Das Kapital

GENESIS OF THE INDUSTRIAL CAPITALIST

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty-One
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
The genesis of the industrial *
capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer.
Doubtless many small guild-masters, and yet more independent small artisans,
or even wage labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists,
and (by gradually extending exploitation of wage labour and corresponding
accumulation) into full-blown capitalists. In the infancy of capitalist
production, things often happened as in the infancy of medieval towns,
where the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which
servant, was in great part decided by the earlier or later date of their
flight. The snail’s pace of this method corresponded in no wise with the
commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries
of the end of the 15th century created. But the middle ages had handed
down two distinct forms of capital, which mature in the most different
economic social formations, and which before the era of the capitalist
mode of production, are considered 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?”
The author should have remembered that revolutions are not made by laws.
The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented
from turning into industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution,
in the towns by the guild organisation. These fetters
vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation
and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were
established at sea-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old
municipalities and their guilds. Hence in England an embittered struggle
of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning
of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into
a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are
the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the
commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It
begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions
in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars
against China, &c.
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves
now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal,
Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century,
they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the
national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system.
These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial
system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and
organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of
transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode,
and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society
pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a
speciality of Christianity, 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.”
The history of the colonial administration of Holland — and Holland was
the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century —
“is one of the most
extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness”

Nothing is more characteristic than their system
of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained
for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the
chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young
people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they
were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says:
“This one town of Macassar, e.g., 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 secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into
the town in 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him,
to “abstain” from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason.
Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi,
a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only
18,000. Sweet commerce!
The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides
the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as
well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods
to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands,
as well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher
employés of the company. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and
other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employés
themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The
Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received
contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists,
made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a
day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling.
The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance.
A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his
departure on an official mission to a part of India far removed from the
opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000;
Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser
who carried out the contract declared that after all he realised an enormous
gain. According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the Company
and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians
as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying
up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.

The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful
in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West
Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India,
that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called,
the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself.
Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in
1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every
Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100
on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain
tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and
upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for
women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children
£50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on
the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in
the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked
by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping
as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”
The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation.
The “societies Monopolia” of Luther were powerful levers for concentration
of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures,
and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The
treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement,
and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into
capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, in 1648
stood already in the acme 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, marine, manufactures,
surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic
was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put together.”
Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more
over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of
all the rest of Europe put together.
Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the
period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the
commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant
rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was “the strange
God” who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of
Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a
heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity.
The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose
origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages, took
possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial
system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house
for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e.,
the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked
with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national
wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples
is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence,
the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it
is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with
the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes
the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.
The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive
accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren
money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without
the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable
from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually
give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily
negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard
cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created,
and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the
government and the nation – as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants,
private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders
the service of a capital fallen from heaven – the national debt has given
rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all
kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern
bankocracy.
At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles,
were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by
the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they
received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence the accumulation
of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive
rise in the stock of these banks, whose full development dates from the
founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began with
lending its money to the Government at 8%; at the same time it was empowered
by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again
to the public in the form of banknotes. It was allowed to use these notes
for discounting bills, making advances on commodities, and for buying the
precious metals. It was not long ere this credit-money, made by the bank
itself, became. The coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to
the State, and paid, on account of the State, the interest on the public
debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back
more with the other; it remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal creditor
of the nation down to the last shilling advanced. Gradually it became inevitably
the receptacle of the metallic hoard of the country, and the centre of
gravity of all commercial credit. What effect was produced on their contemporaries
by the sudden uprising of this brood of bankocrats, financiers, rentiers,
brokers, stock-jobbers, &c., is proved by the writings of that time,
e.g., by Bolingbroke’s.
With the national debt arose an international credit system, which
often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or
that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed
one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice
in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland
and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures
were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant
in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore,
from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially
to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England
and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in
the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England,
the capitalised blood of children.
