Das Kapital

THE SECRET OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Twenty-Six
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
We have seen how money is changed into capital; how
through capital surplus-value is made, and from
surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital
presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes
capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes
the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of
labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The
whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious
circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a
primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith)
preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the
result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its
starting point.
This primitive accumulation plays in Political
Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.
Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human
race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told
as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were
two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and,
above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending
their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of
theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to
be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but
the history of economic original sin reveals to us that
there are people to whom this is by no means essential.
Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort
accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing
to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin
dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all
its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and
the wealth of the few that increases constantly although
they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is
every day preached to us in the defence of property.
M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with
all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once
so spirituel. But as soon as the question of
property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the
intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all
ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it
is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,
briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of
Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.
Right and “labour” were from all time the sole means of
enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a
matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are
anything but idyllic.
In themselves money and commodities are no more
capital than are the means of production and of subsistence.
They want transforming into capital. But this transformation
itself can only take place under certain circumstances that
centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of
commodity-possessors must come face to face and into
contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of
production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase
the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s
labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers
of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of
labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither
they themselves form part and parcel of the means of
production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor
do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of
peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from,
unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With
this polarization of the market for commodities, the
fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given.
The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation
of the labourers from all property in the means by which
they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist
production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains
this separation, but reproduces it on a continually
extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way
for the capitalist system, can be none other than the
process which takes away from the labourer the possession of
his means of production; a process that transforms, on the
one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production
into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into
wage labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation,
therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of
divorcing the producer from the means of production. It
appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric
stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding
with it.
The economic structure of capitalist society has
grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The
dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the
former.
The immediate producer, the labourer, could only
dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached
to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman
of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who
carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must
further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their
rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of
their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement
which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on
the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from
the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for
our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new
freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had
been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all
the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation,
is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and
fire.
The industrial capitalists, these new potentates,
had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of
handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of
the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of
social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle
both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives,
and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free
development of production and the free exploitation of man
by man. The chevaliers d’industrie, however, only succeeded
in supplanting the chevaliers of the sword by making use of
events of which they themselves were wholly innocent. They
have risen by means as vile as those by which the Roman
freedman once on a time made himself the master of his
patronus.
The starting point of the development that gave
rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was
the servitude of the labourer. The advance consisted in a
change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of
feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To
understand its march, we need not go back very far. Although
we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production
as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in
certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era
dates from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the
abolition of serfdom has been long effected, and the highest
development of the middle ages, the existence of sovereign
towns, has been long on the wane.
In the history of primitive accumulation, all
revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the
capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those
moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly
torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and
“unattached” proletarians on the labour-market. The
expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant,
from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The
history of this expropriation, in different countries,
assumes different aspects, and runs through its various
phases in different orders of succession, and at different
periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has
it the classic form.
Footnotes
1.
In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest,
the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than
elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country before
he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His
emancipation at once transformed him into a free
proletarian, who, moreover, found his master ready
waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed down
as legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the
world-market, about the end of the 15th century, annihilated
Northern Italy’s commercial supremacy, a movement in the
reverse direction set in. The labourers of the towns were
driven en masse into the country, and gave an
impulse, never before seen, to the petite culture,
carried on in the form of gardening.
Transcribed by Zodiac
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
Next: Chapter Twenty-Seven: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
Capital Volume One- Index