An important concluding chapter to the struggle against the natural economy consists in the separation of agriculture from handicraft production, or the expulsion of rural handicraft production from the peasant economy. Handicrafts emerged historically as a subsidiary occupation, a mere appendage to agriculture among settled, civilized peoples. The history of European handicraft production in the Middle Ages is the history of its emancipation from agriculture, its release from the bonds of the manorial estate, its specialization and development into guild production in the towns. Whereas production in the towns had developed first from handicrafts to manufactures and then to the capitalist large-scale industrial factory, handicraft production in the rural, peasant economy remained tightly bound up with agriculture. During the time not devoted to cultivating the soil, handicrafts played an extremely important role in the peasant economy as auxiliary domestic production oriented to personal needs.317 The development of capitalist production constantly tears away one branch of production after the other from the peasant economy, in order to concentrate them in the form of mass production in factories. The history of the textiles industry is a typical example. The same process occurs, if less conspicuously, in all other branches of handicraft production in the rural economy. In order to turn the peasant masses into buyers of its commodities, capital initially strives to reduce the peasant economy to the one branch that it cannot immediately take over (and that it can annex only with great difficulty in Europe, given property relations there): agriculture.318 This process appears outwardly to be an entirely peaceful one; it is a process that is imperceptible, and that seems to be caused by purely economic factors. The technical superiority of mass production in the factory, with its specialization, its scientific ability to analyze the production process into its constituent parts and to recombine them, its access to raw materials on the world market, and its technically improved tools, is undisputed in comparison with primitive peasant industry. In reality, it is factors such as the burden of taxation, war, and the selling-off and monopolization of the nation’s land—factors that belong equally to the spheres of political economy, political power, and criminal law—that are effective in this process of the separation of peasant agriculture from industry. Nowhere has this process been carried so thoroughly as in the United States of America. Railways—i.e. European, and above all, British capital—gradually brought the American farmer over the vast expanse of the Union, from the east to the west, and he exterminated the American Indians with firearms, bloodhounds, liquor, and syphilis and violently drove them westwards so that he could appropriate their land as “free land” in order to clear and cultivate it. The American farmer, the “backwoodsman” of the good old days before the American Civil War, was a completely different character in comparison to his modern counterpart. The former could do pretty much everything himself, and led a practically self-sufficient life on his isolated farm, rarely needing anything from the outside world. At the beginning of the 1890s, one of the leaders of the Farmers’ Alliance, Senator [William A.] Peffer, wrote the following description:
The American farmer of today is altogether a different sort of man from his ancestor of fifty or a hundred years ago. A great many men and women now living remember when farmers were largely manufacturers; that is to say, they made a great many implements for their own use. Every farmer had an assortment of tools with which he made wooden implements, as forks and rakes, handles for his hoes and ploughs, spokes for his wagon, and various other implements made wholly out of wood. Then the farmer produced flax and hemp and wool and cotton. These fibers were prepared upon the farm; they were spun into yarn, woven into cloth, made into garments, and worn at home. Every farm had upon it a little shop for wood and iron work, and in the dwelling were cards and looms; carpets were woven, bed-clothing of different sorts was prepared; upon every farm geese were kept, their feathers used for supplying the home demand with beds and pillows, the surplus being disposed of at the nearest market town. During the winter season wheat and flour and corn meal were carried in large wagons drawn by teams of six to eight horses a hundred or two hundred miles to market, and traded for farm supplies for the next year—groceries and dry goods. Besides this, mechanics were scattered among the farmers. The farm wagon was in process of building a year or two; the material was found near the shop; the character of the timber to be used was stated in the contract; it had to be procured in a certain season and kept in the drying process a length of time specified, so that when the material was brought together in proper form and the wagon made, both parties to the contract knew where every stick of it came from, and how long it had been in seasoning. During winter time the neighborhood carpenter prepared sashes and blinds and doors and moulding and cornices for the next season’s building. When the frosts of autumn came the shoemaker repaired to the dwellings of the farmers and there, in a corner set apart to him, he made up shoes for the family during the winter. All these things were done among the farmers, and a large part of the expense was paid with products of the farm. When winter approached, the butchering season was at hand; meat for family use during the next year was prepared and preserved in the smoke house. The orchards supplied fruit for cider, for apple butter, and for preserves of different kinds, amply sufficient to supply the wants of the family during the year, with some to spare. Wheat was threshed, a little at a time, just enough to supply the needs of the family for ready money, and not enough to make it necessary to waste one stalk of straw. Everything was saved and put to use. One of the results of that sort of economy was that comparatively a very small amount of money was required to conduct the business of farming. A hundred dollars average probably was as much as the largest farmers of that day needed in the way of cash to meet the demands of their farm work, paying for hired help, repairs of tools, and all other incidental expenses.319
This idyll was brought to an abrupt end by the American Civil War. The war had saddled the Union with an enormous state debt of $6 billion, which caused the tax burden to be sharply increased. Particularly after the war, however, there had also begun a feverish development of the modern transport system and of industry, especially the machine industry, fostered by the imposition of higher protective tariffs. The railway companies were granted large-scale concessions of public lands in order to encourage railway construction and settlement of the land by farmers: in 1867 alone, they were conceded over 74 million hectares of land. The railway network then grew at an unprecedented rate. In 1860 it spanned less than 50,000 km, in 1870 just over 85,000 km, but by 1880 it covered more than 150,000 km (by means of comparison, the entire European railway network grew from 130,000 km to 169,000 km between 1870 and 1880). The speculation in railways and real estate provoked massive waves of immigration into the U.S. from Europe: there were more than 4.5 million immigrants to the U.S. in the twenty-three years from 1869 to 1892. A related phenomenon was the process whereby the U.S. gradually emancipated itself from European—principally British—industry, setting up its own factories and establishing its own textiles, iron, steel, and machine industries. Agriculture was revolutionized most rapidly of all. Shortly after the Civil War, the owners of the plantations in the Southern states had been forced to introduce the steam plough by the emancipation of African Americans. It was especially the new farms that were established in the west following the construction of railways that adopted the most modern machinery and techniques from the outset. According to the report of the U.S. Commissioner for Agriculture in 1867:
The improvements are rapidly revolutionizing the agriculture of the West, and reducing to the lowest minimum ever attained, the proportion of manual labor employed in its operations … Coincident with this application of mechanics to agriculture, systematic and enlarged business aptitudes have also sought alliance with this noble art. Farms of thousands of acres have been managed with greater skill, a more economical adaptation of means to ends, and with a larger margin of real profit than many others of eighty acres.320
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*The Morrill Tariff Act of 1861 increased a range of import duties on goods from overseas. Justin Smith Morrill was a U.S. congressman from Vermont. Thaddeus Stevens, the famous Abolitionist who was one of the most powerful figures in Congress at the time, was a cosponsor of the Morrill Tariff Act; he argued that it would help impoverish the southern slaveholding class.
