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A. The Expropriation of Land in the Old World
The term "capitalism" is commonly used, especially on the libertarian right, simply to refer to an economic system based
primarily on markets and private property. There is no harm in this; many intellectually honest libertarians (e.g. the Nockians
and the Rothbardian Left) distinguish clearly between their "free market capitalism" (much of which is amenable to the free
market socialism of Benjamin Tucker), and the "actually existing capitalism" of today's corporate economy. But that is not
the meaning of capitalism as the classical socialists used the word. As we have already seen, Thomas Hodgskin used the term
"capitalism" to refer, not to a free market, but to a statist system of class rule in which owners of capital were privileged
in a manner analogous to the status of landlords under feudalism. For Marx, free markets and private property were not sufficient
conditions of capitalism. For example, an economic system in which artisans and peasants owned their means of production and
exchanged their labor-products in a free market would not be "capitalism." Capitalism was a system in which markets and private
property not only existed, but in which workers did not own the means of production and were forced instead to sell their
labor for wages.
For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians
and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation"12:
In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want
transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this,
viz., that two very different kinds of commodity possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the
owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence...; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own
labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour.... The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers
from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour.... The process, therefore, that clears the way for
the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his own means
of production.... The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing
the producer from the means of production....13
This process did not come about naturally. "...Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities,
and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour power.... It is clearly the result of a past historical development,
the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production."14
The means by which it did come about was described by Marx, in perhaps the most eloquent passage in his entire body of work:
....[T]hese new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production,
and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation,
is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.15
That was brought about by expropriating the land, "to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the
lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands."16 Although some form of forcible robbery took place
in every country in Europe, we focus on Britain as the case most relevant to the origins of industrial capitalism.
To grasp the enormity and wickedness of the process, one must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial
economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650
were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any normally accepted standard of morality, it was
their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled
these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.
J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant
society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The landlord class saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance
to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural
community was "taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government."17
The first mass expropriation, amounting to about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the Tudor seizure of monastic
land and subsequent distribution of it among noble favorites. This was a blow against the laboring classes in two ways: first,
because many of the Church's tenants were evicted during the subsequent enclosure process; and second, because income from
that land had been the major source of poor relief.
The suppression 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 citizens, who
drove out, en masse, the hereditary subtenants and threw their holdings into one.18
The king's men who gobbled up the former property of the monasteries had few qualms about how they treated their new tenants.
According to R. H. Tawney,
Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversions of arable to pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values
at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transaction would not pay.
Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown? "Do ye not know," said the grantee of one of the Sussex
manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their commons, "that the King's
grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down
the houses of such poor knaves as ye be."
Among the victims, as illustrative cases, were the inhabitants of the village enclosed by the Herbert family to make the
park at Washerne; and the tenants of Whitby, whose annual rents were raised from £29 to £64.19
The expropriation of the Church destroyed the funding system for the main source of charitable support for the poor and
incapacitated. The Tudor state filled the void with its Poor Laws. The effect was as if, in the modern world, the state had
expropriated the major property and securities of the charitable foundations, and given them to Fortune 500 corporation; and
then created a welfare system at taxpayer expense with incomparably more draconian controls on the poor.20
Still another form of expropriation was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute
a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Enclosures occurred in two large waves: the first,
becoming a mighty surge under the Tudors and slowing to a trickle under the Stuarts, was enclosure of land for sheep pasturage.
The second, which we will consider below, was the enclosure of open fields for large-scale capitalist farming.
The overall scale of the expropriations was quite massive. The number of tenants dispossessed after the dissolution of
the monasteries was 50,000. The area enclosed from 1455-1605 was "some half-million acres." The number dispossessed from enclosed
lands between 1455 and 1637 was 30-40,000. "This may well have represented a figure of over 10 per cent. of all middling
and small landholders and between 10 and 20 per cent. of those employed at wages...; in which case the labour reserves thereby
created would have been of comparable dimensions to that which existed in all but the worst months of the economic crisis
of the 1930's." Although "the absolute number of persons affected in each case may seem small by modern standards,
the result was large in proportion to the demand for hired labour at the time."21 And those peasants not subject
to enclosure were victimized by rack-renting and arbitrary fines, which often resulted in their being driven off the land
by inability to pay.22
The expropriation of Royalist land during the Interregnum followed a similar pattern to that of the monasteries under Henry
VIII. Purchasers of confiscated lands, Christopher Hill wrote, "were anxious to secure quick returns. Those of their tenants
who could not produce written evidence of their titles were liable to eviction."23 Tenants of sequestered estates
complained that the new purchasers "wrest from the poor Tenants all former Immunities and Freedoms they formerly enjoyed...."24
Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform" of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. (The
legislation can be assigned more than one date, since like all legislation passed during the Interregnum, it had to be confirmed
under Charles II). The landlords' rights in feudal legal theory were transformed into absolute rights of private property;
the tenants were deprived of all their customary rights in the land they tilled, and transformed into tenants at-will in the
modern sense.
