Chapter 26:  The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

Outline of Marx's Discussion:

"Primitive," or "Original," or "Previous" Accumulation is historical point of departure of capitalism.

The Myth of Political Economy:

frugal elite (who accumulated wealth)
vs
lazy rascals (who spent it all and were left with nothing but their skins)

In Actual History:
capitalists (replace guild masters or feudal lords)
vs
working class (displaced from the soil, lost their tools, autonomy)

The capitalists gained control of the means of production via "conquest enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force" (1)

"So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production." (2)

Workers are freed in a double sense:
    1. neither are they owned (i.e., as slaves) as means of production
    2. nor do they own the means of production: change in form of servitude,

Capitalist era dates from the 16th Century.

Commentary

What makes capitalism a new kind of society has been the creation of two new classes: a capitalist one made up of those who seek to organize most people's lives around the work of producing commodities and another, a class of workers, made up of those whose lives are subordinated to that organization. The secret of this creation—hidden by pro-capitalist political apologists in the telling of history—is that the emerging class of capitalists imposed this social order with brutality and violence, forcibly serparating people from their means of livelihood and destroying their ways of life. Those means included: privately owned tools, formal and informal land tenure and commons, such as pastures, fishing waters, forests and often language and culture to which everyone in a community had acess. Although this forcible separation created a situation where the reality (and threat) of destitution and starvation would largely replace the lash as a coercive instrument of control, violence continued to provide capitalists with a supplementary weapon for keeping people subordinated, right down to the present. This is true whether the violence has been wielded by corporate goons, paramilitary thugs or by government police and military.

Marx both critiques political economy by showing it to be at once apologetic and false and gives an overview of the actual processes through which capitalism emerged as a new kind of social order—an outline of the history he examines more thoroughly in the subsequent chapters.(3)

His analysis temporarily ignores the central subjects of political economy —the interactions of "money and commodities"—to focus on the social social conflicts that shaped the new world in which those things came to figure so centrally. The violence that capitalists required to impose their order reveals the depth of resistance. The agents of this new order, the "knights of industry", exploited every opportunity to achieve power, to subordinate the exploited classes of the old order in a new way and to usurp the power of the feudal lords, the "knights of the sword." Here the nascent capitalist class is portrayed as using "base" means, of "making use of events in which they played no part whatsoever" and of using various "revolutions"as "levers."

The Myths of Political Economy

Myths about the class structure of capitalism have served to justify its historical origins and on-going class disparities. The central myth, still promulgated today, is a morality tale that portrays capitalists as obtaining their wealth by frugally saving and investing. It suggests that everyone has always been able to become a capitalist by the same means, and those who do not, have no one to blame but themselves.

In 19th Century English literature, this myth was already the object of ridicule far more ascerbic than that of Marx's. For example, in Charles Dickens's (1812–70) 1854 novel Hard Times, which narrates the lives and tragedies of several people in a fictional Manchester-style, manufacturing city called Coketown, we find many passages where various persons are repeating this myth. Examples include the self-praising speeches of Mr. Josiah Bounderby—the novel's central capitalist—constantly bragging (falsely it turns out) about how he raised himself out of the mud to his present august position as mill owner and banker. (4) More concise, however, is a pretty exchange between Bounderby's ex-housekeeper Mrs. Sparsit and Bitzer, his light porter, general spy and informer at the bank, in which the repetition of the myth reveals both a distain for those irrational creatures (the workers) who put human relationships before personal profit and a self-delusion about the origins of wealth. Both, of course, are merely repeating the self-justifying truisms of Bounderby in an almost ritual, and mutually reinforcing, manner. (5) The effect is both comic and appalling.

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?     "As to their wanting recreations, ma'am," said Bitzer, "it's stuff and nonsense. I don't want recreations. I never did, and I never shall; I don't like 'em. As to their combining together; there are many of them, I have no doubt, that by watching and informing upon one another could earn a trifle now and then, whether in money or good will, and improve their livelihood. Then, why don't they improve it, ma'am! It's the first consideration of a rational creature, and it's what they pretend to want."      "Pretend indeed!" said Mrs. Sparsit.      "I am sure we are constantly hearing, ma'am, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families," said Bitzer.  "Why look at me, ma'am! I don't want a wife and family. Why should they?"      "Because they are improvident," said Mrs. Sparsit.      "Yes, ma'am," returned Bitzer, "that's where it is.  If they were more provident and less perverse, ma'am, what would they do?  They would say, 'While my hat covers my family,' or 'while my bonnet covers my family,'—as the case might be, ma'am—'I have only one to feed and that's the person I most like to feed.'"      "To be sure," assented Mrs. Sparsit, eating a muffin.      "Thank you, ma'am," said Bitzer, knuckling his forehead again, in return for the favour of Mrs. Sparsit's improving conversation. "Would you wish a little more hot water, ma'am, or is there anything else that I could fetch you?" (from Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book the second: Reaping, Chapter 1: The Effects in the Bank.)

A subtler, but even more biting indictment of the myth of the self-made man, is contained in Charlotte Brontë's first novel The Professor which was written in 1846 but not published until after her death in 1857. The protagonist, a young man who becomes a school teacher, rather than a capitalist, only achieves success by fully participating in a dog-eat-dog world fully shaped by the laissez-faire, competitive capitalism of the 19th Century. The novel portrays the necessary combination of aggressiveness and defensiveness required for survival, as well as the ultimate loneliness and isolation of even the most successful competitors for status and love.  It is an amazingly modern treatment of what Marx in his 1844 Manuscripts and social critics in the 20th Century call the alienation of capitalist society. The pressures to which the young professor succumbs and the behaviors that he adopts continue to be depressingly widespread in contemporary academia where academics are pitted against each other in an endless struggle for publication, research funds and promotion.

In American literature and popular culture, this myth has taken many forms, including the novels for young adults of Horatio Alger (1832–99). With the rise of the modern corporation with its many-leveled wage and salary hierarchy, the myth has taken the form of stories of energetic individuals who work hard and scheme their way up that hierarchy, perhaps even to the top. From Horatio Alger’s young men to Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success (1987) or Melanie Griffith in Working Girl (1988), the myth has changed little. It has, however, also been repeatedly critiqued, in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) or poems such as Edwin Robertson’s “Richard Cory” (1897), made famous in Simon and Garfunkel’s musical interpretation (1966). (6) I return to these critiques in my commentary on Chapter 7.

Controversy: Was Marx an "Historical Materialist"?

Declining to take on the history of capital everywhere, Marx announces that he will take the example of England as the "classic" case. And indeed throughout Capital most of Marx's examples are drawn from British history although from time to time, including this section on primitive accumulation, he brings in the experiences in other countries. However, since Capital was published in 1867, there are many who have tried to convert Marx's analysis of the rise of capitalism into a general theory of history, i.e., historical materialism. Engels's efforts in this direction built on a few generalizations that he and Marx had made in their early joint works The German Ideology (c.1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848). In the former, they insisted on the material foundations of human life in the genesis of ideology. In the latter, aimed at differentiating their communist movement from a variety of socialist efforts, they famously wrote: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." A decade later, in his brief preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1850) Marx wrote:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.(7)

Given the generic character of this passage, characterizing human history in general, it is easy enough to see why some would see it as a first step toward a general theory of human history. Engels, but not Marx, went on to attempt the elaboration of such a general theory in writings such as Anti-Dühring (1878) and The Dialectics of Nature (1883), where he pushed beyond a general theory of history, to sketch a virtual cosmology—a dialectical materialism encompassing all of nature as well as human history, a cosmology in which historical materialism constituted a subset of a broader vision.

These works became essential references for official Soviet ideology, referred to in shorthand as histomat and diamat. At their nadir, during Stalin’s regime, both were reduced to a virtual catechism to which all Soviet intellectuals were forced to adhere. They were also used to justify—when it suited Soviet interests—demands that members of the Soviet-organized Third International in regions of the Global South support the development of capitalism against so-called “feudal forces.” In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953 and of the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the theory was refurbished as an elaborate structural model by Althusser and his collaborators. The ongoing appeal of one version of historical materialism or another is evident in the continuing publication of the academic journal Historical Materialism (1997–), its conferences and its book series.

Unfortunately for those attached to the idea of a general theory of history, Marx wrote his own commentary on this kind of interpretation of his work. One author to whom Marx took exception was Nicolai K. Mikhailovski (1842–1904) who had used Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation to argue the historical necessity for all countries, including Russia, to pass through the stage of capitalism. Yes, the czar should be overthrown, but that overthrow must be followed by accelerating capitalist industrialization of the country. This was a highly political issue in Russia in the 1870s and remained so right through the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks seized power and pursued precisely such a policy. Others, such as the populists, recognized no such inevitability, argued and organized for a revolution of workers and peasants that would undercut the beginnings of capitalism in Russia and permit a direct passage from the traditional village mir (a communal form of organization) to communism. In the process of rejecting Mikhailovski's interpretation, Marx refuses the conversion of his theory into "historical materialism":

It is absolutely necessary for him to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate for all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed.(8)

Elsewhere in the same letter, to illustrate his objection to applying his analysis willy-nilly, Marx points out how the expropriation of peasants in ancient Rome led not to wage labor but to slavery.

Four years later, in a letter to Vera Zasulich (1849-1919), he again rejected the generalization of his theory and insisted on the open-ended possibilities of the Russian village mir as the basis of a new society:

The historical inevitability of this process [the genesis of capitalist production] is, expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe . . . Hence, the analysis presented Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune, but a special study which I have made of it and the material which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of the social regeneration of Russia . . . (9)

He hoped, we now know, vainly, that revolution might give the mir a chance to become the point of departure for the growth of an alternative, more attractive culture and civilization. (10)

From these notes and from the treatment in Capital I draw two conclusions: first, this section on primitive accumulation shows the conditions and processes through which capitalism emerged and which it must maintain to reproduce its social order. People must be separated from alternative means of livelihood and driven into the labor market, where they can gain their bread only by working for business. (11) Second, it is a mistake to see this analysis as a linear stages theory that says all peoples have to pass through these processes.

Even today, when it can be argued that all countries have long been caught up in the capitalist web and their workers fitted into its net of exploitation, there is nothing in Marx that argues each subordinated group must progress through predetermined stages of development before they can fight to be free of capitalism. In a world organized around an extremely complex multinational division of labor, it makes no sense to interpret the call for a “universal development of productive forces” as a call for universal industrialization. Marx shows us how capitalist development has always involved underdevelopment, both as a process and as a strategy. The development of capitalism is not only based on the underdevelopment and impoverishment of all other modes of life but in the process, it generates a poverty it can never abolish because it provides an ongoing threat that not being directly exploited by capitalism can be worse than being exploited by it. (12) The division of labor, a corresponding income hierarchy and the promise of upward mobility have provided capitalists with carrots to induce acceptance of its rules of the game, but also with the sticks of unemployment and poverty to club people into line when the carrot does not provide sufficient motivation.

Extensions: Capitalism Can Not Eliminate the Alternatives

As he argues here, and again in Chapter 25 on accumulation, capitalist development never means giving everyone a living wage in exchange for work. On the contrary, many, perhaps most (on a world scale) of those whose previous ways of life are progressively destroyed are doomed to remain unwaged and poor.

This is one reason why so many people have resisted and fought to preserve their independence as communities and their uniqueness as cultures. In the United States, as in other so-called developed capitalist countries, most people have lost that struggle and been swept into the world of factories, offices, ghettos and suburbs. Some have preserved unique cultural attributes by forming rural or urban communities. We have the Amish in the countryside, Native Americans on reservations, and ethnic communities in cities. Others, from time to time, have broken away to form intentional communities that escape, to some degree, subordination to wage labor. But most people have been integrated into the waged/unwaged hierarchies of capitalist society. In the Global South, where factories have been fewer and capitalist development has concentrated its poverty, a higher percentage of people have had better luck in preserving some land, some control over their means of production and more of their traditional culture. They are not outside of capitalism, they too are exploited, as we will see, in a variety of ways, yet they still have some space that supports their ongoing struggle for autonomy. In Capital, Marx does not talk much about these situations because his historical examples are mostly drawn from the British Isles where very little of pre-capitalist social forms and culture survived.(13)

One place where access to land and community cohesion have made possible resistance to total subsumption to capitalism and a certain degree of autonomy is Mexico. In the early 1990s, in the run-up to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican government pushed through a consitutional amendment aimed at undercutting one of the few fruits of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) won by peasants and the indigenous: the collective ownership of land in the form of ejidos where the land belonged to communities and not to individuals and could not be bought and sold. While not organized like the Russian mir, the ejidos nevertheless provided the material foundations for peasant, especially indigneous, communities to survive and preserve elements of their languages, music, dress and self-organization quite different from the institutions of the centralized Mexican state. Thus, they have formed unwanted rigidities to Mexican and American business with an interest in expanding their investments and tapping more people as cheap labor.

While the amendment of the Mexican constitution pleased business, indigenous communities saw it as a death knell foretelling widespread ethnic genocide. As a result in the southern state of Chiapas the indigenous members of many communities united to form, equip and launch a rebellion against such a destiny. These are the Zapatistas, self-named after one of the heroes of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), a peasant from the state of Morelos who became leader of the Liberation Army of the South.

On January 1, 1994, the same day NAFTA went into effect, fighters of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation) poured out of the jungles and forests and seized six cities in Chiapas. As they did so they explained their rebellion as a last ditch defense against their extermination as peoples and demanded official recognition of their rights to preserve and evolve, in their own ways, their traditional forms of social organization. The Mexican government counterattacked with troops but was soon forced into negotiations by widespread protests all over Mexico and around the world. Those protests were sparked by the ability of the Zapatistas, especially their main early spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, to clearly articulate not only NAFTA's threat to their communities and their demands for autonomy, but also a more general critique of neoliberalism that resonated around the world so much so as even to inspire foreign musicians, such as the band Rage Against the Machine to celebrate their rebellion in the song "People of the Sun." (14) Outflanked and defeated repeatedly in the subsequent political struggle, the state attacked again in early 1995 and was again forced to back off.

Over the last two decades, the conflict has continued and so far, despite the consitutional amendment permitting communities to be privatized, broken up, sold off and dispersed, the indigneous of the Zapatista movement have been successful in resisting such pressures. Indeed, they have continued to reorganize themselves in more and more explicitly anti-capitalist ways and carried those efforts to the rest of grassroots Mexico seeking ways of building a nationwide, anti-capitalist movement. (15) They continue to resist the final enclosure of the Mexican countryside and the completion of the kinds of processes described by Marx in these chapters.

Because many pre-capitalist forms in Britain were also exploitative, such as the rural world of tenants dominated by a landed aristocracy, Marx had no nostalgia for them. In many areas of the rest of the world, however, those cultures which predated capitalism were either not exploitative, or the people had spheres of autonomy filled with their own traditions, skills and rituals, as in Mexico where strong elements of precolumbian, mesoamerican culture have survived and evolved. (16) Where capitalism has succeeded in destroying such cultures the world has suffered an absolute loss of cultural diversity and human meaning with little to take their place other than the alienated world of capitalist poverty. Where capitalism has failed to impose its own rules of the game because of peoples' resistance, the conflict continues.

Late in his life, Marx not only studied the peasant mir in Russia but also delved into anthropological works on so-called primitive cultures, looking, his notebooks suggest, for further possibilities of avoiding the evils of capitalism through the further development of autonomous cultural practices. (17)

Today, we can look around the world, to some degree here in the U.S. and in the other "developed" capitalist countries, but to a larger degree in the Global South and see the wide variety of distinct ways of life which have been preserved (with change of course), or invented, that still offer a diverse array of alternatives to the dominant culture of capitalism. Whether these alternatives are judged satisfying or seen as points of departure, they show something extremely important: capital has never been able to shape the world entirely according to its own rules.

Beyond the survival of pre-capitalist cultural practices, people have also repeatedly created new kinds of social relationships that are incompatible with the capitalist rules of the game and in the process, have posed new alternatives to it. In his theoretical chapters, Marx shows capitalism really has no creativity at all, but lives by absorbing and harnessing the creativity of those it dominates. The realization of this constant failure of capital to bend all people during all their lives to its demands alerts us to the essential source of potential change: those alternatives preserved and created through struggle.

With these notes of warning about too simplistic an adoption of Marx's analysis as being universally valid in its details, and even more so as being a prescription for a painful but necessary historical passage, we can proceed to examine the elements of this original accumulation which Marx selected for detailed treatment

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

On the issue of the myths of political economy, there are three types of literature. The first, is that which portrays the myths and contributes to their promulgation. In the United States, the best known of this sort are the stories of Horatio Algers such as Ragged Dick (1867) and Struggling Upward (1890) which have been reprinted together in a Penguin American Library Edition (1985). The second, which I have cited and quoted in my commentary, critiques and sometimes ridicules the myths. This includes both literary treatments such as Dickens' Hard Times (1842) or Brontë's The Professor (1846) and the more analytical treatments of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts or such contemporary treatments as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, 1953 or Erich Fromm's The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, 1968. The third type of material is that of professional historians which describe the actual rise of capitalism in all its brutality and ugliness. Such material is not as vast as the reality but reliable accounts are available for many areas of the world, from Britain and other areas of early capitalist development, from the Global South where capitalism extended its rule via colonialism, and later, after World War II, continued to dominate in various forms of neocolonialism.

For the rise of the English working class, as seen from the bottom up, see the following three supurb works: Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage, 1963, Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, New York: Penguin, 1972 and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

On the issue of whether Marx was an "historical materialist", you can read both those who claim that he was and his own words arguing that he was not. The former was the official line of the Soviet Communist Party and its derivitives as well as various other more or less "orthodox" Marxist tendencies which have seen him both as the philsopher of "dialectical materialism" and as the social scientist of "historical materialism. The Soviets published a selection of writings by Marx, Engels and Lenin that they felt contributed to the definition and development of historical materialism: K. Marx, F. Engels and V. Lenin, On Historical Materialism: A Collection, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. A typical contemporary orthodox treatment is Maurice Cornfoth, Historical Materialism, New York: International Publishers, 1971. A more sophisticated Althusserian formulation is given by Étienne Balibar in his essay "The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism" included in Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, London: New Left Books, 1970. A critique of the Althusserian version of historical materialism is given by Edward Thompson in his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. A more recent evaluation is Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory, New York: Praeger, 1981.

For a more detailed discussion of Marx's work and thoughts on 19th Century Russia, see Teodor Shanin (ed) Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983 which includes the letters to Zasulich.

On the issue of existing alternatives to capitalism, living within the interstices of capitalist domination, there are two kinds of material. First is that of anthropology which has been devoted to studying such cultural survivals on the margins of the industrial countries and throughout the largely non-industrialized ones of the Global South. The literature here is obviously too vast too cite, but contemporary struggles of such peoples to survive and evolve are chronicled and supported in the journal Cultural Survival Quarterly. Second is that of the history of "working class culture" or of popular counter-culture which has been generated and reproduced within the struggle against capitalist domination.  This includes not only the struggles of daily life and such mass movements of as those of the 1960s, but also the accounts of recurrent efforts to elaborate intentional "utopian" communities in autonomous spaces carved out of the larger capitalist society.  Here again the literature is enormous.

CONCEPTS FOR REVIEW

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

*1. What is the idyllic myth of the origins of capitalism, according to Marx?  What is his critique of that myth?

2. What are the two senses in which workers are freed during the period of the emergence of capitalism?  What two transformations are involved?

3. Who did the industrial capitalists come to replace in society?

4. Over what period does Marx consider capitalism to have emerged?

5. In footnote #1 Marx notes a case where workers who had once been driven into the cities came to be once more driven into the countryside. How is land reform like this process he describes?

6. What is the role of force Marx sees in the emergence of capitalism?

*7. What can we deduce about peoples' response to primitive accumulation from capital's need to use violence to impose its new kind of civilization?

8. "Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it (primitive accumulation) the classic form." England is for Marx his most steady point of reference and source of examples throughout Capital. Do you think this means that he sees in the history of the rise of capitalism in England an inevitable series of steps through which all societies pass? As an intellectual exercise, collect all the quotes you can to buttress such a position.

*9. How did Marx respond to Mikhailovski's application of the analysis in Capital to the case of Russia? Does he embrace or reject the interpretation of his theory as a general "historical-philosophical theory of universal development"?

10. Discuss the relationship of Marx's analysis in this chapter with the structure of presentation of all of Part VIII in this volume.

11. From the reading of this chapter, what can you say about Marx's concept of the working class? of the capitalist class?  of class? If not everyone has been drafted into the waged working class, through what other ways can you think of have people been forced to work for capital.

*12. Discuss the issue of cultural creation and destruction in the rise of capitalism.  Give some examples of cultures which were mostly, or entirely destroyed.  Was this destruction a one-time phenomenon of primitive accumulation or has it been an ongoing process?

Footnotes

1 Capital, Vol. 1., p. 874.

2 Ibid., p. 875.

3 This opening makes clear why the subtitle of Volume I of Capital is "A Critique of Political Economy." His critique does not provide an alternative political economy or economic theory of capitalism, but rather an analysis designed to inform struggles to overthrow it.

4 Dickens's character, Mr. Josiah Bounderby, has found a real-life incarnation in Donald Trump; the parallels between their incessant, narcissistic bragging and their lies about the sources of their wealth are striking.

5 Here too are parallels with the sycophants with which Trump surrounds himself.

6 Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Poems, New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.

7 MECW, vol. 29, p. 263.

8 Marx to Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877, MECW, vol. 24, p. 200.

9 Marx to Vera Zasulich, March 8, 1881, MECW, vol. 24, pp. 370-371. Also available in the same volume are three drafts of the letter. See pp. 346-369.

10 These letters have played a role in efforts to show how Marx's later work escaped what seemed to be its early limitations. See Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, New York Monthly Review Press, 1983 and Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

11 In recent years, a debate arose about whether Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation is only applicable to the period of the rise of capitalism or also explains continuing processes of enclosure, dispossession and the imposition of markets in contemporary capitalism. See the articles collected in the second issue of the online journal The Commoner, September 2001.

12 This point was apparently made so frequently by the English economist Joan Robinson that the statement “The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism” has been repeatedly attributed to her. See her An Essay on Marxist Economics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd rev. edn., 1967.

13 Fortunately, a bit more has survived in England's first colonies, Wales (1282), Ireland (1603) and Scotland (1707), especially, for those of us who appreciate things Celtic, their traditional language, music and folklore. Capitalists, of course, try to co-opt/instrumentalize all such survivals—just as they do with wholly new artistic and musical creations —by turning them into profitable commodities and spectacles. Thus, folk and even protest music often wind up being sold for a profit. Of course, in the process capitalist commodification often becomes a vehicle for the widespread circulation of anti-capitalist messages and struggle. In the place of wandering troubadours such as Joe Hill (1879–1915) and Woody Guthrie (1912–67), who inspired workers' struggles as they moved from place to place, came LP recordings of Pete Seeger (1919–2014) spreading their songs across the USA, and Bob Dylan (1941–) inspiring the cultural revolution of the 1960s through LPs, tapes and televised performances. Today, with peer-to-peer digital sharing, YouTube and various social media, capitalist commodification has become more difficult and the circulation of anti-capitalist art and music more widespread than ever before. See Brett Caraway, "Survey of File-Sharing Culture", International Journal of Communication, no. 6, 2012, pp. 564-584.

14 “People of the Sun” got Rage Against the Machine banned by the Mexican government until 1999 when they were finally able to stage a concert in Mexico City. See their video The Battle of Mexico City (2001). The Zapatistas and their supporters have made extensive use of social media, beginning with email and webpages, to circulate information about their struggles and to coordinate resistance to government repression. See H. Cleaver, “The Zapatistas and the Electronic Circulation of Struggle” (1995), in John Holloway and Eloina Peláez (eds.), Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998, pp. 81–103.

15 This was the objective of “The Other Campaign” launched in 2005 as an alternative to presidential elections in Mexico. Having won a certain freedom to travel by dint of continuous struggle, a group of Zapatista spokespeople carried their message and questions about democratic alternatives to Mexico’s formal electoral system throughout Mexico.

16 See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

17 See Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx: Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock, Amsterdam: Van Gorcum & Co., 1972 and Anderson, Marx at the Margins.

Outline of Marx's Discussion:

England: serfdom disappeared by last part of 14th Century
- mostly independent peasants in 15th Century
- part time laborers
- right to common land for grazing, timber, etc.
- small peasant properties
Prelude to Revolution: last 1/3 of 15th Century to first 1/3 of 16th Century
- dissolution of bands of feudal retainers
- partly by royal power reducing wealth of aristocracy
- partly by feudal lords
- driving peasants from land for sheep walks (fx increased wool price)
- usurping commons
- destruction of houses - futile legislation for 150 years after Henry VII (1489) to stem this trend, i.e., to 1630.
16th Century: Reformation
- colossal spoliation of catholic church property - ex-feudal proprietor of land
- dissolution of monasteries
- estates given to royal favorites, drove out hereditary sub-tenants
- estates sold at nominal price
17th Century: "Glorious Revolution" of William of Orange
- theft of state lands, seized and given away or sold at low prices
18th Century: Law becomes tool of land theft
-"Bills for the Enclosure of Commons" by Parliament dominated by "landed and capitalist profit grubbers."
19th Century: "the clearing of the estates"
- clearing of cottages and people
- particularly dramatic in Scotland, e.g. by the Duchess of Sutherland:
- 15,000 people pushed out by British soldiers in appropriation of 794,000 acres of land,
- pushed to seashore, later driven awary again when sea-shore let to London fishmongers.
- conversion of sheep-walks to "deer-forests" for sport (led to famine)
Results:
1. destruction of yeomanry (independent peasants) by 1750
- replaced by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile rabble,
- and sheep/deer, agricultural labor
2. destruction of a whole system of private property and its replacement by another
3. driving of people into the manufacturing towns:
- creation of the human material to be shaped into an industrial working class,
- "driven from the land and forbidden to emigrate"



Commentary

This historical analysis of the first step in the creation of the working class centers on the forcible expropriation of the means of livelihood of peasants and craftspeople. In England some 6,000,000 acres or 1/4 of the cultivated acreage was enclosed by direct act of parliament. Another 4-7 million acres are estimated to have been enclosed privately. (1) The second step—forcing them into the factories—comes in the next chapter. This expropriation of the land was a long process, 300 to 400 years, and only through considerable violence were these changes accomplished. Vast numbers resisted and had to be forcibly dispossessed, a violence that forced them to seek refuge in woodland or cities or even flee abroad.

One area of dispossession, which Marx highlights, is the highlands in Scotland where the Dutchess of Sutherland and others drove their clansmen from the land. Such enclosures and the human misery produced were fought by those directly victimized and protested by sympathizers.

The long and tragic history of the enclosures with their terrible costs to humans and to nature left an indelible mark on the various cultures of the "British" Isles. These costs were a central issue in the transformation wrought by the rise of capitalism, the commercialization of agriculture and the industrialization of manufacturing. Not surprisingly, they have also become the inspiration of folk music that remembers and laments. "The Highland Clearances" written by Andy Stewart, blasts Queen Victoria for sanctioning the kind of highland clearances carried out by the duchess of Sutherland, evokes the burning of the peasant crofts and recalls those who were forced to take ship for the New, and hopefully better, World.(2)




The Highland Clearances Ah, for the Glens are lyin' bare And the wee bit farm deserted, And the woods of Germany, Grow in rows o'er the broken hearted. Black is the wood on the roof ance was braw (ance was braw = once was grand) But blacker still is your heart Victoria Sent your men untae our glens You'll need the Good Lord Lookin' o'er ye.	Many hae gane tae Americay. You burnt their hames and garred them wander (hames = homes, garred = forced) For a' would have stayed wi' the deil himsel' (deil = devil) As bide an hour wi' the cruel Gillanders. Ah for the Glens are lyin' bare And the wee bit farm deserted, And the woods of Germany, Grows in rows o'er the broken hearted. Silly Wizard, So Many Partings, 1989 Shanachie 79016

While the new capitalist farmers were on the offensive, they found it no easy task to drive off and pauperize the population. There was violent resistance to physical removal; there were polemics written by economists and others, and from time to time, there was even legislation against the process—though largely ignored and unenforced. As we see in the subsequent chapter, the dispossessed also turned to "vagabondage and brigandry" out of desperation and to avenge themselves for the loss of their land and livelihoods.

This process that Marx analyzes in Britain has been universal throughout the bloody history of the creation of the capitalist world. Marx mentions Germany, Sweden and France in passing, but it has been employed everywhere capitalists invaded, from Asia, through the Middle East and Africa to the Western Hemisphere. In all those regions, British capitalists, backed by their government’s army and navy, established private property by force and fiat against the indigenous peoples and their customs, no matter how varied. So too did the Dutch in the East Indies. In the lands of the Incas and Aztecs, the violence of the Spanish conquistadors and expropriators is well known. Both Spaniards and Portuguese established huge colonial empires in South America, bequeathing the region the title of Latin America following the imposition of their own languages on indigenous peoples. (3) The Dutch also carved out pieces of South America and Southern Africa. Throughout the “Age of Imperialism,” capitalists, backed by their governments, competed, both economically and militarily, frequently displacing one another in wars for the control of the peoples, resources, markets and investment opportunities throughout the world.

Over time, “primitive” accumulation became a recurrent aspect of capitalist development. Despite capitalist efforts to extend their control throughout the world, that world was just too large and its people too numerous and too resisting for capitalist investment to expand as rapidly as its colonial control. As we see in Chapter 25, capitalists have sought to use un-dispossessed people left on the land as a vast, latent “reserve army” to be expelled and exploited when needed. Today, these conflicts continue as capital repeatedly seeks to steal what little land remains in the hands of small farmers, peasants and indigenous communities. Undeterred by government regulation, private capitalists clear-cut and burn tropical rainforests, which remain the home of diverse traditional cultures. Governments seize both private and public lands for corporate investors in airports, golf courses or mining. As such enclosures continue, so too do the struggles against enclosure, sometimes in the courts, sometimes in the streets and forests.(4)

Because his subject is the creation of the working class, Marx focuses on the dispossession of independent peasants and does not dwell either on the general nature of the pre-capitalist system, or on details of the ways of life being wiped out. His general interpretive analysis grasps the transition in terms of where it is headed but gives little sense of the kind of societies that were being destroyed. As a result, he leaves us no feeling for either the world of the peasants who are being driven off their land, or for the world of the landed estates whose "retainers" were being let go to join the unemployed, potentially waged labor force.

Marx's reasons for this absence can be explained partly by ignorance, partly by just not taking the time away from trying to understand the kind of world capitalists were imposing to examine the world(s) it was replacing. Certainly, he had no nostalgia for any kind of feudalism, nor was he a pastoralist wanting to turn history back to mythical peasant utopias. What little attention he did pay to peasant struggles before writing Capital—mainly those of French peasants—led him to be dismissive of their revolutionary potential. (5) However, as I have mentioned, years after Capital was published, debates in Russia over the importance of peasant life as a potential point of departure for a post-capitalist future led him to a much more sympathetic examination of the peasant mir.(6)

Whatever Marx's reasons for largely neglecting the study of the world(s) resisting capitalist enclosure, similar ongoing struggles—many of which have survived for hundreds of years—demand that we do the work he only began with his investigation of Russian peasant life and try to understand what such people have been fighting to protect. (See below, the last part of these commentaries on this chapter.)


Literary Illustrations

Traces of this great drama abound in English literature. While several middle- or upper-class poets wrote pastoral verses idealizing a vanishing world they knew only as tourists, lamenting its passing through enclosure, a handful of those who actually worked the land also took up the pen to chronicle the destruction of their world. One among those whose writings have come down to us was John Clare (1793-1864). Born in the village of Helpstone, Northamptonshire, Clare was a landless agricultural laborer who worked in various jobs. He was also an acute and sympathetic observer of both the nature around him and a harsh critic of the way that nature and the people who worked in it were being wiped out by enclosures. The following poem "The Mores" or "Moors" (Clare's spelling is often local and non-standard), begins with an evocation of a beautiful, wide-open natural area of "unbounded freedom" unmolested by fence or plow, where Clare had spent his boyhood. But then comes enclosure that builds fences, "improves" the land, trampling on labor's rights and turning the poor into slaves. Clare's contempt for this process and the character of those responsible are crystal clear. "Fence now meets fence in owner's little bounds / Of fields and meadow large as garden grounds / In little parcels little minds to please / With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease." (7)

The Mores

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring's blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon's edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all - a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave
And memory's pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now
The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came, with evening morn and night,
To the wild pasture as their common right
And sheep, unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song
But now all's fled and flats of many a dye
That seemed to lengthen with the following eye
Moors, loosing from the sight, far, smooth, and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poet's visions of life's early day
Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars - flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots - these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners' little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease
Each little path that led its pleasant way
As sweet as morning leading night astray
Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host
That travel felt delighted to be lost
Nor grudged the steps that he had ta-en as vain
When right roads traced his journeys and again -
Nay, on a broken tree he'd sit awhile
To see the mores and fields and meadows smile
Sometimes with cowslaps smothered - then all white
With daiseys - then the summer's splendid sight
Of cornfields crimson o'er the headache bloomd
Like splendid armys for the battle plumed
He gazed upon them with wild fancy's eye
As fallen landscapes from an evening sky
These paths are stopt - the rude philistine's thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice 'no road here'
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho' the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams


I have gathered several of Clare's "enclosure" poems together here.

The drama of this long period lay both in the loss of those various rural ways of life that Marx failed to study and in their replacement by the highly urbanized world of industrial capitalism, with its satanic mills, money values and new kinds of class antagonism. The so-called “industrial novels” of the nineteenth century, however, reflected and nourished political and philosophical debates about the human meaning of these changes. More than “fiction,” these novels are invaluable historical canvases on which their authors painted, in rich detail, their changing world. While the central interests in novels are their characters, whose personal dramas and development make up the narrative structure, the books also contain a variety of vivid portrayals of various aspects of English society: some disappearing and some coming to dominate.

One of those novelists who was preoccupied in her writing with the social and human meanings of the transition was Elizabeth Gaskell (1810– 65). Her novel Mary Barton: A Story of Manchester Life was published in 1848, the same year as Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. The wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester, Gaskell was intimately familiar with the working-class world she portrayed and although, unlike Marx, she hoped for a reconciliation of the classes, her novel gives a sympathetic and very human portrayal of the difficult lives and struggles of manufacturing workers. While Mary Barton only marginally evokes the transition from an agrarian England to an industrializing one, through the character of Alice Wilson, another of Gaskell’s novels, North and South (1855) deals with it quite directly.(8) The “South” of the novel is the largely agrarian south of England—from which the main heroine of the story comes—and the “North” is the increasingly industrial north of that country—to which the heroine moves. Discovering a whole new world, she reflects upon all the differences between the two. Here too, Gaskell portrays the class struggles of industrial capitalism, this time through the eyes of the daughter of a disillusioned minister.

Writing under the pseudonym of George Elliot, Mary Ann Evans (1819–80) is perhaps best known for Silas Marner (1861) and Middlemarch (1872). But she also published Felix Holt: the Radical in 1866, just before Marx published Volume I of Capital. In that novel, Eliot constructs a dramatic tableau of provincial English life with working-class coal miners on one side and the old rural gentry on the other. Her portrayal of the latter conveys just the intense feeling for this disappearing world that is missing in Marx.

While only a reading of the whole novel, with its poetic and striking presentation of individual lives, can do it justice, it includes brilliant snapshots of the world being displaced by capitalism. Her metaphor of the dinosaur evokes the quantitative importance of those estate "retainers" whose dismissal preoccupies Marx and of the imminent extinction of the class which had subordinated so many people, at such great expense, to its own luxurious lifestyle:


But a man of Sir Maximus's rank is like those antediluvian animals whom the system of things condemned to carry such a huge bulk that they really could not inspect their bodily appurtenance, and had no conception of their own tails: their parasites doubtless had a merry time of it, and after did extremely well when the high-bred saurian himself was ill at ease. Treby Manor, measured from the front saloon to the remotest shed, was as large as a moderate-sized village, and there were certainly more lights burning in it every evening, more wine, spirits, and ale drunk, more waste and more folly, than could be found in some large villages. There was fast revelry in the steward's room, and slow revelry in the Scotch bailiff's room; short whist, costume, and flirtation in the housekeeper's room, and the same at a lower price in the servants' hall; a select Olympian feast in the private apartment of the cook, who was a much grander person than her ladyship, and wore gold and jewelry to a vast amount of suet; a gambling group in the stables, and the coachman, perhaps the most innocent member of the establishment, tippling in majestic solitude by a fire in the harness room. For Sir Maximus, as everyone said, was a gentleman of the right sort, condescended to no mean inquires, greeted his head-servants with a 'good evening, gentlemen', when he met them in the park, and only snarled in a subdued way when he looked over the accounts, willing to endure some personal inconvenience in order to keep up the institutions of the country, to maintain his hereditary establishment, and do his duty in that station of life -the station of a long-tailed saurian- to which it had pleased Providence to call him.(9)

The passing of such grand estates was often gradual and often due to their owners’ resistance to changing times, such as the need to modernize the agriculture upon which their rents and incomes were based. Such resistance is part of the tale told in the hugely popular, ITV/PBS Masterpiece Theatre mini-series Downton Abbey (2010–15).(10)


Tales of Resistance

Marx’s analysis also lacks a detailed examination of the resistance that shaped and forced changes in capital’s expropriation and organization of labor. Marx tells us what was done, but he rarely gives a satisfying analysis of the power shifts that made it possible. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) spells out what needs to be done for the study of all worker struggles, overtly revolutionary or otherwise:


We endeavor, first of all, to free the histories of revolutions written up till now from the partisan, and for the most part false, governmental coloring that has been given them. In the histories hitherto written we do not yet see the people; nor do we see how revolutions began. The stereotyped phrases about the desperate condition of people previous to revolutions fail to explain whence amid this desperation came the hope of something better—whence came the revolutionary spirit. And therefore after reading these histories, we put them aside, and going back to first sources, try to learn from them what caused the people to rise and what was its true part in revolutions, what advantages it obtained from a revolution, what ideas it launched into circulation, what faults of tactics it committed.(11)

This perspective suggests some areas of Marx’s argument that need more research:

1. Dissolution of feudal retainers: the reduction of wealth of the feudal nobility that forced them to let servants go is cited but not analyzed. The dismissal of servants is easy to understand: they could hardly fight to stay, though the above passage from George Eliot suggests why they might want to do so. The issue is what did they do when dismissed, how did they live and struggle?

2. Similarly, the issue of the reformation and the overthrow of the hegemony of the Catholic Church needs an examination of the popular forces at play in the English Reformation—forces which not only displaced the Roman church but nearly overthrew the whole regime during the English Revolution of the 17th Century.

3. More important are the usurpation of the common lands through enclosure. Why this was desired, Marx makes clear. How the power was mobilized to do so, he does not. How did the peasants resist? How was the clearing carried out so that peasant resistance was crushed? British troops were used at times. but how were they turned against their own people? One can speculate but Marx tells us very little about the actual dynamics of this "decomposition" of the peasantry. We get neither analysis of politico-military tactics of repression nor of the tactics of resistance that failed (Kropotkin's "faults of tactics").

4. Laws were passed against enclosure for 150 years, but to no avail—a clear split between legislative and executive action. Why? What were the forces that led the latter to defy the former?

Fortunately, we can gain some insights into these things by studying the writings of historians such as E. P. Thompson (1924-93). In his Making of the English Working Class (1963), he revealed new information about agrarian struggles in the period 1790-1830. "How was it possible, . . . for the labourer to be held at brute subsistence level?" he asks and begins to give an answer that takes into account peasant resistance. (12) (Note that he is discussing labor revolt in the later stages of expropriation, the last gasp of the resisting peasantry and the continuing resistance of the new class of agricultural workers.)

On the side of resistance he cites various kinds of resistance: threats to overseers, sporadic sabotage (burning corn ricks), sullen and discontented spirits, turnip-pilfering, alehouse scrounging, poaching and layabouts. In 1816, after the Napoleonic War years (1793-1815) when the return of troops caused problems in East Anglia, dispossessed field laborers rose up demanding minimum wages and price maxims. There were "food riots, forced levies for money from the gentry, and the destruction of threshing machines."(13) The Laborers Revolt of 1830 included multi-village strikes, thresher breaking, demand for land, extortion of money, robbery, etc. This movement gained the sympathy of many in the middle class and some concessions.

On the side of the capitalist farmers and gentry, Thompson mentions various means that were used to repress such rebellions: mobilization of servants and retainers, grooms, huntsmen, game-keepers with pistols, shotguns, etc.; as well as the use of government troops.

Overall he sketches relatively isolated revolts on which superior military force could be focused. Isolation due to the inability to organize beyond local villages was, in turn, due to the difficulty of communication as well as the unevenness of exploitation. Enclosures were not carried out everywhere at once but piece by piece. Isolated in boh space and time, peasant resistance could be destroyed by local goons and government troops. Who were these troops? Were there failures? As we ask these questions of enclosures in the present period, so too must we ask them of those of the 15th to 19th Centuries. We ask them so that we can learn of past strengths and weaknesses in order to do better today. Land is still being seized, people are still being displaced and resistance continues. The peasantry or land question and the capitalist need for labor are still pressing ones. Even when the question is of a shift from unwaged exploitation to waged exploitation (or vice versa) rather than of “primitive” accumulation, the fundamental conflict still plagues us.


The World Turned Upside Down

Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous proud men
to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures
of the Earth from others that these may beg or starve in a
fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children? (14)

Gerard Winstanley (1609–76) was a leader of the “Diggers” or “True Levellers” movement against enclosures, a movement that not only resisted but sought to reverse the process by seizing and working unused, enclosed land. One important moment of those struggles took place in 1649, a time of explosive political conflicts in England. The poor harvests of 1648 had led to widespread hunger and unemployment and the urgency of demands for change had led to widespread radical demands, even within Cromwell’s army. Marxist historian Christopher Hill (1912–2003), a compatriot of E. P. Thompson, did the research necessary to provide a detailed description of the struggles and repression of the Diggers in 1649 in his book The World Turned Upside Down (1984). (15)

As part of those struggles Winstanley wrote a battle song, "You Noble Diggers All," calling workers to battle to reclaim common lands from the greedy hands of private property.(16) The song blasts not only the landlords and their violence but also the lawyers who manipulated the laws to the landlords' advantage and the priests who wielded their religious doctrine to condemn workers and justify the violence used against them. In a fine example of reappropriating past struggles, Leon Rosselson not only resurrected Winstanley's song, but wrote one of his own, whose title "World Turned Upside Down" was probably taken from Christopher Hill's book. (17) Scotsman Dick Gaughan, who has performed the song, wrote this about it: "The mark of a great song is its ability to speak universals about specific happenings and to be relevant to all times. Sometimes we (Scots and Irish) forget that the first colony of the British Empire was in fact England." (18) For a visual, and visceral, sense of the struggles, see the 1975 film Winstanley directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, noted for the quality of its attention to historical detail.


