Chapter 30: Reaction of the Agricultural
Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-
Market for Industrial Capital
The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population, intermittent but renewed again
and again, supplied, as we saw, the town industries with a mass of proletarians entirely
unconnected with the corporate guilds and unfettered by them; a fortunate circumstance that
makes old A. Anderson (not to be confounded with James Anderson), in his “History of
Commerce,” believe in the direct intervention of Providence. We must still pause a moment on
this element of primitive accumulation. The thinning-out of the independent, self-supporting
peasants not only brought about the crowding together of the industrial proletariat, in the way that
Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the condensation of cosmical matter at one place, by its
rarefaction at another.
1
In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth as
much or more produce, after as before, because the revolution in
the conditions of landed
property was accompanied by improved methods of culture, greater co-operation, concentration
of the means of production, &c., and because not only were the agricultural wage labourers put
on the strain more intensely
2
, but the field of production on which they worked for themselves
became more and more contracted. With the setting free of a part of the agricultural population,
therefore, their former means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into
material elements of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast adrift, must buy their
value in the form of wages, from his new master, the industrial capitalist. That which holds good
of the means of subsistence holds with the raw materials of industry dependent upon home
agriculture. They were transformed into an element of constant capital. Suppose, e.g., a part of
the Westphalian peasants, who, at the time of Frederick II, all span flax, forcibly expropriated and
hunted from the soil; and the other part that remained, turned into day labourers of large farmers.
At the same time arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in which the men “set
free” now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as before. Not a fibre of it is changed, but a
new social soul has popped into its body. It forms now a part of the constant capital of the master
manufacturer. Formerly divided among a number of small producers, who cultivated it
themselves and with their families spun it in retail fashion, it is now concentrated in the hand of
one capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for him. The extra labour expended in flax-
spinning realised itself formerly in extra income to numerous peasant families, or maybe, in
Frederick II’s time, in taxes pour le roi de Prusse. It realises itself now in profit for a few
capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over the face of the country, are now
crowded together in a few great labour-barracks, together with the labourers and the raw material.
And spindles, looms, raw material, are now transformed from means of independent existence for
the spinners and weavers, into means for commanding them and sucking out of them unpaid
labour.
3
One does not perceive, when looking at the large manufactories and the large farms, that
they have originated from the throwing into one of many small centres of production, and have
been built up by the expropriation of many small independent producers. Nevertheless, the
popular intuition was not at fault. In the time of Mirabeau, the lion of the Revolution, the great
manufactories were still called manufactures réunies, workshops thrown into one, as we speak of
fields thrown into one. Says Mirabeau:
“We are only paying attention to the grand manufactories, in which hundreds of
men work under a director and which are commonly called manufactures réunies.
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Chapter 30
Those where a very large number of labourers work, each separately and on his
own account, are hardly considered; they are placed at an infinite distance from
the others. This is a great error, as the latter alone make a really important object
of national prosperity.... The large workshop (manufacture réunie) will enrich
prodigiously one or two entrepreneurs, but the labourers will only be journeymen,
paid more or less, and will not have any share in the success of the undertaking. In
the discrete workshop (manufacture separée), on the contrary, no one will become
rich, but many labourers will be comfortable; the saving and the industrious will
be able to amass a little capital, to put by a little for a birth of a child, for an
illness, for themselves or their belongings. The number of saving and industrious
labourers will increase, because they will see in good conduct, in activity, a means
of essentially bettering their condition, and not of obtaining a small rise in wages
that can never be of any importance of the future, and whose sole result is to place
men in the position to live a little better, but only from day to day.... The large
workshops, undertakings of certain private persons who pay labourers from day to
day to work for their gain, may be able to put these private individuals at their
ease, but they will never be an object worth the attention of governments. Discrete
workshops, for the most part combined with cultivation of small holdings, are the
only free ones.”
4
The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural
population not only set free for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of
subsistence, and material for labour; it also created the home-market.
In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage labourers, and their means of
subsistence and of labour into material elements of capital, created, at the same time, a home-
market for the latter. Formerly, the peasant family produced the means of subsistence and the raw
materials, which they themselves, for the most part, consumed. These raw materials and means of
subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer sells them, he finds his market in
manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen stuffs – things whose raw materials had been within
the reach of every peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use – were now
transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts at once served for
markets. The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans until now had found in the
numerous small producers working on their own account, concentrate themselves now into one
great market provided for by industrial capital.
5
Thus, hand in hand with the expropriation of the
self-supporting peasants, with their separation
from their means of production, goes the
destruction of rural domestic industry, the process of separation between manufacture and
agriculture. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the internal market of a
country that extension and consistence which the capitalist mode of production requires. Still the
manufacturing period, properly so called, does not succeed in carrying out this transformation
radically and completely. It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers
but partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts of the town
and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate basis. If it destroys these in one
form, in particular branches, at certain points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs
them for the preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore, a new class
of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of the soil as an accessory calling, find
their chief occupation in industrial labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers
directly, or through the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the chief, cause of a
phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student of English history.
6
From the last third of the
15th century he finds continually complaints, only interrupted at certain intervals, about the
encroachment of capitalist farming in the country districts, and the progressive destruction of the