532
Chapter 30
peasantry. On the other hand, he always finds this peasantry turning up again, although in
diminished number, and always under worse conditions. The chief reason is: England is at one
time chiefly a cultivator of corn, at another chiefly a breeder of cattle, in alternate periods, and
with these the extent of peasant cultivation fluctuates. Modern Industry alone, and finally,
supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic agriculture, expropriates radically the
enormous majority of the agricultural population, and completes the separation between
agriculture and rural domestic industry, whose roots – spinning and weaving – it tears up.
7
It
therefore also, for the first time, conquers for industrial capital the entire home market.
8
1
In his “Notions de Philosophie Naturelle.” Paris, 1838.
2
A point that Sir James Steuart emphasises.
3
“Je permettrai,” says the capitalist, “que vous ayez l’honneur de me servir, à condition que vous me
donnez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que je prends de vous commander.” [I will allow you ... to
have the honour of serving me, on condition that, in return for the pains I take in commanding you,
you give me the little that remains to you] (J. J. Rousseau: “Discours sur l’Economie Politique.”)
4
Mirabeau, l.c., t.III, pp.20-109 passim. That Mirabeau considers the separate workshops more
economical and productive than the “combined,” and sees in the latter merely artificial exotics under
government cultivation, is explained by the position at that time of a great part of the continental
manufactures.
5
“Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into yearly clothing of a labourer’s family by its
own industry in the intervals of other works — this makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to
the factory, thence to the broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have great commercial operations,
and nominal capital engaged to the amount of twenty times its value.... The working-class is thus
emersed to support a wretched factory population, a parastical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious
commercial, monetary, and financial system.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.120.)
6
Cromwell’s time forms an exception. So long as the Republic lasted, the mass of the English people
of all grades rose from the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors.
7
Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen industry has sprung, with the introduction of machinery,
from manufacture proper and from the destruction of rural and domestic industries.
“The plough, the yoke, were ‘the invention of gods, and the occupation of heroes’; are the loom, the
spindle, the distaff, of less noble parentage. You sever the distaff and the plough, the spindle and the
yoke, and you get factories and poor-houses, credit and panics, two hostile nations, agriculture and
commercial.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.122.)
But now comes Carey, and cries out upon England, surely not with unreason, that it is trying to turn
every other country into a mere agricultural nation, whose manufacturer is to be England. He pretends
that in this way Turkey has been ruined, because “the owners and occupants of land have never been
permitted by England to strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance between the
plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow.” (“The Slave Trade,” p.125.) According to him,
Urquhart himself is one of the chief agents in the ruin of Turkey, where he had made Free-trade
propaganda in the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great Russophile by the way, wants
to prevent the process of separation by that very system of protection which accelerates it.
8
Philanthropic English economists, like Mill, Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett, &c., and liberal
manufacturers like John Bright & Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked Cain after
Abel, Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But where do you come from, then? From the
destruction of those freeholders. Why don’t you ask further, where are the independent weavers,
spinners, and artisans gone?
Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial
Capitalist
The genesis of the industrial
*
capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the
farmer. Doubtless many small guild-masters, and yet more independent small artisans, or even
wage labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and (by gradually extending
exploitation of wage labour and corresponding accumulation) into full-blown capitalists. In the
infancy of capitalist production, things often happened as in the infancy of medieval towns, where
the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which servant, was in great part
decided by the earlier or later date of their flight. The snail’s pace of this method corresponded in
no wise with the commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries of
the end of the 15th century created. But the middle ages had handed down two distinct forms of
capital, which mature in the most different economic social formations, and which before the era
of the capitalist mode of production, are considered as capital quand même [all the same] –
usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital.
“At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the possession of the capitalist
... he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe
gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed the largest, and a continually
augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour for himself. The capitalist may
now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no
law has conferred on him the right to this property... this change has been effected
by the taking of interest on capital ... and it is not a little curious that all the law-
givers of Europe endeavoured to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes against
usury.... The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a
complete change in the right of property, and by what law, or series of laws, was it
effected?”
2
The author should have remembered that revolutions are not made by laws.
The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into
industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild
organisation.
3
These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation
and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were established at sea-
ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence in
England an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies,
the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of
primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with
the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant
dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China,
&c.
*
Industrial here in contradistinction to agricultural. In the “categoric” sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist as
much as the manufacturer.