As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue,
which must cover the yearly payments for interest, &c., the modern
system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national
loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses, without
the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence,
increased taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the
accumulation of debts contracted one after another, compels the government
always to have recourse to new loans for new extraordinary expenses. Modern
fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of
subsistence (thereby increasing their price), thus contains within itself
the germ of automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an incident, but
rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first
inaugurated, the great patriot, DeWitt, has in his “Maxims” extolled it
as the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious,
and overburdened with labour. The destructive influence that it exercises
on the condition of the wage labourer concerns us less however, here, than
the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of peasants, artisans, and
in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not
two opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy
is still further heightened by the system of protection, which forms one
of its integral parts.
The great part that the public debt, and the fiscal system corresponding
with it, has played in the capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation
of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett, Doubleday and others,
to seek in this, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the
modern peoples.
The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing
manufacturers, of expropriating independent labourers, of capitalising
the national means of production and subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating
the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of production. The
European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention,
and, once entered into the service of the surplus-value makers, did not
merely lay under contribution in the pursuit of this purpose their own
people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through export premiums.
They also forcibly rooted out, in their dependent countries, all industry,
as, e.g., England did. with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the
continent of Europe, after Colbert’s example, the process was much simplified.
The primitive industrial capital, here, came in part directly out of the
state treasury. “Why,” cries Mirabeau, “why go so far to seek the cause
of the manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? 180,000,000 of debts
contracted by the sovereigns!”
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial
wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase
gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter
is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy,
the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang. Blasé as
Sir F. M. Eden is as to the horrors of the expropriation of the agricultural
population from the soil, from the last third of the 15th century to his
own time; with all the self-satisfaction with which he rejoices in this
process, “essential” for establishing capitalistic agriculture and “the
due proportion between arable and pasture land” — he does not show, however,
the same economic insight in respect to the necessity of child-stealing
and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing exploitation
into factory exploitation, and the establishment of the “true relation”
between capital and labour-power. He says:
“It may, perhaps, be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any manufacture, which,
in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses
should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by
turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest which,
though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers
of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected
together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead
to profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national
felicity?”
“In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly
in Lancashire,” says Fielden, “the newly-invented machinery was used in
large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel.
Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from
towns; and Lancashire, in particular, being, till then, comparatively thinly
populated and barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small
and nimble fingers of little children being by very far the most in request,
the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices from the
different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many,
many thousands of these little, hapless creatures were sent down into the
north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13 or 14 years old. The custom
was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to feed and lodge them
in an “apprentice house” near the factory; overseers were appointed to
see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost,
because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could
exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence. ... In many of the manufacturing
districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which
I belong [Lancashire], cruelties the most heart-rending were practised
upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned
to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink
of death by excess of labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in
the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved
to the bone while flogged to their work and ... even in some instances
... were driven to commit suicide.... The beautiful and romantic valleys
of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public
eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder. The
profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the appetite
that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse
to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any
possibility of limit; they began the practice of what is termed “night-working,”
that is, having tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the
day, they had another set ready to go on working throughout the night;
the day-set getting into the beds that the night-set had just quitted,
and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the beds that the day-set
quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in Lancashire, that the
beds never get cold.”
With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing
period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame
and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served
them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the naïve
Annals of Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth
as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England
extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being
allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa
and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well.
England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743
with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an
official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade.
This was its method of primitive accumulation. And, even to the present
day, Liverpool “respectability” is the Pindar of the slave trade which
— compare the work of Aikin already quoted — “has coincided with
that spirit of bold adventure which has characterised the trade of Liverpool
and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has occasioned
vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand
for the manufactures of the country” (p. 339). Liverpool employed in the
slave-trade, in 1730, 15 ships; in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96;
and in 1792, 132.
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England,
it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier,
more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation.
In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its
pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of
the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation
between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole,
the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite
pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring
poor,” that artificial product of modern society.
