Marx and the Origin of Capitalism
1). Marx and the Origin of Capitalism
Fictional and Historical Accounts of Capitalism’s Beginnings
In the first volume of CAPITAL, Marx spent some time looking in great detail at the genesis of capitalism as it emerged from feudalism. The relevant section, in the first volume of CAPITAL, is set out in Part 8 under the umbrella of “So-Called Primitive Accumulation”. There are six chapters in the section: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land, Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the end of the Fifteenth Century, The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer, The Genesis of the Industrial capitalist and The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.
In the first chapter of this section Marx wrote:
“In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians” (CAPITAL, VOL. 1.ch. 26, So-Called Primitive Accumulation p. 876).
Marx noted, that in his own day, that defenders of capitalism believed that capital accumulation played the same role in political economy as original sin did in theology. Marx sarcastically remarked:
“Long, long ago 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…Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work.” (p873)
The poor were blamed for being poor (they still are).Capitalism was the best of all possible worlds. And private property was sacrosanct. He commented:
“But as soon as the question of property is at stake, it becomes the sacred duty to proclaim the standpoint of nursery tales as the one thing fit for all age-groups and all stages of development” (p 874)
The analogy Marx made between “original sin” and the political economist’s theory of “primitive capital accumulation” is correct, because both drew attention away from the historical reality of capitalism to a fabled mythical past. The real origins of capital accumulation, however, as Marx noted, are far from the “peaceful” and “natural” ideal that Adam Smith and others had imagined. Marx explained that while capital accumulation and inequality are generated from capitalist relations between employer and worker, once these relations are historically established:
“... it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, plays the greatest part” (p. 874).
And he continued
“As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.” (p. 874).
Marx went on to say that workers were:
“...tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage labour
” (p. 899).
Marx set out a historical and factual account of the origin of capitalism not the fictional one presented by the political economists. It was an account of enclosure, pillage and plunder, enslavement, violence, brutality and death. Marx summed up the brutal consequences of primitive accumulation:
“The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians.” (Ch. 27, The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land” p. 895).
So-Called Primitive Accumulation
Why did Marx use the expression “so-called primitive accumulation”? Principally, because the various factors which led to capitalism – the Black Death, which changed the balance of class forces in England, driving lords to become capitalist farmers and peasants to become rural labourers, the break-up of large Church estates during the Reformation, enclosure acts, slavery, colonialism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasant expropriation, the rise of cottage industry workshops, piracy, plunder, robbery and so on – by themselves do not constitute capitalism. This is because the genesis of capitalism also included the formation of the working class, in increasing numbers, generating surplus value to be used as reinvestment to create more and more capital.
Nevertheless, Marx did say that some historical events were more important moments for accumulating capital than others, like the discovery of America. Of the discovery of the Americas he wrote:
“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, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for its 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, etc”.
And he continued:
“The different moments 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 organized 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”. (Chapter 31, page 915).
The flow of precious metals from the Americas, like gold and silver into Europe, mainly to Spain, (hived-off through piracy into Britain), and of the slaves taken from Africa to the plantations the other way, was indispensible for establishing early capital accumulation. In particular the profits from the Atlantic slave trade were significant for providing the capital that drove the development of British industrial capitalism (Eric Williams, CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY, 1944).
Dr Allen Price and Dr Emma Poulter wrote:
“The historian Eric Williams describes how key technologies such as James Watt's steam engine improvements (1784) were developed using profits from slave trading merchants. When fully developed, it was sugar plantation owners who used these steam engines to increase efficiency by replacing horses.
The huge profits that came from plantation slavery in the Americas and the new industries that were created to process goods imported from these plantations changed Britain dramatically. It went from being an agricultural economy to an industrial one in Britain in the late eighteenth century”.
A HREF="http://revealinghistories.org.uk/africa-the-arrival-of-europeans-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/articles/fuelling-the-industrial-revolution.html" TARGET="BLANK">http://revealinghistories.org.uk/africa-the-arrival-of-europeans-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/articles/fuelling-the-industrial-revolution.html
And Dr. Alan Price wrote:
Big profits were made not just by those directly involved in slaving or plantation economies, but also by banks. These banks were most often based in cities such as Liverpool and London. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 in London was crucial to trade regulation and the securing of profits. As trade profits grew, so did the banks and other financial institutions.
