>From Michael Perelman's newly published "The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation" (Duke University Press): Although their standard of living may not have been particularly lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern Europe, like most traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free time. The common people maintained innumerable religious holidays that punctuated the tempo of work. Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, about one-third of the working days, including Sundays, were spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more extravagant estimate that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval Lower Bavaria. Despite these frequent holidays, the peasants still managed to produce a significant surplus. In English feudal society, for example, the peasants survived even though the gentry was powerful enough to extract something on the order of 50 percent of the produce. As markets evolved, the claims on the peasants’ labors multiplied. For instance, in southern France, rents appear to have grown from about one-fourth of the yield in 1540 to one-half by 1665. Although people increasingly had to curtail their leisure in order to meet the growing demands of nonproducers, many observers still railed against the excessive celebration of holidays. Protestant clergy were especially vocal in this regard. Even as late as the 1830s, we hear the complaint that the Irish working year contained only 200 days after all holidays had been subtracted. Time, in a market society, is money. As Sir Henry Pollexfen calculated: "For if but 2 million of working people at 6d. a day comes to 500,000 which upon due inquiry whence our riches must arise, will appear to be so much lost to the nation by every holiday that is kept." Zeal in the suppression of religious festivals was not an indication that representatives of capital took working-class devotion lightly. In some rural districts of nineteenth-century England, tending to one’s garden on the Sabbath was a punishable offense. Some workers were even imprisoned for this crime. Piety, however, also had its limits. The same worker might be charged with breach of contract should he prefer to attend church on the Sabbath rather than report for work when called to do so. In France, where capital was slower to take charge, the eradication of holidays was likewise slower. Tobias Smollett complained of the French: "Very nearly half of their time, which might be profitably employed in the exercise of industry, is lost to themselves and the community, in attendance upon the different exhibitions of religious mummery." Voltaire called for the shifting of holidays to the following Sunday. Since Sunday was a day of rest in any case, employers could enjoy approximately forty additional working days per year. This proposal caused the naive Abbe Baudeau to wonder about the wisdom of intensifying work when the countryside was already burdened with an excess population. How could the dispossessed be employed? Of course, changes in the religious practices of Europe were not induced by a shortage of people but by people’s willingness to conform to the needs of capital. For example, the leaders of the French Revolution, who prided themselves on their rationality, decreed a ten-day week with only a single day off. Classical political economists enthusiastically joined in the condemnation of the celebration of an excessive number of holidays. The suppression of religious holidays was but a small part of the larger process of primitive accumulation. ==== >From the back cover: The originators of classical political economy—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others—created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land. "This study is to be admired for its comprehensiveness, scope, and the amount of unearthing and excavation Perelman provides. The indictment of political economists who addressed themselves to the matter of primitive accumulation is masterful."—H. T. Wilson, York University "Michael Perelman’s excellent book is well documented and theoretically sound. After reading it we see our world in different colors. The origin of market capitalism is the product of strategies pursued to take away from people the conditions for developing alternative ways to live and produce. We also discover that classical political economy has been so instrumental in guiding these strategies. One is left to wonder how the same mechanisms are reproduced today, and since market capitalism was not inevitable but a result of policies, we are induced to look at the future as open. A blow of fresh air amid the stale cultural environment of today’s neoliberal capitalism. "—Massimo De Angelis, University of East London Michael Perelman is Professor of Economics at California State University, Chico. His books include The Natural Instability of Markets: Expectations, Increasing Returns, and the Collapse of Markets. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
