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Appendix: On the "Necessity" of Primitive Accumulation
A central failing of Marxism (or at least the vulgar variety) has been to treat the evolution of particular social and
political forms as natural outgrowths of a given technical mode of production.
No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed,
and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have
matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve,
since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution
are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois
modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.157
For the Marxists, a "higher" or more progressive form of society could only come about when productive forces under the
existing form of society had reached their fullest possible development under that society. To attempt to create a free and
non-exploitative society before its technical and productive prerequisites had been achieved would be folly.158
According to Marx, the laboring classes were capable, on their own, of achieving only a "petty bourgeois consciousness"
(to paraphrase Lenin). He quoted, with apparent approval, the paternalistic elitist Owen's statement to similar effect:
Without large capitals, large establishments would not have been formed; men could not have been trained to conceive the
PRACTICABILITY OF EFFECTING NEW COMBINATIONS, IN ORDER TO SECURE A SUPERIOR CHARACTER TO ALL and the production of more wealth
annually than all could conceive.159
In other words, workers were too atavistic to perceive the advantages of voluntary cooperation and combination, of pooling
their resources for large-scale production, without forward-thinking capitalists knocking their heads together and forcing
them to increase the productive forces. By quoting the paternalist Owen with every sign of approval, Marx implied that industrial
production was impossible until the producers were robbed of their property in the means of production and driven like beasts
into the factories.
This echoed his earlier assertion, in The Poverty of Philosophy, that the development of the forces of production
was impossible without class antagonism.
The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and
finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and immediate labour.... No antagonism, no progress.... Till now the productive
forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms.160
In raising such a question [as that of Proudhon, as to why the English working class had not received all the gains
of its 27-fold increase in productivity] one would naturally be supposing that the English could have produced this wealth
without the historical conditions in which it was produced, such as: private accumulation of capital, modern division of labour,
automatic workshops, anarchical competition, the wage system--in short, everything that is based upon class antagonism. Now,
these were precisely the necessary conditions of existence for the development of productive forces and of the surplus left
by labour. Therefore, to obtain this development of productive forces and this surplus left by labour, there had to be classes
which profited and classes which decayed.161
Freedom was impossible until slavery had created the material conditions for it. Indeed, Engels put it in so many words,
praising the "progressive" achievements of slavery and successive forms of class exploitation as necessary preconditions of
socialism (much as Christian theologians praise the felix culpa, or "happy sin" of Adam, for making possible the beatific
state of redeemed humanity).
It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and
thereby also Hellenism, the flowering of the ancient world.. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without
slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never
forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was
as necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern
socialism.162
That the working classes' own forms of self-organization could not have been the basis for industrialization, went without
saying:
Glassworks, papermills, ironworks, etc., cannot be organized on guild principles. They require mass production; sale in
a general market; monetary wealth on the part of the entrepreneur.... [U]nder the old property
and production relations these conditions cannot be brought together.163
So industrial production, by definition, is something that cannot be freely organized by producers. Hell on earth is historically
necessary.
A simple exchange economy, in which labor owned its means of production, was unable to move beyond petty industry of its
own volition.
This mode of production [petty industry] presupposes parceling of the soil, and scattering of the other means of
production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labor
within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of, the forces of Nature by society,
and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society,
moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, "to decree universal
mediocrity."164
The obvious question that springs to mind is, "Why?" Why could not an artisans' guild function as a means of mobilizing
capital for large-scale production, the same as a corporation? Why could not the peasants of a village cooperate in the purchase
and use of mechanized farming equipment? Perhaps because, in the absence of a "progressive" ruling class, they just couldn't
get their minds right. Or maybe just because.
The anarchist position, in contrast, is that exploitation and class rule are not inevitable at any time; they depend upon
intervention by the state, which is not at all necessary. Just social and economic relations are compatible with any level
of technology; technical progress can be achieved and new technology integrated into production in any society, through free
work and voluntary cooperation. Likewise, any technology is amenable to either libertarian or authoritarian applications,
depending on the nature of the society into which it is integrated.
All the technical prerequisites for steam engines had been achieved by the skilled craftsmen of the High Middle Ages. As
Kropotkin wrote,
Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported
by a series of advances in natural philosophy--and they were made under the mediaeval city organization,--once these discoveries
were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily
to follow. If the mediaeval cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the ethical consequences of the revolution
effected by steam might have been different; but the same revolution in technics and science would have inevitably taken place.
It remains, indeed, an open question whether the general decay of industries which followed the ruin of the free cities, and
was especially noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth century, did not considerably retard the appearance of the steam-engine
as well as the consequent revolution in arts.165
Had not the expropriation of the peasantry and the crushing of the free cities taken place, a steam powered industrial
revolution would still have taken place--but the main source of capital for industrializing would have been in the hands of
the democratic craft guilds. The market system would have developed on the basis of producer ownership of the means of production.
Had not Mesopotamian and Egyptian elites figured out six thousand years ago that the peasantry produced a surplus and could
be milked like cattle, free people would still have exchanged their labor and devised ways, through voluntary cooperation,
to make their work easier and more productive. Parasitism is not necessary for progress.
If anything, primitive accumulation hindered the cause of industrial progress at least as much as it helped it. Rather
than furthering the cause of innovation that would not otherwise have taken place, it is more accurate to say that primitive
accumulation created a situation in which the working class could be motivated only by compulsion. Given the
separation of labor from capital, the only means to industrialize and adopt large-scale production was by impoverishing labor
until its only choice lay between accepting work on any terms offered, and starvation. This is not to say that industrialization
could only have occurred under these circumstances--only that the wage system, once created, was limited to the possibilities
set by its own inner logic.
The separation of labor from capital, as has been true of so many aspects of state capitalism, led to irrationality. Laborers
were deprived of the intrinsic motivation to increase the efficiency and productivity of their work methods, which would have
existed in an economy of worker-owned and -organized production. The disutilities and benefits of labor not being fully internalized
by the laborer, the owners of capital could not find a sufficient labor force willing to work.
In fact, the ruling class did not simply impose from above a revolution that could not otherwise have occurred. Rather,
it preempted all alternative possibilities for industrialization from below. To the extent that the only source of investment
capital for machine production came from above, it is because the mercantile interests controlling the guilds and towns had
made it impossible for the laboring class to achieve the same results by horizontal association, and by mobilizing and pooling
their own credit. As we saw above, the mass of investment capital used in the industrial revolution came from the merchant
capitalists, who had taken it from the direct producers by robbery. In such a zero-sum situation, the laboring classes necessarily
had fewer reserves at their own disposal. At the same time, the democratic qualities of the guilds were actively suppressed,
and rendered incapable of serving as a vehicle for craftsmen to mobilize their own capital from below.
It is in this context that we should consider the extended passages in the Grundrisse on the role of usury and merchant
capital in preparing the way for capitalism. The merchant oligarchies, with the help of the state, were able to preempt, crowd
out, or suppress the self-organization of credit and to prohibit direct trade between producers and consumers, while amassing
to themselves large masses of merchant capital through state-enforced monopoly. It was only as a result of this legacy that
merchant capital was able to take control of the supply of raw materials for artisan labor, to control the wholesale marketing
of its products, and thus to organize production under the putting-out system.
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