In the Introduction to Part Two, we referred to the "nursery school tale" of primitive accumulation, which has long served the capitalists as a legitimizing myth. In fact, capitalist apologists seldom even address the issue, if they can avoid it. More often, they take the existing distribution of property and economic power as a given. Their most dumbed-down line of argument, typically, simply starts with the unquestioned fact that some people just happen to own the means of production, and that others need access to these means and advances to live on while they work. From this it follows that, if the owners of capital are kind enough to "provide" this "factor of production" for the use of labor, they are entitled to a fair recompense for their "service" or "abstinence."

The inadequacy of this approach should be clear from even the most cursory consideration. An apologist for state socialism might just as easily say, to a free market advocate in a state-owned economy, that he wouldn't have a job if the state didn't "provide" it. An apologist for the manorial economy could likewise admonish the ungrateful peasant that all his labor would avail him nothing without the access to the land that the feudal landlord graciously "provided." The question remains: how did those who control access to the means of production come to be in this position? As Oppenheimer pointed out in his criticism of Marshall, no discussion of the laws governing the distribution of product can be meaningful without first considering the "primal distribution of the agents (factors) of production...."¹

To the extent that they are forced to address this question at all, capitalist apologists fall back on the above-mentioned nursery tale, by which existing class divisions arose naturally from an "original state of equality, ...from no other cause than the exercise of the economic virtues of industry, frugality and providence." There is, in this process, "no implication... of any extra-economic power."²

As Marx summarized it, the legend of primitive accumulation was a sort of variation on the fable of the ant and the grasshopper:

Perhaps Engels should have titled his work Anti-Marx, instead of Anti-Dühring.

Oppenheimer also recounted this edifying fable, in language quite similar to that of Marx. Since, however, Oppenheimer was a free market socialist like Hodgskin and Tucker, he was (unlike Marx and Engels) in no danger of subsequent embarrassment over the implications of rejecting the bourgeois fairy tale.

This ahistorical myth survived the twentieth century, and is still alive and well--at least so long as it is not challenged by the historically literate. It was stated by Mises in Human Action:

It can be illustrated by any number of boilerplate articles in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, debunking the "myth" of dark satanic mills or Third World sweatshops, on the ground that laborers found them preferable to "available alternatives":

The fairy tale was retold recently by Radley Balko, who referred to Third World sweatshops as "the best of a series of bad employment options available" to laborers there.⁶ Within a couple of days, this piece was recirculated over the "free market" [sic] blogosphere, along with numerous comments to the effect that "sweatshops are far superior to third-world workers' next best options...," or to similar effect.⁷

This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: "Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get." For every imaginable policy issue, the good guys and bad guys can be predicted with ease, by simply inverting the slogan of Animal Farm: "Two legs good, four legs baaaad." In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury. As one of the most egregious examples of this tendency, consider Ayn Rand's characterization of big business as an "oppressed minority," and of the Military-Industrial Complex as a "myth or worse."

The ideal "free market" society of such people, it seems, is simply actually existing capitalism, minus the regulatory and welfare state: a hyper-thyroidal version of nineteenth century robber baron capitalism, perhaps; or better yet, a society "reformed" by the likes of Pinochet, the Dionysius to whom Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys played Aristotle.

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article in The Freeman arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because "that’s not how the free market works"--implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of "free market principles."

The capitalist myth of primitive accumulation cannot stand up either to logic or to the evidence of history; by the two together, it has been smashed beyond recovery. Oppenheimer demonstrated the impossibility of such primitive accumulation by peaceful means. Exploitation could not have arisen in a free society, by the working of the marketplace alone.

But on examination, Oppenheimer pointed out, the land could not have been occupied by natural and economic means. Even in the twentieth century, and even in the Old World, the population was not sufficient to bring all arable land into cultivation.⁹

The land had, indeed, been "occupied"--but not through the economic means of individual appropriation by cultivation. It had been politically occupied by a ruling class, acting through the state.

Establishing this does not, by any means, depend simply on such deductive arguments. The political preemption of the land is a fact of history. The basic facts, largely beyond serious controversy, are accessible in a large body of secondary works by such radical historians as J.L. and Barbara Hammond, E. G. Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson.

Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable. The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.

Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.

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:

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:

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 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,

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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:

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":

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.

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:

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:

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:

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,

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.

In the New World as well as the Old, too much comfort or independence on the part of the laboring classes could be a great inconvenience to "the nation" or "the people" (which entities, presumably, did not include the helots who actually produced the things consumed by "the nation" or "the people"). The response of the capitalist (with the power of the state "at his back"), in the colonies as in the Old World, was (as Marx put it) "to clear out of his way by force, the modes of production and appropriation, based on the independent labour of the producer."⁵²

Settler societies have always had one disadvantage, from the point of view of the ruling classes: the widespread availability of cheap land. Adam Smith observed that in the North American colonies, where affordable land was readily available, the price of labor was very high because the average laborer preferred independence to employment: "neither the large wages nor the easy subsistence which that country affords to artificers can bribe him rather to work for other people than for himself."⁵³

E. G. Wakefield, in View of the Art of Colonization, wrote of the unacceptably weak position of the employing class in the colonies where self-employment with one's own property was readily available. Labor was scarce even at high wages.⁵⁴

