Capital, vol. I, The process of accumulation of capital

Simple reproduction

Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.

The conditions of production are at the same time the conditions of reproduction. No society can go on producing, in other words no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same, the society can reproduce or maintain its wealth on the existing scale only by replacing the means of production which have been used up – i.e. the instruments of labour, the raw material and the auxiliary substances – with an equal quantity of new articles. These must be separated from the mass of the yearly product, and incorporated once again into the production process. Hence a definite portion of each year’s product belongs to the sphere of production. Destined for productive consumption from the very first, this portion exists, for the most part, in forms which by their very nature exclude the possibility of individual consumption.

If production has a capitalist form, so too will reproduction. Just as in the capitalist mode of production the labour process appears only as a means towards the process of valorization, so in the case of reproduction it appears only as a means of reproducing the value advanced as capital, i.e. as self-valorizing value. The economic character of capitalist becomes firmly fixed to a man only if his money constantly functions as capital. If, for instance, a sum of £100 has this year been converted into capital, and has produced a surplus-value of £20, it must continue during the next year, and subsequent years, to repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the value of the capital, or a periodic fruit borne by capital-in-process, surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue arising out of capital.¹

If this revenue serves the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption, and if it is consumed as periodically as it is gained, then, other things being equal, simple reproduction takes place. And although this reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production, on the same scale as before, this mere repetition, or continuity, imposes on the process certain new characteristics, or rather, causes the disappearance of some apparent characteristics possessed by the process in isolation.

The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude to the production process; and this prelude is constantly repeated when the period of time for which the labour-power has been sold comes to an end, when a definite period of production, such as a week or a month, has elapsed. But the worker is not paid until after he has expended his labour-power, and realized both the value of his labour-power and a certain quantity of surplus-value in the shape of commodities. He has therefore produced not only surplus-value, which we for the present regard as a fund to meet the private consumption of the capitalist, but also the variable capital, the fund out of which he himself is paid, before it flows back to him in the shape of wages; and his employment lasts only as long as he continues to reproduce this fund. This is the reason for the formula of the economists, mentioned in Chapter 18, under II, which presents wages as a share in the product itself.² What flows back to the worker in the shape of wages is a portion of the product he himself continuously reproduces. The capitalist, it is true, pays him the value of the commodity in money, but this money is merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour. While he is converting a portion of the means of production into products, a portion of his former product is being turned into money. It is his labour of last week, or of last year, that pays for his labour-power this week or this year. The illusion created by the money-form vanishes immediately if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single worker, we take the whole capitalist class and the whole working class. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the working class drafts, in the form of money, on a portion of the product produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The workers give these drafts back just as constantly to the capitalists, and thereby withdraw from the latter their allotted share of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form of the commodity.

Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form of appearance of the fund for providing the means of subsistence, or the labour-fund, which the worker requires for his own maintenance and reproduction, and which, in all systems of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because his own product constantly moves away from him in the form of capital. But this form of appearance of the labour-fund makes no difference to the fact that it is the worker’s own objectified labour which is advanced to him by the capitalist.³ Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory labour services. He works on his own land with his own means of production for, say, three days a week. The other three days are devoted to forced labour on the lord’s domain. He constantly reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the form of a money payment for his labour, advanced by another person. But in return his unpaid and forced labour for the lord never acquires the character of voluntary and paid labour. If one, fine morning, the landowner appropriates to himself the plot of land, the cattle, the seed, in short, the means of production of the peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power to the former. He will, other things being equal, labour six days a week as before, three for himself, three for his former lord, who thenceforth becomes a wage-paying capitalist. As before, he will use up the means of production as means of production, and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion of the product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that forced labour is changed into wage-labour, the labour-fund, which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce, takes the form of a quantity of capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord of the land. The bourgeois economist, whose limited mentality is unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing which appears within that form, shuts his eyes to the fact that even at the present time the labour-fund only crops up exceptionally on the face of the globe in the form of capital.⁴

Variable capital, it is true, loses its character of a value advanced out of the capitalist’s funds⁵ only when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant renewal. But that process must have had a beginning of some kind. From our present standpoint it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once upon a time, became possessed of money by some form of primitive^* accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation] that took place independently of the unpaid labour of other people, and that this was therefore how he was able to frequent the market as a buyer of labour-power. However this may be, the mere continuity of the process of capitalist production, or simple reproduction, brings about other remarkable transformations which seize hold of not only the variable, but the total capital.

If a surplus-value of £200 is generated every year by the use of a capital of £1,000, and if this surplus-value is consumed every year, it is clear that when this process has been repeated for five years, the surplus-value consumed will amount to 5×£200, or the £1,000 originally advanced. If only a part were consumed, say one-half, the same result would follow at the end of ten years, since 10×£100 = £1,000. The following general formulation emerges: the value of the capital advanced divided by the surplus-value annually consumed gives the number of years, or periods of reproduction, at the expiration of which the capital originally advanced has been consumed by the capitalist and has disappeared. The capitalist thinks that he is consuming the produce of the unpaid labour of others, i.e. the surplus-value, and is keeping intact the value of his original capital; but what he thinks cannot alter the actual situation. After the lapse of a certain number of years, the value of the capital he possesses is equal to the sum total of the surplus-value he has appropriated during those years, and the total value he has consumed is equal to the value of his original capital. It is true that he has in hand a quantity of capital whose magnitude has not changed, and that part of it, such as buildings, machinery, etc., was already there when he began to conduct his business operations. But we are not concerned here with the material components of the capital. We are concerned with its value. When a person consumes the whole of his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts. And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent of his original capital, the value of his present capital represents nothing but the total amount of surplus-value appropriated by him without payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist.

Therefore, entirely leaving aside all accumulation, the mere continuity of the production process, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and necessarily, converts all capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. Even if that capital was, on its entry into the process of production, the personal property of the man who employs it, and was originally acquired by his own labour, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialized either in the money-form or in some other way. We saw in Chapter 4 that for the transformation of money into capital something more was required than the production and circulation of commodities. We saw that on the one hand the possessor of value or money, on the other hand the possessor of the value-creating substance – on the one hand, the possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the possessor of nothing but labour-power – must confront each other as buyer and seller. A division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and subjective labour-power, was therefore the real foundation and the starting-point of the process of capitalist production.

But what at first was merely a starting-point becomes, by means of nothing but the continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the characteristic result of capitalist production, a result which is constantly renewed and perpetuated. On the one hand, the production process incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorization. On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it – a personal source of wealth, but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for himself. Since, before he enters the process, his own labour has already been alienated [entfremdet] from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him [fremder Produkt]. Since the process of production is also the process of the consumption of labour-power by the capitalist, the worker’s product is not only constantly converted into commodities, but also into capital, i.e. into value that sucks up the worker’s value-creating power, means of subsistence that actually purchase human beings, and means of production that employ the people who are doing the producing.⁶ Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer.⁷ This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.

The worker’s consumption is of two kinds. While producing he consumes the means of production with his labour, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour-power by the capitalist who has bought it. On the other hand, the worker uses the money paid to him for his labour-power to buy the means of subsistence; this is his individual consumption. The worker’s productive consumption and his individual consumption are therefore totally distinct. In the former, he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist. In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the production process. The result of the first kind of consumption is that the capitalist continues to live, of the second, that the worker himself continues to live.

When dealing with the ‘working day’, we saw that the worker is often compelled to make his individual consumption into a merely incidental part of the production process. In such a case, he provides himself with means of subsistence in order to keep his labour-power in motion, just as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine, and oil to the wheel. His means of consumption are then merely the means of consumption of a means of production; his individual consumption is directly productive consumption. This, however, appears to be an abuse, rather than an essential attribute of the capitalist process of production.⁸

The matter takes quite another aspect if we contemplate not the single capitalist and the single worker, but the capitalist class and the working class, not an isolated process of production, but capitalist production in full swing, and on its actual social scale. By converting part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist valorizes the value of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits not only by what he receives from the worker, but also by what he gives him. The capital given in return for labour-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual consumption of the working class is the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in return for labour-power into fresh labour-power which capital is then again able to exploit. It is the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker. The individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, just as the cleaning of machinery does, whether it is done during the labour process, or when intervals in that process permit. The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant to the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum, and an immense distance separates his attitude from the crudeness of the South American mine-owners, who force their workers to consume the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food.⁹

Hence both the capitalist and his ideologist, the political economist, consider only that part of the worker’s individual consumption to be productive which is required for the perpetuation of the working class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power to consume. What the worker consumes over and above that minimum for his own pleasure is seen as unproductive consumption.¹⁰ If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the worker’s consumption unaccompanied by an increase in the consumption of labour-power by capital, the additional capital would be consumed unproductively.¹¹ In reality, the individual consumption of the worker is unproductive even from his own point of view, for it simply reproduces the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist and to the state, since it is the production of a force which produces wealth for other people.¹²

From the standpoint of society, then, the working class, even when it stands outside the direct labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour are. Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits, a mere aspect of the process of capital’s reproduction. That process, however, takes good care to prevent the workers, those instruments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away, by constantly removing their product from one pole to the other, to the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for the workers’ maintenance and reproduction; on the other hand, by the constant annihilation of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-appearance on the labour-market. The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract.

In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever it seemed necessary, in order to enforce its proprietary rights over the free worker. For instance, down to 1815 the emigration of mechanics employed in machine-making was forbidden in England, on pain of severe punishment.

The reproduction of the working class implies at the same time the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another.¹³ The capitalist regards the existence of such a skilled working class as one of the conditions of production which belong to him, and in fact views it as the real existence of his variable capital. This becomes very clear as soon as a crisis threatens him with its loss. As a result of the American Civil War and the accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton workers of Lancashire were, as is well known, thrown out of work. Both from the working class itself, and from other social strata, there arose a cry for state aid, or voluntary national subscriptions, in order to make possible the emigration of those who were ‘redundant’ to the English colonies or to the United States. That was the time when The Times published a letter (24 March 1863) from Edmund Potter, a former President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly described in the House of Commons as ‘the manifesto of the manufacturers’.¹⁴ We shall reproduce here a few characteristic passages, in which the proprietary rights of capital over labour-power are unblushingly asserted.

‘He’ (the man out of work) ‘may be told the supply of cotton-workers is too large… and… must… in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps, and that then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds… Public opinion… urges emigration… The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound… But if the public funds are to be devoted to assist emigration, he has a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest.’ The same Potter then proceeds to point out how useful the cotton industry is, how ‘it has undoubtedly drawn the surplus population from Ireland and from the agricultural districts’, how immense is its extent, how it yielded 5/13ths of total English exports in the year 1860, how, after a few years, it will again expand by the extension of the market, particularly of the Indian market, and by calling forth a plentiful supply of cotton at 6d. per lb. He then continues: ‘[It is not to be denied that] time – one, two, or three years it may be – will produce the quantity… The question I would put then is this – Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth while to keep the machinery’ (he means the living labour-machines) ‘in order, and is it not the greatest folly to think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that the workers are not a property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but they are the strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which cannot be replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work might much of it be beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth.¹⁵ Encourage or allow (!) the working-power to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?’ This cry from the heart reminds one of Lord Chamberlain Kalb.^* ‘Take away the cream of the workers, and fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree, and the floating will not subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior labour… We are told the workers wish it’ (emigration). ‘Very natural it is that they should do so… Reduce, compress the cotton trade by taking away its working power and reducing their wages expenditure, say one-fifth, or five millions, and what then would happen to the class above, the small shopkeepers; and what of the rents, the cottage rents… Trace out the effects upward to the small farmer, the better householder, and… the landowner, and say if there could be any suggestion more suicidal to all classes of the country than enfeebling a nation by exporting the best of its manufacturing population, and destroying the value of some of its most productive capital and enrichment… I advise a loan (of five or six millions sterling)… extending it may be over two or three years, administered by special commissioners added to the Boards of Guardians in the cotton districts, under special legislative regulations, enforcing some occupation or labour, as a means of keeping up at least the moral standard of the recipients of the loan… can anything be worse for landowners or masters than parting with the best of the workers, and demoralizing and disappointing the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a depletion of capital and value in an entire province?’

Potter, the chosen mouthpiece of the cotton manufacturers, distinguishes between two sorts of ‘machinery’. Both belong to the capitalist, but one stands in his factory, while the other is housed in cottages outside the factory at night-time and on Sundays. The one is inanimate, the other living. The inanimate machinery not only wears out and loses value from day to day, but also much of it becomes out of date so quickly, owing to constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with advantage by new machinery after a few months. With the living machinery the reverse is true: it gets better the longer it lasts, and in proportion as the skill handed down from one generation to another accumulates. Here is the answer given by The Times to the cotton magnate:

‘Mr Edmund Potter is so impressed with the exceptional and supreme importance of the cotton masters that, in order to preserve this class and perpetuate their profession, he would keep half a million of the labouring class confined in a great moral workhouse against their will. “Is the trade worth retaining?” asks Mr Potter. “Certainly by all honest means it is,” we answer. “Is it worth while keeping the machinery in order?” again asks Mr Potter. Here we hesitate. By the “machinery”, Mr Potter means the human machinery, for he goes on to protest that he does not mean to use them as an absolute property. We must confess that we do not think it “worth while”, or even possible, to keep the human machinery in order – that is to shut it up and keep it oiled till it is wanted. Human machinery will rust under inaction, oil and rub it as you may. Moreover, the human machinery will, as we have just seen, get the steam up of its own accord, and burst or run amuck in our great towns. It might, as Mr Potter says, require some time to reproduce the workers, but, having machinists and capitalists at hand, we could always find thrifty, hard, industrious men wherewith to improvise more master-manufacturers than we can ever want. Mr Potter talks of the trade reviving “in one, two, or three years”, and he asks us not “to encourage or allow (!) the working power to emigrate”. He says that it is very natural the workers should wish to emigrate; but he thinks that in spite of their desire, the nation ought to keep this half million of workers with their 700,000 dependants, shut up in the cotton districts; and as a necessary consequence, he must of course think that the nation ought to keep down their discontent by force, and sustain them by alms – and upon the chance that the cotton masters may some day want them… The time is come when the great public opinion of these islands must operate to save this “working power” from those who would deal with it as they would deal with iron, and coal, and cotton.’¹⁶

This article was only a jeu d’esprit. The ‘great public opinion’ was in fact of Mr Potter’s own opinion, it too thought that the factory workers were movable accessories to the factories. Their emigration was prevented.¹⁷ They were locked up in that ‘moral workhouse’, the cotton districts, and they form, as before, ‘the strength’ of the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire.

Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.¹⁸ It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labour-power and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage¹⁹ is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour.²⁰

The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.²¹

The transformation of surplus-value into capital

Capitalist production on a progressively increasing scale. The inversion which converts the property laws of commodity production into laws of capitalist appropriation

Earlier we considered how surplus-value arises from capital; now we have to see how capital arises from surplus-value. The employment of surplus-value as capital, or its reconversion into capital, is called accumulation of capital.¹

Let us first consider this process from the standpoint of the individual capitalist. Suppose a master-spinner has advanced a capital of £10,000, of which four-fifths (£8,000) is laid out in cotton, machinery, etc. and one-fifth (£2,000) in wages. Let him produce 240,000 lb. of yarn every year, and let the value of this yarn be £12,000. The rate of surplus-value being 100 per cent, the surplus-value is contained in the surplus, or net product, of 40,000 lb. of yarn, which is one-sixth of the gross product, and has a value of £2,000 which will be realized by a sale. £2,000 is £2,000. Neither seeing nor smelling will tell us that this sum of money is surplus-value. When we know that a given value is surplus-value, we know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either of value or of money.

In order to transform this newly acquired sum of £2,000 into capital, the master-spinner will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance four-fifths of it (£1,600) in the purchase of cotton, etc. and one-fifth (£400) in the purchase of additional spinning workers, who will find in the market the means of subsistence whose value the master has advanced to them. The new capital of £2,000 then functions in the spinning-mill and in its turn brings in a surplus value of £400.

The capital-value was originally advanced in the form of money. The surplus-value, however, existed from the outset as the value of a definite portion of the gross product. If this gross product is sold, converted into money, the capital-value regains its original form. From this moment on, the capital-value and surplus-value are both sums of money, and their reconversion into capital takes place in precisely the same way. The one as well as the other is laid out by the capitalist in the purchase of commodities that place him in a position to start making his goods again, and indeed, on a larger scale this time. But in order to be able to buy these commodities, he must find them ready in the market.

His own yarn circulates only because he brings his annual product to market, as do all other capitalists with their commodities. But these commodities, before coming to market, were already part of the annual production fund, i.e. part of the total mass of objects of every kind into which the sum total of the individual capitals, or the total social capital, had been converted in the course of the year, and of which each capitalist had in hand only a small fraction. All the transactions in the market can accomplish is the interchange of the individual components of this annual product, their transfer from one hand to another. They cannot increase the total annual production, nor can they alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence the use that can be made of the total annual product depends entirely on its own composition, and in no way on circulation.

Annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use-values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. After we have deducted this, there remains the net or surplus product, which contains the surplus-value. And what does this surplus product consist of? Only of things destined to satisfy the needs and desires of the capitalist class, things which consequently enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? If that were all, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place.

Accumulation requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, transform into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the worker (i.e. means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In a word, surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, whose value it is, already comprises the material components of a new quantity of capital.²

Now, in order that these components may actually function as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the workers already employed does not increase, either extensively or intensively, additional labour-powers must be enlisted. The mechanism of capitalist production has already provided for this in advance, by reproducing the working class as a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only to maintain itself, but also to increase its numbers. All capital needs to do is to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labour-powers of all ages, with the additional means of production comprised in the annual product, and the transformation of surplus-value into capital has been accomplished. Looked at concretely, accumulation can be resolved into the production of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The cycle of simple reproduction alters its form and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral.³

Let us now return to our example. It is the old story: Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob and so on. The original capital of £10,000 brings in a surplus-value of £2,000, which is capitalized. The new capital of £2,000 brings in a surplus-value of £400, and this too is capitalized, transformed into a second additional capital, which in its turn produces a further surplus-value of £80. And the process continues in this way.

We leave out of account here the portion of the surplus-value consumed by the capitalist. We are also not interested, for the moment, in whether the additional capital is joined on to the original capital, or separated from it so that it can valorize itself independently. Nor are we concerned whether the same capitalist employs it who originally accumulated it, or whether he hands it over to others. All we must remember is this: by the side of the newly formed capital, the original capital continues to reproduce itself and to produce surplus-value, and this is true of all accumulated capital in relation to the additional capital engendered by it.

The original capital was formed by the advance of £10,000. Where did its owner get it from? ‘From his own labour and that of his forefathers’, is the unanimous answer of the spokesmen of political economy.⁴ And, in fact, their assumption appears to be the only one consonant with the laws of commodity production.

But it is quite otherwise with regard to the additional capital of £2,000. We know perfectly well how that originated. There is not one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labour. The means of production with which the additional labour-power is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the workers are sustained, are nothing but component parts of the surplus product, parts of the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Even if the latter uses a portion of that tribute to purchase the additional labour-power at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them.

If the additional capital employs the person who produced it, this producer must not only continue to valorize the value of the original capital, but must buy back the fruits of his previous labour with more labour than they cost. If we view this as a transaction between the capitalist class and the working class, it makes no difference that additional workers are employed by means of the unpaid labour of the previously employed workers. The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine that throws the producers of that capital out of work, and replaces them with a few children. In every case, the working class creates by the surplus labour of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following year.⁵ And this is what is called creating capital out of capital.

The accumulation of the first additional capital of £2,000 presupposes that a value of £10,000 exists, advanced by the capitalist, and belonging to him by virtue of his ‘original labour’. The second additional capital of £400 presupposes, on the contrary, only the prior accumulation of the £2,000, of which the £400 is the capitalized surplus-value. The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.

The surplus-value that makes up additional capital no. 1 is the result of the purchase of labour-power with part of the original capital, a purchase which conformed to the laws of commodity exchange and which, from a legal standpoint, presupposes nothing beyond the worker’s power to dispose freely of his own capacities, and the money-owner’s or commodity-owner’s power to dispose freely of the values that belong to him; equally, additional capital no. 2 is merely the result of additional capital no. 1, and is therefore a consequence of the relations described above; hence each individual transaction continues to conform to the laws of commodity exchange, with the capitalist always buying labour-power and the worker always selling it at what we shall assume is its real value. It is quite evident from this that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, is now turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange, since, firstly, the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself merely a portion of the product of the labour of others which has been appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange between capitalist and worker becomes a mere semblance belonging only to the process of circulation, it becomes a mere form, which is alien to the content of the transaction itself, and merely mystifies it. The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form; the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others. Originally the rights of property seemed to us to be grounded in a man’s own labour. Some such assumption was at least necessary, since only commodity-owners with equal rights confronted each other, and the sole means of appropriating the commodities of others was the alienation of a man’s own commodities, commodities which, however, could only be produced by labour. Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour thus becomes the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity.⁶

Therefore,* however much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation of these laws but, on the contrary, from their application. Let us make this clear once more by briefly reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose culminating point is capitalist accumulation.

We saw, in the first place, that the original transformation of a sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labour-power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use-value – labour – is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid of labour equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise lawfully his.

The value of this product includes: first, the value of the means of production which have been used up. Useful labour cannot consume these means of production without transferring their value to the new product; but, to be saleable, labour-power must be capable of supplying useful labour in the branch of industry in which it is to be employed.

The value of the new product includes, further, the equivalent of the value of the labour-power together with a surplus-value. This is so because the value of the labour-power – sold for a definite length of time, say a day, a week, etc. – is less than the value created by its use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value of his labour-power and by so doing has alienated its use-value – this being the case in every sale and purchase.

The fact that this particular commodity, labour-power, possesses the peculiar use-value of supplying labour, and therefore of creating value, cannot affect the general law of commodity production. If, therefore, the amount of value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product, but augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used up by the buyer.

The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values of the commodities given in exchange for one another. From the very outset, indeed, it presupposes a difference between their use-values and it has nothing whatever to do with their consumption, which begins only after the contract has been concluded and executed.

Thus the original transformation of money into capital takes place in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production and with the rights of property derived from them. Nevertheless, its result is:

(1) that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

(2) that the value of this product includes, apart from the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist;

(3) that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he finds another buyer.

Simple reproduction is only the periodic repetition of this first operation; each time, money is freshly transformed into capital. Thus the law is not broken; on the contrary, it gains the opportunity to operate continuously. ‘Several successive acts of exchange have only made the last represent the first.’⁷

And yet we have seen that simple reproduction suffices to stamp this first operation, in so far as it is conceived as an isolated process, with a totally changed character. ‘Of those who share the national income among themselves, the one side’ (the workers) ‘acquire each year a fresh right to their share by fresh labour; the others’ (the capitalists) ‘have already acquired, by their original labour, a permanent right to their share.’⁸ It is indeed a well-known fact that the sphere of labour is not the only one in which primogeniture works miracles.

Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction on an extended scale, by accumulation. In the former case the capitalist squanders the whole of the surplus-value in dissipation, in the latter he demonstrates his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and converting the rest into money.

The surplus-value is his property; it has never belonged to anyone else. If he advances it for the purposes of production, the advances made come from his own funds, exactly as on the day when he first entered the market. The fact that on this occasion the funds are derived from the unpaid labour of his workers makes absolutely no difference. If worker B is paid out of the surplus-value which worker A produced, then, in the first place, A furnished that surplus-value without having the fair price of his commodity cut by even a farthing, and, in the second place, the transaction is no concern of B’s whatever. What B claims, and has a right to claim, is that the capitalist should pay him the value of his labour-power. ‘Both of them still benefited: the worker because he was advanced the fruits of his labour’ (should read: of the unpaid labour of other workers) ‘before the work was done ‘(should read: before his own labour had borne fruit);’ the employer, because the labour of this worker was worth more than his wages’ (should read: produced more value than the value of his wages).⁹

To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view them in their totality, as the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production.

Only the mutually independent buyer and seller face each other in commodity production. Relations between them cease on the day when the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the result of a new agreement which has nothing to do with the previous one and in which it is only an accident that brings the same seller together again with the same buyer.

If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we must consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any connection with the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it is not admissible to look here for relations between whole social classes.

However long a series of periodic reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity. As long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange – taken in isolation – the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionized without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production. The same rights remain in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate the unpaid labour of others over and over again.

This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the worker himself, of labour-power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that commodity production is generalized and becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that every product is produced for sale from the outset and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of circulation. Only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole; but it is also true that only there does it unfold all its hidden potentialities. To say that the intervention of wage-labour adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own immanent laws, undergoes a further development into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation.¹⁰

We have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital, whatever its original source, is transformed into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. But in the flood of production the total capital originally advanced becomes a vanishing quantity (magnitudo evanescens in the mathematical sense), in comparison with the directly accumulated capital, i.e. the surplus-value or surplus product that is reconverted into capital. This occurs whether the capital originally advanced is functioning in the hands of the man who accumulated it, or in the hands of other people. Hence the political economists describe capital in general as ‘accumulated wealth’ (transformed surplus-value or revenue) ‘that is employed over again in the production of surplus-value’,¹¹ and the capitalist himself as ‘the owner of surplus-value’.¹² This same way of looking at things is merely expressed in another form in the statement that all existing capital is accumulated or capitalized interest, for interest is nothing but a fragment of surplus-value.¹³

The political economists’ erroneous conception of reproduction on an increasing scale

Before we attempt to give a more detailed characterization of accumulation or the reconversion of surplus-value into capital, we must clear out of the way an ambiguity concocted by the classical economists.

