Lecture
As shown above, the formation of capitalism takes place within the depths of the feudal mode of production, and historically appears as a process of so-called "primitive accumulation of capital." The basis of this process is the separation of direct producers from the means of production and the formation of the free worker — free both from extra-economic regulation and coercion, and from the means of production. This is precisely why primitive accumulation is called "so-called" — it was, in fact, not accumulation in the usual sense, but a process of expropriation of direct producers, proceeding in harsher or milder forms. Initially, wage labor was employed on a small scale, and only sporadically on a large scale (in major construction works or in seasonal agricultural work). Such use of wage labor was limited by the conditions of simple cooperation among hired workers.
The methods of simple labor cooperation were not in themselves anything new, having arisen back in pre-class (and, as a method of organizing forced labor, in early-class) societies. The capitalist mode of production borrowed them in essentially ready-made form. The development of the social division of labor and the expansion of markets for mass commodity production required the creation of more efficient production of specialized commodity goods, capable of ensuring their mass output. This is how manufacture arose — a method of production cooperation based on the division of labor (by product or by operation). Manufacture was an element of the productive forces created under the influence of the needs of developing capitalist production, and under the influence of the contradictions of capitalist relations of production. It was precisely the rapid growth of manufacture that first created a mass demand for free wage workers.
It was mentioned above that, at the initiative of the North Italian urban elite (in which manufacturers played a major role), rural landowners were compelled to grant personal freedom to peasants. The Dutch woolen manufactures were the immediate cause of the "enclosures" in England. At first, the Dutch manufactures merely increased the market for English wool and created among the feudal lords a need to expand sheep pastures, which was achieved by ruthlessly driving peasants off their plots (and often, in the heat of the moment, not only feudally dependent peasants but also free tenants — freeholders — were deprived of their land). But later, the needs of the growth of England's own textile industry, competing with the Dutch, turned the peasants driven from the land — now reduced to beggars and vagrants — into a necessary resource for the English woolen and cotton-spinning manufactures. This is precisely why England's "bloody legislation against the expropriated" (as Karl Marx put it) appeared,
designed to turn a once-free and economically independent, but now declassed, rural population into wage workers. The methods of so-called primitive accumulation of capital used in Great Britain, based on the forcible expropriation of the rural population, were taken by Karl Marx as the basis for his account of the problem of primitive accumulation in "Capital." However, one should not think that this process proceeded in the same way everywhere. For example, the role of violence in accelerating the process of primitive accumulation was less significant in France, and considerably less significant in Northern Europe. National peculiarities of the primitive accumulation of capital (the examples of France, Germany, and Russia): In France, during the bourgeois revolution, the estates of rebellious nobles were expropriated and sold off. This led to the emergence of a mass of small, independent peasant farms based on private property, alongside which (on a lesser scale) large private landownership also appeared.
The further development of the process of so-called primitive accumulation occurred through the operation of the laws of commodity production, in which competition leads to the ruin of some commodity producers and the enrichment of others. This process developed in France throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Gradually, the system of parcelled peasant farming (a parcel being a small plot of land) based on one's own labor was destroyed, and land ownership became concentrated in a smaller number of small, medium, and large farms of the capitalist type. This process occurred somewhat differently in Germany and Russia.
There, the basis of this primitive accumulation was the abolition of serfdom, accompanied by only a partial transfer of land allotments to the peasants and the preservation of large landed estates. This situation led to the persistence of forms of semi-feudal exploitation of the peasants (debt-bondage leases, sharecropping) and only to a very slow transition of both landowner and peasant farms to intensive commodity and capitalist production, accompanied by the gradual ruin of the poorest peasant farms. In the Russian Empire this process was never completed (its historical surrogate was first Stalinist collectivization, and later the transfer of land into private ownership at the beginning of the twenty-first century), while in Germany it developed from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
The Industrial Revolution. Manufacture was merely a superstructure above a sea of small independent commodity producers and traders, although competition from manufactures had already begun to displace small-scale production. Industrial bourgeoisie still occupied a more modest place compared to the representatives of merchant and usurer's capital, on whom both small producers and manufacture largely depended. This era also saw the vigorous development of merchant and usurer's capital, serving both the increased volume of commodity turnover in domestic markets and the growing possibilities of foreign trade. In search of new overseas goods and markets for European production, and in pursuit of gold and silver, rapid external expansion took place, beginning at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. European adventurers founded outposts in new territories, established trade relations with them, carried out plundering expeditions, seized lands and turned them into their colonies, often ruthlessly exterminating the local population.
