Capitalism comes into existence and develops itself historically in a noncapitalist social milieu. In the Western European countries, it is first surrounded by the feudal milieu, from whose womb it emerges (the corvée economy in the countryside, and the artisanal guilds in the towns) and then, after the stripping away of feudalism, by a predominantly peasant-artisanal milieu engaging in simple commodity production both in agriculture and in the handicraft enterprises. Further afield, European capitalism is surrounded by vast territories of non-European cultures that comprise the whole range of stages of development, from the most primitive communist hordes of nomadic hunter-gatherers right up to peasant and artisanal commodity production. This is the milieu within which the process of capital accumulation drives itself forward.
Within this process, there are three phases to be distinguished: the struggle between capital and the natural economy; the struggle between capital and the commodity economy; and capital’s competitive struggles on the world stage over the remaining conditions of accumulation.
Capitalism requires noncapitalist forms of production for its existence and further development. However, not all of these forms serve it in this way. It requires noncapitalist social strata as a market in which to realize its surplus value, as a source for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor-power for its wage system. Forms of production based on a natural economy are of no use to capital for any of these purposes. In all natural economic formations, whether these are primitive rural communes with common ownership of the land, or feudal relations of bondage and the like, the economy pivots around subsistence production, and there is therefore little or no need for external commodities, and as a rule no excess product, or at least no urgent need to dispose of an excess product. Most important, however, is the following: the fundamental characteristic of all forms of production based on a natural economy is that the means of production and labor-power are bound in one form or another. The economic organization of the communist rural commune, no less than that of the feudal estate based on corvée and the like, rests on the trammeling of the most important means of production—the land—as well as of labor-power through the rule of law and tradition. The requirements of capital thus come up against the rigid constraints of the natural economy in every respect. Therefore capitalism above all wages a constant war of annihilation everywhere against any historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this be the slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or the patriarchal peasant economy. Political violence (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by the state, and cheap commodities form the main methods by which this struggle is fought. These methods partly run in parallel, and partly succeed each other, and they act to mutually reinforce each other. If the violent struggle in Europe took the form of revolution against feudalism (as is ultimately the case in the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries), then in non-European countries it took the form of colonial policy in the struggle against more primitive social forms. Here, the system of taxation that was established, and trade, especially with primitive communities, constituted a conglomeration in which political power and economic factors closely interlock.
The economic goals pursued by capitalism in its struggle with societies based on a natural economy can be enumerated as follows:
1) To gain direct control over important sources of the forces of production, such as land, wild game in the jungles, minerals, precious stones and ores, the products of exotic flora, such as rubber, etc.;
2) To set labor-power “free” and to compel it to work for capital;
3) To introduce the commodity economy;
4) To separate handicraft production and agriculture.
During original accumulation, i.e. during the historical emergence of capitalism in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, the dispossession of the peasants in the U.K. and on the continent represented the most tremendous means for transforming the means of production and labor-power into capital on a massive scale.*
Since then, however, and to the present day, this same task has been accomplished under the rule of capital through an equally tremendous, although completely different, means: modern colonial policy. It is illusory to hope that capitalism could ever be satisfied with the means of production that it is able to procure by means of the exchange of commodities. Indeed, the difficulty for capital in this respect consists in the fact that, over vast expanses of the exploitable surface of the globe, the productive forces are in the possession of social formations that either have no inclination to exchange commodities or, worse still, cannot offer for sale the most important means of production on which capital depends, because their forms of property and social structures as a whole preclude this a priori. This goes above all for the land with all its rich mineral resources underground and its wealth of pastures, forests, and waterways on the surface, and also for the livestock of primitive pastoral peoples. For capital, to rely on the gradual process of the internal disintegration of these natural economic formations (a process to be reckoned in centuries), and to await the resulting alienation of these formations’ most important