The Birth-pangs of Capitalism
Economists and politicians all argue that capitalism is the only economic system that works, that it is as “natural” to human life as the air we breathe. Not only do they try to cover up the brutality of capitalist exploitation today, they seek to hide the true history of how it all originated; their blatant distortion of specific historical facts conveniently and carefully find their way into our school textbooks.
TURNING PEASANTS INTO WORKERS
Four to five hundred years ago, there was no such thing as capitalism. The economic system that dominated the world was feudalism. In feudal societies, all power and wealth lay in the hands of the nobility who ruled by religious decree over the mass of poor peasants. Most peasants found themselves forced to scrape a living off the meager land they lived on: land owned principally by the feudal lord. This individual, in order to feed himself without actually doing any work, took his cut of the food grown by the peasants.
Feudalism, as a mode of economic production and definer of social relations, meant that the peasants, from their birth until their deaths, had to eke out a bare subsistence without leaving the lord’s manor. This kind of semi-free labor, where people were not directly owned by their masters (i.e., slaves), but neither were they free to quit or move from their master’s estate. This position of servitude constituted serfdom.
Peasant families and villages were, generally speaking, self-sufficient. The lord would grant his peasants the right to reside on his land and to use areas like hills and forests for their own economic activity: like gathering wood, herding, hunting, and using these raw materials to make such things as clothes and tools. It suited the lord, because he would take a cut of all the produced goods created by his serfs. This system had existed in various forms for thousands of years. So how did capitalism come about?
Capitalism began in England. A ruthless system, it was forcibly imposed on the peasantry by the new property owners (the bourgeoisie) and eventually codified in the legal system they devised. It was such an unnatural a way of life, that robbery of land, the beating and jailing of disobedient peasants, became commonplace for those unwilling to comply with the new regime – some even found themselves hanged for not cowering before the dictates of the rising capitalist class. It was, and remains to this day, a system based upon industry where small ruling classes of millionaire capitalists own what Marx called “the means of production”: the factories, power plants, land, and transport, all the means to produce the things we need.
The rest of society, on the other hand, comprises people who own nothing but their ability to sell their labor-power: the one and only commodity owned and exchanged by individuals of the working class. In order to survive, workers find themselves forced to work for the capitalist, who, in return, pays the workers a wage. He or she then takes what the workers make and then sells it on the market for a profit. Capitalism may be global today, but it started on a tiny island. How did this process begin, of turning peasants into workers?
In order to thrive, capitalism needed a captive labor force that had no land to live on, and, therefore, no alternative but to work for a capitalist. With the wage they received in exchange, they bought food and shelter instead of producing it for themselves. The capitalists did not need the peasants on the land, but they did need them in the factories; however, to create a working class, the capitalists had to throw the peasants off the land, which was the source of their livelihood, and it was not a peaceful process; it was an act of brutal force. The completion of forcing the peasants off their land resulted from the utilization of the enclosures.
THE ENCLOSURES: THE BIGGEST HEIST IN HISTORY
It is possible that you may have heard about enclosures at some point or another in history class; it actually went on for three centuries in waves. The aim was to stop forcibly the communal use of the land for planting or pasture, and, thus, redefining it as private property: forests, grass, soil, water, wildlife, everything found a price tag around it on the market. The reason was that as towns arose and trade developed, the lords could get a lot more out of their land if they produced for the market, selling food and other agricultural goods for a profit, rather than just taking their cut from the peasantry. This economic incentive to produce food for a market rather than consumption was the driving force behind the enclosures.
This took place in the year 1450 on a massive scale, and within 50 years half the country was enclosed; “a mass of free unattached proletarians were hurled onto the labor market.” From 1600-1760, a further 30% of the land was enclosed. Small plots gave way to big estates: by 1700, big aristocratic property owners held 75% of all cultivable land and were using it to farm for profit.
With the loss of the land began a new form of relationship in production. By 1400, the vast majority of peasants found themselves tied to the land on the feudal manor for life. By 1640, the capitalists succeeded in driving some 2 million peasants from their land – roughly 40% of the peasant population. In 1560, only 10% of the total peasant population became wage laborers, but by 1688, this figure was at stunning 56%. A proletariat was undoubtedly in the process of birth.
GET A JOB!
For long period, wage laborers could also work for themselves part-time and, therefore, escape full proletarianization. Capitalist methods of ownership and production in land and industry respectively had not developed to the point where it needed a massive force of full-time waged workers. During the 1700’s, however, the global market expanded to the point where it did. The feudal system of industry under which production took place in small workshops and guilds no longer sufficed for the growing needs of the market; thus, manufacturing took its place. Capitalist farmers wanted the rest of the land, and early manufacturers needed labor to fuel their mills and mines. The result was one final all-out war on communal land, by means of Acts of Parliament beginning in the 1760′s. Anti-vagrancy laws required everyone to find employment, in order to force the landless into work; the enforcement of these laws resulted in the death penalty for those who transgressed. The frequent use of the army was necessary in some instances to suppress riots and put down revolts. In the 1780’s the number of those in prison rose by 70%, and the number of executions nearly doubled.
