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Expropriation of the Majority in Europe
Recall what Theodore Allen said about what made the “servant trade” from Europe possible:
The "servant trade," as it came to be called, that is, the export of chattel laborers from Europe, sprang up as a
response to the profit-making needs of the tobacco business, and it soon became a special branch of commerce….
Investors found the trade attractive. In England, votaries of what today is euphemized as "market principles" sold
English men and women for £2 per head (or even less, sometimes) if they had them already in captivity as convicts
or workhouse inmates. In all, some 92,000 European immigrants were brought to Virginia and Maryland between
1607 and 1682, the great majority being sent to Virginia. More than three-quarters of them were chattel bondlaborers, the great majority of them English (Allen 119).
But why were so many members of the British working class available for transport to Virginia? Why were so many of
them “already in captivity as convicts or workhouse inmates”? Why were so many of them a propertyless, outlawed
class, so that some would go so far as to voluntarily sell themselves into seven years of hard labor even if they were not
captured and transported? What is the economic relationship of the dispossession of the European majority to the
kidnapping and enslavement of the part of the African majority that was kidnapped, transported to the Americas, and
made into a key part of the propertyless working class?
Finding the answer to those questions leads us to the key characteristic of capitalist societies: the expropriation of the
majority. Capital is a system in which the people who produce the wealth of the society do not own the means of
production (what you need to produce) or the means of subsistence (what you need to survive). And because of this the
product of their labor does not accumulate as wealth in their own hands. Instead, the product of the labor of the
majority accumulates in the hands of the owners of the means of production and subsistence, who are a minority. The
term for people who do not own their own means of production is the proletariat. In capitalist societies, the proletariat
makes up the majority of the population.
[Everything below here is excerpted from Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1. Starting quotes from Marx:]
[Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation:” the original creation of a propertyless working majority:]
The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for
the realization of their labor. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this
separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation
can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labor;
it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned
into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-laborers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is
nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’
because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital….
Although we come across the first sporadic traces of capitalist production as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth
centuries in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century….
In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the
course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and
forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless
proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole
process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various
phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as
our example, has it the classic form.
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Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
ln England, serfdom had disappeared in practice by the last part of the fourteenth century. The immense majority of the
population1 consisted then, and to a still larger extent in the fifteenth century, of free peasant proprietors, however
much the feudal trappings might disguise their absolute ownership. In the larger seigniorial domains, the old bailiff,
himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage-laborers of agriculture were partly peasants, who made use
of their leisure time by working on the large estates, and partly an independent, special class of wage-laborer, relatively
and absolutely few in numbers. The latter were also in practice peasants, farming independently for themselves, since,
in addition to their wages, they were provided with arable land to the extent of four or more acres, together with their
cottages. Moreover, like the other peasants, they enjoyed the right to exploit the common land, which gave pasture to
their cattle, and furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, etc. In all countries of Europe, feudal production is
characterized by division of the soil amongst the greatest possible number of sub-feudatories. The might of the feudal
lord, like that of the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent-roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the
latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors. Thus although the soil of England, after the Norman conquest,
was divided up into gigantic baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was
strewn with small peasant properties, only interspersed here and there with great seigniorial domains. Such conditions,
together with the urban prosperity so characteristic of the fifteenth century, permitted the development of … popular
wealth …, but they ruled out wealth in the form of capital.
The prelude to the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production was played out in the last
third of the fifteenth century and the first few decades of the sixteenth. A mass of ‘free’ and unattached proletarians
was hurled onto the labor-market by the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers…. [T]he great feudal lords …
created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the
same feudal title as the lords themselves, and by usurpation of the common lands. The rapid expansion of wool
manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England provided the direct impulse for these
evictions….
[In a section I’ve cut here, Marx uses a series of quotes from various historians to show that there was widespread
condemnation of this expropriation at the time, even among many aristocrats, and laws were passed in the late 1400s1500s to try to stop it, on the grounds that it was destroying the livelihood and independence of the people. Marx says
this was because back then, before capitalism, laws “did not yet stand at that high level of civilization where the ‘wealth
of the nation’ (i.e. the formation of capital and the reckless exploitation and impoverishment of the mass of the people)
figures as the ultima Thule of all statecraft.” Marx quotes the 25th Law of Henry VIII (early 1500s): “many farms and large
flocks of cattle, especially of sheep, are concentrated in the hands of a few men … and marvelous numbers of people
have been derived of the means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families.”]