The commodities the capitalist buys with a part of the surplus-value for his own consumption do not serve as means of production or means of valorization; similarly, the labour he buys for the satisfaction of his natural and social requirements does not serve as productive labour. Instead of transforming surplus-value into capital, he rather consumes or expends it as revenue when he purchases those commodities and that labour. It was of decisive importance for the bourgeois economists, when confronted with the habitual mode of life of the old nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, ‘consists in consuming what is available’,* and is displayed in particular in the luxury of personal retainers, to promulgate the doctrine that the accumulation of capital is the first duty of every citizen, and to preach unceasingly that accumulation is impossible if a man eats up all his revenue, instead of spending a good part of it on the acquisition of additional productive workers, who bring in more than they cost. On the other hand, the economists also had to contend against the popular prejudice which confuses capitalist production with hoarding,¹⁴ and therefore imagines that accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued from destruction in its existing natural form, i.e. withdrawn from consumption, or wealth that does not enter into circulation. The exclusion of money from circulation would constitute precisely the opposite of its valorization as capital, and the accumulation of commodities in the sense of hoarding them would be sheer foolishness.¹⁵ In fact the accumulation of commodities in great masses is the result either of a bottleneck in circulation or of overproduction.¹⁶ It is true that the popular mind is impressed, on the one hand, by the sight of the mass of goods that are stored up for gradual consumption by the rich,¹⁷ and on the other hand by the formation of a reserve. The latter is a phenomenon which is common to all modes of production, and we shall dwell on it for a moment when we come to analyse the process of circulation.^*

The classical economists are therefore quite right to maintain that the consumption of the surplus product by productive, instead of unproductive, workers is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation. But at this point the mistakes also begin. Adam Smith has made it the fashion to present accumulation as nothing more than the consumption of the surplus product by productive workers. This amounts to saying that the capitalization of surplus-value consists merely in turning surplus-value into labour-power. Let us listen to Ricardo on this point: ‘It must be understood that all the productions of a country are consumed; but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed by those who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another value. When we say that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we mean is, that the portion of revenue, so said to be added to capital, is consumed by productive instead of unproductive labourers. There can be no greater error than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.’¹⁸ There can be no greater error than the one repeated after Adam Smith by Ricardo and all subsequent political economists, namely the view that ‘the portion of revenue so said to be added to capital, is consumed by productive labourers’. According to this, all surplus-value that is transformed into capital becomes variable capital. However, in actual fact the surplus-value, like the value originally advanced, divides up into constant and variable capital, into means of production and labour-power. Labour-power is the form in which variable capital exists during the process of production. In this process the labour-power is itself consumed by the capitalist while the means of production are consumed by the labour-power in the exercise of its function, i.e. labour. At the same time, the money paid for the purchase of the labour-power is converted into means of subsistence, which are consumed, not by ‘productive labour’, but by the ‘productive worker’. Adam Smith, at the end of a quite preposterous analysis, comes to the absurd conclusion that even though each individual capital is divided into a constant and a variable part, the capital of society can be entirely resolved into variable capital, i.e. it is laid out exclusively in the payment of wages.* For instance, suppose a cloth manufacturer converts £2,000 into capital. He lays out one part of the money in buying weavers, the other in woollen yarn, machinery, etc. But the people from whom he buys the yarn and the machinery themselves use a part of the purchase money to pay for labour, and so on until the whole £2,000 is spent in the payment of wages, i.e. until the entire product represented by the £2,000 has been consumed by productive workers. It is evident that the entire thrust of this argument lies in the words ‘and so on’, which send us from pillar to post. In fact, Adam Smith breaks off the investigation just where the difficulties begin.¹⁹

The annual process of reproduction is easily understood, as long as we look solely at the sum total of the year’s production. But every single component of this annual product must be brought into the market as a commodity, and there the difficulties begin. The movements of the individual capitals and personal revenues cross and intermingle, and become lost in a general alternation of positions, i.e. in the circulation of society’s wealth. This confuses the onlooker, and provides the investigation with very complicated problems to solve. In the third part of Volume 2 I shall give an analysis of the way the whole system is actually linked together. It is one of the great merits of the Physiocrats that in their Tableau économique† they were the first to attempt to depict the year’s production in the shape in which it emerges from circulation.²⁰

For the rest, it goes without saying that political economy has not failed to exploit, in the interests of the capitalist class, Adam Smith’s doctrine that the whole of that part of the net product which is transformed into capital is consumed by the working class.

Division of surplus-value into capital and revenue. The abstinence theory

In the previous chapter, we treated surplus-value (or the surplus product) solely as a fund for satisfying the capitalist’s individual consumption requirements. In this chapter, so far, we have treated it solely as a fund for accumulation. In fact, however, it is neither the one nor the other: it is both. One part of the surplus-value is consumed by the capitalist as revenue,²¹ the other part is employed as capital, i.e. it is accumulated.

With a given mass of surplus-value, then, the larger the one part, the smaller the other. Other things being equal, the ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of the accumulation. But it is the owner of the surplus-value, the capitalist, who makes this division. It is an act of his will. That part of the tribute exacted by him which he accumulates is said to be saved by him, because he does not consume it, i.e. because he performs his function as a capitalist, and enriches himself.

Except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence which, to use Lichnowsky’s amusing expression, ‘ain’t got no date’.* It is only to this extent that the necessity of the capitalist’s own transitory existence is implied in the transitory necessity of the capitalist mode of production. But, in so far as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.

In so far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital – endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will – his own private consumption counts as a robbery committed against the accumulation of his capital, just as, in double-entry book-keeping, the private expenditure of the capitalist is placed on the debit side of his account against his capital. Accumulation is the conquest of the world of social wealth. It is the extension of the area of exploited human material and, at the same time, the extension of the direct and indirect sway of the capitalist.²²

But original sin is at work everywhere. With the development of the capitalist mode of production, with the growth of accumulation and wealth, the capitalist ceases to be merely the incarnation of capital. He begins to feel a human warmth towards his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at his former enthusiasm for asceticism, as an old-fashioned miser’s prejudice. While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, as ‘abstinence’ from accumulating, the modernized capitalist is capable of viewing accumulation as ‘renunciation’ of pleasure. ‘Two souls, alas, do dwell within his breast; The one is ever parting from the other.’*

At the historical dawn of the capitalist mode of production – and every capitalist upstart has to go through this historical stage individually – avarice, and the drive for self-enrichment, are the passions which are entirely predominant. But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in the form of speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the ‘unfortunate’ capitalist. Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation. Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not, like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out labour-power from others, and compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life. Thus although the expenditure of the capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the dashing feudal lord’s prodigality, but, on the contrary, is always restrained by the sordid avarice and anxious calculation lurking in the background, this expenditure nevertheless grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. At the same time, however, there develops in the breast of the capitalist a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment.

Dr Aikin says, in a work published in 1795: ‘The trade of Manchester may be divided into four periods. First, when manufacturers were obliged to work hard for their livelihood.’ They enriched themselves chiefly by robbing the parents whose children were bound as apprentices to them: the parents paid a high premium, while the apprentices were starved. On the other hand, the average profits were low, and, in order to accumulate, extreme parsimony was needed. They lived like misers, and were far from consuming even the interest on their capital. ‘The second period, when they had begun to acquire little fortunes, but worked as hard as before’ (for the direct exploitation of labour costs labour, as every slave-driver knows) ‘and lived in as plain a manner as before… The third, when luxury began, and the trade was pushed by sending out riders for orders into every market town in the Kingdom… It is probable that few or no capitals of £3,000 to £4,000 acquired by trade existed here before 1690. However, about that time, or a little later, the traders had got money beforehand, and began to build modern brick houses, instead of those of wood and plaster.’ Even in the early part of the eighteenth century, a Manchester manufacturer who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests exposed himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours. Before the rise of machinery, a manufacturer’s evening expenditure at the public house where they all met never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny for a screw of tobacco. It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch, that a person actually engaged in business was seen with a carriage of his own. ‘The fourth period,’ the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, ‘is that in which expense and luxury have made great progress, supported by a trade extended by means of riders and factors through every part of Europe.’²³ What would the good Dr Aikin say if he could rise from the grave and see the Manchester of today?

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’²⁴ Therefore save, save, i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination. Not for one instant did it deceive itself over the nature of wealth’s birth-pangs.²⁵But what use is it to lament a historical necessity? If, in the eyes of classical economics, the proletarian is merely a machine for the production of surplus-value, the capitalist too is merely a machine for the transformation of this surplus-value into surplus capital. Classical economics takes the historical function of the capitalist in grim earnest. In order to conjure away the awful conflict between the desire for enjoyment and the drive for self-enrichment, Malthus, around the beginning of the 1820s, advocated a division of labour which assigned the business of accumulating to the capitalist actually engaged in production, and the business of spending to the other sharers in surplus-value, the landed aristocracy, the place-men, the beneficed clergy and so on. It is of the highest importance, he says, ‘to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion for accumulation’.²⁶ The capitalists, who had long since turned themselves into good livers and men of the world, complained loudly at this. What, exclaimed one of their spokesmen, a follower of Ricardo, does Mr Malthus preach high rents, heavy taxation, etc. so that the industrious may constantly be kept up to the mark by the pressure of unproductive consumers? By all means let there be production, production on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth, but ‘production will, by such a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is it quite fair thus to maintain in idleness a number of persons, only to pinch others, who are likely, from their characters, if you can force them to work, to work with success.’²⁷Though he finds it unfair to spur on the industrial capitalist by depriving his bread of its butter, he still thinks it necessary to reduce the worker’s wages to a minimum, ‘to keep him industrious’. Nor does he for a moment conceal the fact that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of making a profit. ‘Increased demand on the part of the labourers means nothing more than their disposition to take less of their own product for themselves, and leave a greater part of it to their employers; and if it be said, that this begets glut, by lessening consumption’ (on the part of the workers) ‘I can only reply that glut is synonymous with large profits.’²⁸

The learned dispute between the industrial capitalist and the wealthy landowning idler as to how the booty pumped out of the workers may most advantageously be divided for the purposes of accumulation had to fall silent in the face of the July Revolution. Shortly afterwards, the urban proletariat sounded the tocsin of revolution at Lyons, and the rural proletariat began to set fire to farmyards and hayricks in England. On this side of the Channel Owenism began to spread; on the other side, Saint-Simonism and Fourierism. The hour of vulgar economics had arrived. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior discovered at Manchester that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product of the unpaid ‘last hour of the twelve hours of labour’,* he had announced to the world another discovery. ‘I substitute,’ he proudly says, ‘for the word capital, considered as an instrument of production, the word abstinence.’²⁹ An unparalleled example of the ‘discoveries’ of vulgar economics! It replaces an economic category with a sycophantic phrase, and that is all. ‘When the savage,’ says Senior, ‘makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he does not practise abstinence.’ This is supposed to explain how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour were constructed ‘without the abstinence’ of the capitalist. ‘The more society progresses, the more abstinence is demanded,’³⁰ namely from those whose business it is to appropriate the industry and the products of others. All the conditions necessary for the labour process are now converted into acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist If the corn is not all eaten, but in part also sown – abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature – abstinence of the capitalist.³¹ The capitalist robs himself whenever he ‘lends (!) the instruments of production to the worker’, in other words, whenever he valorizes their value as capital by incorporating labour-power into them instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure, horses and all; or, as the vulgar economist childishly conceives, instead of dissipating ‘their value’ in luxuries and other articles of consumption.³² How the capitalist class can perform the latter feat is a secret which vulgar economics has so far obstinately refused to divulge. Enough that the world continues to live solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist. Not only accumulation, but the simple ‘conservation of a capital requires a constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it’.³³ The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from his martyrdom and his temptation, in the same way as the slave-owners of Georgia, U.S.A., have recently been delivered by the abolition of slavery from the painful dilemma over whether they should squander the surplus product extracted by means of the whip from their Negro slaves entirely in champagne, or whether they should reconvert a part of it into more Negroes and more land.

In economic formations of society of the most diverse kinds, there occurs not only simple reproduction but also, though in varying degrees, reproduction on an increasing scale. Progressively more is produced and consumed, and therefore more products have to be converted into means of production. However, this process does not appear as an accumulation of capital, and consequently it does not appear as the function of a capitalist, as long as the worker’s means of production, and with them his product and means of subsistence, do not confront him in the shape of capital.³⁴ Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in the chair of Political Economy at Haileybury, the college that trains people for the Indian Civil Service, discusses this point well in the light of two important facts. Since the greater part of the Indian population are peasants cultivating their land themselves, their products, their instruments of labour and their means of subsistence never take ‘the shape of a fund saved from revenue, which fund has, therefore, gone through a previous process of accumulation’.³⁵ On the other hand, in those provinces where English rule has least disturbed the old system, the non-agricultural workers are directly employed by the magnates, to whom a portion of the agricultural surplus product is rendered in the shape of tribute or rent. One part of this product is consumed by the magnates in its natural form, another part is converted by the workers into articles of luxury and other consumption goods for the use of the magnates, and the remainder forms the wage of the workers, who own their implements of labour. Here, production and reproduction on an increasing scale go on their way without any intervention from that peculiar saint, that knight of the woeful countenance, the ‘abstaining’ capitalist.

The circumstances which, independently of the proportional division of surplus-value into capital and revenue, determine the extent of accumulation, namely, the degree of exploitation of labour-power, the productivity of labour, the growing difference in amount between capital employed and capital consumed, and the magnitude of the capital advanced

If we assume the proportion in which surplus-value breaks up into capital and revenue as a given factor, the magnitude of the capital accumulated clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus-value. Suppose that 80 per cent of the surplus-value is capitalized, and 20 per cent is eaten up, then the accumulated capital will be £2,400 or £1,200, according to whether the total amount of surplus-value was £3,000 or £1,500. Hence all the circumstances that determine the mass of surplus-value operate to determine the magnitude of the accumulation. Here we shall summarize them once again, but only in so far as they offer fresh material which relates to accumulation.

It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political economy lays such great stress on this point that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation which results from an increase in the productivity of labour with the acceleration which arises from an increase in the exploitation of the worker.³⁶ In the chapters on the production of surplus-value we constantly assumed that wages were at least equal to the value of labour-power. But the forcible reduction of the wage of labour beneath its value plays too important a role in the practical movement of affairs for us not to stay with this phenomenon for a moment. In fact, it transforms the worker’s necessary fund for consumption, within certain limits, into a fund for the accumulation of capital.

‘Wages,’ says John Stuart Mill, ‘have no productive power; they are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour, to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools themselves. If labour could be had without purchase, wages might be dispensed with.’³⁷ But if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price. This zero cost of labour is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this absolute zero. An eighteenth-century writer we have often quoted already, the author of the ‘Essay on Trade and Commerce’, actually reveals the innermost secret of English capital when he declares that England’s historical mission is to force down English wages to the French and Dutch level.³⁸ He says, naïvely: ‘But if our poor’ (a technical term for the workers) ‘will live luxuriously… then labour must, of course, be dear… One has only to consider what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, etc.’³⁹ He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with one eye on heaven, laments: ‘Labour is one-third cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard, and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is dear, they eat very little bread.’⁴⁰ ‘To which may be added,’ our essayist continues, ‘that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money… These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable, since they have been effected both in France and in Holland.’⁴¹ Twenty years later, an American humbug, the ennobled Yankee Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford),* pursued the same line in philanthropy, to the great satisfaction of God and man. His Essays are a cookery book with recipes of all kinds for replacing the ordinary, but expensive food of the worker with various surrogates. The following is a particularly successful recipe issued by this remarkable ‘philosopher’: ‘5 lb. of barley-meal, 7 1/2d.; 5 lb. of Indian corn, 6 1/4d.; 3d. worth of red herring, 1d. salt, 1d. vinegar, 2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 20 3/4d.; make a soup for 64 men, and at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn… this soup may be provided at 1/4d. the portion of 20 ounces.’⁴² With the advance of capitalist production, the adulteration of food has rendered Thompson’s ideal superfluous.⁴³

At the end of the eighteenth and during the first ten years of the nineteenth century, the English farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wages by paying the agricultural labourers less than the minimum in the actual form of wages, and the remainder in the form of parochial relief. Here is an example of the buffoonery of the English Dogberries, when they were ‘legally’ laying down a wage-tariff: ‘The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr Burke, when they fixed the rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795… There they decided that, “income (weekly) should be 3s., for a man”, when the gallon or half-peck loaf of 8 lb. 11 oz. is at 1s., and increase regularly till bread is 1s. 5d.; when it is above that sum, decrease regularly till it be at 2s., and then his food should be 1/5th less.’⁴⁴ Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords (1814) a certain A. Bennett, a big farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian and wage-regulator, was asked: ‘Has any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up to the labourers out of the poors’ rate?’ Answer: ‘Yes, it has; the weekly income of every family is made up to the gallon loaf (8 lb. 11 oz.), and 3d. per head!… The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the family for the week; and the 3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to find clothes, the 3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of Wiltshire, and, I believe, throughout the country.’⁴⁵

‘For years’, exclaims a bourgeois writer of the time, ‘they (the farmers) have degraded a respectable class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse to the workhouse… the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented any accumulation on the part of his labouring dependants.’⁴⁶ The case of so-called ‘domestic industry’ shows the part played in our own time by direct robbery from the worker’s necessary consumption-fund in the formation of surplus-value, and therefore in the formation of the fund for the accumulation of capital.* We shall give further facts on this subject later.

Although that portion of the constant capital which consists of the instruments of labour must, in all branches of industry, be sufficient for a certain number of workers (this number being determined by the size of the enterprise), it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the quantity of labour employed. Let us suppose that 100 workers, working 8 hours a day in a given factory, yield 800 hours of labour. If the capitalist wishes to raise this total by one half, he can employ 50 more workers; but then he must also advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labour. But he might also let the 100 workers work 12 hours instead of 8, and then the instruments of labour already to hand would suffice. They would merely be consumed more rapidly. Thus additional labour, arising from a greater exertion of labour-power, can augment the surplus product and surplus-value, which is the substance of accumulation, without a proportional augmentation in the constant part of capital.

In the extractive industries, mines etc., the raw materials do not form part of the capital advanced. The object of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but something provided by nature free of charge, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. Here the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour which can very easily absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night shifts, for example). All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day of production, the two original agencies working to form the product, man and nature, continue to co-operate, and now, as creators of the products, they are also creators of the material elements of capital. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any prior increase in the size of the constant capital.

In agriculture, the amount of land under cultivation cannot be increased without laying out more seed and manure. But once this has been done, the purely mechanical ploughing of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the size of the product. A greater quantity of labour, performed by the same number of workers as before, thus increases the fertility of the land without requiring any new contribution in the form of instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.

Finally, in industry proper, every additional expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry both with its own raw materials and with those for its instruments of labour, the additional product provided by extractive industry and agriculture without any additional advance of capital also redounds to the advantage of manufacturing industry.

We arrive, therefore, at this general result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production which have already been produced, and in which it has its being.

Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social labour.

The mass of the products in which a certain value, and therefore a surplus-value of a given magnitude is embodied, increases along with the productivity of labour. If the rate of surplus-value remains the same (or even if it falls, provided that it falls more slowly than the productivity of labour rises), the mass of the surplus pro-due. increases. If the division of this product into revenue and additional capital remains the same, the consumption of the capitalist may accordingly increase without any decrease in the fund for accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation-fund may even increase at the expense of the consumption-fund, while the cheapening of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of enjoyment as formerly, or even more. But the increasing productivity of labour is accompanied by a cheapening of the worker, as we have seen, and it is therefore accompanied by a higher rate of surplus-value, even when real wages are rising. The latter never rise in proportion to the productivity of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets in motion more labour-power and, consequently, more labour. The same value in constant capital is embodied in more means of production, i.e. in more instruments of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary materials. It therefore supplies both more product-creating agencies and more value-creating agencies, in other words absorbers of labour. Therefore, even if the value of the additional capital remains the same or diminishes, accelerated accumulation still takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend, but the production of surplus-value increases more rapidly than the value of the additional capital.

The growth of the productivity of labour also has an impact on the original capital, i.e. the capital which is already engaged in the production process. A part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour such as machinery, etc., which are not consumed, and therefore not reproduced or replaced, until long periods of time have elapsed. However, every year some of these instruments of labour perish, or reach the ultimate limit of their productive function. At this point, then, they reach the time for their periodic reproduction, for their replacement with other, similar machines. If the productivity of labour has increased in the place where these instruments of labour are constructed (and it does develop continually, owing to the uninterrupted advance of science and technology), the old machines, tools, apparatus, etc. will be replaced by more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency) cheaper ones. The old capital is replaced in a more productive form, not to mention continual improvements in the details of the instruments of labour actually in operation. The other part of the constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is reproduced over and over again within the space of a year; the part of constant capital produced by agriculture is reproduced annually, by and large. Every time improved methods are introduced, therefore, this has an almost simultaneous impact on the new capital and the capital already engaged in its function. Every advance in chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials, and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending capital’s sphere of investment along with its growth; it also teaches capital how to throw back the waste from the processes of production and consumption into the cycle of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, it creates fresh materials for it. Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth resulting from the simple act of increasing the pressure under which labour-power has to operate, science and technology give capital a power of expansion which is independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react at the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered the stage of its renewal. This, in passing into its new shape, incorporates, free of charge, the social advances made while its old shape was being used up. Of course, this development of productivity is accompanied by a partial depreciation of the functioning capital; but in so far as this depreciation makes itself acutely felt in competition, the main burden falls on the worker, in whose increased exploitation the capitalist seeks compensation for his loss.

Labour transmits to the product the value of the means of production consumed by it. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labour increase as the labour becomes more productive. Although the same quantity of labour adds to its products only the same sum of new value, the old capital-value, transmitted by the labour to the products, nevertheless continues to increase in line with the growth in productivity.

An English spinner and a Chinese spinner, for example, may work the same number of hours with the same intensity; they will then both create equal values in the course of a week. But in spite of this equality, an immense difference exists between the value of the weekly product of the Englishman, who works with a mighty automatic machine, and that of the Chinese, who only has a spinning-wheel. In the same time as the Chinese spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum of old values, many hundred times as great, swells the value of his product, for in that product the old values re-appear in a new useful form, and can thus function anew as capital. ‘In 1782,’ as Friedrich Engels informs us, ‘the whole wool crop of the preceding three years’ (in England) ‘lay unused for want of workers, and would have continued so to lie if the newly invented machinery had not come to its assistance and spun it.’⁴⁷ The labour which was objectified in the form of machinery did not of course directly cause men to spring out of the earth, but it made it possible for a smaller number of workers, adding relatively less living labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into it new value, but also to preserve its old value, in the form of yarn, etc. At the same time, it provided the means and the incentive for an increased reproduction of wool. It is the natural property of living labour to keep old value in existence while it creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and value of its means of production and therefore with the accumulation which accompanies the development of its productivity, labour maintains and perpetuates an always increasing capital-value in an ever-renewed form.⁴⁸ This natural power of labour appears as a power incorporated into capital for the latter’s own self-preservation, just as the productive forces of social labour appear as inherent characteristics of capital, and just as the constant appropriation of surplus labour by the capitalists appears as the constant self-valorization of capital. All the powers of labour project themselves as powers of capital, just as all the value-forms of the commodity do as forms of money. With the growth of capital, the difference between the capital employed and the capital consumed increases. In other words, there is an increase in the value and the material mass of the instruments of labour, such as buildings, machinery, drain-pipes, ploughing oxen, apparatus of every kind that functions for a longer or shorter time in constantly repeated processes of production, or serves for the attainment of particular useful effects, while the instruments of labour themselves only gradually wear out, therefore only lose their value piecemeal, and transfer that value to the product only bit by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as agencies in the formation of products without adding value to those products, i.e. in the same proportion as they are wholly employed but only partly consumed, to that degree do they perform, as we saw earlier, the same free service as the forces of nature, such as water, steam, air and electricity. This free service of past labour, when it is seized on and filled with vitality by living labour, accumulates progressively as accumulation takes place on a larger and larger scale.

Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i.e. since the debts owed to the labour of A, B, C etc. are disguised as the assets of the non-worker X, bourgeois citizens and political economists are full of praise for the services performed by past labour, which, according to that Scottish genius MacCulloch, ought indeed to receive a special remuneration in the shape of interest, profit, etc.⁴⁹ The ever-growing weight of the assistance given by past labour to the living labour process in the form of means of production is therefore attributed to that form of past labour in which it is alienated [entfremdet], as unpaid labour, from the worker himself, i.e. it is attributed to its form as capital. The practical agents of capitalist production and their ideological word-spinners are as incapable of thinking of the means of production separately from the antagonistic social mask they wear at present as a slave-owner is of thinking of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave.

With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of surplus-value produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited; this corresponds, although in varying proportions, with the magnitude of the capital. Thus the more that capital increases by means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of value increase that is divided into a fund for consumption and a fund for accumulation. The capitalist can therefore live a more pleasant life, and at the same time ‘renounce’ more. And, finally, the more the scale of production extends, along with the mass of the capital advanced, the greater the expansive capacity of its driving forces.

The so-called labour fund

It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but a part of social wealth which is elastic, and constantly fluctuates with the division of surplus-value into revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, science and land (which means, economically speaking, all the objects of labour furnished by nature without human intervention) incorporated in it form elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have ignored all relations arising from the process of circulation, which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And since we presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, i.e. we presupposed the social process of production in a form developed by purely spontaneous growth, we disregarded any more rational combination which could be effected directly and in a planned way with the means of production and the labour-power at present available. Classical political economy has always liked to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle of the ‘common sense’ of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.⁵⁰ Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper* is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.⁵¹ This dogma in fact renders the commonest phenomena of the production process, for instance its sudden expansions and contractions, and even accumulation itself, absolutely incomprehensible.⁵² It was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch, etc., for apologetic purposes, and in particular so as to represent one part of capital, namely variable capital, or that part convertible into labour-power, as being of fixed size. Variable capital in its material existence, i.e. the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the worker, or the so-called labour fund, was turned by this fable into a separate part of social wealth, confined by natural chains and unable to cross the boundary to the other parts. To set in motion the part of social wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour is required. This mass is given by technology. But the number of workers required to put this mass of labour-power in a fluid state is not given, for it changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power. Nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit, which is moreover very elastic. The facts on which the dogma is based are these: on the one hand, the worker has no right to interfere in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-worker and means of production. On the other hand, it is only in favourable and exceptional cases that he can enlarge the so-called ‘labour fund’ at the expense of the ‘revenue’ of the rich.⁵³

How absurd a tautology results from the attempt to represent the capitalist limits of the labour fund as social barriers imposed by its very nature may be seen, for example, in Professor Fawcett.⁵⁴ ‘The circulating capital of a country,’ he says, ‘is its wage-fund. Hence, if we desire to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring population.’⁵⁵ That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we assert that the sum thus obtained forms the total value of the ‘labour fund’ handed down to us by the grace of God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the number of workers, in order to find out how much each is permitted to receive on the average. A very shrewd way of proceeding, this is. It does not prevent Mr Fawcett from saying, in the same breath: ‘The aggregate wealth which is annually saved in England, is divided into two portions; one portion is employed as capital to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to foreign countries… Only a portion, and perhaps, not a large portion of the wealth which is annually saved in this country, is invested in our own industry.’⁵⁶

The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus product, which is embezzled from the English workers without any equivalent being given in return, is thus used as capital, not in England, but in foreign countries. But with the additional capital thus exported, a part of the ‘labour fund’ invented by God and Bentham naturally also flows out of the country.⁵⁷

The general law of capitalist accumulation

A growing demand for labour-power accompanies accumulation if the composition of capital remains the same

In this chapter we shall consider the influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class. The most important factor in this investigation is the composition of capital, and the changes it undergoes in the course of the process of accumulation.

The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. There is a close correlation between the two. To express this, I call the value-composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.

The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have compositions which differ from each other to a greater or lesser extent. The average of their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total capital in the branch of production under consideration. Finally, the average of all the average compositions in all branches of production gives us the composition of the total social capital of a country, and it is with this alone that we are concerned here in the final analysis.