You Noble Diggers All You noble all, stand up now, stand up now You noble Diggers all, stand up now, The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name Your digging do distain and your persons all defame Stand up now, Diggers all. Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now, Your houses they pull down, stand up now, Your houses they pull down, for rightful men in town But the gentry must come down, and the poor to wear the crown Stand up now, Diggers all. With spades and hoes and ploughs, stand up now, stand up now With spades and hoes and ploughs, stand up now Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold, To kill you if they could and rights from you withhold, Stand up now, Diggers all. Their self-will is their law, stand up now, stand up now Their self-will is their law, stand up now, Since tyranny came in, they count it now no sin To make a jail a gin and to starve the poor folk therein Stand up now, Diggers all. The gentry are all around, stand up now, stand up now The gentry are all around, stand up now, The gentry are all around, on each side they are found Their wisdom's so profound to cheat us of the ground Stand up now, Diggers all. The lawyers they conjoin, stand up now, stand up now, The lawyers they conjoin, stand up now, To arrest you they advise, such fury they devise, But the devil in them lies and hath blinded both their eyes Stand up now, Diggers all. The clergy they come in, stand up now, stand up now, The clergy they come in, stand up now, The clergy they come in and say it is a sin That we should now begin our freedom for to win Stand up now, Diggers all. Gainst lawyers and gainst priests, stand up now, stand up now Gainst lawyers and gainst priests, stand up now. For tyrants are they both even flat against their oath To grant us they are loth free meat and drink and cloth Stand up now, Diggers all. The club is all their law, stand up now, stand up now, The club is all their law, stand up now. The club is all their law to keep poor folk in awe But they no vision saw to maintain such a law Glory now, Diggers all. (Leon Rosselson, Harry's Gone Fishing, Wimbley Park: Fuse Records, 1999 (CFCD 007).

The World Turned Upside Down In 1649 To St. George's Hill A ragged band they called the Diggers Came to show the people's will They defied the landlords They defied the laws They were the dispossessed Reclaiming what was theirs 'We come in peace' they said 'To dig and sow We come to work the land in common And to make the waste land grow This earth divided We will make whole So it can be A common treasury for all 'The sin of property We do disdain No one has any right to buy and sell The earth for private gain By theft and murder They took the land Now everywhere the walls Rise up at their command 'They make the laws To chain us well The clergy dazzle us with heaven Or they damn us into hell We will not worship The God they serve The God of greed who feeds the rich While poor men starve We work, we eat together We need no swords We will not bow to masters Or pay rent to the lords We are free men Though we are poor' You Diggers all stand up for glory Stand up now From the men of property The orders came They sent the hired men and troopers To wipe out the Diggers claim Tear down their cottages Destroy their corn They were dispersed -- Only the vision lingers on 'You poor take courage You rich take care The earth was made a common treasury For everyone to share All things in common All people one We come in peace' -- The order came to cut them down (Dick Gaughan, Handful of Earth, El Cerrito: Advent Records (3602). First recorded/published by Topic Records in 1981.)

Hill's description of the events dealt with in these songs goes as follows:


"On Sunday 1 April . . . a group of poor men (described as labourers in a legal action three months later) collected on St. George's Hill . . . and began to dig the waste land there. It was a symbolic assumption of ownership of the common lands . . . The numbers of the Diggers soon rose to twenty or thirty. 'They invited all to come in and help them,' an observer noted, 'and promise them meat, drink and clothes . . . They give out, they will be four or five thousand within ten days . . . It is feared they have some design in hand.' Consider for a moment the area affected. St. George's Hill was just outside London, within easy reach of any poor man there who might be interested in the colony. It lay on the edge of Windsor Great Forest, where in 1641 'scores and hundreds set upon the King's deer.' It was unpromising agricultural land, the improver Walter Blith sniffed. Kingston, the nearest town, to which the Diggers were taken for trial by the local landlords, was a great corn market. It had a long-standing radical tradition . . . landowners in the area round St. George's Hill were more disturbed by the digging than the Council of State or General Fairfax . . . Nor does Oliver Cromwell seem to have been unduly alarmed when a 'northern profetess' warned him, a propos the Diggers, that 'if provision be not made for them poor commoners, England will have new troubles.' But parson Platt and other Lords of manors in Surrey organized raids on the colony and an economic boycott; they harassed the Diggers with legal actions . . . Even after the Diggers moved to Cobham Heath a few miles away the raids continued, and by April 1650 the colony had been forcibly dispersed, huts and furniture burnt, the Diggers chased away from the area. It was a brief episode in English history, involving perhaps a few score men and their families: we know the names of seventy-three of them . . . But historians are becoming aware that it was not quite so isolated in occurrence as used to be thought . . . We should see the Digger colony on St. George's Hill as merely one particularly well-documented example of a trend which was repeated in many other places . . . Other Digger colonies appeared at Wellingborough in Northhamptonshire, Cox Hall in Kent, Iver in Buckinghamshire, Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in Middlesex, Dunstable in Bedfordshire, Bosworth in Leicestershire, and at unknown places in Glouscestershire and Nottinghamshire. Not enough local work has yet been done on most of these places, but we know something about Wellingborough . . . the Wellingborough Diggers produced a DECLARATION which tells us very precisely what sort of people supported their movement. There were 1169 persons in receipt of alms in the parish. Trade was decayed, there was no work; 'rich men's hearts are hardened, they will not give us if we beg at their doors. If we steal, the law will end our lives, givers of the poor are starved to death already and it were better for us that are living to die by the sword than by the famine.' So they, like the Surrey Diggers, had begun to 'dig up, manure and sow corn upon the common waste ground called Bareshank . . . But this colony seems to have been suppressed at the same time as that in Surrey." pp. 107-124.


The Diggers' attempt to reverse the process of enclosure and clearing failed. But that failure was only one moment in a multitude of struggles that shaped the emerging class composition of England. And the Diggers' visions, of the common use of the land, and of the right of people to eat and to determine their own lives are still shared by many and not all "diggers" have failed.

The twentieth century saw a vast resurgence of demands for "land reform," the restoration to people of land previously taken from them. During the Mexican Revolution begun in 1910, Mexican peasants cut barbed wire fences and retook their land in revolts dramatically portrayed in the film Viva Zapata! (1952).(19) During the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the slogan "Bread and Land" millions of peasants reappropriated what had once been theirs. In China in 1927, Mao Zedong visited Hunan province and discovered that the revolution had begun without him; poor peasants were expropriating the rich and redistributing the land. In Vietnam, peasants joined the Vietminh against colonialists who had seized their land for rice and rubber production for export, fighting in turn, the French, the Japanese, the French again and finally the Americans. Those were four great revolutionary moments when the reappropriation of land, the reversal of enclosure, was a central issue. We could multiply the examples of such conflicts a thousand-fold, throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas. Today, two current struggles come immediately to mind: those of the Landless Laborers in Brazil (MST) and of the Zapatistas in southern Mexico who have fought to reclaim lands previously stolen and concentrated in the hands of capitalist farmers.


Enclosing Water

Echoing the sad tale of Highlanders pushed to the seashore by the Duchess of Sutherland, who then “let the seashore to the big London fishmongers,” (20) an Irish song tells the story of the resistance of fishermen in Northern Ireland to their dispossession by British colonialism. The original expropriation of eel-fishing rights was carried out under the orders of King Charles I in the mid-1600s. The Toome Eel Fishery referred to in the song was formed in the late 1950s and was awarded exclusive fishing rights by a British court in 1963. Lough Neagh is both the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles (153 square miles) and the largest eel fishing area in Northern Ireland, with an annual take of about 600 tons.

On the jacket of their record This is Free Belfast the Men of No Property give the following background: "Northern Ireland's great Lough Neagh is the richest fishing ground of Western Europe. Instead of this natural treasure being the heritage and property of all the people, the fishing rights to its greatest catch: eels, are controlled exclusively by one company, the Dutch-controlled Toome Eel Fisheries (N.I.) Ltd. This company prosecutes the fishermen, and can revoke their licenses."(21)


The Great Eel Robbery Come all you gallant Ulstermen And listen what I say I was a hardworking fisherman From the shores of sweet Lough Neagh My father fished the deep at Doss And knew its rocky shores, But I have lost my livelihood And cannot fish no more. Well, the cruel decision the judges made In Belfast town one day, Caused woe and misery for the fishers Of Lough Neagh The decision that those judges made Our fishing then was doomed, When they found in favor of the men From the fisheries at Toome. Now we contend King Charles gave away What was not his very own, A gift that scheming lawyers traced To the fishery at Toome.

They've stolen away what should belong To each and every man, And for our fate cruel England's law Well, she does not give one damn. They called our fishing poaching And they held us up to scorn, Even though it was a heritage To which we all were born, The waters of Lough Neagh we fished As our fathers did before, But because of the Toome Eel Fishery We cannot fish no more. For they have a great monopoly That stretches Europe round, From the Baltic, Scandinavia, Even to our own Lough Erne, They now control the markets and The prices that you pay, For nature's bounteous harvest Of our inland sea, Lough Neagh. But though we've had a setback The decision we'll reverse, For Irishmen they must possess What is given them by birth, We'll smash that great monopoly On Lough Neagh's rocky shore, And Irishmen will gain their right To fish there evermore. (Men of No Property, This is Free Belfast: Irish Rebel Songs of the Six Counties, New York: Paredon Records, 1971. (P1006)

The song ends with a promise of continuing struggle to win back fishing rights for local fishermen. And indeed, the fishermen formed a Lough Neagh Fisherman's Association and registered as a trade union to fight for their rights. According to one account the fishermen successfully formed a "Co-operative Society" that was able to buy 20% of the shares of Toome Eel Fishery (NI) Ltd. When the majority shareholders refused to buy eels from the Irish fishing co-operative, the latter by-passed Toome and developed new markets in Europe. With the profits they realized from those markets, they were ultimately able to buy out the other 80 percent of the shares of Toome and as forecast in the song, the full rights to eel fishing finally reverted to local Irish fishermen!(22)

There is another interesting dimension to this story. The song notes that the Dutch company held a "great monopoly that stretches Europe round". Leaving aside the empirical question of exactly what the market share of that company has been, it is true enough that fishing, not just in Europe but around the world, has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of huge multinational corporations using "advanced" technology to maximize their take and profits. One result has been global over-fishing and a dramatic depletion of many species of fish. Moreover, because fish eat fish, this has caused such a disruption of ocean ecological balance as to create a growing crisis - one that cannot be overcome by the substitution of aguaculture or farm fishing for wild catch. The Associated Press reports that this overfishing and depletion includes the European eel.(23) Not only are prices rising rapidly as supply shrinks, but the reduction in the eel population is also creating worries about the impact on other animals who eat them, e.g., cormorants, herons, otters and other European wildlife.

In contrast to this over-fishing, the fishermen of Lough Neagh are carefully manage their fishing in ways designed to sustain the eel population on which their livelihood depends. This is often the case with local fishing, as with local agriculture. A multinational corporation can deplete what they see as a "resource" and move on; local populations, dependent on the sustainability of their ecosystem, are often more careful in how they interact with it. (24)


Enclosures in United States

In North America the initial expropriation of the "agricultural population" was the displacement and extermination of Native Americans. Forming a diverse array of cultures based on various mixtures of agriculture and hunting & gathering, the these peoples filled the land the European invaded. Their hunting and gathering spread out over wide regions, and their agricultural methods often involved shifting and moving about. To the Europeans, used to dense populations where virtually every available hectare of arrable land was cultivated, or given over to city building, North America looked "empty", or at least so they pretended. As the Europeans occupied the East Coast and pushed inland they sought to either subordinate or eliminate those in their way. For the most part, the indigenous population was never accepted assimilation. With few exceptions, they could never be put to work directly, either as slaves or as wage labor —they simply refused, prefering to fight or to die. In some cases the European invaders were able to tap the Indians' labor indirectly through the fur trade but mostly they simply pushed them out of the way and killed them when they resisted.

TThat resistance, of course, was great, long and bloody. It took a 200-year war to secure the majority of the land and to eliminate most of the Indians, confining the few who remained to reservations. This is a history that has been, for the most part, passed over quickly at all levels of school, from elementary to university. Ignorance of Native American culture and stereotypical images of barbaric savages were promulgated to rationalize their destruction and only recently have begun to be replaced by more informed and less racist knowledge and treatments. With respect to Native American resistance, for a long time about the only aspects of that history whose memory was preserved with respect were some of their more effective armed struggles—preserved ironically by the military forces that defeated them, but that still honor the brilliance of their strategies and tactics of war.

Fortunately, the neglect and failure to appreciate the resilience and creativity of Native American resistance has been increasingly countered in recent years, first by student struggles to create space and to gain resources for Native American Studies and second, by histories written from the point of view of the indigenous.(25)

Beyond these accounts of primitive accumulation in Britain and North America— understood as the creation of the classes of capitalist society—we must also recognize that both processes cannot be properly analyzed within national or even continental bounds. Because the indigenous population would not work for a wage, and because indentured European servants often escaped their servitude, the North American working class was constructed, in part, through the enslavement of Africans. That enslavement ripped people from their land and forcibly transported them across the Atlantic to plantations where they were put to work on land stolen from the Cherokee (Tsalaqi), the Creek (Muskogee), the Chickasaw (Chikasha), the Choctaw (Chahta) and the Seminole (Meskwaki). Just as the displaced agricultural population in Britain migrated from rural areas toward cities and even abroad, so too did the African slave trade force a migration that contributed to the formation of a working class throughout much of the Atlantic basin. Thus, primitive accumulation in the New World was closely interlocked with that of Europe and Africa, making it mandatory to study the formation of an Atlantic working class rather than a purely North American one. (26)

This history and its study is complicated by the process of separating people from the land being repeatedly renewed. European settlers, who displaced the indigenous population, used the land they seized to ground their own independence from the growing capitalist demands for labor. For the most part, the frontier was not settled by capitalist plantation owners and ranchers employing slave or waged labor, but by family farmers who came west precisely to escape the factories and slums of both Western Europe and the American East Coast. The frontier moved west year after year and generation after generation as part of a struggle for freedom from exploitation—even as the indigenous population lost its freedom, and often its very existence.

This westward movement of pioneers, mountain men and homesteaders provided not only the inspiration for ideals such as Jefferson’s agrarian democracy, but also an ongoing problem for capitalists who wanted to integrate the labor of these independent agriculturalists into a wider project of accumulation. As late as the nineteenth century, most US citizens still lived on the land and their labor (like that of the indigenous before them) could only be tapped through the market. They could only be exploited through unequal exchange in which they sold agricultural produce that took a great deal of labor to create and bought manufactured products that took much less. With the development of capitalist banking and finance, they were also exploited through mortgages and bank loans. Over the years, these methods all worked together to generate a slow but inexorable process of dispossession, through which the vast majority of independent farmers lost their farms and were forced into wage labor. This process is still going on, even though only 3 or 4 percent of Americans still live on the land. It accelerates in hard times, when farm prices are low and mortgages and bank loans cannot be repaid, and slows during upturns when expanding demand and government subsidies keep farm output prices up and credit cheap.

As might be expected, this process, like earlier periods, generated considerable resistance. From the Whiskey Rebellion (1791–94) through the Populist Revolt of the 19th Century to the American Farm Movement of the 1970s (supported by Willie Nelson's Farm Aid concerts), it has been a long and bitter history. Repeatedly, the dreams of independence of many generations of American farmers have been crushed and, like the British yeomen and Native Indians before them, they and their families have been driven from the land.

Typical of the popular music of farmer resistance are two songs, one from the period of the Populist Revolt and the second from that of the American Farm Movement. “The Farmer is the Man” originated among western farmers after the Civil War and became famous during the Populist Revolt of the 1890s. In that song, those responsible for the exploitation and ultimate enclosure of family farmers’ lands and tools are the mortgage men and bankers who “get it all.”(27)


The Farmer is the Man When the farmer comes to town With his wagon broken down, Oh, the farmer is the man Who feeds them all. If you'll only look and see, I think you will agree That the farmer is the man Who feeds them all. The farmer is the man, The farmer is the man, Lives on credit till the fall; Then they take him by the hand And they lead him from the land, And the middleman's the one Who gets it all. When the lawyer hangs around And the butcher cuts a pound, Oh, the farmer is the man Who feeds them all, And the preacher and the cook Go a-strolling by the brook But the farmer is the man Who feeds them all. Oh, the farmer is the man, The farmer is the man, Lives on credit till the fall- With the interest rates so high It's a wonder he don't die For the mortgage man's the one Who gets it all. When the banker says he's broke And the merchant's up in smoke, They forget that it's the farmer feeds them all. It would put them to the test If the farmer took a rest; Then they'd know that it's The Farmer feeds them all. Oh, the farmer is the man, The farmer is the man, Lives on credit till the fall; And his pants are wearing thin His condition it's a sin, He's forgot that he's the man Who feeds them all.


The more recent song about the loss of family farms is “Rain on the Scarecrow” by John Cougar Mellencamp.(28) This song is bleaker, more about loss than about struggle, but fitting, given that most farmers have lost and very few remain. The story is the same: “The crops we grew last summer weren't enough to pay the loans / Couldn't buy the seed to plant this Spring, and the Farmers Bank foreclosed."


Rain on the Scarecrow Scarecrow on a wooden cross Blackbird in the barn Four hundred empty acres That used to be my farm I grew up like my daddy did My grandpa cleared this land When I was five I walked the fence While grandpa held my hand Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the Plow This land fed a nation This land made me proud And Son I'm just sorry there's no legacy for you now Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the plow Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the plow The crops we grew last summer Weren't enough to pay the loans Couldn't buy the seed to plant this Spring And the Farmers Bank foreclosed Called my old friend Schepman up To auction off the land He said John it's just my job and I hope you understand Hey calling it your job ol' hoss Sure don't make it right But if you want me to I'll say a prayer for your soul tonight And grandma's on the front porch swing With a bible in her hand Sometimes I hear her singing "Take me to the Promised Land" When you take away a man's dignity He can't work his fields and cows There'll be blood on the scarecrow Blood on the plow Well there's ninety-seven crosses Planted in the courthouse yard Well there's ninety-seven families Who lost ninety-seven farms I think about my grandpa and my neighbors And my name And some nights I feel like dyin' Like that scarecrow in the rain Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the Plow This land fed a nation This land made me proud And Son I'm just sorry there're just memories for you now Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the plow Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the plow Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the Plow This land fed a nation This land made me proud And Son I'm just sorry thery're just memories for you now Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the plow Rain on the scarecrow Blood on the plow (John Cougar Melencamp, Scarecrow, PolyGram Records, 1985 (824 865-2 M-1)

Women, Witches and the Enclosure of the Body

Marx's analysis of the enclosures focuses on the theft of peasants' land, one of their basic means of subsistence and sources of power to resist exploitation by others (whether landlords who would charge rent or capitalists who would profit from paying low wages). The loss of land, of course, was often accompanied by the loss of most other means of subsistence including home and tools (such as spinning wheels, axes, saws, looms, cauldrons) which allowed peasants to provide themselves with housing, furniture, clothes and food. Thus, along with the expropriation of the means of production went that of the means of reproduction —of reproducing daily life for oneself and one's family.

Accompanying this expropriation of land and the material means of reproduction was another expropriation even more intimate: that of women's bodies. During this period, a wide variety of women's social practices and rights came under attack including their right to regulate their own fertility, their equality with men in both work and struggle and their right to enjoy their own sexuality and their spiritual relations with nature. Contraception was outlawed; they were painted as evil and threatening to men, their proper role was redefined as broodmare and houseworker; adultry was criminalized; as was free, collective sexuality (of both women and men); their skills at healing and magic were outlawed and made punishable by death. Their proper roles were redefined as brood mare and housewife. Their rights and possibilities were dramatically reduced as they were more deeply, subordinated to men in both homes and workplaces.

The nadir of this repression unfolded in Britain and Western Europe during 1550-1650, the period of the "Great Witch Hunt," which saw tens of thousands of women tortured and executed for once common practices that had been criminalized. Most of the victims of this repression were poor peasant women singled out in a population that was resisting the enclosures. In Britain, this period is bracketed by the 1549 Ketts Rebellion against enclosures and the English Revolution, which sought to turn the whole new order "upside down." During those years, the state, in collaboration with both Catholic and Protestant Churches, accelerated a wave of repression against women that had been growing with the rise of capitalism and popular resistance to it. Midwives (sage femmes, or wise women, in French) were accused of being in league with the devil and preventing procreation or committing infanticide. This persecution was the beginning of a process where women were forced to procreate more workers for the labor market and increasingly excluded from all aspects of obstetrics and gynecology which were taken over by men and the state.

Rebellious women who spoke out or who insisted on their rights and their desires were accused of witchcraft and killed, as examples to all others. Such attacks struck directly at the important roles women had played in peasant revolt. Any and all manifestation of sexual desire outside of marriage—adultry, procreation, prostitution, etc.— was criminalized.(29) The sexuality of the young was repressed, of the old ridiculed—indeed the stereotypical image of the witch as an old, evil and lascivious crone dates from this period (and is still with us). Women in general were accused by demonologists of "insatiable sexuality" capable of dominating men to the point of being able to cause impotence. (30)

Such repressive laws, such as those calling for sexually active but unwed women to be put to death, had already been attacked vehemently at the beginning of the 16th Century by Ludovico Ariosto in his epic romantic poem Orlando Furioso(1516). In that poem, one of the main characters, a chivilrous knight named Rinaldo, learns of a princess who had been set up for death by a spurned suitor. The suitor achieved his revenge by making it seem as if she had made love with another outside of wedlock—this in a country (Scotland) where such behavior was punishable by death. Rinaldo's reaction expresses Ariosto's own feelings about such repressive laws. “This inequality in law much wrong / Has done to women. / With God’s help I mean / To show that to have suffered it so long / The greatest of inequities has been. / A curse upon the legislator’s head!”(31)


59 The law of Scotland, harsh, severe, unjust, Decrees that every woman who in love Bestows herself (except in marriage) must Be put to death, quite irrespective of Her rank, if she is thus accused of lust; And the dread sentence no appeal can move, Unless a knight will come to her defense And boldly champion her innocence. . . . 63 Rinaldo thought a while and then he said: 'A damsel is condemned to death because She gave her lover solace in her bed Who with desire for her tormented was? A curse upon the legislator's head! And cursed be all who tolerate such laws! Death rather to such damsels as refuse, But not to her who loves and life renews. . . . 66 If the same ardour, if an equal fire Draws and compels two people ever more To the sweet consumation of desire (Which many ignoramuses deplore), Why should a woman by a fate so dire Be punished who has done what men a score Of times will do and never will be blamed, Nay rather, will be praised for it and famed? . . . 67 'This inequality in law much wrong Has done to women. With God's help I mean To show that to have suffered it so long The greatest of inequities has been.' A curse upon the legislator's head! (from Canto IV)

The attack on women was orchestrated also to strike at men’s sexual freedom and to undermine any solidarity between men and women while redirecting the energy of both into work for capital.(32) Women were to procreate and recreate the working class, while men were to do the work of disciplining women—and eventually both would be driven into the factory. Not surprisingly, along with the aggravation of antagonistic relations between men and women, the period of the witch hunts also saw the demonization and criminalization of all other “unproductive” sexual activity, such as homosexuality and public, collective sexuality, both of which had been common during the Middle Ages.(33)


Land, Capital and the Struggle for the Preservation of Cultural Diversity

For much of the world, the kind of enclosure Marx is talking about has meant the destruction of entire ways of life that were deeply rooted in people's relationships to the land, both material and spiritual. In capitalism, land becomes a commodity, something to be bought and sold, a source of profits, and mainly, a vehicle for the control and exploitation of other humans. Unlike indigenous cultures, capitalism has no place for a spiritual relation to the land (or to the other creatures who dwell upon it). Instead of being one with the rest of nature, capitalism sees it all as usable and exploitable "resources."(34) For thousands of years, traditional Native Americans lived in balance on the land, hunting and gathering only what they needed for their limited populations and cultivating a little ground for a few crops. Instead of shaping human culture in harmony with the surrounding ecology, capitalism wantonly destroys and pillages the earth. The commons are drawn and quartered into "little parcels little minds to please." Forests are clear-cut for lumber and left as wasteland. Whole species, such as the buffalo, are hunted to near extinction. Grasslands are stripped through overgrazing and turned into deserts. Mountains are ripped apart by "mountain-top removal" and strip-mining more generally. Rivers are turned into open sewers and lakes into cesspools or sterilized with acid rain. Oceans are polluted, overfished and littered with plastic waste. The only spaces spared this exploitation are those that have been fought for and won against the logic of capitalist economics: a few reservations where Native American have refused the temptation of selling their mineral rights, a few National Parks and areas of wilderness, and a variety of so-far commercially value-less lands.

Understanding the human meaning of this destruction requires studying the cultures being destroyed and their ongoing struggles to preserve what is left. Much has been learned by anthropologists and sympathetic outsiders who have observed and tried to understand in the years since Marx studied those few reports available to him.(35) From indigenous communities in southern Mexico to hunter-gatherers in the Amazon and beyond, people whose cultures contain strong pre- or anti-capitalist elements still survive and resist. In a few cases, resistance has mutated into efforts to expand, often through land seizure, to obtain more space for these cultures to grow and evolve. However limited our ability to understand those cultures, we can realize the rich diversity of human being which is at stake and measure the losses humanity has sustained as capitalism has done its best to exterminate all but the most superficial differences around the world, to undermine people's ability to live differently through the expropriation of their land, of their tools, of control over their bodies, integrating them poorly equipped into its spiritless world of endless work.

Recent decades have seen the flourishing of resistance both to capitalist ecological destruction and to the cultural genocide it perpetrates. Films dealing with these tragedies include The Emerald Forest (1985), Amazonia: Voices from the Rainforest (1990, Medicine Man (1992), Ferngully (1992), Zapatista (1999), The Burning Season (2008) and Avatar (2009).


The film The Emerald Forest is the story of the struggle of the peoples of the Amazon rainforest to resist the violent intrusion of capitalism and its destruction of their world. It has the form of an adventure story -a white boy raised among the Indigenous who chooses their ways and fights both the enslavement of their women and the creation of a giant dam. The film shows some of the classic methods used in the Amazon by the invaders: pitting tribe against tribe, murder and the slaughter of the forest. But it also shows some of the spiritual richness of the indigenous culture and the close relations between humans and the animal world. Other tribes have different relations with nature; a recent Ph.D dissertation describes a tribe that communes with plants rather than animals, but the lesson is the same. These so-called primitive people live in harmony not conflict with their world. And they must struggle to prevent its destruction by capital.


Amazonia contains numerous interviews with Brazilian Indians and rubber tappers, once enemies, now increasingly allied in the attempt to defend the rainforest and the autonomy of their lives against the inroads of ranchers, miners and government "development" projects such as roads and dams. It also points out that of the 900 tribes in the Amazon at the time of colonial conquest, only 180 remain; the other 720 were wiped out. Medicine Man deals with how the destruction of the rainforests also involves the destruction of a rich and diverse source of medicinal "resources." Ferngully, an animated feature-length fantasy film, simply celebrates the beauty of the forests. Zapatista documents the indigenous uprising in Chiapas while providing background that makes it understandable. The Burning Season documents forest clearance for commercial palm oil production in Indonesia and its impact on orangutans and global warming. Although science fiction and located on another, fictional planet, the critical acclaim and worldwide popularity of Avatar's portrayal of the conflict between a rapacious capitalist corporation and an indigenous people demonstrates the degree to which people all over have become sympathetic to the struggle against capitalist depredations. There are many more films dealing with these issues.


Recommended Further Reading

The Clearances The thistles climb the thatch. Forever this sharp scale in our poems, as also the waste music of the sea. The stars shine over Sutherland in a cold ceilidh of their own, as, in the morning, the silver cane cropped among corn. We will remember this. Though hate is evil we cannot but hope your courtier's heels in hell are burning: that to hear the thatch sizzling in tanged smoke your hot ears slowly learn. Iain Crichton Smith, The Law and the Grace, 1965.

Marx's first writings in "economics" dealt with the enclosures of forests in Germany aimed at forcing the peasants into more waged work. See the article by Peter Linebaugh, "Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood and Working Class Composition: A contribution to the current debate," Crime and Social Justice, No. 6, Fall-Winter 1976, pp. 5-16. Marx wrote many articles dealing with India and the imposition of private property in land, many have been collected in Avineri (ed.) Marx on Colonialism, also see the recent issues of Marx-Engels Collected Works.

Since Marx wrote there has been much debate about the issue of the enclosures. For an apologetic treatment that tries to explain the growth of labor supplies in other ways (e.g., population growth) see the book by J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880, London: Batsford, 1966. For a radical review of the issue and critique of such anti-Marxist arguments, see Bill Lazonick's article on the enclosures in the Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 1974, pp. 1-59. For an even more recent argument that "enclosures" are an integral part of current capitalist strategy see: Midnight Notes, The New Enclosures, 1990.

The Marxist debate on the transition to capitalism from feudalism is even larger than the more narrow topic of the enclosures. An overview of the debate is provided in Chapter 2 "Maurice Dobb and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism" in Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984. In some ways, as Kaye says, the debate as such began with Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1947, 1963, although it had been going on ever since Marx, e.g., the arguments in Russia over whether or not capitalism was inevitable (see my notes on chapter 26). The debate developed with a series of exchanges in the journal Science and Society beginning with an attack on Dobb by the American Marxist Paul Sweezy in 1950. Other contributors included H.K.Takahashi, Rodney Hilton and Christopher Hill. The exchanges were collected into Rodney Hilton (ed), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London: New Left Books, 1976. From my point of view the most interesting moments of the debate, then and since, are those which have emphasized the crisis of feudalism brought on by the struggles of the dominated classes. The writings by Rodney Hilton, for example, focus on the struggles of the peasantry which ruptured the sinews of feudal society. For an overview of his work see the book by Kaye.

On the evolution of early capitalism and the struggles of peasants and workers, a lot of historical work on England has been done by Marxist historians like Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Peter Linebaugh. See references in the notes on chapter 26 and the book by Kaye on British Marxist Historians. There are other works which trace this same kind of process elsewhere. For example on colonial Central America see the UT M.A. Thesis by Mark Walker, An Analysis of the Class Struggle from a Working Class Perspective: Example of Guatamala, 1977. On post colonial Argentina see the UT Ph.D. Dissertation by Ricardo Salvatore, Class Struggle and International Trade: Rio de la Plata's Commerce and the Atlantic Proletariat, 1790-1850, 1987. More generally, the development of a Marxist theory of this dynamic (working class power and capitalist development) has been a central theme in the tradition of what I call "autonomist Marxism". See the introduction to my Reading Capital Politically for an overview.

On the Diggers, besides the book by Christopher Hill (The World Turned Upside Down), there is also a recent pamphlet reprint of Digger writings: Digger Tracts, 1649-50, Aporia Press, 1989, which can be obtained through Bound Together Books in San Francisco. Other books on peasant struggles in England include: Julian Cornwall, The Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, Charles Poulson, The English Rebels, London: Jouneyman Press, 1984; R. B. Dobson (ed) The Peasant Revolt of 1381, London: Macmillan, 1970; R. Hilton and T. H. Aston (eds), The English Rising of 1381, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1550-1660, New York: Praeger, 1971, London: Hutchinson, 1984.

Two novels that provide some humanity to the story of the Highland Clearances are: Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies, 1968 and Jeanne Williams, Daughter of the Storm. Crichton Smith's story takes place in the midst of the clearances carried out by the Dutchess of Sutherland that Marx discusses in this chapter. His main character is an old woman whose husband was killed fighting the queen's war and whose son has emigrated to Canada. William's story takes place on an island in the hebrides. Her main character is a young woman and the there's a romance thread that runs through the novel amidst the historical drama of the clearances and the resistance to them. Both are based on real history and many of the subsidiary characters - especially the oppressors - were quite real, and their real names are used in the stories. Both novels are very much worth the read.

The literature on contemporary peasant struggles for land reform is enormous but central must be that which deals with Mexico, Russia and China -the three great peasant revolutions of the 20th Century. For an overview see: Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper & Row, 1969 which also deals with Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba. On Russia see Teodore Shanin's two volumes: Russia as a 'Developing Society' and Russia, 1905-07, Revolution as a Moment of Truth, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985 and 1986. Mao's report following his discovery of peasant revolution in China is "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" in Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works, Volume I, Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967.

The literature dealing with the enclosure of North America, and the separation of Native Americans from their land is vast, and unfortunately, most of it has been written from the point of view of whites. As a beginning you might want to look at two recent overviews of contemporary Indian resistance and attempts to regain what was stolen from them: M. Annette Jaimes (ed) The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, Boston: South End Press, 1992 and Ward Chruchill, Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Expropriation in Contemporary North America, Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1993. Churchill has also published a debate between Indigenists and orthodox Marxists which demonstrates the inability of Leninist-Stalinist Marxism to understand class struggle from the point of view of Native Americans: Marxism and Native Americans, Boston: South End Press, 1983. A taste of the history of the struggle over Indians lands and their genocide can be obtained through such books as Robert F. Heizer, The Destruction of the California Indians, Lincoln: University of Nebaska Press, 1974 which emphasizes the victimization of West Coast tribes, and Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 and George H. Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Cooperation and Resistance in Southern California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975 both of which emphasize Native American resistance and self-activity in the same area.

For a critique of the dominant capitalist view of nature (and people for that matter) as "resources' see the essays by Wolfgang Sachs and Vandana Shiva in Wolfgang Sachs (ed) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power, London: Zed Books, 1992.

The UT dissertation mentioned in the blurb on the Emerald Forest is Clarice Mota, As Jurema Told Us: Kariri-Shoko and Shoko Mode of Utilization of Medicinal Plants in the Context of Modern Northeastern Brazil, 1987. For further information on current struggles of others, besides the Irish fishermen, whose way of life is tied to fishing and threatened by the encroachment of capitalism see the special issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly on "Fishing Communities", Volume 11, No. 2, 1987. The same journal has also had a recent issue on the efforts of capitalist pharmaceudical companies to exploit the "resources" developed by indigenous peoples in the Third World: see the issue on "Intellectual Property Rights: The Politics of Ownership" Summer 1991.

For further information on the witch hunts and the enclosure of women's bodies see: the recent supurb book on the subject by Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Other materials include: Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, (1911) New York: Russell & Russell, 1965, New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1968; Margaret Murray, The Witchcult in Western Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921; George L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929, Russell & Russell, 1956, 1958; Thomas R. Forbes, "Midwifery and Witchcraft", Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. XVII, 1962, pp. 417-439; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study, New York: Harper and Row, 1970; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, New York: Scribner, 1971; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973; Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, New York: Random House, 1974; Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-hunt, New York: Basic Books, 1975; Brian Easlea, Witchhunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to the Debates of the Scientific Revolution, 1450-1750, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980; Brian Levack, The Witchhunt in Early Modern Europe, London: Longman, 1987; Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination, London: Routledge, 1992.




CONCEPTS FOR REVIEW

serfs free peasant proprietor Enclosures wage-laborers feudal retainers land reform the commons sheep walks the Diggers

Flanders wool market Reformation cultural diversity spoliation of church property poor rate Dutch. of Sutherland yeomanry thefts of state lands clearing of estates

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

1. Describe some of the pre-capitalist attachments between those who worked and the land.

2. How does Marx's description of the clearing of the land, the enclosures, etc. constitute a description of only the first moment in the creation of the working class -- despite the fact that this "moment" stretched over several centuries?

3. How did the Reformation create an opportunity for the take over of church property? Which two classes suffered the consequences?

4. What was "common land"? From when did it date? How was it destroyed?

*5. What is there in Marx's description of the clearing of the estates that suggests resistance on the part of those displaced? What is lacking in Marx's analysis?

6. What does the length of time of the expropriation of the land and of the diversity of Marx's examples suggest about the strategies of expropriation that were successful?

*7. What is the American counterpart to the expropriation of land in England? What land was taken and who was displaced? Was the destiny of those displaced the same as that of the workers in England?

*8. What can we say about resistance to these expropriations in the United States? Was it a simple process or was the resistance long and intense? When did it end?

*9. Do you think it is a moment of primitive accumulation when a bank forecloses on a mortgage and forces a small family off the land? If not, then what is it?

*10. Who were the Diggers, when did they struggle, for what, and what was the result?

11. Do you think land reform, e.g. in El Salvador, represents a reversal of the process of primitive accumulation, or something else?

*12. Consider the seizure of empty buildings in Zurich by street youths, or of empty houses in Frankfort or Los Angeles by the homeless. Are these activities analogous to land reform efforts in rural areas of the Third World? If so how? If not why not?


FOOTNOTES

1 The area enclosed officially is from the estimate by J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880, London: Batsford, 1966, p. 77. The estimate of privately enclosed land is from Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present, London: Longmans Green, 1941, p. 163.

2 Silly Wizard, So Many Partings, Shanachie Records, 1980.

3 From the beginning of colonialism, colonial powers imposed not only work but also their own languages on the indigenous populations. For an interesting account of introduction of this method of domination to the founders of the Spanish empire, see Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1980.

4 Within the United States, the current Trump administration’s shrinking of National Monuments and the sale of mining, lumbering and grazing rights on public lands are prime examples of contemporary government-managed enclosure of the commons.

5 See his essays "Class Struggles in France" about the Revolution of 1848, MECW, vol. 10, pp. 118-123, and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", MECW, vol. 11, pp. 187-192.

6 See the discussion of this in my analysis of Chapter 26 and the question of whether Marx was an historical materialist.

7 John Clare, Selected Poems, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 170

8 The book was made into a TV mini-series North & South, Brian Percival (dir.), BBC One, 2004.

9 George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, New York: Penguin Classics, 1987, pp. 182-183.

10 Conflict arises in season four of the series, over whether the estate’s income from tenants should be supplemented by producing pigs for the market. Opinions are divided by generations, with Lord Grantham resisting while Tom, Mathew and Mary embrace this very capitalist venture. See Mollie Burton’s commentary “Pig Farming and Downton’s Bright Future”

11 Peter Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism” (1901), reprinted in Roger Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkins ’ Revolutionary Pamphlets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1927, pp. 186–187. Kropotkin carried out just such research into the role of peasants and the urban poor in the French Revolution and published the results as Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution (1909), New York: Black Rose Books, 1989.

12 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York Vintage, 1966, p. 218.

13 Ibid., pp. 225–226.

14 Gerard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness (1649), (accessed January 15, 2019).

15 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London: Penguin, 1984, pp. 107-124. See too the 1975 film Winstanley, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo (dirs).

16 Gerrard Sabine and George Holland (eds.), The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (1941), New York: Russell & Russell, 1965, p. 663.

17 Leon Rosselson, Harry's Gone Fishing, Wimbley Park Fuse Records, 1999 (CFCD 007).

18 Gaughan recorded and released this album in the wake of the political turmoil surrounding the general election of 1979 that brought Margaret Thatcher to power.

19 This not-to-miss film's screenplay was written by John Steinbeck, directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata.

20 Capital, Vol. I, p. 892

21 Men of No Property, This is Free Belfast: Irish Rebel Songs of the Six Counties, New York: Paredon Records, 1971 (P1006).

22 Rev. Oliver P. Kennedy, "The Lough Neagh Eel Fishery", Inland Waterways News, vol. 27, no. 3, Autumn 2000.

23 Toby Sterling, "Europe's Eel Population Collapsing", The Associated Press, August 15, 2004.

24 Just how widespread these struggles are can be seen in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese, Our Mother Ocean: Enclosure, Commons, and the Global Fishermen's Movement, Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2014.

25 See Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999; Ward Churchill, Struggle for the Land: Native American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization, San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2nd edn., 2002; and David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

26 Such has been the objective of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in their Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000.

27 Pete Seeger, American Industrial Ballads, Smithsonian Folkway Records, 1992 (CD SF 40058).

28 John Cougar Mellencamp, Scarecrow, PolyGram Records, 1985 (824 865-2 M-1).

29 As in Scotland in the case described by Ludovico Ariosto below and in many cases continuing until today. Even where women have succeeded in removing such laws, the repression has often continued in the form of social opprobrium, e.g., procreation outside of marriage, and civil liability, e.g., adultry.

30 Such fear of women’s sexuality has continued to haunt gender relationships long after demonologists became mere subjects of horror films. It poisoned medicine and early psychology, where female sexuality was diagnosed in terms of hysteria and can still be found among insecure men and misogynistic defenders of male dominance.

31 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516), Part One, Canto IV, New York: Penguin Classics, 1975.

32 Freud’s argument in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) that civilization is based on the sublimation of libidinal energy into work was taken over by Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) for the case of capitalism in Eros and Civilization, New York: Beacon Press, 1955. One doesn’t have to agree with either’s theoretical apparatus to see the appropriateness of the analysis in a society which tries to channel all energy into work.

33 The argument of this section is based, in part, on two critical overviews of the studies of English and European witch hunts: Richard A. Horsley, “Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. IX, no. 4, Spring 1979, pp. 689–715; and Silvia Federici, “The Great Witch Hunt”, The Maine Scholar, vol. 1, no. 1, Autumn 1988, pp. 31–52. More recently, Federici has given us a much more complete history of both women’s struggles in this period and their violent repression in her books: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia, 2004 and Witches, Witch Hunting and Women, Oakland, CA and Brooklyn, NY: PM Press, Autonomedia, Common Notions, 2018.

34 See Vandana Shiva's essay "Resources", in Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, 1992, pp. 206-218.

35 Krader, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx.

Outline of Marx's Analysis

People resisted, choosing to become "beggars, robbers and vagabonds" instead of exploited factory workers. Thus, the use of violence to reduce them to a "labor force".

1530: Henry VIII (1491-1547):

The photo above is of a slave in the United States, his back scarred from repeated whippings. The photo below is of prisoner in Iraq who has been beaten and whipped by Iraqi guards of the new United States backed regime in that country. See the August 7, 2004 story behind this second photo at OregonLive.Com

--whipping
--sliced off ear
--hanged
--72,000 thieves put to death






1547: Edward VI (1537-1553):



--slavery
--whip and chains
--branded V on chest of vagabonds
--execution
--take children



1572: Elizabeth (1558-1602):



--branded on ear
--execution







James I (1566-1625);



--public whipping
--branded R left shoulder
--execution






Early period: "Direct extra-economic force"

Later period: "silent compulsion of economic relations" or "natural laws"

The State: "the rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state" (p. 899)

--to lengthen the working day (Chap. 10)
--to set maximum wages (punishment more severe for acceptance than payment)
--outlawing of "combinations, contracts, oaths" from 14th Century to the 19th Century


"The barbarous laws against combinations of workers collapsed in 1825 in the face of the threatening attitude of the proletariat" (p. 903)

"It is evident that only against its will, and under the pressure of the masses, did the English Parliament give up the laws against strikes and trade unions" (p. 903)

Commentary:

The conversion of peasants and artisans into waged and potentially waged workers involved a long and brutal campaign by capital to drive the "freed" population into the labor market—a campaign whose difficulty was due to resistance, documented in centuries of "bloody legislation" aimed at its suppression.

In part, resistance was a refusal of the factory and the refusal to be reduced to a machine among machines in that factory. The following statement by one American manager reveals how capitalists saw workers: “I regard my work-people just as I regard my machinery. . . . They must look out for themselves as I do for myself. When my machines get old and useless, I reject them and get new, and these people are part of my machinery.”(1) No residue here of the paternalism of feudal times, much less the closeness and mutual support of so-called primitive cultures, only the most violent redefinition of human beings as animate tools, an attitude echoed in more recent times by economists who consider workers “human capital.”(2)

Charlie Chaplin's classic film Modern Times (1936) presents an eloquent visual representation of workers as part of the machinery, paced by machinery, eaten up by machinery and driven crazy by the factory. Although it concerns the assembly line of Fordism in the 20th Century its basic vision is every bit as valid for earlier periods.

As early as 1857, Marx observed in his Grundrisse notebooks, "They must be forced to work within the conditions posited by capital".(3) They do not go willingly from the fields, forests and villages to the "satanic mills" of early capitalist factories and into the dank tenements available to such mill workers. Force must be used because they resist. Marx cites begging, vagabondage and robbing as forms taken by the resistance to entering factories and he describes the bloody legislation passed to repress them. However, he does not analyse these activities in any detail; we get no texture of this resistance, only of punishment by whip and branding iron. When he analyses the factory in Chapters 13, 14, and 15 on cooperation, the division of labor and machineryand modern industry, he does show how the struggle continued inside the factories through machine breaking, strikes and so on.

The continuing brutality of factory work, described by Rebecca Harding Davis in her book Life in the Iron Mills (1861), through that portrayed by Bruce Springsteen in his song “Factory” (1978), goes far to explain why so many have resisted being forced to work in them.(4) The day-to-day violence of work and of the struggle over that work have shaped our world both on the job and off.

