The brutal process of separating people from their means of providing for themselves, known as primitive accumulation, caused enormous hardships for the common people. This same primitive accumulation provided a basis for capitalist development. Joan Thirsk, one of the most knowledgeable historians of early British agriculture, describes above the nature of some of the harshest social and personal transformations associated with the enclosures. Some people denounced this expropriation. Marx (1977, 928) echoed their sentiment, charging: ‘‘The expropriation of the direct producers was accomplished by means of the most merciless barbarianism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions.’’ Formally, this dispossession was perfectly legal. After all, the peasants did not have property rights in the narrow sense. They only had traditional rights. As markets evolved, first land-hungry gentry and later the bourgeoisie used the state to create a legal structure to abrogate these traditional rights (Tigar and Levy 1977). Simple dispossession from the commons was a necessary, but not always sufficient condition to harness rural people to the labor market. Even after the enclosures, laborers retained privileges in ‘‘the shrubs, woods, undergrowth, stone quarries and gravel pits, thereby obtaining fuel for cooking and wood for animal life, crab apples and cob nuts from the hedgerows, brambles, tansy and other wild herbs from any other little patch of waste. . . . Almost every living thing in the parish however insignificant could be turned to some good use by the frugal peasant labourer or his wife’’ (Everitt 1967, 405). To the extent that the traditional economy might be able to remain intact despite the loss of the commons, a supply of labor satisfactory to capital might not be forthcoming. As a result, the level of real wages would be higher, thereby impeding the process of accumulation. Not surprisingly, one by one, these traditional rights also disappeared. In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, ‘‘property became absolute property: all the tolerated ‘rights’ that the peasantry had acquired or preserved . . . were now rejected’’(Foucault 1979, 85). Primitive accumulation cut through traditional lifeways like scissors. The first blade served to undermine the ability of people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern measures required to keep people from finding alternative survival strategies outside the system of wage labor. A host of oftentimes brutal laws designed to undermine whatever resistance people maintained against the demands of wage labor accompanied the dispossession of the peasants’ rights, even before capitalism had become a significant economic force.~Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2002), Ch. 1 - The Enduring Importance of Primitive Accumulation, P. 13-14
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 23:40:28 +0000
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