Growth of capital implies growth of its variable constituent, in other words, the part invested in labour-power. A part of the surplus-value which has been transformed into additional capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional labour fund. If we assume that, while all other circumstances remain the same, the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e. a definite mass of the means of production continues to need the same mass of labour-power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour, and the fund for the subsistence of the workers, both clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and with the same rapidity. Since the capital produces a surplus-value every year, of which one part is added every year to the original capital; since this increment itself grows every year along with the augmentation of the capital already functioning; and since, lastly, under conditions especially liable to stimulate the drive for self-enrichment, such as the opening of new markets, or of new spheres for the outlay of capital resulting from newly developed social requirements, the scale of accumulation may suddenly be extended merely by a change in the proportion in which the surplus-value or the surplus product is divided into capital and revenue – for all these reasons the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the growth in labour-power or in the number of workers; the demand for workers may outstrip the supply, and thus wages may rise. This must indeed ultimately be the case if the conditions assumed above continue to prevail. For since in each year more workers are employed than in the preceding year, sooner or later a point must be reached at which the requirements of accumulation begin to outgrow the customary supply of labour, and a rise of wages therefore takes place. Complaints were to be heard about this in England during the whole of the fifteenth century, and the first half of the eighteenth. The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-labourers support and multiply themselves in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e. the presence of capitalists on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side, so reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage-labourers at the other pole. The reproduction of labour-power which must incessantly be re-incorporated into capital as its means of valorization, which cannot get free of capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, forms, in fact, a factor in the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat.¹

Classical political economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc., as mentioned earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the consumption, by productive workers, of the whole of the capitalized part of the surplus product, or with the transformation of the surplus product into additional wage-labourers. John Béliers was already saying this in 1696: ‘For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as many pounds in money, and as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the rich man be, but a labourer? And as the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers there will be, the more rich men… the labour of the poor being the mines of the rich.’² So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century: ‘It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor; for who would do the work?… As they [the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class, by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get… Those that get their living by their daily labour… have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy… From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; for besides that they are the never failing nursery of fleets and armies, without them there could be no enjoyment, and no product of any country could be valuable. To make the society’ (which of course consists of non-workers) ‘happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.’³

What Mandeville, an honest man with a clear mind, had not yet grasped was the fact that the mechanism of the accumulation process itself not only increases the amount of capital but also the mass of the ‘labouring poor’, i.e. the wage-labourers, who turn their labour-power into a force for increasing the valorization of the growing capital, and who are thereby compelled to make their relation of dependence on their own product, as personified in the capitalist, into an eternal relation. In reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden remarks, in his The State of the Poor; or an History of the Labouring Classes in England,’ the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatigably employed… There are others who, though they “neither toil nor spin”, can yet command the produce of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilization and order… They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions,⁴ which have recognized that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion of labour… Persons of independent fortune… owe their superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely… to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community… This [the scheme approved by Eden] would give the people of property sufficient influence and authority over those who… work for them; and it would place such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will allow to be necessary for their own comfort.’⁵ Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, was the only disciple of Adam Smith to have achieved anything of importance during the eighteenth century.⁶

Under the conditions of accumulation we have assumed so far, conditions which are the most favourable to the workers, their relation of dependence on capital takes on forms which are endurable or, as Eden says, ‘easy and liberal’. Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive, i.e. the sphere of capital’s exploitation and domination merely extends with its own dimensions and the number of people subjected to it. A larger part of the worker’s own surplus product, which is always increasing and is continually being transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments, make additions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc., and lay by a small reserve fund of money. But these things no more abolish the exploitation of the wage-labourer, and his situation of dependence, than do better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger peculium, in the case of the slave. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-labourer has already forged for himself allow it to be loosened somewhat. In the controversies on this question, the essential fact has generally been overlooked, namely the differentia specifica of capitalist production. Labour-power is not purchased under this system for the purpose of satisfying the personal needs of the buyer, either by its service or through its product. The aim of the buyer is the valorization of his capital, the production of commodities which contain more labour than he paid for, and therefore contain a portion of value which costs him nothing and is nevertheless realized [realisiert] through the sale of those commodities. The production of surplus-value, or the making of profits, is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour-power can be sold only to the extent that it preserves and maintains the means of production as capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and provides a source of additional capital in the shape of unpaid labour.⁷ The conditions of its sale, whether more or less favourable to the worker, include therefore the necessity of its constant re-sale, and the constantly extended reproduction of wealth as capital. Wages, as we have seen, imply by their very nature that the worker will always provide a certain quantity of unpaid labour. Even if we leave aside the case where a rise of wages is accompanied by a fall in the price of labour, it is clear that at the best of times an increase in wages means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labour the worker has to supply. This reduction can never go so far as to threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts over the rate of wages (and Adam Smith already showed that in such a conflict the master, by and large, remained the master) a rise in the price of labour resulting from accumulation of capital implies the following alternatives:

Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not interfere with the progress of accumulation. There is nothing remarkable in this, for as Adam Smith says, ‘after these’ (profits) ‘are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than before… A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits’ (op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 189). In this case it is evident that a reduction in the amount of unpaid labour in no way interferes with the extension of the domain of capital. Or, the other alternative, accumulation slackens as a result of the rise in the price of labour, because the stimulus of gain is blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens; but this means that the primary cause of that lessening itself vanishes, i.e. the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour-power. The mechanism of the capitalist production process removes the very obstacles it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to a level corresponding with capital’s requirements for self-valorization, whether this level is below, the same as, or above that which was normal before the rise of wages took place. We see therefore that in the first case it was not the diminished rate, either of the absolute or of the proportional increase in labour-power, or the working population, which caused the excess quantity of capital, but rather the converse; the increase in capital made the exploitable labour-power insufficient. In the second case it was not the increased rate, either of the absolute or of the proportional increase in labour-power, or the working population, that made the capital insufficient, but rather the converse; the relative reduction in the amount of capital caused the exploitable labour-power, or rather its price, to be in excess. It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of capital which are reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable labour-power, and therefore seem produced by the latter’s own independent movement. To put it mathematically: the rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent variable; the rate of wages is the dependent, not the independent variable. Thus, when the industrial cycle is in its phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities is expressed as a rise in the relative value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a general rise in the price of commodities is expressed as a fall in the relative value of money. The so-called Currency School* conclude from this that with high prices too much money is in circulation, with low prices too little. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of the facts⁸ are worthily paralleled by the economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that in one case there are too few, and in the other, too many wage-labourers in existence.

The law of capitalist production which really lies at the basis of the supposed ‘natural law of population’ can be reduced simply to this: the relation between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages is nothing other than the relation between the unpaid labour which has been transformed into capital and the additional paid labour necessary to set in motion this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes which are mutually independent, i.e. between the magnitude of the capital and the numbers of the working population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same working population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class increases so rapidly that its transformation into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalized, accumulation slows down, and the rising movement of wages comes up against an obstacle. The rise of wages is therefore confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale. The law of capitalist accumulation, mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature, in fact expresses the situation that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever larger scale, of the capital-relation. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development. Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.⁹

A relative diminution of the variable part of capital occurs in the course of the further progress of accumulation and of the concentration accompanying it

According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of social wealth nor the magnitude of the capital already acquired that leads to a rise of wages, but only the constant growth of accumulation and the degree of rapidity of that growth (Adam Smith, Book I, Chapter 8). So far, we have considered only one special phase of this process, that in which the increase of capital occurs while the technical composition of capital remains constant. But the process goes beyond this phase.

Given the general basis of the capitalist system, a point is reached in the course of accumulation at which the development of the productivity of social labour becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation. ‘The same cause,’ says Adam Smith, ‘which raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its productive powers, and to make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work.’*

Apart from natural conditions, such as the fertility of the soil, etc., and apart from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown rather qualitatively in the high standard of their products than quantitatively in their mass), the level of the social productivity of labour is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one worker, during a given time, with the same degree of intensity of labour-power, turns into products. The mass of means of production with which he functions in this way increases with the productivity of his labour. But those means of production play a double role. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others is a condition, of the increasing productivity of labour. For example, the consequence of the division of labour (under manufacture) and the application of machinery is that more raw material is worked up in the same time, and therefore a greater mass of raw material and auxiliary substances enters into the labour process. That is the consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drain-pipes, etc. is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. This is also true of the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport, etc. But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated into them, is an expression of the growing productivity of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor.

This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of the means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour-power that vivifies them, is reflected in its value-composition by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent. There may be, for example, originally 50 per cent of a capital laid out in means of production, and 50 per cent in labour-power; later on, with the development of the productivity of labour, 80 per cent may be laid out in means of production, 20 per cent in labour-power and so on. This law of the progressive growth of the constant part of capital in comparison with the variable part is confirmed at every step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities, whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same epoch. The relative magnitude of the part of the price which represents the value of the means of production, or the constant part of the capital, is in direct proportion to the progress of accumulation, whereas the relative magnitude of the other part of the price, which represents the variable part of the capital, or the payment made for labour, is in inverse proportion to the progress of accumulation.

However, this diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the constant part, or, in other words, this change in the composition of the value of the capital, provides only an approximate indication of the change in the composition of its material constituents. The value of the capital employed today in spinning is 7/8 constant and 5/6 variable, while at the beginning of the eighteenth century it was 1/2 constant and 1/2 variable.* Yet, in contrast to this, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour, etc. that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively today is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The reason is simple: with the increasing productivity of labour, the mass of the means of production consumed by labour increases, but their value in comparison with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely, but not in proportion to the increase in their mass. The increase of the difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the constant capital, and the mass of the labour-power into which the variable capital, is converted. The former difference increases with the latter, but in a smaller degree.

The progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital, therefore, but this by no means thereby excludes the possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose that a capital-value† is divided at first into 50 per cent constant and 50 per cent variable capital, and later into 80 per cent constant and 20 per cent variable capital. If, in the meantime, the original capital, say £6,000, has increased to £18,000, its variable constituent has also increased, in fact by 20 per cent. It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But whereas formerly an increase of capital by 20 per cent would have sufficed to raise the demand for labour by 20 percent, now the original capital needs to be tripled to secure an increase of 20 per cent in the demand for labour.

We showed in Part IV how the development of the social productivity of labour presupposes co-operation on a large scale; how the division and combination of labour can only be organized on that basis, and the means of production economized by concentration on a vast scale; how instruments of labour which, by their very nature, can only be used in common, such as systems of machinery, can be called into existence; how gigantic natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the production process can be transformed into a process of the technological application of scientific knowledge. When the prevailing system is the production of commodities, i.e. where the means of production are the property of private persons and the artisan therefore either produces commodities in isolation and independently of other people, or sells his labour-power as a commodity because he lacks the means to produce independently, the above-mentioned presupposition, namely co-operation on a large scale, can be realized only through the increase of individual capitals, only in proportion as the social means of production and subsistence are transformed into the private property of capitalists. Where the basis is the production of commodities, large-scale production can occur only in a capitalist form. A certain accumulation of capital in the hands of individual producers therefore forms the necessary pre-condition for a specifically capitalist mode of production. We had therefore to presuppose this when dealing with the transition from handicrafts to capitalist industry. It may be called primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation], because it is the historical basis, instead of the historical result, of specifically capitalist production. How it itself originates we need not investigate as yet. It is enough that it forms the starting-point. But all methods for raising the social productivity of labour that grow up on this basis are at the same time methods for the increased production of surplus-value or surplus product, which is in its turn the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, also methods for the production of capital by capital, or methods for its accelerated accumulation. The continual re-conversion of surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the production process. This is in turn the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising the productivity of labour that accompany it, and of an accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a pre-condition for the specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter reacts back to cause an accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the specifically capitalist mode of production develops, and, with the capitalist mode of production, the accumulation of capital. These two economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they give to each other, that change in the technical composition of capital by which the variable component becomes smaller and smaller as compared with the constant component.

Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller army of workers. Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions as capital, accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and extends the specifically capitalist methods of production. The growth of the social capital is accomplished through the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances remaining the same, the individual capitals grow, and with their growth the concentration of the means of production increases, in the proportion in which they form aliquot parts of the total social capital. At the same time offshoots split off from the original capitals and start to function as new and independent capitals. Apart from other causes, the division of property within capitalist families plays a great part in this. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of capitalists grows to a greater or lesser extent. Two features characterize this kind of concentration, which grows directly out of accumulation, or rather is identical with it. Firstly: the increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Secondly: the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists who confront each other as mutually independent and competitive commodity-producers. Therefore not only are accumulation and the concentration accompanying it scattered over many points, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new capitals and the subdivision of old. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour; and on the other hand as repulsion of many individual capitals from one another.

This fragmentation of the total social capital into many individual capitals, or the repulsion of its fractions from each other, is counteracted by their attraction. The attraction of capitals no longer means the simple concentration of the means of production and the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from the first one in this respect, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of already available and already functioning capital. Its field of action is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, or in other words by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place. This is centralization proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

The laws of this centralization of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A few brief factual indications must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, all other circumstances remaining the same, on the productivity of labour, and this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which large-scale industry has taken control of only sporadically or incompletely. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitude, of the rival capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, and partly vanish completely. Apart from this, an altogether new force comes into existence with the development of capitalist production: the credit system.* In its first stages, this system furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists by invisible threads the money resources, which lie scattered in larger or smaller amounts over the surface of society; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralization of capitals.

Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there also takes place a development of the two most powerful levers of centralization – competition and credit At the same time the progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to centralization, i.e. the individual capitals, while the expansion of capitalist production creates, on the one hand, the social need, and on the other hand, the technical means, for those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous centralization of capital for their accomplishment. Today, therefore, the force of attraction which draws together individual capitals, and the tendency to centralization, are both stronger than ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the movement towards centralization is determined, to a certain degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and the superiority of the economic mechanism already attained, the advance of centralization does not depend in any way on a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital. And this is what distinguishes centralization from concentration, the latter being only another name for reproduction on an extended scale. Centralization may result from a mere change in the distribution of already existing capitals, from a simple alteration in the quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital. Capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand in one place, because in other places it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested there were fused into a single capital.¹⁰ In a given society this limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.

Centralization supplements the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this latter result is the consequence of accumulation or centralization, whether centralization is accomplished by the violent method of annexation – where certain capitals become such preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to themselves – or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organizing joint-stock companies – the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting-point for a more comprehensive organization of the collective labour of many people, for a broader development of their material motive forces, i.e. for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by customary methods, into socially combined and scientifically arranged processes of production.

But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it passes from the circular to the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure compared with centralization, which needs only to change the quantitative groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway. Centralization, however, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And while in this way centralization intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds up those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for labour.

The masses of capital welded together overnight by centralization reproduce and multiply as the others do, only more rapidly, and they thereby become new and powerful levers of social accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the progress of social accumulation, we tacitly include – these days – the effects of centralization.

The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation (see Chapter 24, Section 1) serve above all as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital itself reaches the point where it has to be renewed in all its aspects, a time when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the other capitals in a perfected technical shape, in which a smaller quantity of labour will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw material. The absolute reduction in the demand for labour which necessarily follows from this is obviously so much the greater, the higher the degree to which the capitals undergoing this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the movement towards centralization.

On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of further accumulation attracts fewer and fewer workers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced with a new composition repels more and more of the workers formerly employed by it.

The progressive production of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army

The accumulation of capital, which originally appeared only as its quantitative extension, comes to fruition, as we have seen, through a progressive qualitative change in its composition, i.e. through a continuing increase of its constant component at the expense of its variable component.¹¹

The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productivity of labour which corresponds to it, and the change in the organic composition of capital which results from it, are things which do not merely keep pace with the progress of accumulation, or the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate, because simple accumulation, or the absolute expansion of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralization of its individual elements, and because the change in the technical composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technical composition of the original capital. With the progress of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc., so that as the capital grows, instead of 1/2 its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, etc. is turned into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8, into means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the extent of the total capital but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the growth of the total capital, instead of rising in proportion to it, as was previously assumed. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent, the labour incorporated in it, does admittedly increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses in which accumulation works as simple extension of production on a given technical basis are shortened. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of the total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of workers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already performing their functions. This increasing accumulation and centralization also becomes in its turn a source of new changes in the composition of capital, or in other words of an accelerated diminution of the capital’s variable component, as compared with its constant one. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable component, which accompanies the accelerated increase of the total capital and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase in the working population, an increase which always moves more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.

If we consider the total social capital, we can say that the movement of its accumulation sometimes causes periodic changes, and at other times distributes various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital occurs without any increase in its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple concentration*; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with an absolute diminution in its variable component, or in other words, in the labour-power absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues to grow for a time on its existing technical basis, and attracts additional labour-power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic change and reduces its variable component; in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of the capital, and therefore of the number of workers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and the temporary production of a surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the extrusion of workers already employed, or the less evident, but not less real, form of a greater difficulty in absorbing the additional working population through its customary outlets.¹² Owing to the magnitude of the already functioning social capital, and the degree of its increase, owing to the extension of the scale of production, and the great mass of workers set in motion, owing to the development of the productivity of their labour, and the greater breadth and richness of the stream springing from all the sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of workers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion; an increase takes place in the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital and in its technical form, and an increasing number of spheres of production become involved in this change, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes alternatively. The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.¹³ This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population, which are historically valid within that particular sphere. An abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man.

But if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements. With accumulation, and the development of the productivity of labour that accompanies it, capital’s power of sudden expansion also grows; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands (and capital only forms an elastic part of this), not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows also because the technical conditions of the production process – machinery, means of transport, etc. – themselves now make possible a very rapid transformation of masses of surplus product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation and capable of being transformed into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, etc., which now become necessary as a result of the further development of the old branches. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses. The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.

This peculiar cyclical path of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also impossible when capitalist production was in its infancy. The composition of capital at that time underwent only very gradual changes. By and large, therefore, the proportional growth in the demand for labour has corresponded to the accumulation of capital. Even though the advance of accumulation was slow in comparison with that of the modern epoch, it came up against a natural barrier in the shape of the exploitable working population; this barrier could only be swept away by the violent means we shall discuss later. The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the precondition for its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly ‘sets free’ a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increased production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’. The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alternations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them. Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity.* When this periodicity has once become consolidated, even political economy sees that the production of a relative surplus population – i.e. a population surplus in relation to capital’s average requirements for valorization – is a necessary condition for modern industry.

‘Suppose,’ says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, and later on employed at the Colonial Office, ‘suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? That, at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of competition on which the wealth of the country is founded.’¹⁴ Even Malthus recognizes that a surplus population is a necessity of modern industry, although he explains this, in his narrow fashion, not by saying that part of the working population has been rendered relatively superfluous, but by referring to its excessive growth. He says: ‘Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among the labouring class of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it… From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till after the lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly; a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population.’¹⁵ After political economy has thus declared that the constant production of a relative surplus population of workers is a necessity of capitalist accumulation, she very aptly adopts the shape of an old maid and puts into the mouth of her ideal capitalist the following words addressed to the ‘redundant’ workers who have been thrown onto the streets by their own creation of additional capital: ‘We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence.’¹⁶

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.

We have so far assumed that the increase or diminution of the variable capital corresponds precisely with the increase or diminution of the number of workers employed.

But the number of workers under the command of capital may remain the same, or even fall, while the variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual worker provides more labour, and his wages thus increase, although the price of labour remains the same or even falls, only more slowly than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case, becomes an index of more labour, but not of more workers employed. It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to extort a given quantity of labour out of a smaller rather than a greater number of workers, if the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in proportion to the mass of labour set in motion; in the former that increase is much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the more decisive is this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital.

We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production, and of the productivity of labour – which is at once the cause and the effect of accumulation – enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable capital, to set in motion more labour by greater exploitation (extensive or intensive) of each individual labour-power. We have further seen that the capitalist buys with the same capital a greater mass of labour-power, as he progressively replaces skilled workers by less skilled, mature labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or children.

On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation a larger variable capital sets more labour in motion without enlisting more workers; on the other, a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in motion more labour with the same mass of labour-power; and, finally, a greater number of inferior labour-powers is set in motion by the displacement of more skilled labour-powers.

The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of workers, therefore proceeds still more rapidly than the technical transformation of the process of production that accompanies the advance of accumulation and is accelerated by it, and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the means of production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a lesser extent means for employing workers, this relation is itself in turn modified by the fact that in proportion as the productivity of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for workers. The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists,¹⁷ and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the progress of social accumulation. The importance of this element in the formation of the relative surplus population is shown by the example of England. Her technical means for the ‘saving’ of labour are colossal. Nevertheless, if tomorrow morning labour were universally to be reduced to a rational amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the working class according to age and sex, the available working population would be absolutely insufficient to carry on the nation’s production on its present scale. The great majority of the now ‘unproductive’ workers would have to be turned into ‘productive’ ones.

Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and this in turn corresponds to the periodic alternations of the industrial cycle. They are not therefore determined by the variations of the absolute numbers of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into an active army and a reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is alternately absorbed and set free. The appropriate law for modern industry, with its decennial cycles and periodic phases which, as accumulation advances, are complicated by irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly, is the law of the regulation of the demand and supply of labour by the alternate expansion and contraction of capital, i.e. by the level of capital’s valorization requirements at the relevant moment, the labour-market sometimes appearing relatively under-supplied because capital is expanding, and sometimes relatively over-supplied because it is contracting. It would be utterly absurd, in place of this, to lay down a law according to which the movement of capital depended simply on the movement of the population. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According to them, wages rise as a result of the accumulation of capital. Higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on until the labour-market becomes over-supplied, and hence capital becomes insufficient in relation to the supply of labour. Wages fall, and now we have the obverse side of the medal. The working population is, little by little, decimated by the fall in wages, so that capital is again in excess in relation to the workers, or, as others explain it, the fall in wages and the corresponding increase in the exploitation of the workers again accelerates accumulation, while, at the same time, the lower wages hold the growth of the working class in check. Then the time comes round again when the supply of labour is less than the demand, wages rise, and so on. This would indeed be a beautiful form of motion for developed capitalist production! Before the rise in wages could produce any positive increase of the population really fit for work, the deadline would long since have passed within which the industrial campaign would have to have been carried through, and the battle fought to a conclusive finish.

Between 1849 and 1859 a rise of wages which was in practice merely nominal, although it was accompanied by a fall in the price of corn, took place in the English agricultural districts. In Wiltshire, for example, the weekly wage rose from 7s. to 8s.; in Dorsetshire it rose from 7s. or 8s. to 9s., and so on. This was the result of an unusual exodus of the agricultural surplus population caused by wartime demands,* and by the vast extension of railways, factories, mines etc. The lower the wage, the higher is the proportion in which even a very insignificant increase is expressed. If the weekly wage, for instance, is 20s. and it rises to 22s., that is a rise of 10 per cent; but if it is only 7s., and it rises to 9s., that is a rise of 28 4/7 per cent, which sounds very fine. Anyway, the farmers howled, and the London Economist, with reference to these starvation wages, prattled quite seriously of ‘a general and substantial advance’.¹⁸ What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied as a result of this splendid remuneration that their wages had to fall again, which is the way things are supposed to happen according to the dogmatic economic brain? No, they introduced more machinery, and in a moment the labourers were ‘redundant’ again to a degree satisfactory even to the farmers. There was now ‘more capital’ laid out in agriculture than before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell, not only relatively, but absolutely.

The economic fiction we have been dealing with confuses the laws that regulate the general movement of wages, or the ratio between the working class – i.e. the total sum of labour-power – and the total social capital, with the laws that distribute the working population over the different spheres of production. If, for example owing to a favourable conjuncture, accumulation in a particular sphere of production becomes especially active, and profits in it, being greater than the average profits, attract additional capital, then of course the demand for labour rises, and wages rise as well. The higher wages draw a larger part of the working population into the more favoured sphere until it is glutted with labour-power, and wages at length fall again to their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great. At that point the influx of workers into the branch of industry in question not only ceases, but gives place to an outflow of workers. Here the political economist thinks he can grasp the situation, he thinks he can see an absolute diminution of workers accompanying an increase of wages, and a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute increase of workers. But he really sees only the local oscillations of the labour-market in a particular sphere of production – he sees only the phenomena which accompany the distribution of the working population into the different spheres of outlay of capital, according to its varying needs.

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work. It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely convenient to capital’s drive to exploit and dominate the workers.

This is the place to return to one of the great exploits of economic apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new machinery, or the extension of old, a portion of variable capital is transformed into constant capital, the economic apologist interprets this operation, which ‘fixes’ capital and by that very act ‘sets free’ workers, in exactly the opposite way, pretending that capital is thereby set free for the workers. Only now can one evaluate the true extent of the effrontery of these apologists. Not only are the workers directly turned out by the machines set free, but so are their future replacements in the rising generation, as well as the additional contingent which, with the usual extension of business on its old basis, would regularly be absorbed. They are now all ‘set free’ and every new bit of capital looking round for a function can take advantage of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general demand for labour will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market as many workers as the machines threw into it. If it employs a smaller number, the number of ‘redundant workers’ increases; if it employs a greater, the general demand for labour increases only to the extent of the excess of the employed over those ‘set free’. The impulse that additional capital seeking an outlet would otherwise have given to the general demand for labour is therefore in every case neutralized until the supply of workers thrown out of employment by the machine has been exhausted. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalist production takes care that the absolute increase of capital is not accompanied by a corresponding rise in the general demand for labour. And the apologist calls this a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced workers during the transitional period when they are banished into the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor is supply of labour identical with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent forces working on each other. Les dés sont pipés.* Capital acts on both sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of workers by ‘setting them free’, while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. Thus as soon as the workers learn the secret of why it happens that the more they work, the more alien wealth they produce, and that the more the productivity of their labour increases, the more does their very function as a means for the valorization of capital become precarious; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition amongst themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by setting up trade unions, etc., they try to organize planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class, so soon does capital and its sycophant, political economy, cry out at the infringement of the ‘eternal’ and so to speak ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand. Every combination between employed and unemployed disturbs the ‘pure’ action of this law. But on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, for example) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army, and with it the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with its platitudinous Sancho Panza, rebels against the ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand, and tries to make up for its inadequacies by forcible means.

Different forms of existence of the relative surplus population. The general law of capitalist accumulation

The relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Leaving aside the large-scale and periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, so that it sometimes appears acute, in times of crisis, and sometimes chronic, in times when business is slack, we can identify three forms which it always possesses: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant.

In the centres of modern industry – factories, workshops, ironworks, mines, etc. – the workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, so that the number of those employed increases on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form.

Both in the factories proper, and in the large workshops, where machinery enters as one factor, or even where no more than a division of labour of a modern type has been put into operation, large numbers of male workers are employed up to the age of maturity, but not beyond. Once they reach maturity, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, while the majority are regularly dismissed. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, which grows with the extension of those branches of industry. Some of these workers emigrate; in fact they are merely following capital, which has itself emigrated. A further consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male – witness England. That the natural increase of the number of workers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet, at the same time, exceeds those requirements, is a contradiction inherent in capital’s very movement. Capital demands more youthful workers, fewer adults. This contradiction is no more glaring than the other contradiction, namely that a shortage of ‘hands’ is complained of, while, at the same time, many thousands are out of work, because the division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry.¹⁹

Moreover, the consumption of labour-power by capital is so rapid that the worker has already more or less completely lived himself out when he is only half-way through his life. He falls into the ranks of the surplus population, or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely among the workers in large-scale industry that we meet with the shortest life-expectancy. ‘Dr Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated that the average age at death of the Manchester… upper middle class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the labouring class was 17; while at Liverpool those figures were represented as 35 against 15. It thus appeared that the well-to-do classes had a lease of life which was more than double the value of that which fell to the lot of the less favoured citizens.’²⁰ Under these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take a form which swells their numbers, despite the rapid wastage of their individual elements. Hence, rapid replacement of one generation of workers by another (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social requirement is met by early marriages, which are a necessary consequence of the conditions in which workers in large-scale industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of the workers’ children sets on their production.

As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for a rural working population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being compensated for by a greater attraction of workers, as is the case in non-agricultural industries. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the lookout for opportunities to complete this transformation. (The term ‘manufacture’ is used here to cover all non-agricultural industries.)²¹ There is thus a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population. But the constant movement towards the towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which only becomes evident at those exceptional times when its distribution channels are wide open. The wages of the agricultural labourer are therefore reduced to a minimum, and he always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.

The third category of the relative surplus population is the stagnant population. This forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it is precisely this which makes it a broad foundation for special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterized by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages. We have already become familiar with its chief form under the rubric of’ domestic industry’. It is constantly recruited from workers in large-scale industry and agriculture who have become redundant, and especially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is giving way to manufacture, and manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows in proportion as, with the growth in the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population also advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of families, stands in inverse proportion to the level of wages, and therefore to the amount of the means of subsistence at the disposal of different categories of worker. This law of capitalist society would sound absurd to savages, or even to civilized colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.²²

Finally, the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Apart from vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat, this social stratum consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis of trade, and diminishes with every revival. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and in times of great prosperity, such as the year 1860, for instance, they are enrolled in the army of active workers both speedily and in large numbers. Third, the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity is implied by their necessity; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the faux frais* of capitalist production: but capital usually knows how to transfer these from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.

