primitive accumulation now distribute themselves, more or less in chronological order, over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England in particular. In England, at the end of the seventeenth century, they are systematically combined in the colonial system, the system of national debt, the modern system of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods rest in part on the most brutal violence — the colonial system, for instance. But all of them made use of state power, the concentrated and organized violence of society, to hothouse the transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist one, and to shorten the transitions. Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

Of the Christian colonial system, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, W. Howitt, 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." Note 241/[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," 3rd ed., Brussels, 1837. One must study this material in detail to see what the bourgeois makes of himself and of the worker, wherever he can model the world after his own image without restraint.

The history of Dutch colonial administration — and Holland was the model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century — unfolds a picture of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness that has no equal. Nothing is more characteristic than their system of man-stealing in Celebes, to obtain slaves for Java. Men-stealers were trained for this very purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller were the chief agents in this trade, native princes its chief sellers. The stolen youths were hidden away in the secret prisons of Celebes until ripe for shipment on the slave-ships. An official report says: Note 242: Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut.-Gov. of that island, "The History of Java." London, 1817. [Vol. II, pp. cxc-cxci.]

"This one town of Macassar, for example, 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 gain possession of Malacca, the Dutch bribed the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, so as to 'abstain' from paying the £21,875 bribe. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, counted over 80,000 inhabitants in 1750; by 1811, only 8,000. That is doux commerce [sweet trade] for you!

The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides political rule in the East Indies, the exclusive monopoly of the tea trade, of the China trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, along with trade in India's interior, became a monopoly of the Company's higher officials. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel, and other goods were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The officials themselves fixed the prices and fleeced the unfortunate Hindu at will. The Governor-General himself took part in this private trade. His favourites received contracts on terms that let them, cleverer than the alchemists, make gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up overnight like mushrooms; primitive accumulation proceeded without the advance of a single shilling. The judicial prosecution of Warren Hastings swarms with examples of this kind. Here is one case. An opium contract is assigned to a certain Sullivan at the very moment of his departure — on official business — for a part of India quite remote from the opium districts. Sullivan sells his contract for £40,000 to a certain Binn; Binn sells it the same day for £60,000, and the eventual purchaser who actually carries out the contract declares that even so he cleared an enormous profit. According to a list laid before Parliament, the Company and its officials extorted £6,000,000 in gifts from the Indians between 1757 and 1766! Between 1769 and 1770 the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to resell it except at fabulous prices. Note 243: In 1866 more than a million Hindus died of starvation in the single province of Orissa. Even so, an attempt was made to enrich the Indian exchequer through the prices at which food was doled out to the starving.

The treatment of the natives was naturally at its wildest in plantation-colonies worked purely for export, such as the West Indies, and in rich, densely populated countries, such as Mexico and the East Indies, given over to plunder and murder. Yet even in the colonies proper the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, set, by resolutions of their Assembly in 1703, a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had declared a certain tribe rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp, aged 12 and upward, £100 in new currency; for a male prisoner, £105; for captured women and children, £50; for the scalps of women and children, £50! Some decades later the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of those pious pilgrim fathers, who had meanwhile grown rebellious themselves: at English instigation and English pay they were tomahawked. The British Parliament declared bloodhounds and scalping to be 'means that God and Nature had put into its hand.'

The colonial system ripened trade and shipping as in a hothouse. The 'monopoly companies' (Luther) were mighty levers of the concentration of capital. The colony secured the burgeoning manufactures a market for their goods, and an accumulation intensified by monopoly of that market. The treasure captured outside Europe by direct plunder, enslavement, and murder flowed back to the mother country and there turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, stood, as early as 1648, at the peak 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, shipping, manufactures surpassed those of any other country. The capital of the Republic was perhaps more considerable than that of the rest of Europe put together."

Gülich forgets to add that, by 1648, the mass of the Dutch people were already more overworked, poorer, and more brutally oppressed than the people of the rest of Europe put together.

