Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 10a
Poverty map of part of London, 1889; darker areas show slums or
“rookeries”.
Home Market
Marx's
first concern in his description of Primitive Accumulation is to establish
where the labour power came from, in the metropolitan countries where
capitalism was established as a system for the first time, and where it eventually
proved itself to be even more profitable than the slave trade that stole people
from Africa and worked them to death on plantations in North and South America,
and in the Caribbean islands.
The
expectation that the reader brings, on seeing the phrase “primitive
accumulation”, is therefore not necessarily fulfilled. It is not the case that
a hoard of money was first created, whether by plunder or by any other means,
so as to purchase the commencement of capitalism. Rather, it was a case of
piecing together the component parts of the capitalist system, which were: the
bourgeois class that had arisen from the peasantry; the dispossessed “free
labouring” proletariat, also originally peasants; and the ready market for
commodities constituted by both of these two new classes, together.
This new
abundance of available labour power in the metropolis, personified in citizens
without property, was the consequence of deliberate dispossession. It had the
immediate consequence of producing what we now call “unemployment”, which was
immediately criminalised as “vagrancy”. The unemployment was an essential
precondition for capitalism to arise, yet the bourgeoisie in its eternal
hypocrisy criminalised its own victims.
Our text
today, downloadable via the link given below, is a compilation of Chapters 28,
29 and 30 from Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1. It describes a time, long ago, when
the slogan could have been “Capitalism is the future, build it now”. The
elements of capitalism were being assembled then.
Chapter 28
is an easy read detailing the legal steps in the original case, that of
England.
Having
shown where their labour power came from, Marx at the beginning of Chapter 29
asks “whence came the capitalists originally?” This very short chapter answers
the question in the case of the capitalist farmers, who were the necessary
original capitalists, and who were already a historically-existing class in
England by the late 16th century (from which class later came, for
example, Oliver Cromwell).
In Chapter
30, Marx turns his attention to the question of just how yet another of the
necessary pre-requisites of capitalism came into being, namely the “home
market”. The very same peasants who had been thrown off the land into the towns
to live in shacks had to eat, whether they were working or not, and the farms
that they had left were still the only source of food. Thus was set in motion
the relation of demand and supply, and also of concentration of industries into
“manufactories” as opposed to the family-scale production of earlier times.
These kinds of changes can still be observed as they happen, in South Africa
Good images
of the slums of England, also once known as “rookeries” (the equivalent of
South Africa’s present-day “informal settlements”, less politely called
“squatter camps”) are hard to find. The illustration above is from the “Poverty
Map” of part of the East End of London, prepared by or on the orders of Charles Booth, a “philanthropist”. The
red areas are "middle class, well-to-do", light blue areas are “poor,
18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”, dark blue areas are “very poor,
casual, chronic want”, and black areas are the "lowest class...occasional
labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals".
Booth’s
1889 survey found that 35% of London’s huge 1889 population was living in
poverty.
Please download
and read the text via the following link:
Further reading:
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