The enclosures laid the basis for large-scale, capitalist agriculture that ultimately, through its efficiency and use of machinery, freed the majority of humanity from the endless, repetitive, drudgery of farming and the narrow horizons of village life, with its superstition, ignorance, and oppression of women and children. Whether such a thing could have occurred through a voluntary, just process is debatable, but what emerged was progressive compared to all previous societies. It provided the possibility of developing a society where by we have many different things we can do and buy; many different opportunities open to us: not the single option of a lifetime of backbreaking labor to make just enough food to eat and remain vulnerable to famine, disease, and plague. Nevertheless, the enclosures were at the same time a “massively violent act exercised by the upper classes against those of the lower ones.” Marx called it an act of “ruthless terrorism.”
THE RISE OF INDUSTRY: TURNING PEOPLE INTO MACHINES
By 1600 industry was already developing out of agriculture. Rural society along with the growing cities provided a mass market for industry (small tools, house fittings, footwear, and textiles). Up to around 1700, the making of these things by households was primarily a part-time profession of farmers and their families. Metalworking and textiles developed in the northern areas of England on this basis. The gradual transformation of peasant artisans into merchants and employers who then employed others of their class, i.e., those individuals pushed off the land by lords or by their inability to compete on the market, marked these years of economic transformation. Those who were more efficient, those who invested and concentrated production (and their workers) into one or a few workshops gained over those who remained locked into primitive and small-scale methods of production.
Even until well into the 18th century, most exploited workers did not work in factories; this form of work was still exceptional: seeing it as a form of punishment and loss of independence. Early factories were set up as a sort of “houses of correction,” sucking in child labor since people would not easily volunteer to go and work in these hellholes. Between 1786 and 1805, 33% of all apprentices died, ran away, or went back to their parents.
That changed, however, as the market grew larger and the scale of operations grew larger to feed the market; new machine techniques increased the productivity of each worker and lowered the cost of the product, allowing greater profits and driving the building of more and larger factories.
Inside the factories, work discipline found resistance by those who suffered most under it. The habit of punctuality, not stopping for breaks, and working steadily, needed constant reinforcement in order to keep the capitalist system running smoothly. The capitalists’ ideal was to “make such machines of the men as cannot err,” to quote Josiah Wedgewood, one of the first large-scale pottery manufacturers. His harsh system of factory discipline meant that in 1783 he had to call in the army to deal with a workplace revolt against his rules; they hanged one leader.
Again, at the time, the propagandists of capitalism did not try to hide these shameful facts. As one admitted, “the modern industrial proletariat was introduced to its role not so much by attraction or monetary reward, but by compulsion, force and fear forged over a fire by the powerful blows of a hammer.”
This system did not just “come about”; the imposition of capitalism required brutal methods against the peasantry to facilitate its expansion. The sweeping of the old feudal state based on the landed aristocracy, which stood in the way of capitalist production, was necessary too. The English Revolution of 1649 was the first of many bourgeois revolutions that swept Europe and ushered in a new epoch: capitalism.
YET THIS IS ALL STILL HAPPENING…
Of course, this bloody story is not just a history exercise. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America hundreds of millions endure these very same horrors as they flee the poverty of rural life to the equally miserable city slums and shantytowns due exclusively to the expropriation of their former lands by multi-nationals.
In China, many peasants are being press ganged into factories as the Stalinist bureaucrats reinstate capitalism. Imprisonment is the norm for many trade unionists.
In Colombia, death squads and the army forcibly remove peasants by the thousands to make way for big capitalist ranchers.
One of the key components of the growing anti-capitalist movement is the peasantry of the developing world – from the KRRS Indian farmers association struggling against Monsanto’s expensive G.M. seeds, to the Brazilian Sem Terra Movement of landless peasants.
The Zapatistas began their revolt as an insurrection of the indigenous peasants of Chiapas in Southern Mexico where the North American Free-Trade Agreement threatened to take away the last remnants of land left to them after centuries of enclosure.
We must support these struggles for the right of peasants to work their land; however, we do not want a return to the village where everyone farms for subsistence. We want to take what was progressive about capitalism – technology and mass production – and use it to meet human need instead of profit.
A socialist system that does not rely on the forcible exploitation of the many by the few but relies instead on the planned collective use of the earth’s limited resources, would release the millions of desperately poor from a life of servitude and begin to raise the quality of life for all across the globe.