From the back-window I can see a narrow brickyard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs . . . I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscles and flesh all begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. (Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, New York: The Feminist Press, 1972. Originally written 1861 in Wheeling on the Ohio River.)

Both Davis and Springsteen portray the consequences of factory work for community and family life. She evokes men "laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy," while he remembers his daddy coming home "with death in his eyes" and "Somebody's gonna get hurt tonight.

FACTORY Early in the morning factory whistle blows, Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes, Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light, It's the working, the working, just the working life. Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain, I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain, Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life, The working, the working, just the working life. End of the day, factory whistle cries, Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes, And you just better believe, boy, Somebody's gonna get hurt tonight, It's the working, the working, just the working life. (Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Columbia Records, 1978 (JC-35318)

The Street as an Alternative to the Factory

Begging was already a form of refusal to work in the feudal period, where various persons made use of a certain space created by Catholic attitudes toward alms-giving to live without working. This was a struggle because there was, even then, an attempt to distinguish between "deserving" and "undeserving" beggers and the undeserving included those judged able to work. By the 15th Century and the 16th the attempts to control begging advanced with the need for labor in the emerging capitalist factories, and with the growing militancy of the beggers. In 1529 a Great Riot exploded in Lyons:

. . . mobs of destitute people pillaged the homes of the rich, broke into the municipal granary, and occupied the city hall in protest aginst the soaring price of bread. The Grande Rebeine caused profound concern in Lyons, and over the next few years the new system of poor relief was put into effect.(5)

The Lyons system of poor relief had two sides: 1) it granted bread, etc., and 2) it aimed at regulating the poor and forcing them to work. Tickets were allocated (like food stamps) for bread. Children were housed in "hospital asylums," vocational training was provided, they were then placed in domestic service or apprenticed. The city government also provided support for industry, especially the Lyons Silk industry, to help provide jobs. Finally, begging was forbidden, a new special police force was set up: the chasse-coquins and if any beggars were caught, they were put to work at hard labor or thrown into jail. This was the kind of treatment so thoroughly portrayed in Victor Hugo's great novel Les Misérables (1862).

Despite such state tactics, begging remained widespread. Beggars used many different kinds of tricks in their trade. Some feigned illnesses by chewing soap, foaming at the mouth and acting epileptic. There were at one time 19 secret societies in Rome ranging from "gibbering idiots," "illness fakirs" to tradesmen who had lost their jobs. In 1627 an Italian monk listed 33 types of false beggars that included "tears at will," "flour for communion wafers," "mad as result of tarantula bite," and so on. Sir Thomas Moore complained of these "sturdy and valiante beggars, cloking their idle lyfe under the colors of some disease or sickness."(6)

Clearly many people preferred the colorful life of the street to the drab drudgery of the factory and the grim grey existence of the factory family. Henry Mayhew (1812–87), a playwright and a founder of the satirical weekly Punch, was also an investigative reporter. He interviewed vagrants, both the temporarily jobless and the permanently unwaged, gathered their stories, published them in the Morning Chronicle in London and later in his book London Labour and the London Poor; Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That WILL Work, Those That CANNOT Work, and Those That WILL Not Work (1851). The vagrants often juxtaposed the joys of wandering and begging to the drudgery of waged labor.(7)

Listen carefully to the following testimony by an English "vagrant" about his life in the early 19th Century:

In another autobiographical story recorded by Mayhew, a vagrant tells of cooperation among the beggers and pickpockets and how they shared their experiences and even those of more famous "criminals":

History has also recorded considerable sympathy for beggars among common people—to the point of helping them resist arrest—probably because most workers knew they might become beggars themselves, by choice or because of downturns in the industrial cycle. Garraty notes "French archives contain evidence showing that the police were often harassed by crowds when they attempted to arrest beggars."(8)

Even more colorful, the history of "robbery" and "pilfering" provides rich material for the beginning of a class analysis of crimes against property. (9) On the one side, workers directly appropriate what they have produced but is now owned by capitalists, whether on the job or in the larger society. On the other side, capitalist theft is legalized, from their domestic enclosure of land, homes and tools to their foreign conquests. Such analysis reveals how business has succeeded in pitting workers against workers, from communities where desperate workers rob other workers, nativists against immigrants and colonial armies to carry out the dirty work of spreading capitalist theft across the face of the earth.

Controversy: The Nature of the State

What is the "state"? Marx doesn't analyse the state in the abstract but rather shows us concretely.(10) Here the state appears as government, legislation (Statute of Laborers, etc.), as the House of Commons, as police and armies. In this period, capital succeeds in turning the state-as-government into a tool, an organ of its class rule. This is done both via laws for capital that are enforced, and via laws against capital that are not enforced (such as those against enclosures).(11) Yet the passage of some laws that favor the working class shows that the government is also a terrain of class conflict. What ultimately matters however are neither votes nor debate, but acts. Which and whether laws are passed and enforced is a function of class power.

During this period of "bloody legislation," capital succeeded in using state power for its own ends, against workers and against the old landed aristocracy. Capitalist power is clearly greater than that of workers, yet the balance of power also shifts and causes shifts in government action. Marx attributes the collapse of laws against combinations of workers in 1825 to the "threatening attitude of the proletariat."(12) Similarly, the abandonment of laws against strikes was done only "under the pressure of the masses."(13) Similar shifts in power, resulting in changes in laws concerning the length of the working day, are analyzed in Chapter 10.

Two observations: first, government appears as an organ of capitalist class rule only to the degree that it acts in the interests of that class. It is also a terrain, a space where struggle ensues, and working-class power may be reflected in both parliamentary debate and in executive action. Today the growth of working-class power has resulted in many enforced laws which benefit workers to the detriment of capital. This does not mean that government is a neutral third-party, mediating between the classes as sometimes depicted. It does mean that no simple theory of government as capitalist-state will suffice. Second, although Marx does mention some of the victories won by the working class as well as some defeats, he does not analyse or describe the struggles that produced these changes and while we can see both the need for struggle and its possible effectiveness, we learn nothing of the methods used and how they succeeded. What concretely constituted the "threatening attitude of the proletariat"? How did the "masses" exert pressure? Of these things we learn little.

Working Class Struggles

E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class reveals something of those struggles which Marx mentions but fails to analyze in detail. Examining the period between the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 and their repeal in 1824-25,(14), he shows us how rising anger and militancy of both reformist intellectuals and workers took a number of forms including clandestine political groupings and secret unionism but never in any centralized movement. He shows how such underground activity developed rapidly in response to the anti-combination laws and acts. Workers drew together and swore secret oaths in multiple conspiracies. When they could not strike openly, they developed subtle new methods for sabotaging production, methods that would leave little evidence for prosecution. "If the demands were not met there was no need—in the small workshop— for a formal strike; men would simply drop away or singly give notice." On the other hand, the workers developed many forms of direct action because they had no other recourse. "In its milder forms it was little more than extreme moral pressure. The craftsman working under the union rate would be boycotted; the 'illegal' man would find that his tools were 'lost', or would be 'fined' by his shopmates. In Spitalfields, silk would be cut in the loom; in the woolen districts pieces would be slashed; in the framework-knitting industry the 'jacks', vital parts of the stocking-loom, would disappear. Blacklegs or bad masters would know themselves to be watched; a brick might come through the window, or they might be attacked in a lane at night . . . there was a scatter of cases reported from Glasgow, Dublin, Manchester and Sheffield, of actual or attempted assassinations, vitriol-throwing or charges of gunpowder thrown into workshops."(15)

In such ways were the "threatening attitudes" of the proletariat expressed and the Combination Acts undermined to such a degree that by 1824 a repeal bill was moved through Parliament by men arguing that the Acts had favored combination and must needs be abolished to undermine the growth of working-class organizations! Much to these persons' despair, however, repeal was followed immediately by widespread, now legal, strikes and conflict. Efforts to reinstate the Acts in 1825 were immediately attacked by a "storm of protests, petitions, meetings, and deputations from every trade". The reinstatement efforts failed, opening the way for "the great wave of general unionism between 1832 and 1834."(16)

We need this kind of history and analysis complement Marx's sketch in Capital. We need to examine how those before us fought being forced into the labor market and factories, and how they fought once there —how they fought singly, in small groups, and in relationship to political groups and to the emerging unions. We need to examine how their struggles interacted with the plans of capital. What methods worked, which did not. Beyond understanding how capital imposed its system, and maintained it, only by fierce repression against widespread militancy, we need to learn lessons for today from the history of those struggles.

Vagrancy Laws During Reconstruction

In the United States, the early post-Civil War period provided a very close parallel to this use of vicious legislation to force a population freed from the land into service to capital. Large numbers of newly freed slaves, together with many uprooted and burned out whites, roamed the South wanting only "forty acres and a mule" to begin a new life. The failure of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 to include land reform—the breakup and redistribution of the old plantation land to those who had worked it—condemned the war-freed and uprooted population to search for work where they could find it. Southern landowners, of course, wanted to reinstitute the plantation system via wage labor, under conditions similar to the slavery they had lost. Most of the freed and uprooted, however, refused to return to those conditions. Failing to entice these potential workers into such employment, the capitalists used force in a method strikingly like that used in England.

The photo to the right is of a prisoner working at the notorious Parchman Penitentiary, a huge prison plantation in the Mississippi Delta, where prisoners were treated with extreme brutality.

Harsh laws in most southern states criminalized vagabondage, petty pilfering and other crimes against "property," resulting in a rapid increase in the number of people thrown into prison. In some cases, such as the notorious Parchman Penitentiary, a huge prison plantation in the Mississippi, the government imposed what amounted to slave labor. To help finance the penal system, it also supplied a large quantity of cheap labor to capitalists who were unwilling to pay sufficiently high wages to attract a work force. State governments would lease out prisoners to work in chain gangs at nominal cost to local and national capitalists. C. Vann Woodward (1908-99) in his book Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951) provides us with horrifying descriptions. (17) In his book we find the following:

The system quickly became a large-scale and sinister business. Leases of ten, twenty, andthirty years were granted by legislatures to powerful politicians, Northern syndicates, mining corporations, and individual planters. Laws limiting hours of labor and types of work for convicts were nonexistent in some states and negligible in others . . . The South's 'penitentiaries' were great rolling cages that followed construction camps and railroad building, hastily built stockades deep in forest or swamp or mining fields, or windowless log forts in turpentine flats. (p. 213)(18)

The conditions in these state-provisioned labor camps rivaled not only the brutality of the English situation in the 16th and 17th Centuries, but the Soviet gulag and Nazis camps of the 20th Century. It is always worth remembering the slogan over the entrance to the German concentration camp at Auschwitz was the very capitalist slogan Arbeit Mach Frei—"Work Makes You Free." In some ways, labor camps and prison labor are the quintessential expression of capitalist society. They are among the few places where the illusions of freedom are discarded, and work is imposed directly and brutally. And in Alabama:

A report of the inspectors of the Alabama penitentiary revealed that the prisons were packed with several times the number of convicts they could reasonably hold. 'They are as filthy, as a rule, as dirt could make them, and both prisions and prisoners were infested with vermin. The bedding was totally unfit for use . . . [It] was found that convicts were excessively and sometimes cruelly punished; that they were poorly clothed and fed; that the sick were neglected, insomuch as no hospitals had been provided, that they were confined with the well convicts. A grand-jury investigation of the penitentiary hospital in Mississippi reported that inmates were 'all bearing on their persons marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatments. Most of them have their backs cut in great wales, scars and blisters, some with the skin peeling off in pieces as the result of severe beatings . . . They were lying there dying, some of them on bare boards, so poor and emaciated that their bones almost came through their skin, many complaining for want of food . . . We actually saw live vermin crawling over their faces, and the little bedding and clothing they have is in tatters and stiff with filth.(C. Van Woodward, op. cit., p. 214) (19)

With this kind of treatment death rates were high. But it didn't matter because there were always more vagabonds or petty criminals to be shipped out to the mines or swamps to be worked to death for the sake of capitalist profits.(20)

This was very similar to the period of slavery when the slave trade supplied so many slaves that cheap new muscle could replace that driven into the grave. In Chapter 10, Marx discusses the abuses capitalists inflict when the supply of labor is cheap:

"Hence the Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchial characater as long as production was chiefly directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the over-working of the Negro and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system."(21)

Once the slave trade was abolished and slaves became hard to replace capital, their treatment improved to insure reproduction! In the post Civil War South the roaming masses provided the same kind of surplus labor supply as the slave hunting grounds of Africa—with the same kinds of abuses.

Workers did not accept such barbaric treatment passively. Crime grew in response to repression, and in turn swelled the ranks of prison labor. Non-prison labor finding itself undercut by cheap convict labor fought against this involuntary servitude of so many of their number. When convicts were used to break strikes and displace legal laborers, open conflict over this issue became widespread. Woodward quotes one Colonel Colyar who was the Tennessee Democratic leader and general counsel to the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company: “we found that we were right in calculating that free laborers would be loath to enter upon strikes when they saw that the company was amply provided with convict labor.”(22) By 1891, however, the good Colonel’s workers had had enough. When the company offered a contract with no-strike and other objectionable clauses and the workers refused it,

the company ordered convicts to tear down their houses and build stockades for the convicts who were to replace free labor. The evicted miners then marched in force on the stockades and, without bloodshed, compelled guards, officers and convicts to board a train for Knoxville.

Governor John P. Buchanan, with three companies of militia promptly returned the convicts to the stockades. A few days later more than a thousand armed miners packed the guards and convicts off to Knoxville a second time, and those of another company along with them, again without bloodshed.

The conflict over convict labor continued until October 31, 1891 when the workers "forcibly freed the convicts of the Tennesseee Coal Mine Company, allowed them all to escape, and burned down the stockades. They repeated the same tactics later at two other mining companies, releasing in all some five hundred convicts. The mine operators of the area then employed free labor . . ." (23) In other words in this instance the workers won and defeated this strategy of capital by using armed force.

There is a song that dates from this period, written in the town of Coal Creek. According to the notation on the Smithsonian/Folkways recording it "is a miner's version of a song which was sung by the Negro convicts who were working the mine."

ROLL DOWN THE LINE Way back yonder in Tennessee They leased the convicts out Sent them workin in the mine Against free labor stout. Free labor rebelled against it To win it took some time But when the lease was in effect They made 'em rise and shine. Chorus: Bully won't you roll down the line Bully won't you roll down the line Yonder come my darlin' Comin' down the line Early Monday mornin' They get 'em up on time Send you down to Lone Rock Just a look into that mine. Send you down to Lone Rock Just look into that hole The very next thing the captain says You better get your pole Chorus The beans they are half done The bread is not so well The meat it is all burned up And the coffee's black as hell. But when you get your task done And on the floor you fall Anything you get to eat Will taste good done all wrong. Chorus The bank boss he's a hard man A man you all know well And if you don't get your task done He's gonna give you hell. But when you get your task done And on the floor you fall The very next thing the captain says Better get your pole Chorus Repeat (Pete Seeger, American Industrial Ballads, 1957, Smithsonian-Folkways, CD SF 40058)

Unfortunately, even today, almost two decades into the twenty-first century, penal labor is thriving. Many prisons in the US are still being run as gulags with their inmates either put to work by the prison itself or rented out to private capital.(24)

Controversy: The Wage, Its Absence and the Imposition of Work

Although primitive accumulation has often been defined as the creation of a waged proletariat, we have seen how that very process also involved the creation of the unwaged, from vagabonds through slaves to housewives and children.

In an article analysing Marx's treatment of conflict over laws passed against the appropriation of forest wood by peasants in Germany, historian Peter Linebaugh has argued that the real issue was a change in the wage-form. Traditionally, the appropriation of forest wood and timber was legal and one part of the subsistence income of German peasants. Its outlawing was a way of forcing peasants to turn to the labor market for a greater part of their subsistence, a way of increasing the pressure on them to work for a wage. It was not an act of primitive accumulation because the peasants were already working within the capitalist system—reproducing themselves as part-time labor-power. The attempt to restrict their access to wood simply pushed them deeper into a labor market within which they were already emeshed.(25)

Regarding slavery in the capitalist epoch, Marxists have debated the status of slaves because they are not waged. Some, such as historian Eugene Genovese (1930–2012),have argued that slavery constituted a different kind of social system articulated with the capitalism. Others, myself included, see American slave labor as a peculiar form of labor command within capitalism, a form of unwaged labor essential to the functioning of both Southern and Atlantic capitalism. Cotton slavery in the U.S. was the material foundation of the cotton textile mills in Manchester England. In Capital Marx often speaks of "wage-slavery" marking the similarity of wage labor to slavery. Clearly, for him, the distance between the two in the 19th Century was not great. Elsewhere he wrote:

"I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of the proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is the pivot of our industrialism today as much as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery, you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies; it was the colonies that created world trade; it is world trade that is the necessary conditon for large-scale industry." (26)

On the other hand, in Chapter 3 we saw him contrast the fate of the Roman plebes and enclosure-freed Englishmen. One situation led to slavery and one to capitalism. His analysis is not a priori but he deals with slavery within the overall historical context. In the ancient world it defines a social system. In the capitalist 19th Century it is a peculiar form of labor control within a system based more on exchange than on direct coercion. Yet the coercion of the market is not far from that of the whip. Not in the 19th Century, and not in the 21st when slavery persists in the interstices of contemporary capitalist society.

During the late slave period just before the Civil War, the South was beginning to industrialize, partly in response to resentment over terms of trade between the raw materials of the South and the industrial products of the North. Robrt S. Starobin (1939–71), in a book on this industrialization effort, noted how the situation of the slave was being transformed by the needs of industry for greater labor mobility. (27) Rather than being inseparable from the plantation, slaves were being sent out by their owners to seek work for wages! The industrially employed slaves would then turn over part of their wage to their owner. This meant a dramatic transformation in the day-to-day habits and behavior of the slaves as well as in the nature of their relationship with their owners and with capital. In short they were acting less like slaves and more like free labor.

We must examine the role of slavery within Atlantic capitalism by the pattern of conflict between the working class and capital in the various countries. Eric Williams (1911–81) argued that slavery itself originated from the struggles of both “free” waged workers and indentured workers in the colonies. Capital had to seek out new sources of cheap and totally controlled labor to compensate for the concessions made to workers at home and the facility with which the indentured could escape.(28) Slaves, of course, fought for freedom, through overt revolts and by escaping. (29) At least some English workers saw the freedom of slaves as beneficial to them. Marx even wrote to Lincoln congratulating him on the freeing of the slaves and his re-election in 1864 in a letter on behalf of the International Working Men's Association (the First International). (30) During the Civil War, British textile capitalists supported the Southern cause, because they depended upon cheap, slave-produced Southern cotton. Some even argued that Britain should enter the war on the Southern side. Demonstrations by British workers helped block such intervention.

Within the U.S. many Northern workers also saw, to some degree, that their ability to win higher wages and better working conditions depended upon ending a situation where some workers were literally made slaves—to work at extremely low "wages." In Chapter 10, Marx notes:

In the United States of America, every independent worker's movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific . . . (31)

As the struggles of the waged and unwaged were linked, so too are many (and eventually all) conflicts between various groups of workers and capital interconnected. If the power of American workers in the North and of British workers was limited by slavery in the early 19th Century, today we see plenty of evidence of how the power of those same workers is limited by the weakness of workers in the Global South. Multinational corporations and free trade have increased capital's ability to shift jobs from high to low wage areas, undercutting the livelihoods of workers in the former areas with little or no improvement for workers in the latter ones. The solution to this problem today, as in the 19th Century, is an acceleration of the international circulation of struggle via the self-conscious collaboration between higher, lower and unwaged workers.(32)

Recommended Further Reading

On the street as an alternative to the factory, see John A. Garraty, Unemployment in History, New York: Harper Colophon, 1978 and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and the other references listed at the end of the section above on "Literature and Class Struggle" and in the chronology of Victorian social literature.

Marxist theoretical discussions and debates over the "state" are virtually endless; it has always been a central issue because there have always been those who have conceived of revolution in terms of taking over or overthrowing of the state. For a survey and discussion of the evolution of the idea of the state in Marx see Hal Draper's Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume I: State and Bureaucracy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977. The classic, and most progressive, statement by Lenin on the subject his book The State and Revolution, 1917. In the 1970s there was a new wave of work on state theory in Europe and in the United States as capitalism was plunged into crisis and existing state policies floundered. A collection of pieces from the German "state-derivation" debate are in John Holloway and S.Picciotto (eds), State and Capital: A Marxist Debate, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. In France a new school of theory emerged which reframed the issue of state in terms of the "regulation" of various modes of accumulation, e.g., M.Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, London, New Left Books, 1979 which hand an impact on some English Marxists like Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State, Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982. For some recent debate on this subject see: Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway (eds) Post-Fordism & Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State, London: MacMillan, 1991 and Simon Clarke (ed) The State Debate, London: MacMillan, 1991, both of which include regulation theorists and autonomist critics.

On "crime" and working class struggle, there has recently been a spurt of new work by Marxist historians of which the most important works are: Edward Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act, 1975, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and Edward Thompson (eds) Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, 1975 and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 1992. Unlike many earlier historical works that have looked at "crime" from the point of view of the police and the maintenance of "order", these works attempt to examine the history from the bottom-up, from the point of view of the workers' whose struggles have brought them into conflict with laws made by the ruling classes. "Our starting-point, " writes Linebaugh, "is neither law nor 'critical law' but the hanged men and women whose views and actions continually challenged both law and their own class." (p. xxiii)

On 18th and 19th Century slavery, there is, of course, an endless literature. Among Marxist historians there are several approaches of interest. The more or less "orthodox" approach to the subject can be found in the work of Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, New York: International Publishers, 1943 and Essays in the History of the American Negro, New York: International Publishers, 1945 as well as the works of Eugene Genovese such as The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, New York: Pantheon, 1966. What mainly chracterizes Genovese's approach is an attempt to differentiate the Southern slave system from the wider system of capitalism; this he does by identifying different behaviors on the part of the slave owning class and by defining slavery as a distinct "mode of production". A second, more interesting, and bottom-up approach has emphasized the self-activity of slaves not only in revolt but in everyday life. The seminal work was C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1963 (originally written in 1938). See also: C. L. R. James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade", Amistad, I, 1970, reprinted in C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present: Selected Writings, London: Allison Busby, 1977. James' work was a fundamental influence on that of George Rawick who gather, edited and commented some 20 volumes of slave narratives as part of an extensive project documenting the slave self-activity. Rawick's summary analysis of the results of that research was published as From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, Westport: Greenwood, 1972 (volume 1 in the series of narratives). This book like that of James', had far reaching influence, not only on historians like Linebaugh but also among a wide variety of activists, including feminists in Italy, who saw parallels between the kind of practices Rawick discovered among slaves and those of women struggling against capitalist patriarchy. Finally, little by little there has been developing an analysis of the working class at the level of the entire Atlantic region which attempts to resituate each element of the working class, including slaves, within the wider context of an international circulation of workers, their experience and their struggles. See, for example, Peter Linebaugh, "All the Atlantic Mountains Shook, Labour/Le Travail, Winter 1982, Marcus Rediger, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, New York: Cambridge, 1987, and Ricardo Salvatore, Class Struggle and International Trade: Rio de la Plata's Commerce and the Atlantic Proletariat, 1790-1850, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1987.

Concepts for Review

Questions For Review

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

1. Marx describes the resistence to the factory in these terms: "these men . . . could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers and vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances." Why might people have turned to these methods out of "inclination"?

*2. List the punishments Marx mentions for refusal to work? Are there such punishments today? What are they? In society in general? In the school? In the family? In prisons?

3. How did workers force a change from maximum to minimum wage laws? How did they force an end to anti-combination laws?

4. How does this chapter constitute a description of the second step in forcing people to subordinate their lives to work?

*5. Provide a working class rationale for begging or for stealing (from capitalists) as an alternative to work? Do you think Austin street people have anything in common with the English people against whom the "bloody legislation" was directed?

6. What do you think Marx means by "the state"? Is it the same as government or different? How? What examples does he give of the exercise of state power? What do his examples suggest about the class charactaer of the state?

*7. Discuss the similarities and differences between the laws against vagabonds passed during the period Marx was examining and those passed in the post-Civil War period in the American South.

8. Discuss the relationship between slavery and wage labor in the early 19th Century. Was slavery a part of primitive accumulaton? Was its end?

*9. What does the analysis of the "bloody legislation," of wage labor, of slave labor and of prison labor tell you about the nature of the wage in capitalism? What other forms of unwaged forced labor can you think of?

Footnotes

1 Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860, Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1964, p. 77.

2 See Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (1964), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn., 1993.

3 Grundrisse, p. 736.

4 Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, New York: The Feminist Press, 1972. Originally written 1861 in the city of Wheeling on the Ohio River. Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Columbia Records, 1978 (JC-35318).

5 John A. Garraty, Unemployment in History, New York Harper Colophon, 1978, p. 25. Something similar happened with the widespread urban uprisings of the mid-196os. They were followed by a massive expansion of the Federal Food Stamp program. See Tim Reynolds, The Food Stamp Explosion, University of Texas at Austin, M.A. Thesis, 1980.

6 Thomas Moore, Utopia (1516), Book 2, Part 2, New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

7 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, New York: Penguin Classics, 1985, pp. 383–385.

8 Garraty, Unemployment in History, op. cit., p. 55.

9 Essential contributions to the analysis of the class politics of crime in this period can be found in E. P. Thompson, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, New York: Pantheon, 1975. On Jack Sheppard and the working-class art of excarceration, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, London: Allen Lane, 1991, Chapter 1: “‘The Common Discourse of the Whole Nation’: Jack Sheppard and the Art of Escape.”

10 One result has been a proliferation of Marxist efforts to "fill the gap" in his theory by conjuring up a Marxist theory of the state. Among the many contributions to that effort, see the issues of the journal Kapitalistate (1973-83).

11 The non-enforcement of laws and regulation costly to business became public policy under the Reagan administration that systematically sought to undermine existing labor rights and environmental protection laws by eliminating them where possible and refusing to enforce them elsewhere. This practice has been renewed under Donald Trump.

12 Capital, Vol. I, p. 903.

13 Ibid.

14 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, op. cit., pp. 497–521.

15 Ibid., pp. 514–515.

16 Ibid., p. 520.

17 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1817–1913, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951, pp. 213-214.

18 Ibid., p. 213.

19 Ibid., p. 214.

20 For a visual, though tame, taste of this regime, see the film Cool Hand Luke (1967) with Paul Newman in a modern chain gang. Just in case you think that vicious corporal punishment has been banned from the capitalist world in this new 21st century, take a look at documentation compiled by World Corporal Punishment Research—or do some research on the Abu Ghraib prison once run by the US government in Iraq.

21 Capital, Vol. I, p. 345.

22 Woodward, Origins of the New South, op. cit., p. 233.

23 Ibid., pp. 233–234.

24 For an example of the former, see the documentary Angola for Life: Rehabilitation and Reform Inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary (2015) and the article about it by Whitney Benns, "American Slavery, Reinvented", The Atlantic Monthly, September 21, 2015. See also Vicky Paliez, "The Prison Industry in the United States, Big Business or a New Form of Slavery", Center for Research on Globalization, March 2008. Compare with the recent imposition of forced labor in China where ethnic minorities are being incarcerated in labor camps and forced to work for American companies. See Dake Kang, Martha Mendoza and Yanan Wang, "In Locked Compound, Minorities in China Make Clothes for US", Associated Press, December 18, 2018.

25 Peter Linebaugh, "Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate," Crime and Social Justice, 6 (Fall/Winter 1976), pp. 5-16.

26 Capital, Vol. I, p. 625, and “Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov” (December 28, 1846), MECW, Vol. 38, p. 101.

27 Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

28 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944, which is directly indebted to C. L. R. James's book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), rev. 2nd edn., New York: Vintage Books, 1963 (see Williams's bibliographic notes III.B. at the end of his book).

29 Escaping in the US often made use of the underground railroad; escaping in Latin America and the Caribbean often involved flight into the hinterland and the establishment of "maroon" communities, sometimes with indigenous peoples. See Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd edn., Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

30 Karl Marx, "To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America", MECW, Vol. 20, pp. 19-21.

31 Capital, Vol. I, p. 414.

32 See slides prepared for a 2004 debate on "outsourcing".

Outline of Marx's Analysis:

"Whence came the capitalists originally?" The expropriation of the agricultural population only created "great landed proprietors.

Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer: "was a slow process" evolving through many centuries.

For England:

1) First form: the baileff, himself a serf, like the Roman villicus.
2) Second form: emerging in second half of the 14th Century was the farmer provided by the landlord with seed, cattle and farm implements, exploits more wage labor.
3) Third form: metayer or sharecropper who advances part of inputs, rest advanced by landowner and they divide the output.
4) Fourth form: 15th Century on, capitalist farmer proper who has his own capital for investment, employs wage labor and pays rent.

This emerging class gets boost in 15th/16th Century from:

1) "Usurpation of the common lands" which allows expansion in cattle and manure.
2) Fall in value of gold and money causing a rise in the prices (e.g., agricultural output) which undermining real wages and rents, raising surplus value/profits.

So, by the end of the 16th Century, England had a "class of capitalist farmers."

Commentary

Analyzing the emergence of the capitalist class, Marx begins in the countryside, where he began his discussion of the genesis of the working class. The expropriation of the rural population made it possible for the landed proprietors to reorganize the countryside, directly or through intermediaries. In some cases, landlords took over supervision of waged workers on their enlarged domains. In most, they hired others to reorganize agricultural production increasing its commercialization, demanding only their share of the surplus-value as rent. The examples Marx gives shows the decreasing control of landlords, per se, and the increasing control of the emerging class of capitalist farmers. Like the capitalist class more generally, in order to emerge as a dominant class, agrarian capitalists had to first gain control over production, independent of the landlords, and second, employ a reorganized labor force to produce a marketable surplus.

As the point of departure of this process in Europe varied enormously, so too did the paths along which the new class emerged. They varied from region to region and country to country. The history in the United States was just as varied, starting from family farming, waged labor and plantation slavery. After slavery was ended by revolt and civil war, small farmers, whether independent or sharecroppers, were slowly squeezed off the land in an ongoing process of enclosure by large-scale capitalist agribusiness, with considerable help from the US government.

The Resistance to Market Forces in American Farming

In the United States, the westward movement of people seeking alternatives to the emerging factories (in Europe and on the East Coast of North America) created a class of independent family farmers linked together in many kinds of community. These farmers were akin to the independent yeoman farmers Marx saw being wiped out in England. Obtaining land by displacing Native Americans, their labor could only be harnessed/exploited by the emerging capitalist system through the market (the manipulation of domestic terms of trade and high interest rates). Such exploitation culminated in the Populist Revolt in the late 19th Century, when millions of American farmers joined together to protest, among other things, the falling ratio of the prices they received for their crops to the prices they paid for their tools, seeds, etc. They also protested the limitation of the money supply to gold—that kept supplies of money limited, prices down and interest rates up—and demanded the monetization of silver.(1)

Throughout much of the following twentieth century, farmers had to struggle against a tendency for the terms of their trade to fall and thus for their situation to worsen.(2) A blues song, “Seven Cent Cotton,” composed in 1927 by Sampson Pittman, dealt with just such a problem: low prices for cotton and high prices for just about everything the farmers had to buy. The song begins: "7¢ cotton and 40¢ meat / How in the world / Can a poor man eat? / Flour up high and / Cotton down low / How in the world / Can we raise the dough?”(3)

Seven Cent Cotton 7¢ cotton and 40¢ meat How in the world Can a poor man eat? Flour up high and Cotton down low How in the world Can we raise the dough? Clothes worn out Shoes run down Old slouch hat With a hole in the crown Back nearly broken And fingers all sore Cotton gone down To rise no more 7¢ cotton and 8 dollar pants Who in the world Has got a chance We can't buy clothes We can't buy meat Too much cotton And not enough to eat Can't help each other What'll we do I can't explain it So it's up to you. 7¢ cotton and two dollar hose Guess we'll have to do Without any clothes

7¢ cotton and 40¢ meat How in the world Can a poor man eat? Mule's in the barn No crop laid by The corn crib's empty And the cow's gone dry Well water low Nearly out of sight Can't take a bath On a Saturday night No use talkin' Any man is beat With 7¢ cotton and 40¢ meat 7¢ cotton and 40¢ meat How in the world Can a poor man eat? Poor are gettin poorer All around here The kids comin' regular Every year Fatten our hogs Taken 'em to town All we get is 6¢ a pound Very next day We have to buy it back 40¢ a pound in a paper sack. (Pete Seeger, American Industrial Ballads, Folkways, 1957. (5251) Smithsonian/Folkways 1992. (CD SF 40058))

Other methods of exploitation included debt peonage through which farmers would become indebted to landowners, banks or suppliers and forced to produce commercial crops to pay off their debt. This was the fate of many ex-slaves after the Civil War. For those who escaped imprisonment and de facto slavery (see my commentary on Chapter 28) and were unable to obtain land, they often found themselves “sharecropping” others’ land and trapped in perpetual debt.(4) Others have been subordinated via the modern “putting out” or “contract farming” system, whereby small farm owners sign contracts with food chains or food processing corporations and must follow the methods and instructions of their buyers. In both cases, as in the case of slavery, people’s skills and labor have been manipulated and exploited by capital without this being done through the wage.

Capitalists have not always found it easy to entice or compel American family farmers to produce for the market, and thus expose themselves to exploitation. The traditional American family farm is a complex combination of animal husbandry, vegetable and grain growing, designed from the first to be largely self-supporting. Animal wastes are returned to the soil as nutrients; the animals feed on grain or their byproducts or on fallow pastures being renewed by nitrogen-fixing crops. Drying, butchering, salting, canning and more recently freezing have provided farm families with food the year round. In these circumstances, it is possible for small farmers, if they are not caught by the debt traps of suppliers or bankers, to produce for the market only to the degree that they choose, selling just enough to buy things they cannot produce. In research for his PhD dissertation, Ricardo Salvatore discovered how the refusal of New England farmers to produce hides for even a regional leather market forced East Coast shoe producers to import hides from as far away as Argentina and California.(5) Those farmers who refused to subordinate their production to the market were opting for a certain culture and way of life in which they were working for themselves and their own self-defined needs.

In a process that Marx analyzes with respect to industry in Chapter 25, American agriculture has suffered gradual processes of both proletarianization and centralization. Exploited and then foreclosed, most small farmers have been driven off the land and into rural or urban labor markets. Some, in self-defense, have survived by banding together in farmer cooperatives.(6) Parallel has been the rise of larger, more wealthy farmers and ranchers and their takeover by Eastern or European investment companies. American agribusiness emerged from open range wars, where the stronger stole from the weaker, and from some buying up others' land, often at cut-rate prices from foreclosing banks. The big farms and ranches fenced the land and hired ever more laborers, including cowboys to manage herds and cattle drives-armed cowboys who, sometimes, struck for higher wages." (7) In these ways, the experience of England has been essentially repeated in North America, albeit with some variation.

The period of the Populist Revolt was the last important instance of large and small American farmers combining in a common political cause. Subsequently, the state, through the Department of Agriculture, went out of its way to destroy this alliance by supporting the growth of the American Farm Federation that catered to large farmers and by directing its increasing number of agricultural extension agents to push new technology mainly toward more affluent farmers who could afford the necessary investment.(8) In recent years, the revival of the “farm movement” in response to the latest credit crunches and crises of parity in output and input prices has been supported by those few small farmers who are left, and some large farmers who stand to gain from price supports. This “movement” is on a very small scale in comparison to the Populist Revolt, in large measure because while in 1870 almost 50 percent of Americans still worked the land, today that number has been reduced to 3–4 percent and is still declining.

As its operations and the need for cheap farm labor grew, U.S. agribusiness turned to immigrant labor, both legal—through the Bracero Program— and illegal. By the 1960s, however, field workers (mostly Mexican, or Mexican American) began to form unions, fight for union recognition, higher wages and better working conditions in the central valley of California. They fought in part through strikes and in part through a nationwide grape boycott that mobilized millions of shoppers (mainly housewives) in their support. Many of us who were supporting the resistance of peasants in Southeast Asia to US government counterinsurgency war also lent our time and energy to support that struggle in the American countryside.

The struggles of farmworkers have been commemorated in song. An early one, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” (1948) by Woody Guthrie, lamented the exploitation of immigrant workers. Another, the “Corrido de Delano” or the “Ballad of Delano” by Lalo Guerrero (1916–2005), celebrated the battles of the United Farm Workers in California. The song begins: “In 1965 or 1966, more or less / Our people rose up / In the fields of Delano / Demanding better wages / For working the land.”

Among the many other musical expressions of such rural conflicts in that period was “Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan. His song, however, was more than an expression of rural revolt; it expressed a whole cycle of social struggles of the late 1960s: the revolt against capitalist work in all its forms. “Maggie’s Farm” could be any farm, factory, office or schoolroom where people were put to work and mistreated. The miseries that Dylan describes are those of all workers: ideas which can’t be realized because work drains away energy, low wages, penalties for the infraction of stupid rules, the blindness of bosses to anything besides their pursuit of profit, their frequent enjoyment of their power over workers, the shadow of the state standing behind them to protect them from workers’ revolt, ideology that hides hypocrisy. Yet, the song reveals the struggle for self-realization despite the oppressions of boring work. It begins: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more / No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more / Well, I wake up in the morning / Hold my hands and pray for rain / I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane / It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.” Just how widely the sentiments of the song rippled, can be seen in its Wikipedia entry.

Maggie's Farm I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more Well, I wake up in the morning Hold my hands and pray for rain I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more Well, he hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime He asks you with a grin, if you're havin a good time And he fines you everytime you slam the door I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Pa no more No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Pa no more Well, he puts his cigar out in your face just for kicks His bedroom window, it is made out of bricks The National Guard stands outside his door I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Pa no more I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Ma no more No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Ma no more Well, she talks to all the servants about man and god and law Everybody says she's the brains behind Pa She's 68 but she says she's 54 I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Ma no more I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more Well, I try my best to be just like I am But everybody wants you to be just like them They say sing while you slave and I just get bored I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. (Bob Dylan, Bringing It all Back Home, Columbia Records, 1965. (CS 9128))

Parallels in the Global South

Colonial plantations, on land stolen from indigenous populations, faced resistance and had to resort to many different forms of coerced labor. (9) For the most part, such agriculture produced raw materials for the industries of the colonizing countries, e.g., American, Egyptian or Indian cotton, Caribbean sugar or Vietnamese rice and rubber. See the films Burn and The Mission for vivid portrayals of the colonial period in Latin America. The post colonial period perpetuated plantation or ladifundia forms of exploitation, still based on stealing land from the indigneous people and on driving them into wage labor, or, where they had the power to retain some of their own land, on trying to draw them into market production. Like some American family farmers, many peasant communities have refused to gear their production to the demands of the market. Some, seduced by market income in the past, have withdrawn after nasty experiences of finding their income subject to wild fluctuations in market prices. Periods of downturns in crop prices have shown them that their medium- and long-run income, not to mention their cultural ways of life, are more secure when their production is essentially organized to meet their own needs and only surpluses are offered to the market.

On the other hand, in the post-colonial era, influential commercial producers reacted to such market price instability by demanding considerable state intervention to lessen such fluctuations and stabilize income. In this way new independent governments gained some control over their economies, which had been and continued to be dependent on former colonial trade. Such interventions—such as subsidizing the prices of basic food crops—were long opposed by development economists and foreign governments who wanted to open those markets to their own exports.

That long opposition culminated in the trumpeted free-market, neoliberal ideology of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. On every front, the US government pressured foreign governments to "open their markets" and reduce government "regulation." The ideology was that of 18th and 19th Century liberalism: "free markets are the best solution to all economic problems." (10) The actual strategy was merely a variant of colonial force: hammer down all those defenses that local groups had erected to their subordination by multinational capital. During the 1982 debt crisis in Mexico, for instance, the International Monetary Fund demanded the elimination of subsidies supporting the price of the basic food crop, maize, as one condition (among many) for debt rollover. It was accepted and enforced by the Mexican government. The result was a drop in maize prices and a flood of maize imports from the US that convinced many peasants to abandon market-geared monoculture and return to more diverse farming practices designed for local needs. This pattern has been replicated worldwide.

Such neoliberal policies have continued to be pursued by Democratic as well as Republican administrations. A decade after Mexico’s de facto default, the Clinton administration pushed through the neoliberal NAFTA that went into effect on January 1, 1994, an implementation met by the indigenous Zapatista uprising on the very same day. Within a year, the peso went belly-up and that same administration demanded further opening of the Mexican economy to foreign investment and trade as conditions for bailing out speculators. In all these cases, the welfare of both farmers and consumers was subordinated to that of multinational corporations, including agribusiness.

The Use of Inflation in Primitive and Mature Accumulation

Marx’s analysis of the way inflation (a general rise of prices) enriched capitalist farmers in the 16th Century is still instructive in our own period. The utilization of inflation by capitalists to transfer value from waged workers (and others on fixed income) to themselves (the owners of the commodities whose prices are rising) became a conscious policy in the 1940s–1960s, a period in which capitalist macroeconomic policy was dominated by the thought of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Keynes had seen how inflation could be used to undermine real wages in the presence of “money illusion.” Then development economists such as Sir William Arthur Lewis (1915–91) recommended state-generated inflation as a way to increase savings and investment to spur accumulation in the Global South.(11) In some countries, such as Brazil, this was institutionalized, not only with inflation but with differential indexation whereby wages were indexed at a lower rate than capital values.

In the 1970s rapid inflation was the only way capital could undermine real wages, given that, in the late 1960s, nominal wages had grown more rapidly than productivity and undermined profits. Thus, the acceptance by US capital of the quadrupling of oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1974 and again in 1978, in the hope and expectation that hundreds of billions of "petrodollars" would be recycled through Western banks and become available for capital to use against workers.(12) Inflation successfully prevented the rapid rise of real wages and an accelerated fall in the share of profits. However, workers' continued success in raising nominal wages generated accelerating inflation that became, for business, more of a problem than a useful strategy. At that point, policies "attacking inflation" became a euphemism for what were really "attacks on wages."

This points to a basic lesson to be learned from the study of this part of Capital: in his analysis of the period of primitive accumulation, Marx outlines and analyzes then new phenomena, which become established patterns of mature accumulation. We can approach primitive accumulation by looking backward and asking how the mechanisms of capitalist domination became established, but we can also examine the ongoing patterns of accumulation to discover how the same mechanisms have been continually re-employed. Land, for example, is still being enclosed and people continue to struggle against enclosure or to reverse it, seeking the re-establishment of ever larger commons as one vehicle for escaping capitalist domination. Certainly, the structure of the section, two chapters on the emergence of the working class, and three on the emergence of the capitalist class, points to a fundamental point which many Marxists have overlooked: socially speaking, accumulation is an accumulation of classes and the accumulating quantities of money, means of production, commodities, factories, etc., are only moments, or elements, in the social accumulation of the antagonistic social struggles which make up the interactions of those classes.

Recommended Further Reading

See footnotes.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

1. Why does Marx begin his discussion of the emergence of the capitalist class in the countryside?

2. What is the nature of the conflict between the emerging class of capitalist farmers and the landlords?

3. What kind of conflicts between workers and managers do you think might have influenced the pattern of emergence of the capitalist farmers?

*4. With regard to the United States discuss the class status of: the family farmer in the Midwest and West of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the family farmer of the present who contracts his production (say of chickens) to Safeway, the slave plantation owner producing for the English market, the black and white sharecroppers of the post-Civil War period.

*5. Under what conditions was it possible for the emerging capitalist farmers to benefit from 16th Century inflation? How was that different from the Keynesian or Lewis use of inflation in the post WWII world? What conditions had to be met for the strategy to work?