At the same time, there was an enormous increase in both direct and indirect taxation. The Tariff Act of 1864,* which still forms the main foundation of the system in force today, increased excise duty and income tax to an extraordinary degree. Hand in hand with this development, there began a veritable orgy of protective tariff raising under the pretext of the heavy war taxation—the higher protective tariffs were to offset the increased burden of taxation on domestic production.321 Messrs. [Justin Smith] Morrill, [Thaddeus] Stevens, and the other gentlemen who used the war to generate a storm of protest as a means of pushing through their protectionist program, founded the system whereby customs policy was openly and cynically transformed into the instrument of private interests of all kinds for the purposes of profiteering. Each and every domestic producer appearing before Congress in order to demand a special tariff for his own personal enrichment saw his request readily granted. The tariffs were simply ratcheted up as much as anyone demanded. Taussig, an American, writes as follows:
The war had in many ways a bracing and ennobling influence on our national life; but its immediate effect on business affairs, and on all legislation affecting moneyed interests, was demoralizing. The line between public duty and private interests was often lost sight of by legislators. Great fortunes were made by changes in legislation urged and brought about by those who were benefited by them, and the country has seen with sorrow that the honor and honesty of public men did not remain undefiled.322
This tariff, which signaled a profound transformation in the economic life of the nation and remained unchanged for a further twenty years, and which essentially forms the basis for legislation on customs policy of the U.S. to this day, was literally rushed through the House of Representatives* in three days and the Senate in two days—without criticism, without debate,† and without opposition.323
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*Luxemburg has “Congress” here.
†This is somewhat inaccurate; the southern states were furious about the Act, which they viewed as fostering the interests of northern industry at their expense. The bill moved quickly through Congress, largely because many of the southern representatives were not present since they had already decided upon secession from the Union.
This shift in U.S. fiscal policy marked the beginning of flagrant parliamentary corruption and the undisguised and unscrupulous use of elections, legislation, and the press as the instruments of the naked financial interests of large capitals. “Enrich yourselves!” became the motto in public life after the “noble war” to free humanity from the “blemish of slavery”: the Yankee liberator of African Americans indulged in orgies of mercenary speculation on the Stock Exchange; in Congress, he endowed himself with public lands, and enriched himself through duties and taxes, through monopolies, fraudulent share-issues, and the theft of public assets. Industry flourished. Gone were the days when the small- and medium-scale farmer could manage with hardly any cash, when he could thresh his wheat reserves as the need arose, in order to convert them into money. Now he always needed money—in great quantities—in order to pay his taxes, and he soon found that he needed to sell everything that he produced in order to acquire everything that he needed in turn from manufacturers in the form of commodities. Peffer provides the following account:
Coming from that time to the present, we find that everything nearly has been changed. All over the West particularly the farmer threshes his wheat all at one time, he disposes of it all at one time, and in a great many instances the straw is wasted. He sells his hogs, and buys bacon and pork; he sells his cattle, and buys fresh beef and canned beef or corned beef, as the case may be; he sells his fruit, and buys it back in cans. If he raises flax at all, instead of putting it into yarn and making gowns for his children, as he did fifty years or more ago, he threshes his flax, sells the seed, and burns the straw. Not more than one farmer in fifty now keeps sheep at all; he relies upon the large sheep farmer for the wool, which is put into cloth or clothing ready for his use. Instead of having clothing made up on the farm in his own house or by a neighbor woman or country tailor a mile away, he either purchases his clothing ready-made at the nearest town, or he buys the cloth and has a city tailor make it up for him. Instead of making implements that he uses about the farm—forks, rakes, etc.—he goes to town to purchase even a handle for his axe or his mallet; he purchases twine and rope and all sorts of needed material made of fibers; he buys his cloth and his clothing; he buys his canned fruit and preserved fruit; he buys hams and shoulders and mess pork and mess beef; indeed, he buys nearly everything now that he produced at one time himself, and these things all cost money. Besides all this, and what seems stranger than anything else, whereas in the earlier time the American home was a free home, unencumbered, not one case in a thousand where a home was mortgaged to secure the payment of borrowed money, and whereas but a small amount of money was then needed for actual use in conducting the business of farming, there was always enough of it among the farmers to supply the demand. Now, when at least ten times as much is needed, there is little or none to be obtained, nearly half the farms are mortgaged for as much as they are worth, and interest rates are exorbitant. As to the cause of such wonderful changes … the manufacturer came with his woollen mill, his carding mill, his broom factory, his rope factory, his wooden-ware factory, his cotton factory, his pork-packing establishment, his canning factory and fruit preserving houses; the little shop on the farm has given place to the large shop in town; the wagon-maker’s shop in the neighborhood has given way to the large establishment in the city where … a hundred or two hundred wagons are made in a week; the shoemaker’s shop has given way to large establishments in the cities where most of the work is done by machines.324