From the late 1600s to the 1800s, the providing of insurance, loans and other more complex trading instruments created massive new opportunities for making money. All this helped create modern capitalism. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of history that a crude labour system like slavery was at the heart of the development of the modern global economy.
A HREF="http://revealinghistories.org.uk/africa-the-arrival-of-europeans-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/articles/triangular-trade-and-multiple-profits.html" TARGET="BLANK">http://revealinghistories.org.uk/africa-the-arrival-of-europeans-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/articles/triangular-trade-and-multiple-profits.html
In 1833 Parliament finally abolished slavery. The negotiated settlement brought emancipation - but only with the system of apprenticeship tying the newly freed slaves another form of un-free labour for fixed terms, and the grant of £20 million in compensation, to be paid by the British taxpayers to slave owners (A HREF="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context/" TARGET="BLANK">https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context/). Property was sacrosanct, which included the ownership of slaves and is reflected in the generous compensation given by the government to former slave holders.
As the historian E.M. Woods noted:
“...it is impossible to deny the importance of the colonies in Britain’s highly lucrative external trade, and the essential part played by slaves in producing its highly profitable commodities, tobacco and sugar. Nor can it be denied that industrialization at home, based as it was on the production of cotton textiles, would depend on colonial cotton produced largely by slaves in the West Indies” (EMPIRE OF CAPITAL, 2002 p.106)
The human cost was high. The missionary writer Antonio Vieira asserted in 1657 that over two million Indians had died in Brazil as a result of enslavement (J. H. Parry, TRADE DOMINION, p. 343). It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died in a series of events that have been described as the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era (Forsythe, David P. ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HUMAN RIGHTS, VOLUME 4. Oxford University Press p, 297, 2009).
According to scientists from University College London, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans in 1492 led to 56 million deaths by 1600 (Koch, Alexander; Brierley, Chris; Maslin, Mark M.; Lewis, Simon L. "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492”, QUARTERLY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2019, p. 13-36
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261
Mark Maslin, professor of geography at University College London, one of the co-authors of the study, said the large death toll also boosted the economies of Europe. He wrote:
"...the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. It also allowed for the Industrial Revolution and for Europeans to continue that domination” (CNN February 1, 2019).
Then there were the various wars between England and Spain, Holland and France. The first Dutch War in the 17th century opened India and the Far Eastern Trade to English merchants. The second Dutch war opened West Africa and the slave trade. The war of Spanish Succession won for England the coveted Asiento, the monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanish American Empire, which France had tried to secure for her merchants by annexing Spain.
Britain’s overseas empire, through control of trade routes and strategic points of influence, was also growing during this period. The main base for the English slave trade was Jamaica which was captured in 1655. Although there were British slave ships in Elizabethan times, and the colonies in the Caribbean, Virginia etc from the 17th century employed slaves – including convicts sent from England as indentured labour - the ending of the Royal African Company’s monopoly in 1698, coupled with increasing demands of the sugar plantations in the West Indies, led to a rapid expansion of the British slave trade and importance of ports such as Bristol and Liverpool.
Liverpool thrived on overseas merchant investment, specializing in tobacco and slaves. Over 100 ships were leaving Bristol a year on the slave trade, with capacity for about 30,000 slaves. “Slaves were the precious life-blood of the West-Indian economy where King Sugar reigned and in which £70 m had been invested by 1790” (R. Porter, SOCIAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN IN THE 18TH CENTURY p. 51) This was advantageous as it was a source of valuable raw materials, primitive capital accumulation and also a world market in which to sell commodities.
As the historian, Henry Heller concluded;
“The birth of capitalism was simultaneously the product of both new relations of production and the creation of the world market and that they are dialectically connected...the accumulation of capital is not merely the product of the social relations of production but also the circulation and realisation of capital...the development of capitalist world money out of gold and silver produced in Latin America was critical to the emergence of the world market by lubricating exchange relations across the globe” (A MARXIST HISTORY OF CAPITALSIM, 2018, p. 40).
Primitive accumulation allowed a certain concentration of wealth in a few hands but it also put in place the social relations between capital and labour. The working class was necessary to generate surplus value, capital accumulation and the expansion of value from one circuit of capital to another.