6. How sensitive do you think people are today to the effects of inflation on the value of their wages? Do you think many people understand that the war on inflation is actually a war on wages? Why or why not? Is an understanding of the impact of inflation on real wages enough to undermine its usefulness for that purpose?

7. Under which circumstances does it make sense to call farmers "capitalists" and under which to call them "workers?"

8. Imagine yourself in the position of a peasant with enough land to survive on. Under which conditions would you be tempted to produce for the market? Under which conditions might you be willing to reorient all your production for the market? What do you imagine might be the benefits of these acts? What would be the dangers?

Footnotes

1 On the agrarian Populist Revolt in the United States, see the following works: John Hicks, The Populist Revolt, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1931; C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1963; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, New York Oxford University Press, 1978; Robert Klepper, The Economic Bases for Agrarian Protest Movements in the U.S., 1870–1900, New York Arno, 1978; Bruce Palmer, "Man Over Money": The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism, Chapel Hill: University of Northern Carolina Press, 198o; Donna Barnes, Farmers in Rebellion: the Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmer's Alliance and People's Party in Texas, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984. For an allegorical treatment of the populist battle for the monetarization of silver, see Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chicago, IL: George M. Hill Co., 1900. You can also re-examine the 1939 film version, but its makers changed Dorothy’s magical shoes from silver (symbolic of free silver) to ruby (looked better on the screen) and thus obfuscated a main point!

2 This problem with relative prices deserves two further comments: 1) the ratio has sometimes been quite consciously manipulated by policymakers to exploit farmers, the most notorious case being the Stalinist government in the Soviet Union that wielded the “scissors” against peasants; 2) concern with just such problems on an international scale was raised by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986) and others who argued that the raw material exporting Global South as a whole was chronically faced with falling terms of trade.

3 For one rendition of this song, and for the rest of the lyrics, see Pete Seeger, American Industrial Ballads, Folkways, 1957 (5251), Smithsonian/Folkways, 1992 (CD SF 40058). Others, but not Pete’s, are available on YouTube.

4 See Edward Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993.

5 Ricardo D. Salvatore, "Class Struggle and International Trade: Rio de la Plata's Commerce and the Atlantic Proletariat, 1790–1850”, University of Texas at Austin, PhD dissertation, 1987. The problem of controlling a hide-producing proletariat reappeared in the Pampas, where fiercely independent gauchos only killed wild cattle for hides when they needed money.

6 See the discussion of cooperatives in my commentary on Chapter 13.

7 See Ruth Allen, Chapters in the History of Organized Labor in Texas, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1941.

8 On how the alliance between small and large farmers was irretrievably broken with help from the Department of Agriculture, see Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy, New York: Atheneum, 1969.

9 See Marx's comments on the attitudes of freed slaves in Jamaica, cited in my commentary on Chapter 10.

10 Of course, markets have never been free, neither then nor now, but are carefully organized to benefit those capitalists with the most clout in shaping trade policies.

11 See W. A. Lewis’s classic article on development and the use of inflation against the working class: “Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor”, Manchester School, May 1954, pp. 139–191. On Keynes and “money illusion,” see his General Theory, 1936. For a class analysis of the dynamics of inflation politics in Brazil, see Nathan Dudley, “Worker Struggle and Wage Compression: The Rise and Fall of Indexation in Brazil”, University of Texas, MA thesis, May 1988; and Conrad Herold, “Working Class Struggle and the Brazilian Debt Crisis”, University of Texas, PhD dissertation, 1994.

12 US negotiators let OPEC know that it would not oppose increases in oil prices. When European governments sought to form a "buyers' cartel" to manipulate demand against OPEC's manipulation of supply, the US government refused to go along. See V. H. Oppenheim, "Why Oil Prices Go Up: The Past: We Pushed Them", Foreign Policy, no. 25, Winter 1976-1977, pp. 24-57.

Outline of Marx's Analysis

Point of departure: largely self-sufficient peasantry, which worked the land, produced raw materials, and processed them into final consumption goods, e.g., raised sheep, worked wool into thread and hence into cloth and clothes.

Expropriation of the land had three results:

1. Peasants became workers and landlords either became or hired agrarian capitalists.
2. Produced raw materials, along with the land became the property of the agrarian capitalists.
3. The destruction of independent artisanal and handicraft production so that all consumer goodshad to be purchased.
Destruction of Artisanal Production
– begins with expropriation of the land which often involved the destruction of villages and means of artisanal production such as looms
– is temporarily limited by the rise of cottage industry which is subordinated to merchant capital.
– this begins the period of manufacturing controlled by merchants, in isolated workshops, with the aim of profits
– is completed with the rise of industrial factories in which production and workers are concentrated in "labor barracks"
– creates the home market which replaces what were once home made or artisan goods produced to meet local needs
Home market = demand for food + clothes + housing, etc., from people who had previously provided their own but are now working for wages and buying what they need on the market.

Commentary

The expropriation of land and the bloody legislation against the expropriated produced not only a proletariat available for work in capitalist industry, but also a market for the goods being produced by that industry. Previously, that market was quite limited because most people produced what they needed. It was restricted to the wealthy with money to spend or to local exchange, often under conditions of barter or reciprocity within a community. Marx points out that the rise of a waged working class also meant the rise of a class of consumers who increasingly bought everything they needed in the market.

The Imposition of the Market

For most people involvement with the market in pre-capitalist times was marginal. In Albrecht Durer's 1512 etching we see his portrayal of two peasants at the market. You will note that they have but a few items to sell. Similarly, those doing the buying would also buy little of what they needed.

As we saw in Chapter 28, throwing peasants off the land does not necessarily mean they will present themselves at the factory gates or constitute an immediate market for capitalists' goods. The inability to produce one's own food or clothing does not mean those who need to eat or to be clothed will have the money necessary to buy what they need or that buying them is the only way to obtain them. They could also be appropriated directly. In legend, Robin Hood and his merry men poached the king's deer. As commons were enclosed, peasants continued to gather wood in forests for huts and fires and poached game on now private land.(1) Along with the laws against vagabondage, aimed at creating a class of waged workers, came other laws aimed at preventing such direct appropriation, i.e., property laws that imposed the market as the only legal way to acquire goods. These laws were every bit as bloody, perhaps more so, than those against vagabondage. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, British courts regularly hanged people for petty "theft." Historian Peter Linebaugh coined the term "thanatocracy" for this rule by death.(2)

While this distinction between direct appropriation and buying with a wage may seem clear cut, historically it was not so neatly defined. During the period of manufacturing, it was commonplace in many trades, for the workers to take part of their income in the form of directly appropriated means of production. For example, silk workers would appropriate scraps of silk cloth, shoemakers would keep excess leather, shipwrights would help themselves to scrap lumber, sailors would take tobacco being transported in their ships, cowboys could take part of their pay in calves or put their own brand on mavericks, and so on. In each case the workers would either consume the material directly, sell it for money or work it up into a product (e.g., leather into shoes) and sell that for money.(3) Eventually, this kind of activity was criminalized; laws were passed attacking these non-wage forms of income and through them the real wage was lowered, making the workers poorer and the employers richer. Moreover, the struggle over such appropriation led to a variety of new methods of production: from hogsheads (large wooden barrels) in shipping (to make "pilfering" more difficult) to Mirabeau's fabriques réunies in which workers could be watched over, their labor process more carefully controlled and "waste" limited.

Valorization and disvalorization

Another way of looking at the emergence of the "home market" is the commodification of production, that is so say how goods which had been produced for use, came to be produced for sale. This is characteristic of the capitalist organization of life: capitalists convert human activities into commodity producing ones. The people capitalists put to work, produce not just useful items but items or services but commodities that can be sold to make a profit (or so the capitalists hope. This whole process of putting people to work producing commodities, sold to realize a profit, which is then reinvested to begin the whole process over again, Marx calls (in Chapter 7) “valorization” or the “self-valorization” of capital.(4)

Capitalist valorization is quite the reverse from the point of view of displaced peasants and artisans. Peasants displaced from the land lose their ability to farm, not only in the direct sense that without land they cannot grow food, but over time the very skills necessary for farming are lost within a generation. Their children, raised away from the land, never acquire the skills of their parents. Artisans, who knew how to spin thread or weave cloth but lost their spinning wheels and looms, soon lose their skills in those handicrafts. Their children never gain them. Thus, the creation of value for the capitalist means the creation of what Ivan Illich has called “disvalue” for the expropriated.(5) This loss of skill, this loss of the ability to produce for oneself to meet one’s own needs, involves two related processes, devalorization and disvalorization. Where certain skills and abilities and knowledges are lost completely, not just by the individual but by society, we can say there has been devalorization or the destruction of value. Where the skills and abilities are lost to individuals but taken over and incorporated into capital and the production of commodities, we can say the people have suffered disvalorization—the displacement of personal and communal skills into the production of commodities.(6)

These processes, although begun in the earliest period of primitive accumulation, continue to this day. In Chapter 15 of Capital, on machinery and modern industry, Marx analyzes this process in terms of deskilling. He shows how the development of machines has involved the mechanical reproduction of skills that workers then no longer exercise. The more this process develops, the fewer aspects of traditional skill are exercised by workers. The result is a real process of "abstraction" through which work is steadily reduced to simple machine tending.

Today, the processes of devalorization and disvalorization are most evident in the Global South. In barrios and villages, we find people whose abilities to meet their own needs are being undermined by the intrusion of the market. Sometimes, as in the case of the substitution of marketed baby formula for breastfeeding, the results have been dramatic: malnourishment, crippling and even death.(7) In other cases, say the substitution of store-bought clothing for homespun, the results are not so immediately obvious or dramatic but, in the long run, cultural traditions and ways of life are lost, e.g., patterns unique to communities woven into clothing, traditional reverence for the earth. The creation of the home market replaces diverse cultural practices and ways of being by a single way of doing things and similar goods. Capitalists like to point with pride to the array of colors and styles available in your average department store, or the array of foods available in supermarkets. But compared to the pre-existing diversity of styles in clothing and cuisines, their vaunted "choices" pale, mere variations to maximize sales.

Under these circumstances, people have long fought against the subordination of their activities to capitalist accumulation and for the preservation of their cultures, which cannot survive independently of the structure of those activities. Just as peasants struggled against the expropriation of their land, so too did the artisans among them struggle against the destruction or subordination of their tools and crafts. As described in Chapter 15, during the early period of manufacture workers sometimes smashed machines that would subordinate their skills, increase their work and lower their income.(8) Such struggles also constituted a defense of ways of life, of patterns of interactions, within a community and between generations (parent-child, apprenticeships).

Looking primarily at Europe, Marx saw the rigidities of the guilds with their strict rules that limited production, the number of journeymen working under a master, and so on. In those conditions, he saw capitalism bringing a certain freeing up, a liberation of production from artificial restraint, thus an historically progressive force. But the guilds were mainly city institutions and Marx never closely explored the great variety of cultural practices in the countryside&mdashh;at least not until late in his life, long after Capital was written. Then, he began to read ethnographic studies and was drawn into debates about the Russian mir, or peasant commune. As a result, he showed a greater appreciation of such alternative forms of social organization. Unfortunately, none of this shows up in Capital; it was never revised to take account of this new appreciation.

The Realties and Costs of Agricultural Development

Marx does address a fundamental difficulty inherent in the rise of an industry based on a labor force separated from the land. If expropriation led to a fall in production of foodstuffs, because of fewer people working the land and agrarian capitalists replacing food production with raw material production for multiplying factories, there would be a serious problem in feeding those forced off. However, he was aware of two factors that tended to offset such a difficulty. First, England had increasing recourse to importing foodstuffs from the continent.(9) Second, the concentration of the land in the hands of an emerging capitalist class was accompanied by an increase in agricultural productivity, an early “green revolution” that involved innovations such as crop rotation, the spreading use of nitrogen-fixing crops, drainage, land reclamation and water meadows.(10) These improved methods were implemented primarily by the greater cooperation and intensity of work by wage laborers under the control of agrarian capitalists. Under these circumstances, the “setting free” of part of the agricultural population was accompanied by a similar “setting free” of part of the product of the soil, now sold in the market to those forced into the cities.(11)

Increased productivity has often been used as a justification for changes in land tenure by policymakers in Western capitalist countries as well as by those in the Soviet bloc who imposed collectivization. But two points temper this rationale. First, it is easy to find many areas of the world where land was expropriated but then not cultivated at all and so productivity did not rise. In some cases, the land was monopolized purely with the intent of preventing the indigenous population from having recourse to subsistence farming. Examples are common in Central America. When the CIA overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954, it was partly because its democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzman (1913–71), had appropriated unused lands of the United Fruit Company for distribution to landless peasants.(12) In other areas, expropriated lands have been used productively and then abandoned but not given back to their original owners, e.g., in the Brazilian northeast where, when the price of sugar dropped, sugar cane lands were abandoned. In the Soviet Union and other so-called socialist countries, peasant resentment and resistance to forced labor systematically undermined the productivity of the state or collective farms.

Second, the basic argument that changes in land tenure can raise productivity is, itself, questionable. Questionable not because data on productivity, such as pounds of wool per acre or per hour of labor, do not show a rise, but because of the narrow notion of productivity. Traditional self-sustaining agriculture has almost always involved a complex mix of interrelated activities— well-known in traditional American family farming that long dominated US agriculture. The traditional family farm engaged in both cropping and husbandry. Corn provided food for the table, feed for cattle as well as marketable produce. Cattle provided milk and milk by-products, meat, income through the sale of meat and hides as well as fertilizer for the fields. Rotated nitrogen fixing crops such as alfalfa or clover provided feed for the cattle as well as fertilizer to the soil. Gardens provided a balance of vegetables and fruit for the table, and sometimes for sale in local markets. Pigs absorbed table waste while producing meat for consumption or sale, and so on. The replacement of a large number of such farms by a few commercial agribusiness operations that produce just one crop, such as hybrid corn, or feedlot cattle or pigs, has involved the substitution of a simple monoculture system, whose productivity is narrowly defined and easy to measure, for a complex system whose productivity is not so simply measured, or even conceptualized. That complex system was a way of life that integrated humans and nature as well as nature itself.(13) Destroying such ways of life replaces complex, balanced ecosystems by simplified, unbalanced ones, often with disastrous consequences for the land, for water and for human life. (14) In short, the decline of traditional farming involved tremendous human and ecological costs in terms of the destruction of ways of being that could not be legitimately compared with or compensated for by increased productivity. What has been true in the United States has also been true around the world, from the destruction of Mexican milpas and communities to the commercialization of Asian wet-paddy rice culture..

Recommended Further Reading

See footnotes

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

1. What was the relationship between agricultural production and artisan manufacture in the period before the expropriation of the agrarian population?

2. What are the processes Marx cites through which the agricultural revolution raises output on the land? In what sense was the agricultural revolution a technological one, in what sense a social one and how were these two related?

3. Explain what it means to say that the means of subsistence were "set free" at the same time the workers were. Is this as simple as it sounds?

4. What does Marx and Mirabeau's discussion of the factory tell us about its initial form and origins?

*5. In footnote seven (on p. 912 of Vintage ed.) Marx extends the discussion from the creation of the "home" market to that of the foreign market—a moment of analysis of "imperialism." How might protection (limiting competing imports) hasten the separation of agriculture and domestic industry as Marx suggests?

*6. Discuss the process of disvalorization as presented in the commentary. Can you observe this process in the world around you? What about in school? What abilities and skills do children sometimes acquire independently of school which are then undermined by the structure of school?

Footnotes

1 See Peter Linebaugh, "Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Com¬position: A Contribution to the Current Debate", Crime and Social Justice, no. 6, Fall-Winter 1976, pp. 5-16 on Marx's early interest in such direct appropriation. See also Douglas Hay, "Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase", in Thompson et al., Albion's Fatal Tree.

2 See Linebaugh, The London Hanged, Chapter Two: "'Old Mr Gory' and the Thanatocracy."

3 Linebaugh analyzes several of these situations, both the direct appropriation that supplemented money wages and its criminalization. Ibid., Chapters 5, 8 and 11. See also Allen, Chapters in the History of Organized Labor in Texas.

4 As opposed to the self-valorization of workers. In the Introduction to Reading Capital Politically, I point out how this term “self-valorization” was appropriated and redefined by the autonomist Marxist Antonio Negri to designate, not the self-valorization of capital, but the self-activities of workers valorizing their own lives.

5 On the concept of disvalue, see Ivan Illich’s essay “Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies” in his book Towards a History of Needs, Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1977.

6 For further methodological considerations on valorization and disvalorization, see Harry Cleaver, “The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: from Valorization to Self-Valorization”, in Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.), Open Marxism, vol. 2, Theory and Practice, London: Pluto, 1992, pp. 106–144.

7 Such results led to an international boycott of Nestle for pushing baby formula to the poor in the Global South and to the formation of the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFA).

8 Capital, Vol. I, pp. 554-555.

9 102. With England in the lead in the development of manufacturing, many countries on the continent, from Revolutionary France to Czarist Russia exported grain to England in order to buy manufactured goods, including machinery to expand their own industry. This would only pose a problem in times of war, e.g., the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) when grain imports were cut off.

10 See G. E. Mingay, Agricultural Revolution: Changes in Agriculture, 1650–1880, London: A & C Black Publishers, 1977.

11 This history was forgotten by economists who expected, after World War II, to be able to move some 25 percent of the agricultural labor force in Eastern Europe into manufacturing labor with no reduction in output. They were wrong and soon had to revise their plans to include increased investment in agriculture to raise productivity. See Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s classic “Problems of Industrialization of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe”, Economic Journal, Vol. 53, no. 210/211, 1943, pp. 202–211. A later example of the less optimistic efforts to find ways of imposing work is John C. H. Fei and Gustav Ranis, Development of the Labor Surplus Economy: Theory and Policy, Chicago, IL: Homewood, 1964.

12 Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Also see the now released CIA assassination plans for the overthrow of the Arbenz government and the "cleansing" of his supporters.

13 See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1977, 2015.

14 Examples include the impoverishment of the soil by monocropping, the runoff of excess inorganic fertilizers into waterways causing eutrophication and the overuse of pesticides poisoning workers in the fields, consumers and a variety of non-human an-mals, most recently honeybees, whose colony collapses are threatening entire industries requiring them for pollination.

Outline of Marx's Argument

Industrial capital grew up more rapidly than agarian capital
– less through gradual accumulation by workers or artisans
– more through the annexation of labor by merchant or usurer capital
– despite traditional restrictions of guilds, etc.
– began in sea ports and villages beyond such constraints
– accelerated and solidified through the victory of capital over the feudal ruling classes
– financed by wealth accumulated through force

The wealth that financed the rise of industry, Marx emphasizes, was not accumulated through frugality

– but rather by force
– above all, in the beginning, by colonialism
– "enslavement and entombment in mines" of the indigenous population of the Americas
– "the conquest and plunder of India"
– the enslavement of Africans
– the monopolization of trade (including the Opium trade in China)
– but also the use of banks, the national debt and taxation (imposed by state power)
– "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

Colonialism: Marx: Dutch, English, Spanish

– violence and the plunder of wealth
– massacre and the direct theft of land and riches
– enslavement of populations
– monopolization of trade (including the slave trade)
– the English East India Company in India: salt, tea, betel, opium
– the Dutch in Indonesia: slaves
– trade in both directions: exports of local wealth, imports from the home country
– concentrated wealth in the hands of those who invested it in industry
– led to commercial wars between competing colonial powers

Public Debt: one of the earliest and longest lasting mechanisms that Marx discusses

– private finance capital loaned money to the state in exchange for negotiable bonds
– the state used the money to finance the violence of primitive accumulation: army, navy
– repaid the debt with interest, through the imposition of taxes on the people
– which concentrated more money in the hands of finance capital
– the circulation of state debt & the creation of large scale banking gives rise to the massive expansion of credit
– in the hands of capitalists – before the rise of consumer credit

Trade Protection: monopolization of trade and the extorsion of heavy taxes combine in the use of:

– protective duties
– export primiums
– the destruction of competing industries (e.g. Irish woolen manufacturing)
– all of which plundered both the English people and their trading partners and the concentrated wealth in the hands of the capitalists

These methods financed industrialization

In England:
– the impoverishment of the workers
– the enslavement of their children (who were not free agents in the labor markets)
– cruel working conditions and minimal pay
– the rise of night work: "the beds never get cold"
In the colonies:
– slavery ("the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the new world as its pedestal")
– scalp hunting and murder

"If money," Marx concludes, "'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (p.926)

Commentary

Industrial capital, the prototypical form of capital, emerged alongside agrarian capitalism. Marx refutes the myth that this emergence was accomplished purely through conscientious frugality and entrepreneurial investment by describing the actual sources of finance for investment that became permanent features of capitalism, well beyond the early period of primitive accumulation.

The Myth of Entrepreneurship

Marx’s attack on the myth of entrepreneurial frugality remains important because the myth still flourishes. It became foundational to the ideology of upward mobility, which claims that anyone who works hard can move up the income hierarchy, even to the very top. Recently, it has been refurbished as part of the right-wing attack on those roles of the state used by workers for their own protection. In the United States, amidst the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s, this ideology was elaborated by neo-conservatives, and soon became known in the rest of the world by the label neoliberalism.(1) In the Global South, it has been an important element of the writings of people such as economists P. T. Bauer (1915–2002)—created a "life peer" by the UK's union busting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher!—and Hernando De Soto Polar (1841 -)&mdashbest known for his counter-revolutionary(2) advocacy of government deregulation—both of whom have been vociferous advocates of "liberating" the market and entrepreneurship around the world. In the Soviet Bloc and China, the appeal to liberate entrepreneurial spirit was a part of the reformist attack on state planning, and after the fall of the wall, the imposition of the market and the gutting of worker protectons became integral parts of the programs of "shock therapy" reforms in Eastern Europe.

While Marx accepts the grain of truth that many small guild masters, independent small artisans and even wage-laborers, “transformed themselves. . . into capitalists.”(3), he argues that such personal initiative, savings and investment were not the major mechanisms by which industrial capitalism emerged. Nor we can add, are small businesses today the major source of capitalist expansion.

Since the 1970s, attacks on the Keynesian social and environmental programs and regulations have been rationalized by the pretense that they undermine entrepreneurship. State paternalism, neoliberals have claimed, whether of welfare state in the West or of socialist governments in the East, creates dependency and tends to snuff out the entrepreneurial spirit vital to the building of free enterprise and society more generally. Targets have included programs that support working-class income and increase workers' ability to resist exploitation, as well as environmental, occupational safety and health regulations that workers have imposed on business to limit damage to both humans and the rest of nature. Neoliberals call for deregulation to cut corporate costs and enhance private profits, the selling off (enclosure) of public lands for purposes of exploitation, the removal of environmental regulations to encourage investment, the reduction or elimination of social safety-net programs, vouchers to finance private schools outside the public-school system, and in countries now freed from Soviet-style regimes, the substitution of private farming for state or collective farms. Hypocrisy is blatant in the steadfast opposition these same capitalist apologists maintain to any reduction in the role of government in the defense and subsidization of corporations and in their repeated support for "supply-side" tax cuts that supposedly increase investment but actually benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Such policies have rightly given rise to the term "corporate welfare."

Analyzing the rise of industrial capitalism shows us how these arguments are just as ideological and self-serving as those Marx confronted in the 19th Century. Even during the birth of capitalism, in the supposed golden age of laissez faire, before the rise of "big government" or the welfare state, the role of the state was crucial for the emergence and survival of capitalism. Whether describing the state use of armed violence to capture and maintain colonies for exploitation by "free enterprise" or analyzing the use of national debt and taxation to finance such violence and to transfer income from workers to capital, Marx highlights the ways in which the greatest and most important "entrepreneurial" ability of all was the ability to mobilize, not individual creativity, but state power in the service of capital accumulation. Similarly, he shows how the main beneficiaries of this ability were not small, "entrepreneurial" firms, built with individual initiative, but giant monopolistic trading and industrial enterprises —such as the British and Dutch East India Companies—built and sustained by state charters and armed support.

The myth of entrepreneurship derives its strength partly from the ubiquitous propaganda apparatus of capital, but also from an extremely important truth hidden beneath all its distortions and hypocrisy. Within capitalism, the real sources of creativity and innovation are social individuals working and thinking within a collective process. The myth of entrepreneurship misleads by pointing only to the innovative individual (from Horatio Alger to Steve Jobs), while ignoring both the social fabric enabling such individuals to create and their dependence on capitalist finance, which turns their innovations into new modes of exploitation.

The real source of innovation and wealth, Marx argues, is living labor (including creative thinking). Capitalists, as such, serve as mere managers of a system in which dead labor—in the form of capital, whether means of production or money—dominates living labor. Where those who work and think have the power to force capital to harness rather than repress such creativity, the system accumulates and develops rapidly. Where workers are weak and capital powerful and rigid in its control, the system can accumulate only quantitatively and tends to stagnate. In the West, the right-wing calls for a liberation of entrepreneurship, but their policy prescriptions have been focused primarily on liberating not individuals but multinational corporations from constraints that benefit workers and protect the environment. In the last years of the Cold War, Soviet reformers, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, found themselves caught in a contradiction; they needed looser industrial and political controls (to achieve more flexibility and rapid accumulation) but feared the result would be explosive expressions of discontent they could not manage. Their fears soon proved to be justified, the Berlin Wall fell and their regime with it, soon replaced by a savage mafia-capitalism dedicated to maximum exploitation and repression. The reality of neoliberalism is Trump's authoritarianism and Putin's dictatorship.

Capitalist Development and the Role of the State

Thus, capitalists' attitude toward the state depends entirely on the degree to which it serves their needs. Where, during the early period of primitive accumulation, industrial capitalists did not have the power to use the state to eliminate guild rules inimical to their business interests, they set up operations in sea ports and villages where such restrictions did not obtain. Where and when capitalists were able to usurp state power, they used it to craft a world more to their own convenience. They pillaged the Global South through colonialism. They impoverished and disvalorized their employees through low wages and taxation. In both areas, they imposed a murderously repressive social order based on slavery and the exploitation of children.

The central role of colonialism in the original accumulation of industrial capital consists of a series of mechanisms, some crass and violent, some subtler but still violent, which facilitated amassing the wealth that financed British industrialization.(4) These mechanisms became quasi-permanent features of capitalism right up to the decolonialization period after World War II. The violence he describes in the initial conquest and plundering was required to overcome the fierce resistance of the people being colonized. The example he cites from the United States— scalping and murdering Native American men, women and children—was far from unique, as people everywhere resisted integration into the invading European capitalist takeover of their lands.

The violence did not disappear with the stabilization of colonial rule because resistance did not disappear. Violence begat violence. In the French colony of Vietnam, for example, military force was required to maintain control against both passive resistance and armed struggle. It took their military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to force their withdrawal from Indochina. The history of colonialism is one long drama of invasion, resistance, conquest, exploitation, continued resistance and continued repression. But repression ultimately failed, as one anti-colonial struggle after another succeeded in pushing foreign governments and their repressive apparatus out. Unfortunately, as colonized people were to learn to their chagrin, the end of formal colonialization did not always mean the end to the mechanisms of exploitation.

One such mechanism was trade, trade internal to the colony, trade between the colony and the colonizing country, and trade with the outside world. Marx describes the case of India where the British took over the trade in consumer items such as salt, betel, opium and rice.(5) In the case of rice, he claims that the British created a famine in the process. Indeed, famine became recurrent.(6) Most notorious was the Bengal famine of 1943 in which over 2 million people died. Four years later, the British were finally forced out. Another example of British efforts to monopolize trade within a colony was Nigeria, which came into direct conflict with the market women who had traditionally dominated domestic trade. When the women sought to affirm their traditional rights, the British violently repressed them.(7)

The rise of British industry at home—the central subject of this chapter—was fueled by the monopolization of colonial foreign trade. Colonialism meant an extension of the markets for industrial output beyond the home market.(8) Colonial powers prevented any other countries' industries from selling in their conquered territories, destroyed local industry, either directly (say by cutting off the thumbs of the weavers) or indirectly by underselling at lower prices. (9) In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels commented on this aspect of capitalist expansion:

"[The bourgeoisie] has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconsciounable freedom -Free Trade. . . . The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate." (10)

The reference to "Chinese walls", of course, is not to the great wall of China, built to keep out nomadic tribes and to tax commerce on the Silk Road, but to the efforts of the Chinese ruling class to keep out Western capitalist merchants and their cheap and often noxious commodities. The walls were battered down by both cheap commodities and the gun boats of the Western powers which forced China to accept foreign trade.(11)

European capitalists not only imposed exports on their colonies, they also demanded protectionist measures to limit imports at home to keep prices and profits up. Demands for “free trade” or for “protectionism” depended purely on what was useful to a particular set of capitalists at any point in time.

Arguments for either set of policies could draw on the writings of economists, always ready to provide rationales for capitalist demands. The proponents of “free trade” could draw on classical political economists such as Adam Smith (1723––90) and David Ricardo (1772–1823). The latter was especially useful because he provided a theory of “comparative advantage” that argued that all parties could gain from trade. The proponents of protectionism had not only the arguments of US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) for protecting American industry, but The National System of Political Economy (1841) by Friedrich List (1789-1846) who turned Hamilton's arguments into systematic economic theory.'(12) List, who had supported the new German Customs Union to facilitate wider trade, came to modify his embrace of free trade by supporting the argument that "infant-industries" deserve protection until they can get their production costs lowered enough to become competitive in world markets. The imposition of barriers to imports helped create the home markets required by new industry. By limiting supply, protectionist measures raise the prices at which industrialists can sell, boosting their profits and ability to invest. In consumer goods industries, the higher prices undercut the real wages of their customers, who pay this supposedly limited, short-term subsidy for the sake of the development of industry.

In a speech given in January 1848, the year he and Engels published the Manifesto, Marx addressed free trade and protectionist policies directly and at length. After reproducing the arguments on all sides, especially mocking capitalist arguments about how one policy or the other would benefit workers, he shows how, on the contrary, workers suffer from both policies. "What is Free Trade," he asks, "under the present conditions of society?" His answer: "Freedom of Capital. . . freedom of Capital to crush the worker." What of protection? "The Protective system is nothing but a means of establishing manufacture upon a large scale, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the market of the world; and from the moment that dependence upon the market of world is established, there is more or less dependence upon Free Trade too."

Given this analysis, he goes on to conclude, "Generally speaking, the Protective system in these days is conservative, while the Free trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a word, the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favor of Free Trade."(13)

Today, conflicts over the choice of free trade versus protectionist policies persist. Campaign contributions have bought some industries continuing protection for their markets and their profits, at the expense of those who buy their products. The sugar industry in the US is one durable example. The price of sugar has been, since 1789, artificially raised by tariffs.

After the Great Depression of the 1930s, multinational corporate interests increasingly demanded free trade. Most economists concurred, arguing that competing protectionist measures had deepened that crisis. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of 1947 was formed to reduce obstacles to trade. In the wake of World War II, American companies, less damaged by war than their foreign counterparts, wanted as much freedom to invest and export as possible. Reduced trade barriers and subsidies, such as the Marshall Plan (1948–51), where some 13 billion dollars were loaned to countries in Western Europe, facilitated a huge flow of consumer and capital goods from the US.(15) While policymakers saw the Plan as a way to stabilize Western Europe at the dawn of the Cold War, economists justified it mainly by recourse to Ricardo’s arguments for free trade. For economists and for business media, trade is almost universally portrayed in terms of the relationships between nations, rather than between classes. Ricardo laid out his argument about “comparative advantage” and “gains from trade” in terms of trading between England and Portugal. Politicians and TV commentators today talk about improving or worsening trade between countries such as the United States and China. Determining such conflicts and influencing the negotiations between governments, however, are the class forces at work within the individual countries and across borders.

Negotiated in secret collaboration with business interests, NAFTA provides a good example. On the surface, it appeared to be simply an agreement between the governments of the US, Canada and Mexico to form a free trade zone that could compete with the increasingly unified European Union, created in 1993. Both blocs contain huge populations, large internal markets and enormous combined resources. But behind this appearance lay patterns of struggle between capital and labor.

The interest of American and Canadian corporations in including Mexico in a trading bloc derives from the possibilities of pitting Mexican workers against American and Canadian workers who are paid more and have more legal rights. Having already moved thousands of jobs south into Mexico, corporations have used the threat of moving to Mexico, where workers are much less powerful, both on the job (lower wages and benefits) and off (little social security, unenforced environmental protection, political repression), as a threat to obtain concessions (lower wages, more flexible work rules, etc.) from American and Canadian workers."(16) Such outsourcing requires that goods once produced in the US or Canada, but now produced in Mexico can be freely exported back into the US and Canada. Without the ability to do so, such a continental strategy against labor could not work.

Opposition to the treaty clarified the class content of trade. Literally thousands of protestors from all three countries—from unions to environmentalists—collaborated to oppose a corporate-friendly NAFTA. Coalitions of hundreds of groups in each country organized to oppose the treaty. Those coalitions, in turn, linked together to support each other through international discussion and the circulation of information. This was the first time that such grassroots organization occurred on this scale."(17) Although those efforts were defeated, and NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the network of new contacts prepared the ground for the subsequent alter-globalization movement that mobilized against the World Trade Organization (WTO), formed to undercut local democracy by imposing global trading rules. Grassroots groups such as People's Global Action organized massive demonstrations in Geneva, Seattle and elsewhere. Just how much of a threat to capitalist interests such mobilization constitutes can be measured by the increasing violence unleashed by the state in Quebec City, in Prague and in Genoa, including beatings, torture and killings. Measured by the breadth of mobilization and the degree of repression, the intensity of class struggle around trade has become great indeed.

Banks, Debt and Taxes

The last of the mechanisms of amassing investible funds that Marx highlights is the manipulation of public debt and taxes. He describes a process that would grow and develop over time to become one of the most powerful levers of capitalist control in our day. He deals with this issue at both the national and international level, and so should we. The process is a simple one, although obscure to most of us. Capitalists loan money to the state to finance its expenses over and above revenues (e.g., to cover budgetary deficits). The state uses the money to pay for its expenditures—Marx emphasizes those which support the process of primitive accumulation—and then pays back the borrowed money, at interest, with money acquired through taxation, an act which Marx describes as turning money into capital “as with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand.”(18) Here he emphasizes taxes on subsistence goods, which impoverishes peasants and artisans and results in their expropriation. Augmented, the money loaned becomes capital—finance or usurer’s capital. Although not based on the extraction of surplus labor from industrial workers analyzed in the rest of the book, this amassing does make such extraction possible. This process in turn, because national debt takes the form of negotiable securities, provides one basis for the expansion of banking and financial markets, which also facilitate financial intermediation or the pooling of money that can be used to finance industrial capital.

Marx does not discuss, at this point, something he knows to be a complicated issue: the conditions under which amassed money-capital becomes available for industrial investment. Already quite familiar with the problem in the 1850s, he analyzed and wrote many articles about it, years before Capital went to press. He criticized, at length, the French Crédit Mobilier, an early financial institution that claimed to be channeling capital into industry. Marx showed that it greatly overstated the degree to which this was being done and was in fact guilty of a great deal of speculation with other people’s money.(19) Nevertheless, he claims the development of financial markets played a key role in amassing the money that financed industrialization, but his focus is more on the amassing than on its channeling to industrial investment.

Today, when the United States and many other countries have highly developed financial markets, this remains an issue of contention. One of the most severe critiques of financial deregulation that began at the end of the 1970s have been how it facilitated the diversion of money out of real capital investment and into the “casino economy” with its various forms of speculation, from real estate through stocks to mergers and takeovers.(20) The result was very slow growth in the real economy, collapse of the US savings and loan industry and the stock market crash of 1987. Similarly, the freeing of financial markets from state regulation has been contentious in the Global South. Free market economists make the kind of claim Marx is making in this chapter: that the development of such markets would speed investment. But, is Marx's analysis of the Crédit Mobilier more to the point? To what degree does such freeing simply result in financial swindling and speculation rather than investment in new factories? The international financial crises associated with the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1992; the Peso crisis of 1994; the Asia crisis of 1997; the Russian financial crisis of 1998; the repeated failures in the late 1990s to implement the European Monetary Union; the Turkish financial crisis in 2000; and the 2001-02 financial crisis in Argentina and, most recently, the financial crisis of 2007-09 have kept the issue alive.

The repayment of sovereign debt as a risk-free use of the state's power of taxation to multiply the capital of finance capitalists has certainly become a permanent feature of capitalism. The current US federal deficit is a case in point. Excesses of government expenditures over tax revenues have been financed with hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, loans from private capitalists being repaid at market rates of interest with taxpayers' money.

Ever since Marx was writing, international loans to foreign governments have also provided a lucrative way to convert bank money into finance capital. In the early 20th Century, Western bankers sought, with their nations' gunboats and marines, to obtain a slice of the royal Chinese debt."(21) After World War II, the Marshall Plan initiated decades of US government loans to other governments, in return for concessions to US diplomatic objectives and the interests of multinational corporations. More recently, in the 1970s, OPEC petrodollars, deposited in Western banks, were lent to desperate oil-importing countries at flexible rates of interest, to be repaid with export revenues via various forms of taxation. When American monetary policy tightened after 1980, interest rates soared, the world economy was pitched into depression, and those borrowing governments faced a crisis. Unable to raise the sums necessary to repay the sudden spike in repayment obligations, the result was an international debt crisis. Further loans to repay earlier loans were conditional on the imposition of austerity on the workers of the indebted countries."(22)

Slavery and Child Labor

At the end of the chapter, Marx emphasizes what were clearly to him two of the most obnoxious and reprehensible features of early capitalism: slavery and the exploitation of children. The wage-slavery of the Old World, he argued, had the formal slavery of the New World as its foundation. The taking of slaves in Africa, the trade in slaves that brought them to the Americas and the peculiar institution of plantation slavery were all vital in producing the raw material worked up in British industry: textiles from cotton, rum from sugar and so on.(23) Thus, the capitalism emerging in this period was not just British capitalism but was an Atlantic capitalism of a particularly vicious nature. Not only did it plunder and loot, but it imposed both literal as well as waged slavery.

Though Marx joined others of his day in condemning the exploitation of children in mines and textile mills, decades would pass before effective child labor laws would put an end to the most flagrant abuses of this sort in the US and other industrial centers. That said, the exploitation of children has never ended, not in the US or in other countries around the world. The subjection of children to forced labor for pitiful payment outside any free labor market is still common.(24) This is not about fast food stores hiring teens, or children put to work by television and Hollywood producers, but rather the forced prostitution of children and their exploitation in industrial production (such as carpet making, cocoa production, cobalt mining) around the world under conditions every bit as atrocious as those described by Marx. Most out-and-out slavery, the buying and selling of individuals, has been largely abolished, with a few exceptions, including the sex trade where children are trafficked along with adults. Groups such as the Anti-Slavery Society as well as the International Labor Organization periodically publish reports of the depressing extent of such exploitation.(25) Those reports include a textbook for university students that is well worth reading. It has many illustrations and personal testimony from children as well as analysis of the depth of the problem.

These aspects of capitalism have been around since its inception and continue, wherever business has the power to impose them. As Marx points out, if you really want to understand capitalism (or any other social system of class domination) study it where it exists with the fewest constraints. (26)

Recommended Further Reading

On contemporary neo-conservative, anti-state (i.e., anti-pro-worker policies) propaganda in the United States, read almost any Reagan or Bush speech or see: Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, New York: Basic Books, 1978 or Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. You might also want to see the film Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas; this film, in which he delivers the famous "Greed is Good" speech, is quintessential Reagan era. For background, see Peter Steinfels, The Neo-Conservatives, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Hernando de Soto is best known for his book: The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, New York: Harper & Row, 1989 which deals with the supposed virtues of the market in Peru.

On Western aid and markets in Eastern Europe, the best known spokesperson is Jeff Sachs, see, for example, Jeff Sachs and David Lipton, "Poland's Economic Reform," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 3, Summer 1990, pp. 47-66.

On the crisis of the Keynesian State see Zerowork #1, December 1975, or my essay on the subject "The Rise and Fall of the Keynesian State" that you can find on my Eco 304L webpage.

On the class politics of Mexican border industrialization see: Devon Peña's UT Dissertation on Class Strugles in the Maquiladoras (subsequently published as a book: Terror of the Machine) or Devon Peña, "Tortuosidad: Shop Floor Struggles of Female Maquiladora Workers," in Vicki Ruiz and Susan Tiano (eds), Women on the U.S.-Mexican Border: Responses to Change, London: Allen & Unwin, 1987.

On the North American Free Trade Agreement which will extend these relations deeper into Mexico see: John Cavanagh et. al., (eds) Trading Freedom: How Free Trade Affects Our Lives, Work and Environment, San Francisco: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1992; Dan La Botz, Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today, Boston: South End Press, 1992; John Cavanagh, et. al., Trade's Hidden Costs: Worker Rights in a Changing World Economy, Washington: International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund, 1988.

The literature on colonialism, neo-colonialism and "imperialism" by Marxists is vast. In general, all are explained by the need of capital to expand. Lenin's classic book is Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism, 1917, based in part on Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 1915 and John Hobson, Imperialism - a study, (1902). A post-WWII, Third World point of view from Africa is Nwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1965. A Marxist commentary on Nkrumah is C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1977. See also many of the books mentioned above, e.g., Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 1992, Ricardo Salvatore, Class Struggle and International Trade, 1987, etc.

A study of Marx's examination of the Crédit Mobilier can be found in Joseph Ricciardi, Essays on the Role of Money and Finance in Economic Development, UT Ph.D. Dissertation, 1985. Marx's writings are now all easily available in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels Collected Works, New York: International Publishers, Volume 15 and thereabouts.

On international debt at the turn of the century see the classic Dollar Diplomacy. On the recent debt crisis, I have an essay "Close the IMF, Abolish Debt and End Development: A Class Analysis of the International Debt Crisis", Capital & Class, #39, Winter 1989, as well as an annotated reading list and packet of materials I use in my Spring course Eco 357L on The Political Economy of International Crisis. The annotated reading list is on the web.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

1. What are the two paths along which the industrial capitalist appears? Which does Marx think is the more important?

2. How are usurer's and merchant capital different from industrial capital? What were the obstacles to the former being turned into the latter?

3. What does Marx characterize as the "chief moments of primitive accumulation"? Why chief?

4. What are the "different moments" of primitive accumulation which are "systematically combined together at the end of the 17th Century in England? Discuss their relationships to each other.

5. Discuss: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power." (p. 916)

*6. In this chapter we have a whole discussion of colonialism - a phenomenon only mentioned in a footnote in Chap.30. Describe the ways in which colonialism constitutes a world wide extension of primitive accumulation as well as a part of it in England.

7. In footnote 4 Marx says: "This stuff (on slavery, etc.) ought to be studied in detail, to see what the bourgeois makes of himself and of the worker when he can model the world according to his own image without any interference." What does this suggest methodologically with respect to understanding the most fundamental nature of capitalism? What does it suggest about the transformations of capitalism that have occurred since "the bourgeois" could shape the world "without interference"? What is the primary source of "interference"?

8. List the ways Marx discusses through which capital is able to use the state for its own purposes during this period.

9. Were you aware that the Puritains started the practice of paying money for Indian scalps? Why were the Indians killed instead of being put to work?

10. How did British colonialism cause famine and starvation in India?

11. Discuss the relation between industrial and commercial development in the period of manufacture and in that of industry.

*12. Describe the creation and operation of national debt. How does it act to concentrate wealth in the hands of capitalists at the expense of others? Is this still a characteristic of ongoing as opposed to primitive accumulation? What do you think is the impact of the current $200 billion debt on this process?

13. How did national debt give rise to joint-stock companies, stock exchange gambling and "the modern bankocracy"?

*14. What was the role of the "international credit system" in primitive accumulation? Explain Marx's examples. What do you imagine is its role today? Do you think Marx's comment - "A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any birth-certificate, was yesterday, in England (or elsewhere), the capitalized blood of children." - is still true?

