The section on so-called primitive accumulation (I do not know why it is “so-called”) is Marx’s most historical exposition in Volume I. It traces the period from approximately the 16th century to the early 19th century, which encapsulates the emergence of capitalism in England. As usual, Marx’s history is polemical—his primary focus is to smash the bourgeois myth that this was a peaceful, “idyllic” process whereby capitalism evolved by its natural economic laws. Instead, he states boldly that “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (926) But Marx also grounds his description of primitive accumulation in the dialectical understanding that it was contradictory: at once liberating and enslaving for the laboring masses.
For Marx, the essential struggle of primitive accumulation is the conflict between the feudal lords, the emergent capitalist class, the peasantry and the emergent proletariat. The capitalist class seems to have coalesced out of a combination of merchants, money lenders, artisans and former feudal lords who were able to parlay initial accumulations of wealth into capital. The key catalyst was the dissolution of the feudal estates with the advent of mass agricultural production. As demand for wool increased, many landowners saw it as more profitable to convert the common feudal lands that were worked by the peasantry into grazing pastures for sheep. This led to the progressive enclosure of these common lands during this period, forcing the peasants off the land and converting them into landless proletarians. Marx states that common agricultural land had disappeared in England by 1750.
Alongside this enclosure movement, a violent process of plunder was taking place outside of Europe as the slave trade grew and European explorers rampaged through the Americas, stealing gold and silver. These adventures, which were often backed by states and their banks and joint-stock companies, provided the massive initial wealth with which capital accumulation could begin. This initial period of imperialism prefigures the properly capitalist imperialism starting in the late 19th century, which uses similar methods of leveraging massive amounts of wealth, but is distinguished in that its primary feature is the export of capital as opposed to the extraction of natural resources. As Marx states, capitalist imperialism was beginning during his time with colonial plunder but it wouldn’t reach maturity until slightly after his death.
But Marx lays out the dialectical unfolding of primitive accumulation in the following way: “Hence the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” (875)
Marx’s point here is that while the emergent working class was liberated from the bondage of serfdom, it was simultaneously enslaved by capitalism. While the peasant possessed a sort of private property in his limited ability to own his labor, now with the assent of “private property” as a juridical governing principle, he is completely dispossessed, with only his labor-power to sell. Private property under the emergent capitalist system is only the right to exploit the labor of others.
Primitive accumulation, then, entails the splitting apart of the worker from the means of production. As Sismondi puts it, quoted by Marx in a footnote, “We are in a situation which is entirely new for society… we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour.” (928) We see the massive growth of wealth by the emergent capitalist class and the complete atomization and alienation of the laboring masses. Contrary to Adam Smith’s notion that capitalists became capitalists because they were hard-working and frugal, in fact the primary tool of the capitalist class in its revolution was violence and plunder.
World of Lenidzky 