540
Chapter 31
commerce,” it is our bounden duty again and again to brand the Burkes, who only differ from their
successors in one thing — talent.
14
Marie Angier: “Du Crédit Public.” Paris, 1842.
15
“Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very
true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit,
just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A
certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness;
50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per
cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of
its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both.
Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35,
36.)
Chapter 32: 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 co-
operation, 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.
1
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