15. Why do you think DeWitt thought that the modern tax system was "the best system for making the wage-laborer submissive, frugal, industrious . . . and overburdened with work"? Discuss the analogy with the hut tax in the colonies. Do you think this is still true? How? How do some argue that this is now changed, that higher taxes make people less willing to work? What makes such a change possible?

16. Discuss the process Marx describes through which the emerging capitalist countries sought to "forcibly uproot all industries in the neighboring dependent countries." Does this still go on?

17. Between the old precapitalist society and the full development of the emerging system was a long period in which force and brutal coercion played as much or more of a role than the market in mobilization of people into the labor force. What information does Marx give us in this chapter that illustrates that use of force?

18. With the rise of large-scale industry what changes in the processes Marx is describing?

19. Sketch the exploitation of children Marx describes in this chapter. Do you know when this ended in the United States - if you don't go to the PCL and look up a bit of history of child labor laws.

*20. From Marx's analysis in this chapter, how would you characterize the place of slavery in relationship to capitalism in this period. Did slavery constitute a separate mode of production, an integral part of North Atlantic capitalism, or what?

21. From what you have read here, and from what you have read elsewhere do you think Marx exaggerates when he says: ". . .capital comes (into the world) dripping from head to toe, from every pore with blood and dirt." Just how good a metaphor for the birth of capital is the chest burster of "Alien"? How bloodstained do you think capitalism is today? How fresh are the stains?

Footnotes

1 The term neo-conservative was adopted in the United States by conservatives who wanted to differentiate themselves not only from “liberals” (which in the US has come to mean vaguely socially progressive) but also from earlier moderate conservatives. Self-proclaimed neo-conservatives emerged on the public scene with the crisis of Keynesianism whose managers— members of what some used to call the Establishment—tended include both “liberals” and “mainstream or moderate conservatives” (as opposed to far-right groups like the John Birch Society and the China Lobby). The neo-conservatives, backed by considerable right-wing money began to build alternative policymaking institutions—such as the Heritage Foundation—and proclaim a “return to first principles,” namely a faith in markets and opposition to all government programs benefiting workers. First in Latin American, now pretty much everywhere, the term neoliberal has been used to characterize the policies of those neo-conservatives. The term neoliberal evokes a contemporary version of 19th Century liberalism, i.e., the ideology of free trade and faith that markets were the best way to solve most problems—coupled, of course, with the use of the state for the repression of workers’ struggles. The worldwide adoption of the term neoliberal accelerated in the wake of the Zapatistas’ multinational Encounters against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in 1996 and 1997.

2 The "other path" in the title of De Soto's first and best known book El Otro Sendero (1989) was "other" to that of the revolutionary Sendero Luminosa (Shining Path) guerrilla group in Peru. In it De Soto called for the liberation of the entrepreneurial abilities of the inhabitants of Peru's (and of the Global South more generally) informal sectors from government regulation. Where he saw teeming multitudes of potential entrepreneurial capitalists, others, such as Mexican grassroots activist Gustavo Esteva saw yet other, often anti-capitalist, paths to social reform. See Esteva's "Regenerating People's Space," Alternatives XII, 1987, pp. 125-152.

3 Capital, Vol. I, p. 914.

4 Socially speaking, real "wealth" in capitalism is not gold or money but social power, the power of capital to command people's lives as labor. Thus, the colonial plundering of gold or other non-human material resources was secondary to the imposition of work on the colonized and the use of the colonized to reinforce the imposition of work within the colonial country.

5 Capital, Vol. I, p. 917.

6 See Brian Murton, "VI.4: Famine", in K. F. Kiple and K. C. Ornelas (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Food, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 1411-1427.

7 See Judith Van Allen, "Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women", Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. VI, no. ii, 1972, pp. 165-181, and the Wikipedia entry on the Abeokuta Women's Revolt.

8 The colonies, Marx wrote, “provided a market for the budding manufactures.” Capital, Vol. I, p. 918.

9 See Michael Edwards, Growth of the British Cotton Trade 1780–1815, New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1976.

10 MECW, Vol. 6, pp. 487–488.

11 Classic were the British wars to force China to accept British exports of opium.

12 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (1841), New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

13 "Speech on the Question of Free Trade", January 9, 1848, MECW, Vol. 6, pp. 463-465.

14 The 1969 film Burn!, is a story of imperialist rivalry over control of slaves and sugar production on one Caribbean island. One power brings in an agent—played by Marlon Brando—to organize a slave revolt to undermine another power's control. After the revolt succeeds, Brando is brought back in to put down the rebellious slaves. To do so, he burns down the island with all its sugar cane fields. The film is both historical AND an allagory of the war in Vietnam where one general infamously stated about the distruction of a village, that he had to destroy it to save it! Because the allegory was so clear, the film was quickly blacklisted and disappeared from theatres—despite its famous star. Sidney W. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Penguin, 1985 may lack the visual drama of film but the history it recounts is every bit as dramatic.

15 Reduced barriers to capital investment, achieved through the rules of the International Monetary Fund, created in 1945, also facilitated a wave of investment by increasingly multinational “American” corporations.

16 For a dramatic exploration of the consequences to Flint, Michigan of such displacement, watch Michael Moore's film Roger and Me (1989) about the results of General Motors moving auto plants and some 30,000 jobs to Mexico.

17 For a capitalist view of the dangers of such international grassroots mobilization, see Cathryn Thorup, "The Politics of Free Trade and the Dynamics of Cross-Border Coalitions in U.S. Mexican Relations", Columbia Journal of World Business, vol. XXVI, no. 11, Summer 1991, pp. 12-26.

18 Capital, Vol. I, p. 919.

19 A study of Marx’s examination of the Crédit Mobilier can be found in Joseph Ricciardi, “Essays on the Role of Money and Finance in Economic Development”, University of Texas at Austin, PhD dissertation, 1985, some of which was more recently published as “Marx on Financial Intermediation: Lessons from the French Crédit Mobilier in the New York Daily Tribune”, Science & Society, Vol. 79, no. 4, October 2015, pp. 497–526. Marx’s writings on this subject are now easily available in MECW, Vol. 15 and thereabouts.

20 See Anthony Bianco, “The Casino Society: Playing with Fire”, BusinessWeek, September 16, 1985 and Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

21 See Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism, New York Monthly Review Press, 1966.

22 See Cleaver, "Close the IMF, Abolish Debt and End Development: a Class Analysis of the International Debt Crisis", Capital & Class, vol. 13, issue 3, no. 39, Winter 1989, pp. 17-50.

23 This infamous pattern is now known as the “Atlantic triangular slave trade.” Manufactured goods were traded in Africa for slaves. Slaves were traded to the Western Hemisphere for raw materials. Raw materials were traded to New England, Britain and Europe.

24 If slavery involves legally enforced, unpaid labor, then we should include two other groups of incarcerated workers: children in schools and prisoners in both public and private jails—even if individuals are being neither bought nor sold.

25 Those reports include an ILO textbook well worth reading. It has many illustrations and personal testimony from children as well as analysis of the depth of the problem. One such group, the Concerned Center of Child Workers in Nepal, publishes a newsletter (Voice of Child Workers) in which you can find ample illustration of the extent of the problem in that country.

26 Capital, Vol. I, p. 916, footnote 4.

Outline of Marx's Analysis

Three historical phases:

1. either: a) slaves, serfs, or b) private property in means of production based on the labor of its owner

– peasants own land, artisans own tools
– fragmentation of holdings, excludes co-operation
– small scale industry
– «first negation: of individual private property»
– violent and protracted

2. private property in means of production of capitalism

– based on expropriation of personal private property
– cooperation, division of labor in workplace, socialized labor
– large scale industry, application of science
– expropriation of capitalist by capitalist via centralization of capital
– internationalization of production and markets
– growth in mass of misery, oppression, slavery, exploitation
– growth in the revolt of the working class
– expropriation of the expropriators
– -«second negation: of capitalist private property»
– quicker, less violent

3. social property in the means of production

– individual property founded on achievements of capitalism
– based on the carrying on of production by society
– i.e., co-operation and possession in common of means of production

Commentary

This chapter sums up both the historical processes of primitive accumulation and the dynamics of capitalist development itself, especially the processes of centralization of capital and class struggle, which Marx argues will bring the overthrow of capitalism.

The Ideology of Private Property

Marx juxtaposes capitalist private property to small-scale, personal private property in the means of production, e.g., land and tools, which he notes existed to some degree under most earlier social systems. He contemptuously condemns the capitalist ideology of private property, not only because it serves as a justification for violence and exploitation, but also because it ignores how the creation of capitalist private property involved the mass destruction of earlier forms of property.

Private property is usually justified by appealing to people’s sense that it is only proper for individuals to have property/control/possession of the fruits of their own labor. Farmers who work the land should have property rights in that land and whatever their cultivation can produce. Artisans who weave cloth should own their looms and the cloth they have woven and be free to determine what becomes of it. Anyone who works, gets paid a wage, and uses that wage to buy something has a right to the personal ownership of that thing because, in a transformed way, it was obtained through personal effort. Such were the kind of arguments put forward by John Locke (1632–1704) in his Second Treatise of Civil Government in 1690.(1)

Marx argues that such reasoning, based on individual effort, is hypocritically used to justify something very different: the capitalist ownership and control of goods produced by other people (i.e., the workers in the factories owned and controlled by the capitalists). A concept of justice that makes sense at the level of the individual does not necessarily make sense at the social level, if applied to property relations between factory owners and workers. This distinction is ignored or skimmed over for the sake of justifying capitalist control over their workers’ products. But why should capitalists “own” the products of workers? Because the capitalists own the machines and raw materials? But labor is just as vital, perhaps more so, and that is “owned” by the workers. Shouldn’t both capitalists and workers own the products and share in whatever revenue comes from their sale? In Chapter 6, Marx argues that because they purchase workers’ “labor-power” (their ability and willingness to labor) capitalists own everything in the production process, i.e., both means of production and the labor of their workers, and therefore have unique property right to the products. However, one judges this situation, it is quite clearly not covered by an ideology based on the situation of individuals.

As the material in this section of primitive accumulation has made clear, the capitalists used violence to wipe out the personal means of production of most people, monopolizing them in their own hands. In this process, they showed no respect for "private property." How hypocritical then to use moral principles applicable to the individual to justify the results of the violation of those principles.

One other note on this mutation of property rights: while today there are many cases of personally owned, small businesses (mostly short-lived), the vast bulk of capitalist operations are organized through limited liability corporations in which "ownership" is diffused among a great many anonymous shareholders and their "property" is controlled by a handful of managers and, perhaps, a few shareholders who own substantial blocks of stock. Because of this mutation, capitalists sought, successfully, to have property laws rewritten in such a way that "corporations" are treated in much the same way as individuals with respect to property and other rights but not with respect to liability.(2) Rights are concentrated; liability is limited. This is the hypocritical context of the ideology of property rights: the property of giant multinational corporations (who often exercise power greater than many nations) is justified using ethical arguments applicable to a very different reality.

Revolution and Communism

Although he does not use the terms revolution and communism in this chapter, the "expropriation of the expropriators" clearly refers to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalists, while "social property" or the "possession in common of the land and the means of production" also clearly refers to communism as the form of post-capitalist society. In Capital, Marx makes only passing allusions to these two phenomena. He sets out an analysis of capitalism, but neither an analysis of possible revolutions nor blueprints for post-capitalist society.

Nevertheless, the book has a great deal about class struggle against capitalism. He shows, for example, how alienated workers come to constitute a threat to the survival of the system by self-organizing in factories—created by capitalists for the purpose of control and exploitation. He mentions such things as strikes (Chapter 10) and machine breaking (Chapter 15), but nothing about actual processes of revolution. In this chapter, the only comment touching this issue is his assertion that the overthrow of capital will be less violent and less protracted than the capitalist overthrow of the earlier modes of production. This will be true, he suggests, because workers are many and capitalists are few. But from such a comment to an analysis of how such an overthrow might take place is obviously a long jump and has been the subject of Marxist debate and organization ever since.

Both before and after he wrote Capital, Marx, along with Friedrich Engels and other friends, engaged directly in political struggles against feudal absolutism and against capitalism. Before and during the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, Marx and Engels both contributed to the emergence of a revolution against the absolutist state in Germany through journalism (publishing newspaper articles, the Communist Manifesto, etc.) and then, in Engels’s case, through direct participation in armed struggle against the state. Although there is relatively little in their writings on the subject of the methods to be used to overthrow capitalism, I think it is fair to say that while they thought many different forms of struggle were appropriate at different times and places, they were not optimistic about the likelihood of capitalists voluntarily stepping aside to allow workers to take over. After Marx’s death in 1883, during the years of the Second International (1889–1914), Engels and many other Marxists had great hopes that increases in workers’ right to vote (first men, then women) and the rise of social democratic parties could bring about a peaceful end to capitalism. Not only did that dream die with the onset of World War I, but in the decades since, even when social democrats have gained national power through elections, they have either proved complicit with capitalism or been overthrown. As a result, Marxists have split over this issue. Some continue to embrace an electoral path to the transcendence of capitalism; others have thought it impossible and organize for violent revolution.

Given his analysis of the growth of class struggle, always situating its development within the material conditions of the organization of capital and the self-organization of the workers, Marx also thought that the paths through capitalism to communism were multiple. Twenty-two years after the 1848 Revolutions, another revolution erupted in France and created the Paris Commune. Marx followed that revolution—centered in Paris—closely and his commentaries are among the most interesting of his writings. In the Civil War in France (1871), he describes and analyzes the sequence of events by which the French government was overthrown, a new revolutionary government established and then crushed by the old regime.(3) Marx drew no formulae from these events, any more than he had from the 1848 Revolutions. In each case, he sought to judge the adequacy of the measures taken in terms of the actual historical conditions obtaining at the time.

This approach made it impossible for Marx to design revolutionary strategies before the fact, a priori; every revolution would be unique in terms of which particular methods would be appropriate and successful. Clearly, he felt this to be the case in the 1870s when he was consulted about the possibilities of revolution in Russia. As I mentioned in my commentary on Chapter 26, he rejected the idea of applying his work on England, without qualification, to Russia and argued that the existence of a materially different situation, especially the existence of the peasant mir, implied that another path to and through revolution to "social regeneration" was at least possible.

Something similar can be said about Marx's approach to communism—a term chosen to differentiate his politics from existing ideas of socialism—a post-capitalist, classless society. In Capital, very little is said about this. He only mentions "social property" being established "on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely cooperation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labor itself."(4) We can assemble a variety of such limited comments from Marx's writings, from the 1840s to those in the 1880s, but nowhere is there a pre¬scription or formula, a design or a blueprint, for either the structure or the workings of a communist society.

In the mass media, the adjective "Marxist" is often used interchangeably with "communist," as in "a Marxist society" or a "Marxist government." Such terms are also used to refer either to some hypothetical post-capitalist society, or to existing societies that call themselves "socialist" or "communist," such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Both uses are erroneous. First, Marx everywhere eschewed "utopianism" which, by definition, involves intentionally designing a better society that does not yet exist.(5) There have been many efforts to found utopian communities but none of them were designed by Karl Marx. He clearly believed in trying to imagine and in trying to achieve a better society, but he also felt, as in the case of revolution, that the form and content of such a society would be determined as a collective social project based on historical givens, and not on the implementation of any one, or even a few, persons’ ideas. Second, the founders and managers of the USSR appropriated Marx’s analysis of capitalism in two ways. They used his critique of capitalism to denounce the sins of their Western adversaries during the Cold War and, ironically, they appropriated his analysis of capitalist accumulation as a guide for accumulation within their own system.(6) The resulting “socialism” amounted to a new form of state capitalism, with only the mix of planning and markets differing from that in the West.

A basic methodological principle permeates Marx’s work on revolution and communism: to understand the direction in which society seems to be evolving, study the social forces at work forcing changes. For some idea about what a future society might be like, look both at those aspects of the current society which people are struggling to eliminate and at those new kinds of relationships they are struggling to bring into being or to nourish to full growth. This approach to understanding social change (as the basis for contributing to it), makes studying Marx still useful.

Dialectics

Towards the end of his analysis in this chapter, Marx uses two obscure terms: “the first negation” and “the negation of the negation.” Both derive from the writings of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) that Marx studied as a student and critiqued in the 1840s.(7) In Hegel's philosophical system, everything, both thought and the rest of the cosmos, develops "dialectically." That is to say, he saw everything unfolding in a complex kind of movement, which he analyzed in a series of lectures and books. Leaving aside the rest of the cosmos, Marx felt that Hegel was correct in grasping the form of social development that occurred within capitalism as dialectical. Therefore, from time to time, he found Hegelian concepts accurately denoted various aspects of the social relations of capital.

In this case, the "first negation" was capital's destruction of pre-capitalist social relations. As was typical of such a Hegelian concept, this first negation both destroyed some aspects of the old society (personal property), yet at the same time preserved something of the past (private property), while creating something new (capitalist private property).

The "negation of the negation" Marx imagined, would be the suspension of capital's monopolization of the means of production (capitalist private property), with all that entails, through revolution. Yet, again, Marx thought this second negation would also preserve something of the old system (cooperation and a sophisticated system of social production) while eliminating its more obnoxious characteristics (class domination, exploitation and alienation).

The concept of dialectics is most often presented in terms of the famous triad: thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, in which a thesis (e.g., capitalism) gives rise to its anti-thesis (e.g., the working class), and this contradiction is resolved (e.g., through revolution) in a way that produces fundamental changes (e.g., the elimination of classes) while retaining progressive features of the old contradiction (e.g., socialized production). This triad, however, is only one brief moment of the Hegelian dialectic, spelled out at great length in his Science of Logic (1816) and other books, and also only one of the many moments of his analysis which Marx thought relevant to the analysis of social relations under capitalism.

There are reasons, however, to think long and hard about the differences as well as the similarities between Hegel and Marx. For Hegel, his dialectics was a cosmology, a science of an unending reality. There are plenty of reasons, however, to think that while Marx saw the social relationships of capitalism as dialectical—and therefore containing aspects grasped by Hegel—the antagonism of working-class struggle always posed the threat of a revolution in which synthesis would be impossible and the dialectical character of the class relationship ruptured completely. By implication, there is no a priori reason to think that the social relationships of post-capitalist society would be dialectical in the same sense that they are in capitalism.

Recommended Further Reading

For an overview of Marx's views on Revolution see: Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, 3 Volumes, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986. Among the most important things Marx wrote on this subject are his essays on the Revolutions of 1848 and on the Paris Commune of 1870. The best of these are: Class Struggles in France and Civil War in France, respectively.

The essay on the Commune, Civil War in France, is probably the most important thing Marx wrote on post-capitalist society, which he called communism. For a wide variety of quotes and references, I have a rather large Mac file of Marx's scattered statements on communism which I will share with you if you like. On the contradictions between freedom and authority that have always been present in the idea of socialism -and communism for that matter- see my essay "Socialism" in Wolfgang Sachs (ed) The Development Dictionary, London: Zed, 1992. This essay also has a useful bibliography of the main works in the history of 19th and 20th Century socialism and communism.

On dialectics -the idea and practice of which goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks- you can read the classics, e.g., Hegel's Science of Logic (or his smaller Encyclopedia Logic), his Phenomenology of the Spirit and his History of Philosophy. For an old but unusually clear non-Marxist exposition of Hegel's ideas which place them in the history of philosophy, see W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (1924), London: Dover, 1955. You can also read orthodox Marxists on the subject, starting with Engel's books Anti-Dürhing and Dialectics of Nature, but they, like Hegel, make it into a cosmology. Better to read Marx and see how he perceives "dialectical" relations in capitalist society.

Over time a strain of modern philosophy developed -originating with or against Marx depending on your point of view- which was very anti-dialectic. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 and Toni Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, New York: Autonomedia, 1984. Negri, in particular develops the concept of a separate and antagonistic working class "logic" which threatens that of the "dialectic" of capital.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

*1. Discuss the relations of private property under pre-capitalist relations and compare/contrast them with those under capitalism. What do you think of the critique of the ideology of private property?

2. Does the term simple commodity production denote an historical period or a scattered phenomenon or what?

*3. In what sense has the working class as a class been united and organized by capital? How is it that "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own gravediggers."?

4. What does Marx think of the motives of the newly emerging capitalist class? Do you agree? Why?

5. What do you think are the mechanisms of the centralization of capitals by which one capitalist expropriates another? At least a partial answer can be found in Chapter 25.

*6. Why should it be true that as "the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class . . ."? Is the first part of this statement an assertion that people are getting absolutely poorer?

7. What does Marx mean when he says that the "monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production"?

*8. Marx writes: "The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." What is the "integument"?

9. What does it mean to say the capitalist mode of appropriation is the "first negation" of individual private property? What is the "negation of the negation"?

10. Marx says "Its (capitalism's) fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable . . ." What do you think he means when he says "inevitable"? Is this prophecy or rhetoric?

Footnotes

1 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, student edn., 1988.

2 The most notorious recent example has been the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case in which a conservative Supreme Court used the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution to grant corporations the same ability to spend money influencing elections as individuals.

3 MECW, Vol. 22, pp. 307-359.

4 Capital, Vol. I, p. 929.

5 For an example of Marx and Engels's friendly, yet critical, comments on the utopian socialists, see the discussion in the Communist Manifesto. Given the relatively underdeveloped struggles of workers of their time, they argue, the utopians were led to substitute their own visions for the analysis of the positive directions of the struggles. "Historical action," the utopians hope, "is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans. . . . In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.” MECW, Vol. 6, pp. 515–516.

6 This appropriation is clear in an essay by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky (1886–1937) titled “Primitive Socialist Accumulation” (1926) devoted to accelerating investment in industry via the expropriation of peasant surpluses. See Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. 77–146. The main thing that differentiated his kind of accumulation from that analyzed in this part of Capital was the word “socialist.” Stalin instituted that expropriation with a vengeance via forced collectivization. See also Rita di Leo, “I Bolscevichi e «il capitale», Contropiano, maggio-agosto, 2/1969, pp. 273–344, and her Il modello di stalin: il rapporto tra politica e economia nel socialismo realizzato, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977.

7 Notably “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole” (1843), MECW, Vol. 3, pp. 326–346, and “The German Ideology” (1846), MECW, Vol. 5, pp. 15–539.

Outline of Marx's Analysis

True Colonies:
– "virgin soil" colonized by free immigrants, e.g., America, Australia
– as opposed to colonies constructed from old societies, e.g., India, Indonesia
– In true, or free, colonies there is a dramatic contradiction between:
– the capitalists who want to hire workers to valorize their capital
– and people who, because of the availability of land, become independent producers

Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), a kidnapper, ex-con and English political economist

– looks at this situation in the true colonies
– sees how labor markets are constantly "understocked"
– and capitalists unable to valorize their capital
– and deduces the need to deprive people of the possibility of being independent
– so, his solution is to put an artificial price on the land
– which will force immigrants to work for capitalists
– and the price they eventually pay for the land can be used to import more workers

Marx applauds the honesty of Wakefield's analysis because:

– Wakefield is admitting to the need to separate people from the land
– in order for capitalism to develop
– and in the process, he [Wakefield] admits people are better off as free producers
– the absence of expropriation gives workers the power to demand higher wages
– all this ends "the illusion" of "free contracts" between equals in the labor market

However, when approaches such as Wakefield's were tried by England in Australia:

– they were undermined as the flow of immigrants simply diverted itself to the US
– but eventually, the "squandering" of land on aristocrats and capitalists
– together with the influx of gold seekers
– and the destruction of artisans by cheap British imports
– succeeded in producing a labor surplus

Thus, once more, Marx concludes that the secret of primitive accumulation is:

"that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore
capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition
the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of
the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker." (p. 940)

Commentary

Three interesting dimensions to Marx's analysis stand out. First, the chapter extends his previous comments on the hypocrisy of capitalist ideology of private property Wakefield's work illustrates clearly how that ideology is set aside when it becomes an obstacle to capital accumulation.(1) Second, it expands his analysis of colonialism in Chapter 31. Third, his reading of Wakefield provides a political methodology for reading other economists.

Land and Power

By demonstrating an acute awareness of how access to land helps people resist the labor market and wage labor, Wakefield confirms Marx's analysis in Chapter 27 of the capitalist use of expropriation. Unlike England, in Australia and in North America, there was too much land to enclose. Immigrants—both those fleeing capital's depredations in Europe and those transported as criminals—fled to unenclosed land to avoid the clutches of waged labor. This goes far toward illuminating the drama of past and current struggles over land tenure and its reform around the world. Unfortunately, the backdrop to this story of struggle between colonizing capitalists and immigrant workers in Australia and in North America, was the expropriation, slaughter and displacement of the aboriginal population.

As we have seen, the struggle over land did not end with the establishment of capitalism. To begin with, the elimination of smallholding peasants and farmers was often very incomplete. Where the incompleteness was substantial, there has been ongoing conflict between small farmers and capitalists over control of land. On the whole, small farmers have lost; their numbers and the proportion of land under their control has declined more or less continuously. But this history of defeat has included dogged resis¬tance. Even today small farmers continue to fight against their expulsion from the land.

At the same time, a great many of the dispossessed, all around the world, have fought to regain what they, or their ancestors, have lost. In some countries, they have achieved considerable success, either through revolutionary or, sometimes, legal means. One important example is Mexico. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the struggle for land was a central issue during the Mexican revolution. Millions of peasants mobilized in 1910 not only to overthrow the Porfiriato, but to retake lands that had been stolen from them since colonial times. In 1934, from the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, they won the redistribution of millions of acres of land to ejidos—a fundamental reorganization of land tenure from private to unalienable communal property. For decades following that redistribution, capitalists renewed their efforts to once again monopolize land. Finally, in 1991, Mexican President Salinas railroaded through a change in the constitution undermining the legal protections for ejidal lands—as one giveaway in negotiations over NAFTA. Three years later, Mexican campesinos rose up once again, this time in the form of the EZLN. That rebellion, launched on January 1, 1994, the same day NAFTA went into effect, constituted what indigenous communities in the southern state of Chiapas saw as a life-or-death effort to defend their land, their communities and their ways of life.

Other major examples of peasant revolt in the twentieth century—always including the fight for land—included, most notably, the revolutions in Russia and in China. Despite the way local, revolutionary Marxists argued for the “leading role” of the industrial proletariat in those countries, they were well aware that the vast majority of the population demanding change were peasants. Slogans including “Land and Bread” were designed to appeal to both peasants and industrial workers. Peasant struggles for land also played a key role in many decolonization movements, e.g., India, Vietnam, as well as in battles for land reforms in the post-colonial period. Such struggles continue today all around the world.

Despite such overwhelming evidence of the ability of peasants to mobilize, many “orthodox” Marxists have attacked small landholders, farmers and peasants as structurally reactionary. They have emphasized Marx and Engels’s comments on the failure of peasant revolts in Germany, on the limitations of growth potential in English smallholdings, and on the politics of peasants in France.(2) Doing so justified systematically subordinating peasant needs and desires to what they viewed as more progressive objectives of the factory proletariat.(3) The results in the Soviet Union, in China and elsewhere has been to turn Marxism into an ideology of rural expropriation via collectivization and state control.

Yet, here, as in his comments cited earlier about the Russian peasant commune, we see Marx's appreciation of the advantages of personal property in the land and its associated means of production. In commenting on Wakefield, he emphasizes how control over land "is the secret. . . of the prosperity of the colonies." He points out how Wakefield admits that this control benefits small farmers: "He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising and comparatively cultured, whereas 'the English agricultural laborer [with no land] is a miserable wretch, a pauper.'"(4) While it is certain that Marx was no Jeffersonian romantic dreaming that all life should be organized around the small farm, it is nevertheless clear that he understood both the benefits and the power that people derive from being self-sufficient and not dependent on capitalists for a wage. Orthodox Marxist-Leninists in the USSR, who justified forced collectivization as "primitive socialist accumulation," understood this as well. Like Mr. Wakefield, they sought to subordinate peasants' labor-power to the accumulation of capital. Unfortunately for their plans, the allocation of small subsistence plots of land to Russian peasants gave them a vital resource to resist their exploitation on collective and state farms. Both Soviet planners, in their day, and Chinese Communist Party leaders were forced, time and again, to capitulate to the long war of attrition peasants have carried out based, in part, on their little plots of land. The struggles have continued in the post-Soviet era in Russia, in Eastern Europe and in China.

Reading Bourgeois Economics Politically

Marx's treatment of Wakefield provides us a paradigm for reading the writings of economists. Unlike many critics who tend to focus on the ideological aspect of capitalist thought, Marx focuses on the strategic meaning of Wakefield's ideas. He is primarily interested in the strategies and tactics that Wakefield proposes for gaining control over workers. Marx's presentation in Capital provides us with an insight into the class content of such approaches and the dangers they represent.(5) Here Marx provides a report on the enemy's strategy that both makes sense of some workers' behavior on the battlefields of the class war and provides insights that can guide that of others.(6)

In some sub-fields of economics, such as “development” economics (the contemporary counterpart of Wakefield’s work), the strategic content of economic theory is often very clear. For example, in my commentary on Chapter 29, I highlight the work of W. A. Lewis who wrote about how to use money and inflation against workers to the benefit of capitalists. In other sub-fields, this content is often less clear and must be deciphered. For example, in Keynesian macroeconomics, aggregation tends to hide class relations in nebulous categories. “Consumption,” for example, denotes not just the expenditure of working-class wages and salaries on consumption goods and services but includes that of all receivers of income. Similarly, “savings” includes not only the unexpended income of “households” but retained profits of corporations. Nevertheless, by studying the evolution of the theory within the historical context of class struggle, we can decode such concepts and discover their class meaning.

For example, we can recognize in the centrality of the “consumption function,” and of “demand” more generally, Keynes’s response to the changing balance of class power in the 1920s and 1930s. His theoretical concepts expressed his recognition of a situation in which working-class wages could no longer be usefully viewed simply in terms of costs—to be held down as much as possible—but had to be understood as the main source of markets for final output. As such, he pointed out how their increase can induce capitalist investment and accumulation. Keynes’s genius lay in seeing how, when they could no longer be repressed, workers’ demands for wages, unemployment compensation and social security could be harnessed for capitalist development.

Keynes’s own ability to read pre-Keynesian economic theory politically can be seen in his reactions to the return of the pound to the gold standard after World War I. In a remarkable series of articles entitled “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill” (1925), Keynes forced into public scrutiny and debate the strategic class meaning of the return to gold.(7) As he showed, it was no mere technical adjustment, but required a direct attack on working-class wages—an attack which could not be publicly admitted but which would inevitably generate a highly unpopular class war. Although he was no Marxist, his political reading of this international monetary policy is very similar, methodologically, to Marx's reading of Wakefield. This kind of reading turns the study of economic theory into an adventure in class espionage. Making clear how economics functions as a tool of capitalist management, facilitates our understanding of the strategies that are being woven against us and thus finding ways to defend ourselves.

Recommended Further Reading

The seminal essay that got beyond traditional Marxist critiques of Keynes was Antonio Negri, "John M. Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State in 1929," in Toni Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83, London: Red Notes, 1987. Originally in Contropiano 1968.

For another example of reading bourgeois theory politically, you might look at my "Supply Side Economics: The New Phase of Capitalist Strategy in the Crisis," published in French in Babylone No. 0 (Paris) and in Italian in Metropoli No. 7 (Rome) and Spanish in El Gallo Illustrado (Mexico City). An English version is available.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

(An * means that one possible answer to that question can be found at the end of the study guide.)

1. In what ways do "independent" producers constitute "obstacles" to the development of capitalism?

2. How are political economists "sycophants" of capital?

3. Discuss: "He [Wakefield] discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things." "A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain relations does it become capital . . . Capital is a social relation of production." (footnote#4)

4. How did Wakefield think the division between workers and capitalist arose in Europe?

*5. How does Marx think that the workings of supply and demand in the labor market are kept within bounds desired by capital? What other methods can you think of for accomplishing that end? Inversely, how might those bounds be breached?

6. What happened to Mr. Peel on the banks of Swan River? What did Mr. Molinari discover to his horror in the West Indies? How are these two series of happenings related?

*7. What was Wakefield's solution to the problem of labor supply? Does it resemble current discussions of immigration in the United States? How?

8. Did Wakefield's solution work? If not why not?

Footnotes

1 For more on Wakefield's work within the evolution of classical political economy, see Michael Perelman's The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 324-339.

2 Marx’s best-known comments on the peasantry are in his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1851), MECW, Vol. 11, pp. 187–192. Engels’s most thorough work on the subject was: “The Peasant War in Germany” (1850) in MECW, Vol. 10, pp. 397–482.

3 Lenin wrote endlessly on the subject, largely as part of an ongoing debate in Russia, first with the Populists and then among the Bolsheviks. On the Bolshevik debates, see Moshe Lewin and Irene Nove, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, New York: W. W. Norton, 1968, 1975, Chapter 6: “The Party and the Accursed Problem”; and Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, New York: Vintage, 1971, Chapter 6: “Bukharinism and the Road to Socialism.” For an overview of the orthodox Marxist tradition (Engels, Lenin, Mao) of anti-peasant analysis, see Chapter 1 in Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico, New York: Praeger, 1985.

4 Capital, Vol. I, p. 938.

5 Marx spent considerable time and energy analyzing bourgeois economics. The main results can be found in the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value, but his insights and comments are scattered through many other works.

6 In the introduction to my book Reading Capital Politically, I liken this approach to the portrayal in the movie Patton (1970) of General George Patton’s reading of German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s book on tank warfare. Patton read Rommel, not to critique him, but to defeat him.

7 John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill”, in John Maynard Keynes, Collected Works, Vol. XIII, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 207–230.

Chapter 26

1. The idyllic myth of the origins of capitalism is that it arose from some people (mostly men) saving and investing their income instead of wasting it on consumption, gradually gaining enough resources to put others to work --those who were not so frugal and crafty. The on-going propagation of the myth saw capitalism constantly renewed by the same means --by newly self-made-entrepreneurs who raised themselves by their financial bootstraps to compete with established capitalists. Thus, in Hard Times, we find Bitzer expressing impatience with "hands" who are not individually penny-pinching, self-serving and trying to climb the "ladder of success". Marx critiques these view by showing how much capitalist wealth was accumulated by theft and enslavement. Elsewhere he also points out that workers don't make enough to save even if they would, much less, save enough to invest. Nor, he might have added, did they have the time, energy, information of connections necessary to successful "entry" into competition.

7. We can deduce that violence was needed to impose this new kind of civilization because there was resistance to it. Unless you want to suppose some gratuitous will-to-violence against people who were quite willing to cooperate, we have to suppose some correlation between the methods used and the methods necessary to achieve the desired ends. The resistance apparently came from both the old ruling class --the landed aristocracy-- and from the old exploited classes —the peasants and worker-artisans.

9. He responds by rejecting the idea that his analysis of the rise of capitalism in England should be taken as an inevitable process in all countries, e.g. Russia. Here and in his letters to Zasulich, he argues that different peoples may follow different paths, e.g., the Russians might follow a different path because the traditional collectivist practices of the mir provided a different point of departure and possible template for further development.

12. Cultural creation and destruction. Capitalism is not just a way of organizing the economy; it is also a way of organizing all of society around the economy, a way which subordinates cultural activities to the needs of capitalist reproduction. Thus, the social relationships of capitalism have tended to penetrate and reshape or supplant all other kinds of social relationships. As a result, pre-capitalist cultures have been more or less undermined or destroyed. Of course, faced with this invasion of a new way of life, many people have experienced these changes as threatening and resisted them, with greater or lesser success, depending on the case.  Others have experienced at least aspects of these changes as liberating and have thrown themselves into the whirlwind of change. But even then, they have usually experienced the dual "freedom" Marx talks about "free from" and "free to". Examples of those cultures mostly, or entirely destroyed, might include most of the indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. No, it was not a one-time phenomena but became an on-groing process. Unable to immediately put people to work everywhere in the colonial world, the capitalists often left them on their own, to reproduce themselves as a "reserve army of labor' (see chapter 25). But this also meant that they continued to live in ways that preserved many aspects of pre-colonial times and to develop in ways which were influenced by but distinct from the central capitalist culture.

Chapter 27

5. That in Marx's description which suggests resistance by the displaced is the force used to accomplish the displacement. If there were no resistance there would have been no need of force. What is lacking is an account and analysis of the resistance and of subsequent struggles to regain what had been lost (or some variation thereof, e.g., the Diggers).

7. American counterpart = First, the expropriation of the land from the Indians and second, the subsequent displacement of farmers from the land by banks and agribusiness --a process that reduced the population on the land to 3 - 4 percent. One might also include subsequent enclosures such as that of Thompson Square Park in New York City. Destiny? Indians died rather than work for the white man.  Farmers went to the city. Squatters moved elsewhere.

8. Resistance? Indians fought to the death or to incarceration on reservations. Farmers fought individually and collectively as in the Populist Movement of the 19th century or more recently in the American Farm Movement. Those who occupied Thompson Square Park continue to resist, resulting in barbed wire and police guards. Resistance has been recurrent, even today Indians fight to regain their land.

9. Bank Foreclosure? Not primitive accumulation in the sense that the farm family has usually been long incorporated into the capitalist system. Yet, it is clearly a continuation of the original processes of enclosure by which people were driven off the land. Linebaugh may be right that it is simply a change in the "wage form" but it has the same contours as primitive accumulation.

10. Diggers --Landless English in the 1640's who banded together to attempt to regain the use of unused commons (mostly wastelands). They fought for the land, albeit for a kind of collective appropriation which they invented and which was not, therefore, a simple return to the past. They failed, were driven from the land and prosecuted, but made a long remembered contribution to the history of working class struggle in England.

12. The squatting of abandoned buildings is analogous to land reform in the Third World to the degree that it involves people struggling for the direct appropriation of space for their own needs. Inasmuch as it is usually resisted by the State as a violation of property rights and almost never adopted as a policy for the pacification of the homeless, it has not yet become a tool in capital's strategic arsenal (with minor exceptions in New York City).

Chapter 28

2. Punishments:  whipping and imprisonment, half the ear sliced off, execution, enslavement, forced to work with whip and chains, branded, have their children taken away, iron neck rings, sent to the galleys.  Yes, there are such punishments today, but less open --mostly jailing but the violence of prisons makes jailing much more of a punishment than mere incarceration. School: failure and condemnation to the galleys of McDonalds for life; family: grounding, beatings, expulsion; prisons: solitary confinement, violence.

5. Rationale:   begging:  better the charity of the person in the street than that of the capitalist who thinks he has bought you with his money; stealing:  direct appropriation of wealth, from capitalists who have stolen the tools and products from those who do the work, seems only fair. Street people:  also victims of and rebels against enclosures, this time of the industrial belt in the North; also the cripples of past wars and alienated lives.

7. Similarities: both past against vagabonds created by enclosure of land. Differences: the English lost traditional rights; ex-slaves did not get land reform (forty acres and a mule from plantation owners). England: traditional land use was pre-capitalist; in the South, slavery had been an integral part of the North Atlantic capitalist economy.

9. It tells me that integral to the imposition of the wage form was the simultaneous imposition of a variety of other kinds of coercion designed to impose work on everyone; that the wage form has always involved unwaged forms. Other forms? Compulsory schooling, job search by the unemployed, housework by women taught it is their destiny, South African homelands where unwaged domestic labor makes low urban and mining wages possible. etc.

Chapter 29

4. Class status of: 1. Family Farmer --In a few cases autonomous and outside of capitalist class relations, but mostly part of working class, exploited via market; 2. Contract Farmer --Legally a small capitalist supplying commodities to larger capitalists, but often exploited by big capital and banks so unable to accumulate, effectively locked into relying on own labor;  3. Slave Plantation Owner --capitalist supplying raw material and exploiting an unwaged labor force; 4. Sharecropper --ostensibly independent but exploited by land owners and debt peonage, so part of working class.

5. Capitalist farmers could benefit from 16th century inflation when wages and rent were more or less fixed --thus the prices of their goods rose while costs declined relatively. In the 16th century no one was consciously manipulating the money supply and the rate of inflation. In the post WWII period on the contrary, central monetary authorities did just that to undercut real wages and raise profits.  For this to work either workers had to suffer from monetary illusion and not try to raise wages with inflation, or they had to be too weak to achieve such an increase whether they understood or not.

Chapter 30

5. Protection of local industry will raise prices of local industrial output by excluding cheaper foreign imports. The higher prices will increase profits and stimulate a shift of resources out of agriculture (unless it too is protected) into industry. e.g., increase demand for local goods due to exclusion of imported ones should increase industrial demands for labor which would be less available for agriculture; wealthy landowners may invest in more profitable industry.

6. Disvalorization --the process of pre-existing skills being absorbed by capital, often piecemeal with other aspects totally lost or devalued. Yes, e.g., school. Kids develop creativity in play, school either kills it (devalues its) or channels it narrowly into activities (work) useful to capital, so they wind up being able to create ads but not worlds.

Chapter 31

6. Colonialism = worldwide extension of primitive accumulation in the basic sense that it involved an international process of class creation, especially the forced drafting of third world populations into the working class dominated and organized by the capitalist class of the colonizing nation. At the same time, it was also an integral part of English primitive accumulation in the sense that the colonization and enslavement of the Third World went hand in hand with the accumulation of the vast bulk of the English population as workers in English textile mills, etc.

12. National Debt = money borrowed to finance excess of government expenditures over tax revenues, then owed to lenders. Concentrates wealth because it is repaid with interest obtained by taxing others.  Yes, today national debt is in trillions --a high percentage of our taxes are being transferred to the holders of that debt. Despite Reagan-Bush balanced budget rhetoric, the giant deficit produced by their tax cuts have accelerated this concentration of wealth.

14. International credit systems both mobilize money internationally (e.g., Venice to Holland, Holland to England, England to US) and reconcentrated it internationally (in Venice, Holland and England respectively).  Yesterday (1970's) international banks loaned US/European/OPEC money to Mexico, etc. Today (1980's, 1990's) they drain the money out of the debtor countries through capital flight and debt repayment. Yes, the blood of children working in the factories of Mexico stains money repaid to US banks; the blood of children sold for body parts stains the money paid by Guatemala, etc.

20. Slavery in the New World produced raw materials for industry in the Old World, thus it was an integral part of Atlantic capitalism. Its "mode" of production my have differed in a technical sense (e.g., slave gangs instead of waged workers) but slaves' work was being valorized within the same economic mechanism.

Chapter 32

1. Pre-capitalist private property in England = personal property in one's tools and products often co-existed with the "commons" i.e. property of the community.  Capitalist private property was founded on the destruction both of personal property and of the commons, both of tools and products. "Personal" or "individual" private property was often more complicated than it seems; there were family rights and property, clan rights and property, and so on. But the basic point remains the same, that capitalist private property rights were founded on the destruction of earlier rights and its ideology doesn't recognize this.

3. United and organized by 1. Bringing them together in factories and cooperative production, and 2. imposing a common antagonism (exploitation) and enemy (capital).  This despite all the tendencies of capital to divide and conquer, separate and disorganize, by pitting white against black, men against women, English against Irish, etc.

6. Because the growth of the mass of these things involved the growth of antagonism and with it revolt. Clearly there are many strategies, e.g., divide and conquer, which may offset this tendency as the antagonism is directed away from capital and toward other groups of people.  Absolutely poorer? Not necessarily, could even be less poor and still have the mass grow, or could have an increase in the relative mass and poverty.  Mass = quantity.

8. Integument = the social relations of capital, the rules of the game, the legal and economic organization that links and binds all the different parts of the system together: laws, money, exchange, etc.

Chapter 33

5. Through the manipulation of supply and demand. In this chapter he shows us Wakefield's plan for manipulating the supply of labor.  By restricting access to land, Wakefield thought to increase supply.  Increased immigration could also be used, and was in both the United States and Australia, both free immigration and coerced immigration, e.g., transported prisoners.  Breach? By seizing land and refusing the labor market, by refusing to immigrate according to capitalist needs.