Today industrial supremacy carries commercial supremacy with it; in the manufacturing period proper, by contrast, it was commercial supremacy that gave industrial predominance. Hence the leading role the colonial system played at that time. It was "the strange god" who perched himself beside the old idols of Europe on the altar, and one fine day, with a shove and a jolt, knocked them all over. It proclaimed money-making as the sole and ultimate purpose of mankind.

The system of public credit, that is of national debts, whose origins can already be traced to Genoa and Venice in the Middle Ages, took possession of the whole of Europe during the manufacturing period. The colonial system, with its maritime trade and its trade wars, served it as a hothouse, so that it first took root in Holland. The national debt — the alienation of the state, whether despotic, constitutional, or republican — sets its stamp on the capitalist era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that really enters into the collective possession of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, quite consistently, the modern doctrine that a people grows richer the more deeply it goes into debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital, and with the rise of national indebtedness, loss of faith in the national debt takes the place of the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness. Note 243a/[7]: William Cobbett remarks that in England all public institutions are called 'royal'; as compensation for this, however, there is the 'national' debt.

The public debt becomes one of the most energetic levers of primitive accumulation. As if by the stroke of a magic wand, it endows unproductive money with the power to breed and so turns it into capital, without exposing it to the toil and risk inseparable from industrial or even usurious investment. The state's creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public, easily transferable bonds that go on functioning in their hands exactly as so much hard cash would. Apart from the class of idle rentiers thus created, and the improvised wealth of the financiers who act as middlemen between government and nation — as well as of the tax-farmers, merchants, and private manufacturers for whom a good part of every state loan does the service of capital fallen from heaven — the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to trading in negotiable paper of every kind, to speculation: in a word, to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

From their birth, the great banks decked out with national titles were nothing but companies of private speculators who placed themselves alongside the governments and, thanks to the privileges they received, were able to advance them money; hence the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the shares of these banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began by lending its money to the government at 8 per cent; at the same time Parliament empowered it to coin money out of that same capital, by lending it a second time to the public in the form of banknotes, which it was allowed to use to discount bills, make advances on goods, and buy up precious metals. It was not long before this credit-money, manufactured by the bank itself, became the coin in which the Bank of England made loans to the state and, on the state's account, paid the interest on the public debt. Not content with giving with one hand in order to take back more with the other, it remained, even while receiving, the nation's perpetual creditor down to the last farthing advanced; gradually it became the country's inevitable repository of metallic treasure and the centre of gravity of all commercial credit. Around the time England stopped burning witches, it began hanging banknote forgers; what effect the sudden appearance of this brood of bankocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, and stock-jobbers had on their contemporaries is shown by the writings of the period, Bolingbroke's among them. Note 243b/[8]: If the Tartars were to flood Europe today, it would be hard work to make them understand what a financier is among us. (Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, vol. IV, p. 33, London ed., 1769.)

With the national debts arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people: the villainies of the Venetian plunder-system form one such hidden basis of Holland's capital wealth, since decaying Venice lent it great sums of money, and the same holds between Holland and England. Already at the start of the 18th century Holland's manufactures were far outstripped, and it had ceased to be the leading commercial and industrial nation; one of its main lines of business from 1701 to 1776 therefore became lending enormous capitals, above all to its powerful rival, England. Something similar holds today between England and the United States: much capital that appears in the United States today without any birth certificate was, only yesterday, children's blood capitalised in England.

Since the national debt has its backing in state revenues, which must cover the annual interest and similar payments, the modern system of taxation became the necessary complement of the system of national loans: loans let a government meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayer feeling it at once, but they require higher taxes later, and conversely, the rise in taxation caused by the accumulation of successively contracted debts forces the government, whenever new extraordinary expenses arise, always to take up new loans in turn. Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of subsistence — and hence their dearer price — thus carries within itself the seed of automatic progression. Over-taxation is not an accident but rather a principle; in Holland, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot de Witt accordingly celebrated it in his Maxims as the best system for making the wage-labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and — overburdened with work. The destructive influence it exerts on the wage-labourer's condition concerns us less here than the violent expropriation, which it also conditions, of the peasant, the artisan — in short, of every element of the petty middle class. On that point there are not two opinions, even among bourgeois economists; its expropriating efficacy is further reinforced by the protectionist system, which forms one of its integral parts.

