Das Kapital

HISTORICAL TENDENCY OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty Two
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e.,
its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate
transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a
mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers,
i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of
its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property,
exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour
belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals
are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character.
The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the
intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property
of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry,
whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is
an essential condition for the development of social production and of
the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode
of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence.
But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate
classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own
means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which
he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.
This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering
of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these
means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour
within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive
application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development
of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of
production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive
bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree
universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth
the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces
and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social
organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated;
it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised
and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the
pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation
of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence,
and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of
the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It
comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review
only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation
of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished
with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous,
the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private
property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated,
independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted
by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally
free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour.
As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed
the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned
into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist
mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation
of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production
into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as
well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form.
That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for
himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation
is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production
itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many.
Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists
by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the
labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical
cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour
into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all
means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised
labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market,
and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital,
who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation,
grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation;
but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always
increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism
of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital
becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished
along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and
socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible
with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The
knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist
mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first
negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the
proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of
a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This
does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him
individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e.,
on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means
of production.
The transformation of scattered private property, arising
from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally,
a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the
transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting
on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case,
we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in
the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of
the people.
Footnotes
1. “Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait
nouvelle de la societé... nous tendons a séparer toute espèce de
propriété d’avec toute espèce de travail.”
[We are in a situation which is entirely new for society ...
we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour]
(Sismondi: “Nouveaux
Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t.II, p.434.)
2. The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due
to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet
the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are 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 really revolutionary class. The other
classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat
is its special and essential product.... The lower middle classes, the
small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these
fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence
as fractions of the middle class... they are reactionary, for they try
to roll back the wheel of history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest
der Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.
Transcribed by Zodiac
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
Next: Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation
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