After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation, 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 taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the people, vindicated for themselves the
rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement
which, mutatis mutandis, had the same effects on the English agricultural labourer, as the edict of the Tartar
Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry.25
(The effects of the laws of settlement, as a form of social control, will be dealt with below.)
As Christopher Hill put it, "feudal tenures were abolished upwards only, not downwards." At the same time that landlords
were guaranteed against all uncertainty and caprice from above, the peasants were placed at the absolute mercy of the landlords.
The Act of 1660 insisted that it should not be understood to alter or change any tenure by copyhold. Copyholders
obtained no absolute property rights in their holdings, remaining in abject dependence on their landlords, liable to arbitrary
death duties which could be used as a means of evicting the recalcitrant. The effect was completed by an act of 1677 which
ensured that the property of small freeholders should be no less insecure than that of copyholders, unless supported by written
legal title. So most obstacles to enclosures were removed: the agricultural boom of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
redounded to the benefit of big landowners and capitalist farmers, not of peasant proprietors.... The century after the failure
of the radicals to win legal security of tenure for the small men is the century in which many small landowners were forced
to sell out in consequence of rack-renting, heavy fines, taxation and lack of resources to compete with capitalist farmers.26
At the same time, all the feudal dues previously paid by the aristocracy as a condition of their ownership, were replaced
with taxes on the population at large.
And so the abolition of the military tenures in England by the Long Parliament, ratified after the accession of Charles
II, though simply an appropriation of public revenues by the feudal land holders, who thus got rid of the consideration on
which they held the common property of the nation, and saddled it on the people at large, in the taxation of all consumers,
has long been characterized, and is still held up in the law books, as a triumph of the spirit of freedom. Yet here is the
source of the immense debt and heavy taxation of England.27
After the "Glorious Revolution," by which the people of England had been freed from the papist tyranny of James II into
the tender ministrations of the Whig Oligarchy, yet another reform was introduced. In a foreshadowing of the misnamed "privatization"
of our own day, most of the crown land, rightfully the property of the laboring people of England, was parceled out to the
great landlords.
They inaugurated the new era by practicing on a colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed
more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure....
The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates... form the basis of the today
princely domains of the English oligarchy.28
In addition to its land "reforms," the Whig parliament under William and Mary introduced the Game Laws as a means of restricting
independent subsistence by the laboring classes. Hunting, for the rural population, had traditionally been a supplementary
source of food. The 1692 law, in its preamble, specifically referred to the "great mischief" by which "inferior
tradesmen, apprentices, and other dissolute persons [!] neglect their trades and employments" in favor of hunting
and fishing.29
Even after the expropriations of the Tudor and Stuart periods, the dispossession of the peasantry was still incomplete.
A significant amount of land still remained in peasant hands under customary forms of ownership, and continued to provide
a margin of independence for some. After the Tudor expropriations, many vagabonds migrated into "such open-field villages
as would allow them to squat precariously on the edge of common or waste." One seventeenth century pamphleteer noted that
"in all or most towns where the fields lie open and are used in common there is a new brood of upstart intruders as inmates,
and the inhabitants of lawful cottages erected contrary to law...." He referred to the common complaint of employers,
that they were "loyterers who will not usually be got to work unless they may have such excessive wages as they themselves
desire."30 Hence, the final expropriation of even these last remaining peasant lands was vital to the full
development of capitalism.