7. Restrict access to land, increase immigration.  Less concern now with keeping land out of the hands of people in the United States, but access to land elsewhere does influence immigration flows to the United States, e.g. reversal of Mexican land reforms have been one source of increased immigration across the Mexican-US border.

Overview of Chapter

Section 1: The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-value and Exchange-value

Use-values
From Exchange-value to Value

Useful labor
Abstract labor, or labor as source of value
Socially Necessary Labor Time

(a) The Simple, Isolated, or Accidental Form of Value
(b) The Expanded Form of Value
(c) The General Form of Value
(d) The Money Form of Value

Preliminary Commentary

Marx’s presentation begins with the analysis of commodities— of useful products of human labor that are bought and sold—because:

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as “an immense collection of commodities,” the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of a commodity.(1)

His “wealth of societies” echoes the title of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), the foundational text of classical political economy. But when he goes on to specify “in which the capitalist mode of production prevails”, we know that he will be analyzing wealth in capitalism, not in any random “nation”.

Part VIII on Primitive Accumulation explains why wealth appears as commodities in capitalism—because capitalists have imposed the commodity-form on both workers and production. They have stripped people of their land and tools (Chapter 27) and have forced them to sell their willingness and ability to work as a commodity for wages (Chapter 28). These processes created a “home market” (Chapter 30) in which most consumer goods take the form of commodities. In Volume II, Marx restates this point explicitly. “The wage-laborers, the mass of direct producers, . . . must constantly be faced with the necessary means of subsistence in purchasable form, i.e., in the form of commodities . . . When production by means of wage-labour becomes universal, commodity production is bound to be the general form of production”. (2) With raw materials, machinery, factories and office buildings being produced by capitalist-controlled wage (or slave) labor, this has also been true for producer goods. Finally, the same is true for everything produced for sale to the state or for export abroad.

Beyond a new organization of production—in which wealth takes the form of commodities—Part VIII also explains how work imposed in this manner results in a class society, made up of capitalists who impose work and workers upon whom work is imposed. Workers, unable to escape the factory or office, continue to resist and sometimes create alternatives. To provide an analysis that can help workers overthrow this system, Chapter 1 explains how commodities are not simply “things produced and sold” but embody characteristics of the antagonistic class relationships of capitalism. The real “wealth” of capitalists is their control over people via imposed work. This fundamental bond must be broken to liberate society from the exploitation characteristic of capitalism and the cruel alienation that results.

Figure 1 portrays the overall structure of his analysis. Section 1 analyzes the commodity into use-value and exchange-value, beneath which lurks “value” whose substance is abstract labor. Section 2 examines the measure of value— socially necessary labor time. Section 3 explores the complexities of the form of value. Section 4 calls our attention to the fetishism of the presentation up to this point and prepares us for Chapter 2 that begins de-fetishizing the analysis by situating commodities in the hands of their owners.

Figure 1 Diagram of the structure of Chapter 1

Section 1: The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value

Outline of Marx’s Analysis

Commodities have two contradictory aspects
– use-value, or value in use
– exchange-value, or value in exchange
– this contradiction is resolved via exchange
Use-values have qualities and exist as quantities
– various qualities imply various uses
– various qualities imply various measures of quantity
– only realized when used/consumed
Exchange-value appears first as quantity in exchange
– 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron
– as use-values corn and iron are different, but
– the equality in exchange implies some common property
– abstracted from their different use-values and
– abstracted from the different useful labors that produced them
– common property = products of undifferentiated labor
– commodities are “crystals of this social substance”, abstract labor
– substance of commodity values = abstract labor
Measure of commodity values = labor time socially necessary to produce them
– socially necessary labor time (SNLT) varies with conditions of production
Use-values can exist without value,
– when not produced by labor, e.g., air, unworked soil, wild forests
– when produced by labor but not exchanged, consumed directly

Commentary

Marx analyzes the commodity into its two modes of existence. In the first part of Figure 1, we have:

A commodity is a use-value because it has a value in use; that is, it “satisfies human wants of some sort or another.” It also is an exchange-value because it has a value in exchange; that is, it can be exchanged for something else. However, these two different determinations are contradictory. A commodity only becomes a use-value if it used. It only becomes an exchange-value if it is not used but exchanged. Yet, the commodity—sold, bought and consumed—is the unity of these opposites. The strange combination of unity and opposition, in which the opposites only have their meaning vis-à-vis each other and are thus inextricably joined, constitute what Marx means by a contradiction or contradictory relation. Just such a contradiction obtains in the antagonistic class relationships of capitalism. Each class stands opposed to the other, but at the same time each exists, as such, only within the relationship. A capitalist class can only exist when those with money can hire people and put them to work; people constitute a working class only in their subordination to capital.(3)

This contradiction, which Marx analyzed in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, can only find its solution in the actual exchange process which: “must comprise both the evolution and the solution of these contradictions.” (4) He analyzes this solution more fully in Chapter 3, where he describes the realization of the two contradictory aspects in circulation as a metamorphosis. Before a commodity is sold and consumed, both use-value and exchange-value have only abstract and potential existences. Selling the commodity results in the metamorphosis of its potential exchange-value into whatever has been obtained in exchange. In Chapter 3, the exchange value of commodities appears in the form of money. When that money is then exchanged for another commodity, obtained for consumption, exchange-value metamorphoses again into use-value, realized as it is consumed.

The biological metaphor of metamorphosis evokes the changes in form through which an insect develops from an egg, through the stages of pupa, larva, chrysalis, to adult; the form and appearance change but the essence remains constant. The Monarch, for example, through all these stages in becoming a butterfly remains Danaus plexippus. What remains the same as the commodity goes through its metamorphoses? Marx’s answer is “value”, whose substance is human labor in the abstract, and whose form is exchange-value. Before turning to how he extracts that answer from his analysis of exchange-value, and what he means by it, let’s examine his analysis of use-value in more detail.

Use-values

At first, Marx suggests that use-values only “provide the material for a special brand of knowledge, namely the commercial knowledge of commodities”.(5) Similarly, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he wrote that use-values “do not express the social relations of production” and that “use-value, as such, lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs in this sphere only when it is itself a determinate form.”(6) Despite these comments, throughout his writings we discover that use-value has many “determinate forms”, which do express distinct social relations—and are often contested. Even before he published Capital, while analyzing how some product can be directly reinvested, Marx notes how this is an example of the importance of “the analysis of use-value for the determination of economic phenomena”. Here, in Volume I, use-value expresses “value” (see Section 3 below); labor-power has varying use-values (Chapters 6 & 7); the manipulation of use-value is one way of cheating workers/consumers (Chapter 10); machines, besides their use in making things, also serve to control workers (Chapter 15). Many years later, in his “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner” (1879), Marx explicitly rejects as “drivel” that use-value has no place in his analysis beyond being one aspect of the commodity. Besides the value of a commodity being represented in the use-value of another, he also points out that “behind use-value is useful labor, one aspect of the twofold character of labor which produces commodities” (see Section 2 below) and “surplus value itself is derived from a 'specific' use-value of labor-power [see Chapter 7 below] . . . etc., etc.” He concludes: “for me use-value plays an important part quite different from its part in economics hitherto.”(8) Use-value, therefore, is worth considering at some length.

The use-values of commodities have specific qualities, or attributes, produced by specific sorts of concrete useful labor, and specific quantities, the result of that labor being exerted over measurable amounts of time.

Marx illustrates his argument with a variety of apparently innocuous use-values/commodities—linen, iron, clocks and corn (wheat). (9) I say “apparently” because these played key roles in the period of capitalist development he was analyzing. Linen, a cloth made from flax was, along with wool, then cotton, essential to the development of the textile industry, the core of British industrialization. Iron, along with coal, was required in the production of machinery for industry and weapons for controlling workers both at home and throughout the expanding British Empire. Clocks (and eventually watches) became tools for measuring work and maximizing exploitation. Wheat bread was the basic means of subsistence for the working class in England. In the same spirit, in Reading Capital Politically, I examined food and energy more generally than just bread and coal. While food provides us with nutrition and pleasure, both in consumption and in the opportunities for social bonding, control over its production provides capitalists with profit and control over the rest of us—because they make food a commodity and write laws that force us to buy what we need and want and thus to work for wages. While human energy provides us with life and non-human energy with the means to reduce work and make life more pleasant (heating and lighting our homes etc.), capitalists exploit our energy as part of our labor-power and, like food, turn non-human energy into commodities they sell for profits or use against us. (Chapters 12–15) Here, let’s turn from the production of things to that of services, now the dominant commodity-producing sector of the economy.

Although in the 19th Century the limited commercialization of services meant Marx felt he could largely ignore them, services now make up the majority of commodities and include transportation, finance, entertainment, medical aid, housekeeping, care-giving, communication and schooling. In each case, the use-value to their purchasers depends upon the nature of the service. Their use-value to capital, besides exchange-value, parallels that of food and energy: control over those who need or desire them. Also, in each case, a vast number of differentiated services are offered to workers, corporations and government.

Narrowing our focus to just one kind of service—the loaning of money and the resulting debt of the borrower—we can easily see the differences in use-values for borrowers and lenders. In Marx’s time, most lending was by capitalists to each other and to governments because workers had very low, precarious wages and little or no collateral to cover default on debt. As we saw in Chapter 31, the immediate use-value to those who loaned money to governments was the profit they received via interest— profit that could be loaned out again. Over time, financial institutions increasingly loaned to businesses that used their borrowings for either speculation or real investment, i.e., putting people to work. A secondary use-value was the leverage lenders gained over the behavior of borrowers. By the end of the 19th Century, the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1941) argued that businesses had become so dependent on banks as to give the later considerable power over the former.(10) In the 20th Century, as workers’ struggles succeeded in repeatedly raising wages, they gained access to various kinds of credit. As a result, we are able to obtain other services and things such as washing machines (credit cards), automobiles (car loans) or houses (mortgages). Such borrowing allows us to enjoy use-values before we have enough cash-on-hand to pay for them. Yet, the form of such lending—the fine print and fraudulent practices—often traps us in perpetual debt, endless worry and the need to work and work and work to meet our repayment obligations. The result, of course, has been intense conflicts between debtors and creditors.

These stark differences between the use-values of commodities to workers and their use-values to capital have resulted in struggle over the qualities and prices of commodities. “Consumerism” has involved not only the efforts of capitalists to persuade people that they need more and more of this and that through advertising and ideology, but also the self-organization of workers-qua-consumers, who have contested various qualities of commodities, e.g., dangerous automobiles, poisonous effects of the “chemical feast”, and even their very existence, e.g., hydrocarbon energy commodities that many want to replace with renewable ones to stave off both immediate harm to people and their environment and long-term effects on global warming and all of its emerging, catastrophic consequences.

From Exchange-value to Value

Marx begins his analysis of exchange-value much the way Adam Smith did: with simple barter, the exchange of a given quantity of one thing for a given quantity of another. Whereas Smith evoked hunting and gathering societies that exchanged such things as pelts, hides, fish or tools, Marx chose, as we have seen, commodities important for British capitalism, e.g., 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron.(11) Whether we consider Marx’s choices or the more contemporary ones I have suggested, we quickly see that the meanings of the exchange-value of any given commodity are not the same for workers and capitalists.

We can easily see this in the domain of finance, looking (as above) only at the loaning of money and the resulting debt of the borrower. The higher the rate of interest (and accompanying fees), the more profit capitalist lenders will rake in and the “deeper” the debt of borrowers.(12) For those institutions that make such loans out of monies in their possession, e.g., automobile companies or banks, the objective is the extraction of as much interest as possible, to maximize their profits. So, whether the loans are made to businesses, government or individuals, lenders encourage 1) the very partial repayment of the principal borrowed, e.g., a minimum repayment that only slowly reduces the principal upon which interest is charged, and 2) refinancing of debt that prolongs the period during which they can extract interest and profit. Beyond such simple financial calculations, keeping people, business or governments in perpetual debt with continuing obligations to repay grants leverage and power over borrowers. Hilferding made this point about bank loans to businesses, millions of workers today live under constant threat of dispossession (of automobiles by the “repo” man, or of homes by sheriffs with notices of eviction). Many governments facing difficulty in repaying their debt out of current revenue choose to cut expenditures—imposing austerity on workers—instead of raising taxes.(13)

In the 1970s, when capitalists responded to worker success in raising wages by raising prices, the resulting accelerating inflation undercut real interest rates. Lenders responded by imposing flexible rate loans. When President Jimmy Carter brought Paul Volcker in to chair the Fed and attack inflation, i.e., wages, he increased interest rates, drove up loan repayment costs and pitched the world economy into a depression. Coupled with simultaneous financial deregulation, the result was the International Debt Crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the imposition of austerity on workers, rising unemployment, falling wages and widespread recourse by workers to debt to maintain their standard of living. All of which prepared the ground for further financial crisis, first the collapse of the Savings & Loan Industry in the late 1980s and then that of 2006-2008 in which millions lost jobs and homes, prompting protests and demands for increased regulation, e.g., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and debt-forgiveness, e.g., the widespread demands to cancel student debts and make education free.

Value

To return to barter, the implied em>equivalence, accepted by the exchangers, cannot lie in the use-values of the items exchanged because they are qualitatively different and have quite different use-values. Nor can it lie in the concrete useful labor that produced them because those labors were also quite distinct. In his example of 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron, cultivating and harvesting labor is obviously quite different from mining and smelting labor even if both extract something usable from the earth. So, what is the source of equivalence perceived by the exchangers?

For Marx, equivalence must lie in some common property. Abstracting from both use-value and the concrete, useful labors that produce use-values, he writes that:

exchange-values [commodities] can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value. If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor . . . Nor [are they] any longer the product of . . . any particular kind of productive labor . . . [they] are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract . . . they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor . . . crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity values.(14)

Marx’s argument that “only one property remains, that of being products of labor” has been repeatedly challenged with counterarguments that strike at the heart of the “labor” theory of value. For example, some have argued that labor is not the only universal factor of production, energy is another. Already in Marx’s time, non-human sources of energy were rapidly replacing human muscle-power as capitalists invested in machinery, driven by water, then steam, then electrical power. All commodities, therefore, can also be understood as “products of energy”. Why, then, privilege a labor theory of value over an energy theory of value?

Marx was neither economist nor engineer; he does not offer a technical theory based on inputs and outputs, as expressed, for example, in economists’ production functions of the sort Q = f(K, L, E) where output, Q, is a function of inputs capital, K, e.g., machinery and raw materials, labor, L, and energy, E. He is not interested in just any “common property”. What interests him is the “social substance”, because his is a social theory in which he centers the key social relationship of capitalism: imposed labor (and the resistance to it). We see this in Part VIII, where imposed labor forms the primary means through which capital subordinates most people’s lives to its own organizational forms.(15)

Can this “abstract labor”, the substance of value, have any semantic meaning beyond being the fruit of a logical deduction? There are at least two ways in which I think it does.

First, Marx argues that as it develops, the capitalist division of labor tends to simplify skills to the point where workers can be moved easily from task to task. If the forms of labor are increasingly secondary, then it makes sense to speak of labor abstracted from those changing forms. This argument has been accepted by many as sufficient justification for considering “abstract labor” the substance of value.(16)

Second, in what sense is the varying content—different kinds of useful labor—secondary? There are many important passages in Capital where the concrete form of useful labor is vitally important to Marx’s analysis. For example, in Part IV, Chapters 12-15 repeated alterations in the technical composition of capital (the shop floor arrangement of workers, tools, machines and raw materials) are shown to have been essential in maintaining or regaining control over workers. But, in capitalism, “control’ means, above all, keeping people working at producing commodities. Therefore, there is a second, more profound semantic meaning to his “abstract labor”; the substance of value is precisely the social control over people’s lives provided by any form of labor, independently of its content or form. Capitalism structures people’s lives and society around work, no matter the nature of the work, which changes over time as technology evolves within the dynamics of struggle between the imposition of work and people’s resistance to it. In other words, “value” expresses the particular social use-value of labor to capital as its primary means of social control. Marx’s labor theory of value is a theory of the value of labor to capital.

Section 2: The Dual Character of the Labor Embodied in Commodities

Outline of Marx’s Analysis

1) Useful labor Social division of labor involves heterogeneous use-values and forms of labor
– qualitatively different use-values, e.g., cloth and coats, produced by…
– qualitatively different forms of labor, e.g., weaving and tailoring
– in Indian villages, use-values are not commodities
– in capitalism, use-values are commodities
Labor as creator of use-values, or useful labor, is:
– a “condition of human existence”
– an eternal natural necessity
– mediates the metabolism between humans and nature
– Petty: labor is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother
2) Abstract labor, or labor as source of value
– labor abstracted from useful or determinate qualities
– labor as simple expenditure of human labor-power
– value of a commodity represents human labor pure and simple
– simple average labor produced by simple, i.e., average, labor-power
– complex labor = intensified or multiplied simple labor
– magnitude of value determined by labor time
– if one coat has same value as 20 yards of linen, both embody same amount (duration) of labor
– value varies with productivity, or output per hour of concrete useful labor
– increased productivity increases material wealth or output per hour
– increased productivity decreases value per unit

Commentary

This section provides, as Marx says, a “further elucidation” of the arguments in Section 1 about the two-fold nature of the labor contained in commodities. His elucidation, therefore, is divided into two parts, the first elaborates his previous analysis of useful labor, the second deepens his previous analysis of abstract labor, or the substance of value. The former elaboration has been much less controversial than the second.

Useful labor

Useful labor is heterogeneous. People do all kinds of useful labor, producing all kinds of useful things (and services). With the textile industry the heart of British industrialization, Marx points to the useful labor that weaves linen thread (made from flax) into linen cloth and the quite distinct useful tailoring labor that cuts and sews that cloth into linen coats. He might have added the horticultural labor that grows the flax, the harvest labor that reaps it, the labor that rets it, the labor that scutches it, the labor that heckles the fibers and the spinning labor that spins the long flax fibers into the thread necessary to weave/produce linen cloth. Because humans discovered many kinds of labor early on, there has always been a social division of labor, where some folks undertake some kinds of useful labor and others undertake other kinds. But only in capitalism have the diverse use-values produced by the diverse forms of useful labor generally taken the form of commodities, of things and services that are sold to others. Why this has been so, is explained in his analysis of primitive accumulation.

His emphasis on how human labor “mediates the metabolism between man and nature”, foreshadows an analysis he elaborates in Chapter 7 on “The Labor Process”. (17) Here, by asserting that labor is “a condition of human existence” and “an eternal natural necessity”, he frames his concept of useful labor as generic and a-historical, applicable throughout human history. The formulation by William Petty (1623–1687) that labor is the father of material wealth and earth the mother, Marx proposes true for all time. (18) In so doing, he sets the stage for differentiating “abstract labor” from useful labor as a characteristic of capitalism alone.

Abstract labor, or labor as source of value

Section 1 arrived at the concept of abstract labor by abstracting from the diverse determinate forms of useful labor. Here, Marx defines labor as the “simple expenditure of human labor-power”, without regard to the particular skills involved, he suggests two corresponding concepts, 1) “simple labor-power” and 2) “simple average labor” performable by “every ordinary man” (with “ordinary” explicitly understood to evolve over time with society).

The idea of an undeveloped” “simple labor” implies its contrary, that of more developed, or skilled “complex labor”. To explain the relationship between the two, Marx offers “More complex labor counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labor, so that a smaller quantity of complex labor is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labor.” But who is doing the counting; who is considering, or making the judgement about what equals what? Marx doesn’t say, but merely argues that “this reduction [of complex to simple] is constantly being made . . . behind the backs of the producers”. How?

The lack of precision about the “who” and the “how” has led to various interpretations trying to clarify these statements. The most common interpretation perceives a “reduction” problem solved through market mechanisms of exchange, an optimistic logic akin to that of economists’ wishful expectations of tendencies toward equilibrium. This interpretation finds consistency in another statement that Marx makes here, namely, “through its value [a commodity] is posited as equal to the product of simple labor.” This reading sees “value” as revealed in exchange, not the varying exchange-values resulting from market fluctuations, but some underlying value which anchors those fluctuations. Once “prices” are accepted as the monetary expression of exchange-value (at the end of this chapter, and then in Vol. III), this “reduction” problem re-emerges as the so-called “transformation problem” of whether and in what manner values determine prices.

My alternative interpretation, consistent with my suggestion that Marx’s labor theory of value is a theory of the value of labor to capital, is the following. If the substance of value (denoted by the concept of abstract labor) is precisely the social control over people’s lives that any labor, independently of its content or form, provides capital, then that substance becomes the determinate character of whatever kind of useful labor we care to consider—quite independently of whatever “complexity” or skill is being exercised. As to “who” counts or considers, the answer becomes “capital” or “capitalists” or “capitalist policy makers”, who worry, first and foremost, not about the kinds of useful labor being imposed but the overall success of business in putting people to work. Here is the real-world “reduction”; forget complexity and ask rather how many and for how long are those ordinary men and women being employed? When Marx says this happens “behind the backs of the producers”, many Marxists think “behind the backs of the capitalists”, forgetting that “the producers” are the workers they employ. The reduction of the problem that concerns workers —of whether the existing complex assortment of concrete labors is producing what they need—to that of how successfully work is being imposed overall, not only happens “behind their backs” but usually behind closed doors, among policy makers dedicated to preserving and expanding capital’s way of organizing life around imposed labor. “Simple labor” then, is not so much a characterization of some basic ability as it is a concept denoting the simple fact of being put to work—in more or less complex ways. Thus the “value” of a commodity is “equal to” or determined by the amount of work that can be imposed in producing it.

Socially Necessary Labor Time

But how is the “amount” of work measured? Assuming the “intensity” of labor constant, Marx argues that the amount of labor and the corresponding magnitude of value are determined by the time of labor, irrespective of complexity or skill.(19) Not the concrete labor time required to produce a given commodity, in a given production setting, but the average amount, or socially necessary labor time (SNLT) required. Thus, from a capitalist point of view, two commodities produced with the same amount of labor have equal values. They have equal values because their production provides equal opportunities for putting people to work.

With the amount or quantity of value now seen to be determined by the time of labor, Marx turns to the effects on variations in the effectiveness, or productivity (e.g., output per hour), of useful labor.(20) A doubling of productivity, brought about, for instance, through the introduction of machines, or better machines, will cut in half the value of each unit of output, because each unit takes only half the time to produce. Or, the value of each unit of that commodity to capital will be cut in half because producing it provides only half the opportunity for putting people to work.

These results clarify the distinction between the meanings of useful labor and abstract labor—one determines actual production, the other the value of the labor employed to capital as its primary means of social control—and lay the basis for further analysis. In the next section, Marx examines quantitative changes in exchange rates due to changes in productivity. In Chapter 3 on money, he examines how changes in the productivity of labor producing metals used for money are related to changes in prices. In his extensive analysis of technological change in Part IV, Chapters 12-15, he explores how productivity evolves as an aspect of class struggle over the imposition of work and resistance to it.

Section 3: The Value-form or Exchange-Value

Outline of Chapter

(a) The Simple, Isolated, or Accidental Form of Value
(b) The Total or Expanded Form of Value
(c) The General Form of Value
(d) The Money Form of Value

Preliminary Commentary

This frequently neglected section on the form of value, begins with the simplest form—where one good represents the value of another— and ends with the money form, where some historically and socially determined money represents the value of every commodity. Further determinations of the character and roles of money are analyzed in Chapters 2 and 3, which build on the complexities examined in this section.

Marx shows us how, just as use-value receives an expression and existence in the bodily form of the commodity, so too does value receive an independent expression and existence in the form of money. In the Grundrisse, before he had worked out the mode of presentation used in Capital, the understanding of money was a central concern of his studies of value and abstract labor. In the early notebooks comprising the “chapter on money” a great many of the determinations of Chapter 1 are discussed, not as abstract qualities of commodities in general, but directly as determinations of money, the ultimate commodity.(21)

Unfortunately, most Marxists have had little to say about the form of value or the complexities hidden within the money form but revealed in this section. For example, both Paul Sweezy and Ronald Meek, two widely read and influential Marxist economists, focused on the substance and measure of value almost totally ignoring its form. Sweezy's “qualitative value problem” concerns only the qualities of abstract labor and socially necessary labor time and ignores form completely.(22) Meek's commentary on Chapter 1 devotes fifteen pages to the quantitative reduction problem and only one very short paragraph to the form of value (to which Marx devotes 24 pages).(23) He justified this neglect by quoting Engels, who thought all the detail was just about how the emergence of money overcame the inefficiencies of barter exchange.

This neglect, however, is quite inexcusable. Not only does this section reveal many subtle aspects of exchange and money, but because both are elements of the class relationship, these same aspects can be discovered throughout the social relationships of capitalism.

(a) The Simple, Isolated, or Accidental Form of Value

Outline of Marx’s Analysis

Commodities’ character as value is purely social
– that character appears in the social relation of exchange
– commonly recognized value-form is the money form
– objective: reveal, through analysis, what lies within the money form
– simple form: xA = yB, e.g., 20 yards of linen = 1 coat

– relative form: value of xA is expressed by yB
– equivalent form: yB

– expresses the value of xA,
– is form of existence of the value of xA
– is material embodiment of the value of xA

– most focus on quantities, xM and y, but …
– quantitative equality requires a common quantum, i.e., value
– exchange gives value a form distinct from use-value
– 20 yds linen = 1 coat implies equation of weaving with tailoring

– what is equal in the two kinds of labor is...
– their common quality of being human labor in general

– labor creates value, but is not value

– becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form, a materially different thing
– so, in exchange, the coat (in equivalent form) represents more than it does alone

– in exchange, yB becomes a mirror for the value of xA

– i.e., yB reflexively mediates A’s relation to its value

– x and y, the quantities of A and B, change with productivity

– changes in productivity in production of A, changes value per unit

– which changes amount y of B required to represent the value of A

– changes in productivity in production of B also changes required y

Commentary

Marx devotes more words to presenting his analysis of the simple form of value than to any of the other forms, including that of money. The reason for this he explained to Engels in 1867. “The simplest commodity-form,” he wrote, “contains the whole secret of the money form and with it in embryo, of all the bourgeois forms of the product of labor.” (24) Through the exchange of some quantity x of commodity A for some quantity y of commodity B, or

the value of commodity A finds an independent expression and a concrete manifestation in commodity B. This simple, or elementary, exchange relation is also called accidental because it is accidental which commodity expresses the value of another. This relationship, although pictured above in the form of an equation, is not a mathematical, reversible equation. Marx is careful to explain that the equals sign is short for is worth. As it is written, xA = yB says that xA is worth yB meaning that yB expresses the value of xA. To obtain an expression of the worth of yB, the relationship must be rewritten as yB = xA, i.e., yB is worth xA, where now xA expresses the value of yB. Most of the analysis of this section consists of analyzing the meanings of this relation.

Marx first deals with the qualitative aspects of this relation, ignoring the quantitative constants x and y. He formalizes the unsymmetrical nature of the expression by analyzing the two forms within the simple form: the relative form and the equivalent form.

In the exchange xA = yB, Marx calls commodity A the relative value form because its value is expressed in, and relative to, commodity B. He calls commodity B the equivalent form because it serves as the material equivalent for the value of commodity A. In other words, commodity A gets its value expressed, while (the corporeal use-value of) commodity B provides a phenomenal expression of the value of A. Therefore, when the value of commodity B is expressed by xA in yB = xA, then B has the relative form and A the equivalent form.

As with the relationship between use-value and exchange-value, we find an opposition and a unity. We have an opposition because the relative value form and the equivalent form exist as two opposed, contradictory poles. We have unity in the sense that they are “mutually dependent and inseparable.” A only has the relative form if it has an equivalent B; B is only an equivalent when expressing the value of some other A. The two expressions represent the two sides of an actual exchange process. When a commodity is brought to market its owner only finds out what it is worth by exchanging it. The commodity acquired is accepted as the equivalent of the value of the commodity given up.(25)

As with use-value and exchange-value, this unity of opposites has the form of the class struggle: two opposed perspectives and forces bound in one contradictory totality. This is obvious in the case where the commodity brought to market is the labor-power of workers. When they sell their labor-power to capital, it has the relative form and the value received (the wage or other income) has the equivalent form. An examination of each of these forms—in this chapter carried out only with respect to the exchange of random commodities—further clarifies this kind of relationship.

The Relative Form of Value

Why is it value that is being expressed by B and not something else? Because the only thing commodity B has in common with A that matters to capital is value, i.e., the value of being products of labor-in-general, of being vehicles for the imposition of work and social control. It is in this sense, within the framework of capitalism, that commodity A achieves an independent expression of its value to capital in B. In a simple exchange of “use-values” between friends, outside of any capitalist market, no such common value need exist or be postulated.(26) For example, I prepare and serve you a meal (an objectivization of some of my skills); you reward me with a smile and a request for second helping. There is no basis—common value—for equivalence in such a case. (27)

But in capitalism, where the value of things to capital is measured by the amount of work that can be imposed in their production, Marx points out that these relations between the two commodities necessarily represent the relations between the labor contained in them. The equation of the two products of labor distinguishes the substance of their value—abstract labor—from the useful labors that produced them as distinct commodities. The exchange equation expresses the reduction of the various kinds of useful labor to abstract labor, the common value to capital of all kinds of labor that produce commodities.

His analysis of the quantitative aspect of the relative form of value, having established that the only way magnitude can be expressed relatively is in terms of the same quantum of quality, shows how the quantity of the value of one commodity, A, can be expressed by a quantity of another, B. Inevitably, the expression of value will vary with changes in the productivity of either commodity A or commodity B. Earlier, in Section 1, we saw the impact of variations in productivity during the analysis of socially necessary labor time and in Section 2 we saw how this was grounded in changes in useful labor, while abstract labor remained constant. If the intensity of labor is constant, an increase in the productivity of the labor required to produce some good, A, implies a drop in the socially necessary labor time per unit and a reduction in its per unit value. As more use-values embody the same total value, each unit embodies less. In this section, we see the implications for the simple form of value and the quantitative expression, yB, of changes in the value of commodity xA.

If the productivity of the labor producing commodity A rises, so that its per unit value falls, and if the productivity in the production of B has not changed, then a decreased amount y of the equivalent commodity B will be sufficient to express the value of xA. If the productivity of the useful labor producing B rises, reducing its value per unit, while that producing A remains constant, then there must be an increase in the amount y of B expressing the value of xA. If the productivity of both change, then the quantitative variation can be calculated by taking both effects into account. This illustrates a further reason why the relative value form is called relative. The relative value of commodity A can change (because of a change in the value of commodity B), although its value (in terms of socially necessary labor time) remains the same. Or, its relative value can remain the same, even if the value of A changes.

The Equivalent Form and Reflexivity

When we say that B expresses the value of A, we are speaking of a relation of mediation known as reflection. In this kind of mediation, one thing (in this case, commodity A) is related to an aspect of itself (value) through another thing (in this case, commodity B). Familiar examples of this kind of mediation are how we all come to know our image through a mirror, or aspects of ourselves (from image to abilities) through the comments of others. (28)In speaking of how the equivalent performs such a service, Marx says: “In order to act as such a mirror of value, tailoring itself [producing commodity B, the coat] must reflect nothing apart from its own abstract quality of being human labor.” (29) In a footnote, Marx notes that Hegel called this kind of relation “determinations of reflection” [Reflexionsbestimmungen].” (30) In the first German edition of Capital, Marx wrote: “Its [coat's] status as an equivalent is [so to speak] only a reflexion-determination of linen.”(31) Also, “the relative value-form of a commodity is mediated; namely through its relationship to another commodity.”(32) In other words, commodity A can come explicitly into relation to itself as value only through the mediation of another commodity (B) expressing a single aspect of commodity A. We can represent this relation of reflective mediation as:

As with two randomly exchanged commodities, this relationship of reflective mediation is also an aspect of the commodity-form of the class relation. Individuals and capital stand as oppose poles just like the relative and equivalent value-forms. Just as the relative value-form finds its meaning only in the equivalent form, so too do individuals recognize themselves as workers only through their relation to their employers. It is not just a matter of perception. Within capitalism individuals can only exist as workers, and collectively constitute a working class, within that relation. Put in the language above, the mass of workers has their joint condition as working class reflected to them through capital acting as a mirror which mediates this recognition. In this way, the class gains both definition and self-recognition. This is true both in terms of class-in-itself, in which all workers have in common is the exchange of their labor-power for income, and in terms of class-for-itself in which workers discover their unity through struggle. Just as the equivalent form brings out and expresses a unique quality in other commodities, value, so too does capital reflect a unique quality of people, their labor-power, or their ability and willingness to be put to work. Inversely, those with money can only be capitalists when they are able to hire people and put them to work. But the relation is not parallel. People can break out of this reciprocal relationship—rejecting and smashing the mirror—and remain people, complete with all their skills, now freed to build new worlds. Whereas if we deprive capital (or capitalists, the functionaries of capital-as-social-relation) of its ability to impose work on us, it loses its control over us and with it, its ability to organize society, leaving the rest of us free to experiment with new modes of self-organization.

The analysis, so far, shows us how all the elements which we have analyzed—use-value, exchange-value, abstract labor, socially necessary labor time, and so on—are combined in their elementary interrelationships in this simple value form. In the expanded, general, and money forms which follow, further determinations are taken into account to achieve a more complete and more complex expression of value.

The Insufficiency of the Simple Form and the Transition to the Expanded Form

While the simple form gives the value of A an independent expression in B, there is nevertheless a contradiction between this form and the nature of value. This is the “insufficiency” of the simple form of value. The simple form fails to represent “A's qualitative equality with all other commodities and its quantitative proportionality to them.”(34) Why should it? The reason lies in his previous analysis of value. In Section 1, he designated the substance of value as abstract labor. Abstract labor, in turn, denotes the peculiar character of all concrete forms of useful labor as serving capital as its primary mode of organizing its control over society. In Section 2, socially necessary labor time was based on averages across the whole commodity-producing society. Now, if the substance and measure of value reflect this universality of the commodity-form, then so too must the phenomenal form of value. The value-form must represent these interconnections among all commodities. His exposition of his analysis of the value-form progresses in this direction.

(b) The Total or Expanded Form of Value

If, in the elementary form, A finds its expression in one other commodity, B, and if, furthermore, the B chosen is accidental, then any commodity could be so chosen. “The number of such possible expressions,” Marx writes, [of the value of A] “is limited only by the number of different kinds of commodities distinct from it.”(35) This is why the second form of value, the expanded form of commodity A's value, consists of “an indefinitely expandable series of different simple expressions of that value.”(36) In this way, the immediate contradiction between the individual representation of A's value and the multiplicity of commodities (universality of value) is resolved. This new form, a more complete expression of value, can be represented in the following manner.

The relation of reflection, by which the relative value of A is given independent expression through a particular equivalent, is now multiplied. “Every other commodity now becomes a mirror of linen's value. (37)” This is why Marx calls the relative form “expanded.” The equivalent form remains particular in the sense that, although there is an endless list of equivalents, each is a particular expression of A's relative value. In this way, the various kinds of useful labor that produced all these commodities are expressed as equal through the interrelation of the products.

Each of these many expressions of the value of A has the characteristics of the simple value form: the polarity between relative and equivalent forms, the unity of opposites, reflectiveness, and so on. In this way, the more complete form preserves the previous form containing all the latter's relations to the class struggle. What analysis of this expanded form reveals, however, is much more than a mere list of possibilities.

The importance of this new form lies in its comprehensiveness. Because all commodities are involved, accidentality disappears. The form provides a representation of the totality of generalized commodity production under capitalism. By including the production of all commodities, not just of things and services but also of labor-power, the representation expresses much of capital’s social totality.(38)

Because the number of expressions of value is limited only by the number of commodities, for which there is no theoretical limit, the form also expresses capital’s tendency to expand infinitely. It seeks to constantly expand its way of organizing society, forever bringing more and more people, activities, and materials, under its control by forcing them to become elements of the production of commodities. This tendency toward infinite extension is not provoked “from the outside.” Capitalist social relationships generate, through their mutual antagonism, their own self-expansion, only one part of which is the expansion of the commodity world. Those antagonistic social relationships— especially the struggles of workers—force capitalists to seek out and invest in new sources of all the elements that make it up. Whether we are speaking of its expansion internationally, as different parts of the world are brought into the orbit of its imposition of social control through work, or of its expansion into all sectors of production, or of its expansion into all aspects of the reproduction of labor-power, in each case the new “areas” of control are not mere additions. They grow out of dynamics internal to the class struggle and constitute moments of reorganization as capital tries to retain or expand overall control.

In Marx’s time, that tendency was manifested not only in the commodification of everyday life, but also in colonialism, as capitalists in countries such as Britain, France and Holland built empires, annexing ever greater numbers of people, their lands, “resources” and activities throughout the world. This tendency of capitalism toward infinity, moreover, does not merely involve adding something new to existing social orders, it has always been one of subsuming them, of transforming them into moments of existing relationships. Controlling the cheap and often slave labor employed in raw material production in colonies facilitated control of workers in English factories. These dynamics continue in the form of vertical integration in industry, outsourcing and immigration to pit foreign cheap labor against more expensive local labor. In this way capitalism is also totalizing; in the language of contemporary literary criticism, it seeks to impose its own narrative on the world.(39)

Today, we can recognize this tendency in both neo-liberal globalization and in the ever-multiplying number of commodities imposed upon us. We can also recognize it in the privatization of space exploration and colonization. In the United States, NASA has been turning over ever more of its programs to private corporations such as SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Corporations already own and operate satellites and are preparing to build and operate space shuttles and orbital hotels for wealthy tourists. As many science fiction writers have long foreseen, unchecked capitalism will expand throughout the solar system and, if possible, bring its nightmarish form of society to the stars. The expanded form expresses this tendency toward infinite expansion. In more optimistic sci-fi, such as Star Trek, we figure out how to get rid of capitalism and expand into the universe largely free of its constraints.(40)

Unfortunately for capital, however, the realization of its efforts to find ever more opportunities to impose work requires the mobilization of workers’ (our) imagination and creativity. As Marx discusses in later chapters, living labor—our activity—is the only source of innovation and change within capitalism. Inevitably, despite capital’s efforts to constrain and harness that power for its own purposes, we, both individually and collectively, discover our own kind of infinity—that of the potentially infinite possibilities for living realizable only through freedom from the constraints of capitalism. In the very movement whereby capital multiplies a world of proliferating commodities, we discover vast potential beyond capital itself, which tries to restrict our possibilities to those in its own interest.

Defects of the Expanded Form

Although this form gives us a more complete representation of value, by making the interrelationship among all commodities explicit, Marx points out why even this form is inadequate. He lists its defects. First from the point of view of the relative value form, the series of equations representing the relative expression of value is interminable, a pieced-together mosaic of independent expressions; there is no common representation of value which would express its universality. And then, from the point of view of the equivalent form, because we have particular equivalents, we have a series of unrelated, fragmentary equivalent forms, the labor embodied in each equivalent thus appears only as particular not general, or abstract labor. Abstract labor, therefore, is only manifested through the totality of its particular forms, but that totality is an ever-incomplete series lacking internal unity.

In short, an adequate expression of value must represent the interaction of all the (potentially infinite) commodities capital succeeds in forcing us to produce, but in a way that expresses their common character. In the expanded form the common substance of abstract labor remains unexpressed because we have no unique or common expression for the value of each commodity. This critique by Marx of the expanded form is similar to Hegel's critique of the bad infinity—also an unlinked, interminable series.

(c) The General Form of Value

The answer to the defect of the expanded form is implicit in that form. While the expanded form appears as a natural extension of the simple form, because the equivalent chosen in the simple form is arbitrary, the general form emerges from a reversal in perspective. When A is exchanged against B, C, D, those commodities express the value of A. But it is also true that B, C, D and so on are being exchanged for A. Consequently, A, viewed as equivalent, expresses the value of B, C and D, etc. This gives a common expression for the value of all commodities, namely xA. We now have a potentially infinite list, but one that is no longer fragmentary because all commodities are linked through a common or general expression of value in A.

For each commodity, the expression of its value takes place in its exchange with another commodity, yB = xA, but when the equivalent is the same for all, the form taken as a whole is unified. A unique aspect of all commodities, value now has a unique representative. By being equated to this single representative, the value of any commodity is not only distinguished from its bodily use-value, but its representation also expresses what it has in common with all other commodities.

This form is general, or universal, in all its parts. The relative form of any given commodity is universal “because it is the relative value-form of all other commodities at the same time.”(43) The equivalent form is universal because the equivalent has become the unique form of appearance of value for all commodities. Because of this, the labor producing it “acquires as a result a general social form, the form of equality with all other kinds of labor . . . the general form of appearance of undifferentiated human labor” or abstract labor.(44) That abstraction from concrete specificity within capitalism makes the universal equivalent the embodiment and symbol of the core class relationship: the imposition of work as the fundamental vehicle for the organization of society.

Within this general form, the internal contradictions characteristic of the earlier forms still obtain. The irreversible and contradictory polarity and reflectiveness of the simple form, the totalizing and infinite aspects of the expanded form, all remain characteristics of the general form. But now something new appears. Because the universal equivalent has acquired the character of direct exchangeability with every other commodity, all other commodities have lost that quality. They are longer exchanged for each other but must first be exchanged for the universal equivalent.

This observation highlights a fundamental aspect of the general form—namely, as the equivalent form becomes the universal equivalent for the value of all other commodities, it also becomes the universal mediator between them all. Earlier, we saw how individual commodities related to their own value through the mediation of an equivalent (through reflection). We now see how reflexive mediation, as a characteristic of the general form, is part of another kind of mediation played by the universal equivalent: “All commodities by mirroring themselves in one and the same commodity as quantities of value, reflect themselves reciprocally as quantities of value.”(45) Reciprocal reflection, but mediated through the universal equivalent. (46)That equivalent has become a mediator for the expression of value of each commodity and for the relation of all commodities to each other as values.

This second form of mediation between two distinct commodities is syllogistic mediation. In a syllogism, two distinct entities are related via a third.(47) The universal equivalent, xA, mediates the relationship between yB and wC.

Expressing the value of each individual commodity, the universal mediator binds them together. It explicitly incorporates each individual commodity into the universal value relation. By having a common expression of value, the otherwise disparate exchanges become parts of an interconnected commodity world. The series grows, potentially infinitely. But that infinity is no longer a tiresome mosaic of separate elements. Like Hegel’s “good infinity”, the capitalist commodity world is now expressed as an integrated and united whole in which the repeated appearance of new commodities no longer means only the creation of new finites, but the continuation of a tendentially infinite process.

Syllogistic mediation plays a fundamental role, not only in how capital organizes the world of commodities but in how it organizes its control over workers. Just as the universal equivalent mediates between all commodities, capital trys to mediate all relations in the social factory, between workers producing commodities, between producers and consumers, between parents and children, between teachers and students, between spouses, between ethnicities, races, age groups and genders, between locals and immigrants, and so on.

But what does it mean to say that capital intervenes as a mediating force everywhere? We have already seen how capital imposes money as universal, mediating equivalent. (More on this in the next section.) We have also seen how it uses the state, e.g., troops for enclosure, property laws and police to impose the commodity-form, maximum or minimum wage laws, and so on. Seeing how some of us are organized to mediate capital’s relations with others is often less obvious. In RCP, I illustrated this kind of mediation with several examples: in the relations between the waged, in those between waged men and unwaged women, between teachers and students and between domestic and immigrant workers. In each case, capital sets up a hierarchy, of higher waged over lower waged, waged men over unwaged women, waged teachers over unwaged students, and domestic workers over immigrants. Through these hierarchies it seeks to pit us against one another and use some of us to manage others—both by imposing work on those ranked lower and by absorbing the ire of those imposed upon. To reinforce these mediations, capital also makes use of racial, gender, ethnic, religious or national differences among workers. So, in a place like Texas, local Anglo workers tend to be higher paid and hold managerial positions vis-à-vis lower paid black or Mexican-American workers.