We can now understand the foolishness of the economic wisdom which preaches to the workers that they should adapt their numbers to the valorization requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation itself constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly expanding strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism.

On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labour, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital. The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself, therefore, under capitalism, in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorization requirements of capital.

We saw in Part IV, when analysing the production of relative surplus-value, that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

This antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation²³ is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although they lump it together with other phenomena which are admittedly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, since they appear only in pre-capitalist modes of production.

The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the eighteenth century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a universal natural law of social wealth. ‘In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance each other’ (il bene ed il male económico in una nazione sempre all’istessa misura): ‘the abundance of wealth with some people is always equal to the lack of wealth with others’ (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale alia mancanza di essi in altri): ‘The great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute deprivation of the essential necessities of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active,’ and so on.²⁴ About ten years after Ortes, the High Church Protestant parson, Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth in a thoroughly brutal way. ‘Legal constraint’ (to labour) ‘is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise,… whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions.’ Everything therefore depends on making hunger permanent among the working class, and this is provided for, according to Townsend, by the principle of population, which is especially applicable to the poor. ‘It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident’ (i.e. so improvident as to be born without silver spoons in their mouths) ‘that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery… but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions… it’ (the Poor Law) ‘tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which God and Nature have established in the world.’²⁵ If the Venetian monk found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal a justification for the existence of Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries and pious foundations, the beneficed Protestant finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws by which the poor possessed a right to a miserable amount of public relief.

‘The progress of social wealth,’ says Storch, ‘begets this useful class of society… which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which, in a word, takes on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional’ (c’est bon, ça)‘dignity of character.’²⁶ Storch then asks himself what the actual advantage is of this capitalist civilization, with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He can find only one answer: security!

‘Thanks to the advance of industry and science,’ says Sismondi, ‘every worker can produce every day much more than he needs to consume. But at the same time, while his labour produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit for labour.’ According to him, ‘men’ (i.e. non-workers) ‘would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection, and all the enjoyments that industry procures for us, if it were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil like that of the worker… Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests… The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers of labour can have no other result than the increase of luxury and enjoyment on the part of the idle rich.’²⁷

And finally, that fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire Destutt de Tracy makes the point in the most brutal fashion: ‘In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor.’²⁸

Illustrations of the general law of capitalist accumulation

England from 1846 to 1866

No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation as the period of the last twenty years. It is as if Fortunatus’s purse* had been discovered. But of all countries England again provides the classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world market, because capitalist production is fully developed only in England, and finally because the introduction of the free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar economics. We have already sufficiently indicated the titanic progress of production in Part IV; in fact, in the latter half of the twenty-year period under discussion it has gone far beyond its progress in the former half.

Although the absolute growth of the English population in the last half century has been very great, the relative increase or rate of growth has fallen constantly, as is shown by the following table, borrowed from the census, which gives the average annual increase of the population of England and Wales over successive ten-year periods:

Annual percentage growth of the population of England and Wales, decimals

Year range	per cent
1811–21	1.533%
1821–31	1.446%
1831–41	1.326%
1841–51	1.216%
1851–61	1.141%

Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of wealth. Here the movement of profits, ground rent, etc., which are subject to income tax, provides the surest basis. The increase of profits liable to income tax in Great Britain from 1853 to 1864 (farmers and some other categories not included) amounted to 50.47 per cent (or an annual average of 4.58 per cent),²⁹ while the population itself increased during the same period by about 12 per cent. The augmentation of the rent of land subject to taxation (including houses, railways, mines, fisheries, etc.) amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38 per cent, or 3 5/12 per cent annually. Under this heading, the following categories showed the greatest increase:³⁰

	Percentage excess of annual income of 1864 over that of 1853	Percentage increase per year
Houses	38.60%	3.50%
Quarries	84.76%	7.70%
Mines	68.85%	6.26%
Ironworks	39.92%	3.63%
Fisheries	57.37%	5.21%
Gasworks	126.02%	11.45%
Railways	83.29%	7.57%

If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive years each, the rate of increase of these incomes accelerates constantly. Incomes arising from profits increased between 1853 and 1857 at 1–73 per cent a year; 1857–61,2.74 per cent, and 1861–4, 9.30 per cent a year. The sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that come under the income tax was, in 1856, £307,068,898; in 1859, £328,127,416; in 1862, £351,745,241; in 1863, £359,142,897; in 1864, £362,462,279; in 1865, £385,530,020.³¹ The accumulation of capital was accompanied at the same time by its concentration and centralization. Although no official statistics of agriculture existed for England (they did for Ireland) they were voluntarily given in ten counties. It emerged from these statistics that between 1851 and 1861 the number of farms of less than 100 acres had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so that 5,016 had been thrown together into larger farms.³² From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than £1,000,000 came under the succession duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, eight did; and from 1856 to June 1859, i.e. in 4 1/2 years, four did.³³ The centralization will best be seen, however, from a short analysis of the Income Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, etc.), in the years 1864 and 1865.1 note in advance that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything over £60. These taxable incomes amounted in England, Wales and Scotland in 1864 to £95,844,222, and in 1865 to £105,435,579.³⁴ The number of persons taxed was, in 1864, 308,416 out of a population of 23,891,009; in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of 24,127,003. The following table shows the distribution of these incomes in the two years:

	Year ending 5 April 1864		Year ending 5 April 1865
	Income from profits (£)	Persons	Income from profits (£)	Persons
Total income of persons in this category	95,844,222	308,416	105,435,738	332,431
	57,028,289	23,334	64,554,297	24,265
	36,415,225	3,619	42,535,576	4,021
	22,809,781	832	27,555,313	973
	8,744,762	91	11,077,238	107

In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,543,079 tons of coal, of value £16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855, 3,218,154 tons of pig-iron, of value £8,045,385; in 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value £11,919,877. In 1854 the length of railways in use in the United Kingdom was 8,054 miles, with a paid-up capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the length was 12,789 miles, with a paid-up capital of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum of the exports and imports of the United Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865, £489,923,285. The following table shows the movement of exports:

1846	£58,842,377
1849	£63,596,052
1856	£115,826,948
1860	£135,842,817
1865	£165,862,402
1866	£188,917,56335

After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph uttered by the Registrar-General: ‘Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth.’³⁶ Let us now turn to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of this wealth, the working class. ‘It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country,’ says Gladstone, ‘that we see, beyond the possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and distress’ (upon the working class) ‘there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment’ (and a constant increase of capital).³⁷ Thus spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons on 13 February 1843. On 16 April 1863, twenty years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget, he said: ‘From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent… In the eight years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible… this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power… entirely confined to classes of property… must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say.’³⁸ How lame an anticlimax! If the working class has remained ‘poor’, only ‘less poor’ in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class ‘an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power’, then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have. As for the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official statistics, for instance the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an increase in price of 20 per cent over the last ten years, if we compare the average of the three years 1860 to 1862 with the average of 1851 to 1853. In the following three years, 1863 to 1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt, coal and a number of other necessary means of subsistence.³⁹Gladstone’s next Budget speech of 7 April 1864 is a Pindaric dithyramb on the progress of surplus-value extraction and the happiness of the people, moderated by ‘poverty’. He speaks of masses ‘on the border of pauperism’, of branches of trade in which ‘wages have not increased’, and finally sums up the happiness of the working class in the words: ‘human life is but, in nine cases out often, a struggle for existence’.⁴⁰ Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, declares roundly: ‘I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase of capital’ (in the last ten years) ‘but this apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries of life are becoming dearer’ (he believes that this is because of the fall in value of the precious metals)… ‘the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is no perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial classes… They’ (the workers) ‘become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to whom they owe money.’⁴¹

In the chapters on the ‘Working Day’ and ‘Machinery’ the reader has seen the circumstances under which the British working class created an ‘intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power’ for the possessing classes. There we were chiefly concerned with the worker while he was exercising his social function. But for a full elucidation of the law of accumulation, his condition outside the workshop must also be looked at, his condition as to food and accommodation. The limits of this book compel us to concern ourselves chiefly with the worst paid part of the industrial proletariat and the agricultural labourers, who together form the majority of the working class.

But before this, just one word about official pauperism, or the part of the working class which has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labour-power), and vegetates on public alms. The official list of paupers in England⁴² numbered 851,369 persons in 1855; 877,767 in 1856; and 971,433 in 1865. As a result of the cotton famine, it swelled to 1,079,382 in 1863 and 1,014,978 in 1864. The crisis of 1866, which hit London most severely, created there, in the centre of the world market, a city with more inhabitants than the kingdom of Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year 1866 of 19.5 per cent compared with 1865, and of 24.4 per cent compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. Two points emerge clearly when we analyse the statistics of pauperism. On the one hand, the rise and fall of the number of paupers reflects the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. On the other, the official statistics become more and more misleading as to the actual extent of pauperism in proportion as, with the accumulation of capital, the class struggle develops, and hence the class-consciousness of the workers as well. For example, the barbarous nature of the treatment of the paupers, at which the English press (The Times, Pall Mall Gazette, etc.) has cried out so loudly during the last two years, is in fact of ancient date. F. Engels, in 1844, demonstrated exactly the same horrors, and exactly the same transient, canting outcries of ‘sensational literature’.* But the frightful increase in the number of deaths by starvation in London during the last ten years proves beyond doubt the growing horror in which the workers hold the slavery of the workhouse,⁴³ that place of punishment for poverty.

The badly paid strata of the British Industrial Working Class

During the cotton famine of 1862[–3], Dr Edward Smith was charged by the Privy Council to make an investigation into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed cotton workers of Lancashire and Cheshire. His observations during many preceding years had led him to the conclusion that ‘to avert starvation diseases’ the daily food of an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon and 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at least 4,300 grains of carbon and 200 grains of nitrogen; for women, about the same quantity of nutritive elements as are contained in 2 lb. of good wheaten bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and women, at least 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His calculation was practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its agreement with the miserable quantity of nourishment to which the emergency had reduced the consumption of the cotton workers. This was, in December 1862. 29,211 grains of carbon and 1,295 grains of nitrogen a week.

In 1863, the Privy Council ordered an investigation into the state of distress of the worst-nourished part of the English working class. Dr Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr Smith. His inquiry covers on the one hand the agricultural labourers, on the other hand silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers, glove-weavers and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those comparatively in the best circumstances.

As a general result it was found that ‘in only one of the examined classes of indoor operatives did the average nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency’ (i.e. sufficient to avert starvation diseases) ‘and that in two classes there was defect – in one, a very large defect – of both nitrogen and carbon. Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the average local that.’⁴⁴ Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed.⁴⁵ The insufficiency of food among the agricultural labourers fell as a rule chiefly on the women and children, for ‘the man must eat to do his work’. Still greater penury ravaged the urban workers he examined. ‘They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of severe and injurious privation.’⁴⁶ (This is all ‘abstinence’ on the part of the capitalist! For it is ‘abstinence’ from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of his ‘hands’.)

The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named categories of purely town-dwelling workers, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr Smith, and with the food-allowance of the cotton workers during the time of their greatest distress:⁴⁷

(Both sexes)	Average weekly carbon (in grains)	Average weekly nitrogen (in grains)
Five indoor occupations	28,876	1,192
Unemployed Lancashire operatives	28,211	1,295
Minimum quantity to be allowed to the Lancashire operatives, equal number of males and females	28,600	1,330

Just under one-half (60/125) of the categories of industrial worker investigated had absolutely no beer, and 28 per cent no milk. The weekly average of liquid means of nourishment in the families varied from seven ounces in the case of the needlewomen to 24 3/4 ounces in the case of the stocking-makers. The majority of those who did not obtain milk were needlewomen in London. The quantity of bread consumed weekly varied from 7 3/4 lb. for the needlewomen to 11 1/2 lb. for the shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9 lb. per adult weekly. Sugar (treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for the kid-glovers to 11 ounces for the stocking-makers; and the total average per week for all categories was 8 ounces per adult per week. The total weekly average butter intake (fat, etc.) was 5 ounces per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7 1/4 ounces for the silk-weavers to 18 1/4 ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the different categories, 13.6 ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult was expressed in the following average figures: silk-weavers 2s. 2 1/2d., needlewomen 2s. 7d., kid-glovers 2s. 9 1/2d., shoemakers 2s. 7 3/4d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6 1/4d. For the silk-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only 1s. 8 1/2d. The worst-nourished categories were the needlewomen, silk-weavers and kid-glovers.⁴⁸ In his General Health Report, Dr Simon says this about the state of nourishment: ‘That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator of disease can be affirmed by any one who is conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of hospitals… Yet in this point of view there is, in my opinion, a very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than food – against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate protection – dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which over-crowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture there will have been scarcely any – even cleanliness will have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious moment… These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the indoor operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting… And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism.’⁴⁹

The intimate connection between the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the housing situation. Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding concentration of workers within a given space; and therefore the more quickly capitalist accumulation takes place, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class. ‘Improvements’ of towns which accompany the increase of wealth, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the erection of palaces to house banks, warehouses etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, obviously drive the poor away into even worse and more crowded corners. On the other hand, everyone knows that the dearness of houses stands in inverse ratio to their quality, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit and at less cost than the mines of Potosi were ever exploited. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and thus of capitalist property-relations in general,⁵⁰ is here so evident that even the official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on ‘property and its rights’. This evil makes such progress alongside the development of industry, the accumulation of capital and the growth and ‘improvement’ of towns that the sheer fear of contagious diseases, which do not spare even ‘respectable people’, brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than ten Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened middle classes in certain towns, such as Liverpool, Glasgow and so on, took strenuous measures to deal with the problem through their municipalities. Nevertheless, Dr Simon says in his report of 1865: ‘Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in England.’ By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the condition of the housing of agricultural labourers, and in 1865 the same thing was done for the poorer classes of the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) Reports on Public Health. I shall come back to the agricultural labourers later on. On the condition of urban dwellings, I quote, as a preliminary, a general remark made by Dr Simon. ‘Although my official point of view,’ he says, ‘is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored… In its higher degrees it’ (i.e. overcrowding) ‘almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilization which has its essence in physical and moral cleanliness.’⁵¹

London takes the first place in overcrowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human beings. ‘I feel clear,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘on two points; first, that there are about twenty large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition exceeds almost anything I have seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case twenty years ago.’⁵² ‘It is not too much to say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal.’⁵³

Furthermore, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small shopkeepers and other elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more and more under the curse of these vile housing conditions, in proportion as ‘improvements’, and with them the demolition of old streets and houses, advance, in proportion as factories spring up and the influx of people into the metropolis grows, and finally in proportion as house rents rise owing to increases in urban ground rent. ‘Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more than one room.’⁵⁴ There is almost no house property in London that is not over burdened with a number of middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in comparison with its yearly revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of it again at a ‘jury price’ (the expropriation valuation fixed by jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value arising from the proximity of some large-scale undertaking. As a result of this, there is a regular trade in the purchase of ‘fag-ends of leases’. ‘Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to do as they do – get all they can from the tenants while they have them, and leave as little as they can for their successors.’⁵⁵

The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. Owing to the construction of railways within the city, ‘the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London of a number of families wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty worldly goods on their backs, without any resting place but the workhouse.’⁵⁶ The workhouses are already overcrowded, and the ‘improvements’ already sanctioned by Parliament have only just begun. If the workers are driven away by the demolition of their old houses, they either do not leave the old parish, or at the most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can get to it. ‘They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to their workshops. The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish, parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those… Even at an advanced rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to get an accommodation so good as the meagre one they have left… Half the workmen… of the Strand… walked two miles to their work. ‘This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the wealth of London, may serve as an example of the way human beings are packed together in that city. In one of its parishes, the Public Health Officer reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the Thames was included in the parish. It will of course be understood that all the measures for the improvement of public health which have been taken so far in London have in fact, by demolishing uninhabitable houses, driven the workers out of some districts only to crowd them together still more closely in other districts. ‘Either,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘the whole proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public compassion (!) be effectually aroused to the obligation which may now be without exaggeration called national, of supplying cover to those who will provide it for them.’⁵⁷Capitalist justice is truly to be wondered at! The owner of land and houses, the businessman, when expropriated by ‘improvements’ such as railways, the building of new streets, etc., does not just receive full compensation. He must also be comforted, both according to human law and divine law, by receiving a substantial profit in return for his compulsory ‘abstinence’. The worker, with his wife and child and chattels, is thrown out into the street, and, if he crowds in too large numbers near districts where the local authority insists on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of public health!

Except London, there was at the beginning of the nineteenth century no single town in England of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are twenty-eight towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. ‘The result of this change is not only that the class of town people is enormously increased, but the old close-packed little towns are now centres built round on every side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable to the rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The successors of these rich are occupying the larger houses at the rate of a family to each room… and find accommodation for two or three lodgers… and a population, for which the houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children.’⁵⁸ The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the improvised dwellings of the workers.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district which is becoming more and more productive, takes second place after London in the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons live there in single rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community, houses in great numbers have recently been pulled down by the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was therefore more full than ever in 1865. There was scarcely a room to let. Dr Embleton, of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says: ‘There can be little doubt that the great cause of the continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding of human beings, and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any civilized community; in them, men, women, and children lie at night huddled together; and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and the day-shiñ the night-shift, in unbroken series for some time together, the beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water and worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous.’⁵⁹ The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s. ‘The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘contains a sample of the finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by external circumstances of house and street into an almost savage degradation.’⁶⁰

As a result of the ebb and flow of capital and labour, the state of the dwellings of an industrial town may today be tolerable, tomorrow frightful. Or the local magistracy of the town may have summoned up the energy to remove the most shocking abuses. The next day, masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural labourers may come crowding in, like a swarm of locusts. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or a hitherto respectable working-class dwelling is transformed into a lodging-house whose personnel changes as quickly as soldiers’ quarters in the Thirty Years War. Take Bradford for example. There the municipal philistine had just been engaged in making improvements to the town. Besides, there were still 1,751 uninhabited houses in Bradford in 1861. But now comes that revival of trade which the sweet-natured Liberal Mr Forster, the Negro’s friend, recently crowed over so gracefully.* With the revival of trade there naturally occurred an overflow from the wages of the ever-fluctuating ‘reserve army’ or ‘relative surplus population’. The frightful cellar habitations and rooms registered in the list,⁶¹ which Dr Hunter obtained from the agent of an insurance company, were for the most part inhabited by well-paid workers. They declared that they would willingly pay for better dwellings if they were to be had. Meanwhile they become degraded and fall ill, every man jack of them, while that sweet-natured Liberal, Forster M.P., sheds tears of joy over the blessings of free trade, and the profits of the eminent men of Bradford who deal in worsted. In the report of 5 September 1865, Dr Bell, one of the poor law doctors of Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality of fever patients in his district to the conditions in which they live. ‘In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet… there are ten persons… Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys include 223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants, 453 beds, and 36 privies… The beds – and in that term I include any roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings – have an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5 and 6 persons to each, and some people, I am told, are absolutely without beds; they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards – young men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for human habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are distributed amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to fester in our midst.’⁶²

Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its dwellings. ‘Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe.’⁶³

The nomadic population

We now turn to a group of people whose origin is rural, but whose occupation is for the most part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown from one point to another according to its present needs. When they are not on the march they ‘camp’. Nomadic labour is used for various building and draining works, for brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, etc. A flying column of pestilence, it carries smallpox, typhus, cholera and scarlet fever into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp.⁶⁴ In undertakings which involve a large outlay of capital, such as railways etc., the contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and so on, thus improvising villages which lack all sanitary arrangements, are outside the control of the local authorities, and are very profitable to the gentleman who is doing the contracting, for he exploits his workers in two directions at once – as soldiers of industry, and as tenants. Depending on whether the wooden hut contains one, two or three holes, its inhabitant, the navvy or whatever he may be, has to pay 2,3 or 4 shillings a week.⁶⁵ One example will suffice. Dr Simon reports that in September 1864 the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary: ‘Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway from Lewisham to Tun-bridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the principal works being in the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was also established the depot for the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were built in several places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr Jay, for their especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and, besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be, although there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were, according to the medical report we received, that in the night-time these poor people were compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr Jay promised to appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from contagious diseases, might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the 23rd July last, but although since the date of the last promise there have been several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease, yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9th September instant, Mr Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most disgraceful. I should add, for your’ (the Minister’s) ‘information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house, which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious diseases, has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox and fever; that from the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of five months, there have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them being in the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of persons who have suffered from that disease although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families keeping it as private as possible.’⁶⁶

Workers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid categories of the British proletariat. The price they pay for their wages was shown on an earlier page.⁶⁷ Here I shall merely glance at their housing conditions. As a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether he is the proprietor or a tenant, builds a number of cottages for his ‘hands’. They receive cottages and coal for firing ‘for nothing’ – i.e. these form part of their wages, paid in kind. Those who cannot be housed in this way receive in compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts rapidly attract a large population, made up of the miners themselves and the artisans, shopkeepers, etc. who group themselves around them. The ground rent is high, as it generally is where population is dense. The mining employer therefore tries to put up, within the smallest space possible at the entrance to the pit, exactly the number of cottages necessary to pack together his workers and their families. If new mines are opened in the neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only one point of view is of significance, the ‘abstinence’ of the capitalist from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable. ‘The lodging which is obtained by the pitmen and other labourers connected with the collieries of Northumberland and Durham,’ says Dr Julian Hunter, ‘is perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the dearest of which any large specimens can be found in England, the similar parishes of Monmouthshire excepted… The extreme badness is in the high number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the ground-plot on which a great number of houses are thrust, the want of water, the absence of privies, and the frequent placing of one house on the top of another, or distribution into flats,… the lessee acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not resident.’⁶⁸ ‘In pursuance of my instructions,’ says Dr Stevens, ‘I visited most of the large colliery villages in the Durham Union… With very few exceptions, the general statement that no means are taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be true of all of them… All colliers are bound’ (’bound’, an expression which, like ‘bondage’, dates from the age of serfdom) ‘to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months… If the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the “viewer”, a mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at the annual “binding”, such men are turned off… It appears to me that no part of the “truck system” could be worse than what obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is bound to take as part of his hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences; he cannot help himself, and it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him except his proprietor (he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably certain. The collier is also often supplied with water by the proprietor, which, whether it be good or bad, he has to pay for, or rather he suffers a deduction for from his wages.’⁶⁹

In a conflict with ‘public opinion’, or even with the Officers of Health, capital has no difficulty in ‘justifying’ the partly dangerous and partly degrading conditions to which it confines the working and domestic life of the mine-worker, on the ground that they are necessary for profitable exploitation. It is the same thing when capital ‘abstains’ from protective measures against dangerous machinery in the factory, from safety appliances and means of ventilation in the mines, and so on. It is the same here with the housing of the miners. Dr Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, says in his official report: ‘In apology for the wretched household accommodation… it is alleged that mines are commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee’s interest (which in collieries is commonly for twenty-one years), is not so long that he should deem it worth his while to create good accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople and others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to act liberally in the matter, this disposition would commonly be defeated by his landlord’s tendency to fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege of having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable village which the labourers of the subterranean property ought to inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes others who might desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report to enter upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it even needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were provided, the cost… would eventually fall – whether on landlord, or lessee, or labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are vouched for in the annexed reports’ (those of Dr Hunter, Dr Stevens, etc.) ‘a remedy may well be claimed… Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do great public wrong. The landlord in his capacity of mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate, and then in his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the labourers whom he collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. The lessee’ (the capitalist exploiter of the mine) ‘meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for resisting that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be exorbitant, the consequences fall not on him, that his labourers on whom they fall have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that neither obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable inducements towards a “strike”.’⁷⁰

Effect of crises on the best paid section of the working class

Before I turn to the agricultural labourers, I shall just show, by one example, how crises have an impact even on the best paid section of the working class, on its aristocracy. It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the gigantic crises with which the industrial cycle always terminates. The next crisis was due in 1866. Already discounted in the actual factory districts by the cotton famine, which threw much capital from its accustomed sphere into the great centres of the money-market, the crisis assumed this time a predominantly financial character. Its outbreak in May 1866 was signalled by the failure of a giant London bank, immediately followed by the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of the great London branches of industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only overproduced beyond all measure during the swindling period,* but they had, apart from this, entered into enormous contracts on the speculative assumption that credit would be forthcoming to an equivalent extent. A terrible reaction then set in, which continues even now (at the end of March 1867) both in shipbuilding and in other London industries.⁷¹ Let me characterize the situation of the workers by quoting the following from a very detailed report by a correspondent of the Morning Star, who visited the chief centres of distress at the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867: ‘In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of over half a year’s duration)… I had great difficulty in reaching the workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it… They were waiting for their tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. The yard was a great square place with an open shed running all round it, and several large heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also, were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer weather the men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he chipped away at the rime-covered granite until he had broken up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work, and got his day’s pay – threepence and an allowance of food. In another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder, for the warmth of one another’s bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and disputing the while as to which could work the longest on a given quantity of food – for endurance was the point of honour. Seven thousand… in this one workhouse… were recipients of relief… many hundreds of them… it appeared, were, six or eight months ago, earning the highest wages paid to artisans… Their number would be more than doubled by the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse to apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey houses, that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the Committee of the Unemployed… My first call was on an ironworker who had been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray infront of the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea… The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman, who, without saying a word, led us into a little back parlour, in which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again. “Nothing have they done, sir,” said the woman, pointing to her boys, “for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone – all the twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it would yield a little to keep us when we got past work. Look at it,” she said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bankbook with all its well-kept entries of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how the little fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day… Our next visit was to an iron labourer’s wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two wretched children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead… On getting outside a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children, a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to show.’*

On the after-pains of the crisis of 1866, we shall quote an extract from a Tory newspaper. It must not be forgotten that the East End of London, which is dealt with here, is not only the location of the iron shipbuilding mentioned above, but also of the so-called domestic industry, which is always paid less than the minimum wage. ‘A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did not parade with their black flags en masse, the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them… In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed – next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw – cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving, they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves are driven by the parochial charges to the verge of pauperism’ (Standard, 5 April 1867).