Finally, the agricultural work of the farmer himself has become mechanized:
He ploughs and sows and reaps with machines. A machine cuts his wheat and puts it in a sheaf, and steam drives his threshers. He may read the morning paper while he ploughs and sit under an awning while he reaps.325
This revolution in American agriculture after the “Great War”* was not the end, but merely the beginning of the maelstrom in which the farmer was caught. The history of the American farmer itself brings into focus the second phase of the development of capitalist accumulation, which it illustrates in an equally apposite manner. Wherever it encounters the natural economy (i.e. production for one’s own needs and the combination of agriculture with handicrafts), capitalism attacks and eliminates it, replacing it with the simple commodity economy. It requires the commodity economy as a means of disposing of its own surplus value. Commodity production is the general form that is required for capitalism to thrive. However, as soon as simple commodity production has taken root on the ruins of the natural economy, capitalism declares war on the former in turn. Capitalism enters into a relation of competition with the commodity economy: after it has summoned the latter into existence, capitalism competes with it for means of production, labor-power, and markets. If the objective was first to isolate the producer, to sever the protective ties binding him to the community, and then to separate agriculture from handicrafts, now the task at hand is to separate the petty commodity producer from his means of production.
In the U.S., as has been observed, the “Great War” ushered in an era of large-scale looting of the nation’s lands by monopolist corporations and individual speculators. The feverish construction of railways, and especially the speculation in railways, gave rise to frenetic speculation in real estate, in which vast assets, even entire counties, became the booty of individual venturers and companies. This in turn led to huge waves of immigration into the U.S. from Europe, channeled by a locusts’ swarm of agents and hucksters using all manner of unscrupulous advertising, scams, and frauds. These waves of immigration first landed in the eastern states of the Atlantic coast. However, as industry grew in these regions, agriculture was pushed to the west. The “center of the Corn Belt,”† which had been near Columbus, Ohio in 1850, continued to move in the next fifty years and shifted 99 miles to the north and some 680 miles to the west. In 1850, the Atlantic states supplied 51.4 percent of the entire wheat harvest, but this was reduced to 13.6 percent by 1880, when the northern central states supplied 71.7 percent and the western states 9.4 percent.
In 1825, Congress had decided under [President James] Monroe to transplant the American Indians living east of the Mississippi to the west. The American Indians put up desperate resistance, but the remaining survivors after the carnage of forty wars* waged on them were swept away like bothersome detritus, like herds of buffalo, and penned like wild game into “reservations.” The American Indian had to make way for the farmer, but then it was the turn of the farmer to make way for capital, and he was himself driven west of the Mississippi.
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*That is, the American Civil War.
†A Weizenzentrum—a wheat or corn center, or the geographical center of the American granary.
Following the railway tracks, the American farmer moved west and northwest into the promised land, lured by the misleading claims of large-scale real estate speculators’ agents. Yet the most fertile and most favorably situated lands were retained by corporations that ran large-scale, purely capitalist farming operations. After he had hauled himself off into the wilderness, the farmer saw a dangerous competitor and mortal enemy emerge alongside him in the form of the “bonanza farm,” the large-scale capitalist farm, which was unknown to the Old World and the New alike. Here, surplus value production was undertaken applying all of the resources of modern science and technology.
In 1885, Paul Lafargue wrote the following account:
As the foremost representative of financial agriculture we may consider Oliver Dalrymple, whose name is today known on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 1874 he has simultaneously managed a line of steamers on the Red River and six farms owned by a company of financiers and comprising some 75,000 acres. Each one is divided into departments of 2,000 acres, and every department is again subdivided into three sections of 667 acres that are run by foremen and gang-leaders. Barracks to shelter 50 people and stable as many horses and mules, are built on each section, and similarly kitchens, machine sheds, and workshops for blacksmiths and locksmiths. Each section is completely equipped with 20 pairs of horses, 8 double ploughs, 12 horse-drawn drill-ploughs, 12 steel-toothed harrows, 12 cutters and binders, 2 threshers, and 16 wagons. Everything is done to ensure that the machines and the working animals (humans, horses, and mules) are in good condition and able to do the greatest possible amount of work. There is a telephone line connecting all sections and the central management.
