In addition to the theoretical input into Marx’s main work, there was a considerable input from factual knowledge both of the history of English capitalism and contemporary English factory conditions. Marx explains in his preface the reason for taking his historical material from England:
The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. (Capital, 1959, p. 8)
Marx goes on to tell his German readers that this is also their future and indeed that where industry had already developed in Germany the situation was far worse for lack of factory legislation. He also praises the English factory inspectors very highly:
We should be appalled by the state of things at home if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it was possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food. (p. 9)
Marx himself read the reports of these inspectors with great care, and they are often quoted in Capital.
I want in this chapter to look at two very different sections in Capital which show this work in its factual dimension. The first is one of the parts where Marx shows what exploitation meant in real terms to the workers who suffered it, the chapter on the working day. The second is an account of how, in historical fact, the separation of the means of labour from the worker came about.
The working day
In the first section of the chapter on the working day, Marx sets up a hypothetical debate between the capitalist as the personification of self-expanding capital, and a worker. The worker’s case is apparently along the lines of a real manifesto issued by London builders striking for a nine-hour day. The capitalist, having bought a day’s labour-power, wants the worker to work as many hours in that day as is possible, resting only enough to be back on the job the next morning. For the price of a day’s labour-power is to maintain the worker for a day, and the more hours worked in that day the more the surplus that accrues to the capitalist. It is in this connection that Marx uses a metaphor very reminiscent of his early writing. Calling capital ‘dead labour’ (since the means of labour that are the material embodiment of capital are the product of past labour), Marx writes that, ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (p. 233).
The worker, on the other hand, puts another gloss on the question of what the capitalist has legitimately bought. Suppose, he says, that overwork kills him in ten years, when he could otherwise have expected a working life of thirty years: the capitalist is using up three days’ labour-power for the price of one.
Of course, from a human point of view, the worker ought to be able to live out his natural life, but from the point of view of the law of exchanges, capitalist and worker have equal claims here.
Between equal rights force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class. (p. 235)
In the second section of this chapter, Marx compares capitalist exploitation with exploitation in pre-capitalist societies. He mentions that:
Where not the exchange-value but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production itself. Hence in antiquity overwork becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money form; in the production of gold and silver. (p. 235)
He quotes Diodorous Siculus on working to death in the ancient gold mines. The Athenian silver mines at Lavrion would be another example.
Marx goes on to compare the neo-feudal exploitation of peasants in nineteenth-century Romania with the exploitation of proletarians in England. In both cases, production is for the market, so there is an unlimited demand for surplus labour; but in Romania, surplus labour took the ‘visible’ form or a corvée or conscription of peasants’ labour to work for the boyards (aristocrats) on a certain number of days per year. Marx points out that, just as English manufacturers did, the boyards strove, legally or illegally, to maximize the hours of peasants’ labour that they could conscript.
Section three of the chapter on the working day has the title ‘Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation’. Just as a chemist will ensure that the materials used in their experiments are pure, and a student of animal behaviour will observe animals in conditions unaffected by interaction with humans by concealing cameras in their habitats, so Marx, in order to study capitalism in its pure or ‘wild’ form, looks at industries unaffected by legislation. This will establish tendencies inherent in capitalism, which tendencies are in modern societies modified by political restraints, but still exist, just as gravity is operating even when the roof is not falling on your head. Much of this chapter is quoted from reports of magistrates, doctors or other concerned authorities.
Factory legislation had initially been restricted to the textile industry. Marx’s first example of unlimited exploitation is the lace industry, where children of nine or ten worked from two, three or four in the morning till ten, eleven or twelve at night. This is asserted by a magistrate at a meeting in Nottingham in 1860, and reported in the Daily Telegraph from which Marx quotes it. The magistrate refers to:
Their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stonelike torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate ... We are not surprised that Mr Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against discussion ... The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually. (pp. 243–4)
Marx next discusses the pottery industry, in which children of seven were worked fifteen hours a day. Statistics also showed that adult workers in this industry were being killed by their work: in Stoke-on-Trent, 36.6 per cent of the population were potters, but more than half the deaths were from lung diseases caused by working in pottery. Only immigration from rural areas kept the population going.
