In chapters 26 through 33 of Capital, we see the application of Marx’s historical materialism in practice, a historiographical approach focusing on the developmental transition from feudalism to capitalism, and, particularly, the so called “primitive accumulation.” Marx’s systematically describes the process by which this transition began in fifteenth century England, the appalling role of the state in this transition, the separation of the agriculture from capitalist industry, and an exploration of the contradictions of colonialism using the perspective of one bourgeoisie economist. One of the of more enjoyable aspects of Marx’s writing, aside from his unique insights, is the flurry of sharp wit with which he cuts through the bourgeoisie idealism of the capitalist paradigm, of which I will highlight some my favorites in the my summary below. Chapter 26 is short, but an important introduction to this concept of primitive accumulation which Marx cheekily analogizes as the “original sin” of the bourgeoisie historical narrative. Basically, a perpetuated myth of the bourgeoisie elite of their “earned” place in capitalist society. “Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living” (p. 873, Penguin Classics Ed. 1976). A common demonization of the poor that perpetuates to this day. A consistent characterization of historians of the advent of capitalism as the dawn of freedom from servitude under feudalism. But, from Marx’s perspective, it was expropriation of the peasantry from one form of exploitation under feudalism, in which the serf had the benefit of land, to another form under capitalism, in which the worker only had his labour. Chapter 27 dives into this transition further, highlighting the role of the state in propping up the feudal system that provided protections for serfs such as the Act of Henry VII in 1489 which “forbade the destruction of all ‘houses of husbandry’ possessing 20 acres of land” (p. 880). Then quoting F. Bacon’s The Reign of Henry VII: ’profound and admirable, in making farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is, maintained with such a proportion of land unto them as may breed a subject to keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.’ What the capitalist system demanded was the reverse of this: a degraded servile condition of the mass of the people, their means of labour into capital (p. 880). Then as time progressed, legislation was gradually implemented shrinking the entitled acres of land diminishing the serf’s independent livelihood, and driving them from their homes so the state may expropriate the land for capitalist agricultural production; divorcing the peasantry from the agriculture completely into industrial production. A process which was accelerated by the Reformation in the sixteenth century. “The property of the [Catholic] church formed the religious bulwark of the old conditions of landed property. With its fall, these conditions could no longer maintain their existence…by about 1750 the yeomanry had disappeared, and so, by the last decade of the eighteenth century, had the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer” (p. 883). Primitive accumulation, in sum, was accomplished not by disciplined frugality, but by plunder of the Church’s property, abdication by the state to protect the powerless, the seizure of feudal property and the transformation of it into ‘private property.’ “They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians” (p. 895). Marx’s description is a near Romanization of the feudal arrangement between the serf class and lords. Although he acknowledges the exploitation of the serfs, the description would seem to suggest this exploitation was somehow a lesser degree than that of the capitalist class, which is arguable. What is not arguable is the atrocious, sometimes violent, usurpation of their land rights by the state driving them into a new form of subjugation as wage-labourers, “paupers,” and “vagabonds.” In the process, cultivating a false narrative of what put them there in the first place. Chapter 28 proceeds in a similar vein with examination of different legislation used by the state to suppress wages and collectivization. Many of these laws I was unaware of, and yet found unsurprising; no doubt such laws garnering only passing mention in most history books and courses, if mentioned at all, even when I was in undergrad. Many of laws of which punishing the poor and homeless for the crime of being so. “Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals,” Marx remarked, “and assumed that it was entirely within their powers to go on working under the old conditions which in fact no longer existed” (p. 896). The perpetuation of the “original sin” narrative of the poor entrenched in law; much like the introduction of work requirements under welfare reform during the Clinton administration in the nineties. Chapters 30 and 32 examine the rise of the industrial capitalists and tendency of capital accumulation. Of particular interest to me was Marx’s discussion of the role of public or national debt in chapter 31. The national debt, i.e. the alienation of the state – whether that sate is despotic, constitutional or republican – marked the capitalist era with its stamp. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is – the national debt. Hence, quite consistently with this, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, lack of faith in the national debt takes the place of the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness (p. 919). An example of Marx clever wit, referencing of course the “unpardonable sin” in Matthew 12:31. The management of the public debt, an article of faith in conservative politics. An apparent an odious contradiction. The national debt provides an illusion of need for financing it, which means treasury bonds sold by the state, giving capitalist a tax free method of capital accumulation. “As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows unproductive money with the power of creation and thus turns it into capital, without forcing it to expose itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury” (p. 919). Treasury bonds, a store of value insured (for the most part) against inflation, is indeed an expansionary means of capital accumulation and yet an unproductive one in the economy. Furthermore, the use of this instrument is nonetheless financed through taxes on the rest of us, while a biased persists towards lower taxes on nonproductive capital gains. The creation of the bonds has also led to bond markets, and, naturally, speculation. However, as one of a neo-chartalist persuasion, I would quibble with Marx’s explanation for the need of increasing taxation. As the national debt is backed by the revenues of the state, which must cover the annual interest payments etc., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement to the system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayers feeling it immediately, but they still make increased taxes necessary as a consequence…Over-taxation is not an accidental occurrence, but rather a principle (p. 921). The need to tax to pay interest on the national debt is not the driving force by which taxes must be raised. The necessity of taxes is to drive the acceptance of the currency. The state appropriates resources as needed by spending money into the economy. The money is accepted by the citizenry by decree or fiat, and or by the institution of taxation which requires the citizenry to pay in the unit of account specified by the state. The government