The six farms of 75,000 acres are cultivated by an army of 600 workers, organized on military lines. During the harvest, the management hires another 500 to 600 auxiliary workers, assigning them to the various sections. After the work is completed in the fall, the workers are dismissed with the exception of the foreman and 10 men per section. In some farms in Dakota and Minnesota, horses and mules do not spend the winter at the place of work. As soon as the stubble has been ploughed in, they are driven in teams of a hundred or two hundred pairs 900 miles to the South, to return only the following spring.
Mechanics on horseback follow the ploughing, sowing, and harvesting machines when they are at work. If anything goes wrong, they gallop to the machine in question, repair it, and get it moving again without delay. The harvested corn is carried to the threshing machines that work day and night without interruption. They are stoked with bundles of straw fed into the stokehold through pipes of sheet-iron. The corn is threshed, winnowed, weighed, and filled into sacks by machinery, then it is put into railway trucks that run alongside the farm, and goes to Duluth or Buffalo. Every year, Dalrymple increases his land under seed by 5,800 acres. In 1880 it amounted to 25,000 acres.326
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*During the administration of President James Monroe in 1824, plans were begun (by Secretary of War John Calhoan) to evict Native Americans living in the southern states to Arkansas and Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi. Congress passed the bill in early 1825, which led tens of thousands to be forcefully expelled from their traditional lands. The policy of eviction became even more egregious under President Andrew Jackson from 1829, leading to a campaign of ethnic cleansing known as “the trail of tears.” The refusal of some indigenous groups, such as the Seminoles, to accept the forced removals led to numerous wars that continued through the 1860s.
By the late 1870s, there were already individual capitalists and corporations owning 14,000 to 18,000 hectares of wheat land. Since Lafargue wrote the above account, further enormous technical advances have been made in American large-scale capitalist farming, and the use of machinery has vastly increased.327
The American farmer could not compete with capitalist enterprises of this type. At the very time when the general transformations in relations in the U.S. in terms of finance, production, and the transport network compelled him to give up production for personal needs and to produce exclusively for the market, the prices for agricultural produce fell extraordinarily sharply owing to the colossal expansion in cultivation of the soil. Similarly, at the very time when the mass of farmers saw their fate bound up with the market, the U.S. agricultural market was suddenly transformed from a local one into a world market subject to wild gyrations as a result of the speculative activities of a small number of giant capitals.
In 1879, a year not without significance in the history of European and American agrarian relations alike, the mass export of wheat commenced from the U.S. to Europe.328
It was of course large capitals that monopolized the benefits accruing from this expansion of the market. On the one hand, the small farmer was crushed by the competition from the expansion in megafarms, and on the other he fell prey to speculators who bought up his grain to exert pressure on the world market. Defenseless in the face of the immense powers of capital, the farmer fell into debt—the typical form of the demise of the peasant economy. Farmers’ indebtedness soon became a public emergency. In 1890, Secretary [Jeremiah McLain] Rusk of the U.S. Department of Agriculture wrote the following in a circular addressing the desperate situation of the farmers:
The burden of mortgages upon farms, homes, and land, is unquestionably discouraging in the extreme, and while in some cases no doubt this load may have been too readily assumed, still in the majority of cases the mortgage has been the result of necessity … These mortgages … drawing high rates of interest … have today, in the face of continued depression of the prices of staple products, become very irksome, and in many cases threaten the farmer with loss of home and land. It is a question of grave difficulty to all those who seek to remedy the ills from which our farmers are suffering. At present prices the farmer finds that it takes more of his products to get a dollar wherewith to buy back the dollar that he borrowed than it did when he borrowed it. The interest accumulates, while the payment of the principal seems utterly hopeless, and the very depression that we are discussing makes the renewal of the mortgage most difficult.329
According to the census of May 29, 1891, 2.5 million farms had contracted mortgage debt, of which two-thirds were owner-operated by independent farmers; the mortgage debt of this latter group amounted to almost $2.2 billion.
