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serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer. But this capitalist
soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material
substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even when they are its exact
opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the
individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal
division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to
pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law.
“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of
capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his
own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for
owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.”
6
So long, therefore, as the
labourer can accumulate for himself – and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his
means of production – capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are
impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then, in old Europe,
was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions of labour, i.e., the co-existence of
capital and wage labour, brought about? By a social contract of a quite original kind. “Mankind
have adopted a... simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital,” which, of
course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination, floated in their imagination as the
sole and final end of their existence: “they have divided themselves into owners of capital and
owners of labour.... The division was the result of concert and combination.”
7
In one word: the
mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the “accumulation of capital.” Now, one would
think that this instinct of self-denying fanaticism would give itself full fling especially in the
Colonies, where alone exist the men and conditions that could turn a social contract from a dream
to a reality. But why, then, should “systematic colonisation” be called in to replace its opposite,
spontaneous, unregulated colonisation? But - but - “In the Northern States of the American
Union; it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the
description of hired labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the
people.”
8
Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of
capital, exists so little that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of
Colonial wealth. His systematic colonisation is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do
with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain
labourers from Spain. But, without labourers, their capital must have perished, or at least, must
soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his
own hands. This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England – the Swan River
Settlement – where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want
of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ
with his own hands.”
9
We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the
capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this – that
the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into
his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the
same operation.
10
This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate
vice – opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free,
where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour
very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined
labour at any price.”
11
As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the
soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation
of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry.
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Chapter 33
Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is
exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in
particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some
portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They
frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their
own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many
cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the
secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.”
12
With such queer people as these,
where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?
The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this – that it not only constantly reproduces
the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of
capital, a relative surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of
labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to
capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that
indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug
political economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of free contract
between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the
commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy
is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-
country, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour-market
is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand,
the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the
other, the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with
impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of
wage-labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation of capital? The wage-worker of
to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from
the labour-market, but not into the workhouse. This constant transformation of the wage-
labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich
themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of
the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer remain
indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence,
also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that
our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage
labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labour is
always not only small but uncertain.”
13
“Though the produce divided between the capitalist and
the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few,
even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.”
14
The
labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater
part of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his
own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be labourers for hire; they... become
independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.”
15
Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good
money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the
absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in
the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies
“the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers – for a class to whom the capitalist
might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilised countries the
labourer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence
must be created by artificial means.”
16