Along the way, geographical discoveries were made — as the English pirate Francis Drake did: seeking to avoid an ambush by the Spanish fleet in the Strait of Magellan (after he had plundered the Atlantic coast of the Spanish colonies in South America), he discovered a new strait, which now bears his name. Manufacturing industry laid the foundation for the formation of the economic superiority of European countries in international trade and the mass expansion of manufactured goods into less developed countries, driven by industrial capital's need for new, broader markets. However, even manufacture did not fully satisfy capital's interest in the unrestrained expansion of production and markets. Hand tools could not ensure sufficiently mass-scale production, and since production was manual in character, the cost of hiring labor was the main cost of production. The transition to machine production was able to solve both of these problems — increasing the mass-scale output of goods and lowering the cost of hiring labor. (A theoretical analysis of the causes and consequences of this transition will be given in later chapters.) From the end of the eighteenth century in Great Britain, and a few decades later in other European countries, the Industrial Revolution, or capitalist industrialization of production, began.
Capital began to apply, on a mass scale, technical innovations that replaced manual labor with machine labor. A broad demand for inventions arose. The Industrial Revolution sharply changed the face of the society in which the capitalist mode of production was developing. The transition to capitalist machine industry led to the mass ruin of small commodity producers engaged in manual labor. The initial stage of the Industrial Revolution, since it was directly dictated by capital's need to lower the cost of hiring labor, was marked by a worsening of the condition of wage workers. Moreover, under the influence of this same interest, there was a shift toward the mass use of cheaper female and child labor, which was more easily pressured by manufacturers. These processes caused a sharp intensification of class contradictions and conflicts, which, on the workers' side, still took weakly organized forms but often erupted into armed uprisings (the revolts of English weavers at the end of the eighteenth century, of Silesian weavers in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth, and of Lyon weavers in France in 1830). And in world trade, the Industrial Revolution secured the formation of an industrial monopoly, first for Great Britain and then for a number of other European powers. The competition of European industry ruined small producers both within Europe and beyond it.
In Europe, however, small-scale production was replaced by national industrial capital organizing large-scale machine production, and the ruined small producers were turned into wage workers. In the colonial countries, on the other hand, the ruin of peasants and artisans working for the market was accompanied by the establishment of the trade hegemony of foreign (European) industrial capital and the complete decline of local pre-industrial manufacturing (and, in part, agriculture as well), which led to pauperization and often to death by starvation for millions of ruined artisans and peasants. This industrial monopoly was supplemented by the direct plunder of the human resources of the colonies, both through the organization of the slave trade and through the organization of mass forced labor of the local population itself. Raw material resources were also subjected to plunder.
All of this together secured a sharp gap in the level of economic power between the European countries and all the rest of the world's countries — a gap that has, for the most part, persisted to this day. In the countries undergoing the Industrial Revolution, there occurred a rapid decline in the share of independent peasants, artisans, and small traders, the ruin of landowners (including large ones) who had not switched to modern capitalist methods of production, and a fall in the number of unproductive workers serving the interests of the feudal aristocracy. Alongside this, the size of the working class (especially the factory proletariat) grew significantly, and the numbers and economic standing of industrial capitalists increased, pushing aside the commercial and financial bourgeoisie.
Thus, the capitalist mode of production acquires a dominant (or at least a leading) character in the economies of countries passing through the Industrial Revolution. The capitalist mode of production displaces and transforms all pre-bourgeois, early-bourgeois, and transitional forms of production, if not eliminating them entirely, then pushing them into the background. The external expansion of industrial capitalism has a contradictory effect on the economies of the colonies, creating in them elements of decline and regression and entrenching backward economic and political forms, but, on the other hand, also creating certain preconditions for the development of capitalist relations. Most bourgeois revolutions occur at the beginning of the era of the Industrial Revolution (in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, and so on) or immediately before it (in France, the United States, Japan). It is in this era that the proletariat first appears on the social stage as an independent political force, and the classical Marxist conceptions of the capitalist economic system begin to take shape.
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