Marx - Capital Ch 26-33

Ch 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

Economic myth
● two sorts of people
○ diligent, intelligent, frugal elite -> wealthy
○ lazy rascals, spending their substance, in riotous living -> impoverished
● methods of primitive accumulation involve conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and
force in general

● polarization of commodity market

○ owners of means of production
○ free workers, sellers of labor-power
■ do not own means of production
■ they are not the means of production (as slaves and serfs were)
● capital-relation created through divorce of worker from ownership of his labor conditions

● economic structure of capitalism <- economic structure of feudalism

● to become free seller of labor-power, the worker must

○ remove bonds and status of serf or slave
○ escape the regime of the guilds and their rules and regulations
● producers -> wage-laborers
○ only achieved after producers were robbed of means of production and lost
feudal guarantees of living
○ replacement of feudal lords with industrial capitalists
■ enslavement of the worker

● origins of capitalism: 14th or 15th century in the mediterranean

○ serfdom is abolished
○ coexisting independent city-states fall into disarray
● capitalist transformation robs laborers of their subsistence and throws them on the
market as free, unprotected, and rightness proletarians

Ch 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population front the Land

● 14th century England: end of serfdom in practice

● dissolution of feudal retainers largely expanded labor-market
● rise of wool; enclosure for sheep-walks
● legislative response to enclosure trends is fruitless
● legislative revival of old laws during reign of Charles 1 during the 17th century
○ 4 acres law

● dissolution of catholic monasteries hurled inmates into the proletariat

○ workers robbed of their legally-owned land
● poor-rate is introduced
 ● restoration of the Stuarts
○ landed proprietors abolished feudal tenure of land
○ taxed the people

● glorious revolution
○ colossal theft of lands by "capitalist profit-grubbers"

● wealth of a nation as it relates to the poverty of a people

● usurpation of common lands and agricultural revolution

○ agricultural laborers' wages fall below the minimum between 1765-80
○ necessitates Poor Law relief

● opposing view voiced by Dr Price

○ concentration of labor on one farm leads to manufacture surplus

● connection between agricultural laborer and communal property vanished by 19th

century

● clearing of estates
○ Scottish highlands and the clansmen
○ Duchess of Sutherland; sheep farms

Ch 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The
Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament

● the free and rightless proletariat became vagabonds and beggars

● legislation that punishes begging with violence, branding, slavery, and death

● capitalists use state to mold labor practices to expand profits

○ maximum wages
○ ban against worker combinations
○ extension of work day

Ch 29: The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer

● bailiff -> farmer -> share-cropper -> free farm-laborer

● usurpation of common lands - farmer augmented stock of cattle
● wealth of farmer
○ fall in value of precious metals and money
○ rise in prices of agricultural products swelled farmer's money capital
● rich class of capitalist farmers

Ch 30: Impact of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for
Industrial Capital
 ● workshop
○ combined workshop - benefits entrepreneurs
○ isolated workshop - makes workers comfortable
● manufacture incompletely transforms the economic landscape
● expropriation of agricultural population -> home market
● England as
○ a corn-growing country
○ a cattle-breeding country
● large scale industry completes the transformation by destroying the connection between
agriculture and rural domestic industry -> industrial capital

Ch 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist

● usurer's capital
● merchant's capital

● gold and silver in America

● extirpation, enslavement, and extermination of indigenous Americans
● conquest and plunder in India
● conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting

● colonialism -> devastation and depopulation

○ English East India Company
○ Puritans in New England
● colonial manufacture market
○ mother country monopoly of market

● system of public credit dated to Italy in the Middle Ages

○ national wealth only enters collective possession in the national debt
○ public credit as credo of capital
○ greater debt -> greater wealth
■ public bonds
○ debt -> joint-stock companies

● banks
○ Bank of England - 1694
■ lent its money to government at 8 percent
■ coin money out of same capital
■ credit-money became coin

● child labor

Ch 32: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

● private property
● shift to capitalism
○ socialization of labor and expropriation of the capitalist suggested
 ● transformation of individual property into capitalist private property and finally into social
property

Ch 33: The Modern Theory of Colonization

● mother country
○ capitalist regime has indirect control of social layers belonging to the antiquated
mode of production
● colonies
○ producers own conditions of labor

● systematic colonization: manufacturing wage-laborers in the colonies

○ capital is a social relation between persons mediated by things
○ means of production and subsistence are not capital
○ capital necessitates being means of exploitation and domination over the worker
○ worker accumulation prevents capitalist mode of production
○ slavery as sole natural basis of colonial wealth
● independent landowners in the colonies
● violation of supply and demand -> importation of paupers
○ regular supply of labor

capitalist mode of production and accumulation have for their fundamental condition the
annihilation of the private property which rests on the labor of the individual (expropriation of the
worker)