As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the workers’ paradise, because ‘freedom of labour’ or, what is the same thing, ‘freedom of capital’ is there limited neither by the despotism of the trade unions nor by the shackles of the Factory Acts, we shall say a word or two here about the ‘good fortune’ of the Belgian worker. Assuredly no one was more thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of this good fortune than the late M. Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions, and member of the Central Statistical Commission of Belgium. Let us take his work Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique (Brussels, 1855). Here we find, among other things, a discussion of a normal Belgian worker’s family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates on very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with those of the soldier, the sailor and the prisoner. The family ‘consists of father, mother, and four children’. Of these six persons, ‘four may be usefully employed the whole year through’. It is assumed that ‘there is no sick person among them, or anyone incapable of work’, nor are there ‘expenses for religious, moral and intellectual purposes, except a very small sum for church pews’, nor contributions to savings banks or benefit societies, ‘nor expenses due to luxury or the result of improvidence’. The father and eldest son, however, allow themselves ‘the use of tobacco’, and on Sundays ‘go to the ale-house’, for which a whole 86 centimes a week are reckoned. ‘From a general compilation of wages allowed to workers in different trades, it follows that the highest average daily wage is 1 franc 56 centimes for men, 89 centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and 55 centimes for girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a year… In the family taken as typical we have calculated all possible resources. In ascribing wages to the mother of the family, however, we thereby remove the household from her management. But who will look after the house and the young children? Who will prepare the meals, do the washing and mending? This is the dilemma presented every day to the workers.’ According to this the budget of the family is:

	Highest average daily wage	300 working days
The father	1.56 francs	468
The mother	89 francs	267
The boy	56 francs	168
The girl	55 francs	165
Total		1,068

The annual expenditure of the family would result in the following deficits, according to whether the worker has the food of:

The sailor in the fleet	fr. 1,828	Deficit fr.	760
The soldier	fr. 1,473	Deficit fr.	405
The prisoner	fr. 1,112	Deficit fr.	44

‘We see that few workers’ families can reach, we will not say the average of the sailor or soldier, but even that of the prisoner. The general average (of the cost of each prisoner in the different prisons during the period 1847 to 1849), has been 63 centimes for all prisons. This figure, compared with that of the daily maintenance of the worker, shows a difference of 13 centimes. It must be remarked further that if in the prisons it is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of administration and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners do not have to pay for their lodgings… How does it happen, then, that a great number, we might say the great majority of workers, live even more economically than prisoners? It is because they adopt expedients whose secrets are only known by the workers: they reduce their daily rations; they substitute rye-bread for wheat; they eat less meat, or even none at all, and the same with butter and condiments; they content themselves with one or two rooms where the family is crammed together, where boys and girls sleep side by side, often on the same mattress; they economize on clothing, washing, and decency; they give up the diversions of Sunday; in short, they resign themselves to the most painful privations. Once this extreme limit has been reached, the least rise in the price of food, the shortest stoppage of work, the slightest illness, increases the worker’s distress and brings him to complete disaster: debts accumulate, credit fails, the most necessary clothes and furniture are pawned, and finally the family asks to be enrolled on the list of paupers.’⁷² In fact, in this ‘paradise for capitalists’, the smallest change in the prices of the most essential means of subsistence is followed by a change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See Manifest der Maatschappij ‘De Vlamingen Vooruit!’, Brussels, 1860, pp. 15–16.)*

There are 930,000 families in Belgium, of whom, according to the official statistics, 90,000 are wealthy and on the list of voters, i.e. 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the lower middle class in towns and villages, the greater part of them constantly sinking into the proletariat, i.e. 1,950,000 persons. Finally, 450,000 working-class families, i.e. 2,250,000 persons, of whom the model ones enjoy the good fortune depicted by Ducpétiaux. Of the 450,000 working-class families, over 200,000 are on the pauper list!

The British agricultural proletariat

Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalist production and accumulation assert itself more brutally than in the progress of English agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and the retrogression of the English agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid look back. Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the eighteenth century, although the revolution in property relations on the land which is the basis of the altered mode of production occurred much earlier.

If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful observer though a superficial thinker, about the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter plays a very pitiable role as compared with his predecessor of the end of the fourteenth century, ‘when the labourer… could live in plenty, and accumulate wealth’,⁷³ not to speak of the fifteenth century, ‘the golden age of the English labourer in town and country’. We need not, however, go back as far as that. In a very instructive book produced in 1777 we read: ‘The great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him’ (the gentleman); ‘while the poor labourer is depressed almost to the earth. His unfortunate situation will fully appear, by taking a comparative view of it, only forty years ago, and at present… Landlord and tenant… have both gone hand in hand in keeping the labourer down.’⁷⁴ It is then proved in detail that real agricultural wages fell by nearly, 1/4 or 25 per cent, between 1737 and 1777. ‘Modern policy,’ as Dr Richard Price was saying at the same time, ‘is, indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people; and the consequences may in time prove that the whole kingdom will consist of only gentry and beggars, or of grandees and slaves.’⁷⁵

Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780, with respect to his food and dwelling, as well as his self-respect, amusements, etc., is an ideal never attained again since that time. His average wage expressed in pints of wheat was, from 1770 to 1771, 90 pints, in Eden’s time (1797) only 65, and in 1808, 60.⁷⁶

The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War, during which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stockbrokers, army contractors and so on enriched themselves to such an enormous extent, has been already indicated above. The nominal wage rose, partly as a result of the depreciation of banknotes, and partly owing to a rise in the prices of the primary means of subsistence which occurred independently of this depreciation. But the real movement of wages can be demonstrated quite simply, without entering into details that are unnecessary here. The Poor Law was the same, and was administered in the same way, in 1795 and in 1814. It will be remembered how this law was put into effect in the country districts: in the form of alms, the parish made up the nominal wage to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the labourer. The ratio between the wage paid by the farmer and the wage-deficit made good by the parish shows us two things. First, the fact that wages had fallen below their minimum; second, the degree to which the agricultural labourer was a combination of wage-labourer and pauper, or the degree to which he had been turned into a serf of his parish. Let us take one county that represents the average situation in all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of six persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income, £29 18s.; deficit made good by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county, the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of five persons £54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36 2s.; deficit made good by the parish, £18 6s. 4d.⁷⁷ In 1795 the deficit was less than a quarter of the wage, in 1814 it was more than a half. It is self-evident that under these circumstances the meagre comforts that Eden still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer had vanished by 1814.⁷⁸ Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale,* was thenceforth the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

This state of affairs continued quietly until ‘the Swing riots, in 1830, revealed to us’ (i.e. to the ruling classes) ‘by the light of blazing corn-stacks, that misery and black mutinous discontent smouldered quite as fiercely under the surface of agricultural as of manufacturing England.’⁷⁹ It was at this time that Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the agricultural labourers ‘white slaves’, and a bishop echoed the epithet in the House of Lords. The most notable political economist of that period – E. G. Wakefield – says: ‘The peasant of the South of England… is not a freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a pauper.’⁸⁰

The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the condition of the agricultural labourers. On the one hand, it was in the interest of the middle-class agitators to prove how little the Corn Laws protected the actual producers of the corn. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie was seething with wrath at the denunciations of the factory system made by the landed aristocracy, at the affectation of sympathy displayed by those utterly corrupt, heartless and genteel idlers for the woes of the factory workers, and at their ‘diplomatic zeal’ for factory legislation. There is an old English proverb to the effect that when thieves fall out, honest men come into their own, and in fact the noisy and passionate dispute between the two factions of the ruling class as to which of them exploited the workers more shamelessly was the midwife of truth on both sides of the question. Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was the protagonist of the aristocratic philanthropic campaign against the factories. He therefore formed a favourite target for the revelations of the Morning Chronicle in 1844 and 1845 on the condition of the agricultural labourers. This newspaper, at that time the most important Liberal organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts, commissioners who did not content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published the names both of the families of labourers examined and of their landlords. The following list [p. 832] gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blandford, Wimborne and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr G. Bankes and the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that, just like Bankes, the pope of the Low Church, the head of the English pietists, also pockets a large part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of the rent of their houses.

The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English agriculture. Drainage on the most extensive scale,⁸² new methods of stall-feeding and the artificial cultivation of green crops, the introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new treatment of clay soils, increased use of mineral manures, employment of the steam-engine and all kinds of new machinery, more intensive cultivation in general, are all characteristic of this epoch. Mr Pusey, Chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society, declares that the (relative) expenses of farming have been reduced nearly 50 per cent by the introduction of new machinery. On the other hand, the actual productive return of the soil rose rapidly. Greater outlay of capital per acre, and as a consequence more rapid concentration of farms, were essential conditions of the new method.⁸³

⁸¹

Children (a)	Number of members in family (b)	Weekly wage of the men (c)	Weekly wage of the children (d)		Weekly income of the whole family (e)		Weekly rent (f)		Total weekly wage after deduction of rent (g)		Weekly income per head (h)
		s.	s.	p.	s.	p.	s.	p.	s.	p.	s.	p.
First village
2	4	8	—		8	—	2	—	6	—	1	6
3	5	8	—		8	—	1	6	6	6	1	3 ½
2	4	8	—		8	—	1	—	7	—	1	9
2	4	8	—		8	—	1	—	7	6	1	¾
6	8	7	1	6	10	6	2	—	8	6	1	1 ½
3	5	7	2	—	7	—	1	4	5	8	1	1 ½
Second village
6	8	7	1	6	10	—	1	6	8	6	1	¾
6	8	7	1	6	7	—	1	3 ½	5	8 ½	—	8 ½
8	10	7	—	—	7	—	1	3 ½	5	8 ½	—	7
4	6	7	—	—	7	—	1	36 ½	5	5 ½	—	11
3	5	7	—	—	7	—	1	36 ½	5	5 ½	1	1
Third village
4	6	7	—	—	7	—	1	—	6	—	1	—
3	5	7	2	—	11	6	—	10	10	8	2	1 ½
0	2	5	2	6	5	—	1	—	4	—	2	—

s. = shillings

p. = pence

At the same time, the area under cultivation increased, from 1846 to 1856, by 464,119 acres, without counting the large part of the eastern counties which was transformed from rabbit warrens and poor pastures into magnificent corn-fields. It has already been seen that, simultaneously with this, the total number of persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the actual agricultural labourers of both sexes and all ages are concerned, their number fell from 1,241,396 in 1851 to 1,163,217 in 1861.⁸⁴ The English Registrar General rightly remarks: ‘The increase of farmers and farm-labourers, since 1801, bears no kind of proportion… to the increase of agricultural produce,’⁸⁵ and this disproportion is even more noticeable for the last period, when a positive decrease of the agricultural population went hand in hand with an increase in the cultivated area and in the intensity with which it was cultivated, an unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated with the soil and devoted to its cultivation, an augmentation of the product of the soil unparalleled in the history of English agriculture, abundant rent-rolls for the landowners, and growing wealth for the capitalist farmers. If we take this together with the swift, unbroken extension of the market, i.e. the growth of the towns, and the reign of free trade, then the agricultural labourer was at last, post tot discrimina rerum,* placed in circumstances that ought, secundum artem,† to have made him drunk with happiness.

But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the situation of the English agricultural labourer of today, in comparison with his predecessor from 1770 to 1780, not to speak of his predecessor in the last half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century, has changed for the worse to an extraordinary extent, that ‘the peasant has again become a serf’, and a serf worse fed and worse clothed.⁸⁶

Dr Julian Hunter, in his epoch-making report on the dwellings of the agricultural labourers, says: ‘The cost of the hind’ (a name for the agricultural labourer, inherited from the time of serfdom) ‘is fixed at the lowest possible amount on which he can live… the supplies of wages and shelter are not calculated on the profit to be derived from him. He is a zero in farming calculations.’⁸⁷ ‘The means’ (of subsistence) ‘are always supposed to be a fixed quantity.’⁸⁸ ‘As to any further reduction of his income, he may say, nihil habeo nihil curo.*He has no fears for the future, because he has now only the spare supply necessary to keep him. He has reached the zero from which are dated the calculations of the farmer. Come what will, he has no share either in prosperity or adversity.’⁸⁹

In the year 1863, an official inquiry took place into the conditions of nourishment and work of the criminals condemned to transportation and penal servitude. The results are recorded in two voluminous Blue Books. Among other things it is said: ‘From an elaborate comparison between the diet of convicts in the convict prisons in England, and that of paupers in workhouses and of free labourers in the same country… it certainly appears that the former are much better fed than either of the two other classes,’⁹⁰ while ‘the amount of labour required from an ordinary convict under penal servitude is about one-half of what would be done by an ordinary day-labourer.’⁹¹ Here are a few characteristic depositions of witnesses. No. 5056: ‘The diet of the English prisons is superior to that of ordinary labourers in England’. No. 5075: ‘It is the fact… that the ordinary agricultural labourers in Scotland very seldom get any meat at all.’ Answer No. 3047: ‘Is there anything that you are aware of to account for the necessity of feeding them very much better than ordinary labourers? – Certainly not.’ No. 3048: ‘Do you think that further experiments ought to be made in order to ascertain whether a dietary might not be hit upon for prisoners employed on public works nearly approaching to the dietary of free labourers?’⁹²… ‘He’ (the agricultural labourer) ‘might say: “I work hard, and have not enough to eat, and therefore it is better for me to be in prison again than here.”’⁹³ From the tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled this comparative summary.⁹⁴

Weekly amount of nutriment

	Quantity of nitrogenous ingredients (ounces)	Quantity of non-nitrogenous ingredients (ounces)	Quantity of mineral matter (ounces)	Total (ounces)
Portland (convict)	28.95	150.06	4.68	183.69
Sailor in the Navy	29.63	152.91	4.52	187.06
Soldier	25.55	114.49	3.94	143.98
Working coach-maker	24.53	162.06	4.23	190.82
Compositor	21.24	100.83	3.12	125.19
Agricultural labourer	17.72	118.06	3.29	139.08

The general result of the inquiry by the medical commission of 1863 into the state of nourishment of the worst fed classes of the people is already known to the reader. He will remember that the diet of a great part of the families of agricultural labourers is below the minimum necessary ‘to avert starvation diseases’. This is especially the case in all the purely rural districts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, Staffordshire, Oxford-shire, Berkshire and Hertfordshire. ‘The nourishment obtained by the labourer himself,’ says Dr E. Smith, ‘is larger than the average quantity indicates, since he eats a larger share… necessary to enable him to perform his labour… of food than the other members of the family, including in the poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon… The quantity of food obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period of rapid growth, is in many cases, in almost every county, deficient, and particularly in nitrogen.’⁹⁵ The male and female servants who live with the farmers themselves are sufficiently nourished. Their number fell from 288,277 in 1851 to 204,962 in 1861. ‘The labour of women in the fields,’ says Dr Smith, ‘whatever may be its disadvantages… is under present circumstances of great advantage to the family, since it adds that amount of income which… provides shoes and clothing and pays the rent, and thus enables the family to be better fed.’⁹⁶ One of the most remarkable findings of the inquiry was that the agricultural labourer of England, as compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, ‘is considerably the worst fed’, as the appended table shows:⁹⁷

Quantities of carbon and nitrogen consumed every week by an average adult agricultural labourer

	Carbon (grains)	Nitrogen (grains)
England	46,673	1,594
Wales	48,354	2,031
Scotland	48,980	2,348
Ireland	43,366	2,434

‘To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of the house accommodation generally had by our agricultural labourers,’ says Dr Simon, in his official Health Report, ‘almost every page of Dr Hunter’s report bears testimony. And gradually, for many years past, the state of the labourer in these respects has been deteriorating, house-room being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and, when found, greatly less suitable to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been the case. Especially within the last twenty or thirty years, the evil has been in very rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches, see fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the land which he contributes to till, whether the house-room which he gets shall be human or swinish, whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his poverty – all this does not depend on his willingness and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make of their “right to do as they will with their own”. However large may be a farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of labourers’ dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain… An extraneous element weighs the balance heavily against him… the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions concerning settlement and chargeability.⁹⁸ Under this influence, each parish has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident labourers: – for, unhappily, agricultural labour instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-working labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism – a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so near, that any illness or temporary failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief – and thus all residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor-rates… Large proprietors⁹⁹… have but to resolve that there shall be no labourers’ dwellings on their estates, and their estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsiblity for the poor. How far it has been intended, in the English constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in land should be acquirable, and that a landlord, “doing as he wills with his own”, should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens, whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to discuss… For that power of eviction… does not exist only in theory. On a very large scale it prevails in practice – prevails… as a main governing condition in the household circumstances of agricultural labour… As regards the extent of the evil, it may suffice to refer to the evidence which Dr Hunter has compiled from the last census, that destruction of houses, notwithstanding increased local demands for them, had, during the last ten years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes or townships of England, so that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to become non-resident (that is in the parishes in which they work), these parishes and townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population 5 1/3 per cent greater, into house-room 4 1/2 per cent less… When the process of depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr Hunter, is a show-village where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but persons who are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers, are allowed to live; regular servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class.¹ But the land requires cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed upon it are not the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open village, perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received them when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things are tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand, testify, in their unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are doomed. They are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While the shelter holds together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad enough he will be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no repair, no improvement shall it receive, except such as its penniless occupants can supply. And when at last it becomes quite uninhabitable – uninhabitable even to the humblest standard of serfdom – it will be but one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will be somewhat lightened. While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates through the depopulation of lands over which they have control, the nearest town or open village receives the evicted labourers; the nearest, I say, but this “nearest” may mean three or four miles distant from the farm where the labourer has his daily toil. To that daily toil there will then have to be added, as though it were nothing, the daily need of walking six or eight miles for power of earning his bread. And whatever farm-work is done by his wife and children, is done at the same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil which the distance occasions him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy scraps of land, which they throng as densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And into those wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the open country, have some of the worst features of the worst town residences) crowd the agricultural labourers of England²… Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the labourer is housed upon the lands which he cultivates, his household circumstances are generally such as his life of productive industry would seem to deserve. Even on princely estates… his cottage… may be of the meanest description. There are landlords who deem any stye good enough for their labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent.³ It may be but a ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden – but the labourer is helpless against the wrong… And the Nuisances Removal Acts… are… a mere dead letter… in great part dependent for their working on such cottage-owners as the one from whom his’ (the labourer’s) ‘hovel is rented… From brighter, but exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice, that attention should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts which are a reproach to the civilization of England. Lamentable indeed, must be the case, when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their mere numerical insufficiency. For years the overcrowding of rural labourers’ dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For, again and again in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic disease in rural districts have insisted on the extreme importance of that overcrowding, as an influence which renders it a quite hopeless task, to attempt the limiting of any infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been pointed out that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences which there are in country life, the crowding which so favours the extension of contagious disease, also favours the origination of disease which is not contagious. And those who have denounced the overcrowded state of our rural population have not been silent as to a further mischief. Even where their primary concern has been only with the injury to health, often almost perforce they have been referred to other relations on the subject. In showing how frequently it happens that adult persons of both sexes, married and unmarried, are huddled together in single small sleeping rooms, their reports have carried the conviction that, under the circumstances they describe, decency must always be outraged, and morality almost of necessity must suffer.⁴ Thus, for instance, in the appendix of my last annual report, Dr Ord, reporting on an outbreak of fever at Wing, in Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who had come thither from Wingrave with fever, “in the first days of his illness slept in a room with nine other persons. Within a fortnight several of these persons were attacked, and in the course of a few weeks five out of the nine had fever, and one died.”… From Dr Harvey, of St George’s Hospital, who, on private professional business, visited Wing during the time of the epidemic, I received information exactly in the sense of the above report… “A young woman having fever, lay at night in a room occupied by her father, and mother, her bastard child, two young men (her brothers), and her two sisters, each with a bastard child – ten persons in all. A few weeks ago thirteen persons slept in it.”’⁵

Dr Hunter investigated 5,375 agricultural labourers’ cottages, not only in the purely agricultural districts, but in all the counties of England. 2,195 out of the 5,375 had only one bedroom (often used at the same time as a living-room), 2,930 only two, and 250 more than two. I give below a short selection of examples, gathered from a dozen counties.

1. Bedfordshire

Wrestlingworth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, although many are smaller than this. The small, one-storied cots* are often divided by partitions into two bedrooms, one bed frequently in a kitchen, 5 feet 6 inches in height. Rent, £3 a year. The tenants have to make their own privies, the landlord only supplies a hole. As soon as one has made a privy, it is made use of by the whole neighbourhood. One house, belonging to a family called Richardson, was of quite unapproachable beauty. ‘Its plaster walls bulged very like a lady’s dress in a curtsey. One gable end was convex, the other concave, and on this last, unfortunately, stood the chimney, a curved tube of clay and wood like an elephant’s trunk. A long stick served as prop to prevent the chimney from falling. The doorway and window were rhomboidal.’ Of seventeen houses visited, only four had more than one bedroom, and those four overcrowded. The cots with one bedroom sheltered three adults and three children, a married couple with six children, etc.

Dunton. High rents, from £4 to £5, weekly wages of the men, 10s. They hope to pay the rent by the straw-plaiting of the family. The higher the rent, the greater the number that must work together to pay. Six adults, living with four children in one sleeping apartment, pay £3 10s. for it. The cheapest house in Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad, let for £3. Only one of the houses investigated had two bedrooms. A little outside the village, a house whose ‘tenants dunged against the house-side’, the lower 9 inches of the door eaten away through sheer rottenness; the doorway, a single opening closed at night by a few bricks, ingeniously pushed up after shutting and covered with some matting. Half a window, with glass and frame, had gone the way of all flesh. Here, without furniture, huddled together were three adults and five children. Dunton is not worse than the rest of the Biggleswade Union.

2. Berkshire

Beenham. In June 1864 a man, his wife and four children lived in a cot (one-storied cottage). A daughter came home from service with scarlet fever. She died. One child sickened and died. The mother and one child were down with typhus when Dr Hunter was called in. The father and one child slept outside, but the difficulty of securing isolation was seen here, for in the crowded market of the miserable village lay the linen of the fever-stricken household, waiting for the wash. The rent of H’s house, 1s. a week; one bedroom without window, fire-place, door, or opening, except into the lobby; no garden. A man lived here for a little while, with two grown-up daughters and one grown-up son; father and son slept on the bed, the girls in the passage. Each of the latter had a child while the family was living here, but one went to the workhouse for her confinement and then came home.

3. Buckinghamshire

Thirty cottages – on 1,000 acres of land – contained here about 130–140 persons. The parish of Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres; it numbered, in 1851, thirty-six houses and a population of 84 males and 54 females. This inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in 1861, when they numbered 98 males and 87 females; an increase in ten years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile, the number of houses had declined by 1.

Winslow. Great part of this newly built in good style; demand for houses appears very marked, since very miserable cots let at 1s. to 1s. 3d. per week.

Water Eaton. Here the landlords, in view of the increasing population, have destroyed about 20 per cent of the existing houses. A poor labourer, who had to go about 4 miles to his work, answered the question whether he could not find a cot nearer: ‘No; they know better than to take a man in with my large family.’

Tinker’s End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were four adults and four children; 11 feet long, 9 feet broad, 6 feet 5 inches high at its highest part; another 11 feet 3 inches by 9 feet, 5 feet 10 inches high, sheltered six persons. Each of these families had less space than is considered necessary for a convict. No house had more than one bedroom, not one of them a back door; water very scarce; weekly rent from 1s. 4d. to 2s. In sixteen of the houses visited, only one man that earned 10s. a week. The quantity of air for each person under the circumstances just described corresponds to that which he would have if he were shut up in a box of 4 feet measuring each way, the whole night. But then, the ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional ventilation.

4. Cambridgeshire

Gamlingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the wretchedest cots to be found anywhere. Much straw-plaiting. ‘A deadly lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth’, reigns in Gamlingay. The neglect in its centre becomes mortification at its extremities, north and south, where the houses are rotting to pieces. The absentee landlords bleed this poor rookery too freely. The rents are very high; eight or nine persons packed in one sleeping apartment, in two cases six adults, each with one or two children in one small bedroom.

5. Essex

In this county, decline in the number of persons and of cottages goes hand in hand in many parishes. In not less than twenty-two parishes, however, the destruction of houses has not prevented increase of population, or has not brought about that expulsion which, under the name ‘migration to towns’, generally occurs. In Fingringhoe, a parish of 3,445 acres, there were 145 houses in 1851, and only 110 in 1861. But the people did not wish to go away, and managed even to increase under these circumstances. In 1851, 252 persons inhabited 61 houses, but in 1861, 262 persons were squeezed into 49 houses. In Basildon, in 1851, 157 persons lived on 1,827 acres, in 35 houses; at the end often years, 180 persons lived in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South Farnbridge, Widford, Basildon and Ramsden Crags, in 1851, 1,392 persons were living on 8,449 acres in 316 houses; in 1861, on the same area, 1,473 persons in 249 houses.

6. Herefordshire

This little county has suffered more from the ‘eviction spirit’ than any other in England. At Madley, overcrowded cottages generally, with only two bedrooms, belonging for the most part to the farmers. They can let them very easily for £3 or £4 a year, and pay a weekly wage of 9s.!

7. Huntingdonshire

Hartford had, in 1851, 87 houses; shortly after this, nineteen cottages were destroyed in this small parish of 1,720 acres; population in 1831, 452; in 1851, 832; and in 1861, 341. Fourteen cottages, each with one bedroom, were visited. One of these rooms, in which eight people slept, was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2 inches broad, 6 feet 9 inches high: the average, without making any deductions for projections into the apartment, comes to about 130 cubic feet per head. In the fourteen sleeping rooms, thirty-four adults and thirty-three children. These cottages are seldom provided with gardens, but many of the inmates are able to farm small allotments at 10s. or 12s. per rood (1/4 acre). These allotments are at a distance from the houses, which are without privies. The family ‘must either go to the allotment to deposit their ordures’, or, as happens in this place, if the reader will permit the reference, ‘use a closet with a trough set like a drawer in a chest of drawers, and drawn out weekly and conveyed to the allotment to be emptied where its contents were wanted’. In Japan the cyclical movement of the conditions of human life proceeds more cleanly and more decently than this.

8. Lincolnshire

Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright’s house, with his wife, her mother, and five children; the house has a front kitchen, scullery, bedroom over the front kitchen; front kitchen and bedroom, 12 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches; the whole ground floor, 21 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The bedroom is a garret; the walls run together into the roof like a sugar-loaf, a dormer-window opening in front. ‘Why did he live here? On account of the garden? No; it is very small. Rent? High, 1s. 3d. per week. Near his work? No; 6 miles away, so that he walks daily, to and fro, 12 miles. He lived there, because it was a tenantable cot,’ and because he wanted to have a cot for himself alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The following are the statistics of twelve houses in Langtoft, with twelve bedrooms, thirty-eight adults, and thirty-six children.

Twelve houses in Langtoft

Houses	Bedrooms	Adults	Children	Number of persons
No. 1	1	3	5	8
No. 2	1	4	3	7
No. 3	1	4	4	8
No. 4	1	5	4	9
No. 5	1	2	2	4
No. 6	1	5	3	8
No. 7	1	3	3	6
No. 8	1	3	2	5
No. 9	1	2	0	2
No. 10	1	2	3	5
No. 11	1	3	3	6
No. 12	1	2	4	6

9. Kent

Kennington, very seriously over-populated in 1859, when diphtheria appeared, and the parish doctor instituted a medical inquiry into the conditions of the poor classes. He found that in this locality, where much labour is employed, various cots had been destroyed and no new ones built. In one district, there stood four houses, named birdcages; each had four rooms of the following dimensions in feet and inches:

Kitchen: 9 ft 5 by 8 ft 11 by 6 ft 6.

Scullery: 8 ft 6 by 4 ft 6 by 6 ft 6.

Bedroom: 8 ft 5 by 5 ft 10 by 6 ft 3.

Bedroom: 8 ft 3 by 8 ft 4 by 6 ft 3.

10. Northamptonshire

Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the winter twenty to thirty men were lounging about the streets from lack of work. The farmers do not always till the corn and turnip lands sufficiently, and the landlord has found it best to throw all his farms together into two or three. Hence the shortage of employment. While on one side of the wall the land is crying out to be worked, on the other side the defrauded labourers are casting longing glances at it. Feverishly over-worked in summer, and half-starved in winter, it is no wonder if they say in their own local dialect, ‘the parson and gentlefolks seem frit to death at them’.

At Floore there are cases, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of couples with four, five, six children; three adults with five children; a couple with grandfather and six children down with scarlet fever, etc.; in two houses with two bedrooms, two families of eight and nine adults respectively.

11. Wiltshire

Stratton. Thirty-one houses visited, eight with only one bedroom. Pen Hill, in the same parish: a cot let at 1s. 3d. a week with four adults and four children, had nothing good about it, except the walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of stones to the roof of worn-out thatch.

12. Worcestershire

House-destruction here not quite so excessive; yet from 1851 to 1861, the number of inhabitants to each house, on the average, has risen from 4·2 to 4·6.