Although the length of the working day is Marx’s main concern in this chapter, working conditions are discussed insofar as they ruin health and shorten workers’ lives. In the manufacture of Lucifer matches, a kind of lockjaw was caused by chemical pollution. There was
a range of the working day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture. (p. 246)
Children as young as six were among those working in these conditions.
Marx also documents the dangers to the public of overwork in transport industries. Railway employees prosecuted after an accident that had killed hundreds pointed out that their working day had, over the last five or six years, been raised from eight hours to fourteen, eighteen or twenty hours.
After a discussion of nightwork – and adulteration of goods – in baking, Marx concludes this section with an account of a woman who was literally worked to death in a fashionable London milliners, and of the degeneration under capitalism of conditions in the blacksmith’s trade, once regarded as a healthy occupation in its rural setting, but which had been so changed by the unlimited demands of capitalist exploitation that it was dramatically shortening the lives of its workers. The blacksmith
can strike so many blows per day, walk so many steps, breathe so many breaths, produce so much work, and live an average, say, of fifty years; he is made to strike so many more blows, to walk so many more steps, to breathe so many more breaths per day, and to increase altogether a fourth of his life. He meets the effort; the result is, that producing for a limited time a fourth more work, he dies at 37 for 50. (p. 256)
Of course, the tendency of capitalism documented in this chapter – the tendency to extend the working day to its physical maximum – has since been offset in every trade (in prosperous countries) by legislation and trade-union action. But as a tendency it still exists, and occasionally is illegally realized. The same is rather more often true of unhealthy working conditions. A friend of mine who worked in motor manufacture was told by his doctor to give up his job if he valued his lungs. And in jobs that are not paid an hourly rate, unpaid overtime is often enforced.
In the following section, Marx discusses nightwork and the relay system, whereby (for instance) steelworks were kept open at all hours, exploiting child labour at night as well as day. This may be the place for a word about Marx’s attitude to women’s labour, which he mentions here. He certainly saw the involvement of women in productive industrial work as something that had come to stay and which, under conditions more suitable to human beings, would be liberating. He had no wish to limit women to domestic labour. Indeed, even child labour had his support provided it was in healthy conditions, and combined with education. But he just as certainly thought that some trades were unsuitable for women. In this section, he says, ‘In some branches of industry, the girls and women work through the night together with the males’ (p. 257) and he appends in a footnote a quote from an inspector’s report:
Marx clearly approves of these comments and concludes that women should not be employed in this kind of work. If anyone feels that this makes him a collaborator in the oppression of women, it should be said in his defence that the women of that period were only too glad to get out of trades of this nature, and did not see this as a restriction of their ‘freedom of labour’, any more than did the men who were effectively prevented from working more than ten hours by the factory acts (though the employers tried to depict the factory acts as such a restriction on freedom).
In section five, Marx looks at the pre-history of the struggle to reduce the working day. He again points out that the capitalist wants the whole twenty-four hours, minus only what is necessary to enable the worker to get back to work next day, and does not have any regard for
time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) – moonshine! (p. 264)
He mentions that rural workers were still sometimes imprisoned for working in the garden on a Sunday, yet a factory worker would be punished for breach of contract if he failed to work for his boss on a Sunday, even if his motives were religious.
For Marx, the issue at stake is whether the worker is ‘nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power’ or whether he or she also had a life to live. But the capitalist goes even further than just reducing the worker to labour-power.