Marx’s Definition of Primitive Capital Accumulation
In THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (1776), Adam Smith had written of “previous accumulation”. Marx used Smith’s expression, translating it into German as ursprünglich ("original or initial"). When Marx’s Capital was translated back into English, the term used by Marx was rendered as “primitive” (see Perelman. Michael, THE INVENTION OF CAPITALISM: CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION, chapter 2, p. 26, 2000).
Perelman added:
“to underscore his distance from Smith, Marx prefixed the pejorative “so-called” to the title of the final part of the first volume of Capital... in order to call attention to the actual historical experience...Marx’s survey of primitive accumulation carries us through a several centuries-long process, in which a small group of people brutally expropriated the means of production from the people of precapitalist society around the globe” (p. 26).
Marx gave the following definition of primitive capital accumulation. He said it was:
“... nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.” (CAPITAL VOL. 1, p875)
Although elements of capitalism began in Italy, Holland and France, according to Marx: “...the capitalist era begins from the 16th century” with the “expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil...” (ch. 26. p. 876): a process that had taken several centuries. For capitalism to consolidate its position, the entire production process required a number of economic, technical, political and legal conditions to dominate social relationships. Although the forcing of the peasant off the land “assumes different aspects in different countries”, for Marx, only in England did it possess the “classic form” (p. 876).
Marx believed that this separation of the peasantry from the land was a necessary condition for the development of capitalism, in that it created the conditions in which there was a pliable and abundant proletariat:
“when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians” (p. 876).
This "free" proletariat was needed for the creation of the factory system and the development of manufacturing cities. Free in the double sense of the word. Free from the ownership of the means of production and free to sell their labour power as a commodity on the labour market or starve. The process of primitive accumulation created the changes in social relations, property relations, and the accumulation of wealth that permitted the creation of the capital-labour relation and factory-based capitalism.
No account was taken by employers of the gender or the age of the workers; with women routinely working down mines and children being used in the mills. In 1841 there were 2350 women employed in the coal mines of the UK, one third of them in Lancashire. After 1842, when an Act of Parliament prevented women from going down the mines, the women and girls worked at the surface, pushing wagons from the pit head to the sorting screens, or sorting coal at the screen themselves.
Cotton mills were one of the first places to exploit child labour during the Industrial Revolution. The first jobs for children were in the water-powered cotton mills near the river. With the invention of the spinning jenny and the steam engine, cotton could be spun much faster and cotton mills could be moved into the cities. Orphans, or parish apprentice children, were taken in and exploited by factories and mill owners to work in exchange for food, water, housing, and clothing.
Huge factory expansion would not have been possible without the exploitation of child labour. After carrying out detailed statistical analyses of the period, Professor Jane Humphries of Oxford University discovered that child labour was much more common and economically important than previously realised. Her estimates suggest that, by the early 19th century, England had more than a million child workers (including around 350,000 seven- to 10-year-olds) – accounting for 15 per cent of the total labour force (Jane Humphries, CHILDHOOD AND CHILD LABOUR IN THE BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 2010).
As Marx observed:
“While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal” (Chapter 31, page 925).
2). The Consolidation of Capital and the Communist Manifesto
When Marx and Engels first wrote the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in 1848 most of Europe was still Feudal. Marx and Engels commented that:
“In...the Middle Ages (we have), feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen apprentices, serfs; in almost all these classes, again subordinate gradations” (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (p. 60).
Feudalism was the dominant social system which existed in Europe during the Middle Ages. The feudal mode of production was based on the effective possession of land by the Crown, Lords and the Church. The peasants “owned” some of the means of production within the Manorial system but they were exploited by having either to give away a portion of their produce or work in kind, pay tithes, rent and taxes. Political force and religion were used as means of social control. In the townships there were feudal guilds with masters and journeymen with rigid control through a system of masters, journeymen and apprenticeships.
Feudalism gave way to capitalism. By the end of the eighteenth century half the population of Western Europe were wage workers (Heller, page 15). This meant that working class labour was available to generate surplus value and profits to the capitalist class.
