Scribd
Upload
69 views

Max Primitive Accumulation - Unknown

This document summarizes Marx's analysis of "primitive accumulation" in his work Capital Volume One. It describes how the accumulation of capital requires surplus value, which in turn requires capitalistic production and separation of workers from means of production. It argues this initial separation and transformation of means of subsistence into capital occurred through processes of conquest, enslavement, robbery and force, divorcing producers from their means of production and transforming them into wage laborers. It examines how this dissolved feudal systems and allowed the rise of industrial capitalists through emancipating laborers from serfdom and guilds, though they were left with nothing after being robbed of their own means of production.

Uploaded by

ハイロ ナルバエス
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
69 views

Max Primitive Accumulation - Unknown

This document summarizes Marx's analysis of "primitive accumulation" in his work Capital Volume One. It describes how the accumulation of capital requires surplus value, which in turn requires capitalistic production and separation of workers from means of production. It argues this initial separation and transformation of means of subsistence into capital occurred through processes of conquest, enslavement, robbery and force, divorcing producers from their means of production and transforming them into wage laborers. It examines how this dissolved feudal systems and allowed the rise of industrial capitalists through emancipating laborers from serfdom and guilds, though they were left with nothing after being robbed of their own means of production.

Uploaded by

ハイロ ナルバエス
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 8

Karl Marx.

Capital Volume One


Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive
Accumulation

We have seen how money is changed into capital; how


through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplusvalue more capital. But the accumulation of capital
presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes
capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes
the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of
labour power in the hands of producers of commodities.
The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious
circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a
primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam
Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an
accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of
production, but its starting point.
This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy
about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit

the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its
origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an
anecdote of the past. In times long gone by 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. The legend of
theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to
be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow;
but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that
there are people to whom this is by no means essential.
Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort
accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing
to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin
dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its
labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the
wealth of the few that increases constantly although they
have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is
every day preached to us in the defence of property. M.
Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the
solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so
spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up,
it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food
of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all
stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that
conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play

the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy,


the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and labour
were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the
present year of course always excepted. As a matter of
fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything
but idyllic.
In themselves money and commodities are no more
capital than are the means of production and of
subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this
transformation itself can only take place under certain
circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very
different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face
to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of
money, means of production, means of subsistence, who
are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by
buying other peoples labour power; on the other hand,
free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and
therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the
double sense that neither they themselves form part and
parcel of the means of production, as in the case of
slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production
belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they
are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of
production of their own. With this polarization of the market

for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist


production are given. The capitalist system presupposes
the complete separation of the labourers from all property
in the means by which they can realize their labour. As
soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not
only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a
continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that
clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other
than the process which takes away from the labourer the
possession of his means of production; a process that
transforms, on the one hand, the social means of
subsistence and of production into capital, on the other,
the immediate producers into wage labourers. The socalled primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else
than the historical process of divorcing the producer from
the means of production. It appears as primitive, because
it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of
production corresponding with it.
The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out
of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution
of the latter set free the elements of the former.
The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose
of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to

the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of


another. To become a free seller of labour power, who
carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he
must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds,
their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the
impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the
historical movement which changes the producers into
wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their
emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the
guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois
historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen
became sellers of themselves only after they had been
robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the
guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation,
is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and
fire.
The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on
their part not only to displace the guild masters of
handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of
the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of
social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle
both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives,
and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free

development of production and the free exploitation of man


by man. The chevaliers dindustrie, however, only
succeeded in supplanting the chevaliers of the sword by
making use of events of which they themselves were
wholly innocent. They have risen by means as vile as
those by which the Roman freedman once on a time made
himself the master of his patronus.
The starting point of the development that gave rise to the
wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was the
servitude of the labourer. The advance consisted in a
change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of
feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To
understand its march, we need not go back very far.
Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist
production as early as the 14th or 15th century,
sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the
capitalistic era dates from the 16th century. Wherever it
appears, the abolition of serfdom has been long effected,
and the highest development of the middle ages, the
existence of sovereign towns, has been long on the wane.
In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are
epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in
course of formation; but, above all, those moments when

great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from


their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and
unattached proletarians on the labour-market. The
expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant,
from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history
of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes
different aspects, and runs through its various phases in
different orders of succession, and at different periods. In
England alone, which we take as our example, has it the
classic form. [1]

Footnotes
1. In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest,
the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than
elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country
before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil.
His emancipation at once transformed him into a free
proletarian, who, moreover, found his master ready waiting
for him in the towns, for the most part handed down as
legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the
world-market, about the end of the 15th century,
annihilated Northern Italys commercial supremacy, a

movement in the reverse direction set in. The labourers of


the towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave
an impulse, never before seen, to the petite culture,
carried on in the form of gardening.

You might also like