If money, according to Augier, “comes into the
world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping
from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
Footnotes
* Industrial here in contradistinction to
agricultural. In the “categoric” sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist
as much as the manufacturer.
2. “The Natural and Artificial Rights
of Property Contrasted.” Lond., 1832, pp. 98-99. Author of the anonymous
work: “Th. Hodgskin.”
3. Even as late as 1794, the small cloth-makers
of Leeds sent a deputation to Parliament, with a petition for a law to
forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. (Dr. Aikin, l. c.)
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.” 3me éd. Bruxelles, 1837. This subject
one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and
of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after
its own image.
5. Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut-Gov.
of that island: “The History of Java,” Lond., 1817.
6. In the year 1866 more than a million
Hindus died of hunger in the province of Orissa alone. Nevertheless, the
attempt was made to enrich the Indian treasury by the price at which the
necessaries of life were sold to the starving people.
7. William Cobbett remarks that in England
all public institutions are designated “royal”; as compensation for this,
however, there is the “national” debt.
8. “Si les Tartares inondaient l’Europe
aujourd’hui, il faudrait bien des affaires pour leur faire entendre ce
que c’est qu’un financier parmi nous.” [if the Tartars were to flood into Europe today, it would be a difficult job to make them understand what a financier is with us] Montesquieu, “Esprit des lois,”
t. iv., p. 33, ed. Londres, 1769.
9. Mirabeau, l. c., t. vi., p. 101.
10. Eden, l. c., Vol. I., Book II.,
Ch. 1., p. 421.
11. John Fielden, l. c., pp. 5, 6. On
the earlier infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), l. c.,
p. 219. and Gisborne: “Enquiry into the Duties of Men,” 1795 Vol. II. When
the steam-engine transplanted the factories from the country waterfalls
to the middle of towns, the “abstemious” surplus-value maker found the
child-material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek 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, Francis Horner,
lumen of the Billion Committee and intimate friend of Ricardo, said in
the House of Commons: “It is notorious, that with a bankrupt’s effects,
a gang, if he might use the word, of these children had been put up to
sale, and were advertised publicly as part of the property. A most atrocious
instance had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench two years before,
in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one
manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some
benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible
had come to his knowledge while on a [Parliamentary] Committee ... that
not many years ago, an agreement had been made between a London parish
and a Lancashire manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every
20 sound children one idiot should be taken.”
12. In 1790, there were in the English
West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen for one,
in the Dutch twenty-three for one. (Henry Brougham: “An Inquiry into the
Colonial Policy of the European Powers.” Edin. 1803, vol. II., p. 74.)
13. The phrase, “labouring poor,” is
found in English legislation from the moment when the class of wage labourers
becomes noticeable. This term is used in opposition, on the one hand, to
the “idle poor,” beggars, etc., on the other to those labourers, who, pigeons
not yet plucked, are still possessors of their own means of labour. From
the Statute Book it passed into Political Economy, and was handed down
by Culpeper, J. Child, etc., to Adam Smith and Eden. After this, one can
judge of the good faith of the “execrable political cant-monger,” Edmund
Burke, when he called the expression, “labouring poor,” — “execrable political
cant.” This sycophant who, in the pay of the English oligarchy, played
the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution, just
as, in the pay of the North American Colonies, at the beginning of the
American troubles, he had played the Liberal against the English oligarchy,
was an out and out vulgar bourgeois. “The laws of commerce are the laws
of Nature, and therefore 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. A very good portrait of this Edmund Burke, during his
liberal time, is to be found in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Tucker. Tucker
was a parson and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent
political economist. In face of the infamous cowardice of character that
reigns today, and believes most devoutly in “the laws of commerce,” it
is our bounden duty again and again to brand the Burkes, who only differ
from their successors in one thing — talent.
14. Marie Angier: “Du Crédit
Public.” Paris, 1842.
15. “Capital is said by a Quarterly
Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true;
but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no
profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor
a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per
cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce
eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime
at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance
of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit,
it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply
proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35, 36.)
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Next: Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
Capital Volume One- Index