Peffer draws the following conclusion:
The situation is this: farmers are passing through the “valley and shadow of death”; farming as a business is profitless; values of farm products have fallen 50 percent since the great war, and farm values have depreciated 25 to 50 percent during the last ten years; farmers are overwhelmed with debts secured by mortgages on their homes, unable in many instances to pay even the interest as it falls due, and unable to renew the loans because securities are weakening by reason of the general depression; many farmers are losing their homes under this dreadful blight, and the mortgage mill still grinds. We are in the hands of a merciless power; the people’s homes are at stake.330
In the attempt to rescue the situation, the indebted and ruined farmer had no other option but to supplement his income as a wage-laborer, or else to abandon his farm altogether and to shake from his boots the dust of the “promised land,” the “cornfield paradise” that had become a hell for him—providing, of course, that his farm had not already fallen into the clutches of his creditors, as indeed happened in thousands of cases. Abandoned and decaying farms were to be found on a massive scale by the mid-1880s. In 1887, [Max] Sering wrote:
If the farmer cannot pay his debts to date, the interest he has to pay is increased to 12, 15, or even 20 percent. He is pressed by the banker, the machine salesman, and the grocer who rob him of the fruits of his hard work … He can either remain on the farm as a tenant or move further west, to try his fortunes elsewhere. Nowhere in North America have I found so many indebted, disappointed, and depressed farmers as in the wheat regions of the North Western prairies. I have not spoken to a single farmer in Dakota who would not have been prepared to sell his farm.331
In 1889, the Commissioner of Agriculture in Vermont reported the widespread desertion of farms. He noted the following:
There appears to be no doubt about there being in this state large tracts of tillable unoccupied lands, which can be bought at a price approximating the price of Western lands, situated near school and church, and not far from railroad facilities. The Commissioner has not visited all of the counties in the State where these lands are reported, but he has visited enough to satisfy him that, while much of the unoccupied and formerly cultivated land is now practically worthless for cultivation, yet very much of it can be made to yield a liberal reward to intelligent labor.332
In 1890, the Commissioner of the State of New Hampshire published a sixty-seven-page document detailing farms for sale at extremely low prices; among these were 1,442 farms with residential buildings that had only recently been abandoned. It was the same story elsewhere. Thousands upon thousands of acres of wheat and maize fields lay fallow and were turning into wasteland. In order to repopulate the deserted land, real estate speculators launched a sly advertising campaign and attracted new droves of immigrants to the country, new victims who would suffer the same fate as their predecessors, but in even more brief period of time.333
A private letter written at the time gives the following account:
In the neighborhood of railroads and markets, there remains no common land. It is all in the hands of the speculators. A settler takes over vacant land and counts for a farmer; but the management of his farm hardly assures his livelihood, and he cannot possibly compete with the big farmer. He tills as much of his land as the law compels him to do, but to make a comfortable living, he must look for additional sources of income outside agriculture. In Oregon, for instance, I have met a settler who owned 160 acres for five years, but every summer, until the end of July, he worked twelve hours a day for a dollar a day at road-making. This man, of course, also counts as one of the five million farmers in the 1890 census. Again, in the County of Eldorado, I saw many farmers who cultivated their land only to feed their cattle and themselves. There would have been no profit in producing for the market, and their chief income derives from golddigging, the felling and selling of timber, etc. These people are prosperous, but it is not agriculture that makes them so. Two years ago, we worked in Long Cañon, Eldorado County, living in a cabin on an allotment. The owner of this allotment came home only once a year for a couple of days, and worked the rest of the time on the railway in Sacramento. Some years ago, a small part of the allotment was cultivated, to comply with the law, but now it is left completely untilled. A few acres are fenced off with wire, and there is a log cabin and a shed. But during the last years all this stands empty; a neighbor has the key and he made us free of the hut. In the course of our journey, we saw many deserted allotments, where attempts at farming had been made. Three years ago I was offered a farm with dwelling house for a hundred dollars, but in a short time the unoccupied house collapsed under the snow. In Oregon, we saw many derelict farms with small dwelling houses and vegetable gardens. One we visited was beautifully made: a sturdy blockhouse, fashioned by a master-builder, and some equipment; but the farmer had abandoned it all. You were welcome to take it all without charge.334
Where could the ruined American farmer turn? He set out with his walking staff to follow the shifting “center of the Corn Belt” and the railways. The “cornfield paradise” had partly moved northward to Canada, to the Saskatchewan and Mackenzie rivers, where wheat still thrives south of the 62nd parallel. Thus many of the farmers of the U.S. moved northward to Canada, only to suffer the same fate there in due course.335 In recent years, Canada has joined the ranks of the wheat exporters on the world market, but its agriculture is even more dominated by large capitals than is that of the U.S.336 In Canada, the distribution of public lands to private capitalist corporations occurred on an even more monstrous scale than in the U.S. The Charter of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, with its grant of land, represents an unprecedented theft of public assets by private capital. Not only was the company guaranteed a twenty-year monopoly over railway construction; not only did the state grant a concession, free of charge, of around 713 miles of land on which the railway was to be built, with a value of approximately $35 million; and not only did the state guarantee 3 percent interest on the share capital of $100 million for ten years, and provide a cash loan of $27.5 million—on top of all this, the company was granted some 25 million acres of land of its own choice among some of the most fertile and most favorably situated lands, including those not immediately contiguous to the railway itself! All future settlers on this vast expanse of land were thus placed at the mercy of railway capital ex ante. In turn, the railway company immediately proceeded to sell off 5 million acres of this land, in order to convert it as soon as possible into cash, to the Canada North-West Land Company, a consortium of British capitalists led by the Duke of Manchester.* The second capitalist consortium to be generously endowed with public lands was the Hudson Bay Company, which received a title to no less than one-twentieth of all the lands bounded by Lake Winnipeg, the border with the U.S., the Rocky Mountains, and northern Saskatchewan, in return for renouncing its privileges in the northwest. These two capitalist consortia combined thus gained possession of five-ninths of the land that was fit for settlement. A significant proportion of the remaining lands were allocated to twenty-six capitalist “colonizing companies.”337 The farmer in Canada thus finds himself hemmed in on all sides by the web of capital and its speculation. Yet mass immigration to Canada continues, not only from Europe, but from the U.S. as well!
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*That is, William Montagu, a conservative member of parliament at the time.
These are the movements induced by capitalist domination on the world stage: having been driven from the land in the U.K., the peasant was first pushed to the eastern United States, and then westward, where he was once again transformed into a petty commodity producer on the ruins of the American Indian economy. Suffering ruin yet again in the west, he was driven northward. Railways led the way, and ruin followed in their tracks—in this movement, capital was both engine driver and executioner bringing up the rear. There has been a return to the general trend of rising prices for agricultural produce after prices plummeted during the 1890s, but this benefits the American small-scale farmer as little as it does the European peasant.