In this connection, Marx compares wage labour in the UK with slavery in the USA. As long as slaves were irreplaceable workers on an isolated estate, the master had some self-interest in keeping them alive and well. But since it became possible to work your slave to death in Georgia or Mississippi and replace them with new slaves from Kentucky or Virginia, this was what many masters did. But this was parallel with what happened in some of the industrial towns of England and Scotland, as has already been mentioned in connection with the potteries. Proletarians who had been worked into an early grave were replaced by workers emigrating from rural districts, or from Ireland. Marx quotes from a speech in the House of Commons in 1863:
The cotton trade has existed for ninety years ... It has existed for three generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during that period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives. (p. 267)
Marx shows in this section that the individual capitalist is not necessarily to blame, but rather the system, for ‘Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist’ (p. 270). He mentions that twenty-six firms in the potteries, including Wedgwood, petitioned for legislation limiting working hours for children, since without such legislation no capitalist was free to introduce decent conditions, as the competition of those who did not would drive them out of business.
Free competition between capitalists does not unambiguously mean freedom, even for capitalists; capitalists may not be free to treat their workers decently unless they – and their competitors – are compelled to treat their workers decently. This shows why Marx should be taken seriously when he writes in the preface to Capital:
To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them. (p. 10)
So Marx is in no sense a ‘lifestyle socialist’: he does not think that being a socialist entails trying to live as if socialism already existed, or trying to refuse to participate in capitalist institutions and practices, both of which are impossible. Being a socialist in a capitalist society means working for socialism, no more and no less.
Marx goes on to discuss the history of legislation about the working day. In his own time, such legislation was aimed at limiting the working day; but from the late Middle Ages till shortly before Marx’s time, legislation about the working day aimed to increase it. This makes it look as though there had been progress by Marx’s time, and in a sense there had. But working hours in Marx’s time were, in absolute terms, longer than in the pre-capitalist period when governments had been trying to lengthen them.
Thus the statute of 1496, in Henry Tudor’s time, set summer working hours (winter hours would have been shorter) as five a.m. till seven or eight p.m., with a total of three hours for meal breaks. This adds up to eleven or twelve hours, which is shorter than was commonly worked in the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts. Moreover, while capitalists in Marx’s time often broke the law and worked their labourers for longer hours, in King Henry’s time the opposite happened – hours were in practice shorter than the law required. Thus the working day had in practice increased with the coming of industrial capitalism. Marx quotes the recent law in Massachusetts which limited child labour to twelve hours a day, and comments that in the mid-seventeenth century this was the normal working day for able-bodied adults.
Marx quotes at length an eighteenth-century debate over whether it was desirable to compel workers to work a six-day week. Postlethwaite urges that the ingenuity and dexterity of English handworkers derives from their having leisure to relax in their own way. The author of an ‘Essay on Trade and Commerce’ disagrees, and recommends workhouses, which are ‘houses of terror’, with a twelve-hour working day, to intimidate workers into accepting longer hours with lower pay. Yet this twelve-hour day was, by the 1830s, regarded as dangerously short by the advocates of laissez-faire, when it was enacted for children of thirteen to eighteen. Likewise in France, the twelve-hour day was enacted during the Second Republic, and defended as the one good thing remaining from the Republic when Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III) sought to tamper with it.
This all indicates that capitalism had in fact increased the working day, where pre-capitalist and early capitalist legislation had failed to do so.
Marx goes on in section six to discuss the factory acts in the United Kingdom, which he sees as victories in the workers’ struggle, resisted and often disobeyed by most of the capitalists.
The first step was the 1833 Act, which set the working day at twelve hours for thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds, and eight hours for children of nine to thirteen. Marx argues that it was not properly enforced until 1844, when it was extended to women, and effectively to men, since bosses could not work the factory profitably without female and child labour. In 1847 the working day was reduced to ten hours. Capitalists responded by reducing wages by 25 per cent, and organizing petitions against the act, which some workers signed under duress. Marx quotes from a report of the factory inspectors the following dialogue and comment:
‘Though I signed it [the petition], I said at the time I was putting my hand to a wrong thing.’ ‘Then why did you put your hand to it?’ ‘Because I should have been turned off if I had refused.’ Whence it would appear that this petitioner felt himself ‘oppressed’, but not exactly by the Factory Act. (p. 284 n. 3)
Some capitalists also retaliated by sacking women and young people and reintroducing nightwork for men. Others avoided giving the statutory meal breaks by saying that the meal times were before work started in the morning and after it finished in the evening.