Understanding this kind of mediation in the class struggle not only helps illuminate its complexity, but also suggests how we can take the initiative to rupture and destroy it, forcing a recomposition of class relations. This happens when we refuse the mediation and bypass it. In industry, in wildcat strikes rank & file workers organize autonomously and bypass both foremen and trade union officials to confront employers directly. In education, when university students occupy an administration building, demanding an end to school complicity with war, or a termination of cuts to programs important to them, they are bypassing the mediation of professors and directly confronting the administrators of capital’s edu-factories. When students in K-12 schools walk out—as they did during the “Si, se puede!” immigrant rights marches in the Spring of 2006 and in March 2018 during the National School Walkout, in the wake of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—they are bypassing both teachers and administrators. Today, “Dreamers”, threatened by Trump’s efforts to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and by resurgent racism and nativism, school children, threatened by repeated mass shootings, and black youth, threatened by police murders of unarmed civilians, are also on the march. In echoes of the Civil Rights Movement, they are all bypassing local mediations and demanding security from deportation, from the profit-hungry arms industry and from racist police through changes in laws both local and national. In the great “Women’s Marches” of 2017–2019, millions of women have acted collectively, bypassing all of capital’s mediations.(48)

These mediations can also be broken as well as bypassed. That happens when they result in such harsh conflict as to no longer function as intended. University students generally carry their struggles directly to the administration or beyond. But in K-12 schools, student refusal of discipline rarely bypasses teachers to strike directly at administrators—as in the walkouts in 2006 and 2018. Instead, anger flares against teachers, sometimes to such a degree that the latter cannot retain control. This has spurred the proliferation of teacher unions, changing the relationship between administrators and teachers. Acting in federations, mobilizing at the level of the state, they make demands for collective instead of individual bargaining over salaries and conditions of work. The work of having to impose discipline in an increasingly rebellious classroom is the equivalent of speed-up on an assembly line—it increases the intensity of the workday and the requirements for reproducing labor-power. In these circumstances, militant teacher unions are creating a whole new alignment of power in education. Faced with teacher refusal to try to impose discipline in dangerous situations, school administrations and city governments are being forced to pay higher wages, to bring in security guards, metal detectors and police, so on.

At the same time, such developments raise serious problems for working-class strategy. How can this growing power of students and teachers be organized so that it is directed more against capital than against each other? The autonomous power of students has forced the creation of a new level of autonomous organization and power among teachers—a recomposition of class relations. But as long as the dynamic and direction of these developments are not understood, there is the danger of ultimate collapse and defeat.

In universities we have seen such dangers. In the Sixties, the antiwar struggles of students forced a recomposition of the teaching staff that included a new generation of radicals and new fields of study initially aimed at supporting further protest, e.g., Black Studies, Mexican-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Peace Studies. The changes undermined the ability of higher education to discipline, plan, and organize the supply of labor. But the insurgent spirit that created those new programs has been constantly undermined by both the usual neutralizing institutional measures, e.g., competition for funding and promotion,(49) and by outside attacks by conservative forces, e.g., the National Association of Scholars or, more recently, Turning Point USA. In the same period, student pressures undermined grade tracking, generating grade inflation. But as a result, experiments are underway to find other modes of judging the ability and willingness of students to work. All these developments have led to the current attempt by capital to reimpose work discipline in the schools through fiscal crisis, and a nationwide restructuring of education. Such a restructuring necessarily involves attempts to find new kinds of mediation to replace those which student and teacher/professors’ struggles have rendered less reliable. Being clear about mediation can help in discovering vulnerabilities and modes of subversion. Recognizing the dynamics of mediation can facilitate their refusal and defeat, as when students join teacher strikes, seen lately in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and Los Angeles. (50)

Ultimately, we must destroy the divisions and intra-class antagonisms which capital imposes. But while students and professors may struggle against administrator plans, or men and women, whites and black, locals and immigrants seek ways to destroy the mediations, solutions are never so simple as “unite and fight.” As I argued in the section on abstract labor, the divisions are real and hierarchical; they are power divisions, and collaboration requires a power struggle not only of different segments of the working class against capital but also, at times, between those segments. Our problem of political organization is how to develop our intra-class struggles, not as a circular firing squad, but in ways that strengthen all of us.

(d) The Money Form of Value

The transition from the general form to the money form is much simpler than the previous transitions. The money form differs from the general form only in so far as the universal equivalent has become fixed by social custom into some one commodity. Once this happens, the universal equivalent functions as money and we have the money form.

The money form is the total relationship,

and must be differentiated from money which, in this case, is gold. This money form contains all the determinations of the prior forms. It has the contradictory unity and reflective relations between the relative form and the equivalent form brought out in the simple form. It has the totality and infinitude brought out in the expanded form and welded together in the general form. And it has the mediated character of the general form. Like capital, then, the money form is contradictory, reflexive, totalizing, infinite, and mediated.

Marx’s whole analysis in this first chapter has been leading to the money form. We can now reverse the process and reassess each step as elements of a theory of money. Money is partly defined as a universal equivalent, not simply one element of this totality but expressing this totality. Money is one commodity among many, and the unique general expression of their value to capital as vehicles for the imposition of work. Money, by expressing all commodities as values, expresses the domain of capital—the social relations which turn use-values into commodities. As a moment in the money form, money is a moment of the whole of capitalism. If capital is most basically the social relations of the commodity-form (of which the commodity world is a part), then money is the quintessential expression of the commodity-form itself. In capitalist society, to have a coin in the hand is to have a golden drop of that society itself. Look deeply into that coin, as you might with a crystal ball, and behind its golden luster, which has stopped many an eye, you discover the blood and sweat of the class struggle.

When we look back at the roles of the equivalent form in the various relations we have examined, we now know we were looking at the roles of money. For example, money stands as equivalent in contradictory unity with labor-power. It does the same with all other commodities and, by so doing, shows them (through reflection) their character as values, and thus as parts of capital. The tendency for capital to expand infinitely is partly the tendency to turn social relations into money relations, that is, to convert all use-values into values by utilizing their production as a means of social control and by setting them equal to money. Money becomes the magic wand by which capital incorporates both old and new elements of the world into itself.

To set an object equal to money is to give it a price. Thus, the price form is a sub-form of the money form, in which any

But the price-form never stands alone. It is part of the money form. Setting any commodity equal to some quantity of money, by giving it a price, instantly ties it into the whole world of capital.(51) How? By setting a price, it is affirmed that this use-value, having been produced by useful labor of some sort, is only one special product of that universal tool of capital's control: work. Setting an object equal to money sets it equal to all other commodities and equates the labor which produced it to all other labor, affirms its common usefulness to capital as means of social control. (We ignore, as Marx does, cases where prices are set on things that are not the products of labor, e.g., unworked land.) It makes no difference whether the quantity of embodied labor is socially necessary or not—as we have seen earlier, this is often not the case. The qualitative equality of work has been affirmed and the quantity set socially. Money shows to the commodity its value for capital, i.e., the usefulness of the labor that produced it as a vehicle for controlling society.

Money not only equates all commodities as products of labor but also stands as the universal mediator between all these different elements of capital. In the exchange of labor-power for money, money mediates its owner’s relation to capital, not only to direct employers but to other workers and to all commodities. The money wage, M, is one way in which capital, K, mediates its relation to our labor-power, LP: K – M – LP. There are many others, as we saw in the preceding section, but the money wage is the most common and most revealing. As such it also establishes the importance of the unwaged relation to capital.

As we have seen, unwaged relations may be mediated in a variety of ways, e.g., men mediating the relation of their unwaged wives or professors mediating that of students to capital. All workers, waged and unwaged, must obtain the means of subsistence, but not always directly through wages. School children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor-power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but most receive no direct money payment. As unwaged housewives are supported by the resources (money) obtained by a waged husband, so children are supported by one or more waged parent. The relation with capital is mediated directly for whoever is paid a money wage, but that person mediates for unwaged family members. In these circumstances, the ways those at home work for capital is hidden by the absence of direct money payment. (52)

This brings out an important consideration about money that is often overlooked—namely, that for money to play the role of mediator or universal equivalent, there must be many relations where it does not mediate directly. The place in Capital where Marx makes this clearest is in his analysis—in Chapter 25—of the waged and unwaged. For capital to be able to use the money wage to mediate its relation to waged workers, it must maintain a reserve army of unwaged workers as a check on the power of the former. But to say that there must always be such an army is to say that money is the universal mediator in a peculiar way. Ultimately, everyone must get commodities to survive, but not necessarily through their personal command of a wage. Money, however, remains the universal mediator because it even defines its absence. The unwaged are defined with deference to the waged—defined by their lack of control over some money. Unwaged spouses and children may not receive money directly from capital, but they either receive some through the waged member of the household or receive what money buys—what they lack is control over the money supporting them, buying their food, etc. This is exactly why the struggle of the unwaged has often been for wages, not because they want to expand capital's dominion—they already suffer that—but to gain greater powers of self-determination. This was the objective of the Wages for Housework Campaign.(53)

The maintenance of non-monied, or unwaged, relations are important to capital in many ways. The image of the milling crowd at the factory gates begging for jobs or protesting their absence is one traditional but limited vision. To it we must add unwaged students, women, and street dwellers in the developed world. But, as we saw in the analysis of primitive accumulation, the case of the Global South is even more dramatic. Through colonialism, capital created and maintained vast, partially self-supporting global reserves of unwaged labor-power—a world-wide reserve army. Despite the defeat of most formal colonial empires, poverty continues to be the tool by which vast millions are kept alive but (capitalists hope) available when needed. These reserves are drawn upon either for immigration into areas where their cheap labor can be used to hold down the wage demands of more powerful workers (e.g., Mexican and Caribbean labor in the U.S.; Mediterranean, East European and African workers in Western Europe) or for employment in their own areas when runaway shops seek out their cheap, and often politically repressed, labor locally. Of course, time and again things have not worked out so well and the struggles of the unwaged have often made them unprofitable for capital's factories.

That money is a mediator—interposed between capital and the working class—means two things. First, for workers, attacks on capital can both use and refuse this mediation, exactly as women and students have used and bypassed men and professors, respectively. In strikes, workers refuse the wage mediation and attack capital directly with refusal of work, sabotage, factory seizure, and so on. So too, direct appropriation involves the refusal of capital’s prices of other commodities, e.g., changing labels in a supermarket, using free slugs instead of purchased tokens in the subway, or the total elimination of price through shoplifting, sneaking into movie theatres, employee theft, or collective Black Christmases where commodities are seized.(54) It involves the self-reduction or bypassing of utility or housing prices, e.g., collective refusal to pay, illegally taping electrical lines or gas pipes, squatting abandoned buildings.(55) This refusal of price is a refusal of capital's rules of the game. Refusing to accept the role of money amounts to the refusal to accept everything we have seen going into the determination of money—the whole set of value relations. This is a working-class perspective with a vengeance.

The only question one might ask is whether it makes any difference that today gold has been largely demonetized and replaced by paper and bank accounts. Marx shows in Chapter 3 that it does not; I return to this question in my commentary on that chapter.

Howsoever capital manipulates money, whether through corporations, national governments, or international agreement, it should now be clear that the actual object of the manipulations is the value relation between workers and capital. We have seen the complex way money expresses this class relation and the complex roles it plays at the heart of that relation. Many roles and institutions of money are not analyzed in Chapter 1, but the analysis of the universal equivalent in the money form and the price form has given us some fundamental and basic insights into the role of money as medium of circulation and as mediator between the classes. It permits us to see, if not the details, at least the basic character of money in every period of class struggle.

Section 4: The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret

Outline of Marx’s Analysis

Commodities seem simple but are very strange, enigmatic things
– not as sensuous use-values, not as products of useful labor
– but as values, as products of abstract labor
– such that the relationships between their producers “take on the form of a social relation between the products of labor”
Thus fetishism,
– where social relations among producers assume “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
– akin to religion where “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures”
– attaches itself to products of labor
– social relations among producers exist only through the mediation of exchange
Its secret,
– producers see only the relationship between objects that are exchanged
– but equating different products in exchange, equates different kinds of labor
– thus, fetishism hides value, or, the value hidden within the commodity form
– commodities become social hieroglyphs that must be deciphered
Value,
– deciphering becomes possible through the quantitative equality revealed in the exchange of commodities
– at first random, but eventually “firmly established” through repeated exchanges
– amidst fluctuations, socially necessary labor time “asserts itself”
– determination of the magnitude of value by labor time is therefore “a secret” hidden under random fluctuations
– analysis of prices led to determination of the magnitude of value
– analysis of their common expression in money led to the establishment of their character as values
– but the money form conceals the social character of an individual’s labor
Social character of private labor,
– hidden in capitalism
– in plain view in Robinson Crusoe, in feudal society, in associations of free men
– in all these cases, social relations are not disguised as social relations between things.
Classical political economy,
– analyzed value and its magnitude, but...
– never clearly differentiated between “labor as it appears in the value of a product” and “labor as it appears in the product’s use-value”
– never asked why labor is expressed in value, why labor time is expressed in the magnitude of value
– never saw that purely quantitative distinctions presuppose their qualitative unity, “reduction to abstract human labor”
– never succeeded “in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value”

Commentary

This fourth section has a strange relationship with the three sections that precede it. Whereas those three exposit a theory of the value of labor to capital and explore many of its aspects, the arguments in this section critique what has just been laid out for failing to explicitly situate commodities as moments of a set of social relationships. Although throughout this section Marx refers only to the social relationships of commodity producing society, he also makes clear that the only fully developed one is capitalism. (56)

There are two main points to this section. The first identifies fetishism, or how omnipresent commodity exchange hides the social relationships that have generated that phenomenon. The second, partly through lengthy footnotes, illustrates this fetishism by pointing to how poorly economists have seen through it, remaining stuck at the analysis of the relationships among things. By failing to perceive how the interactions among things have been determined by the social relationships that produced them and they have never been able to understand “value” in terms of those social relationships.

Fetishism

In my experience of teaching, I have found that for most students, their only notion of fetishism has been limited to that of a sexual fetish, i.e., some body part or thing upon which people have a sexual fixation—thus missing the idea of something hidden behind the fetish. Because of this limitation, I have often used the example of Chinese foot fetishism as an illustration of the kind of thing Marx discusses with respect to commodities. In that particularly obnoxious case, the subordination and domination of Chinese women, achieved through the painful breaking and binding of their feet—often inflicted by their mothers —was camouflaged by making those crippled feet into supposedly desirable, sexually stimulating objects. Indeed, specialized shoes were sometimes constructed, covered with sexually evocative imagery, diverting attention from the real social relationship of domination to that of sexual excitation. (57) Marx’s own choice—religion—to illustrate fetishism posed several problems for my students.

In “the misty realm” of religion, Marx argues, “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.” (58) Where is the fetishism? In the way the preoccupation of religious people with their gods (or, for Deists, their God) blinds them to how their imagined deities are indeed “the products of the human brain”. This analysis amounts to what is sometimes called a “projection” theory of religion. Marx was neither the first to embrace such a theory—he was preceded by both conservative thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and David Hume (1711–1776) and radical ones such as Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) —nor the last, as we find similar concepts in the work of Nietzsche and in modern psychology where interest in “projection” has shifted from a preoccupation with religion to one with interpersonal relationships, e.g., individuals who project their own traits onto the behavior of others, whether those traits be desirable or not.(59)

My students’ problems with Marx’s theory of religion included 1) perceiving it as a harsh attack on religion in general, and 2) perceiving it as an attack on their own beliefs. Where gods and goddesses have been incarnations of natural forces or personifications of particular human traits, e.g., Aphrodite or Venus as goddess of beauty, many students found the idea of projection easy enough to grasp, and even accept. But those who believed in a singular, unique God, e.g., those in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, found it much harder to see their God as a projection and personification of human ideas of power, of goodness and of the patriarchal social relations of the societies that birthed those religions.

Perceiving Marx’s theory as an attack on religion in general usually derived not only from the cited passage in Capital, but from his well-known reference to religion as “the opiate of the people” in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843). Marx’s phrase has usually been interpreted as condemning religion for promising an illusory “pie up in the sky, after you die” and distracting workers from struggle against their exploiters in the here and now. Today, during an opioid-addiction epidemic, where the primary starting point of addiction has been the use of painkillers, it should be easier to read Marx’s characterization of religion in the spirit of his time. In those days, the primary use of opiates was, as it is today, pain killing. There were, to be sure, “opium eaters”, both in Britain and in China, where the British East India company fought two wars to open the country to its opium. But far more common was the use of morphine (extracted from opium) and of laudanum (opium prepared in an alcoholic solution) as pain killers. Within both that historical context, and within the current epidemic, to call religion an “opiate of the people” appears less of a condemnation and more as simple commentary on how the pains of day-to-day existence are, to some degree, alleviated by religious faith.

With commodity fetishism, Marx argues, relationships between producers “take on the form of a social relation between the products of labor”. In other words, people see only that mass of commodities, evoked at the beginning of the chapter, being produced by a diverse array of producers, and not the social relationships they embody. This is an everyday experience, as we are bombarded by advertisements touting this or that commodity. As a result, most people only relate to other producers through the market, through buying (or ignoring) the products of their labor. Economists too, Marx observes, have been primarily preoccupied with the analysis of market relations where commodities are bought and sold—to the detriment, he argues, of their ability to understand the social dynamics of capitalism.

The Limited Understanding of Economists

With their attention focused on commodity exchange, Marx argues, economists were inexorably drawn to the analysis of the quantitative relationships among commodities, as manifested in their money prices. “It was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities,” he writes, “which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values.”(60) While the classical political economists’ theory of value was based on labor, that theory was soon replaced with “neoclassical economics” whose core was “price theory”, or what is now called “microeconomics”, where market-determined, money price is the only concept of value.(61) Even after the advent of Keynesian “macroeconomics”, however, market prices have remained the only recognized universal measure of value. Fetishism obtains throughout because of the way the money form “conceals the social character of private labor” and the social relations among producers, “instead of revealing them plainly.”

Marx’s assessment of the limited understanding of classical political economists was based on extensive critical study of their writings, beginning in the 1840s, that revealed, he felt, both what they had understood and what they failed to comprehend. By 1863, four years before publishing Capital, he had filled some 23 notebooks, over a thousand pages, with extensive commentary on the writings of political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Originally intended as Volume IV of Capital, some of that critical material was included in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy but most was eventually compiled and published after his death in the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value. What you find in this section of Chapter 1 is therefore a very abbreviated set of critical comments based on that research.

In those comments, Marx highlights what he considers the fundamental limitation of even the best analyses of the classical political economists.

As regards value in general, classical political economy in fact nowhere distinguishes explicitly and with a clear awareness between labor as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labor as it appears in the product’s use-value . . . It does not occur to the economists that a purely quantitative distinction between the kinds of labor presupposes their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labor.(62)

In Section 2, Marx considered this distinction “the pivot on which a clear comprehension of Political Economy turns.” He considered his discovery of this distinction and his working out of its implications, not only for the critique of classical political economy but for his own theory, essential. He once wrote to Engels that one of the “best points in my book” was “the two-fold character of labor, according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value.”(63)

He also claims that “one of the chief failings of classical political economy” was its inability to discover “the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value.” Not only did Smith and Ricardo treat the form of value as “something of indifference” but by treating capitalism as “the eternal natural form of social production” they overlooked “the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc.”(64) This blindness to historical specificity has plagued economics ever since. Whether looking back at history or at the current conjuncture, economists tend to deploy the same a-historical theory in their analysis.

In a final point, let us note Marx’s critique of economists’ efforts to include “nature” in the determination of exchange-value. He writes, “The degree to which some economists are misled by fetishism . . . is shown, among other things by the dull and tedious dispute over the part played by nature in the formation of exchange-value.”(65) Because, he argues, “exchange-value is a definite social manner of expressing the labor bestowed on a thing, it can have no . . . natural content”. As he pointed out in Section 2, labor mediates humans’ relationship to nature, but his theory of value is a social theory of that mediation, not, as the economists would have it, a theory that sees labor as one input into production and “nature” (in whatever form) another input. In formulations such as the production function Q = f(K, L, N), economists only achieve the homogeneity of both inputs (K, L, N) and output Q, necessary to the utilization of such equations, by measuring everything in terms of exchange-value (money), thus deriving their equations based on an assumption that not only capital and labor, but also “nature” can be measured in such a fashion.

Footnotes

1 In the preface to the first German edition, in which Marx talks about the method he uses in this chapter, he refers to the commodity form as the cell form: "Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labor, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does indeed deal with minutiae, but so similarly does microscopic anatomy." Capital, Vol. I, p. 90.

2 Capital, Vol. II, p 119.

3 The contradictory unity of capital and labor is akin to that of masters and slaves analyzed by Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), New York: Oxford Univer¬sity Press, 1977. There, Hegel argues further that masters require that for slaves to be truly slaves, they must acknowledge and accept their servitude. By that criterion neither Spartacus nor Nat Turner were truly slaves. Through their rebellion, they asserted their autonomy and became more than mere workers. The same is true for those who rebel against capitalist control over their lives.

4 MECW, Vol. 29, p. 285.

5 Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.

6 MECW, Vol. 29, p. 270.

7 MECW, Vol. 32, p. 120.

8 “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen oekonomie”, MECW, Vol. 24, pp. 544–546.

9 In British usage, and in this context, "corn" refers to important cereal crops. In England that was wheat; in Ireland and Scotland oats, in Mexico maize, in China rice.

10 See his book Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (1910), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985

11 In British Imperial weight measures, a quarter of corn = 28 pounds and cwt = hundredweight = four quarters or 112 pounds. In this and other examples of exchange, the equals symbol (=) should be read "is worth" because clearly iron is not the same as corn.

12 The real cost of borrowing derives not merely from interest and fees but often from a whole host of ancillary conditions, including time and conditions of repayment.

13 Such was the case in New York City in 1974 when lenders would rollover loans to the city government only when it accepted to impose austerity on city workers and welfare recipients. See Donna Demac and Philip Mattera, "Developing and Underdeveloping New York: The 'Fiscal Crisis' and the Imposition of Austerity", Zerowork #2, Fall 1977, pp. 113-139.

14 Capital, Vol. I, p. 128. Marx doesn’t consider the possibility of non-equivalent reciprocity, where exchange merely satisfies both participants, with no underlying common property or common measure at all.

15 In the fourth section of this chapter, Marx's social focus is dear when he laments "the dull and tedious dispute [among economists] over the part played by nature in the formation of exchange-value. Because exchange-value is a definite social manner of expressing the labor bestowed on a thing, it can have not more natural content than has, for example, the rate of exchange." p. 176.

16 See, for example, Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (1949), New York Monthly Review Press, 1968; and Ronald Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956.

17 In Capital, like most writers in his day, Marx used the term “man” to designate the human species. When not directly quoting Marx, I use non-sexist alternatives such as humanity or humans.

18 Capital, Vol. I, p. 134.

19 In Chapter 15, Section 3c, he drops the assumption and examines how capital seeks to intensify labor as a means of imposing more work and extracting more value.

20 NB: although in microeconomic models each factor of production has its own productivity (output per unit of input), in Marx’s analysis the focus is on labor productivity because labor is the source of value for capital. Henceforth, unless otherwise specified, all references to changes in productivity are to changes in the productivity of useful labor.

21 Grundrisse, Notebooks I and II.

22 Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, op. cit., pp. 23-40.

23 Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value, op. cit., pp. 173-174. A. Leontiev gives about four pages to the form of value in his Political Economy: A Beginner's Course (1935), San Francisco, CA: Proletarian Publishers, n.d., pp. 64-67 and Isaak Illich Rubin (1886–1937) does only a little better in his Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (1928), Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1972, pp. 115-123. One might be tempted to simply attribute this to an intellectual error, but, as I argued in Reading Capital Politically this neglect of the form of value can be seen as only one manifestation of a much broader failure to confront the question of form throughout the class struggle. See RCP, 2nd edn., pp. 136-13.

24 Mark to Engels, June 22, I867, MECW, Vol. 42, p. 384.

25 Keep in mind that here, as in most of the book, Marx assumes equal exchange, i.e., no cheating, in which one commodity owner would wind up with another commodity of lesser value. Why he makes this assumption becomes clear in his analysis of exploitation in Chapter 7.

26 I put use-value in quotes because outside of capitalism, either before its historical rise, or in a future post-capitalist world, there seems no reason to use this generic term, invented to differentiate values-in-use from value-to-capital, to characterize things we make or ways we help each other. As we struggle for that future world, free of capital, we can also abandon the vocabulary developed to analyze this insane society that we want to leave behind.

27 In non-capitalist systems of reciprocity, it might be natural for the person so gifted to estimate the time and energy that went into preparing said meal in order to reciprocate, more or less in kind, at some point in the future. But such estimations are more likely to be manifestations of the desire to demonstrate roughly equal appreciation, honor or love than of the desire to calculate equal opportunities to impose work.

28 For a detailed analysis of this kind of mediation between humans, see the analysis of l’autrui (the other) in Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (1943), or Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1966).

29 Capital, Vol. I, p. 150.

30 Ibid., p. 149n. This follows Hegel’s analysis of reflection in his Logic, upon which Marx undoubtedly drew—as Ben Fowkes recognizes in an editorial footnote. Hegel’s analysis appears fittingly in the Book of Essence, which is divided into three parts: essence, appearance and actuality. For Hegel, essence is “being coming into mediation with itself through the negativity of itself” (A related to its value thru B). The metaphor of a mirror which Marx uses to discuss the revelation of essence through reflection is used by Hegel: “The word reflection is originally applied, when a ray of light in a straight-line impinging upon the surface of a mirror is thrown back from it.” Or, “reflection or light thrown into itself, constitutes the distinction between essence and immediate being, and is the peculiar characteristic of essence itself” (§112). The existence of essence, however, must be grounded “not in itself but on something else” (§131), not in commodity A but on B. Marx’s analysis is thus very close to Hegel’s and the lecture of the latter can inform the analysis of the former. The fact that Hegel is indulging in an exercise in philosophy while Marx is analyzing the commodity form of the class struggle should not obscure this relationship. It should only keep us on our toes to be able to grasp not only the similarities but also the differences between the two. See Hegels’ Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

31 “The Commodity” (Chapter 1 of the first German edition of Volume I of Capital), in Value: Studies by Karl Marx, translated and edited by Albert Dragstedt, London: New Park Publications, 1976, p. 24.

32 “The Form of Value”, ibid., p. 60.

33 In footnote 22, where Marx evokes Reflexionsbestimmungen, he prepares the ground for this insight by commenting "one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king."

34 Capital, Vol. I, p. 154.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 155.

38 Much, but not all. Left out are all those relations not involving exchange, e.g., the activities of the unwaged.

39 Many theorists of “new social movements” have accused Marx of seeking to impose a totalizing narrative of class on a world full of other complexities, e.g., racial, ethnic and gender discrimination and resistance. The accusation fails to recognize that it was not his narrative but that of capital he was analyzing and critiquing.

40 I say “largely” because the galaxy is still plagued by Ferengi capitalists. Alternatively, as in the two versions of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), (2008), a wiser galactic civilization stops a humanity still enthralled to capitalism in its tracks.

41 Grundrisse, Notebook IV, pp. 408-409.

42 See Hegel's Logic, §94–§95, pp. 137-141.

43 Value: Studies by Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 29.

44 Capital, Vol. I, p. 159.

45 Value: Studies by Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 30.

46 This reciprocity between any two commodities is, in some ways, like that of Hegel's Civil Society. But the mediation of the reciprocal relation through a universal equivalent is different from Hegel's concept of reciprocity. Marx's introduction of the syllogistic mediation, which Hegel introduces in the Book of the Notion, makes it quite distinct.

47 A classic example of a syllogism in logic textbooks is: Caesar is a man; all men are mortal; therefore, Caesar is mortal. What interested both Hegel and Marx is not the logic of the deduction, but how Caesar's existence as a man mediates his relation to mortality.

48 Many men, refusing their assigned role of mediators, have also marched alongside those women, just as some teachers have marched with their students and all kinds of whites have joined Black Lives Matter marches.

49 Thus, the continuing relevance of Marcuse’s analysis of “repressive tolerance” in Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore and Robert Paul Wolff, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965, 1969.

50 Jeffery R. Webber, “Return of the Strike: A Forum on the Teachers’ Rebellion in the United States”, Historical Materialism, Vol. 26, issue 4, 2018, pp. 1–46.

51 Already in his analysis of the production and circulation of commodities, Marx saw how setting a price on a product incorporated it into capital, even when it was produced by unwaged labor. See Capital, Vol. II, Chapter 4, pp. 109-111. Today, from the perspective of the social factory, in which so-called non-capitalist modes of production are understood as ways of organizing unwaged labor, this is even more true.

52 See the more detailed analysis in my commentaries on the chapters on the wage (especially Chapters 19 and 21).

53 On the logic of the “wages for housework” analysis of the work of women in the home and their demands for payment for their work, see the seminal essay by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1971), in Barbagallo (ed.), Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader, Brooklyn, NY: PM Press, 2019. For some history of that campaign, see Louise Toupin, Le salaire au travail ménager: Chronique d’une lutte féminist international, Montréal: les éditions du remoue-ménage, 2014; and Silvia Federici (ed.), Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977, History, Theory, Documents, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2017.

54 “Black Christmases” refers to the direct appropriation of goods during electrical blackouts, such as the one that occurred in New York City in 2003. The same kind of appropriation occurred during the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s, from Watts in California to Newark, New Jersey, and in moments of crisis, in the absence of outside aid, e.g., New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

55 For examples of the collective self-reduction of prices, see Bruno Ramirez, "The Working-Class Struggle Against the Crisis: Self-Reduction of Prices in Italy", Zerowork #1, 1975, pp. 143-150, or the mass refusal to pay jacked up water prices in Detroit in 2014 or Baltimore in 2016.

56 Among other places where he states this clearly is in footnote 34, where he writes: "The value-form of the product of labor is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory nature." Capital, Vol. I, p. 174.

57 See Michel Beurdeley and Kristopher Schipper, Chinese Erotic Art, Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle Co., 1969 and the attack on foot-binding by Qiu Jin (1875-1907) in Amy Dooling, Women's Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

58 Capital, Vol. I, p. 165.

59 A standout example today is Donald Trump, who repeatedly castigates others for behaviors of which he has been frequently guilty, e.g., lying and purveying what he calls “fake news.”

60 Ibid., p. 168.

61 In Part I of Rupturing the Dialectic, there is a brief analysis of the replacement of the labor theory of value with theories of price determination based first on a homogenous concept of utility, somewhat akin to a labor theory, and then on heterogeneous personal preferences. A much more detailed account is given in Cheeyakpuvanda Carriappa's "The Unruly Masses in the Development of Economic Thought", PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, August 2003.

62 Capital, Vol. I, footnote 33, p. 173.

63 Marx to Engels, August 24, 1867, MECW, Vol. 42, p. 407.

64 These points are made in Capital, Vol. I, footnote 34, p. 174.

65 Capital, Vol. I, p. 176.

Outline of Marx's Discussion

Analysis of fetishism means we must move from study of commodities to that of their owners.
– possession
– embodied will
– consenting alienation
– private property and contract
Contradiction: commodities must be:
– values before use-values
– use-values before values
– resolution = exchange
Money - "crystallizes" out of exchange

History of Exchange

– reciprocity instead of exchange
– exchange of excess
– production for exchange
– emergence of money

Commentary

Here Marx responds to his critique of the fetishism of his own presentation in Sections 1–3 of Chapter 1 because it only dealt with the relationships between commodities independently of the social relations of which they are a part.

From Things to Social Processes

Against his previous descriptions of commodities “doing this” and “doing that” (e.g., expressing value here, reflecting an essence there), he notes that “commodities cannot themselves go to market. . . we must, therefore have recourse to their guardians.”(1) In so doing, we pass from the abstract world of Chapter 1, to the more realistic world of actual exchange—to the market where the owners of commodities meet, trade and realize the form of value.

Marx starts with an analysis of the relation between commodities and their owners, then passes to a summary of the logic of money as a requirement of generalized exchange, and finally to a sketch of the historical emergence of exchange and money. His analysis of the relations between commodities and their owners, and among owners, is very close to Hegel’s in his Philosophy of Right (1820).(2)

1. Owners have possession of commodities
2. Owners are in relation to each other as having their "will" in the objects
3. Alienation of commodities only occurs in consenting acts
4. Juridical expression of this is private property and contracts of exchange

The primary and most fundamental example of this in capitalism is the exchange of labor-power for the means of subsistence. In that case, we have already seen in Part VIII the meaning of the above four conditions. The worker must have possession of his labor-power (not be a slave or a serf). The capitalist must have possession of the means of production (having taken them from the workers). Given this pattern of possession, the two parties are "free" to act. This "freedom" appears as an act of free "will" as well as an act between two freely consenting property owners. That Marx goes beyond Hegel on this was already apparent in Part VIII in his ironic attack on the meaning of such "freedom." This will recur in Chapter 6 on the "Sale and Purchase of labor-power." Finally, the exchange of labor-power for the means of subsistence takes the form of a legal contract, verbal or written. The union contract formed through collective bargaining being a recent formal example.

The introduction of the owner adds concreteness to the analysis of the exchange process, partly because the owner, unlike the commodity, is not interested in just any exchange but in some specific exchange. "[The commodity] is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity. . . the owner makes up for this lack [of specificity] in the commodity of a sense of the concrete, physical body of the other commodity by his own five and more senses?"(3) In other words, the owner goes into the market with a will, with the objective of acquiring some other particular commodity—directly, in the case of barter, indirectly in the case of markets where money is used.

At this point Marx points out a contradiction—an analysis carried over from his earlier work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and from his analysis in Chapter 1 of the two sides of the commodity: use-value and exchange-value. First, sellers' only interest in their own commodities are their exchange-values, "for himself its only direct use-value is as a bearer of exchange-value. . . all commodities are non-use-values for their owners. . . consequently [and this is the first point] commodities must be realized as values [which is to say exchanged] before they can be realized as use-values [consumed]." Second, to be exchanged someone must see them as potential use-values: "they must stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values."(4) There is the contradiction. Before they can be use-values they must be exchange-values but before they can be exchange-values they must be use-values. To be complete as commodities they must be both.

Money in Exchange

In this contradiction Marx sees the origin of the need for money in exchange. In so far as each owner of commodities looks at other commodities "as the particular equivalent of his own commodities [and]. . . his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all others. . . there is in fact no commodity acting as universal equivalent.” This problem was already discussed in Chapter 1 more abstractly (the problem of the expanded form) and the solution perceived: the money form. But this, he notes, cannot be solved in the abstract, at the formal level of Chapter 1:

Only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent . . . through the agency of the social process it becomes the specific social function of the commodity which has been set apart to be the universal equivalent. It thus becomes—money. Money necessarily crystalizes out of the process of exchange.(5)

In other words, the rise of the universal equivalent, i.e., money, is a concrete social phenomenon, not an abstract one; it emerges within the historical development of exchange. It comes with the “broadening and deepening of the phenomenon of exchange.” The “need to give an external expression to this opposition [between use-value and exchange-value] for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value.” So, money within exchange is the historical outgrowth of the exchanging of commodities by their owners. Here again Marx fights the fetishism which would deal with these matters purely in terms of the relations between things.

The rest of this chapter is devoted to a sketch of the process by which money as universal equivalent emerged from widening exchange. Howsoever accurate Marx's treatment, the major methodological point is that we must locate this phenomenon in the real world of exchange, understand what is being designated by the term universal equivalent, money, and not be bemused by commodity fetishism into an equally mistaken money fetishism. As he terminates the chapter: "The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes."(6)

Then and Now

1. There is no reciprocal isolation or foreigness in the "primitive" community—whether of patriarchal family, Indian commune, or Inca state
2. Exchange begins at the boundaries of communities, not produced for exchange
3. Commodities come to be produced for exchange
4. Repetition makes normal, fixes values at definite magnitudes
5. Articles come to only momentary equivalence with universal equivalent, comes and goes
6. The universal equivalent rystallizes out as money form—attached to most important articles of exchange from outside, or to local mobile wealth, i.e., cattle
7. Natural selection leads to money commodity being chosen among those that can be divisible at will, uniform in quality, i.e., precious metals
8. Value of money is determined by labor time of its production, expressed in other commodities.

All of this is a synopsis of his discussion in the Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy and in the Grundrisse's chapter on money, both of which can be consulted for a more developed analysis.

This sketch of the historical origins of money has led some to interpret this chapter, as well as Chapters 1 and 3, as being about money in all kinds of society where money and exchange have existed, not just about money and exchange in capitalism. Of such interpretations I say: the primary analysis in each chapter in Part One is about the determinations of exchange within a fully developed system of exchange. The only fully developed system of exchange is capitalism, for reasons that are presented in Part VIII and elsewhere (Volume II, Part One). Certainly, he does give examples, such as those above, which draw on pre-capitalist societies, while making the point that money as universal equivalent is not an abstraction but designates a real social phenomenon within the history of exchange.(7) And at times he points to the historical roots of various aspects of capital. Here it is money; in Volume III it is merchant capital, rent, etc. But I would recall his discussion in the Introduction to the Contribution about bourgeois economy providing the key to the past, but not equating the past with the present.(8)

Commodification of Life

One aspect of Marx's analysis of the centrality of exchange in capitalism which has struck a sympathetic cord in many, even those who would never call themselves Marxists, is how, in the pursuit of profit and social control capitalism tends to convert almost every thing and every relation into a commodity. This tendency toward the "commodification of life" has been recognized and deplored by a great many novelists, poets, social commentators and song writers. From Balzac's caustic condemnations of an infinitely invasive commerical logic to popular music, the tendency has long been denounced, made fun of and rejected in prose and lyrics.

In reggae musician Jimmy Cliff's song "Commercialization" this aspect of capitalist Babylon is attacked vigorously. He decries the commercialization—"the notion of capitalist civilization—of women, people in general, food, drugs, war and time.(9) Although written long before the Gulf War, its arcade video packaging and selling gives the lyrics about war an unfortunately all too contemporary relevance.

More lighthearted Tom Waits' song "Step Right Up" from the mid-1970s, is more makes carnivalesque fun of advertising and the pretence that any and all problems can be solved by the purchase of some commodity, from the drudgery of housework to fears about personal appearance and relationships.(10) Interlaced with a myriad sound bites of advertising hype and sexual inuendo is the real message of the song: all the junk is being sold for profit at the expense of the buyer ("how do we do it? Volume, volume turn up the volume", "we'll give you the business", "the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.") In this case the very length of the song is both a reproduction and a critique of the endlessness of the advertising noise that constantly bombards us all.

Step Right Up Step right up Step right up Everyone's a winner Bargains galore That's right you too can be The proud owner of the Quality goes in before the name goes on One tenth of a dollar One tenth of a dollar We've got service after sales How bout perfume we got perfume How bout an engagement ring Somethin for the little lady Somethin for the little lady Somethin for the little lady Three for a dollar We got a year end clearance We got a white sale and smoke damaged furniture You can drive it away today Act now Act now And receive as our gift to you They come in all colors One size fits all No muss No fuss No spill You tire of Kitchen drudgery Everything must go Goin' out of business Goin' out of business Goin' out of business sale 50% off original retail price Skip the middle man Don't settle for less How do we do it? How do we do it? Volume, volume, turn up the volume Advertisers Don't hesitate Don't be caught with your drawers down Don't be caught with your drawers down Step right up Step right up That's right For ladies it chops, doesn't stop Never stops, lots of luck!

It'll mow your lawn And it picks up the kids from school And it gets rid of unwanted facial hair It gets rid of embarassing age spots It delivers the pizza And it lengthens And it strengthens And it finds that slipper that's been at large under the chaise-lounge for several weeks And it plays a mean rythmn master And it makes excuses for unwanted lipstick on your collar And it's only a dollar Step right up And it's only a dollar Step right up It forges your signature If not completely satisfied mail back unused portion for complete refund of price of purchase Step right up Please allow thirty days for delivery Don't be fooled by cheap imitations Livin it Livin it, laughtin it, lovin it, swim in it, sleep in it, live in it, swim in it, laugh in it, love in it Removes embarassing stains from contour sheets. That's right And it entertains visiting relatives It turns a sandwitch into a banquet Tired of being the life of the party Change your shorts Change your life Change your life Change into a 9 year old Hindu boy Get rid of your wife It walks your dog It doubles on Sax Jump back Jack See you later alligator See you later alligator It steals your car It gets rid of your gambling debts It quits smoking It's a friend It's a companion It's the only product you'll ever need Follow these easy assembly instructions It never needs ironing It takes weight off hips busts, thighs, chin, middrif

Gives you dandruff It finds you a job It is a job And it strips the phone company free Take ten for five exchange It gives you denture breath And you know it's a friend It's a companion And it gets rid of your travellers checks It's new It's improved It's old fashioned It takes care of business Never needs winding Never needs winding Never needs winding It gets rid of blackheads Heart break of psoriasis Christ you don't know the meaning of heartbreak buddy Come on, come on, come on It's effective It's defective It creates household odors It disinfects It sanitizes For your protection It gives you an erection That wins the election Why put up with painful corns any longer It's a redeemable coupon No obligation No salesman will visit your home We got a jackpot Jackpot, jackpot Prizes! Prizes! Prizes! All work guaranteed How do we do it? How do we do it? How do we do it? We need your business We're going out of business We'll give you the business Get on the business Going out of business sale Receive all Free brochure Free brochure

Read the easy to follow assembly instructions Batteries not included Send before midnite tomorrow Terms available Step right up Step right up Step right up You got it buddy The large print giveth And the small print taketh away Step right up Step right up Step right up Com'on step right up Get away from me kid Step right up Step right up right up right up right... Come on, come on Etc. Tom Waits, Small Change, 1976 Elecktra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records Asylum 7E-1078

In 1979 the British rock group The Clash also took up this theme more directly, attacking the idea that one can buy a “personality” through the purchase of commodities. Instead of being a “happy shopper” constructing his life through his purchases, the singer in “Lost in the Supermarket” wanders confused amidst the mountains of commodities.(11) He has done as the ads say, clipped his coupons, listened to the “hit” music and drunk his bottle of social brew; but lo and behold, the alienation doesn’t go away no matter how much he participates in “exchange.”

Lost in the Supermarket Chorus: I'm all lost in the supermarket I can no longer shop happily I came in here for the special offer of guaranteed personality I wasn't born so much as I fell out Nobody seemed to notice me We had a hedge back at home in the suburb Over which I never could see I heard the people who live on the ceiling Scream and fight scarily Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling That's how its been all around me. Chorus I'm all tuned in. I see your programs I save coupons packets of tea I've got my giant hit discoteque album I empty a bottle I feel a bit free The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls, Make me noises for company. Long distance callers Make long distance calls And the silence makes me lonely Chorus It's not here It disappear Chorus Repeat I'm all lost... I'm all lost in the supermarket I'm all lost... I can no longer shop happily I'm all lost... I came in here for the special offer of guaranteed personality I'm all lost... The Clash, London Calling, CBS, 1979 (E2 36328)

Finally, the Reagan years (1981–89) of “greed is good” justifying tax breaks for the rich, the Bush II years (2001–09) of war, economic crisis and more tax breaks for the rich, and Trump’s most recent (2017) additional tax breaks for the one percent have only reinforced such critical views of the commercialization of life and the narrow concept of self-interest that pervades the ideology that has accompanied it. Such critique has found its way into the repertoires of even the most popular, non-radical rock and country singers. One example is Shania Twain in "Ka-ching!" (2003) who mocks/laments the capitalist seduction that "more is better," the compulsion to buy, the dangers of credit and the notion that having more money and the stuff it buys brings happiness.(12)

Ka-Ching! We live in a greedy little world - that teaches every little boy and girl To earn as much as they can possibly - then turn around and Spend it foolishly We've created us a credit card mess We spend the money that we don't possess Our religion is to go and blow it all So it's shoppin' every Sunday at the Mall All we ever want is more A lot more than we had before So take me to the nearest store Can you hear it ring It makes you wanna sing It's such a beautiful thing - Ka-ching! Lots of diamond rings The happiness it brings You'll live like a king With lots of money and things When you're broke go and get a loan Take out another mortgage on your home consolidate so you can afford To go and spend some more when you get bored

All we ever want is more A lot more than we had before So take me to the nearest store Can you hear it ring It makes you wanna sing It's such a beautiful thing - Ka-ching! Lots of diamond rings The happiness it brings You'll live like a king With lots of money and things Let's swing Dig deeper in your pocket Oh, yeah, ha Come on I know you've got it Dig deeper in your wallet Oh All we ever want is more A lot more than we had before So take me to the nearest store Can you hear it ring It makes you wanna sing It's such a beautiful thing - Ka-ching! Lots of diamond rings The happiness it brings You'll live like a king With lots of money and things Can you hear it ring It makes you want to sing You'll live like a king With lots of money and things Ka-ching! Shania Twain, UP!, Mercury Records, CD 088 170 314-2, 2002.