Admittedly, the number of farms is constantly rising. It increased from 4.6 million to 5.7 million over the last decade of the nineteenth century, and has also continued to grow over the last decade. At the same time, the aggregate value of farms has also risen (from $750 million to $1.65 billion in the last ten years).338 The general increase in prices of agricultural produce might have been expected to help the farmer out, but in fact the proportion of tenant farmers has risen more rapidly than the overall number of farmers. Of the total number of farmers in the U.S., the proportion of tenant farmers was 25.5 percent in 1880, 28.4 percent in 1890, 35.3 percent in 1900, and 37.2 percent in 1910. Despite rising prices for agricultural produce, the proportion of tenant farmers relative to independent farmers is constantly increasing. The former, who make up considerably more than a third of all farmers in the U.S., in reality constitute a stratum corresponding to European agricultural laborers: they are veritable wage-slaves to capital, a constantly fluctuating element driven to work extremely hard to create wealth for capital without being able to eke out anything but a miserable and insecure existence.
In a completely different historical context—in South Africa—the same process demonstrates even more clearly the “peaceful methods” used by capital in competition with the petty commodity producer.
In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, purely peasant relations prevailed until the 1860s. For a long time, the Boers had lived as nomadic pastoralists, having done their best to kill off or drive out the Khoikoi and other indigenous peoples in order to take the best pastures from them. In the eighteenth century, the Boers’ cause had been furthered by the smallpox that was brought over by the ships of the East India Company; repeated epidemics wiped out entire tribes of Khoikoi, thus leaving the land free for the Dutch settlers. When the latter spread eastward, they clashed with the Bantu-speaking tribes and initiated the long era of terrible “Kaffir Wars.”* The devout, God-fearing Dutch, who considered themselves to be a “chosen people” and prided themselves on their old-fashioned, puritan morals and on being well versed in the Old Testament, were not content with merely stealing the lands of the indigenous inhabitants: like parasites, they established their peasant economy on the backs of the Black Africans, forcing them to work as slaves for them, and systematically and deliberately corrupting and demoralizing them to that end. Liquor played such an essential role in this process that the prohibition on alcohol by the British government failed in the Cape Colony due to the resistance of the Puritans. In general, the Boer economy remained a predominantly patriarchal and natural one until the 1860s. The first railway was not built in South Africa until 1859. The patriarchal character of the Boers did not prevent them from displaying an extreme callousness and brutality, however. It is well known that [David] Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about the Black Africans. The Boers considered the Black Africans to be an object whose natural and God-given purpose was to perform slave labor for them, and held that this was an indispensable foundation of their peasant economy. Consequently, when slavery was abolished in the British colony in 1836,* the Boers responded with the “Great Trek,” despite the fact that the slave-owners had been compensated with £3 million. The Boers emigrated from the Cape Colony, crossing the Orange and the Vaal; in the process, they drove the Ndebele northwards across the Limpopo, setting the latter against the Makalaka. Just as the American farmer drove the American Indians westward under pressure from the capitalist economy, so the Boer drove Black Africans northward. The “Free Republics” between the Orange and the Limpopo thus emerged as a protest against the British bourgeoisie’s infringement of the sacred right to slavery. The tiny peasant republics were involved in a constant guerrilla war with the Bantu-speaking Africans, and then a struggle lasting several decades was fought out between the Boers and the British government on the backs of the Africans. The Black African question—i.e. the question of the emancipation of Black Africans, for which the British bourgeoisie purported to strive—served as a pretext for the conflict. In reality, however, the peasant economy and the colonial policy of large-scale capital engaged each other in a competitive struggle over the Khoikoi and other indigenous peoples—i.e. over their land and their labor-power. The goal of both competitors was exactly the same: to crush, drive out, or exterminate Black Africans, to destroy their forms of social organization, to appropriate their land, and to compel them to work in conditions of exploitation. Only the methods employed were fundamentally different. The Boers represented the ancient form of slavery on a small scale as the foundation for a patriarchal peasant economy, whereas the British bourgeoisie represented modern, large-scale capitalist exploitation of the country and its indigenous inhabitants. The expression of bigotry in the constitution of the Transvaal Republic is terse: “The People shall not permit any equality of colored persons with white inhabitants, neither in the Church nor in the State.”339
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*These are also known as the Xhosa Wars or Cape Frontier Wars. There were nine such wars between 1779 and 1879.
*In 1833 the U.K. passed the Abolition of Slavery Act, which was intended to apply to all of its overseas possessions. It was not until 1835, however, that slaves began to be freed in the Cape Colony. In 1836, largely in response to the implementation of the Abolition of Slavery Act, thousands of Boers began the so-called “Great Trek” in search of new lands to occupy in which to retain their slaves.
In Orange and in Transvaal, no black person was allowed to own land or travel without papers, and there was a curfew for black people after sunset. [James] Bryce tells of a case in which a British farmer had flogged his “kaffir” to death. When the farmer, who had been put on trial, was acquitted, his neighbors feted him with music as they escorted him home. White people frequently attempted to deprive free indigenous workers of their wages by subjecting them to violence after they had finished their work and causing them to flee.