Badsey. Many cots and little gardens here. Some of the farmers declare that the cots are ‘a great nuisance here, because they bring the poor’. In the view of one gentleman: ‘The poor are none the better for them; if you build 500 they will let fast enough, in fact, the more you build, the more they want’ (according to him the houses give birth to the inhabitants, who then by a law of nature put pressure on ‘the means of housing’). Dr Hunter remarks: ‘Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as there is no particular attraction, such as doles, at Badsey, it must be repulsion from some other unfit place, which will send them here. If each could find an allotment near his work, he would not prefer Badsey, where he pays for his scrap of ground twice as much as the farmer pays for his.’*

The continual emigration to the towns, the continual formation of a surplus population in the countryside through the concentration of farms, the conversion of arable land into pasture, the introduction of machinery, etc., are things which go hand in hand with the continual eviction of the agricultural population by the destruction of their cottages. The more empty the district of people, the greater is its ‘relative surplus population’; the greater their pressure on the means of employment, the greater is the absolute excess of the agricultural population over the means for housing it, and the greater, therefore, is the local surplus population in the villages and the pestilential herding together of human beings. The creation of dense knots of humanity in scattered little villages and small country towns corresponds to the forcible draining of men from the surface of the land. The continuous conversion of the agricultural labourers into a surplus population, in spite of their diminishing number and the increasing mass of their products, is the cradle of pauperism. The pauperism of the agricultural labourers is ultimately a motive for their eviction; it is also the chief source of their miserable housing, which breaks down their last power of resistance, and makes them mere slaves of the landed proprietors⁶ and the farmers. Thus the minimum of wages becomes a law of nature for them. On the other hand, the land, in spite of its constant ‘relative surplus population’, is at the same time under-populated. This is not only seen locally, at the points where the flow of men to towns, mines, railway constructions, etc. is most marked. It is to be seen everywhere, at harvest-time as well as in spring and summer, on those numerous occasions when English agriculture, careful and intensive as it is, needs extra hands. There are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements.⁷ Hence we find in the official documents contradictory complaints from the same places of a simultaneous deficiency and excess of labour. A temporary and local shortage of labour does not bring about a rise in wages, but rather forces the women and children into the fields, and constantly lowers the age at which exploitation begins. As soon as the exploitation of women and children takes place on a large scale, it becomes in turn a new means of making the male agricultural labourer ‘redundant’ and keeping down his wage. The finest fruit of this vicious circle thrives in the east of England – this is the so-called gang-system, to which I must briefly return here.⁸

The gang-system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Nottinghamshire, and sporadically in the neighbouring counties of Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Rutland. Lincolnshire will serve as an example. A large part of this county is new land, formerly marsh, or even, as in others of the eastern counties just mentioned, recently won from the sea. The steam-engine has worked wonders in the way of drainage. What were once fens and sandbanks now bear a luxuriant sea of corn, and very high ground rents. The same thing is true of the alluvial lands won by human endeavour, as in the island of Axholme and other parishes on the banks of the Trent. Not only were no new cottages built there but, in proportion as the new farms arose, old cottages were demolished and the supply of labour had to come from ‘open villages’ miles away, by long roads that wound along the sides of the hills. There alone had the population formerly found shelter from the incessant floods of winter. The labourers who live on the farms of 400–1,000 acres (they are called ‘confined labourers’) are solely employed on agricultural work which is permanent, difficult and requires the aid of horses. For every 100 acres there is, on an average, scarcely one cottage. A fenland farmer, for instance, gave this evidence before the Commission of Inquiry: ‘I farm 320 acres, all arable land. I have not one cottage on my farm. I have only one labourer on my farm now. I have four horsemen lodging about. We get light work done by gangs.’⁹ The soil requires a great deal of light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain processes of manuring, removing of stones, and so on. This is done by the gangs, or in other words the organized bands who live in the open villages.

The gang consists of from ten to forty or fifty persons, women, young persons of both sexes (13–18 years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated at the age of 13), and children of both sexes (6–13 years of age). At the head of the gang is the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, and usually what is called a bad lot, a rake, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of enterprise and savoir faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the gang, which works under him, not under the farmer. He generally negotiates with the latter over piece-work, and his income, which on the average is not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer,¹⁰ depends almost entirely on the dexterity with which he manages to extract the greatest possible amount of labour from his gang within the shortest time. The farmers have discovered that women only work steadily under the direction of men, but that women and children, when once set going, spend their vital forces impetuously – as Fourier already knew in his time – whereas the adult male worker is shrewd enough to economize on his strength as much as he can. The gang-master goes from one farm to another, and thus employs his gang for from six to eight months in the year. Employment by him is therefore much more lucrative and more certain for the labouring families than employment by the individual farmer, who only employs children occasionally. This circumstance so completely rivets his influence in the open villages that children can in general be hired only through his agency. The lending-out of the latter, individually and independently of the gang, is a subsidiary trade for him.

The ‘drawbacks’ of this system are the over-working of the children and young persons, the enormous marches that they make every day to and from the farms, which are five, six and sometimes seven miles away, and finally the demoralization of the ‘gang’. Although the gang-master, who is called ‘the driver’ in some districts, is armed with a long stick, he seldom uses it, and complaints of brutal treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic emperor, or a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular with his subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the gipsy life which flourishes under his auspices. Coarse freedom, noisy jollity and the obscenest kind of impertinence give attractions to the gang. Generally the gang-master pays up in a public house; then he returns home at the head of the procession of gang members, reeling drunk, and propped up on either side by a stalwart virago, while children and young persons bring up the rear, boisterously, and singing mocking and bawdy songs. On the return journey what Fourier calls ‘phanerogamie’* is the order of the day. Girls of 13 and 14 are commonly made pregnant by their male companions of the same age. The open villages, which supply the contingents for the gangs, become Sodoms and Gomorrahs,¹¹ and have twice as high a rate of illegitimacy as the rest of the kingdom. The moral character of girls bred in these schools, when they become married women, was shown above. Their children, when opium does not finish them off entirely, are born recruits for the gang.

The gang in its classical form, as we have just described it, is called the public, common or tramping gang. For there also exist private gangs. These are made up in the same way as the common gang, but count fewer members, and work, not under a gang-master, but under some old farm servant, whom the farmer does not know how to employ in any better way. The gipsy fun has vanished in this case, but, according to all the witnesses, the payment and treatment of the children is worse.

The gang-system, which has steadily expanded during the most recent years,¹² clearly does not exist for the sake of the gang-master. It exists for the enrichment of the large-scale farmers¹³ and indirectly for the landowners.¹⁴ For the farmer, there is no more ingenious method of keeping his labourers well below the normal level, and yet of always having an extra hand ready for extra work, of extracting the greatest possible amount of labour with the least possible expenditure of money,¹⁵ and of making adult male labour ‘redundant’. From the foregoing exposition it will be understood why, on the one hand, a greater or lesser lack of employment for the agricultural labourer is admitted, while, on the other, the gang-system is at the same time declared ‘necessary’ on account of the shortage of adult male labour and its migration to the towns.¹⁶ The cleanly weeded land and the unclean human weeds of Lincolnshire are pole and counterpole of capitalist production.¹⁷

Ireland

In concluding this section, we must travel for a moment to Ireland. First, the main facts of the case.

The population of Ireland had, by 1841, grown to 8,222,664. In 1851 it had dwindled to 6,623,985; in 1861, to 5,850,309; and in 1866, to 5 1/2 millions, approximately its level in 1801. The decrease in population began with the famine year of 1846, so that Ireland has lost more than 5/16 of its people in less than twenty years.¹⁸ Total emigration from May 1851 to July 1865 numbered 1,591,487. During the years between 1861 and 1865 the emigration was more than half a million. The number of inhabited houses fell, from 1851 to 1861, by 52,990. From 1851 to 1861 the number of holdings of from 15 to 30 acres increased by 61,000, that of holdings of over 30 acres by 109,000, while the total number of all farms fell by 120,000. This fall was therefore solely due to the suppression of farms of less than 15 acres, in other words it was due to their centralization.

The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a decrease in the mass of products. For our purpose it is sufficient to consider the five years from 1861 to 1865, years during which over half a million emigrated and the absolute number of people sank by more than 1/3 of a million.

Table A: Livestock

Year	Horses		Cattle		Sheep		Pigs
	Total number	Difference	Total number	Difference	Total number	Difference	Total number	Difference
1860	619,811		3,606,374		3,542,080		1,271,072
1861	614,232	– 5,993	3,471,688	– 138,316	3,556,050	+ 13,970	1,102,042	– 169,030
1862	602,894	– 11,338	3,254,890	– 216,798	3,456,132	– 99,819	1,154,324	+ 52,282
1863	579,978	– 22,916	3,144,231	– 110,695	3,308,204	– 147,982	1,067,458	– 86,866
1864	562,158	– 17,820	3,262,294	+ 118,063	3,366,941	+ 58,737	1,058,480	– 8,978
1865	547,867	– 14,291	3,493,414	+ 231,120	3,688,742	+ 321,801	1,299,893	+ 241,413

The following results emerge from the above table: an absolute decrease of 72,358 in the number of horses, an absolute decrease of 116,626 in the number of cattle, an absolute increase of 146,608 in the number of sheep and an absolute increase of 28,819 in the number of pigs.¹⁹

Let us now turn to the produce of agriculture proper, which provides the means of subsistence for cattle and for men. In the following table we have computed the decrease or increase for each separate year, as compared with its immediate predecessor. The cereal crops include wheat, oats, barley, rye, beans and peas; the green crops, potatoes, turnips, mangolds, beetroot, cabbages, carrots, parsnips, vetches, etc. (See Table B.)

Table B: Increase or decrease in the area under crops and grass (in acres)

Year	Cereal crops	Green crops	Grass and clover	Flax	Total cultivated land
	Difference	Difference	Difference	Difference	Difference
1861	– 15,701	– 36,974	– 47,969	+ 19,271	– 81,873
1862	– 72,734	– 74,785	+ 6,623	+ 2,055	– 138,841
1863	– 144,719	– 19,358	+ 7,724	+ 63,922	– 92,431
1864	– 122,437	– 2,317	+ 47,486	+ 87,761	+ 10,493
1865	– 72,450	+ 25,241	+ 68,970	– 50,159	– 28,218
1861–1865	– 428,041	– 107,984	+ 782,834	+ 122,850	– 330,860

In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading ‘grass land’, chiefly because the area under the heading of ‘unoccupied bog and waste’ decreased by 101,543 acres. If we compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667 quarters, of which 48,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley and so on: the decrease in potatoes was 446,398 tons, although the area of their cultivation increased in 1865. (See Table C.)

Table C: Increase or decrease in the area under cultivation, product per acre, and total product of 1865 compared with 1864 ²⁰

Product	Acres of cultivated land			Product per acre			Total product (qrs)
	1864	1865	Difference	1864	1865	Difference	1864	1865	Difference
Wheat	276,483	266,989	– 9,494	13.3 cwt	13.0	– 0.3	875,782	826,783	– 48,999
Oats	1,814,886	1,745,228	– 69,658	12.1 cwt	12.3	+ 0.2	7,826,332	7,659,727	– 166,605
Barley	172,700	177,102	+ 4,402	15.9 cwt	14.9	– 1.0	761,909	732,017	– 29,892
Bere Rye	8,894	10,091	+ 1,197	16.4 cwt	14.8	– 1.6	15,160	13,989	– 29,892
				8.5 cwt	10.4	+ 1.9	12,680	18,364	+ 5,684
Potatoes	1,039,724	1,066,260	+ 26,536	4.1 tons	3.6	– 0.5	4, 312,388	3,865,990	– 446,398
Turnips	337,355	334,212	– 3,143	10.3 tons	9.9	– 0.4	3,467,659	3,301,683	– 165,976
Mangelwurzels	14,073	14,839	+ 316	10.5 tons	13.3	+ 2.8	147,284	191,937	+ 44,653
Cabbages	31,821	33,622	+ 1,801	9.3 tons	10.4	+ 1.1	297,375	350,252	+ 52,877
Flax	301,693	251,433	– 50,260	34.2 st.	25.2	– 9.0	64,506	39,561	– 24,945
Hay	1,609,569	1,678,492	+ 68,924	1.6 tons	1.8	+ 0.2	2,607,153	3,068,707	+ 461,554

From the movement of population and of agricultural production in Ireland, we pass to the movement of the incomes of its landlords, larger farmers and industrial capitalists. This movement is reflected in the rise and fall of the income tax (see Table D).

Table D: The income tax on the subjoined incomes, in pounds sterling ²¹

	1860	1861	1860	1860	1861	1861
Schedule A Rent of land	13,893,829	13,003,554	13,398,938	13,494,091	13,470,700	13,801,616
Schedule B Farmers profits	2,765,387	2,773,644	2,937,899	2,938,823	2,930,874	2,946,072
Schedule D Industrial, etc. profits	4,891,652	4,836,203	4,858,800	4,846,497	4,545,147	4,850,199
Total schedules A to E	22,962,885	22,998,394	23,597,574	23,658,631	23,236,298	23,230,340

Table E: Schedule D Income from Profits (over £60) in Ireland²²

In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading ‘grass land’, chiefly because the area under the heading of ‘unoccupied bog and waste’ decreased by 101,543 acres. If we compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667 quarters, of which 48,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley and so on: the decrease in potatoes was 446,398 tons, although the area of their cultivation increased in 1865. (See Table C.)

From the movement of population and of agricultural production in Ireland, we pass to the movement of the incomes of its landlords, larger farmers and industrial capitalists. This movement is reflected in the rise and fall of the income tax (see Table D).

Table E: Schedule D Income from Profits (over £60) in Ireland²²

It may be recalled that Schedule D (profits with the exception of those of farmers) also includes so-called ‘professional’ profits – i.e. the incomes of lawyers, doctors, etc.; and Schedules C and E, in which no details are given, include the incomes of civil servants, officers, state sinecurists, creditors of the state, etc. Under Schedule D the average annual increase of income from 1853 to 1864 was only 0·93 per cent in Ireland, whereas in the same period in Great Britain it was 4·58 per cent. Table E shows the distribution of the profits (with the exception of those of farmers) for the years 1864 and 1865.

England, a pre-eminently industrial country with fully developed capitalist production, would have bled to death under such a population drain as Ireland has suffered. But Ireland is at present merely an agricultural district of England which happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle and industrial and military recruits.

The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation, greatly diminished the produce of the soil,²³ and in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle breeding, brought about an absolute decline in some of its branches, and in others an advance scarcely worth mentioning, and constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, the rents of the land and the profits of the farmers increased along with the fall in the population, though not so steadily as the latter. The reason for this will easily be understood. On the one hand, with the throwing together of smallholdings and the change from arable to pasture land, a larger part of the total product was transformed into a surplus product. The surplus product increased although there was a decrease in the total product of which the surplus product formed a fraction. On the other hand, the monetary value of this surplus product increased still more rapidly than its actual quantity, owing to the rise in the price of meat, wool, etc. on the English market during the last twenty years, and especially during the last ten.

The scattered means of production that serve the producers themselves as means of employment and subsistence, without valorizing themselves through the incorporation of the labour of others, are no more capital than a product consumed by its producer is a commodity. If the mass of the means of production employed in agriculture diminished along with the mass of the population, the mass of the capital employed in agriculture increased, because a part of the means of production that were formerly scattered was turned into capital.

The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in industry and trade, accumulated only slowly during the last two decades, and with great and constantly recurring fluctuations. So much the more rapidly did the concentration of its individual constituents develop. And, however small its absolute increase, its relative growth, in proportion to the diminishing population, was tremendous.

Here then, under our own eyes, and on a large scale, there emerges a process which perfectly corresponds to the requirements of orthodox economics for the confirmation of its dogma, the dogma that misery springs from an absolute surplus of population, and that equilibrium is re-established by depopulation. This is a far more important experiment than the mid-fourteenth-century plague*so celebrated by the Malthusians. Let us remark in passing: if it required the naïveté of a schoolmaster to apply the standard of the fourteenth century to the relations of production prevailing in the nineteenth century, and the corresponding relations of population, the error was compounded by overlooking the difference between its consequences in England and in France. On this side of the Channel, the plague and the decimation that accompanied it was followed by the enfranchisement and enrichment of the agricultural population; whereas on the other side, in France, it was followed by a greater degree of enslavement and an increase in misery.²⁴

The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. It did not do the slightest damage to the wealth of the country. The exodus of the next twenty years, an exodus which still continues to increase, did not, as for instance the Thirty Years’ War did, decimate the means of production along with the human beings. The Irish genius discovered an altogether new way of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United States send sums of money home every year as travelling expenses for those left behind. Every troop that emigrates one year draws another after it the next. Thus, instead of costing Ireland anything, emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches of its export trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more people than are replaced by births, so that the absolute level of the population falls year by year.²⁵

What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed from the surplus population? These: the relative surplus population is as great today as it was before 1846; wages are just as low; the oppression of the labourers has increased; misery is forcing the country towards a new crisis. The reasons are simple. The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration. The production of a relative surplus population has more than kept pace with the absolute depopulation. A glance at Table B will show that the change from arable to pasture land must work still more acutely in Ireland than in England. In England the cultivation of green crops increases with the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. While a large number of acres that were formerly tilled lie idle or are turned permanently into grass land, a great part of the waste land and peat bogs that were formerly unused becomes of service for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller and the medium farmers – I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more than 100 acres – still make up about 8/10 of the whole number.²⁶ They are, one after the other, and with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an agriculture managed by capital, and thus they continually furnish new recruits to the class of wage-labourers. The one great industry of Ireland, the manufacture of linen, requires relatively few adult men, and only employs altogether, in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton increased in the years from 1861 to 1866, a comparatively insignificant portion of the population. Like all other large-scale industries, it constantly produces, owing to its incessant fluctuations, a relative surplus population within its own sphere, despite the absolute increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it. The misery of the agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories, whose armies of workers are, for the most part, scattered over the country. Here we again encounter the system of ‘domestic industry’ already described, which possesses its own systematic means of rendering workers ‘redundant’ in the form of under-payment and over-work. Finally, although the depopulation does not have such destructive consequences as would result in a country where capitalist production is fully developed, it does not proceed without constantly reacting back onto the home market. The gap caused by emigration limits not only the local demand for labour, but also the incomes of small shopkeepers, artisans and tradesmen in general. Hence the decrease in incomes between £60 and £100 indicated in Table E.

A clear presentation of the condition of agricultural labourers in Ireland is to be found in the Reports of the Irish Poor Law Inspectors (1870).²⁷ As officials of a government which is maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege sometimes open and sometimes disguised, they have to observe all the linguistic precautions their English colleagues disdain. In spite of this, however, they do not let their government cradle itself in illusions. According to them, the rate of wages in the country, still very low, has risen by 50 to 60 per cent within the last twenty years, and stands now at an average of 6s. to 9s. a week. But this apparent rise hides an actual fall in wages, for it by no means cancels out the rise in the price of the necessary means of subsistence that has taken place in the meantime. The proof is the above extract from the official accounts of an Irish workhouse.

Average weekly cost of maintenance per head

The price of the necessary means of subsistence is thus approximately twice as high, and the price of clothing exactly twice as high, as twenty years before.

Even if we leave aside this disproportion, a mere comparison of the rate of wages expressed in money would give a far from accurate result. Before the famine, the great mass of agricultural wages was paid in kind, and only the smallest part in money; today, payment in money is the rule. It follows from this that, whatever movement has taken place in the real wage, its money rate must have risen. ‘Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin… with a rood, or half-acre or acre of land, and facilities for… a crop of potatoes. He was able to rear his pig and keep fowl… But they now have to buy bread, and they have no refuse upon which they can feed a pig or fowl, and they have consequently no benefit from the sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs.’²⁸ In fact the agricultural labourers were formerly indistinguishable from the smallest of the small farmers, and they formed for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the medium and large farms on which they found employment. Only since the catastrophe of 1846 have they begun to form a section of the class of pure wage-labourers, a special estate which is now connected with its masters only by monetary relations.

We know what their living conditions were in 1846. Since then they have grown still worse. Some of the agricultural day-labourers (though their number grows smaller day by day) continue to live on the holdings of the farmers, in overcrowded huts whose hideousness far surpasses the worst examples the agricultural districts of England can offer, And this holds generally, with the exception of certain tracts of Ulster. It holds in the south, in the counties of Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, etc.; in the east, in Wicklow, Wexford, etc.; in the centre, in King’s County and Queen’s County, Dublin, etc.; in the north, in Down, Antrim, Tyrone, etc.; and in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, etc. ‘The agricultural labourers’ huts,’ an inspector cries out, ‘are a disgrace to the Christianity and to the civilization of this country.’²⁹ To make these holes more attractive for the day-labourers, the pieces of land which have belonged to them from time immemorial are systematically confiscated. ‘The mere sense that they exist subject to this species of ban, on the part of the landlords and their agents, has… given birth in the minds of the labourers to corresponding sentiments of antagonism and dissatisfaction towards those by whom they are thus led to regard themselves as being treated as… a proscribed race.’³⁰

The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts situated at the place of work. This was done on the largest scale, and as if in obedience to a command from on high. Thus many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst slum districts. Thousands of Irish families who, even on the testimony of the English, blinded as the latter are by nationalist prejudices, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for the gaiety and the purity of their home life, suddenly found themselves transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now obliged to seek work from the neighbouring farmers, and are only hired by the day, and therefore under the most precarious form of wage. Hence ‘they sometimes have long distances to go to and from work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not infrequently ending in sickness, disease and want’.³¹

‘The towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed to be the surplus-labour of the rural division’³² and then people still wonder that ‘there is still a surplus of labour in the towns and villages, and either a scarcity or a threatened scarcity in some of the country divisions’.³³ The truth is that this scarcity only becomes perceptible ‘in harvest-time, or during spring, or at such times as agricultural operations are carried on with activity; at other periods of the year many hands are idle’;³⁴ that ‘from the digging out of the main crop of potatoes in October until the early spring following… there is no employment for them’;³⁵ and further, that during the active times they ‘are subject to broken days and to all kinds of interruptions’.³⁶

These results of the agricultural revolution – i.e. the change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous economy of labour, etc. – are still further aggravated by the model landlords, who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, condescend to live in Ireland on their demesnes. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be infringed, these gentlemen draw their ‘labour-supply… chiefly from their small tenants, who are obliged to attend when required to do the landlords’ work, at rates of wages, in many instances, considerably under the current rates paid to ordinary labourers, and without regard to the inconvenience or loss to the tenant of being obliged to neglect his own business at critical periods of sowing or reaping’.³⁷

The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long duration of gluts of labour, are all symptoms of a relative surplus population, and they therefore figure in the reports of the Poor Law inspectors as so many hardships suffered by the Irish agricultural proletariat. It will be recalled that we met with similar phenomena among the English agricultural proletariat. But the difference is that in England, an industrial country, the industrial reserve is recruited from the countryside, whereas in Ireland, an agricultural country, the agricultural reserve is recruited from the towns, the places of refuge of the agricultural labourers who have been driven from the land. In England, the surplus rural labourers are transformed into factory workers; in Ireland, those forced into the towns remain agricultural labourers even while they exert a downward pressure on urban wages, and are constantly sent back to the countryside in search of work.

The official inspectors sum up the material condition of the agricultural labourer as follows: ‘Though living with the strictest frugality, his own wages are barely sufficient to provide food for an ordinary family and pay his rent, and he depends upon other sources for the means of clothing himself, his wife, and his children… The atmosphere of these cabins, combined with the other privations they are subjected to, has made this class particularly susceptible to typhus and consumption.’³⁸ In view of this, it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of the inspectors, a sombre discontent runs through the ranks of this class, that they long for the return of the past, loathe the present, despair of the future, give themselves up ‘to the evil influence of agitators’, and have only one fixed idea, to emigrate to America. This is the land of Cockaigne, into which depopulation, the great Malthusian panacea, has transformed green Erin!

One example will be sufficient to show what a prosperous life is led by the Irish factory worker. ‘On my recent visit to the North of Ireland,’ says the English factory inspector Robert Baker, ‘I met with the following evidence of effort in an Irish skilled workman to afford education to his children; and I give his evidence verbatim, as I took it from his mouth. That he was a skilled factory hand, may be understood when I say that he was employed on goods for the Manchester market. “Johnson: I am a beetler* and work from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, from Monday to Friday. Saturday we leave off at 6 p.m., and get three hours of it (for meals and rest). I have five children in all. For this work I get 10s. 6d. a week; my wife works here also, and gets 5s. a week. The oldest girl, who is 12, minds the house. She is also cook, and all the servant we have. She gets the young ones ready for school. A girl going past the house wakes me at half past five in the morning. My wife gets up and goes along with me. We get nothing (to eat) before we come to work. The child of 12 takes care of the little children all the day, and we get nothing till breakfast at 8. At 8 we go home. We get tea once a week; at other times we get stirabout, sometimes of oatmeal, sometimes of Indian meal, as we are able to get it. In the winter we get a little sugar and water to our Indian meal. In the summer we get a few potatoes, planting a small patch ourselves; and when they are done we get back to stirabout. Sometimes we get a little milk as it may be. So we go on from day to day, Sunday and week day, always the same the year round. I am always very much tired when I have done at night. We may see a bit of flesh meat sometimes, but very seldom. Three of our children attend school, for whom we pay 1d. a week a head. Our rent is 9d. a week. Peat for firing costs 1s. 6d. a fortnight at the very lowest.”’³⁹ Such are Irish wages, such is Irish life!

In fact, the misery of Ireland is once again a daily theme of discussion in England. At the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, one of the Irish land magnates, Lord Dufferin, set about solving the problem in The Times. ‘Wie menschlich von solch’ grossem Herrn!’*

We saw from Table E that during 1864, out of a total profit of £4,368,610, three money-grubbers pocketed only £262,610; that in 1865, however, out of a total profit of £4,669,979, the same three virtuosos of ‘abstinence’ pocketed £274,528; in 1864, 26 money-grubbers took £646,377; in 1865, 28 money-grubbers took £736,448; in 1864, 121 money-grubbers took £1,066,912; in 1865, 186 money-grubbers took £1,320,996; in 1864, 1,131 money-grubbers took £2,150,818, nearly half of the total annual profit; and in 1865, 1,194 money-grubbers took £2,418,933, more than half of the total annual profit. But the lion’s share of the yearly national rental which an inconceivably small number of land magnates in England, Scotland and Ireland swallow up is so monstrous that English statesmanship finds it inappropriate to afford the same statistical materials about the distribution of rents as about the distribution of profits. Lord Dufferin is one of those land magnates. That rent-rolls and profits can ever be ‘excessive’, or that the plethora of rent-rolls and profits is in any way connected with the plethora of popular miseries, is, of course, an idea as ‘disreputable’ as it is ‘unsound’. Dufferin keeps to the facts. The fact is that, as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish rent-rolls swell; that depopulation benefits the landlords, thus also benefits the soil and therefore the people, that mere accessory of that soil. He declares, therefore, that Ireland is still over-populated, and the stream of emigration still flows too sluggishly. To be perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least one-third of a million working men. Let no one imagine that this lord, who is also a poet, is a physician of the school of Sangrado,† who, if he failed to find an improvement in the condition of his patient, ordered bloodletting after blood-letting, until the patient lost his sickness when he had lost his blood. Lord Dufferin demands a new blood-letting of one-third of a million only, instead of about two millions; but in fact, unless these two millions are got rid of, the millennium cannot come to pass in Erin. The proof is easily given.

