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ABSTRACT
Differing approaches to the issue of the beginnings of capitalism imply different conceptualization of what capitalism is. This paper elaborates on the notion of original accumulation. It utilizes the Marxist notion of the mode of production to provide the concept of the historical figure which Marx describes as the pre-capitalist money-owner. Two notions are introduced: (1) The money-begetting slave mode of production, existing since antiquity and clearly distinguishing itself from the classical slave mode of production; (2) the contractual money-begetting mode of production that emerged in the middle ages in relation to financial schemes based on partnerships or associations. The taskmaster of each of these two pre-capitalist modes of production is a pre-capitalist money-owner. His later “confrontation and contact” with the labourer who has become a proletarian is finally discussed. Original accumulation is not primitive developed or humane capitalist accumulation, but the transformation of pre-capitalist social relations into capitalist social relations. No version of capitalism is the realm of democracy, freedom, or justice. Capitalism is a social system in which direct coercion guaranteeing economic exploitation of the ruled by the rulers is incorporated into the economic relation itself. “Freedom” is the form of appearance of a historically specific system of class domination and exploitation.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
John Milios is Professor of Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He has authored more than two hundred papers published or forthcoming in refereed journals (in Greek, English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and Turkish) including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, History of Political Economy, History of Economics Review, Review of Political Economy, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Science & Society, Rethinking Marxism, Review of Radical Political Economics, and has participated as invited speaker in numerous international conferences. He has also authored or co-authored some eighteen scholarly books. His most recent books in English are A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crisis: Demystifying Finance (Routledge 2013, Paperback Edition 2014, co-authored with D. P. Sotiropoulos and S. Lapatsioras) and The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System: The Prevalence of an Aleatory Encounter (Routledge 2018). He is director of the quarterly journal of economic theory Thesseis (published since 1982 in Greek) and serves on the editorial boards of four scholarly journals.
Notes
1 To the same tradition belong, among others, Robert Brenner (Citation1985) and Ellen Meiksins Wood (Citation2002).
2 For a more detailed analysis see the Chapter 1 of Milios (Citation2018).
3 Marx (Citation1990, 1019) writes:
The labour process becomes the instrument of the valorisation process, the process of the self-valorisation of capital—the manufacture of surplus value. The labour process is subsumed under capital (it is its own process) and the capitalist intervenes in the process as its director, manager. For him it also represents the direct exploitation of the labour of others. It is this that I refer to as the formal subsumption of labour under capital … ; at the same time, however, it can be found as a particular form alongside the specifically capitalist mode of production in its developed form.
4 Isaac Ilyich Rubin describes it as “the cottage, or domestic system of large-scale industry, the spread of which signified the penetration of commercial capital into industry, and paved the way for the complete reorganization of industry on a capitalist basis” (Rubin Citation1979, 155).
5 “Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation”: the term “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” has been literally translated into English as “primitive accumulation.” As Sweezy (Citation2006, 52) correctly comments:
This [translation] is likely to be misleading, however, since the point is not that the process is primitive in the usual sense of the term … but that it is not preceded by previous acts of accumulation. Hence “original” or “primary” is a better rendering of ursprünglich in this context.The term is translated as “original accumulation” by Martin Nicolaus in Marx’s (Citation1993) Grundrisse.
6 Marx (Citation1990, 874–875; emphasis added) writes:
In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this transformation can itself only take place under particular circumstances, which meet together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorise the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors… . With the polarization of the commodity-market into these two classes, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are present. The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale.
7 Marx (Citation1993, 245) writes:
Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealised expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations they are merely this basis to a higher power.
8 For example, the bloody legislation against the expropriated, the forcing down of wages by acts of parliament, the violent expropriation of pre-capitalist forms of ownership—enclosures etc., plunder and the colonial system (Marx Citation1990, chapters 27–33, 877–932).
9 Marx (Citation1990, 383) writes:
The first “Statute of Labourers” found its immediate pretext (not its cause, for legislation of this kind outlives its pretext by centuries) in the great plague that decimated the population, so that, as a Tory writer says, “The difficulty of getting men to work on reasonable terms” (i.e. at a price that left their employers a reasonable quantity of surplus labour) “grew to such a height as to be quite intolerable.” Reasonable wages were therefore fixed by law as well as the limits of the working day.
10 Marx (Citation1991, 450–451; emphasis added) writes:
The sudden expansion of the world market, the multiplication of commodities in circulation, the competition among the European nations for the seizure of Asiatic products and American treasures, the colonial system, all made a fundamental contribution towards shattering the feudal barriers to production. And yet the modem mode of production in its first period, that of manufacture, developed only where the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages. … And whereas in the sixteenth century, and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode, this happened in reverse on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, once it had been created.
11 Marx (Citation1990, 905) writes, “Where did the capitalists originally spring from? For the only class created directly by the expropriation of the agricultural population is that of the great landed proprietors.”
12 Marx (Citation1993, 504–505; emphasis added) writes:
The monetary wealth which becomes transformed into capital in the proper sense, into industrial capital, is rather the mobile wealth piled up through usury—especially that practised against landed property—and through mercantile profits… . They appear not as themselves forms of capital, but as earlier forms of wealth, as presuppositions for capital… . The formation of capital thus does not emerge from landed property … but rather from merchant’s and usurer’s wealth.