means of production by means of commodity exchange, would be tantamount to forgoing the productive forces of these territories altogether. From the standpoint of capitalism, the inference to be drawn here is that the violent appropriation of the colonial countries’ most important means of production is a question of life or death for it. However, since the primitive social bonds of the indigenous inhabitants constitute the strongest bulwark both of their societies and of the latter’s material basis of existence, what ensues is that capital introduces itself through the systematic, planned destruction and annihilation of any noncapitalist social formation that it encounters. This is no longer a question of original accumulation: this is a process that continues to this day. Each new colonial expansion is accompanied by capital’s relentless war on the social and economic interrelations of the indigenous inhabitants and by the violent looting of their means of production and their labor-power. The aspiration to restrict capitalism to “peaceful competition,” i.e. to commodity exchange proper as it occurs between capitalist producing countries, rests on the doctrinaire delusion that the accumulation of capital could manage without the productive forces and demand of the more primitive social formations, and that it could rely on the slow, internal process of the disintegration of the natural economy. Given its mercurial capacity for expansion, the accumulation of capital can no more afford to wait for the natural increase in the working population than it can be content to bide its time during the naturally long process of the disintegration of noncapitalist forms and their transition to the commodity-economy. Capital knows no other solution to the problem than violence, which has been a constant method of capital accumulation as a historical process, not merely during its emergence, but also to the present day. For the primitive societies, on the other hand, since in such cases it is a question of their very existence, the only possible course of action is to engage in resistance and a life-or-death struggle until they are completely exhausted, or exterminated. Hence permanent military occupation of the colonies, indigenous uprisings, and expeditions to crush these are the order of the day for any colonial regime. These violent methods are here the direct consequence of the clash between capitalism and the natural economic formations that represent constraints upon its accumulation. The means of production and labor-power of these formations, as well as their demand for the capitalist surplus product, are indispensable to capitalism itself. In order to wrest these means of production and this labor-power from these formations, and to convert them into purchasers of its commodities, capitalism strives purposefully to annihilate them as independent social structures. From the standpoint of capital, this method is the most expedient, because it is simultaneously the one that is most rapid and most profitable. Indeed, its reverse side is growing militarism: the significance of the latter for accumulation will be considered in another context below. British policy in India and that of the French in Algeria represent the classical examples of capital’s application of this method.
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*Marx details this violent process in Part 8 of Capital, Vol. 1, entitled “the so-called Primitive Accumulation of Capital.”
The ancient economic organization of the Indians—the communist village community—had persisted in its various forms for millennia and had undergone a long, internal history, despite the political storms that had raged in the “lands of the clouds.” In the sixth century BC the Persians invaded the Indus basin and conquered a part of the country. Two centuries later the Greeks swept in, leaving behind them the Alexandrian colonies as the offshoots of a totally alien culture. Subsequently, there was an incursion by savage Scythians, and the Arabs ruled India for centuries.* Later the Afghans descended from the highlands of Iran, until they in turn were driven out by the brutal onslaught of Tartar hordes from Transoxiana.† Later still, the Mongols left a trail of terror and destruction: entire villages were massacred, and the peaceful paddy fields with their tender rice stalks ran crimson with streams of blood. Yet the Indian village community survived all this, since the entire succession of Muslim conquerors, each one ousting the one before, ultimately left intact the internal social life of the mass of peasants and its traditional structure. These conquerors merely installed their own governors in the provinces to oversee military organization and to collect tributes from the population. All of these conquerors pursued the aim of dominating and exploiting the country; none of them had any interest in robbing the people of its productive forces and annihilating its social organization. In the Moghul Empire, peasants had to pay their annual tribute in kind to the foreign ruler, but they could live undisturbed in their villages and cultivate rice on their sholguras‡ just as their ancestors had done. Then came the British, and the blight of capitalist civilization accomplished in a short time what millennia, and the sword of the Nogais,§ had failed to achieve, namely the complete destruction of the entire social organization of the people. The purpose of British capital was ultimately to gain control of the very basis of existence of the Indian community: the land.