Number and Extent of Farms in Ireland in 1864

Centralization has from 1851 to 1861 mainly destroyed farms of the first three categories, under 1 and not over 15 acres. This gives 307,058 ‘surplus’ farmers, and, reckoning a low average of four persons per family, 1,228,232 persons. On the extravagant assumption that a quarter of these can again be absorbed after the completion of the agricultural revolution, there remain for emigration 921,174 persons. Categories 4, 5 and 6, including farms of between 15 and 100 acres, are, as has long been known in England, too small for the capitalist cultivation of corn, and almost infinitesimal from the point of view of sheep-breeding. On the same assumptions as before, therefore, there are a further 788,761 persons to emigrate: grand total, 1,709,532. And, as appetite grows with eating, Rent Roll’s eyes will soon discover that Ireland with 31/2 millions, still continues to be miserable, miserable because she is overpopulated. Therefore her depopulation must go still further, in order that she may fulfil her true destiny, to be an English sheep-walk and cattle pasture.⁴¹

Like all good things in the world, this profitable mode of proceeding has its drawbacks. The accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace with the accumulation of rents in Ireland. The Irishman, banished by the sheep and the ox, re-appears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian. And there a young but gigantic republic rises, more and more threateningly, to face the old queen of the waves:

Acerba fata Romanos agunt Scelusque fraternae necis.*

So-called primitive accumulation

The secret of primitive accumulation

We have seen how money is transformed into capital; how surplus-value is made through capital, and how more capital is made from surplus-value. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a primitive accumulation (the ‘previous accumulation’ of Adam Smith*) which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.

This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, for example, still repeats it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, who were once so full of wit and ingenuity. But as soon as the question of property is at stake, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the standpoint of the nursery tale as the one thing fit for all age-groups and all stages of development. In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labour’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment, ‘this year’ of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this transformation can itself only take place under particular circumstances, which meet together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors. The free workers are therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With the polarization of the commodity-market into these two classes, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are present. The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.

The immediate producer, the worker, could dispose of his own person only after he had ceased to be bound to the soil, and ceased to be the slave or serf of another person. To become a free seller of labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he can find a market for it, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and their restrictive labour regulations. Hence the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, who were in possession of the sources of wealth. In this respect, the rise of the industrial capitalists appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal power and its disgusting prerogatives, and against the guilds, and the fetters by which the latter restricted the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. The knights of industry, however, only succeeded in supplanting the knights of the sword by making use of events in which they had played no part whatsoever. They rose by means as base as those once used by the Roman freedman to make himself the master of his patronus.

The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted in a change in the form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To understand the course taken by this change, we do not need to go back very far at all. Although we come across the first sporadic traces of capitalist production as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century. Wherever it appears, the abolition of serfdom has long since been completed, and the most brilliant achievement of the Middle Ages, the existence of independent city-states, has already been on the wane for a considerable length of time.

In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form.

The expropriation of the agricultural population from the land

In England, serfdom had disappeared in practice by the last part of the fourteenth century. The immense majority of the population¹ consisted then, and to a still larger extent in the fifteenth century, of free peasant proprietors, however much the feudal trappings might disguise their absolute ownership. In the larger seigniorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage-labourers of agriculture were partly peasants, who made use of their leisure time by working on the large estates, and partly an independent, special class of wage-labourer, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter were also in practice peasants, farming independently for themselves, since, in addition to their wages, they were provided with arable land to the extent of four or more acres, together with their cottages. Moreover, like the other peasants, they enjoyed the right to exploit the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, and furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, etc.² In all countries of Europe, feudal production is characterized by division of the soil amongst the greatest possible number of sub-feudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent-roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors.³ Thus although the soil of England, after the Norman conquest, was divided up into gigantic baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was strewn with small peasant properties, only interspersed here and there with great seigniorial domains. Such conditions, together with the urban prosperity so characteristic of the fifteenth century, permitted the development of that popular wealth Chancellor Fortescue depicted so eloquently in his De laudibus legum Angliae, but they ruled out wealth in the form of capital.

The prelude to the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production was played out in the last third of the fifteenth century and the first few decades of the sixteenth. A mass of ‘free’ and unattached proletarians was hurled onto the labour-market by the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart correctly remarked, ‘everywhere uselessly filled house and castle’.* Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, forcibly hastened the dissolution of these bands of retainers in its striving for absolute sovereignty, it was by no means the sole cause of it. It was rather that the great feudal lords, in their defiant opposition to the king and Parliament, created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal title as the lords themselves, and by usurpation of the common lands. The rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England provided the direct impulse for thes eevictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was therefore its slogan. Harrison, in his Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles, describes how the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country. ‘What care our great incroachers?’ The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. ‘If,’ says Harrison, ‘the old records of euerie manour be sought… it will soon appear that in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk… that England was neuer less furnished with people than at the present… Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them… I could saie somewhat.’* The complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they faithfully reflect the impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the relations of production. A comparison between the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. As Thornton rightly says, the English working class was precipitated without any transitional stages from its golden age to its iron age.†

Legislation shrunk back in the face of this immense change. It did not yet stand at that high level of civilization where the ‘wealth of the nation’ (i.e. the formation of capital and the reckless exploitation and impoverishment of the mass of the people) figures as the ultima Thule‡ of all statecraft. In his history of Henry VII Bacon says this: ‘Inclosures at that time’ (1489) ‘began to be more frequent, whereby arable land, which could not be manured§ without people and families, was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and, by consequence, a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the like… In remedying of this inconvenience the king’s wisdom was admirable, and the parliament’s at that time… They took a course to take away depopulating inclosures, and depopulating pasturage.’* An Act of Henry VII, 1489, c. 19, forbade the destruction of all ‘houses of husbandry’ possessing 20 acres of land. By another Act, 25 Henry VIII [c. 13], this law was renewed. It recites, among other things, that ‘many farms and large flocks of cattle, especially of sheep, are concentrated in the hands of a few men, whereby the rent of land has much risen, and tillage has fallen off, churches and houses have been pulled down, and marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families.’ The Act therefore ordains the rebuilding of the decayed farmsteads, and fixes a proportion between corn land and pasture land, etc. The same Act recites that some owners possess 24,000 sheep, and limits the number to be owned to 2,000.⁴ The cries of the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after Henry VII, against the expropriation of the small farmers and peasants, were both equally fruitless. Bacon, without knowing it, reveals to us the secret of their lack of success. ‘The device of King Henry VII,’ says Bacon, in the twenty-ninth of his Essays, Civil and Moral, ‘was profound and admirable, in making farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is, maintained with such a proportion of land unto them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.’⁵ What the capitalist system demanded was the reverse of this: a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, their transformation into mercenaries, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital. During this transitional period, legislation also strove to retain the four acres of land by the cottage of the agricultural wage-labourer, and forbade him to take lodgers into his cottage. In the reign of Charles I, in 1627, Roger Crocker of Fontmill was condemned for having built a cottage on the manor of Fontmill without four acres of land attached to the same in perpetuity. As late as 1638, in the same reign, a royal commission was appointed to enforce the implementation of the old laws, especially the law referring to the four acres of land. Even Cromwell forbade the building of a house within four miles of London unless it was endowed with four acres of land. As late as the first half of the eighteenth century, complaint is made if the cottage of the agricultural labourer does not possess an adjunct of one or two acres of land. Nowadays the labourer is lucky if it is furnished with a small garden, or if he may rent a few roods of land at a great distance from his cottage. ‘Landlords and farmers,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘work here hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the labourers too independent.’⁶

The process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century from the Reformation, and the consequent colossal spoliation of church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, the feudal proprietor of a great part of the soil of England. The dissolution of the monasteries, etc., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and townsmen, who drove out the old-established hereditary sub-tenants in great numbers, and threw their holdings together. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was quietly confiscated.⁷ ‘Pauper ubique jacet’*cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the forty-third year of her reign it finally proved necessary to recognize pauperism officially by the introduction of the poor-rate. ‘The authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for’ (contrary to traditional usage) ‘it has no preamble whatever.’⁸ The poor-rate was declared perpetual by 16 Charles I, c. 4, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and severer form.⁹ These immediate results of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. The property of the church formed the religious bulwark of the old conditions of landed property. With its fall, these conditions could no longer maintain their existence.¹⁰

Even in the last few decades of the seventeenth century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, on the admission of Macaulay himself, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken squires and their servants, the country clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. By about 1750 the yeomanry had disappeared,¹¹ and so, by the last decade of the eighteenth century, had the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side here the purely economic driving forces behind the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the violent means employed.

After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried out, by legal means, an act of usurpation which was effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land, i.e. they got rid of all its obligations to the state, ‘indemnified’ the state by imposing taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the people, established for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement which had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer, mutatis mutandis, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov had on the Russian peasantry.*

The ‘glorious Revolution’ brought into power, along with William of Orange,¹² the landed and capitalist profit-grubbers. They inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands which had hitherto been managed more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at ridiculous prices, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure.¹³ All this happened without the slightest observance of legal etiquette. The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the stolen Church estates, in so far as these were not lost again during the republican revolution, form the basis of the present princely domains of the English oligarchy.¹⁴ The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation, with the intention, among other things, of converting the land into a merely commercial commodity, extending the area of large-scale agricultural production, and increasing the supply of free and rightless proletarians driven from their land. Apart from this, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of newly hatched high finance, and of the large manufacturers, at that time dependent on protective duties. The English bourgeoisie acted quite as wisely in its own interest as the Swedish burghers, who did the opposite: hand in hand with the bulwark of their economic strength, the peasantry, they helped the kings in their forcible resumption of crown lands from the oligarchy, in the years after 1604 and later on under Charles X and Charles XI.

Communal property – which is entirely distinct from the state property we have just been considering – was an old Teutonic institution which lived on under the cover of feudalism. We have seen how its forcible usurpation, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the fifteenth century and extends into the sixteenth. But at that time the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the eighteenth century shows itself in this, that the law itself now becomes the instrument by which the people’s land is stolen, although the big farmers made use of their little independent methods as well.¹⁵ The Parliamentary form of the robbery is that of ‘Bills for Inclosure of Commons’, in other words decrees by which the landowners grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he himself demands a ‘general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons’ (thereby admitting that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for their transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature to indemnify the expropriated poor.¹⁶

While the place of the independent yeoman was taken by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile rabble dependent on the arbitrary will of the landlords, the systematic theft of communal property was of great assistance, alongside the theft of the state domains, in swelling those large farms which were called in the eighteenth century capital farms,¹⁷ or merchant farms,¹⁸ and in ‘setting free’ the agricultural population as a proletariat for the needs of industry.

The eighteenth century, however, did not yet recognize as fully as the nineteenth the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people. Hence the very vigorous polemic, in the economic literature of that time, on the ‘enclosure of commons’. From the mass of material that lies before me, I give a few extracts chosen for the strong light they throw on the circumstances of the time. ‘In several parishes of Hertfordshire,’ writes one indignant person, ‘twenty-four farms, numbering on the average 50 to 150 acres, have been melted up into three farms.’¹⁹ ‘In Northamptonshire and Leicestershire the enclosure of common lands has taken place on a very large scale, and most of the new lordships, resulting from the enclosure, have been turned into pasturage, in consequence of which many lordships have not now 50 acres ploughed yearly, in which 1,500 were ploughed formerly. The ruins of former dwelling-houses, barns, stables, etc.’ are the sole traces of the former inhabitants. ‘An hundred houses and families have in some open field villages… dwindled to eight or ten… The landholders in most parishes that have been enclosed only fifteen or twenty years, are very few in comparison of the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It is no uncommon thing for four or five wealthy graziers to engross a large enclosed lordship which was before in the hands of twenty or thirty farmers, and as many smaller tenants and proprietors. All these are hereby thrown out of their livings with their families and many other families who were chiefly employed and supported by them.’²⁰ It was not only land that lay waste, but often also land that was still under cultivation, being cultivated either in common or held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was annexed by the neighbouring landowners under pretext of enclosure. ‘I have here in view enclosures of open fields and lands already improved. It is acknowledged by even the writers in defence of enclosures that these diminished villages increase the monopolies of farms, raise the prices of provisions, and produce depopulation… and even the enclosure of waste lands (as now carried on) bears hard on the poor, by depriving them of a part of their subsistence, and only goes towards increasing farms already too large.’²¹ ‘When,’ says Dr Price, ‘this land gets into the hands of a few great farmers, the consequence must be that the little farmers’ (previously described by him as ‘a multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and families by the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, etc., and who therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence’) ‘will be converted into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a necessity of going to market for all they want… There will, perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion to it… Towns and manufactures will increase, because more will be driven to them in quest of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of farms actually operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has been actually operating in this kingdom.’²² He sums up the effect of the enclosures in this way: ‘Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings; and, at the same time, their subsistence in that state has become more difficult.’²³ In fact, the usurpation of the common lands and the accompanying revolution in agriculture had such an acute effect on the agricultural labourers that, even according to Eden, their wages began to fall below the minimum between 1765 and 1780, and to be supplemented by official Poor Law relief. Their wages, he says, ‘were not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life’.

Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an opponent of Dr Price. ‘Nor is it a consequence that there must be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their labour in the open field… If, by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation’ (to which, of course, the people who have been ‘converted’ do not belong) ‘should wish for… the produce being greater when their joint labours are employed on one farm, there will be a surplus for manufactures, and by this means manufactures, one of the mines of the nation, will increase, in proportion to the quantity of corn produced.’²⁴

The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most shameless violation of the ‘sacred rights of property’ and the grossest acts of violence against persons, as soon as they are necessary in order to lay the foundations of the capitalist mode of production, is shown by Sir F. M. Eden, who is, moreover, Tory and ‘philanthropic’ in his political colouring. The whole series of thefts, outrages and popular misery that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, leads him merely to this ‘comfortable’ concluding reflection: ‘The due proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of the fourteenth and the greater part of the fifteenth century, there was 1 acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable land. About the middle of the sixteenth century the proportion was changed to 2 acres of pasture to 2, later on, to 2 acres of pasture to 1 of arable, until at last the just proportion of 3 acres of pasture to 1 of arable land was attained.’

By the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times – have the agricultural population received a farthing’s compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and presented to the landlords by the landlords, through the agency of Parliament?

The last great process of expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called ‘clearing of estates’, i.e. the sweeping of human beings off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in ‘clearing’. As we saw in the description of modern conditions given in a previous chapter, when there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the ‘clearing’ of cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers no longer find on the soil they cultivate even the necessary space for their own housing. But what ‘clearing of estates’ really and properly signifies, we learn only in the Highlands of Scotland, the promised land of modern romantic novels. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone as far as sweeping away several villages at once; but in the Highlands areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), and finally by the peculiar form of property under which the embezzled lands were held.

The Highland Celts were organized in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or ‘great man’, was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these ‘great men’, and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honoured trade as robbers; they merely changed its form. On their own authority, they transformed their nominal right to the land into a right of private property, and as this came up against resistance on the part of their clansmen, they resolved to drive them out openly and by force. ‘A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,’ says Professor Newman.²⁵ This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender,* can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart ²⁶ and James Anderson.²⁷ In the eighteenth century the Gaels were both driven from the land and forbidden to emigrate, with a view to driving them forcibly to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns.²⁸ As an example of the method used in the nineteenth century,²⁹ the ‘clearings’ made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, who had been well instructed in economics, resolved, when she succeeded to the headship of the clan, to undertake a radical economic cure, and to turn the whole county of Sutherland, the population of which had already been reduced to 15,000 by similar processes, into a sheep-walk. Between 1814 and 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this mass of evictions, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut she refused to leave. It was in this manner that this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land which had belonged to the clan from time immemorial. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants some 6,000 acres on the sea-shore – 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these waste lands at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. She divided the whole of the stolen land of the clan into twenty-nine huge sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. By 1825 the 15,000 Gaels had already been replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the original inhabitants, who had been flung onto the sea-shore, tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious, and lived, as an English writer says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.³⁰

But the splendid Gaels had now to suffer still more bitterly for their romantic mountain idolization of the ‘great men’ of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the sea-shore to the big London fishmongers. For the second time the Gaels were driven out.³¹

Finally, however, part of the sheep-walks were turned into deer preserves. Everyone knows that there are no true forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demure domestic cattle, as fat as London aldermen. Scotland is therefore the last refuge of the ‘noble passion’. ‘In the Highlands,’ reports Somers in 1848, ‘new forests are springing up like mushrooms. Here, on one side of Gaick, you have the new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other you have the new forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the Black Mount, an immense waste also recently erected. From east to west – from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to the crags of Oban – you have now a continuous line of forests; while in other parts of the Highlands there are the new forests of Loch Archaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, etc. Sheep were introduced into glens which had been the seats of communities of small farmers; and the latter were driven to seek subsistence on coarser and more sterile tracts of soil. Now deer are supplanting sheep; and these are once more dispossessing the small tenants, who will necessarily be driven down upon still coarser land and to more grinding penury. Deer-forests³² and the people cannot co-exist. One or other of the two must yield. Let the forests be increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a century, as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will perish from their native soil… This movement among the Highland proprietors is with some a matter of ambition… with some love of sport… while others, of a more practical cast, follow the trade in deer with an eye solely to profit. For it is a fact, that a mountain range laid out in forest is, in many cases, more profitable to the proprietor than when let as a sheep-walk… The huntsman who wants a deer-forest limits his offers by no other calculation than the extent of his purse… Sufferings have been inflicted in the Highlands scarcely less severe than those occasioned by the policy of the Norman kings. Deer have received extended ranges, while men have been hunted within a narrower and still narrower circle… One after one the liberties of the people have been cloven down… And the oppressions are daily on the increase… The clearance and dispersion of the people is pursued by the proprietors as a settled principle, as an agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are cleared from the wastes of America or Australia; and the operation goes on in a quiet, business-like way, etc.’³³

The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians.

Bloody legislation against the expropriated since the end of the 15th century. The forcing down of wages by Act of Parliament

The proletariat created by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this free and rightless* proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, 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. Hence at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth centuries, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it was entirely within their powers to go on working under the old conditions which in fact no longer existed.

In England this legislation began under Henry VII.

Henry VIII, 1530: Beggars who are old and incapable of working receive a beggar’s licence. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then they are to swear on oath to go back to their birthplace or to where they have lived the last three years and to ‘put themselves to labour’. What grim irony! By 27 Henry VIII [c. 25] the previous statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal.

Edward VI: A statute of the first year of his reign, 1547,* ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent for a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away three times, he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as he can any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a red hot iron with the letter V on the breast, and set to work, in chains, on the roads or at some other labour. If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of that place, of its inhabitants, or its corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as apprentices, the young men until they are 24, the girls until they are 20. If they run away, they are to become, until they reach these ages, the slaves of their masters, who can put them in irons, whip them, etc. if they like. Every master may put an iron ring round the neck, arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of him.¹ The last part of this statute provides that certain poor people may be employed by a place or by persons who are willing to give them food and drink and to find them work. Slaves of the parish of this kind were still to be found in England in the mid nineteenth century under the name of ‘roundsmen’.

Elizabeth, 1572:† Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless someone will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless someone will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons. Similar statutes: 18 Elizabeth, c. 13, and another of 1597.²

James I: Anyone wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond. Justices of the peace in Petty Sessions are authorized to have them publicly whipped and to imprison them for six months for the first offence, and two years for the second. While in prison they are to be whipped as much and as often as the justices of the peace think fit… Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are to be branded with an R on the left shoulder and set to hard labour, and if they are caught begging again, to be executed without mercy. These statutes were legally binding until the beginning of the eighteenth century; they were only repealed by 12 Anne, c. 23.

There were similar laws in France, where by the middle of the seventeenth century a kingdom of vagabonds (royaume des truands) had been established in Paris. Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1777 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys. The Statute of Charles V for the Netherlands (October 1537), the first Edict of the States and Towns of Holland (10 March 1614) and the Plakaat of the United Provinces (26 June 1649) are further examples of the same kind.

Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour.

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of production’, i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to ‘regulate’ wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation.

The class of wage-labourers, which arose in the latter half of the fourteenth century, formed then and in the following century only a very small part of the population, well protected in its position by the independent peasant proprietors in the countryside and by the organization of guilds in the towns. Masters and artisans were not separated by any great social distance either on the land or in the towns. The subordination of labour to capital was only formal, i.e. the mode of production itself had as yet no specifically capitalist character. The variable element in capital preponderated greatly over the constant element. The demand for wage-labour therefore grew rapidly with every accumulation of capital, while the supply only followed slowly behind. A large part of the national product which was later transformed into a fund for the accumulation of capital still entered at that time into the consumption-fund of the workers.

Legislation on wage-labour, which aimed from the first at the exploitation of the worker and, as it progressed, remained equally hostile to him,³ begins in England with the Statute of Labourers issued by Edward III in 1349. The Ordinance of 1350 in France, issued in the name of King John, corresponds to it. The English and French laws run parallel and are identical in content. Where these labour-statutes aim at a compulsory extension of the working day, I shall not return to them, as we discussed this point earlier (in Chapter 10, Section 5).

The Statute of Labourers was passed at the urgent insistence of the House of Commons. A Tory says naïvely: ‘Formerly the poor demanded such high wages as to threaten industry and wealth. Next, their wages are so low as to threaten industry and wealth equally and perhaps more, but in another way.’⁴ A tariff of wages was fixed by law for town and country, for piece-work and day-work. The agricultural labourers were to hire themselves out by the year, the urban workers were to do so ‘on the open market’. It was forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, to pay higher wages than those fixed by the statute, but the taking of higher wages was more severely punished than the giving of them (similarly, in Sections 18 and 19 of Elizabeth’s Statute of Apprentices, ten days’ imprisonment is decreed for the person who pays the higher wages, but twenty-one days for the person who receives those wages). A statute of 1360 increased the penalties and authorized the masters to extort labour at the legal rate of wages by using corporal punishment. All combinations, contracts, oaths, etc. by which masons and carpenters reciprocally bound themselves were declared null and void. Workers’ combinations are treated as heinous crimes from the fourteenth century until 1825, the year of the repeal of the laws against combinations. The spirit of the Statute of Labourers of 1349 and its offshoots shines out clearly in the fact that while the state certainly dictates a maximum of wages, it on no account fixes a minimum.

In the sixteenth century, as we know, the condition of the workers became much worse. The money wage rose, but not in proportion to the depreciation of money and the corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Real wages therefore fell. Nevertheless, the laws for keeping them down remained in force, together with the ear-clipping and branding of those ‘whom no one was willing to take into service’. By 5 Elizabeth, c. 3 (the Statute of Apprentices), the justices of the peace were given the power to fix certain wages and to modify them according to the time of the year and the current prices of commodities. James I extended these labour regulations to weavers, spinners and indeed to all other possible categories of worker.⁵ George II extended the laws against combinations of workers to all manufactures.*

In the period of manufacture properly so called, the capitalist mode of production had become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of wages as impracticable as it was unnecessary; but the ruling classes were unwilling to be without the weapons of the old arsenal in case some emergency should arise. Hence, even in the eighteenth century, 7 George I, c. 13, forbade a daily wage higher than 2s. 71/2d. for journeymen tailors in and around London, except in cases of general mourning; 13 George III, c. 68, handed over to the justices of the peace the task of regulating the wages of silk-weavers; in 1796 it required two judgements of the higher courts to decide whether the orders made by justices of the peace as to wages also held good for non-agricultural workers; and in 1799 Parliament confirmed that the wages of mining workers in Scotland should continue to be regulated by a statute of Elizabeth and two Scottish Acts of 1661 and 1671. How completely the situation had been transformed in the meantime is proved by a hitherto unheard-of occurrence in the House of Commons. There, where for more than 400 years laws had been made for the maximum beyond which wages absolutely must not rise, Whitbread in 1796 proposed a legal minimum wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt opposed this, but conceded that the ‘condition of the poor was cruel’. Finally, in 1813, the laws for the regulation of wages were repealed. They became an absurd anomaly as soon as the capitalist began to regulate his factory by his own private legislation, and was able to make up the wage of the agricultural labourer to the indispensable minimum by means of the poor-rate. The provisions of the statutes of labourers as to contracts between master and workman, regarding giving notice and the like, which allow only a civil action against the master who breaks his contract, but permit, on the contrary, a criminal action against the worker who breaks his contract, are still in full force at this moment.*

The barbarous laws against combinations of workers collapsed in 1825 in the face of the threatening attitude of the proletariat. Despite this, they disappeared only in part. Certain pretty survivals of the old statutes did not vanish until 1859. Finally, the Act of 29 June 1871 purported to remove the last traces of this class legislation by giving legal recognition to trade unions.† But another Act, of the same date (‘An act to amend the criminal law relating to violence, threats and molestation’),‡ in fact reestablished the previous situation in a new form. This Parliamentary conjuring-trick withdrew the means the workers could use in a strike or lock-out from the common law and placed them under exceptional penal legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the manufacturers themselves in their capacity of justices of the peace. Two years earlier, the same House of Commons, and the same Mr Gladstone, in the customary honourable fashion, had brought in a bill for the removal of all exceptional penal legislation against the working class. But it was never allowed to go beyond the second reading, and the matter was drawn out in this way until at length the ‘great Liberal party’, by an alliance with the Tories, found the courage to turn decisively against the very proletariat that had carried it into power. Not content with this betrayal, the ‘great Liberal party’ allowed the English judges, ever ready to wag their tails for the ruling classes, to exhume the earlier laws against ‘conspiracy’ and apply them to combinations of workers. 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, after it had itself, with shameless egoism, held the position of a permanent trade union of the capitalists against the workers throughout five centuries.

During the very first storms of the revolution, the French bourgeoisie dared to take away from the workers the right of association they had just acquired. By a decree of 14 June 1791, they declared that every combination by the workers was ‘an assault on liberty and the declaration of the rights of man’, punishable by a fine of 500 livres, together with deprivation of the rights of an active citizen for one year.⁶ This law, which used state compulsion to confine the struggle between capital and labour within limits convenient for capital, has outlived revolutions and changes of dynasties. Even the Terror left it untouched. It was only struck out of the Penal Code quite recently. Nothing is more characteristic than the pretext for this bourgeois coup d’état. ‘Granting,’ says Le Chapelier, the rapporteur of the Committee on this law, ‘that wages ought to be a little higher than they are… that they ought to be high enough for him that receives them to be free from that state of absolute dependence which results from the lack of the necessaries of life, and which is almost a state of slavery,’ granting this, the workers must nevertheless not be permitted to inform themselves about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their ‘absolute dependence’, ‘which is almost a state of slavery’, because by doing this they infringe ‘the liberty of their former masters, who are the present entrepreneurs’, and because a combination against the despotism of the former masters of the corporations is – guess what! – a restoration of the corporations abolished by the French constitution!⁷

The genesis of the capitalist farmer

Now that we have considered the forcible creation of a class of free and rightless proletarians, the bloody discipline that turned them into wage-labourers, the disgraceful proceedings of the state which employed police methods to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labour, the question remains: where did the capitalists originally spring from? For the only class created directly by the expropriation of the agricultural population is that of the great landed proprietors. As far as the genesis of the farmers is concerned, however, we can so to speak put our finger on it, because it is a slow process evolving through many centuries. The serfs, as well as the free small-scale proprietors, held land under very different tenures, and were therefore emancipated under very different economic conditions.

In England, the first form of the farmer is the bailiff, himself a serf. His position is similar to that of the villicus in ancient Rome, only in a more limited sphere of action. During the second half of the fourteenth century he is replaced by a farmer, whom the landlord provides with seed, cattle and farm implements. The farmer’s condition is not very different from that of the peasant, but he exploits more wage-labour. Soon he becomes a métayer, a share-cropper. He advances one part of the agricultural stock, the landlord the other. The two divide the total product in proportions determined by contract. This form disappears quickly in England, and gives place to the form of the farmer properly so called, who valorizes his own capital by employing wage-labourers, and pays a part of the surplus product, in money or in kind, to the landlord as ground rent.

During the fifteenth century the independent peasant, and the farm-labourer working for himself as well as for wages, enriched themselves by their own labour; and as long as this was the case, both the farmer’s circumstances and his field of production remained mediocre. But the agricultural revolution which began in the last third of the fifteenth century, and continued during the bulk of the sixteenth (excepting, however, its last few decades), enriched him just as quickly as it impoverished the mass of the agricultural folk.¹ The usurpation of the common lands allowed the farmer to augment greatly his stock of cattle, almost without cost, while the cattle themselves yielded a richer supply of manure for the cultivation of the soil.