The large share that public debt and its corresponding fiscal system have had in the capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation of the masses has led a number of writers — Cobbett, Doubleday, and others — to look here, wrongly, for the fundamental cause of the misery of modern peoples.

The protectionist system was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of expropriating independent workers, of capitalising the nation's means of production and subsistence, of forcibly shortening the transition from the old-fashioned to the modern mode of production. The European states fought over the patent for this invention, and once they had entered the service of the money-makers, they plundered, to that end, not only their own peoples — indirectly through protective tariffs, directly through export premiums, and so on — but also, in their dependent minor territories, forcibly rooted out entire industries, as England did with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the European continent, following Colbert's example, the process was simplified still further: here the industrialist's original capital flows in part directly out of the state treasury.

"Why," cries Mirabeau, "go looking so far afield for the cause of Saxony's manufacturing splendour before the Seven Years' War? A hundred and eighty million in state debts!" Note 244/[9]: Mirabeau, l.c., t. VI, p. 101.

Colonial system, national debt, crushing taxation, protection, commercial wars, and so on — these offshoots of the manufacturing period proper — swell to gigantic size during the childhood period of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by the great Herodian theft of children. Like the royal navy, the factories recruit themselves by means of the press-gang. Blasé as Sir F. M. Eden is about the horrors of expropriating the country people from soil and land, from the last third of the fifteenth century down to his own time, at the end of the eighteenth — however self-satisfied he is in congratulating this process as "necessary" to establish capitalist agriculture and "the true proportion between arable land and pasture" — he shows none of that same economic insight into the necessity of child-theft and child-slavery for transforming manufacturing operation into factory operation, and for establishing the true relation between capital and labour-power. He says:

"It may perhaps be worth the public's consideration whether any manufacture that, to carry out its work successfully, must plunder cottages and workhouses of poor children, so that they, relieving one another in shifts, are worked to exhaustion through most of the night and robbed of rest; a manufacture that, besides, herds together crowds of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, in such a way that the contagion of example must lead to depravity and dissoluteness — whether such a manufacture can add to the sum of national and individual happiness?" Note 245/[10]: Eden, l.c., Book II, ch. I, p. 421. "In Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and especially Lancashire," says Fielden, "the newly invented machinery was employed in large

factories, close by streams capable of turning the water-wheel. Thousands of hands were suddenly required at these places, far from the towns; and Lancashire in particular, until then comparatively thinly populated and barren, now needed above all a population. Small, nimble fingers were especially in demand. At once the custom sprang up of procuring apprentices (!) from the various parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these small, helpless creatures, from the age of 7 to 13 or 14, were dispatched to the north in this way. It was the custom for the master" (that is, the child-thief) "to clothe, feed, and lodge his apprentices in an apprentice-house near the factory. Overseers were appointed to watch over their work. It was in the interest of these slave-drivers to work the children to the utmost, since their pay stood in proportion to the quantity of product that could be wrung from the child. Cruelty was the natural consequence ... In many factory districts, especially Lancashire's, the most heart-rending tortures were inflicted on these harmless and friendless creatures consigned to the factory-masters. They were hounded to death by excess of labour ... they were whipped, chained, and tortured with the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; in many cases they were starved to the very bone while the whip kept them at their work ... indeed, in some cases they were driven to suicide! ... The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire, shut off from the public eye, became grim wastelands of torture — and often of murder! ... The manufacturers' profits were enormous. That only whetted their werewolf hunger. They took up the practice of night-work, that is, once they had crippled one shift of hands through the day's labour, they kept another shift ready for the night's; the day shift climbed into the beds the night shift had just left, and vice versa. It is popular tradition in Lancashire that the beds never grew cold." Note 246/[11]: John Fielden, l.c., pp. 5, 6. On the original infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), l.c., p. 219, and Gisborne, "Enquiry into the Duties of Men," 1795, vol. II. — Once the steam engine had transplanted the factories away from the rural waterfalls into the middle of towns, the "abstinence-loving" money-maker now found the child-material ready to hand, without needing a forced supply of 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, F. Horner (a luminary of the Bullion Committee and an intimate friend of Ricardo's) declared in the Commons: "It is notorious that, along with a bankrupt's effects, a gang — if he may use the expression — of factory children was once publicly advertised and sold off as part of the property. Two years ago" (1813) "a shocking case came before the King's Bench. It concerned a number of boys. A London parish had handed them over to a manufacturer, who transferred them again to another. They were eventually found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute starvation (absolute famine). Another case, still more shocking, had come to his knowledge as a member of the parliamentary committee of inquiry: not many years ago, a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer concluded a contract stipulating that for every 20 healthy children he took, he must also take one idiot into the bargain."