The cries of the people and the legislation … against the expropriation of the small farmers and peasants, were both
equally fruitless…. [According to Francis Bacon, this legislation tried to keep] ‘farms … maintained with such a proportion
of land unto them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty and no servile condition, to keep the plough in the
hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.’5 What the capitalist system demanded was the reverse of this: a degraded
and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, their transformation into mercenaries, and the transformation of
their means of labor into capital.
The process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century [1500s]
from the Reformation, and the consequent colossal spoliation of church property. The Catholic church was, at the time
of the Reformation, the feudal proprietor of a great part of the soil of England. The dissolution of the monasteries, etc.,
hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal
favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and townsmen, who drove out the old-established
hereditary sub-tenants in great numbers, and threw their holdings together. The legally guaranteed property of the
poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was quietly confiscated….
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By about 1750 the yeomanry [small landowners] had disappeared and so, by the last decade of the eighteenth century,
had the last trace of the common land of the agricultural laborer. We leave on one side here the purely economic driving
forces behind the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the violent means employed.
After the restoration of the Stuarts [1660], the landed proprietors carried out, by legal means, an act of usurpation
which was effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land,
i.e. they got rid of all its obligations to the state, `indemnified` the state by imposing taxes on the peasantry and the rest
of the people, established for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to which they had [before]
only a feudal title….
The ‘glorious revolution’ [1688] brought into power … the landed and capitalist profit-grubbers. They inaugurated the
new era by practising on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands…. These estates were given away, sold at ridiculous
prices, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure…. The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together
with the stolen Church estates … form the basis of the present … domains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois
capitalists favored the operation, with the intention, among other things, of converting the land into a merely
commercial commodity, extending the area of large-scale agricultural production, and increasing the supply of free and
rightless proletarians driven from their land…. [T]he new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy,
of newly hatched high finance, and of the large manufacturers, at that time dependent on protective duties.…
Communal property - which is entirely distinct from the state property we have just been considering - was an old
Teutonic institution which lived on under the cover of feudalism. We have seen how its forcible usurpation, generally
accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the fifteenth century and extends into the
sixteenth. But at that time the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation,
for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the eighteenth century shows itself in this, that the
law itself now becomes the instrument by which the people’s land is stolen, although the big farmers made use of their
little independent methods as well. The Parliamentary form of the robbery is that of ‘Bills for Inclosure of Commons’, in
other words decrees by which the landowners grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of
expropriation of the people…..
While the place of the independent yeoman was taken by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile rabble
dependent on the arbitrary will of the landlords, the systematic theft of communal property was of great assistance,
alongside the theft of the state domains, in swelling those large farms … and in ‘setting free' the agricultural population
as a proletariat for the needs of industry.
The eighteenth century, however, did not yet recognize as fully as the nineteenth the identity between the wealth of the
nation and the poverty of the people. Hence the very vigorous polemic, in the economic literature of that time, on the
‘enclosure of commons’….
‘When,’ says Dr Price, ‘this land gets into the hands of a few great farmers, the consequence must be that the little
farmers’ (previously described by him as ‘a multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and
families by the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, etc., and who
therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence ’) ‘will be converted into a body of men who
earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a necessity of going to market for all they want ...
There will, perhaps, be more labor, because there will be more compulsion to it … Towns and manufactures will
increase, because more will be driven to them in quest of places and employment. This is the way in which the
engrossing of farms actually operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has been actually operating in this
kingdom.’21 He sums up the effect of the enclosures in this way: ‘Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks
of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of
day-laborers and hirelings; and, at the same time, their subsistence in that state has become more difficult.’23 In fact, the
usurpation of the common lands and the accompanying revolution in agriculture had such an acute effect on the
agricultural laborers that, even according to Eden, their wages began to fall below the minimum between 1765 and
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1780, and to be supplemented by official Poor Law relief. Their wages, he says, ‘were not more than enough for the
absolute necessaries of life’.
Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an opponent of Dr Price. ‘Nor is it a consequence that there must
be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their labor in the open field … If, by converting the little farmers
into a body of men who must work for others, more labor is produced, it is an advantage which the nation’ (to which, of
course, the people who have been ‘converted’ do not belong) ‘should wish for … the produce being greater when their
joint labors are employed on one farm, there will be a surplus for manufactures, and by this means manufactures … will
increase ….’24
By the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural laborer and communal property
had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times - have the agricultural population received a farthing’s
compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and
presented to the landlords by the landlords, through the agency of Parliament? …
The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands,
the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of
ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic moments of primitive accumulation. They conquered the
field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary
supplies of free and rightless proletarians….
Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The Forcing Down of
Wages by Act of Parliament
The proletariat created by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the
people from the soil, this free and rightless proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as
fast as it was thrown upon the world.… They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers and vagabonds,
partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances. Hence at the end of the fifteenth and during the
whole of the sixteenth centuries, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe.
The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers.
Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it was entirely within their powers to go on working
under the old conditions which in fact no longer existed…. [Take for example the English law of 1572]: Unlicensed
beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless someone will take them into
service….
[Marx cites many similar laws from England, France, and the Netherlands].
[Marx’s summary of the first expropriation of the majority:]
This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology.
Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as
an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all
frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. … Thus it came to pass that the
former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this
original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labor, have up to now nothing to sell but
themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid
childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. … [A]s soon as the question of property is at stake, it
becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the standpoint of the nursery tale …. In actual history, it is a notorious fact that
conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political
economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labor’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of
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enrichment, ‘this year’ of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are
anything but idyllic…
[873-874]
Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds,
and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the
system of wage-labor.
It is not enough that the conditions of labor are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the
other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labor-power. Nor is it enough that they are
compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by
education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The
organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant
generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labor, and therefore wages,
within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic
relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course
used, but only in exceptional cases. ln the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of
production', i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production
themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist
production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to ‘regulate’ wages, i.e. to force them into
the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of
dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation…. [899-900]
The different moments of primitive accumulation [include] the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and
the system of protection. These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all
employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process
of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the
midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power…. [915-916]
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous
population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a
preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist
production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the
commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It begins with the revolt of the
Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of
the Opium Wars against China, etc….[915]
[What a great effort it was] to unleash the ‘eternal natural laws’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the
process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labor, to transform, at one pole, the social means
of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-laborers, into
the free ‘laboring poor’, that artificial product of modern history…. [C]apital comes [into the world] dripping from head
to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt. [925-926]
[Excerpted by me from: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1976 Ben Fowkes translation, 1990 Penguin Classics Edition]
[Excerpted by me from: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1976 Ben Fowkes translation, 1990 Penguin Classics Edition, pp. 875-896.]
[I summarize a few of the footnotes of particular relevance here, or where Marx is quoting directly:]
1. [Marx quotes Macaulay’s History of England, 10th ed. (1854) for statistics; Macaulay notes that “It was computed that those who tilled their own land was greater
than the number of those who farmed the land of others.”]
5. [Marx cites Francis Bacon, The Reign of Henry VII, Verbatim Reprint from Kennet’s ‘England’, ed. 1719, London, 1870, p. 307.]
21., 23. [Footnotes 21. and 23. refer to Richard Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, 6th ed. (1803), vol. 2, pp.155-6, 9.]
24. [Footnote lists: “[J. Arbuthnot,] An Inquiry into the Connection between the Present Price of Provisions. etc., pp. 124, 129. Here is a similar argument, but with an
opposite tendency: ‘Working-men are driven from their cottages and forced into the towns to seek for employment; but then a larger surplus is obtained, and thus
capital is augmented’ ([R. B. Seeley,] The Perils of the Nation, 2nd ed., London, 1843, p. xiv.)”]
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