This purpose was served above all by the fiction, ever popular with European colonizers, that the entire land of a colony belongs to the political sovereign.¶ The British retroactively granted all of India as private property to the Moghul and his governors so that it would pass to them as “legitimate” successors of the latter. The most reputable economics scholars, such as James Mill, dutifully provided “scientific” grounds for this fiction, especially with the famous argument that it was necessary to assume land ownership by the sovereign in India, “for if it did not reside in him, it will be impossible to show to whom it belonged.”297 Accordingly, in Bengal the British transformed all the zamindars (i.e. the Muslim tax farmers and also the hereditary market superintendents) that they found in each district into the owners of the land there, in order to gain a strong ally in the country in the campaign against the peasant masses. They also proceeded in exactly the same way during subsequent conquests in the province of Agra,* in Awadh, and in the central provinces. This caused a series of turbulent peasant uprisings, during which tax collectors were frequently driven out. In the ensuing general confusion and anarchy, British capitalists managed to gain possession of a sizeable portion of the land.
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*Although Arab armies invaded areas of the Indian subcontinent such as Sindh as early as 711, they failed to impose lasting political control over significant parts of India. By 738 the Arabs no longer exerted significant political control east of the Indus River, although traders from Arabia later gained control of parts of southern India and Ceylon.
†Luxemburg appears to be conflating a number of different historical events here. Mahmud of Ghazni conquered large parts of northern India in the eleventh century; the Ghaznavids were not Arab but rather a Turkic people heavily influenced by Persian language and culture. At the end of the twelfth century, the Afghan warrior Mohammed Ghori conquered the Ghaznavids. Although the Mongol invasions of the twelfth century took control of what is now western Pakistan from the Delhi Sultanate (established by Ghori’s successors), they did not end its control of northern India. The Delhi Sultanate was severely weakened by the invasion of Timur (Tamerlane) in 1398, but was not destroyed until the Mughal conquest of 1526.
‡Small plots of communally owned land; Luxemburg apparently learned of the term from James Mill’s History of British India.
§Luxemburg appears to be confusing the Nogais, a Turkic-Mongol people living north and east of the Caspian Sea in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, with the Moghuls.
¶The claim that the sovereign power in India owned the entirety of landed property was first advanced by James Mill, and it became the basis of the theory of “Oriental Despotism.” Like Luxemburg, Marx considered Mill’s claim to be a fictitious portrayal of actual conditions in India that functioned only to serve British imperialist interests. See Marx’s “Notebooks on Kovalevsky,” in Lawrence Krader, The Asiatic Mode of Production (Assen, NL: Van Gorcum, 1975), pp. 343–412.
*Agra is the former capital of Hindustan, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Awadh is in the center of Uttar Pradesh and is a major area of grain production.
Furthermore, the tax burden was so ruthlessly increased that it swallowed up almost all the fruits of the labor of the local population. This was taken to such an extreme that, according to the 1854 official report by the British tax authorities, the peasants of the districts of Delhi and Allahabad found it to their advantage to simply lease or bond their plots of land against the taxes that were levied on them. This taxation system provided the conditions for usury to infiltrate the Indian village and take hold like a cancer, consuming the social organization from within.298 In order to accelerate this process, the British passed a law that flew in the face of all the traditions and concepts of right of the village community: this law provided for the compulsory alienability of village land in case of tax arrears. The attempts of the old kinship associations to protect themselves against this through their preemptive right over the village lands and related tracts of land were in vain—the process of disintegration was in full swing. Compulsory auctions, the forced withdrawal of individuals from the village lands, indebtedness, and expropriation were the order of the day.
Following their usual strategy in the colonies, the British attempted to make it appear that their policy of violence, which had undermined the traditional relations of land ownership and led to the collapse of the Hindu peasant economy, was actually in the interests of the peasantry and was necessary for the latter’s protection from indigenous tyrants and exploiters.299 First, the U.K. artificially created a landed aristocracy in India at the expense of the ancient property rights of the peasant communities, in order subsequently to protect the peasants from these oppressors and to bring this “illegally usurped land” into the possession of British capitalists.
Large estates thus emerged in India within a short space of time, while across large swaths of the country the peasants were transformed into an impoverished, proletarianized mass of small-scale tenant farmers with a short-term lease.