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, European public opinion had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. Nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served as a means to capital accumulation. Read, for instance, the naive commercial annals of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted as a triumph of English statecraft that, at the Peace of Utrecht, England wrung from Spain, through the Asiento treaty, the privilege of conducting the negro trade — which it had until then carried on only between Africa and the English West Indies — now also between Africa and Spanish America. England obtained the right to supply Spanish America with 4,800 negroes annually until 1743. This at the same time furnished an official cloak for British smuggling. Liverpool grew great on the slave trade; that was its method of primitive accumulation. And to this day Liverpool "respectability" has remained the Pindar of the slave trade, which — compare the cited work of Dr. Aikin from 1795 — "raises the spirit of commercial enterprise to the point of passion, produces famous seamen, and brings in enormous sums of money." In 1730 Liverpool employed 15 ships in the slave trade; in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792, 132.

While it introduced child slavery in England, the cotton industry at the same time gave the impetus to transform the formerly more or less patriarchal slave economy of the United States into a commercial system of exploitation. In general, the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed, as its pedestal, slavery sans phrase [pure and simple] in the New World. Note 247/[12]: In 1790, the English West Indies had 10 slaves to every 1 free person; the French, 14 to 1; the Dutch, 23 to 1. (Henry Brougham, "An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers," Edinburgh, 1803, vol. II, p. 74.)

Tantae molis erat [such was the effort required] to set free the "eternal natural laws" of the capitalist mode of production, to accomplish the process of separation between workers and the conditions of labour, to turn, at the one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the people into wage-labourers, into free "labouring poor" — that artificial product of modern history. Note 248/[13]: The expression "labouring poor" occurs in English law from the moment the class of wage-labourers becomes noticeable. The "labouring poor" stand opposed, on the one hand, to the "idle poor" — beggars and so on — and, on the other, to workers who are not yet plucked fowl but still owners of their own means of labour. From statute law the expression passed into political economy, handed down from Culpeper, J. Child, and others to Adam Smith and Eden. Judge by this the bona fide of that "execrable political cant-monger" Edmund Burke, when he declares the expression "labouring poor" to be "execrable political cant." This sycophant, who, in the pay of the English oligarchy, played the romantic against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the start of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy, was through and through an ordinary bourgeois: "The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and consequently 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! In the writings of the Rev. Tucker — a parson and a Tory, but otherwise a decent man and a competent political economist — one finds a very good portrait of this Edmund Burke during his liberal period. Given the infamous shamelessness that prevails today, devoutly believing in "the laws of commerce," it is our duty to brand the Burkes again and again — men who differ from their successors in one thing only: talent. If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a natural blood-stain on one cheek"

capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. Note 249/[14]: Marie Augier, "Du Crédit Public," Paris, 1842, p. 265. Note 250/[15]: "Capital," says the Quarterly Reviewer, "flees turbulence and strife, and is of a timid nature." That is very true, but not the whole truth. Capital has a horror of the absence of profit, or of very small profit, just as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital grows bold: a sure 10 per cent, and it can be employed anywhere; 20 per cent, and it becomes eager; 50 per cent, positively reckless; for 100 per cent it will trample all human laws underfoot; at 300 per cent, there is no crime it will not risk, even at the danger of the gallows. If turbulence and strife bring profit, it will freely encourage both. Witness smuggling and the slave trade. (T. J. Dunning, l.c., pp. 35-36.)