The British government pursued a strategy that was diametrically opposed. For a long time it played the role of protector of the indigenous people, and it especially wooed the local chieftains, propping up their authority, and attempting to impute the right of disposal over lands to them.* To the extent that it was successful, it thus employed tried and tested methods to transform the chieftains into owners of the tribal lands, even though this flew in the face of the traditions and actual social relations of Black Africans. The lands of all the tribes was in fact communal property, and even the most ruthless and despotic rulers, such as the “Matabele” chieftain Lobengula [Khumalo]† merely had the right as well as the duty to allocate to each family a plot of land, which would only remain in the possession of the family for as long as it was cultivated. The ultimate goal of British policy was clear: it was preparing, long in advance, for land theft on a grand scale, using the indigenous chieftains themselves as tools. At first, British policy was restricted to the “pacification” of the Black Africans through large-scale military action. Nine bloody “Kaffir Wars” were fought until 1879 in order to break the Black Africans’ resistance.
It was not until two events that inaugurated a new era in the history of South Africa—the discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields between 1867 and 1870, and that of the gold mines in the Transvaal between 1882 and 1885—that British capital was prompted to give a forceful demonstration of its actual intentions. Soon the British South Africa Company—i.e. Cecil Rhodes—sprang into action. There was a rapid swing in British public opinion. Lust for South African treasures drove the British government to take forceful measures. No cost, no blood sacrifice was deemed too great by the British bourgeoisie in order to conquer the lands of South Africa.‡ Suddenly there was a huge flow of immigrants pouring into the country. Immigration had been rather slow until this time, as emigration from Europe had been deflected from Africa to the U.S. After the discoveries of the diamond and gold fields, the numbers of white people in the South African colonies soared: between 1885 and 1895, 100,000 Britons emigrated to Witwatersrand alone. The modest peasant economy was now pushed into the background, with mining and mining capital now taking center stage.
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*The British employed this strategy as part of an effort to impose their control through “divide and rule” by getting local chieftains to ally with them against other indigenous groups—much along the lines of their strategy in taking over India.
†Lobengula was the last king of the Ndebele people—generally pronounced “Matabele” by the British.
‡This sentence was left out of Schwarzschild’s 1951 translation of The Accumulation of Capital.
The British government now performed a volte-face in its policy. In the 1850s, the British had recognized the Boer republics in the Sand River Convention* and the Bloemfontein Convention.† Now, however, they began the political encirclement of the tiny republics by occupying all surrounding areas, in order to prevent them from expanding; at the same time, the Black Africans, the longtime protégés and favorites of the British, were sacrificed. Blow by blow, British capital forged ahead. In 1868, the U.K. took control of Basutoland—naturally only after the indigenous people had “repeatedly implored them to do so.”340 In 1871, the Witwatersrand diamond fields were seized from the Orange Free State and turned into a Crown Colony under the name of West Griqualand. In 1879, Zululand was conquered and subsequently integrated into the colony of Natal. In 1885, Bechuanaland was annexed and then incorporated into the Cape Colony. In 1888, the British took control of the Ndebele lands and Mashonaland. In 1889, the British South Africa Company was given a charter for both of these areas—of course, this, too, was merely out of courtesy to the indigenous inhabitants and in response to their entreaties.341 In 1884 and 1887, the U.K. annexed St Lucia Bay and the entire east coast as far as the lands that were in Portuguese possession. In 1894, the U.K. took possession of Tongaland. The Ndebele and Mashona rose up in one last desperate struggle, but the British South Africa Company, with Rhodes at its head, put down the insurrection first with great bloodshed,‡ and then using the tried and tested means for the civilization and pacification of the indigenous inhabitants: two great railways were built in the area of the insurgency.
Suddenly finding themselves in a stranglehold, the situation was becoming ever more uncomfortable for the Boer republics. Internally, too, everything was going haywire. The huge torrent of immigration and the waves generated by the new, feverish capitalist economy soon threatened to breach the barriers of the small peasant states. There was indeed a glaring contradiction both in the fields and at the level of the state between the peasant economy and the exigencies and requirements of capital accumulation. The republics failed in every respect to come to terms with the new problems facing them. A series of factors combined to produce the sudden and devastating bankruptcy of the peasant republics: the ineptness and primitiveness of the administration; the constant peril posed by the Black Africans, no doubt favorably regarded by the British; the corruption that had infiltrated the Volksraad as large-scale capitalists used bribery in order to get their way; the lack of a police force to keep the unruly hordes of adventurers in order; the lack of water supplies and means of transport to provide for a colony that had suddenly sprung up with 100,000 immigrants; the lack of labor legislation regulating and securing the exploitation of Black Africans in the mines; the high protective tariffs, which made labor-power more expensive for capitalists; finally, the high freights for coal.
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*The Sand River Convention was an agreement of 1852 in which the U.K. recognized the Boer Transvaal Republic. In exchange, the Boers agreed to end slavery.
†The Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 formally established the Orange Free State of the Boers. In exchange for the Boers agreeing to end slavery, the British cancelled their prior agreements with a number of African chiefdoms in the area, which enabled the Boers to establish military domination over them.
‡This is a reference to the Second Matabele War of 1896 to 1897, when the Ndebele (or Matabele, as called by the British) people rose up against the British South Africa Company. It was mainly fought in what is now Zimbabwe. The Mashona people joined the revolt in June 1896, only to be defeated by the British following their suppression of the Ndebele. At the conclusion of the war the lands of the Matabele and Mashona became the British colony of Rhodesia.