Finally, the specifically capitalist method of colonization finds expression in the following striking circumstance. The British were the first conquerors of India to show a gross indifference toward the works of civilization that formed its public utilities and economic infrastructure. Arabs, Afghans, and Mongols alike had initiated and maintained magnificent works of canalization, they had provided the country with a network of roads, built bridges across its rivers, and sunk wells. Timur, or Tamerlane, the founder of the Mongol dynasty in India, oversaw the allocation of resources for the cultivation of the soil, irrigation, security on the roads, and the provision of food and shelter for travelers.300
The primitive Indian Rajahs, the Afghan or Mongol conquerors, at any rate, in spite of occasional cruelty against individuals, made their mark with the marvelous constructions we can find today at every step and that seem to be the work of a giant race. The Company that ruled India until 1858 [the East India Company—R. L.] did not make one spring accessible, did not sink a single well, nor build a bridge for the benefit of the Indians.301
Further testimony is given by a Briton by the name of James Wilson:
In the Madras province, no one can help being impressed by the magnificent ancient irrigation systems, traces of which have been preserved until our time. Locks and weirs dam the rivers into great lakes, from which canals distribute the water for an area of sixty or seventy miles around. On the large rivers, there are thirty to forty of such weirs … The rainwater from the mountains was collected in artificial ponds, many of which still remain and boast circumferences of between fifteen and twenty-five miles. Nearly all these gigantic constructions were completed before the year 1750. During the war between the Company and the Mongol rulers—and, be it said, during the entire period of our rule in India—they have sadly decayed.302
This all follows quite naturally: for British capital, it was not a question of ensuring the survival of the Indian community or supporting it economically, but rather of destroying it in order to seize its productive forces. The ravenous greed, the voracious appetite for accumulation, the very essence of which is to take advantage of each new political and economic conjuncture with no thought for tomorrow, precludes any appreciation of the value of the works of economic infrastructure that have been left by previous civilizations. In Egypt, recently, British engineers, who had been charged with constructing enormous dams on the Nile for the purposes of capital, invested a lot of effort into uncovering the traces of the ancient system of canals there; meanwhile the British, with a mindless negligence equaling that of the Botocudos,* had allowed a homologous system of canals to decay completely in their Indian provinces. It was not until 1867 that the British were able to appreciate their noble endeavors, when the terrible famine that cost a million lives in the district of Orissa alone forced a British parliamentary inquiry into the causes of the emergency.† The British government is currently attempting to take administrative measures to rescue the peasants from usurers. The Punjab Alienation Act (1900) forbids the alienation or mortgaging of peasant land to the members of other castes than the peasant one, with individual exceptions to be made at the discretion of the tax collector.303
Having systematically severed the protective ties of the ancient Hindu communities and nurtured a system of usury in which an interest rate of 15 percent is a common phenomenon, the British are now proceeding to place the ruined and impoverished Indian peasants under the tutelage of the Exchequer and its officials, i.e. under the “protection” of the very leeches that have bled them dry.
Alongside the martyrdom inflicted upon British India, the history of French policy in Algeria can claim a place of honor in the annals of capitalist colonial economies. When the French conquered Algeria [in 1830], prevalent among the masses of the Arab-Kabyle population were ancient social and economic forms of organization that had persisted, in spite of the long and turbulent history of the country, until the nineteenth century, and indeed these continue to exist to some degree even today.
Although private property held sway in the towns, among the Moors and the Jews, and among merchants, artisans, and usurers, and although broad swaths of the countryside had been seized under Turkish suzerainty and placed under the dominion of the state, still almost half of the cultivated land was held by the Arab and Kabyle tribes as their common property; here, ancient, patriarchal customs prevailed. Many Arab clans led the same kind of nomadic life in the nineteenth century as they had done since time immemorial, an existence that might seem erratic and haphazard to the casual observer, but that is in reality strictly regulated and extremely monotonous. Men, women, and children would migrate along with herds of animals and tents each summer to the coastal region of Tell with its cooling sea-breezes; in the winter they would make the journey back to the protective warmth of the desert. Each tribe and each clan had its own determinate migration routes and summer and winter stations, where it would set up camp. Likewise, in many cases the arable farming Arabs still held the land as the communal property of the clans. The Kabyle extended family, too, lived according to traditional patriarchal rules under the guidance of its chosen leader.
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*The Butocudos is the name that European explorers and colonizers gave to the Aimorés or Krenak peoples of eastern Brazil. Devastated by European colonization, they were forced from their homelands to Minas Gerais, where small numbers of their descendants still survive.
