Das Kapital

REACTION OF THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION ON INDUSTRY

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital
The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural
population, intermittent but renewed again and again, supplied, as we saw,
the town industries with a mass of proletarians entirely unconnected with
the corporate guilds and unfettered by them; a fortunate circumstance that
makes old A. Anderson (not to be confounded with James Anderson), in his
“History of Commerce,” believe in the direct intervention of Providence.
We must still pause a moment on this element of primitive accumulation.
The thinning-out of the independent, self-supporting peasants not only
brought about the crowding together of the industrial proletariat, in the
way that Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the condensation of cosmical
matter at one place, by its rarefaction at another.
In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth
as much or more produce, after as before, because the revolution in the
conditions of landed property was accompanied by improved methods of culture,
greater co-operation, concentration of the means of production, &c.,
and because not only were the agricultural wage labourers put on the strain
more intensely , but the field of production on which
they worked for themselves became more and more contracted. With the setting
free of a part of the agricultural population, therefore, their former
means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into
material elements of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast
adrift, must buy their value in the form of wages, from his new master,
the industrial capitalist. That which holds good of the means of subsistence
holds with the raw materials of industry dependent upon home agriculture.
They were transformed into an element of constant capital. Suppose, e.g.,
a part of the Westphalian peasants, who, at the time of Frederick II, all
span flax, forcibly expropriated and hunted from the soil; and the other
part that remained, turned into day labourers of large farmers. At the same
time arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in which
the men “set free” now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as before.
Not a fibre of it is changed, but a new social soul has popped into its
body. It forms now a part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer.
Formerly divided among a number of small producers, who cultivated it themselves
and with their families spun it in retail fashion, it is now concentrated
in the hand of one capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for
him. The extra labour expended in flax-spinning realised itself formerly
in extra income to numerous peasant families, or maybe, in Frederick II’s
time, in taxes pour le roi de Prusse. It realises itself now in profit
for a few capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over
the face of the country, are now crowded together in a few great labour-barracks,
together with the labourers and the raw material. And spindles, looms, raw
material, are now transformed from means of independent existence for the
spinners and weavers, into means for commanding them and sucking out of
them unpaid labour. One does not perceive, when looking
at the large manufactories and the large farms, that they have originated
from the throwing into one of many small centres of production, and have
been built up by the expropriation of many small independent producers.
Nevertheless, the popular intuition was not at fault. 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.
Says Mirabeau:
“We are only paying attention to the grand manufactories,
in which hundreds of men work under a director and which are commonly called
manufactures réunies. Those where a very large number of
labourers work, each separately and on his own account, are hardly considered;
they are placed at an infinite distance from the others. This is a great
error, as the latter alone make a really important object of national prosperity....
The large workshop (manufacture réunie) will enrich prodigiously
one or two entrepreneurs, but the labourers will only be journeymen, paid
more or less, and will not have any share in the success of the undertaking.
In the discrete workshop (manufacture séparée), on the contrary, no one
will become rich, but many labourers will be comfortable; the saving and
the industrious will be able to amass a little capital, to put by a little
for a birth of a child, for an illness, for themselves or their belongings.
The number of saving and industrious labourers will increase, because they
will see in good conduct, in activity, a means of essentially bettering
their condition, and not of obtaining a small rise in wages that can never
be of any importance of the future, and whose sole result is to place men
in the position to live a little better, but only from day to day.... The
large workshops, undertakings of certain private persons who pay labourers
from day to day to work for their gain, may be able to put these private
individuals at their ease, but they will never be an object worth the attention
of governments. Discrete workshops, for the most part combined with cultivation
of small holdings, are the only free ones.” The expropriation
and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free
for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of subsistence, and material
for labour; it also created the home-market.
In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage labourers,
and their means of subsistence and of labour into material elements of capital,
created, at the same time, a home-market for the latter. Formerly, the
peasant family produced the means of subsistence and the raw materials,
which they themselves, for the most part, consumed. These raw materials
and means of subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer
sells them, he finds his market in manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen
stuffs — things whose raw materials had been within the reach of every
peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use — were now
transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts
at once served for markets. The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans
until now had found in the numerous small producers working on their own
account, concentrate themselves now into one great market provided for
by industrial capital. Thus, hand in hand with the
expropriation of the self-supporting peasants, with their separation from
their means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic industry,
the process of separation between manufacture and agriculture. And only
the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the internal market
of a country that extension and consistence which the capitalist mode of
production requires. Still the manufacturing period, properly so called,
does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely.
It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers but
partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts
of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate
basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain
points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs them for the
preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore,
a new class of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of
the soil as an accessary calling, find their chief occupation in industrial
labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or
through the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the chief, cause
of a phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student of English history.
From the last third of the 15th century he finds continually complaints,
only interrupted at certain intervals, about the encroachment of capitalist
farming in the country districts, and the progressive destruction of the
peasantry. On the other hand, he always finds this peasantry turning up
again, although in diminished number, and always under worse conditions.
The chief reason is: England is at one time chiefly a cultivator of corn,
at another chiefly a breeder of cattle, in alternate periods, and with these
the extent of peasant cultivation fluctuates. Modern Industry alone, and
finally, supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic
agriculture, expropriates radically the enormous majority of the agricultural
population, and completes the separation between agriculture and rural
domestic industry, whose roots — spinning and weaving — it tears up.
It therefore also, for the first time, conquers for
industrial capital the entire home market.
Footnotes
1. In his “Notions de Philosophie Naturelle.”
Paris, 1838.
2. A point that Sir James Steuart emphasises.
3. “Je permettrai,” says the capitalist, “que vous ayez l’honneur de me servir, à condition que vous me donnez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que je prends de vous commander.” [I will allow you ... 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’Economie Politique.”)
4. Mirabeau, l.c., t.III, pp.20-109 passim.
That Mirabeau considers the separate workshops more economical and productive
than the “combined,” and sees in the latter merely artificial exotics under
government cultivation, is explained by the position at that time of a
great part of the continental manufactures.
5. “Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into yearly clothing of a labourer’s family by its own industry in the intervals
of other works — this makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to
the factory, thence to the broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have
great commercial operations, and nominal capital engaged to the amount
of twenty times its value.... The working-class is thus emersed to support
a wretched factory population, a parastical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious
commercial, monetary, and financial system.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.120.)
6. Cromwell’s time forms an exception.
So long as the Republic lasted, the mass of the English people of all grades
rose from the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors.
7. Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen
industry has sprung, with the introduction of machinery, from manufacture
proper and from the destruction of rural and domestic industries.
“The plough, the yoke, were ‘the invention of gods, and the occupation
of heroes’; are the loom, the spindle, the distaff, of less noble parentage.
You sever the distaff and the plough, the spindle and the yoke, and you
get factories and poor-houses, credit and panics, two hostile nations,
agriculture and commercial.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.122.)
But now comes Carey, and cries out upon England, surely not with unreason,
that it is trying to turn every other country into a mere agricultural
nation, whose manufacturer is to be England. He pretends that in this way
Turkey has been ruined, because “the owners and occupants of land have
never been permitted by England to strengthen themselves by the formation
of that 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 the ruin of Turkey, where he had made Free-trade
propaganda in the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great
Russophile by the way, wants to prevent the process of separation by that
very system of protection which accelerates it.
8. Philanthropic English economists, like Mill,
Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett, &c., and liberal manufacturers like
John Bright & Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked
Cain after Abel, Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But where
do you come from, then? From the destruction of those freeholders.
Why don’t you ask further, where are the independent weavers, spinners,
and artisans gone?
Transcribed by Zodiac
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
Next: Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
Capital Volume One - Index