The working out of the new material social conditions, as capitalism emerged from feudalism, caused violent revolutions and political convulsions, such as the English Civil War (1641 – 1651), the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the Reform Act (1832), new ideas and beliefs favouring an emerging capitalist class, and the social transformation of feudal relationships into capitalist ones. Centuries of primitive capital accumulation, social upheavals, mass dispossession of peasants and small farmers and political revolutions were required before the Industrial Revolution could be established and commodity production could be organised and centralised into factories. As Marx and Engels wrote of this consolidation:
“Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is” (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS, SPGB, 1948 p. 67).
In fact, Marx and Engels opened up the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO praising the modernising tendencies of capitalism and the capitalist class and it is in the MANIFESTO that we find the insights about capitalism as a world system and the spread of commodity production and exchange for profit throughout the world. The creative destruction that modern capitalist society unleashed, in which "everything that is solid melts into air", is for Marx and Engels a precondition for the development of the productive forces. Under capitalism the productive forces have been developed to the point where there is the potential for abundance and adequate distribution of goods and services to meet the needs of all society: communism.
Capitalism had opened the world for business and this can be seen already in 1848 with the expansion of the market into the Americas, China and East India. Marx and Engels commented on this fact when they wrote:
"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image." (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, p. 64).
Capitalism, though, had its economic and social problems. Commodity production was riven through with contradictions and conflict. Capitalism could not meet the needs of all society. The productive forces became too powerful for the narrow constraint of profit-making of capitalist relations of production. Capitalism became a barrier on the further development of the forces of production, including co-operative and social labour. The productive forces increasingly became “fettered”, creating disorder; economic crises and class struggle. As Marx and Engels noted:
“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones” (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO p. 60).
Without the intervention of craftsman and workers the capitalist class by itself could not have overthrown feudalism and established capitalism. In all the battles with the Feudal order, the capitalist class had been:
“...compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus drag it into the political arena” (The COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 69).
Capitalism dragged the working class into the political arena. It forced the working class to think and act politically. It taught workers that it had its own class interests distinct from the employing class.
It was not until the 1800s that the centralised factory system in cities and towns allowed capitalism to begin to realise its full exploitive potential. The first steam loom factory was built in Manchester in 1806. In 1835 there were 116,800 power looms in Great Britain, all but six per cent in the cotton industry,
The Manchester capitalist from his mountain, like Moses on Pisgah, beheld the promised land” (Eric williams, CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY p. 128).
And the primary motor force driving this historical process was the class struggle. Increasingly, with the development of the factory system capitalism left two great classes directly facing each other: “Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, p 61). From an “incoherent mass” workers, over time, grew in strength and were able to form trade unions and later political organisations establishing socialist ideas and revolutionary socialist aims.
Wage-labour in Britain was becoming increasingly common. Over half the households in 16th-century England were at least partly dependent on wage labour (James Fulcher CAPITALISM 2004, pp 22). As industrial capitalism developed, conflict over wages became increasingly organised. The spinners in the Mills, for example, defended themselves against wage reductions through their unions, first locally then regionally and nationally. According to James Fulcher:
“In 1810, 1818 and 1830 there were increasingly organised strikes, but these were defeated by the employers, with the assistance of the state, which arrested strikers and imprisoned union leaders. The employers had created their own associations, so that they could ‘black-list’ union militants, answer strikes with ‘lock-outs, and provide mutual financial support” (pp6-7).
All previous class systems were systems of exploitation and class struggle. Capitalism is no exception. And, under the right social and political circumstances, there will be or could be a further social system: socialism – a classless society of free men and women in which:
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and antagonisms, we shall see an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, p. 81).
Once capitalism had been consolidated as a world-wide social system in its own right, the French economist, Louis Auguste Blanqui wrote that Britain had undergone an ‘industrial revolution’ Histoire de l'économie politique, 1837). The term also appeared in “THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND” by Frederich Engels, which was published in 1845. By 1884 the term ‘industrial revolution’ was in common usage after the publication, four years earlier, of an article “Lectures on the Industrial Revolution” (1884) by Arnold Toynbee. There had been a revolution, but the historical circumstances of its birth, when “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (CAPITAL VOL. 1, Marx p. 926), had been largely forgotten.
With every new circuit of capital; from investment, circulation and back again, capitalism has become nothing more than a world-wide social system of class exploitation. The capitalist class pays for its luxury, its fine and sophisticated living and its expanding wealth and privilege in “a currency of blood and wretchedness”, as the academic, Terry Eagleton once put it (MARXISM AS ATHEODICY, York University, 14 May 2010). There is an alternative: a “Communistic revolution”.