†The Orissa famine, which impacted the east coast of India, lasted from 1866 to 1868. Although it originated from a drought that began in 1865, it was greatly exacerbated by the failure of the British colonial authorities to recognize how many Indians needed immediate assistance.
The eldest female member of this clan was likewise chosen by it to oversee its communal domestic economy, or else each female member assumed this responsibility in turn. In terms of its organization, the Kabyle extended family formed a peculiar counterpart on the edges of the Sahara to the renowned Southern Slavonic Zadruga:* not only the land, but also all tools, weapons, and money that were required by its members in order to carry out their work or that were acquired by them were the communal property of the clan. Each man had only his suit of clothing as his private property, and each woman only the dresses and jewelry she had received as her dowry. All the more valuable garments and ornaments were considered the collective property of the clan, and could only by used by individual members with the consent of all the others. If the extended family was not too numerous, all meals would be taken at a common table, with all women cooking in turn, whereas the eldest were responsible for apportioning the food. If the clan was too large, then raw foodstuffs would be distributed monthly by the elders—following a principle of strict equality—to each individual family for it to prepare by itself. The closest ties of solidarity, mutual aid, and equality bound these communities, and, as their last bequest on their deathbeds, patriarchs would enjoin their sons to remain true to the collective family group.304
Turkish rule, which had been established in Algeria in the sixteenth century, had already seriously encroached upon these social relations. However, it was certainly a myth subsequently invented by the French that the Turkish tax authorities had confiscated all the land. This flight of fancy, which could only occur to a European mind, was in contradiction with the whole economic foundation of Islam and with those who professed this faith.† In fact, the opposite was true: the property relations of the village communities and the extended families generally went untouched by the Turks. The latter merely seized a large proportion of uncultivated lands from the clans as the dominion of the state and transformed them into Beyliks‡ under local administrators; in part these lands were worked on behalf of the state, employing indigenous labor-power, and in part they were leased to tenants for a rent or against services performed. Furthermore, the Turks took advantage of each mutiny by the subjugated clans and each disturbance in the country to expand the possessions of the state through the large-scale confiscation of land, and either established military colonies or publicly auctioned the confiscated property, in which case it mostly fell into the hands of Turkish and other usurers. In order to avoid these confiscations and the burden of taxation, many peasants placed themselves under the protection of the Church, just as they had done in Germany in the Middle Ages; the Church thus became the overall landowner of significant tracts of land in the country. As a result of these historical vicissitudes, property relations in Algeria presented the following picture at the time of conquest by the French: 1.5 million hectares were under the dominion of the state, and a further 3 million hectares of uncultivated land were likewise considered as belonging to the state as the “common property of the true believers” (Bled-el-Islam); private property accounted for some 3 million hectares held by the Berbers since Roman times, and a further 1.5 million hectares that had come into private ownership under Turkish rule; finally, a mere 5 million hectares remained the communal property of the Arab clans. In the Sahara, some of the 3 million hectares of fertile land around the oases was communally owned by the extended families, and some was privately owned. The remaining 23 million hectares mostly comprised barren land.
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*A form of rural community based on an extended family that was indigenous to the south Slavs of the Balkans. It was similar to the Russian obshchina.
†For more on this, see Peter Hudis, “Marx Among the Muslims,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 15 (4), December 2004, pp. 51–68.
‡Beyliks were members of the Janissaries, personal bodyguards and members of the standing army under the command of the Ottoman Sultan. Most of them were recruited from Christian families as young boys and raised for lifelong service in the military. They obtained considerable power and wealth, often rivaling that of the Turkish Muslim aristocracy.
