it's true that capitalism is always impure. But I don't see why the
impurities are necessary to capitalism. At least Marx didn't think
so.
^^^^
CB: Why do you say that Marx didn't think so ?
it depends on what we mean by "impure" of course. But it sure seems
like his theory involves capitalism taking over the whole world. Then,
or even before then, capitalism would be replaced by internal forces
(the proletariat). (Marx hoped for "before then" but his theory
suggests the possibility of a total takeover of the world by
capitalism.)
--
Jim Devine
^^^^^
CB: I'd say Marx's thinking on what you say above comes right there in the
Part on the Socalled Primitive Accumulation discussions, Chapter XXXII
Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. There he mentions how
capitalism develops into slavery. As I said one of the other times we
discussed these issues here on PEN-L, this can be interpreted as a general
tendency of capitalism to develop specially oppressed labor along side of
waged, doubly-free labor.
"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital,
who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation,
grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation;"
Capitalism reproduces oppression and slavery, worse than waged-labor, as a
moment of its historical tendency.
http://marxists.nigilist.ru/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
Part VIII: The So-Called Primitive Accumulation Chapter XXVI The Secret of
Primitive Accumulation
704
Chapter XXVII Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
707
Chapter XXVIII Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of
the 15th Century. Forcing down of Wages by Acts of Parliament
723
Chapter XIX Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer
731
Chapter XXX Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of
the Home Market for Industrial Capital
733
Chapter XXXI Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
738
Chapter XXXII Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
748
Chapter XXXIII The Modern Theory of Colonisation
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
________________________________________
Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
________________________________________
What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical
genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate
transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-laborers, and therefore a mere
change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers,
i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner.
Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists
only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to
private individuals. But according as these private individuals are laborers
or not laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless
shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate
stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the laborer
in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether
agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential
condition for the development of social production and of the free
individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of
production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of
dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains
its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of
his own means of labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land
which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.
This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering
of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these
means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor
within each separate process of production, the control over, and the
productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free
development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a
system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less
primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, to
decree universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings
forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new
forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old
social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be
annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the
individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated
ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few,
the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the
means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful
expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of
capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed
in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive
accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was
accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions
the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious.
Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing
together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the
conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property,
which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on
wage-labor. [1]
As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the
old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into
proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist
mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of
labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production
into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well
as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That
which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for
himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is
accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production
itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many.
Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many
capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative
form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science,
the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the
instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the
economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production
of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of
the world-market, and with this, the international character of the
capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the
magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process
of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery,
degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the
working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined,
united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist
production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.
Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last
reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist
integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist
private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
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 labor 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 re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual
property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on
co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of
production.
The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual
labor, 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 socialized production, into socialized 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. [2]
________________________________________
Footnotes
1. Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait nouvelle de la societé...
nous tendons a séparer toute espèce de propriété davec toute espèce de
travail. [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]
(Sismondi: Nouveaux Principes dEcon. Polit. t.II, p.434.) 2. The advance
of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the
isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary
combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry,
therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie,
therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.... Of all the classes
that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is
a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the
face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its special and essential
product.... The lower middle-classes, the small manufacturers, the
shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the
bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the
middle-class... they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of
history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen
Partei, London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.