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win” (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, p. 92).
3). Origin of Capitalism: Enclosures
“A Crime against the People”
In England the process used to force the peasants off the soil was the enclosure of common land and fields and the creation of a landless class of former peasants forced to look elsewhere for work. Writers, critical of the enclosures, had already made forceful comments before Marx. Thomas More wrote in 1516:
“'Each greedy individual preys on his native land like a malignant growth, absorbing field after field, and enclosing thousands of acres with a single fence. Result - hundreds of farmers evicted” (UTOPIA, Book 1, p. 47).
Marx devoted a great deal of research into the question of the enclosures in chapter 27 of CAPITAL: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land. Unlike More and other critics of enclosures he did not make a moral criticism of the greed and avarice of the enclosers. Of advances in agricultural productivity he wrote:
“In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators [after the peasantry was eliminated], the soil brought forth as much produce as before, or even more, because the revolution in property relations on the land was accompanied by improved methods of cultivation, greater co-operation, a higher concentration of the means of production and so on, and because the agricultural wage-labourers were made to work at a higher level of intensity, and the field of production on which they worked for themselves shrank more and more” (CAPITAL,VOL. 1, chapter 30, p. 908).
Yet Marx denounced the enclosures as a crime against the people:
“We have seen how the forcible seizure of the common lands, accompanied for the most part by the transformation of arable into pasture, began in the fifteenth century and lasted on into the sixteenth […] The advance that has been made in the eighteenth century is shown in this, that the law itself now became the instrument by which the theft of the people’s land was achieved, although the great farmers continued to use their petty private methods in addition. The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of ‘Bills for Inclosure of Commons’, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people” (p. 885).
Marx first came into contact with problems facing peasants and access to the commons in 1842 when he was editor of the RHEINISCHE ZEITUNG. Marx had to deal with the forest laws about the right to take fallen branches from the forests. The peasants were being denied their ancient – medieval rights, similar to the English peasants’ rights to take furze and turf from the commons. In the 1859 preface to his CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OFPOLITICAL ECONOMY (1859) he wrote:
“In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions” (p.10).
From Land to Factory
The enclosure of the commons was one of the key historical events which undermined the economic viability of the peasant household. Although enclosures set the conditions for an agricultural revolution, it also meant a massive shift to an industrial, urban and capitalist society in which agricultural workers lost whatever measure of economic independence they once had possessed. Those who entered capitalist society with its employing class became dependent on wages, the wages system and the labour market. They became wage slaves.
As Marx observed:
“The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population, intermittent but renewed again and again, supplied... the town industries with a mass of proletarians” (CAPITAL, VOL. 1. Chapter 30 p. P.908).
Until the 16th century much of the land in England had remained officially as “open fields” manorial wastes and “common land”. From this time onwards enclosures of “open fields” and “common land” became more and more frequent. The enclosed land became the property of wealthy private landlords and farmers. The peasants, who had previously lived on the common land or had access to the open fields, found themselves evicted by often violent force, leaving them without the means to make a living.
The imposition of Protestantism by Henry VIII, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries also played a key role in the acceleration of enclosures of “open fields” and “common land
”. Marx wrote:
“The process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century from the Reformation, and the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic Church was, at the time of the Reformation, the feudal proprietor of a great part of the soil of England. The dissolution of the monasteries, etc., hurled their inmates into the proletariat.” (CAPITAL, chapter 27, volume 1, p 881)
One of the consequences was the creation of “vagabonds”. Marx wrote:
“...these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers and vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances...at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth centuries; a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe...
” (p. 896).
A series of laws was introduced by Parliament between 1563 and 1601. The 1597 Act, for example, laid down stricter guidelines for vagabonds and beggars in response to the economic crisis of the 1590s. But the so-called “undeserving poor”, were brutally treated. The 1563 Act reaffirmed the policy of whipping able-bodied beggars. Later Acts stated that vagabonds should be burned through the right ear and, if they persisted, could be imprisoned and even executed. The policies of ear-boring and execution remained in force until 1593.