After the French had colonized Algeria, they set about their civilizing mission with much pageantry. Had not Algeria, having shaken off the yoke of Turkish rule at the beginning of the eighteenth century, become a free hideout for pirates who made the Mediterranean unsafe and trafficked in Christian slaves? Spain and the U.S. in particular declared a relentless war against such heinous conduct by the Muslims,* even though they themselves were active participants in the slave trade at the time. A crusade against anarchy in Algeria was also proclaimed during the great French Revolution, and the French conquest of Algeria was thus carried out under the banners of the campaign against slavery and the institution of orderly and civilized conditions. Practice was soon to reveal the reality behind these slogans. As is well known, in the forty years that followed the conquest of Algeria, no European state changed its political system more than France. The restoration of the monarchy was followed by the July Revolution [of 1830] and the reign of the “Citizen King” [Louis-Philippe], which was succeeded in turn by the February Revolution [of 1848], the Second Empire [of 1852–70], and finally the débâcle of 1870† and the Third Republic.‡ Political ascendancy passed in turn from the aristocracy to high finance, to the petty-bourgeoisie, and to the broad middle stratum of the bourgeoisie. Yet French policy in Algeria was a pole of constancy throughout this series of phenomena; from beginning to end, it was oriented toward a single goal, and it revealed more clearly than anything else that all of these transformations of the political regime in nineteenth-century France revolved around one and the same fundamental interest—i.e. the dominance of the capitalist bourgeoisie and its form of property.
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*The Barbary Wars were fought between the U.S. and the Barbary States in Northern Africa in 1801–05 and 1815. The Barbary States had demanded tribute payments from the U.S. in order for it to do commerce in the area.
†This refers to France’s defeat in the Franco–German War of 1870. It was followed by the Paris Commune of 1871, the first successful seizure of power by the proletariat in a European city.
‡The Third Republic lasted from 1870 to 1940.
In the session of the French National Assembly of June 30, 1873, the rapporteur for the Commission for the Regulation of Agrarian Affairs in Algeria, Deputy [Gustav] Humbert, made the following statement:
The bill submitted for your consideration is but the crowning touch to an edifice well founded on a whole series of ordinances, edicts, laws, and decrees of the Senate that together and severally have as the same object: the establishment of private property among the Arabs.
In effect, regardless of the storms raging in internal French politics over half a century, the compass of French colonial policy was oriented toward the ever-constant pole of the systematic and deliberate elimination and parcelization of communal property. This corresponded to the following clearly discernable double interest: first, the elimination of communal property was above all intended to shatter the power of the Arab clans as forms of social organization and thus to break their stubborn resistance to the French yoke—a resistance that, despite France’s military superiority, manifested itself in countless tribal rebellions, resulting in a permanent state of war in the colony.305 Second, the break-up of communal property was also a prerequisite for the economic exploitation of the conquered country—i.e. in order to seize the land held by the Arabs for a millennium and to transfer it into the hands of French capitalists. This purpose was served by the already familiar fiction that the land in its entirety was the property of the respective sovereign under Muslim law. Just as the British had done in India, Louis-Philippe’s governors in Algeria declared communal property held by entire clans to be an “impossibility.” On the basis of this fiction, the majority of uncultivated lands, but especially the commons, the woodlands, and pastures, were declared the property of the state and used for the purposes of colonization. A whole system of settlements was instituted—the so-called cantonnements, whereby French colonists were to settle in the midst of the lands held by the clans, while the tribes themselves were to be herded into a minimal area. These seizures of lands held by the Arab clans were “legally” sanctioned under the decrees of 1830, 1831, 1840, 1844, 1845, and 1846. In practice, this system of settlements did not bring about any actual colonization, and merely gave rise to rampant speculation and usury. In most cases, the Arabs managed to repurchase the lands that had been taken from them, although in so doing they incurred heavy debts. The pressure of French taxation had the same effect, especially the law of June 16, 1851, proclaiming all forests to be state property, thus robbing the indigenous inhabitants of 2.4 million hectares of pastures and woodland, and depriving them of the essential conditions for raising livestock. This welter of laws, ordinances, and provisions produced an indescribable confusion in the property relations in the country. In order to take advantage of the prevailing feverish speculation in land, many indigenous inhabitants sold their plots of land to French buyers in the hope of soon being able to regain them; they would often sell the same plot to two or three buyers simultaneously, only for it to be later proved that it was not their property at all, but the inalienable property of the clan. So it was that a group of speculators from Rouen was led to believe that it had bought some 20,000 hectares of land, whereas in fact it had only acquired 1,370 hectares of a disputed area. In another case, an area sold as 1,230 hectares proved ultimately to consist of 2 hectares after its legal status had been resolved.