does not need tax before it spends, and that is true of interest payments as well. Taxes drive money, but the level of taxation and who is taxed is entirely a political choice for which politicians have sided with the capitalist class for most of the history of capitalism. The national debt is simply the sum of all outstanding treasury bonds. The state could stop issuing bonds tomorrow, aside from what that would do to our standing in the present global financial system, the reality is that it would not inhibit the ability of the government to continue to spend with limited inflation risk short of full employment and maximum productive capacity. Chapter 33 was the more interesting chapter not only as a paragon of Marx’s wit, but because of the interesting contradiction of colonialization in America and Australia. In the colonies, the capitalist goal of capital enhancement through the exploitation of labour is continuously throttled by the abundance of land for which workers become their own producers. The prospect of owning land was a driving incentive of immigration to the American colonies. Poor Europeans who could not afford the expense of passage would often agree to indenture contracts between one and seven years in exchange for a small plot of land. It’s estimated between a half and two-thirds of white European immigrants were brought to the American colonies under these indenture contracts. However, this poses a natural problem for the capitalist. Once the contract is expired, the labourer is no longer dependent on the capitalist for subsistence. The labourer can now till and manage his own land, build his own residence, and profit from his own surplus. Thus, this required a steady flow of indentured labour, or wage-labour as the alternative. It should be noted that most of the labour force in the colonies were free wage-labourers as number of immigrants who migrated under no such contracts or the indenture had expired outweighed those who were. But this nonetheless created a problem for American capitalists, a problem recognized by E.G. Wakefield. Marx quoting Wakefield: ’If…all the 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 his own hands. This is to some extent the case in the new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire’” (p. 933). The contradiction of colonization here, the very purpose for which European immigrants colonize, land, undermines the capitalist class. The constant “understock” of labour inevitably leading to the dependence on slave labour to undermine what is essentially full employment in the colonies. From this analysis, I see better where Marx is coming from in chapters 26-27. Marx recognizes the relationship between land and labour in resisting the capitalists. Land was the key which capitalist understood they needed to strip from the labourers, thus the development of eminent domain, a means by which to use the state to procure the land, and capitalist private property rights for which to keep it from the labourer. In reading Engel’s Letters on Historical Materialism, one major theme emerges: Engels must repeatedly clarify the confusion of Marx’s followers and critics that the economic domain is not the only determinant of history; what Althusser referred to as Economism (I think). Clearly the misconception persisted into the twentieth century. “Marx and I are partly responsible,” Engels laments in his letter to J. Block in as late as 1890 (seven years after the death of Marx), “for the fact that at times our disciples have laid more weight upon the economic factor than belongs to it. We were compelled to emphasize this main principle in opposition; to our opponents who denied it, and there wasn’t always time, place and occasion to do justice to the other factors in the reciprocal interaction.” Engels makes similar statement in all the letters. However, seems to undermine this point in his letter to Hans Starkenburg. “The political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development rest upon the economic.” But then acknowledges again that these domains interact on each other. “But they all react upon one another and upon the economic base. It is not the case that the economic situation is the cause, alone active, and everything else only a passive effect. Rather there is a reciprocal interaction with a fundamental economic necessity which in the last instance always asserts itself.” However, while Engels is acknowledging the interaction of these domains, it appears he is still placing an overemphasis on the economic. The Cohen reading, Forces and relations of production, is a defense of his previous writing on historical materialism, the explanation of which are functional explanations. Cohen asserts that relations of production are relations of power; the power capitalist have over labour and the means of production, and the power or lack thereof of the labourer over his own labour. In the case of the wage-worker, none over the means of production. These relations make up the economic superstructure, but do not explain its persistence. While Marx can be quoted as saying the history of society “is the history of class struggle,” Cohen is arguing there is more to it than that. “One may claim, in that spirit, that all history is the history of class struggle without implying that that is all history is, or even that that is what history most fundamentally is” (p. 19). But “if we want to know why class struggle effect is this change rather than that, we must turn to the dialectic of forces and relations of production which governs class behavior and is not explicable in terms of it, and which determines what the long-term outcome of class struggle will be” (p. 19-20). For Cohen, and I think for Marx based on chapters roughly 27-32 of Capital, the functional explanation for the dominance of the capitalist class in their struggle against the proletariat is the role of the state. Cohen sums this up well in this excerpt: In a capitalist society, capitalists have effective power over the means of production. What confers that power on a given capitalist, say an owner of a factory? On what can he rely if others attempt to take control of the factory away from him? An important part of the answer is this: he can rely on the law of the land, which is enforced by the might of the state. It is his legal right which causes him to have his economic power. What he is effectively able to do depends on what he is legally entitled to do. And this is in general true in law-abiding society with respect to all economic powers and all economic agents (p. 16). This aligns with Marx’s historical analysis of the creation of capitalist society in which the state played a central role in creating said society, and by which it is perpetuated. We see to this day the power of the capitalist class in the decisions of our own U.S. Congress despite popular opinion on a multitude of issues. The study by Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University looked at more than 20 years of data and demonstrated empirically that the opinion of the bottom 90 percent of American income earners had no impact on the decisions of Congress. From their abstract: …economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Comments are closed.
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AUTHORAaron Medlin is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying macroeconomics of private debt, monetary economics, international finance, and comparative economic systems. Archives
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