546
Chapter 33
What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the
colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth.
17
The
parcelling-out of the means of production
among innumerable owners, working on their own
account, annihilates, along with the centralisation of capital, all the foundation of combined
labour. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of
fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a
moment, for the working class constitutes its living appurtenance, always in excess, always at
disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells an extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with
some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes
stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” labourers. “Our capital,” says one of the
characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period
of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labour which, we knew,
would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retaining the labour of such emigrants, we should
have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it,
even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply
whenever we might need it.”
18
After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labour with
the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us
a glimpse at the reverse of
the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising,
and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural labourer is miserable wretch, a
pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free
labour employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? ... Undoubtedly ,
farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.”
19
But,
never mind,
national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.
How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to
turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil,
but also – the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put
upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that
compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy
land, and turn himself into an independent peasant.
20
The fund resulting from the sale of land at a
price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of
labour by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the
other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and
thus keep the wage labour market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera
pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic
colonisation.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labour must be constant
and regular, because, first, as no labourer would be able to procure land until he had worked for
money, all immigrant labourers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce
capital for the employment of more labourers; secondly, because every labourer who left off
working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for
bringing fresh labour to the colony.”
21
The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course,
be a “sufficient price” –
i.e., so high “as to prevent the labourers from becoming independent
landowners until others had followed to take their place.”
22
This “sufficient price for the land” is
nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the labourer pays to the capitalist
for leave to retire from the wage labour market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist
“capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more labourers; then he must place, at his
own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labour market, whom the Government
forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.
547
Chapter 33
It is very characteristic that the English Government for years practised this method of “primitive
accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was,
of course, as complete as that of Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act. The stream of emigration was only
diverted from the English colonies to the United States. Meanwhile, the advance of capitalistic
production in Europe, accompanied by increasing Government pressure, has rendered
Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men,
year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United
States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more
rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the
American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes,
the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on
speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid
centralisation of capital. The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for
emigrant labourers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the
lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down
to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats
and capitalists by the Government, so loudly denounced even by Wakefield, has produced,
especially in Australia
23
, in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and
with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes even to the smallest
artisan, an ample “relative surplus labouring population,” so that almost every mail brings the
Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia labour-market,” and the prostitution in some places
flourishes as wantonly as in the London Haymarket.
However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that
interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world,
and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and
therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-
earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.
End of Book I
1
We treat here of real Colonies, virgins soils, colonized by free immigrants. The United States are,
speaking economically, still only a Colony of Europe. Besides, to this category belong such old
plantations as those in which the abolition of slavery has completely altered the earlier conditions.
2
Wakefield’s few glimpses on the subject of Modern Colonisation are fully anticipated by Mirabeau
Pere, the physiocrat, and even much earlier by English economists.
3
Later, it became a temporary necessity in the international competitive struggle. But, whatever its
motive, the consequences remain the same.
4
“A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning
cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no
more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar.... Capital is a social
relation of production. It is a historical relation of production.” (Karl Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,”
N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)
5
E. G. Wakefield: “England and America,” vol.ii. p.33.
6
l.c., p.17.
7
l.c., vol.i, p.18.