Nevertheless, the factory acts came to be accepted by society at large, and later, in the 1860s, were extended to industries other than textiles.
It will be easily understood that after the factory magnates had resigned themselves and become reconciled to the inevitable, the power of resistance of capital gradually weakened, whilst at the same time the power of attack of the working class grew with the number of its allies in the classes of society not immediately interested in the question. Hence the comparatively rapid advance since 1860. (p. 296)
In section seven, Marx looks at the spread of factory legislation to other countries. After the 1848 revolution, French workers got a twelve-hour day, explicitly for all, not just women and children, while
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California. (p. 301)
The eight-hour day also became one of the aims of the First International.
Marx sees the whole history of the working day as a prolonged class struggle. It was waged in various ways: by legislation, by campaigning on both sides for legislation, by industrial actions of various sorts on both sides, and by law-breaking on both sides. The law for Marx can always be seen as a weapon in class struggle, and if it is one side’s weapon, the other side will break it if possible and necessary. Class struggle has often taken the form of law-breaking: by oppressors, from Henry III breaking the Magna Carta, to modern bosses paying below the minimum wage; and by the oppressed, from Robin Hood and his merry men, to modern strikers breaking Thatcher’s anti-union legislation.
In Capital, the question of the working day has become central to Marx’s thought. The concept of exploitation involves the idea that only part of the working day is for the worker’s benefit, the remainder producing the boss’s unearned surplus. And the idea of having free time has become central to Marx’s notion of a society in which human fulfilment is possible. Thus he says in volume III of Capital:
Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite. (pp. 799–800)
Commentators have noted that reading Capital often leaves the reader with an intense hatred of capitalism, and no doubt this was Marx’s intention. The hatred is aroused mostly by perfectly objective reporting of the evils perpetrated by capitalism when it was untrammelled by legislation and trade-union resistance. But of course in all long-industrialized countries, capitalism is now subjected to those limits. Taken by themselves, the horrific histories recounted in Capital could be an argument for those limits, rather than for abolishing capitalism altogether. But at least it should be recognized that the tendency of capitalism is to transgress those limits; that even today it is engaged in constant struggle to loosen the restraints of legislation and to weaken the trade unions. It is a constant struggle on the part of the working class to keep the limits in place. Furthermore, modern capitalism can often avoid them altogether by transferring its investment to countries where the restraints are weak or non-existent. And it has succeeded in creating a new ‘long hours’ culture, where many fathers only see their children awake on Sundays, and people who want to leave work after an eight-hour day are caricatured as dinosaurs. Throughout the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, working hours were reduced, but then something of a plateau was reached, and in the United Kingdom since Thatcher they have risen again. It is perhaps timely to return to Marx’s programme for shortening the working day as the prerequisite of a ‘realm of freedom’ for humankind.
For those who find mathematical economics congenial, there is a section in Capital just before the chapter on the working day (pp. 224–9), called ‘Senior’s “Last Hour” ’. Here Marx takes to task the capitalist economist Nassau Senior, who calculated, just before the Ten Hours Act was passed, that all the profit in the textile industry was made in the last hour of the eleven-and-a-half-hour working day, and hence would disappear if the act were passed. Marx argues that Senior has miscalculated by assuming that the greater part of the working day was devoted, not to producing either wages or profit, but to replacing the capital laid out by the capitalist on plant and machinery. Marx’s own calculation based on Senior’s figures gives half the working day each to the production of wages and profits, and therefore predicts that the ten-hour day would still allow a substantial profit, 82 per cent instead of the 100 per cent prior to the Ten Hours Act. The capital laid out is not replaced by new value-creation, but its value is transferred to the product in proportion as it is used up. The outcome of the Ten Hours Act, which did not ruin industry, confirmed Marx’s predictions.