A further factor, of decisive importance, was added in the sixteenth century. At that time the contracts for farms ran for a long time, often for ninety-nine years. The progressive fall in the value of the precious metals, and therefore of money, brought golden fruit to the farmers. Apart from all the other circumstances discussed above, it lowered wages. A portion of the latter was now added to the profits of the farm. The continuous rise in the prices of corn, wool, meat, in short of all agricultural products, swelled the money capital of the farmer without any action on his part, while the ground rent he had to pay diminished, since it had been contracted for on the basis of the old money values.² Thus he grew rich at the expense both of his labourers and his landlords. No wonder, therefore, that England, at the end of the sixteenth century, had a class of capitalist farmers who were rich men in relation to the circumstances of the time.³

Impact of the agricultural revolution on industry. The creation of a home market for industrial capital

The intermittent but constantly renewed expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population supplied the urban industries, as we have seen, with a mass of proletarians standing entirely outside the corporate guilds and unfettered by them; a fortunate circumstance which makes old A. Anderson* (not to be confused with James Anderson) express a belief in the direct intervention of Providence, in his History of Commerce. We must still pause a moment on this element of primitive accumulation. The thinning-out of the independent self-supporting peasants corresponded directly with the concentration of the industrial proletariat, in the way that Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire explained the condensation of cosmic matter at one place by its rarefaction at another.¹ But this was not the only consequence. In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth as much produce as before, or even more, because the revolution in property relations on the land was accompanied by improved methods of cultivation, greater co-operation, a higher concentration of the means of production and so on, and because the agricultural wage-labourers were made to work at a higher level of intensity,² and the field of production on which they worked for themselves shrank more and more. With the ‘setting free’ of a part of the agricultural population, therefore, their former means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into material elements of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast adrift, had to obtain the value of the means of subsistence from his new lord, the industrial capitalist, in the form of wages. And the same thing happened to those raw materials of industry which depended on indigenous agriculture. They were transformed into an element of constant capital.

Suppose, for example, that one part of the Westphalian peasantry, who, at the time of Frederick II, all span flax, are forcibly expropriated and driven from the soil; and suppose that the other part, who remain behind, are turned into the day-labourers of large-scale farmers. At the same time, large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving arise, and in these the men who have been ‘set free’ now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as it did before. Not a fibre of it is changed, but a new social soul has entered into its body. It now forms a part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer. Formerly it was divided among a mass of small producers, who cultivated it themselves and span it with their families in small portions. Now it is concentrated in the hands of one capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for him. The extra labour expended in flax-spinning was realized formerly in extra income to numerous peasant families, or perhaps, in the time of Frederick II, in taxes pour le roi de Prusse.* Now it is realized in profit for a few capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over the face of the countryside, are now crowded together in a few great labour-barracks, together with the workers and the raw material. And spindles, looms and raw material are now transformed from means for the independent existence of the spinners and weavers into means for commanding³ them and extracting unpaid labour from them. You cannot tell from looking at the large factories and the large farms that they have originated from the combination of many small centres of production, and have been built up by the expropriation of many small independent producers. Nevertheless, unprejudiced observers did not allow themselves to be deceived. In the time of Mirabeau, the ‘lion of the revolution’,* the great factories were still called manufactures réunies, or workshops thrown into one, as we speak of fields thrown into one. Says Mirabeau: ‘We only pay attention to the large-scale factories, in which hundreds of men work under a director, and which are commonly called manufactures réunies. Those where a very large number of workers work in isolation and on their own account are hardly considered worthy of a glance. They are put entirely into the background. This is a very great mistake, as the latter alone form a really important component of the national wealth… The combined workshop (fabrique réunie) will prodigiously enrich one or two entrepreneurs, but the workers will only be journeymen, paid more or less [according to circumstances], and will not have any share in the success of the undertaking. In the isolated workshop (fabrique séparée), on the contrary, no one will become rich, but many workers will be comfortable. The number of hard-working and economical workers will grow, because they will see in good conduct, and in activity, a means of substantially improving their situation, and not of obtaining a small increase of wages that can never be of any importance for the future, and whose sole result is to place men in the position to live a little better, but only from day to day… The isolated, individual workshops, for the most part combined with the cultivation of smallholdings, are the only free ones.’⁴ The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital the workers, their means of subsistence and the materials of their labour; it also created the home market.

In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage-labourers, and their means of subsistence and of labour into material [sachliche] elements of capital, created, at the same time, a home market for capital. Formerly, the peasant family produced means of subsistence and raw materials, which they themselves for the most part consumed. These raw materials and means of subsistence have now become commodities; the large-scale farmer sells them, he finds his market in the manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen stuffs – things whose raw materials had been within the reach of every peasant family, had been spun and woven by the family for its own use – are now transformed into articles of manufacture, the markets for which are found precisely in the country districts. Previously a mass of small producers, working on their own account, had found their natural counterpart in a large number of scattered customers; but now these customers are concentrated into one great market provided for by industrial capital.⁵ Thus the destruction of the subsidiary trades of the countryside, the process whereby manufacture is divorced from agriculture, goes hand in hand with the expropriation of the previously self-supporting peasants and their separation from their own means of production. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the home market of a country that extension and stability which the capitalist mode of production requires.

Still, the manufacturing period, properly so called, does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely. It will be remembered that manufacture conquers the domain of national production only very partially, and always rests on the handicrafts of the towns and the domestic subsidiary industries of the rural districts, which stand in the background as its basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches at certain points, it resurrects them again elsewhere, because it needs them to some extent for the preparation of raw material. It produces, therefore, a new class of small villagers who cultivate the soil as a subsidiary occupation, but find their chief occupation in industrial labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or through the medium of merchants. This is one cause, though not the chief one, of a phenomenon which at first puzzles the student of English history. From the last third of the fifteenth century we find continual complaints, only interrupted at certain intervals, about the encroachment of capitalist farming in the country districts and the progressive annihilation of the peasantry. On the other hand, we always find that this peasantry turns up again, although in diminished number, and in a progressively worse situation.⁶ The chief cause is this: England is at certain epochs mainly a corn-growing country, at others mainly a cattle-breeding country. These periods alternate, and the alternation is accompanied by fluctuations in the extent of peasant cultivation. A consistent foundation for capitalist agriculture could only be provided by large-scale industry, in the form of machinery; it is large-scale industry which radically expropriates the vast majority of the agricultural population and completes the divorce between agriculture and rural domestic industry, tearing up the latter’s roots, which are spinning and weaving.⁷ It therefore also conquers the entire home market for industrial capital, for the first time.⁸

The genesis of the industrial capitalist

The genesis of the industrial¹ capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer. Doubtless many small guild-masters, and a still greater number of independent small artisans, or even wage-labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and, by gradually extending their exploitation of wage-labour and the corresponding accumulation, into ‘capitalists’ without qualification. In the period when capitalist production was in its infancy things often happened as they had done in the period of infancy of the medieval town, where the question as to which of the escaped serfs should be master and which servant was in great part decided by the earlier or later date of their flight. The snail’s pace of advance under this method by no means corresponded with the commercial requirements of the new world market, which had been created by the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. But the Middle Ages had handed down two distinct forms of capital, which ripened in the most varied economic formations of society, and which, before the era of the capitalist mode of production, nevertheless functioned as capital – usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital.

‘At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the possession of the capitalist… he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed the largest, and a continually augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour for himself. The capitalist may now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no law has conferred on him the right to this property… this change has been effected by the taking of interest on capital… and it is not a little curious that all the law-givers of Europe endeavoured to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes against usury… The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a complete change in the right of property, and by what law, or series of laws, was it effected?’² The author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws.

The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital by the feudal organization of the countryside and the guild organization of the towns.³ These fetters vanished with the dissolution of the feudal bands of retainers, and the expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population. The new manufactures were established at sea-ports, or at points in the countryside which were beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence, in England, the bitter struggle of the corporate towns against these new seed-beds of industry.

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of the Opium Wars against China, etc.

The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order. These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

W. Howitt, a man who specializes in being a Christian,* says of the Christian colonial system, ‘The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.’⁴ The history of Dutch colonial administration – and Holland was the model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century – ‘is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness’.⁵ Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men in Celebes, in order to get slaves for Java. Man-stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter and the seller were the chief agents in this trade, the native princes were the chief sellers. The young people thus stolen were hidden in secret dungeons on Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says: ‘This one town of Macassar, for example, is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families.’ In order to get possession of Malacca, the Dutch bribed the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641. They went straight to his house and assassinated him, so as to be able to ‘abstain’ from paying the £21,875 which was the amount of his bribe. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, numbered over 80,000 inhabitants in 1750 and only 18,000 in 1811. That is peaceful commerce!

The English East India Company, as is well known, received, apart from political control of India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and the transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade round India and between the islands,* as well as the internal trade of India, was the monopoly of the higher officials of the Company. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The officials themselves fixed the price and plundered the unfortunate Hindus at will. The Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation proceeded without the advance of even a shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a part of India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the contract declared that he still extracted a tremendous profit from it. According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the Company and its officials obtained £6,000,000 between 1757 and 1766 from the Indians in the form of gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English created a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.⁶

The treatment of the indigenous population was, of course, at its most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export trade, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation was not belied. In 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of £100 was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, £100 in new currency, for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for the scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation, and for English money, they were tomahawked by the redskins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as ‘means that God and Nature had given into its hand’.

The colonial system ripened trade and navigation as in a hothouse. The ‘companies called Monopolia’ (Luther)* were powerful levers for the concentration of capital. The colonies provided a market for the budding manufactures, and a vast increase in accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country’s monopoly of the market. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there. Holland, which first brought the colonial system to its full development, already stood at the zenith of its commercial greatness in 1648. It was ‘in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce between the south-east and the north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, its shipping and its manufactures surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic was probably greater than that of all the rest of Europe put together’.† Gülich forgets to add that by 1648 the people of Holland were more over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.

Today, industrial supremacy brings with it commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture it is the reverse: commercial supremacy produces industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant role played by the colonial system at that time. It was the ‘strange God’ who perched himself side by side with the old divinities of Europe on the altar, and one fine day threw them all overboard with a shove and a kick. It proclaimed the making of profit as the ultimate and the sole purpose of mankind.

The system of public credit, i.e. of national debts, the origins of which are to be found in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages, took possession of Europe as a whole during the period of manufacture. The colonial system, with its maritime trade and its commercial wars, served as a forcing-house for the credit system. Thus it first took root in Holland. The national debt, i.e. the alienation [Veräusserung]* of the state – whether that state is despotic, constitutional or republican – marked the capitalist era with its stamp. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is – the national debt.⁷

Hence, quite consistently with this, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, lack of faith in the national debt takes the place of the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness.

The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows unproductive money with the power of creation and thus turns it into capital, without forcing it to expose itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state’s creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But furthermore, and quite apart from the class of idle rentlers thus created, the improvised wealth of the financiers who play the role of middlemen between the government and the nation, and the tax-farmers, merchants and private manufacturers, for whom a good part of every national loan performs the service of a capital fallen from heaven, apart from all these people, the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments and, thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to those governments. Hence the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stocks of these banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began by lending its money to the government at 8 per cent; at the same time it was empowered by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it a second time to the public in the form of bank-notes. It was allowed to use these notes for discounting bills, making advances on commodities and buying the precious metals. It was not long before this credit-money, created by the bank itself, became the coin in which the latter made its loans to the state, and paid, on behalf of the state, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back more with the other; it remained, even while receiving money, the eternal creditor of the nation down to the last farthing advanced. Gradually it became the inevitable receptacle of the metallic hoard of the country, and the centre of gravity of all commercial credit. The writings of the time (Bolingbroke’s, for instance) show what effect was produced on their contemporaries by the sudden emergence of this brood of bankocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, stock-jobbers, etc.⁸

Along with the national debt there arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian system of robbery formed one of the secret foundations of Holland’s wealth in capital, for Venice in her years of decadence lent large sums of money to Holland. There is a similar relationship between Holland and England. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Holland’s manufactures had been far outstripped. It had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701 to 1776, was the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any birth-certificate, was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children.

As the national debt is backed by the revenues of the state, which must cover the annual interest payments etc., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayers feeling it immediately, but they still make increased taxes necessary as a consequence. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulation of debts contracted one after another compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for new extraordinary expenses. The modern fiscal system, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of subsistence (and therefore by increases in their price), thus contains within itself the germ of automatic progression. Over-taxation is not an accidental occurrence, but rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot, De Witt, extolled it in his Maxims* as the best system for making the wage-labourer submissive, frugal, industrious… and overburdened with work. Here, however, we are less concerned with the destructive influence it exercises on the situation of the wage-labourer than with the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of peasants and artisans, in short, of all the constituents of the lower middle class. There are no two opinions about this, even among the bourgeois economists. Its effectiveness as an expropriating agent is heightened still further by the system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts.

The great part that the public debt and the fiscal system corresponding to it have played in the capitalization of wealth and the expropriation of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett,† Doubleday‡ and others, to seek here, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the people in modern times.

The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, or expropriating independent workers, of capitalizing the national means of production and subsistence, and of forcibly cutting short the transition from a mode of production that was out of date to the modern mode of production. The European states tore each other to pieces to gain the patent of this invention, and, once they had entered into the service of the profit-mongers, they did not restrict themselves to plundering their own people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through export premiums, in the pursuit of this purpose. They also forcibly uprooted all industries in the neighbouring dependent countries, as for example England did with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the Continent of Europe the process was much simplified, following the example of Colbert. The original capital for industry here came in part directly out of the state treasury. ‘Why,’ cries Mirabeau, ‘why go so far to seek the cause of the manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? One hundred and eighty millions of debts contracted by the sovereigns!’⁹

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Herod-like slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang. Though Sir F. M. Eden is indifferent to the horrors of the expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil, from the last third of the fifteenth century up to his own time; though he shows great self-satisfaction in congratulating his country on this process, which was ‘essential’ in order to establish capitalist agriculture and ‘the due proportion between arable and pasture land’; despite this, he does not show the same economic insight into the necessity of child-stealing and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing production into factory production and the establishment of the true relation between capital and labour-power. He says: ‘It may, perhaps be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead to profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national felicity?’¹⁰

‘In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly in Lancashire,’ says Fielden, ‘the newly-invented machinery was used in large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel. Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from towns; and Lancashire, in particular, being, till then, comparatively thinly populated and barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small and nimble fingers of little children being by very far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices (!) from the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these little, hapless creatures were sent down into the north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13 or 14 years old. The custom was for the master’ (i.e. the child-stealer) ‘to clothe his apprentices and to feed and lodge them in an “apprentice house” near the factory; overseers were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence… In many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong (Lancashire), cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour… were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty;… they were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their work and… even in some instances… were driven to commit suicide… The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder. The profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any possibility of limit; they began the practice of what is termed “night-working”, that is, having tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the day, they had another set ready to go on working throughout the night; the day-set getting into the beds that the night-set had just quitted, and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the beds that the day-set quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in Lancashire, that the beds never get cold.’¹¹

With the development of capitalist production during the period of manufacture, the public opinion of Europe lost its last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to the accumulation of capital. Read, for example, the naïve commercial annals of the worthy A. Anderson.* Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statesmanship that, at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards, by the Asiento Treaty, the privilege of being allowed to ply the slave trade, not only between Africa and the English West Indies, which it had done until then, but also between Africa and Spanish America. England thereby acquired the right to supply Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 Negroes a year. At the same time this threw an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. And even to the present day, the Liverpool ‘quality’ have remained the Pindars of the slave trade,* which – as noted in the work by Dr Aikin we have just quoted – ‘has coincided with that spirit of bold adventure which has characterized the trade of Liverpool and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has occasioned vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand for the manufactures of the country’.† In 1730 Liverpool employed 15 ships in the slave trade; in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792, 132.

While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.¹²

Tantae molis erat‡ to unleash the ‘eternal natural laws’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into the free ‘labouring poor’, that artificial product of modern history.¹³ If money, according to Augier,¹⁴ ‘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.¹⁵

The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation

What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e. its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not the direct transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according to whether these private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character. The innumerable different shades of private property which appear at first sight are only reflections of the intermediate situations which lie between the two extremes.

The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry, and small-scale industry is a necessary condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the worker himself. Of course, this mode of production also exists under slavery, serfdom and other situations of dependence. But it flourishes, unleashes the whole of its energy, attains its adequate classical form, only where the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labour, and sets them in motion himself: where the peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tool with which he is an accomplished performer.

This mode of production presupposes the fragmentation of holdings, and the dispersal of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so it also excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the social control and regulation of the forces of nature, and the free development of the productive forces of society. It is compatible only with a system of production and a society moving within narrow limits which are of natural origin. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, ‘to decree universal mediocrity’.* At a certain stage of development, it brings into the world the material means of its own destruction. From that moment, new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society, forces and passions which feel themselves to be fettered by that society. It has to be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production, the transformation, therefore, of the dwarf-like property of the many into the giant property of the few, and the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the instruments of labour, this terrible and arduously accomplished expropriation of the mass of the people forms the pre-history of capital. It comprises a whole series of forcible methods, and we have only passed in review those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the direct producers was accomplished by means of the most merciless barbarism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions. Private property which is personally earned, i.e. which is based, as it were, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour.¹

As soon as this metamorphosis has sufficiently decomposed the old society throughout its depth and breadth, as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form. What is now to be expropriated is not the self-employed worker, but the capitalist who exploits a large number of workers.

This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals. One capitalist always strikes down many others. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour 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.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.

The transformation of scattered private property resting on the personal labour of the individuals themselves into capitalist private property is naturally an incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult process than the transformation of capitalist private property, which in fact already rests on the carrying on of production by society, into social property. In the former case, it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; but in this case, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.²

The modern theory of colonization

Political economy confuses, on principle, two different kinds of private property, one of which rests on the labour of the producer himself, and the other on the exploitation of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter is not only the direct antithesis of the former, but grows on the former’s tomb and nowhere else.

In Western Europe, the homeland of political economy, the process of primitive accumulation has more or less been accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself the whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed, it has at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to the antiquated mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a pre-capitalist world, with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology.

It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime constantly comes up against the obstacle presented by the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist. The contradiction between these two diametrically opposed economic systems has its practical manifestation here in the struggle between them. Where the capitalist has behind him the power of the mother country, he tries to use force to clear out of the way the modes of production and appropriation which rest on the personal labour of the independent producer. The same interest which, in the mother country, compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, to declare that the capitalist mode of production is theoretically its own opposite, this same interest, in the colonies, drives him ‘to make a clean breast of it’, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism between the two modes of production. To this end he demonstrates that the development of the social productivity of labour, co-operation, division of labour, application of machinery on a large scale, and so on, are impossible without the expropriation of the workers and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic armour crumbles off, piece by piece, like rotten touchwood.

It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not something new about the colonies,² but, in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country. Just as the system of protection originally³ had the objective of manufacturing capitalists artificially in the mother country, so Wakefield’s theory of colonization, which England tried for a time to enforce by Act of Parliament, aims at manufacturing wage-labourers in the colonies. This is what he calls ‘systematic colonization’.

First of all, Wakefield discovered that, in the colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing: the wage-labourer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.⁴ A Mr Peel, he complains, took with him from England to the Swan River district of Western Australia means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. This Mr Peel even had the foresight to bring besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women and children. Once he arrived at his destination, ‘Mr Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’⁵ Unhappy Mr Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River!

For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, let us make two preliminary remarks: We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They only become capital under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation of, and domination over, the worker. But this, their capitalist soul, is so intimately wedded, in the mind of the political economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even where they are its exact opposite. Thus it is with Wakefield. Further: he describes the splitting-up of the means of production into the individual property of many mutually independent and self-employed workers as equal division of capital. The political economist is like the feudal jurist, who used to attach the labels supplied by feudal law even to relationships which were purely monetary.

‘If,’ says Wakefield, ‘all the members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital… no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.’⁶ So long, therefore, as the worker can accumulate for himself – and this he can do so long as he remains in possession of his means of production – capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production are impossible. The class of wage-labourers essential to these is lacking. How then, in old Europe, was the expropriation of the worker from his conditions of labour brought about? In other words, how did capital and wage-labour come into existence? By a social contract of a quite original kind. ‘Mankind have adopted a… simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital,’ which, of course, had dangled in front of them since the time of Adam as the ultimate and only goal of their existence, ‘they have divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labour… This division was the result of concert and combination.’⁷ In short: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the ‘accumulation of capital’. Now one would think that this instinct of self-denying fanaticism would especially run riot in the colonies, the only places where the men and the conditions exist to turn a social contract from a dream into a reality. So why should ‘systematic colonization’ be called in to replace its opposite, spontaneous and unregulated colonization? Here is one reason: ‘In the Northern States of the American Union, it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired labourers… In England… the labouring class compose the bulk of the people.’⁸ Indeed, the drive to self-expropriation for the glory of capital exists so little in the case of working humanity, that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of colonial wealth. His systematic colonization is a mere makeshift, resulting from the fact that he has free men, not slaves, to deal with. ‘The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain labourers from Spain. But, without labourers’, (i.e. without slavery) ‘their capital must have perished, or, at least, must soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands. This has actually occurred in the last colony founded by Englishmen – the Swan River Settlement – where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands.’⁹

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this, that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it can therefore turn part of it into his private property and his individual means of production, without preventing later settlers from performing the same operation.¹⁰ This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their cancerous affliction – their resistance to the establishment of capital. ‘Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.’¹¹

In the colonies the separation of the worker from the conditions of labour and from the soil, in which they are rooted, does not yet exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale. Hence the separation of agriculture from industry does not exist either, nor have any of the domestic industries of the countryside been destroyed. Whence then is to come the home market for capital? ‘No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers, they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.’¹² Where, among such curious characters, is the ‘field of abstinence’ for the capitalists?

The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this, that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-labourer as a wage-labourer, but also always produces a relative surplus population of wage-labourers in proportion to the accumulation of capital. Thus the law of supply and demand as applied to labour is kept on the right lines, the oscillation of wages is confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured. At home, in the mother country, the smug deceitfulness of the political economist can turn this relation of absolute dependence into a free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital on one side, the owner of the commodity labour on the other. But in the colonies this beautiful illusion is torn aside. There, the absolute numbers of the population increase much more quickly than in the mother country, because many workers enter the colonial world as ready-made adults, and still the labour-market is always understocked. The law of the supply and demand of labour collapses completely. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and ‘abstinence’; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-labourer as a wage-labourer comes up against the most mischievous obstacles, which are in part insuperable. And what becomes of the production of redundant wage-labourers, redundant, that is, in proportion to the accumulation of capital? Today’s wage-labourer is tomorrow’s independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour-market – but not into the workhouse. This constant transformation of wage-labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentlemen, reacts in its turn very adversely on the conditions of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-labourer remain indecently low. The wage-labourer also loses, along with the relation of dependence, the feeling of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences depicted so honestly, so eloquently and so movingly by our friend E. G. Wakefield.

The supply of wage-labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. ‘The supply of labour is always, not only small, but uncertain.’¹³ ‘Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist… Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.’¹⁴ The workers most emphatically refuse to let the capitalist abstain from paying for the greater part of their labour. It is of no assistance to him if he cunningly imports his own wage-labourers from Europe, with his own capital. They soon ‘cease… to be labourers for hire; they… become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.’¹⁵ Horror of horrors! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wake-field laments the absence both of relations of dependence and feelings of dependence on the part of the wage-labourers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple Merivale, there is in the colonies an urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient workers, for a class of people to whom the capitalist may dictate his terms, instead of having his terms dictated by them… In the old civilized countries the worker, although free, is by a law of nature dependent on the capitalist; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.¹⁶

What now is the consequence of this regrettable state of affairs in the colonies, according to Wakefield? A ‘barbarizing tendency of dispersion’ of producers and of the wealth of the nation.¹⁷ The fragmentation of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundations of combined labour. Every lengthy undertaking, extending over several years and demanding the outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital does not hesitate for a moment, for the working class forms its living appendage, always present in excess, always at its disposal. But not in the colonies! Wakefield recounts the following exceedingly painful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where moreover the wave of immigration often sticks, depositing a sediment of ‘redundant’ workers. ‘Our capital,’ says one of the characters in the melodrama, ‘was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labour which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retaining the labour of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.’¹⁸

After Wakefield has contrasted English capitalist agriculture and its ‘combined’ labour with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly shows us the obverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising and comparatively cultured, whereas ‘the English agricultural labourer is a miserable wretch, a pauper… In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labour employed in agriculture, much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer?… Undoubtedly, farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.’¹⁹ But never mind, the wealth of the nation is once again, by its very nature, identical with the misery of the people.

How then can the anti-capitalist cancer of the colonies be healed? If men were willing to turn the whole of the land from public into private property at one blow, this would certainly destroy the root of the evil, but it would also destroy – the colony. The trick is to kill two birds with one stone. Let the government set an artificial price on the virgin soil, a price independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land²⁰ and turn himself into an independent farmer. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-labourers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour by a violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, is to be applied by the government, in proportion to its growth, to the importation of paupers from Europe into the colonies, so as to keep the wage-labour market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, ‘everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. This is the great secret of ‘systematic colonization’. Under this plan, Wakefield exclaims triumphantly, ‘the supply of labour must be constant and regular, because, first, as no labourer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant labourers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more labourers; secondly, because every labourer who left off working for wages and became a landowner, would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labour to the colony.’²¹ The land-price laid down by the state must of course be ‘sufficient’, i.e. it must be high enough ‘to prevent the labourers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place’.²² This ‘sufficient price for the land’ is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the worker must pay to the capitalist in return for permission to retire from the wage-labour market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist the ‘capital’ which enables him to exploit more workers; then, at his own expense, he must put a ‘substitute’ in the labour-market, who is dispatched across the sea by the government, again at the worker’s expense, for his old master, the capitalist.

It is extremely characteristic that the English government for years practised this method of ‘primitive accumulation’ prescribed by Mr Wakefield expressly for use in the colonies. The resulting fiasco was of course as ignominious as the fate of Peel’s Bank Act.* The stream of emigration was simply diverted from the English colonies to the United States. Meanwhile, the advance of capitalist production in Europe, accompanied by increasing government pressure, has rendered Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand, the enormous and continuous flood of humanity, driven year in, year out, onto the shores of America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the East of the United States, since the wave of immigration from Europe throws men onto the labour-market there more rapidly than the wave of immigration to the West can wash them away. On the other hand, the American Civil War has brought in its train a colossal national debt and, with it, a heavy tax-burden, the creation of a finance aristocracy of the vilest type, and the granting of immense tracts of public land to speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, etc. In short, it has brought a very rapid centralization of capital. The great republic has therefore ceased to be the promised land for emigrating workers. Capitalist production advances there with gigantic strides, even though the lowering of wages and dependence of the wage-labourer has by no means yet proceeded so far as to reach the normal European level. The shameless squandering of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the English government, so loudly denounced even by Wakefield, has, especially in Australia,²³ in conjunction with the stream of men attracted by the gold-diggings, and the competition from imported English commodities which affects everyone down to the smallest artisan, produced an ample ‘relative surplus population of workers’, so that almost every mail-boat brings ill tidings of a ‘glut of the Australian labour-market’, and prostitution flourishes there in some places as exuberantly as in the Haymarket in London.

However, we are not concerned here with the condition of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: 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.