Keeping people out
And the Enclosures continued to take place in subsequent centuries. According to the historian, Ellen Roseman, there were approximately 4000 Enclosure Acts between 1750 and 1850 which converted common land into the exclusive private property of large landowners. All in all, between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual Enclosure Acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres (“On Enclosure Acts and Commons http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=ellen-rosenman-on-enclosure-acts-and-the-commons).
During the 19th century when railways were built across the landscape, very often the routes chosen went over common land – clearly cheaper than buying farmland from landowners. Later the modern motorways were often routed over commons, for example, the M3 runs through Chobham Common. Capitalism had to fight long and hard against what the historian E.P. Thompson called the “moral economy”, a code of customs radically at odds with the discipline of the market and the exercise of market forces (CUSTOMS IN COMMON, chapter 4, Penguin Books, 1993). Yet capitalism won out consolidating its economic and political position throughout the nineteenth century.
In his book “THE ORIGIN OF CAPITALSIM: A LONGER VIEW” (1999), E. M. Woods remarked that to think about an alternative to capitalism requires an engagement with capitalism’s past, particularly the socially disruptive nature of the enclosures in the 16th century when:
“... larger landowners sought to drive commoners off lands that could be profitably put to use as pasture for increasingly lucrative sheep farming” (p. 108).
Woods went on to say:
“Contemporary commentators held enclosure, more than any other single factor, responsible for the growing plague of vagabonds, those dispossessed ‘masterless men’ who wandered the countryside and threatened social order. The most famous of these commentators, Thomas More, though himself an encloser described the practice as ‘sheep devouring men’” (p. 108-109).
And he concluded:
“These social critics... may have overestimated the effects of enclosure at the expense of other factors leading to the transformation of English property relations. But it remains the most vivid expression of the relentless process that was changing not only the English countryside but also the world: the birth of capitalism” (p. 109).
Obviously, the use of the commons was of real value to the local people - if there was no value in its use, why bother to fight the gentry who wanted to fence it off? “Enclosure”, wrote E.P. Thompson, “(when all sophistications are allowed for ) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by Parliament of property-owners and lawyers” (THE MAKINGOF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS 1963, p. 219).
And resistance to enclosures happened in so many places, down the generations. Clearly the lands the gentry chose to enclose and claim as their private property were valuable assets. There are numerous court reports, complaints by the landed aristocracy about resistance and rebellion, as well as pamphlets and writings from, for example, the Levellers and Diggers of the 17th century.
Resistance and Retribution
In the early 18th century the process accelerated as wealthy landowners enclosed forests for parks and hunting lodges, dammed rivers for fishponds, and allowed their deer to trash local farmers’ crops. And when there was resistance with attempts to access former common land, “poachers” were faced with draconian legislation such as the Black Act (1722).
The Black Act was an Act of Parliament passed during the reign of King George I. It was named after the blacking of faces by poachers. The Act established the death penalty for the unlawful killing or maiming of animals. The statute was passed in 1722 to deal with the growing cases of poaching from private parks and land owned by the King and members of the aristocracy. The origins of the Black Act and in particular the exceptional unpleasantness of the then, Prime Minister Walpole, are recounted in E. P. Thompson's WHIGS AND HUNTERS:THE ORIGIN OF THE BLACK ACT (1975). E. P. Thompson
“If we today have ideal notions of what law might be, we derive them in part from the cultural moment. It is, in part, in term of that age’s own aspiration that we judge the Black Act and find it deficient. But at the same time this same century, governed as it was by the forms of law, provides a text-book illustration of the employment of law, as instrument and as ideology, in serving the interests of the ruling class. The oligarchs and the great gentry were content to be subject to the rule of law only because this law was serviceable and afforded to their hegemony the rhetoric of legitimacy” (p. 269).
The following popular broadside was tacked as a handbill in Plaistow in relation to the intended enclosure of Hainault or Waltham Forest:
“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose,
Who steals the common from the goose.
(cited in P. Linebaugh, STOP, THIEF! 2014 p. 153)
A more acerbic comment was made by John Thelwall when he referred to the inclosing system as “that system of enclosure by which the rich monopolize to themselves the estates, rights, and possessions of the poor” (THE TRIBUNE 28, September 1795). While, the poet and agricultural labourer, john Clare commented: “vile enclosure came and made a parish slave of me
”.