* There followed an endless series of lawsuits, in which the French courts generally upheld the claims and partitions made by the buyers. Uncertainty around property relations became generalized, as did speculation, usury, and anarchy. However, the French government’s plan to secure strong support for itself in the shape of a mass of French colonists in the midst of the Arab population ended in abject failure. French policy under the Second Empire thus took a different turn: after stubbornly denying the existence of communal property for thirty years with characteristic European narrow-mindedness, the government was finally forced to rectify its position, and finally gave official recognition to the existence of the undivided property of the clans, only to promptly proclaim the necessity of its forcible division. This is the double meaning of the decree issued by the Senate on April 22, 1863. General Allard made the following declaration:
The government does not lose sight of the fact that the general aim of its policy is to weaken the influence of the tribal chieftains and to dissolve the family associations. By this means, it will sweep away the last remnants of feudalism [sic!—R. L.] defended by the opponents of the government bill … The surest method of accelerating the process of dissolving the family associations will be to institute private property and to settle European colonists among the Arab families.306
The law of 1863 created special commissions for the purposes of dividing up the communally held lands, consisting of a brigadier-general or captain as chairman, a subprefect, a representative of the Arab military authorities, and an official from the Land Authority. To these natural experts on economic and social relations in Africa, three tasks were allotted: first, to mark out the precise boundaries of the lands owned by the clans, then to divide up the land held by each individual clan among its various branches or extended families, and finally to divide up the tracts of land allotted to each branch of the clan into individual private plots. The expedition of the brigadiers-general into the Algerian interior was promptly dispatched, and the commissions proceeded to carry out their tasks in situ, combining the offices not only of land surveyor and land distributor, but also that of judge in all land disputes. In the final instance, the Governor General of Algeria would ratify the plans for distribution. Ten years of diligent exertions on the part of the commissions yielded the following results: between 1863 and 1873, of the 700 areas belonging to the Arab clans, approximately 400 were divided up among the extended families. In this process, the foundations were laid for future inequality, large-scale land ownership, and parcelization of the land: according to size of an area held by a clan, and the number of its members, each of the latter could be allotted between 1 and 4 hectares, 100 hectares, or as much as 180 hectares of land. The division of land did not progress beyond the level of the extended family, however. Despite the best efforts of the brigadiers-general, the division of the areas held by the extended families encountered insurmountable difficulties in the customs of the Arabs. On the whole, French policy had thus failed once again to achieve its aim of creating individual property in order for it to be transferred into French hands.
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*This sentence was omitted in Schwarzschild’s translation of The Accumulation of Capital.
It was the Third Republic, the undisguised regime of the bourgeoisie, that first summoned up the courage and the cynicism to put an end to all divagations and to attack the problem from the other end, dispensing with the preliminary steps taken by the Second Empire. In 1873, the National Assembly drew up a law whose explicit purpose was the direct division of the areas held by all 700 Arab clans into individual holdings, and thus the forcible imposition of private property in the briefest possible period of time. The pretext for this measure was the desperate situation in the colony. If the great famine of 1866 in India had first graphically demonstrated to the British public the benign consequences of British colonial policy and had prompted a parliamentary inquiry into the disaster, Europe was similarly alarmed by the distress calls emanating at the end of the 1860s from Algeria, where massive famine and extraordinary mortality rates among the Arabs were the outcome of more than forty years of French rule. A commission was appointed to investigate the causes of the emergency and to bring succor to the Arabs through new legislation, and it came to the unanimous conclusion that only one thing could serve as a lifebuoy for the Arabs: private property! For only then would all Arabs be in the position to sell or mortgage their plot of land and thus protect themselves against the threat of destitution. Thus it was declared that the only solution to the emergency faced by the Arabs, which had arisen as a result of the theft of Algerian land by the French and the indebtedness caused by oppressive French taxation, was to deliver them completely into the clutches of the usurers. This travesty was played out straight-faced before the National Assembly, and was received with equal earnestness by that worthy body. The “victors” over the Paris Commune reveled in their brazenness.