What does the original accumulation of capital — its historical genesis — actually come down to? Except where it is simply the direct conversion of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, a mere change of form, it means only the expropriation of the immediate producers: the dissolution of private property founded on one's own labour.

Private property, as opposed to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But depending on whether those private individuals are themselves the workers or the non-workers, private property also takes on a different character. The endless shadings it seems to offer at first glance only mirror the intermediate states lying between these two extremes.

The worker's private property in his own means of production is the basis of small-scale production, and small-scale production is a necessary condition for the development of social production and of the worker's own free individuality. This mode of production certainly exists within slavery, serfdom, and other relations of dependence too. But it flowers, unfolds its full energy, and wins its adequate, classical form only where the worker is the free private owner of the conditions of labour he himself handles — the peasant owner of the field he tills, the craftsman owner of the tool on which he plays like a virtuoso.

This mode of production presupposes the fragmentation of the soil and of the other means of production. Just as it excludes their concentration, it also excludes cooperation, the division of labour within one and the same production process, society's own mastery and regulation of nature, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with narrow, naturally-grown limits on production and on society. To want to perpetuate it would mean, as Pecqueur rightly says, decreeing "universal mediocrity." At a certain stage it brings into the world the material means of its own destruction. From that moment forces and passions stir in society's own womb that feel themselves fettered by it. It must be destroyed, and it is destroyed. Its destruction — the transformation of individual, scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, and so of the dwarfish property of the many into the massed property of the few, and so the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil and

means of subsistence and instruments of labour — this terrible and arduous expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prehistory of capital. It comprises a series of violent methods, of which we have passed only the epoch-making ones in review as methods of capital's own original accumulation. The expropriation of the immediate producers is accomplished with the most merciless vandalism, and under the drive of the most infamous, sordid, and pettily odious passions. Self-earned private property — resting, so to speak, on the growing-together of the individual, independent working person with his own conditions of labour — is displaced by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of other people's labour, though formally free labour. Note 251/[1]: "We find ourselves in a situation entirely new to society... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour." (Sismondi, Nouveaux Principes d'Économie Politique, vol. II, p. 434.)

Once this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society in depth and breadth, once the workers have been turned into proletarians and their conditions of labour into capital, once the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialisation of labour and the further conversion of the earth and other means of production into socially exploited — that is, communal — means of production, and therefore the further expropriation of private owners, take on a new form. What now has to be expropriated is no longer the self-managing worker, but the capitalist who exploits many workers.

This expropriation is accomplished through the play of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralisation of capitals. One capitalist always strikes many dead. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, there develops, on an ever-growing scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the earth, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments only usable in common, the economising of all means of production through their use as the means of production of combined, social labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with it the international character of the capitalist régime. With the constantly diminishing number of the capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation grows the mass of misery, oppression, servitude, degradation, and exploitation — but with it too grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly swelling in numbers, and disciplined, united, and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production that has flourished with it and under it. The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. That integument is burst. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The capitalist mode of appropriation that issues from the capitalist mode of production — and so capitalist private property — is the first negation of individual private property founded on one's own labour. But capitalist production, with the necessity of a natural process, begets its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does not re-establish private property, but it does establish individual property on the basis of the achievement of the capitalist era: cooperation and the common possession of the earth and of the means of production produced by labour itself.

The transformation of the scattered private property of individuals, resting on their own labour, into capitalist private property is of course an incomparably more protracted, harsh, and difficult process than the transformation of capitalist property — which already in fact rests on a socialised mode of production — into social property. In the one case it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in this case it is a matter of the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. Note 252/[2]: "The advance of industry, whose involuntary and unresisting promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of large-scale industry cuts, therefore, from under the bourgeoisie's feet the very ground on which it produces and appropriates its products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, is 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 genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and go under with large-scale industry; the proletariat is its own most characteristic product. The middle strata — the small manufacturer, the small merchant, the artisan, the peasant — all fight the bourgeoisie to secure their existence as middle strata from ruin... they are reactionary, for they seek to turn back the wheel of history." (Karl Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, London 1848, p. 11, 9.)