And of course, Scotland had its clearances of populations from the highlands over three centuries to create large landed estates. The highland clearances, though, were rather different – they involved a change in land ownership from joint/collective ownership by the clan to personal ownership by the clan chief, and the new owners then drove their kinsmen off the clan lands, and these lands could then be bought and sold as private property. Marx gave the example of the ‘clearings’ made by the Duchess of Sutherland. Marx said that:
“Between 1814 and 1820...15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All the villages were destroyed and burnt, all their field turned into pasturage...She divided the whole of the stolen land of the clan into twenty-nine huge sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family” (CAPITAL chapter 27, p. 891-892).
From the Common to Communism
It is ironic that In Stanmore, Middlesex, where the Lord of the Manor, Lord Abercorn and his family had devoured most of the common land through the process of enclosure without compensation to the tenants, one of the last pieces of land to be enclosed was in 1853 for the purpose of the “Gentlemen of Stanmore” to play cricket.
Cattle grazing gave way to bat on ball. Gentlemen who did not have to get their hands dirty for a living and had plenty of time for leisurely pursuits like cricket were truly among the beneficiaries of the Enclosure Acts. In many places, the village green remains the main survivor of extensive and important common lands.
(see https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/6313/1/Carter-Enclosure_resistance_mdx.phd..pdf
and http://stanmorecc.hitscricket.com/pages/page_13/default.aspx)
So, in engaging with capitalism’s origins what can we say of an alternative to the profit system? We must look not back to the past but forward to the future – a future where private property has been abolished and replaced with the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. Or, as Marx put it:
“In the former case, it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; but in this case, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people “(CAPITAL,VOL. 1 The Historical Tendency of Capital Accumulation chap. 32 p. 929).
In other words, from the commons to communism.
4). Assault on the Commons
Marx’s critique of capitalism, as an exploitive social system and the historical evidence he brings to support his argument, is opposed by a number of modern academic apologists. They construct alternative narratives justifying capitalism, which are more ingenious but no less fallacious than the ones Marx confronted in his own day.
An influential anti-Marxian text was written in the 1960s by, the reactionary W.W. Rostow, “THE STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH: A NON-COMMUNIST MANIFESTO”. Rostow was a rabid anti-communist, mistakenly believing that the Soviet Union had something to do with the ideas of Marx and socialism. He was also an entrenched supporter of the Vietnam War.
Rostow tried to challenge Marx’s theory of history by producing an alternative, conflict- free, and technocratic model of society. In his book, there was no “primitive accumulation of capital”, with all its brutal consequences, but a free-flowing five-stage model leading to the final stage of human history with the form of consumer society found within the United States. Nothing was said by Rostow about the genocide policy towards Native Americans or the use of slavery in the cotton fields of the South. And this eulogy to American capitalism and its conspicuous consumption was before scientists had shown the evidence of climate change and the damage US capitalism was contributing to the degradation of the environment.
Economists and historians defending capitalism tend to view the profit system as an expression of natural human behaviour. They claim evidence of ‘capitalism’ can be found in different societies since the evolution of the human species, such as competition, self-interest and greed. These attributes are seen as the most beneficial way of promoting human wellbeing in a social system of private property ownership and commodity production and exchange for profit.
In this world-view, capitalism is seen by them as the peak of human development. Unlike Marx, they take a very partial and selective historical view of capitalism’s formation, concentrating instead on trade and commerce and the swashbuckling capitalists who benefit from it. The majority of people, those who are trampled over by this ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, are written off as so much ‘collateral damage’.
There is, for example, the weak argument put forward by economic historians that the enclosure of the “open fields” and the “common land” was efficient, better for everyone involved, and politically neutral in its consequences. They believe that large farms and enclosures maintained or increased farm employment while increasing production even more; the result was a rise in both yields and labour productivity.
Another well-known example of this type of argument was put forward by the Malthusian and eugenicist, Garrett Hardin –“freedom to breed will bring ruin to all” - in his paper “The Tragedy of the Commons”, (SCIENCE, December 1968). This work was intended to cast doubt on “the commons” but also on the very viability of “common ownership” itself.
The crux of his argument is expressed in a few paragraphs. He pictures a pasture “open to all”. The inherent logic of each herdsman trying to keep as many cattle as possible “generates tragedy”:
“As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximise his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component...