Characterized by a coarse narrow-mindedness, the Boer republics defended themselves against the landslides and lava flow of capitalism that were engulfing them with the most primitive means imaginable—means that were only to be found in the armory of the obstinate and hidebound peasant: they denied all civic rights to the mass of Uitlander,* who far outnumbered them in number and who represented capital, power, and the tide of history over and against them! In these critical times, this was a mere farce. Economic mismanagement by the peasant republics had caused dividends to fall sharply, and investors lost patience. Mining capital was in open revolt. The British South Africa Company built railways, crushed the Black Africans, organized uprisings by the Uitlander, and ultimately provoked the Boer War.† The knell had sounded for the peasant economy. In the U.S., the war had been the starting point for the profound transformation, whereas in South Africa it was its conclusion. The result was the same in both cases: the victory of capital over the petty peasant economy, which itself had emerged on the ruins of the primitive, natural economic forms of organization of the indigenous inhabitants. The resistance of the Boer republics against the U.K. was as hopeless as that of the American farmer against the rule of capital in the U.S. In the new Union of South Africa, which has replaced the small peasant republics with a great modern state, thus realizing Cecil Rhodes’s imperialist program, it is capital that has officially assumed command. The old opposition between the British and the Dutch has now been superseded by the new one between capital and labor: both nations have sealed their touching fraternal union in the new state with the civil and political disenfranchisement of the population of five million black workers by one million white exploiters. It was not only the Blacks of the Boer republics who emerged empty-handed from this process; those of the Cape Colony, whom the British government had previously granted equal rights, also found these partially withdrawn from them. This noble endeavor, which crowned the imperialist policy of the Conservatives with a brazen show of force, was accomplished by the Liberal Party to the frenzied applause of the “liberal cretins of Europe,” who felt great pride in the moving gesture with which the U.K. granted the handful of whites in South Africa full self-government and freedom, hailing it as proof of the enduring creative power and greatness of liberalism in the U.K.
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*“Uitlander” is Afrikaans for “foreigner”; it was usually used to refer to British migrants to South Africa.
†The First Boer War, between the U.K. and the Boers, was from 1880–81; the Second Boer War was from 1899–1902.
The ruin of independent handicrafts through competition from capital constitutes a chapter in its own right—a less thunderous one, but no less harrowing. Capitalist domestic industry—the putting-out system—is the darkest episode in this chapter, but there is no need to go further into these phenomena here.
The general result of the struggle between capitalism and the simple commodity economy is the following: once it has replaced the natural economy with the simple commodity economy, capital itself supplants the latter. While it is true that capitalism lives from noncapitalist formations, it is more precise to say that it lives from their ruin; in other words, while this noncapitalist milieu is indispensable for capitalist accumulation, providing its fertile soil, accumulation in fact proceeds at the expense of this milieu, and is constantly devouring it. Historically speaking, the accumulation of capital is a process of metabolism occurring between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production. The accumulation of capital cannot proceed without these precapitalist modes of production, and yet accumulation consists in this regard precisely in the latter being gradually swallowed up and assimilated by capital. Accordingly, capital accumulation can no more exist without noncapitalist formations, than these are able to exist alongside it. It is only in the constant and progressive erosion of these noncapitalist formations that the very conditions of the existence of capital accumulation are given.
The assumptions made by Marx in his reproduction schema thus merely correspond to the objective historical tendency of the movement of accumulation and its theoretical end result. The accumulation process tends to replace the natural economy with the simple commodity economy, and to replace the latter with the capitalist economy everywhere—i.e. it tends to bring capitalist production to a position of absolute dominance as the single and exclusive mode of production in all countries and in all branches.
This is the beginning of a dead-end street, however. Once the end result is achieved—at least in terms of the theoretical construction, if not in practice—accumulation becomes an impossibility: the realization and capitalization of surplus value is transformed into an insoluble problem. At the very moment when Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction corresponds to reality, it registers the endpoint, the historical confines of the movement of accumulation, and thus the end of capitalist production. In capitalist terms, the impossibility of accumulation implies the impossibility of the further development of the productive forces, and thus the objective historical necessity of capitalism’s demise. Hence derives the contradictory movement of the last, imperialist phase of capital’s historical trajectory.
The Marxian schema of expanded reproduction thus does not correspond to the conditions of accumulation, as long as this is able to proceed; it cannot be conjured up out of the fixed, reciprocal relationships and dependencies between the two great departments of social production (i.e. the department producing means of production, and the one producing means of consumption) as formulated by the schema. Accumulation is not merely an internal relation between the branches of the capitalist economy—it is above all a relation between capital and its noncapitalist milieu, in which each of the two great branches of production can partially go through the accumulation process under its own steam, independently of the other, although the movement of each intersects, and is intertwined, with the other at every turn. The complex relations that result from this process—the variations in pace and direction of the trajectories of accumulation of both departments, their interconnections with noncapitalist formations both materially and in terms of value—cannot be expressed in the form of a precise schema. The Marxian schema of accumulation is merely the theoretical expression for the moment at which the dominance of capital will have reached its outer confines, and as such it no less a scientific fiction than his schema of simple reproduction, which is the theoretical formulation of the starting point of capitalist production. These two fictions demarcate the space in which the precise theoretical understanding of the accumulation of capital and its laws is to be gained.