The second wave of enclosures, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was therefore closely connected with the process
of industrialization. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries at between a sixth and a fifth of the arable land in England.31 E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, less
conservatively, estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated
acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...."32 Dobb estimated it as high
as a quarter or half of land in the fourteen counties most affected.33 Of 4000 Private Acts of Enclosure from the
early eighteenth century through 1845, two-thirds involved "open fields belonging to cottagers," and the other third involved
common woodland and heath.34
The Tudor and Stuart enclosures had been carried out by private landlords, on their own initiative, often by stealth. From
the eighteenth century on, however, they were carried out by law, through parliamentary "acts of enclosure": "in other
words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people's land as private property... " Marx cited these acts
as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the
feudal lords," had actually required "a parliamentary coup d’etat... for its transformation into
private property."35
The ruling classes saw the peasants' customary right to the land as a source of economic independence from capitalist and
landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Mandeville, in Fable of the Bees, wrote of the need to keep laborers both
poor and stupid, in order to force them to work:
It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor; for who would do the work?
....As they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest
class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to
hinder him; ...but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle,
and yet continually spend what they get.... Those that get their living by their daily labour... have nothing to stir them
up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure.... To make the society happy and
people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor....36
A 1739 pamphlet, quoted by Christopher Hill, warned that the only way to enforce industry and temperance was "to lay
them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from rest and sleep, in order to procure the common necessities
of life."37
These prescriptions for keeping the working classes productive were echoed in a 1770 tract, "Essay on Trade and Commerce":
That mankind in general, are naturally inclined to ease and indolence, we fatally experience to be true, from the conduct
of our manufacturing populace, who do not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week, unless provisions happen to
be very dear.... I hope I have said enough to make it appear that the moderate labour of six days in a week is no slavery....
But our populace have adopted a notion, that as Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege of being more free and independent
than in any country in Europe. Now this idea, as far as it may affect the bravery of our troops, may be of some use; but the
less the manufacturing poor have of it, certainly the better for themselves and for the State. The labouring people should
never think themselves independent of their superiors.... It is extremely dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state
like ours, where, perhaps, seven parts out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property. The cure will not
be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.38
Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters'
terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up
a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be
kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Board of Agriculture report of Shropshire, in 1794, echoed this
complaint: "the use of common land by labourers operates upon the mind as a sort of independence."39 The
Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family
can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work."40
Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsistence
by working for others." As a result there would, "perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion
to it."41
The Rev. J. Townsend, worthy man of God, likewise wrote (in "A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, By a Well-Wisher to Mankind")
of the benefit of poverty in compelling the poor to labor.
Legal constraint to labour is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, creates ill will etc., whereas hunger
is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth
the most powerful exertions....
It seems to be a law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, that there
may be always some to fulfill the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock
of human happiness is thereby much increased. The more delicate ones are thereby freed from drudgery, and can pursue higher
callings etc. undisturbed.42
The only humans whose drudgery matters, obviously, are the "more delicate ones" whose "human happiness" is increased by
the opportunity to pursue their "higher callings," without the disturbance of having to support themselves by their own labor.
The good Reverend was, indeed, a well-wisher of mankind--except, perhaps, for the 95% of it toiling below his threshold of
visibility.
The Gloucestershire Survey (1807) remarked that among "the greatest of evils to agriculture would be to place
the labourer in a state of independence." For as another observer from the same period observed, "Farmers, like manufacturers,
require constant labourers--men who have no other means of support than their daily labour, men whom they can depend on."43
The Board of Agriculture reports, cited by Christopher Hill, contained enthusiastic praise for the disciplinary effect
of enclosures. Enclosure of commons forced laborers "to work every day in the year." Children "[would] be put out
to labour early." Most importantly, thanks to the suppression of economic independence, the "subordination of the lower
ranks of society... would be thereby considerably secured."44
Of course, suppression of the means of independent subsistence did not take only the form of land-theft. At times, spinning
and weaving in individual cottages was actually prohibited by law, as an interference with the supply of agricultural labor.45
As Kirkpatrick Sale elaborated on the same theme:
By the late eighteenth century there were two kinds of machines capable of sophisticated textile production in England.