In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx stresses:
But the Middle Ages had handed down two distinct forms of capital, which ripened in the most varied economic formations of society, and which, before the era of the capitalist mode of production, nevertheless functioned as capital—usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital. (Marx Citation1990, 914; emphasis added)Historically speaking, capital invariably first confronts landed property in the form of merchant’s capital and usurer’s capital … . The antagonism between the power of landed property, based on personal relations of domination and servitude, and the power of money, which is impersonal, is clearly expressed by the two French proverbs, … “No land without its lord” and “Money has no master.” (Marx Citation1990, 247; emphasis added)
13 Marx (Citation1993, 506–507; emphasis added) writes:
But the mere presence of monetary wealth, and even the achievement of a kind of supremacy on its part, is in no way sufficient for this dissolution into capital to happen. Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have ended their history with free labour and capital, or rather begun a new history. There, too, the dissolution of the old property relations was bound up with development of monetary wealth—of trade etc. But instead of leading to industry, this dissolution led in fact to the supremacy of the countryside over the city… . Capital does not create the objective conditions of labour. Rather, its original formation is that, through the historic process of the dissolution of the old mode of production, value existing as money-wealth is enabled, on one side, to buy the objective conditions of labour; on the other side, to exchange money for the living labour of the workers who have been set free.
14 Marx has clearly pointed out that this is the case for classical slave mode of production. He cites Aristotle, who writes: “Whenever the masters are not compelled to plague themselves with supervision, the overseer assumes this honour, while the masters pursue public affairs or philosophy” (Aristotle, cited by Marx Citation1991, 509). Marx sees further that the concession of the possession relation to a specific social group belonging to the ruled classes takes its most characteristic form in ancient societies, thus shaping the classic (or “patriarchal”) slave mode of production:
[T]his work of supervision necessarily arises in all modes of production that are based on opposition between the worker as direct producer and the proprietor of the means of production. The greater this opposition, the greater the role that this work of supervision plays. It reaches its high point in the slave system. (Marx Citation1991, 507–508; emphasis added)
Contemporary historians have also stressed the dissociation of the slave-owning ruling class from the possession relation (the supervision and “management” of the production process), in other words, the non-homology of ownership and possession of the means of production. The prominent Marxist historian of antiquity, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, emphasizes the fact that “the function of slave (and freedman) overseers was essential … playing a very important role in the economy, perhaps far more so than has been generally realized” (de. Ste. Croix Citation1981, 258). Perry Anderson also writes along these lines:
The very ubiquity of slave-labour at the height of the Roman Republic and Principate had the paradoxical effect of promoting certain categories of slaves to responsible administrative or professional positions… . This process was … another index of the radical abstention of the Roman ruling class from any form of productive labour whatever, even of an executive type. (Anderson Citation1974a, 23–24)
15 Marx (Citation1991, 728–729; emphasis added) writes:
In all forms where the slave economy (not patriarchal slavery, but rather that of the later phases of the Greco-Roman era) exists as a means of enrichment, and where money is thus a means for appropriating other people’s labour by the purchase of slaves, land, etc., money can be valorised as capital and comes to bear interest precisely because it can be invested in this way… . But the extent to which this process abolishes the old mode of production, as was the case in modern Europe, and whether it establishes the capitalist mode of production in its place, depends entirely on the historical level of development and the conditions that this provides.
16 As Frederic C. Lane’s detailed analysis shows, referring to pre-fourteenth-century Venice,
[t]he daily wage was only a part of what a seaman expected to gain from a voyage… . At sea, they were traders as well as sailors or oarsmen, so that it must have been difficult in the twelfth and even in the thirteenth century to draw the line between travelling merchant and merchant-seaman… . A gap between seamen and merchants opened when travelling merchants were transformed into resident merchants. (Lane Citation1973, 168)
17 Marx (Citation1990, 875–876) writes, “[w]e come across the first sporadic traces of capitalist production as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in certain towns of the Mediterranean.”
18 Marx also writes, characteristically,
Let us now consider the total movement, M–C … P … C’–M’, … Here capital appears as a value which goes through a sequence of connected and mutually determined transformations… . Two of these phases belong in the circulation sphere, one to the sphere of production… . This total process is therefore a circuit… . The capital that assumes these forms in the course of its total circuit … is industrial capital—industrial here in the sense that it encompasses every branch of production that is pursued on a capitalist basis… . Money capital, commodity capital and productive capital thus do not denote independent varieties of capital, whose functions constitute the content of branches of business that are independent and separate from one another. They are simply particular functional forms of industrial capital, which takes on all three forms in turn. (Marx Citation1992, 132–133; emphasis added)
Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value. The worker … who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist… . If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation. The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect … but also a specifically social relation of production. (Marx Citation1990, 644; emphasis added)
19 Such theses are put forward, e.g., by Perry Anderson and Louis Althusser (see Anderson Citation1974b, 143; Althusser Citation2006, 198).
20 It will continue to exist until the labouring classes overthrow it. But for this we need a revolutionary political strategy.
21 Keynes (Citation1933, 184–185, 183) writes:
There are still those who cling to the old ideas, but in no country of the world to-day can they be reckoned as a serious force… . The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous; and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.
22 For an extended analysis on this issue see Sotiropoulos, Milios, and Lapatsioras (Citation2013).
23 Harvey (Citation2003, 136; emphasis added) writes:
Like war in relation to diplomacy, finance capital intervention backed by state power frequently amounts to accumulation by other means. An unholy alliance between state powers and the predatory aspects of finance capital forms the cutting edge of a “vulture capitalism” that is as much about cannibalistic practices and forced devaluations as it is about achieving harmonious global development.
24 Marx (Citation1990, 899–900; emphasis added) explains:
It is not enough that the conditions of labour 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 labour-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… . Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but in exceptional cases. In 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.
25 Marx (Citation1991, 970) writes, “ … we are only out to present the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production, its ideal average, as it were.”
26 Harvey (Citation2003, 151) writes, “regional crises and highly localized place-based devaluations emerge as a primary means by which capitalism perpetually creates its own ‘other’ in order to feed upon it.”
27 Althusser (Citation1984, 18) writes:
The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeoisie law exercises its “authority” … the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither “public” nor “private”; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private.