Primitive Accumulation

Discussion

Mick Brooks:

"In Capital, Marx explains the process of primitive accumulation, which established the preconditions for capitalist production. On the one hand, rich men gained fortunes in money rather than land or slaves. On the other hand, the common people were reduced to property less proletarians, forced to sell their labour power in order to live.

“(T)hese newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had [been] robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” (Capital, Volume I, p. 875)

Marx uses Britain as his example of primitive accumulation. Part of this expropriation was the separation of the people from the commons. Medieval and early modern villages had, at their centre, the crop fields. All around were “wastes”, which supplied wood for fuel and building materials, running water and fishing rights and rough grazing for their animals. The villagers could not make a living without these commons. Yet the coming of capitalism saw the enclosures, the seizure of these lands from the villagers and their conversion into the private property of the rich.

“Communal property - which is entirely distinct from the state property we have just been considering - was an old Teutonic institution which lived on under the cover of feudalism. We have seen how its forcible usurpation, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the fifteenth century and extends into the sixteenth. But at that time the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence… The advance made by the eighteenth century shows itself in this, that the law itself now becomes the instrument by which the people's land is stolen… The Parliamentary form of the robbery is that of 'Bills for Inclosure of Commons', in other words decrees by which landowners grant themselves the people's land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people.” (ibid, p. 885)

The poet, and farm labourer, John Clare lamented the enclosure movement in his native village in Northamptonshire with these words:

“Ye injur'd fields ye once where gay When nature's hand displayed Long waving rows of willows grey And clumps of hawthorn shade But now alas your awthorn bowers All desolate we see The woodman's axe their shade devours And cuts down every tree

Not tree alone have owned their force Whole woods beneath them bowed They turned the winding riv'lets course And all thy pastures plough'd To shrub nor tree throughout thy fields They no compassion show The uplifted axe no mercy yields But strikes a fatal blow”

('Helpston Green.' Spelling as in the original. See p. 29 John Clare: a champion for the poor, Carcarnet press, 2000)

Capitalism required a revolution in relations between the classes and a revolution in the way we thought about the world to come into being. Karl Polanyi was well aware of this. “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could not have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course.” (The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Beacon press, 1957, p. 139) “While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.” (ibid, p. 141)

Capitalism had to fight long and hard against what the historian E.P. Thompson calls the “moral economy”, a code of ethics and practice radically at odds with capitalist behaviour. (E.P. Thompson - Customs in common, Penguin Books, 1993). This piece of doggerel from the seventeenth century shows the hatred felt by common people against the enclosure movement:

“The law hangs the man and flogs the woman Who steal the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose, Who steals the common from the goose.”

A similar process of expropriation took place in the Scottish highlands in the years after Culloden. Marx explains the situation.

“The Highland Celts were organized in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or 'great man' was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil.” (ibid p 890)…

“In the eighteenth century the Gaels were both driven from the land and forbidden to emigrate, with a view to driving them forcibly to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. As an example of the method used in the nineteenth century, the 'clearings' made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, who had been well instructed in economics, resolved, when she succeeded to the headship of the clan, to undertake a radical economic cure, and to turn the whole county of Sutherland, the population of which had already been reduced to 15,000 by similar processes, into a sheep-walk. Between 1814 and 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage.” (Capital, Vol. I, pp. 890-891)

In describing the process of expropriation, Marx makes two points. The first is that property is not reducible to private property. There is also the communal property of the villagers and of the clan. The second point is that conventional economics acted throughout as a justification for this legalised robbery of common lands. Hence the sarcastic aside about the Duchess of Sutherland - “well instructed in economics.” The hollowed out concepts of bourgeois economics reduce all property to private property. After all, how could the landed gentry be stealing the commons when they didn't belong to anyone?" (http://www.marxist.com/intellectual-property-rights221105.htm)