Two arguments particularly served the purpose of supporting the new law in the National Assembly. First, the advocates of the government bill repeatedly emphasized that the Arabs themselves urgently desired the introduction of private property. This was indeed true of the land speculators and usurers in Algeria, who had an urgent interest in “freeing” their victims from the protective ties and solidarity of the clans: for as long as Muslim law prevailed in Algeria, the non-alienability of clan and family property represented an insurmountable barrier to the mortgaging of land. The law of 1863 had made a first breach in this barrier, and it was now a question of removing it altogether in order to give free rein to the usurers. The second argument was a “scientific” one. It derived from the same intellectual armory from which the esteemed James Mill had drawn in demonstrating his incomprehension of Indian property relations: British classical economics. In order to prevent famine, private property was the necessary precondition for a more intensive and improved cultivation of the soil in Algeria, for it was obvious that nobody would want to invest capital or intensive labor into land that was not his own individual property and whose fruits were not exclusively enjoyed by him: such was the argument recited emphatically by the scientifically schooled students of Smith and Ricardo. The facts spoke a different language, however. They showed that French speculators used the private property they had acquired in Algeria for anything but more intensive and improved cultivation of the soil. Of the 400,000 hectares of land belonging to the French in 1873, 120,000 were in the hands of two capitalist firms, the Algerian Company and the Setif Company, which did not engage in any agricultural production on them at all, merely leasing them back to the indigenous inhabitants, who cultivated them in the traditional way. A quarter of the remaining French landowners were likewise uninvolved in agricultural production. Capital investment and the intensive cultivation of the soil can no more be conjured up out of nothing than can capitalist relations in general. These existed only in the fantasies of French speculators in their greed for profits, and in the nebulous realms of the scientific doctrines of their economic ideologues. When all pretexts and embellishments used to justify the law of 1873 are stripped away, what it boiled down to was the naked desire to prize the basis of the Arabs’ existence from them—i.e. the land. Despite the flimsiness and obvious mendacity in the arguments used to justify this law, which would sound the death knell for the Algerian population and for its material prosperity, it was passed almost unanimously on July 26, 1873.
This coup soon proved to be a fiasco, however. The policy of the Third Republic was scuppered by the difficulty of introducing, in one fell swoop, bourgeois private property into ancient communist extended family associations, just as the policy of the Second Empire had failed for the same reasons. By 1890, when it had been in force for seventeen years, the law of July 26, 1873, which was supplemented by a second law on April 28, 1887, had yielded the following results: 14 million francs had been spent on the adjudication process in relation to some 1.6 million hectares. It was calculated that the process would take until 1950 to be completed, and would cost a further 60 million francs. The goal of eliminating extended family communism had still not been achieved, however. In reality, the whole process had merely served to foster feverish land speculation, rampant usury, and the economic ruin of the indigenous inhabitants.
The fiasco of the forcible introduction of private property led to a new experiment. Although the laws of 1873 and 1887 had been reappraised and condemned in 1890 by a commission established by the Algerian General Government, it was still another seven years before the learned legislators on the Seine mustered the resolve to pass a reform in the interests of the ruined country. In this new shift in state policy, the compulsory introduction of private property has been abandoned in principle: the law of February 27, 1897, as well as the directive issued by the Algerian Governor-General on March 7, 1898, makes provisions mainly for the introduction of private property through voluntary applications either by owners or by prospective purchasers of land.307 Since, however, certain clauses also provide for the introduction of private property in the case of an application by a single owner of a given tract of land without the consent of other co-owners, and furthermore, since usurers have the option to press for a “voluntary” application by indebted owners at any time, the new law leaves the door wide open for French and indigenous capitalists to continue eating away at and looting the lands belonging to the tribes and extended families.
Resistance to the eighty-year-long vivisection performed on Algeria has been all the weaker, especially in recent years, insofar as the Arabs have found themselves ever more encircled, defenseless, and abandoned in the face of French capital following the conquest in 1881 of Tunisia on one side and, latterly, of Morocco on the other.* The most recent effect of the French regime in Algeria has been the mass emigration of Arabs to Asia Minor.308
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*France gained control of Morocco in 1911.