Primitive accumulation
Marx has explained how the decomposition of production into capital and labour-power reproduces itself from year to year and from generation to generation, so that whatever any individual does, relations of exploitation survive. He has also made it clear that this decomposition is not given by nature – it is a historical fact that the worker under capitalism has been deprived of his or her means of labour. But how did this fact come about historically?
Apologists of capitalism have given an account that makes it look as if, whatever we think of capitalism now, its origins are just. And there are still political philosophers today who think that a just distribution is one that has come about by free contracts from a just starting point. This is the view of Robert Nozick and his followers. The classical account goes like this: originally all were equal, but some worked hard and saved what they earned, while others were lazy or spendthrift; the former came to own capital, the latter not, and the latter, or their descendants, ended up as propertiless proletarians working for the former.
Actually it is not at all clear that this is even coherent. In a non-money economy, one could not accumulate capital; if you worked harder than your neighbour and produced more meat and vegetables, you might have a bigger Christmas dinner, but you could not keep them long. Saving presupposes money, and money presupposes that people already have power over the labour of others, for that is just what money is. However, Marx is not here concerned to prove that this ‘just’ primitive accumulation could not have taken place, but simply that it did not.
The process by which a class of proletarians without the means of labour came to exist alongside a class of capitalists with those means was very different. In the first place, though individual production did exist in the pre-capitalist world, there was not an economy of independent equals; the starting point of the process was another class society: feudalism. When serfs became legally free, in late-medieval England for example, they did not become equals with their lords, but tenants or, in some cases, wage labourers, most of whom would have had a few acres of land to farm on their own account. They may have had more independence than a proletarian, but they were a relatively underprivileged class, and were exploited through rent and interest.
Marx’s main concern, though, is with the next stage in the history: the way free peasants and artisans of the late Middle Ages were transformed into wage labourers. This started to happen in England first of all in the Tudor period.
In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal rights as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. (Capital, vol. I, p. 718)
The motive for this was the growth of the wool trade. Peasants who ploughed the land and ate what they raised were evicted from their lands and driven away from their villages, which became depopulated, while the lords turned the land into pasture for sheep, supporting a much smaller population, but yielding a much greater profit. Successive kings tried unsuccessfully to halt this process. On the other hand, the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII aggravated it, since lands which had been responsibly farmed were bought up by speculators and were depopulated for wool production. This process meant that tens of thousands of previously more or less independent yeomen were deprived of a livelihood, a place to live, and the security of the village community on which they would otherwise have relied in time of need. They had no alternative but to head for the towns, seek work as wage labourers or, failing to find it, to become vagabonds and beggars.
Perhaps the most shameful feature of this whole history of expropriation is the way the state authorities treated these vagabonds. By Henry VIII’s statute of 1530,
For the third offence, they were to be executed. The option of going back to their birthplace was of course not on, since their villages had often been razed to the ground, and not enough work was available in the towns. The stupid cast of mind behind this legislation we can still recognize well enough today in those who advocate harsher treatment of the unemployed as a remedy for unemployment, and write leaders in self-styled ‘quality’ papers to this effect. But the brutality of the punishments beggars belief. Elizabeth I and James I passed similarly brutal laws.
The process of expropriating the peasants did not stop with the Tudors. It was resumed on a massive scale in Scotland in the eighteenth-century ‘highland clearances’. Heads of clans, who were traditionally the nominal holders of clan land, started treating the land as their private property, and evicting its population to make way for deer forests. (‘Forest’ here has its older sense of a place where deer may be hunted – no tree-planting took place.) This they did with the support of the Whig oligarchy and the English army. This was still going on in the early nineteenth century: Marx tells of the Duchess of Sutherland, who appropriated 794,000 acres of clan land, and between 1814 and 1820 evicted 15,000 inhabitants, having their houses burnt down. One old woman who refused to leave was burnt to death in her house.