Recommended Further Reading

For Hegel's discussion, on which Marx draws, see T. M. Knox (ed) Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, First Part: "Abstract Right", Section i: "Property" and Section ii: "Contract". You might also want to read the 1820 preface which contains Hegel's famous remark about the limits of philosophy: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." (p. 13) as well as the Third Part: section ii on "Civil Society"; Subsection a on the "System of Needs" contains his discussion of needs, work, capital and class divisions.

Marx's work The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), which deals primarily with value and money, was the first published fruit of his work in the late 1850s that produced the long unpublished manuscript the Grundrisse (1857-58).

The Contribution to the Critique was intended as the opening salvo of a series of works critiquing political economy but instead of following it up with the next parts, Marx wound up writing Capital instead, whose first volume was published in 1867. Despite the fact that some of the Contribution is included in Capital (and some in Marx's three volume Theories of Surplus Value), there is much material in it which provides useful alternative formulations to the first part of Capital on value and money. The same, of course, is true of the first chapter of Grundrisse manuscripts which also deals with value and money. Both the Contribution and the Grundrisse are available on-line and in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, New York: International Publishers; the former can be found in Volume 29 and the latter in Volumes 28-29. The Grundrisse is also available in a Penguin paperback edition.

Along with Marx's own review of the history of the development of money and exchange, you might also want to look at Ernest Mandel's discussion in Chapter 2 of Volume I of his Marxist Economic Theory, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962. At the same time you might also want to keep in mind that Mandel is a Trotskyist theorist whose understanding of these matters is quite different than the one I have been presenting to you. (Remember he is also the author of the introduction to the edition of Capital which you are using.) Another Marxist treatment, more thorough, is Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920, New York: Verso, 1991 (originally published in Spain in 1960).

There are many works by historians on the history of money and exchange and it has been a central area of contention in anthropology where "formalist" anthropologists have sought to find bourgeois rationality (homo economicus) in every society and "structuralist" anthropologists have sought to understand non-capitalist systems of exchange in their own right as alternative forms of social interaction. Among the latter, some of the most interesting work is by ex-Marxist Karl Polanyi whose book The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1944 is a classic and well worth the read. Polanyi abandons Marx's framework of understanding the modern world in terms of "capitalism" in favor of "the market economy" but the subject is the same and and a great deal can be learned from studying his work. The Fall 1987 issue of Telos magazine has a special section on Polanyi with an interesting overview of his life and work by his daughter Kari Polanyi-Levitt and Marguerite Mendell.

On the commodification of war (as in Jimmy Cliff's song "Commercialization", see Doug Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (1992) on how the pentagon and the news networks packaged and sold the Gulf War to the American people -against one of the most rapidly mobilized and nationwide anti-war movements in U.S. history. For further background see his earlier book: Television and the Crisis of Democracy, Boulder: Westview Press, 1990.

Concepts For Review

Questions For Review

*1. Explain the role of Chapter Two in Capital. That is to say, explain its relation to Chapter One and to what comes after -- at least as far as you have studied to date.

2. Discuss the relationship between commodities and their owners as Marx analyses it here in Chapter Two. What is an "owner?" What is the distinction between "ownership" and "possession?"

3. Discuss the meaning of "freedom" with respect to commodity exchange.

4. What is the attitude of the owners of commodities toward those commodities when they want to exchange them. How do they look at those commodities? What is it about their commodities which concerns them first of all? What else must concern them if they are to actually realize an exchange?

*5. Explain the contradiction and the resolution of the contradiction that Marx says confronts commodities and their owners in exchange.

6. What does it mean to say that "money necessarily crystalizes out of the process of exchange?"

*7. Discuss the issue as to whether the analysis of Chapter Two is applicable to all forms of exchange or only to that within capitalism.

8. What new things do we learn about money in this chapter that we had not already learned in Chapter One?

*9. Apply the analysis of this chapter to the exchange of labor power for the wage.

10. Sketch the history that Marx cites of the development of exchange and money. What do you think is the relationship between this history and the presentation of the chapter?

11. Explain the solution to the "riddle" Marx refers to in his statement: "The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes."

12. If, in so-called "primitive" societies, people produced and shared collectively, or communally, with a division of labor, such that "exchange" relations were those of reciprocity and had no sense of "equality," what does this suggest about the possibilities of post-capitalist society?

Footnotes

1 Capital, Vol. I, p. 178.

2 For Hegel’s analysis, on which Marx draws, see G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox, revised by Stephen Houlgate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, First Part: “Abstract Right”, Section 1: “Property” and Section 2: “Contract.” You might also want to read the Third Part: section 2 on “Civil Society”; Subsection A on the “System of Needs”, which contains his analysis of needs, work, capital and class divisions.

3 Capital, Vol. I, p. 179.

4 All quotations from Capital, Vol. I, p. 179.

5 Ibid., p. 180.

6 Ibid., p. 187.

7 Along with Marx's own review of the history of the development of money and exchange, you might also want to look at Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920, New York: Verso, 1991 (originally published in Spain in 1960).

8 Originally written for the Contribution, the Introduction was set aside and replaced with a shorter Preface. It can now be found in MECW, Vol. 28, pp. 37-45.

9 On the commodification of war, see Doug Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992 on how the Pentagon and the news networks packaged and sold the Gulf War to the American people, against one of the most rapidly mobilized and nationwide anti-war movements in US history. For further background, see his earlier book, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.

10 Small Change, Asylum Records, 1995.

11 London Calling, CBS, 1979.

12 UP!, Mercury Records, 2002.

Outline of Marx's Argument

Section 1: The Measures of Money

Above: El Greco's painting of Christ driving the money lenders from the temple (1571-76). Below: Cranach the Elder's woodcut of the same event from a pamplet - Passional Christi und Antichristi - used by Martin Luther in 1521.

a. money as measure of value

- ideal
- real

- price
- money names
- weight names

Section 2: The Medium of Circulation

a. metamorphosis of commodities

C - M - C, (P - U - I)

qualitative: M - C - M'
quantitative: M = PQ/V

c.coin and symbols of value

- role of the state
- paper money

Section 3: Money

a. hoarding

- money as store of value
- monetary reserves

- credit
- credit and class struggle
- credit and crisis

- extension of analysis to world level
- universal :means of payment

:means of purchase
:embodiment of wealth

Commentary

First and foremost, in capitalism money is power. Money both embodies the power capital has had to impose work on people and bestows the power (through investment) to do it again. At the same time, from the point of view of the rest of us, money --if only we can get our hands on enough of it-- gives us the power to resist or refuse that work. Not surprisingly then, money is a frequent subject of popular music. Big money --especially corporate wealth-- is desired for the power it gives and feared for the threat that it carries. Pink Floyd in their song "Money" (on their ablum The Dark Side of the Moon, 1972), written in a period when capitalists were resisting wage increases, mock the ideological contradictions of such a situation: "Money so they say - is the root of all evil today - but if you ask for a rise - it's no surprise - that they are giving none away." They, of course, are the capitalists and their apologists who preach the evils of money to the working class while using it for their own purposes of domination. Rush, in the following song, written during the Reagan years when capital was wielding its money like a bludgeon against the working class, are more blunt about the power of money:

The Big Money Big money goes around the world Big money underground Big money got a mighty voice Big money make no sound Big money pull a million strings Big money hold the prize Big money weave a mighty web Big money draw the flies Sometimes pushing people around Sometimes pulling out the rug Sometimes pushing all the buttons Sometimes pulling out the plug It's the power and the glory It's a war in paradise It's a cinderella story On a tumble of the dice Big money goes around the world Big money takes a cruise Big money leave a mighty wake Big money leave a bruise Big money make a million dreams Big money spin big deals Big money make a mighty head Big money spin big wheels Sometimes building ivory towers Sometimes knocking castles down Sometimes building you a stairway- Lock you underground It's that old-time religion It's the kindom they would rule It's the fool on television Getting paid to play the fool Big money goes around the world Big money give and take Big money done a power of good Big money make mistakes Big money got a heavy hand Big money take control Big money got a mean streak Big money got no soul..... Rush, Power Windows, 1985 Mercury/PolyGram Records CD 826 098-2

In another song, written only three years later, still during the unapologetic reign of Reagan/Bush and their rich capitalist friends, Randy Newman makes the same point in his own low-key, ironic manner. How is it, he wonders, as so many of us have, that the best and the brighest often just scrape by while the wheelers and dealers, the slimeballs and the crooks are living high off the hog in their "great big houses" with their "great big swimming pools". The answer, of course, is money.

Of course, most of us understand that "it's money that matters" and not just in the USA but throughout the whole capitalist world. The difficult questions concern why it is money that matters and how it can be the weapon as well as the fruit of power.

Marx's analysis in this chapter gives us a broader understanding about how and why money is power. He focuses on a variety of roles which money plays in the capitalist world of commodities. In Chapter One he discussed the forms of value. These forms, which are abstract determinations of the commodity form, identify general aspects of the commodity world as a whole. The general form of value for example:

xA = wM
yB
zC

expresses the interrelation of all the commodities to each other mediated via the universal equivalent. The universal equivalent itself is not isolated from the whole but rather expresses value in relation to the potentially infinite series of other commodities. These forms presuppose the actual world of capitalist commodity exchange and are determinations of it. They express aspects of the relations among commodities, most importantly, those of the central exchange relation between the classes --the exchange of labor power for means of subsistence.

Now in Chapters Two and Three Marx evaluates the form of that exchange process within the actual circulation of commodities in exchange. There is a transition as he isolates and identifies the exchange process, a transition from the form of value, to the exchange aspect of its actualization.

When we look at the money form of value we can see that the form of simple commodity exchange C - M - C emerges if we isolate the mediated relation xA - w gold - yB.

xA
yB = w gold = [xA - w gold - yB] = [C - M - C]
zC

The money form expresses money as the universal mediator. In C - M - C we isolate a single mediated exchange in order to explore the general structure of such exchange. Later, that understood, we can aggregate all such exchanges to obtain circulation as a whole. Marx's analysis of money in chapter three (i.e., the role of M in C - M - C) therefore develops that of the money form of chapter one. Money and the money-form will no longer be confused.

Structure of the Chapter

Marx's discussion begins with money within nationstates --because of the way national governments have come to mint and regulate money-- and then later moves on to an examination of money at the international level. Both of these analyses add concreteness to the much more abstract discussion of chapter one where there was no such reference to nationstates and their role in exchange. He discusses 5 aspects of money within areas controlled by a single state (generally but not always national boundaries):

1. Money as measure of value
2. Money as standard of price
3. Money as means of circulation
4. Money as hoard or store of value
5. Money as means of payment (credit)

1. The difference between measure of value and standard of price

The first aspect of chapter 3 that I want to discuss is Marx's distinction between money serving as the measure of value and money serving as a standard of price. In this discussion Marx is speaking of the ideal or imaginary expression of value and price that occurs before commodities are actually sold. In terms of C-M-C we are only at the first C, neither C - M (sale) nor M - C (purchase) has actually been completed. We can picture this phase of the analysis as concerning:

C - M - C, or C - potential M - potential C

C is produced and real but M is only an anticipated ideal, as is the subsequent M - C, so - M - C is only potential.

Now we saw in the money form of chapter one that money is the expression of value of commodities and its magnitude measures that value.(1) We also saw in the price-form that with respect to a single commodity money not only expresses value but also price. Money (gold) is a standard of price in so far as "it is a fixed weight of metal," i.e., a measure of the quantity of gold (the w in w gold). The setting of this standard is a function of the State. The State sets both the weight unit or quantum with which to measure the amount of gold, eg., ounce, and it gives the money names to those units.

Let's take an example: 1 ton of iron = 1 oz. of Au

Since the amount of socially necessary labor time in the production of one ton of iron is the same as that in the production of 1 oz. of gold, the gold serves as an expression of the value of the ton of iron -both are crystalized, abstract labor time. In terms of the class relationships, both represent the same amount of imposed labor in capital, the same amount of social control -just as many workers can be set to work just as long producing 1 oz. of Au as 1 ton of iron.(2) Now, because the gold is measured, in this case by the ounce, the quantity of value is given, and the gold simultaneously can serve as standard of price. The 1 oz. measures the quantity of gold by a unit weight of gold. It thus gives the price of the iron. The 1 oz. is the weight-name for the price of iron. The State also gives such a measure a money-name, e.g., $35.00. In the days of commodity money, these money-names were attached to gold coins minted by the state at a given, standard weight. To summarize:

Commodity: iron
Quantity: 1 ton
Measure of value: = 1 oz. Au
Standard of Price: = 1 oz. Au or 35 dollars(3)

Various examples: Country, weight, name, coin

U.S., 1 oz., 35 dollars, 35 gold one dollar coins
U.K.,1 oz., 12 pounds, 12 one Lpound; coins
France, 20 grams Au, 100 francs, 100 franc coins

For several historical reasons money names became separated from weight names. One of the more interesting of these reasons was the physical debasement of coins by users. (There was also the debasement of coin by official act of the sovereign and the mint.) The debasement of coin, e.g., the shaving or clipping of metal from metal coins, is interesting because it was both a form of class struggle --anyone who could get their hands on a coin could shave a bit here and there-- and a direct challenge not only to the power of the State but to the class relations embodied in money. With debasement, the money names (i.e., dollar, pounds, francs, etc.) are still applied to coins, but the coins no longer contain the weight of the metal that is the standard of money, thus as standards of price they misrepresent value. A gold coin that was worth $10 upon coinage, after clipping might be worth only $9.95 or $9.90 because it contained less gold. Yet it would continue to be exchanged as if it were worth $10 --until, of course, a general perception of the debasement led to its rejection as a standard. This was the danger to exchange and to the power of the State. As a result the government agency which was responsible for coinage was invariably also preoccupied with ferreting out and persecuting those responsible for such attacks on the value of money.

This is why the distinction between money as measure of value and as standard of price is important. Values can change and leave prices uneffected, or prices can change with value uneffected. Suppose the money name or price changes due to sudden changes in demand, i.e., all of a sudden everyone wants to buy some commodity x. The price of x will be raised as a reaction to the sudden increase in demand but its value, grasped in terms of the socially necessary labor time has not changed. Inversely there may be an inability to sell said commodity at a price which equals the value, and it is either sold at a price under its value or not sold at all. In such cases the full value of the commodity is not realized. It is either devalued or if the price goes to zero, it has no value at all. This is the so-called realization problem. For a commodity to have value it must be exchanged, i.e., have real exchange value. If the price is above or below the value, then there is unequal exchange. If this persists then there will be a change in the production of the commodity, i.e., if it can't be sold, it won't be produced and its production will no longer provide the opportunity for the imposition of work. If price rises more may be produced. In case of what is considered a normal (i.e., upward sloping) supply curve, socially necessary labor time may rise with the increase in production as more people are put to work producing the product at marginally lower levels of productivity.

As a general rule throughout this chapter, and throughout the book more generally, Marx abstracts from such discrepancies and assumes that value = price. This simplifies his analysis and exposition --he doesn't have to be constantly dealing with such discrepancies. However, he is quite explicit about the fact that not only are there some commodities which have a price but no value, e.g., unworked land, but also as a general rule market prices do NOT equal value. He recognizes that the constant fluxuations of supply and demand occur far more rapidly than changes in the socially necessary labor time required to produce commodities. He can make such an abstraction because his primary purpose here is a social/class understanding of the role of money in capitalism rather than explaining price variations.

There have been many who have complained that Marx's theory in chapters 1-3 does not provide an explanation of the fluctuations in relative prices. This is true, but that is because it is not the purpose of the theory. Neoclassical microeconomic theory (or "price theory" as it used to be called) was designed for the analysis of just such market fluctuations and it does the job much better than Marx's value theory --which, I repeat, was not designed for the purpose. However, what Marxist theory does better than neoclassical theory is provide an analysis of money as a moment of the antagonistic relations of capitalism. Neoclassical theory doesn't do this because its purpose is other. For that matter, it doesn't even recognize the existence of class society. When we examine Marx's discussions of historical price fluxtuations we find that he uses a mixture of his labor theory and supply & demand analysis to understand price changes.(4)

2. Money as Means of Circulation

The second aspect of chapter 3 I want to emphasize is money as medium of circulation of commodities, i.e., the role of M in C - M - C. Now this circuit is actually a combination of:

sale: C - M
and
purchase: M - C

In sale, a commodity C is exchanged for money M. In this transaction, the owner of C realizes its exchange-value. The exchange-value of C now has actual existence in the form of the money M. This original owner of C has accomplished the first metamorphosis or change of form.(5)

Now when this money (the exchange-value form of C) is then used as means of purchase (M - C) the second change of form occurs --the second metamorphosis-- as the value of the original commodity is transformed by exchange into a particular use-value which is consumed. Thus the original contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of the commodity discussed at length in chapter one, is resolved as it sequentially becomes potential exchange-value and potential use-value are transformed into actual exchange-value and actual use-value.

If anything occurs to break this sequence then we do not have a commodity circuit. The total process of exchange-value and use-value must be complete, e.g. if goods are never sold they are realized as neither exchange-value nor use-value and they never become a commodity. This is quite possible because the separation of exchange into purchase and sale means that the "commodity" may be suspended either in its original form (no sale) or in the form of money (no purchase). This polarity of sale and purchase and possible rupture implies both the possibility of commercial crises and reflects the underlying antagonistic polarity of capitalist class relations. As Marx writes in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

The "antagonistic nature of bourgeois production is, moreover expressed in the antithesis of buyer and seller" (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 331)

"The division of exchange into purchase and sale . . . contains the general possibility of commercial crisis, essentially because the contradiction of commodity and money is the abstract and general form of all contradictions inherent in the bourgeois mode of labor." (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 332)

Commercial crisis is the rupture of the smooth flow of sale and purchase. The possibility of such a crisis reflects and indicates the possible rupture of the underlying class relation, i.e., the rejection and potential destruction of capital's commodity form by the working class -- the end of sale of labor power by the working class, its purchase by capital, and of the need of the working class to purchase its means of subsistence from capital, i.e., the LP - M - C as expression of the basic imposition of the sale of LP and hence work on the working class by capital.

It is important to see that C - M - C is one moment in the general circulation of commodities, and how it is linked. It would be indicative but misleading to picture circulation as simply the sum of the circuits, because each part of the circuit C - M - C is also a part of two other circuits. Let (C - M - C)₁ also be represented by C₁ - M₁ - C₁. Then the sale C₁ - M₁ is also simultaneously a purchase from the point of view of the owner of money M who spends it on C₁. In other words, if the perspective is that of the owner and seller of C₁ then M₁ is the transformed value of C₁ and we call it M₁. But for the owner of M, its nature is not derived from C₁ but, perhaps, from some previous commodity C₂ which was sold. So from this purchaser's point of view the M is M₂. Etc. Etc. We can picture this interlinkage as follows:

(Purchaser A) sells C₂ for M₂ which can be used to purchase C₂ from seller B.

(Seller B) sells C₁ to Purchaser A for M₁ which can be used to purchase C₁

Physically M₂ = M₁, C₁ = C₂, but the subscripts designate the fact that they play different roles when viewed from different perspectives.

Since the series of such interconnections is unlimited or infinite and since it is interlocked, that infinity is of the "good" variety - self related and mediated by the universal mediator.(6) This is an essential point. The commodity circuit of capital involves all the exchanges. It is one huge circuit of circuits in which exchange-value and use-value are defined within the whole. The role of money as mediator is even clearer now than when we studied the money-form. In the relation C - M - C, we have a clear syllogistic form of mediation which in the Contribution Marx identifies as P - U - I (from Hegel's Logic) or particularity - universality - individuality. C exists for the seller only in a particular aspect of itself, i.e., as potential exchange-value (the seller is not interested in its use-value). When the commodity is then sold it is converted in form into money which is the universal equivalent. The money is then converted subsequently into some individual commodity which is consumed as use-value. Money therefore mediates the two extremes. The most important such mediation, of course, is that between the working class and capital in labor markets and consumer markets:

LP - M - C.

This remains true when we understand LP - M - C as transformed by capital into LP - M - C(MS) . . . P . . . LP*.
Money mediates the renewal of labor power via productive consumption.

Although money is determined in circulation by the exchange of commodities, both qualitatively and quantitatively, money itself also circulates as one moment in this process. This parallel circulation, Marx represents as M-C-M. In the Contribution, the two forms are set out immediately together:

C - M - C
M - C - M

In Capital, the second is talked about but not specified in this way till the chapter on capital. The reason is clear enough. M - C - M makes no sense in and of itself. As Marx says, when we look at M - C - M, "one will immediately recognize the predominant form of bourgeois production" (Contribution p. 123.) But in capital M - C - M must be M - C - M', the expanding form of capital. Marx doesn't want to talk specifically about this expanding aspect of capital just yet, and he therefore restricts himself to dealing with the circulation of money as a moment of the circulation of commodities. Which is fine because it is consistent with the basic perspective of the chapter, namely studying money as the result of the production and circulation of commodities --that is to say, it both embodies and forms a part of the imposition of work (production) through the commodity form (circulation).(7)

The movement in Chapter One from simple value form of the commodity xA = yB to the money form, is paralleled in Chapter 3 by the movement from the flow of commodities to the flow of money. The order emphasizes what is fundamental.

The quantitative aspect of money as medium of circulation concerns how much money is necessary to circulate a given quantity and value of commodities (at a given rapidity). The relation between the required amount of money (M), the total value of the commodities (PQ), assuming value = price, and the rapidity of circulation or velocity of money = V is given by the formula:

M = PQ/V

Although this formula appears to be exactly the same as the "quantity theory" of classical political economy, usually written MV = PQ, or M=PQ/V, Marx's interpretation is quite different. The usual interpretation of the quantity theory assumes that Q and V are given and states that the prices of the commodities will be determined by the amount of money thrown into the economy. In other words P = f(M) and dP/dM > 0.

For example, many quantity theorists interpreted the rise of prices which occurred in Europe in the 16th Century in the wake of the huge new gold flows from the the rape of the New World, as having been caused by the increase in the amount of precious metals, i.e., of money, in circulation. Marx says just the opposite about money gold. Since money exists in circulation only to circulate commodities its amount is determined by the amount and value of the commodities being bought and sold. The value of the commodities is determined by the SNLT, the value of gold by its SNLT. Therefore, the amount of money is determined by the value of gold and the value and quantity of other commodities, or M = f(V), not visa versa. So that he explains the inflation of the 16th Century by the fact that the discovery and rape of the Inca and Aztec civilizations and of the subsequent use of slave labor in the mines of the Western Hemisphere which produced the new flows of gold dramatically reduced the costs of producing gold and thus lowered its value. With a lower value for gold it took more of it to represent the values of a relatively unchanged quantity of commodities. Hence the price rise.(8)

It should be noted here that M = PQ/V, (if M = xAu where Au is gold and x is a quantifier and price = value, and q = the quantity of goods) has the form of the price-form with the additional determination of velocity of circulation --a measure of how fast the exchanges of commodities for money takes place-- a factor not taken into account in chapter one or two. Since Marx is talking here about the totality of circulation, he has essentially added up all of the exchanges of the price form xA = yAu (gold), added up all the goods taken at their values and all the gold at its value. By adding in the additional information of how fast the gold circulates, he then knows how much money is required for circulation.

The metal money circulating is called coin. Since in circulation money "never comes to rest" as Marx says, but flows restlessly and unceasingly, there is no need to have money as means of circulation exist as precise quantities of gold itself --undebased metal coins. Therefore coins of baser metal (tokens) and even paper will serve as symbols of the appropriate amounts of gold. But because any symbol can represent a given value, different amounts of paper (which designate prices) can represent the same amount of value. In these circumstances, which we have already discussed above, where value and price differ, the formula above requires reinterpretation. Now let us write it as:

(1) M = VQ/Vel with Q = total output V = value of commodities and Vel = velocity

In this form the interpretation remains the same as above. But, when we write:

(2) Mp = PQ/Vel where P = price of commodities, and Mp = paper money

we must interpret differently. The amount of paper is clearly arbitrary and its value not determined by its cost of production (SNLT) which we can assume = zero. If the state decides to finance expenditures with huge increases in paper money, the amount of Mp will rise. Since prices are expressed in paper money-names, they will clearly rise as a result. For example, if Mp is quickly doubled then on the average P will double if Q and V remain constant, (i.e. assuming no feedback on production Q from the injection of money). The value represented by the doubled quantity of paper money will not have changed, anymore than will the quantity of commodities Q. Because the increased paper and prices represent the same aggregate value, the value represented by an aliquot portion of paper and prices (e.g. one dollar) has dropped. Paper money has been devalued. In other words we see that there was some truth in the quantity theory but only in the case of paper money. The value of paper money (or rather represented by) is seen to be a function of its own quantity and the values it represents. The failure of the classical political economists to clearly distinguish between value and prices hindered them from seeing this. Their politics, perhaps, kept them from making the distinction.

3. Money as Store of Value

The third point I want to discuss concerns money as money, or money as store of value. When money drops out of circulation it comes to rest as it were. When it does so, when it is held by its owners as hoard, it takes several forms. Often it takes on its corporeal form of gold coin or bullion. Or it takes on the form of gold reshaped into jewlery, sculpture, etc. The less time money is held out of circulation the less likely it will differ from the reserve of coin. The reserves held by individuals or banks for short periods may be of coin or of paper money. But money is still money when it is independent of circulation --when it is non-means of circulation. But in what sense? When such money falls out of circulation it breaks the flow C - M - C and the first metamorphosis is not followed by the second.

In hoarding, value is "stored." Money as the conclusion of C - M we saw to be the money expression of the exchange-value of C. If M is set aside or hidden away, that exchange-value is congealed and suspended in gold. "Exchange-value which was merely a form is turned into the content of the moment." Contribution, p. 128. Yet this solidification of money as solid gold must be understood as a necessary moment in the functioning of gold as money which is means of circulation. How? First, the flow of money into and out of hoard is necessary to regulate the amount of money in circulation. That is, as value, price, quantity and velocity change, the M implied by VQ/V changes. Hoard therefore, like reserves of coin and paper, serves as a reserve which provides the system with flexibility. This is perhaps most obvious in recent years in the case of central and international banks where foreign exchange reserves accumulate as circulation of commodities drops off and are drained in periods when rapid growth of commodity production and circulation demands more "liquid" money, i.e., more money as medium of circulation. Second, it is only because gold (or silver, etc.) proves by the process of dropping out and then returning as means of purchase, i.e. universal equivalent in M-C, that it is not just one more commodity but money. Thus the paradox that gold only becomes "money" as non-means of circulation. "The withdrawal of commodities from circulation in the form of gold," Marx writes, "is thus the only means of keeping them (gold and silver) continually in circulation (as money)." Contribution p. 128. Hoard is thus not simply separate from circulation, it is in continuous tension with it, i.e. flowing in and out over shorter or longer periods. If it did not, it would cease to be money as money.

The hoarders behave as misers, they are caught in a contradiction. As money is piled up in hoard, exchange-value is being accumulated. Now, as we have seen, exchange-value expresses an endless expansion - it has infinite character. But money as hoard is necessarily limited in quantity, and thus no matter how much money the miser has stored away, it is never enough; there is always the contrast between the endless possibility and the limited achievement. The miser is thus driven to pile up money endlessly. This kind of hoarder is, as Marx says, "a martyr to exchange-value." Unlike the capitalist who has understood that the way to accumulate ever increasing quantities of money is to continuously throw it back into circulation, the miser appears as the "holy ascetic seated at the top of a metal column." Another way of saying this, in the language of part 4 of Chapter One, is that misers are the victims of their own money fetishism. Unlike the capitalist who understands that the purpose of money is investment and putting people to work, the miser thinks that the object of making money is the money itself.

This narrow and limited perspective was found among the early mercantile "bullionists" who believed that the objective of foreign trade and government policy should be to enrich a country through the gathering of precious metals, or "treasure" as they often said. They wanted to restrict imports (and thus gold or silver outflow) while encouraging exports (and thus gold or silver inflow). This view was attacked both by more sophisticated mercantilists (like Thomas Mun and Richard Cantillon) and by classical economists (like Adam Smith) who demonstrated how the export of gold and silver (spending money abroad) could result in even more gold and silver being brought into the country (from subsequent exports).

4. Money as Means of Payment

This is the form money takes as the its function of means of payment is separated from the means of purchase. Instead of M - C, purchase, we have buying on credit where the good C is obtained before the payment of money M takes place. In this case M is credit money - generally an IOU of immaginary money which is later paid. For example, when you use a credit card you sign a paper as you purchase and acquire the commodity, but you have not yet paid. You pay later with a check drawn on your bank checking account.

The polarity and separation of actions (M - C) and (C - M) in credit, like the polarity of simple sale and purchase opens the possibility of the disruption of the circulation process --credit crises-- like the 1974-1975 fiscal crisis in New York, where the city government piled up a huge number of IOU's by borrowing to pay for growing services, etc., but then had trouble acquiring the means of payment by taxing business' C - M, etc. --partly because the class struggle in New York was leading to business' pulling out of the city or cutting down operations and thus reducing the number and size of their taxable C - M's.

This crisis was subsequently repeated on a world scale in the 1980s after US President Jimmy Carter's appointee to the Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve tightened up money supplies, dramatically raised interest rates and plunged the world into depression. The combination of high interest rates (dramatically raising the cost of debt service on international loans) and depression (shrinking business sales in both domestic and foreign markets and thus reduced possibilities for earning the foreign exchange necessary to repay the suddenly augmented debt service obligations) caused an international debt crisis from which the world has still not fully recovered.

Similarly, but not exactly the same, during pre-capitalist times, as Marx points out, the struggle between debtor and creditor was often an important aspect of class struggle as it is today:

"The class struggle in the ancient world, for instance, took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors, and ended in Rome with the ruin of the plebeian debtors, who were replaced by slaves." p. 233.

Marx notes that once you have a developed system of credit and money as means of payment, then this must be taken into account in the discussion of the quantitative determination of the amount of money needed to circulate goods. This is taken into account partly by netting out the payments which cancel each other out and adding on the payments left over to those commodities circulating due to direct payment. p. 237 The discussion of money as means of payment and of the credit system is continued by Marx, within the framework of capitalist production and circulation in Volume III of Capital and can there be followed by the student who desires more information on this point.

5. World Money

Marx's remarks on money at the level of the international economy are very brief. He notes mainly that money loses "the local functions it has acquired, as the standard of prices coin and small change, and as a symbol of value." Instead it serves mainly in its original form as bullion, as the commodity gold or silver. In this form it serves primarily as

• universal means of payment to cover debts incurred
• universal means of purchase to circulate goods in international trade directly
• absolute social materialization of wealth when wealth is to be transferred between countries but not in the form of particular commodities.

Because these international payments fluctuate with world trade and capital flows, just as circulation fluctuates within countries, he notes the need for international reserves. In his days when gold and silver were the main international monies, reserves would be held as gold or silver. Today, of course, such reserves are held primarily as stocks of foreign currencies, i.e., as credit accounts denominated in foreign currencies.

Even from these brief remarks, we can see how Marx extends his analysis of domestic money to the world market insofar as it is appropriate. We can do the same with other aspects of his analysis. For example, take his discussion of the separation of price and value. We can find such a separation of money name from value when paper currency (with a purely symbolic value) was used the fixed exchange rate system of Bretton Woods after WWII. The exchange value of the dollar had been fixed at 1 oz. gold being represented by 35 dollars. But, during the post-WWII period, the gold supply grew more slowly than the rapidly expanding trade that accompanied the recovery of Western Europe and Japan. As the result of a growing unwillingness of other countries to hold more dollars and of problems at home, after 1971 the dollar was devalued such that it took some $70 to purchase 1 oz. of gold.(9) The value of the 1 oz. of Au hadn't changed but that amount of gold was given a new money name. At the same time, the prices of all other commodities --whose values could also be assumed to remain the same-- denominated in dollars rose. Thus price can change while the value of a commodity remains the same. In the case cited the devaluation of the dollar has no effect on the value of an ounce of gold (or a ton of iron) but the price of the gold (or iron) as expressed in its money name roses from $35 to $70.

Similarly we can find in Marx's discussions of credit the beginnings of a useful analysis of the rise and role of international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. The Fund was created along with the fixed exchange rate system as a lender of last resort. With a fixed rate system, countries needed to hold reserves in case their need to pay exceeded their inflows in a given period. The Fund managed a pool of reserves provided by participating countries who could borrow from it to cover short run needs --a kind of lender of last resort.

Most importantly however, we must always keep in mind the social relations which money embodies and represents, the class relations of power which are reflected and represented in the exchange form, the money form, etc. International money flows are international rearrangements in those structures of power, as are international commodity flows, and that must never be forgotten! It is always tempting to give in to the money fetish, to forget the social realities of money within the class context and be blinded by money and complicated money mechanisms as such. It is not always easy to translate the complexities of money into class terms. It is not always easy to avoid the fetishism that accompanies the failure to do so. But it must be done, the underlying class meaning must always be sought and laid bare.

To take an example, which extends Marx's analysis to the global level, we can examine the crises around the structure of debt and credit that exploded in the 3rd world in the wake of the two oil crises in the 1970s and in the wake of the fierce tightening of the supply of money in the U.S. in 1979-1981 which drove up interest rates and plunged the world into depression. The so-called Third World Debt crisis, however, must not be seen as merely the byproducts of OPEC price and U.S. monetary policies, but more importantly in terms of the class politics they embody.

Behind the OPEC price increases lay not merely greedy sheiks, but working class pressures for more income and better standards of living. Behind the tight money policies inaugerated by Carter, Volcker and Reagan lay the urgent need to attack a level of working class power within the United States which was driving an accelerating inflation, undercutting exports and business investment generally. Behind the build up of massive debt in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil lay the need for resources to cope with social and labor unrest (both through military and police repression and through development, i.e., more jobs and wages). Thus, behind the international negotiations between "creditor" and "debtor" nations lay the class politics within each, and within the world as a whole.

Paper Money and Credit

To put it simply, while we recognize that this chapter isolates and analyses only a limited number of the determinations of money and not all (e.g., not money as capital in all its complexity), we can also recognize that all the basic elements of Marx's analysis are just as correct today as they were when he wrote Capital. Money is still used to set prices ideally, still circulates commodities as universal mediator, etc. The fact that paper money has replaced virtually all coin does not change this, as Marx has showed. The value of the total paper money supply is determined by the value of the commodities and the conditions of circulation. The fact that in an earlier period paper was tied to gold, and today it is not, changes nothing in this respect. The same can be said about the rise of deposit banking and the rise of checking accounts -- of the replacement of coin and paper by IOU's and means of payment.

On the other hand, analysis of these new forms can show how they make it easier in some ways for capital to use money as a weapon against the working class in new ways (i.e., since the expansion of the money supply now has no legal limits fixed by a tie to gold production). Marx's analysis of credit-money here and in Volume III provides a beginning to understand the complex credit mechanisms of today. Marx did not know the credit card, but his theory grasps it easily. Already in chapter three, in footnote 54, p. 238, he marvels at how small a role is paid by the actual exchange of money (rather than credit) in the accounts of a London merchant bank. The fact that credit-money now functions as medium of circulation has many implications. But it does not change either the function of money as medium of circulation nor the fundamental relation between the value of the commodities in circulation and the supply of money. The latter is simply measured today largely in terms of the quantity of coin and paper plus the quantity of (credit) deposits: M1 (or, measured to include various other credit devices in M2 or M3, etc.).

It is through the new forms of credit that money is manipulated today via government monetary policy as a weapon against the working class in countries like the U.S. Bank reserves are reserves of coin and credit/money and these reserves are manipulated to expand or contract the money supply and thus have an impact on prices, demand for labor (and thus wages), and so on. This is the role of the Federal Reserve Banks in the U.S. -- by changing the legal reserve requirements as a percent of assets, and by changing the rate of interest at which it will lend money to the banks: the discount rate. (A third aspect of monetary policy tools is the buying and selling of government securities in open market operations -- this too depends on the manipulation of new forms of credit - but one which Marx already saw developing and describes in Part VIII on the role of national debt in primitive accumulation).

Yet through all these complex monetary relations we must discover the underlying class meaning. We must see for example how these new monetary tools can be used by capital to intentionally create or permit inflation that can be used to undermine the value of labor-power indirectly through the devaluation of money. However incomplete, Marx's discussion in this chapter provides keys to understanding such Keynesian strategies for lowering real wages, just as it can provide keys for understanding the more recent manipulation of commodity prices to achieve the same result, e.g., food and oil crises of the 1970s). Unfortunately, in far too many Marxist discussions of money in the past (and there have not been that many!) the interactions of money and commodities have been dealt with only in terms of those categories --in the fetishized fashion of chapter one. This tradition we must discard in this period in which the manipulation of money and prices, both nationally and internationlly has become one of the principal tools of capital against us.

Not surprisingly, given the role of money as a weapon of repression and exploitation in the Third World, it is common to find expressions of resentment against money, especially the dollar --the money most frequently used to finance repression-- throughout popular music, just as in the US. One good example of such resentment can be found in Peter Tosh's song "The Day the Dollar Die". One of the best known reggae musicians in the world, Tosh crafted an anticipatory song which celebrates the future (that he obviously thinks inevitable) death of the dollar, and of money more generally. A video of Tosh singing this song at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1979 is now available on YouTube.

Recommended Further Reading

As mentioned in this section of my notes on Chapter 2, and as indicated by the multiple footnotes making reference to it in this chapter, Marx's earlier work Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy provides an interesting and useful supplement to this chapter, as does the chapter on money of the Grundrisse. In both cases you will discover something of Marx's political motivations that are not so obvious in Capital. In each of these books he critiques not only bourgeois political economy but also socialist theories, such as those of French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his followers, which are based, in Marx's view, on a missunderstanding not only of the relation between money and commodities but also of the relationship between both of these and the class relations of capitalism.

With respect to the class politics of the debasement of money, George Caffentzis' book Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money, New York: Autonomedia, 1989, contains both an account of such problems and an analysis of its class character. It also presents an analysis of how and why it was not inconsistent for Locke, a well-known exponent of the quantity theory, to argue for recoinage (which everyone thought would reduce the money supply and cause deflation) during a period of crisis and war. Caffentzis shows that not only did Locke think the internal threat to state power (attack on the state's ability to manage the money supply) was greater than the external one but also how he didn't think the effects of recoinage would be deflationary anyway.

On the class politics of the fiscal crisis of New York, which turned out to be the prototype for fiscal crises everywhere, including the U.S. federal government, see Donna Demac and Philp Mattera, "Developing and Underdeveloping New York: The 'Fiscal Crisis' and the Imposition of Austerity", Zerowork #2, 1977, pp. 113-139 and Eric Lichten, Class, Power & Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis, South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey, 1986.

On the class politics of the international debt crisis, see my article "Close the IMF, Abolish Debt and End Development: A Class Analysis of the The International Debt Crisis," Capital & Class, #39, Winter 1989 and issue #10 of Midnight Notes on the "New Enclosures".

Concepts for Review

measure of value standard of price means of circulation hoard store of value means of payment

money names weight names debasement of coin the realization problem metamorphosis of a commodity velocity quantity theory of money

Questions for Review

1. Explain the role of Chapter Three in Capital. That is to say explain its relationship to Chapters One and Two and to what comes after.

2. Explain the relationship between the general form of value and Marx's formula C - M - C.

3. What can you say about the price on a price tag in a store using Marx's discussion in this chapter?

4. What is the role of the state with respect to the role of money as a standard of price?

5. Explain the relationships among gold, the weight name for the price of a good, and the money name for such a price. How can debasement result in a difference between the price and value of a commodity?

6. Give an example and explain how a thing may have a price but no value.

7. Explain why the general possibility of crisis exists within exchange relationships where money plays the role of mediator. What is the relation between this and a labor strike against a business?

8. Locate C - M - C within the overall world of commodity exchange. Analyse it into its component parts and relate them to the rest of that world.

9. Explain the logic of Marx's comments that C - M - C can be usefully examined within the framework of Hegel's syllogism P - U - I.

10. Explain the difference between Marx's quantity theory of money and that of classical political economy. How do they differ? Under what conditions do their interpretations converge?

11. Discuss the relevance of post-WWII international monetary "liquidity problems" for interpreting the quantity theory.

12. What is the role of hoard in the money system of capitalism?

13. What is the miser's mistake according to Marx?

14. Explain "credit money" in Marx's analysis. How does it not remove the possibility of crisis?

15. "The class struggle in the ancient world," Marx says "took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors..." In what sense are struggles over debt today, especially in the international arena, part of the class struggle?

16. What changes, if any, do we need to make to Marx's discussion of money in order to analyse the role of money internationally?


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Footnotes

1 Because so many things and relationships become commodities in capitalism, money comes to be seen as the measure of everything, even things which might otherwise be thought of with no reference to money. In his song "Money Machine" on his album In The Pocket, James Taylor sings "you can measure your manhood by it". Now it is not only in a capitalist society that your "manhood" is judged by how much money you earn, but in this society it takes a critical faculty to be able to avoid such attitudes.

2 This is an imaginary example, not based on any empirical evidence.

3 I give $35 here because for many years the exchange value of gold was fixed by the American government at $35/oz. That was the price it would pay for gold and that was the amount of gold it would give up (to foreigners) in exchange for their dollars. Since gold was demonetized after the onset of the international monetary crisis in 1971, the price of gold has been set by supply and demand in the gold market and its price has varied enormously but in recent times around $350/oz.

4 You should note that Marx's analysis of supply and demand is not the same as that of contemporary microeconomics. He, like almost every economist of his time, was working before anyone (with the exception of a little known French economist named Cournot) had developed an analysis of supply and demand in terms of mathematical functions relating price and quantity changes. You will not find in his discussion, therefore, distinctions such as those between the quantity demanded at a price and the "demand" conceived in terms of a downward sloping curve. This said, you will also find as competent a discussion of market forces as was available in the mid-19th Century.

5 N.B.:Marx's choice of "metamorphosis", "chrysalis" etc., makes a clear analogy with the evolution of an insects' growth: egg, pupa, larva, chrysalis, adult, etc. -where the form changes but the essence remains constant.

6 On the "good infinity" see the discussion of the general form of value in my commentary on Marx's discussion of the form of value in chapter one.

7 In M - C - M' money appears as the initiator of the process, an occurrance which helps make it a fetish - which hides the centrality of the production process - the control over labor power and the production of commodities, including labor power.

8 In this interpretation Marx shared the position of Adam Smith who was consistent in his value and money theories.

9 The dollar was repeatedly devalued between 1971 and 1973 after which it floated against the other currencies and against gold -with the result that gold was effectively demonetized and its role as an international money collapsed.