One was a cottage-based, one-person machine built around the spinning jenny, perfected as early as the 1760s; the other was
a factory-based, steam-driven machine based on the Watts engine and the Arkwright frame, introduced in the 1770s. The choice
of which was to survive and proliferate was made not upon the merits of the machines themselves nor upon any technological
grounds at all but upon the wishes of the dominant political and economic sectors of English society at the time. The cottage-centered
machines, ingenious though they were, did not permit textile merchants the same kind of control over the workforce nor the
same regularity of production as did the factory-based machines. Gradually, therefore, they were eliminated, their manufacturers
squeezed by being denied raw materials and financing, their operators suppressed by laws that, on various pretexts, made home-production
illegal.46
Apparently, the recipe for a "free market," as the average vulgar libertarian uses the term, is as follows: 1) first steal
the land of the producing classes, by state fiat, and turn them into wage-laborers; 2) then, by state terror, prevent them
from moving about in search of higher wages or organizing to increase their bargaining strength; 3) finally, convince them
that their subsistence wages reflect the marginal productivity of labor in a "free market."
Marx mocked the bourgeois apologists (in the person of F. M. Eden), usually such zealots for the rights of property, for
their blithe acceptance of the past robbery of the working population:
The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most shameless violation of the "sacred rights
of property" and the grossest acts of violence to persons, as soon as they are necessary to lay the foundations of the capitalist
mode of production, is shown by Sir F. M. Eden.... The whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied
the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, lead
him merely to the comfortable conclusion, "The due proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established...."47
As always, the passive voice is the last refuge of weasels.
Marx was not the only mocker of the bourgeois nursery tale of primitive accumulation. Albert Jay Nock, that patron saint
of the Old Right, also had some sharp words on the subject--not only for the purported apologists of pseudo-"laissez-faire,"
but for the advocates of state action:
The horrors of England's industrial life in the last century furnished a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention.
Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and
hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians--all these are glibly charged off by reformers and publicists
to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its
face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were due to the State's primary intervention whereby the population
of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State's removal of the land from competition with industry for labour.
Nor did the factory system and the "industrial revolution" have the least thing to do with creating these hordes of miserable
beings. When the factory system came in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever
Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery
and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State.... Our zealots of
positive intervention would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see what
they can make of them."48
Before we close this section, we should consider the claim of some apologists that these acts of expropriation somehow
increased "efficiency." Like that of Edens above, such apologies these days often issue from the same figures who are the
most scandalized at any threat to the absolute right of private property. Leaving aside the moral illegitimacy of such consequentialist
justifications of robbery, it's hard to avoid being amused at the parallelism with Marx and Engels, who, in a distorted version
of the Whig theory of history, saw class exploitation and robbery as the necessary means of creating the "productive forces,"
on the way to the final state of abundance.
As Thomas Fuller scornfully pointed out, an increase in the overall wealth of that mythical being "society" resulting from
such robbery did not necessarily translate into an increased quality of life for those robbed. Tell the fenmen, he said,
of the great benefit to the public, because where a pike or duck fed formerly, now a bullock or sheep fatted; they will
be ready to return that if they be taken in taking that bullock or sheep, the rich owner indicteth them for felons; whereas
that pike or duck were their own goods, only for their pains of catching them.49
And even the increased efficiency of production is by no means self-evident. According to Michael Perelman, in cereal farming
the spade industry of eighteenth century peasants in Western Europe produced a twenty- to thirty-fold increase on seed-corn,
compared to only six-fold by plow cultivation. As for vegetable horticulture, the market gardens of that time compare favorably
in output even to the mechanized agriculture of the contemporary United States. One Paris gardener produced 44 tons of vegetables
per acre; by way of comparison, in 1979 America, the average output per acre was 15 tons of onions or 8.6 tons of tomatoes
(the two most productive crops in terms of weight per unit of area).50
Such intensive forms of cultivation were indeed less efficient, if considered in terms of output per man-hour rather than
of output per acre. But labor was a commodity in abundant supply; this "superfluous" labor was "freed," by expropriation,
from a life of adequate subsistence, in order that it might be allowed to starve without hindrance. As Perelman said, the
small-scale cultivation suppressed by the state was "a viable alternative to wage labor."51 But that was
precisely the point. The real "efficiency" aimed at was efficiency in fleecing the producing classes. As we will see later
in this chapter, the ruling classes have consistently been willing to adopt less efficient forms of production, in material
terms, for the sake of rendering the control of the production process more feasible.
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