notes on capital
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation

(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.

(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."

(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.

(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.

(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."

(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.

(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.

(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.

(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?

(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.

(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.

(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.

(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s

(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position

(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."

(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)

(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."

(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.

(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.

(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.

(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.

(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).

(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."

(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.

(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.

(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.

(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.

(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).

(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.

(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"

(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"

(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.

(929): Why the proletariat? "...with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."

(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)

(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."

(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.

(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.