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to the herd. And another...But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a common. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a common brings ruin to all”
Hardin believed, wrongly, that commonly owned resources would become over-used and destroyed unless they became private property. This argument was used by Libertarians and Classical Liberals (supporters of the 17th century philosopher, John Locke) as an excuse for privatisation policies. Hardin’s argument was also used as a justification for the Enclosure Acts of the 15th and 18th centuries, an argument which conveniently ignored the fact that the impetus for enclosure was the greed of landowners for profitable sheep-rearing and agriculture, at the expense of the lives of the people who once enjoyed access to the common land.
Hardin said that enclosures could be justified on grounds of efficiency. In reality they were a form of class theft, intended to make the poor incapable of finding any other living than one through wage slavery and the labour market. Hardin's theory is a fiction from beginning to end and it is also factually and historically illiterate. The commons were not actually open to all and sundry to graze their animals upon. This right was reserved to people known as the commoners, usually the local villagers. Even the commoners' grazing rights were strictly regulated by local officials in order to prevent overgrazing. The commons were not a “free-for-all” but a carefully tended common resource.
Peter Linebaugh, in his book “STOP, THIEF!: THE COMMONS, ENCLOSURES AND RESISTANCE” (2014), pointed out the error in Hardin’s argument by the way in which he used the concept of the “rational” herdsman. Linebaugh wrote:
“Three times Hardin refers to the “rational” herdsman; it is a fantasy. What he most likely means is the selfish herdsman or the lonely herdsman, because in history, the commons is always governed. The Pinder, the Hayward, or some other officer elected by the commoners will impound that cow, or will fine that greedy shepherd who puts more than his share onto the commons...For Hardin, the world is governed by “dog eat dog”, not “”one and all” (p. 147)
Linebaugh goes on to say, in relation to the commons at Otmoor, Oxfordshire:
“The communal regulations did not permit sheep on the moor from May 1 through October 18 under pain of three shillings four pence fine. A fine of four pence was given to anyone who put a pig on the moor that was not secured with a ring. Four pence was also the fine for keeping a horse, mare, or colt that was not branded. Each town had its own brand reserved by those known as the “moormen”. No hog or pig could be kept between Christmas and April 1. Digging for peat was forbidden on highways and otherwise the pit had to be filled in. And so on. No rational herdsman here!” (p. 147-148).
In his repudiation of Garrett Hardin’ article, Simon Fairlie wrote of the resistance to enclosures:
“...as medieval England progressed to modernity, the open field system and the communal pastures came under attack from wealthy landowners who wanted to privatize their use. The first onslaught, during the 14th to 17th centuries, came from landowners who converted arable land over to sheep, with legal support from the Statute of Merton of 1235. Villages were depopulated and several hundred seem to have disappeared. The peasantry responded with a series of ill fated revolts. In the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, enclosure was an issue, albeit not the main one. In Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450 land rights were a prominent demand. By the time of Kett's rebellion of 1549 enclosure was a main issue, as it was in the Captain Pouch revolts of 1604-1607 when the terms "leveller" and "digger" appeared, referring to those who levelled the ditches and fences erected by enclosers”.
http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain
Despite attempts to attack, water down and revise Marx’s theory of the origin of capitalism, the account he gave in Capital has survived the test of time. The common people were reduced to propertyless workers, forced to sell their labour power in order to live.
As Marx concluded:
“(T)hese newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had [been] robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” (CAPITAL, Ch 26, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, p. 875).
As for common ownership of the means of production and distribution in a socialism, they will be under democratic control by all of society. ‘Democratic control’ is the only way the means of production and distribution can be operated in the interests of everyone. There will be no “free for all”, but free and direct access will take place in within the socialist principle: “from each according to ability to each according to need”.
[For useful historical accounts of the development of capitalism see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1972; R. H. Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London, 1976; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class 1963; “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present, vol.238 (1967), pp. 56-97 and ‘Custom, Law and Common Right’, in Customs in Common, 1991; Robert Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Past and Present (pp 30- 74) 1976); F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th – 18th Centuries (1982-4); Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman, 1992; E. M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 1999; Michael Perelman, The History of Capitalism, 2000; Peter Linebaugh, Stop Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance; 2014; and Henry Heller, A Marxist History of Capitalism, ch 1 &2, 2018.]