The process resumed in England too in the eighteenth century, with the enclosure of land, whereby the rural population lost the commons where they had traditionally been able to collect wood and graze animals.
Marx goes on to discuss briefly the origin of the capitalist farmer, developing from the feudal bailiff to the large tenant farmer, and profiting too from the enclosures of the eighteenth century. He points out how the dispossession of the peasants facilitated capitalism not only by creating a propertiless proletariat, but by depriving the rural population of the ability to grow their own food, thus creating a home market. And he traces the origin of the industrial capitalist, not so much in the successful craftsman as in the merchant or banker who set up industry outside the guild-regulated towns.
Further primitive accumulation came about through the slave trade and the exploitation of Asian countries. ‘In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world’ (pp. 759–60).
In the chapter called ‘Historical tendency of capitalist accumulation’, Marx fleshes out historically the point he makes in the passage I quote at the outset of the book. In the immediate pre-capitalist phase, there were many peasants and craftsmen who owned their own means of labour and thus were free in the work process, though they may have been exploited by landlords, merchants and usurers. Capitalism expropriates some by force and drives others out of business by competition, concentrating the means of production more and more into fewer and fewer hands. This process has advantages – co-operative labour, the application of science to production – but at the expense of the mass of people, who lose their freedom. Marx looks forward to this mass of people eventually ‘expropriating the expropriators’:
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e. on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of means of production.
The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. (pp. 763–4)
Finally, Marx comes to another test case between his thinking and that of capitalist ideologists: the case of the ‘colonies’, in the traditional sense of that word, namely Australia and New Zealand. Capitalists took capital and workers to the colonies, only to discover that, since land was freely available, the workers rapidly transformed themselves into independent farmers and artisans, and the capital was no use since it could not buy labour-power. Apologists of capitalism see capital as the rightful property of the capitalist, ownership of which in no way encroaches on the rights of anyone else. But capital is useless if there are no propertiless proletarians whose labour-power it can buy. A certain Mr Peel, who took with him to Australia £50,000 of capital and 3000 proletarians found when he arrived that he ‘was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river’ (p. 766). As Marx comments, ‘He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.’ In the mythology of capitalism, it differs from slavery and serfdom in that the capitalist’s domination is not over people, but only over property. But it is a form of property that is only useful if it buys domination over people.
What made capitalist relations impossible in Mr Peel’s situation? Simply the individual property of the workers. So individual property and capital, which are seen in capitalist propaganda as the same thing, are mutually incompatible. Consequently, those who wanted to re-establish capitalist relations of production in the colonies came up with the idea that the price of land there should be artificially raised above its market price, to keep the workers exploitable, which lets the cat out of the bag about the supposed ‘naturalness’ of capitalism.
What does this part of Capital, the final and perhaps the most easily readable part, actually prove? It certainly alters one’s perception of English history: Henry VIII was not just beastly to his wives and counsellors, but to the poor among his people too; Elizabeth I didn’t just kill Catholics and Baptists, but the chronically unemployed too. It also certainly proves that capitalism is not a ‘natural’ system, but depends historically upon the violent seizure of the means of life from the greater part of the people. But does it prove that capitalism today is unjust?
After all, we know that Bristol and Liverpool were built on the proceeds of the slave trade, but we do not conclude that those two great cities should be bulldozed down. The evil of the slave trade (that slave trade) is dead, and we rejoice both in its death and in any good that it might have left behind it.
One might accuse Marx of the ‘genetic fallacy’, that is, the idea that facts about the origin of something determine the value of it. But I think this would be mistaken. Marx is not saying that capitalism is bad because its origin is bad. That it is bad – whatever its origin – he has documented elsewhere, for instance in the chapter on the working day. But what he has done in this part of Capital is demolish an argument for capitalism which itself rests on the genetic fallacy, namely that which both the economists of his time and the recent philosophy of Robert Nozick offer: that capitalism is the consequence of a series of just transactions, and is therefore itself just.