This environment also prevented the concentration of wealth, as Wakefield commented: "Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth."⁵⁶ As a result, colonial elites petitioned the mother country for imported labor and for restrictions on land for settlement. According to Wakefield's disciple Herman Merivale, there was an "urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers--for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them."⁵⁷

Faced with this situation, the capitalist could resort to one of two expedients. One of them was the use of slave and convict labor, which we will examine in greater detail in a section below. The other was preemption of ownership of the land by the colonial regime. Political preemption of the land was accompanied by a denial of access to ordinary homesteaders--either by pricing land out of their range, or by excluding them altogether. Wakefield suggested that, since "[i]n the very beginning of a colony, all the land necessarily belongs to the government or is under its jurisdiction," the government could remedy the shortage of cheap wage labor by controlling access to the land.⁵⁸

At the same time that it excluded the laboring classes from virgin land, the state in settler societies granted large tracts of land to the privileged classes: to land speculators, logging and mining companies, planters, railroads, etc. Land grants in colonial America were on a scale comparable those of William after the Conquest. Cadwallader Colden, classifying the population in his State of the Province of New York (1765), put "the Proprietors of the Large Tracts of Land" of 100,000 to above one million acres, at the apex of the social pyramid. According to James Truslow Adams, in Provincial Society, 1690-1763 (1927), Capt. John Evans, a favorite of Governor Fletcher of New York, was granted "an area of indeterminate extent of between three hundred and fifty and six hundred thousand acres..." Although he was later offered £10,000 for this land, his annual quitrent was only twenty shillings (i.e., £1). Governor Bellmont later claimed that almost three-quarters of available land had been granted to thirty persons during Fletcher's term. Lord Courtney, governor from 1702-08, likewise issued large grants often running into the hundreds of thousands of acres, but preferred giving them to companies of land speculators. In New England, in contrast, Adams wrote that the early pattern of land grants to settlers for setting up townships led to more egalitarian patterns of land ownership. Unfortunately, this pattern was later supplanted by large-scale grants of land to speculators, for later sale to settlers, either as individuals or companies.⁵⁹

Such land-grabbing was central to American history from the very beginning, as Albert Jay Nock pointed out: "....from the time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has been regarded as a practically limitless field for speculation in rental values.”⁶⁰

One cause of the American Revolution was Britain's "attempt... to limit the exercise of the political means in respect of rental-values" (namely, the 1763 prohibition of settlements west of the Atlantic watershed). This prevented preemption of the land by land speculators in league with the state.⁶² The mainstream history books, of course, have portrayed this as an offense mainly against the individual homesteader, rather than the big land companies. Many leading figures in the late colonial and early republican period were prominent investors in these land companies: e.g., Washington in the Ohio, Mississippi, and Potomac Companies; Patrick Henry in the Yazoo Company; Benjamin Franklin in the Vandalia Company, etc.⁶³

Lest anyone draw the conclusion that the practice of limiting the working population's access to land was a practice only in the periwigged British Empire of Warren Hastings or Lord North, we should bear in mind that it has been followed in the "new" Empire as well:

Even after the expropriation of their land, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state still had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. And historically, this function was most vital when the bargaining power of labor threatened to increase: "one might expect that the efforts of the State in a capitalist society to control wages and to restrict the freedom of movement of the labourer would be greater when the labour reserve was depleted than when it was swollen."⁶⁵ Thorold Rogers described the law from the Tudor period until the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824, as

As we have seen above, the liquidation of the Church's system of poor relief left a void to be filled by the Tudor state's harsh regulation of the working class. The act of Henry VIII in 1530 licensed beggars who were old or infirm, while providing for the whipping and imprisonment of "sturdy vagabonds." The 27 Henry VIII strengthened the statute with ear-cropping for second offenders, and execution for third. I Edward VI (1547) condemned anyone who refused work as a slave to whoever denounced him. The 1572 act of Elizabeth I prescribed execution of unlicensed beggars on the second offense, unless someone would "take them into service." The statutes were only repealed at the end of the sixteenth century, by 12 Ann, cap. 23, when they had done their work. "Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system."⁶⁷

Queen Anne's repeal of the Tudor legislation did not, by any means, put an end to state-imposed regulation of the working class' movement. The laws of settlement had been created, in the meantime, and were later supplemented by the Combination Laws and the police state of Pitt. The government continued to set maximum wages, as well.

The Act of Settlement dates back to 1662. There had been a great deal of lower class movement during the Interregnum, characterized by the tendency of "poor people... to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock, the largest commons or wastes to build cottages and the most woods for them to burn or destroy." As that quote from the preamble might suggest, the Act was intended to remedy such excess mobility. Under its terms, two justices of the peace in each county were empowered to eject any newcomer to a parish without independent means, and return him to his parish of origin. The legislation was explicitly directed against cottagers and squatters in commons, and was evidently followed "by a destruction of cottages erected in the free times of the interregnum."⁶⁸

In a quotation earlier in this chapter, Marx referred to the "laws of settlements" as analogous to "the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov" in their effect on the English working population. Had he been more familiar with events in America at the time he wrote, he might have referred to the Black Codes as a better analogy. Had he lived into the twentieth century, he might have cited the internal passport systems of South Africa or the Soviet Union. The British state's controls on the movement of population, during the Industrial Revolution, were a system of totalitarian control comparable to all these.

Under the Poor Laws and the Laws of Settlement, a member of the English working class was restricted to the parish of his birth, unless an official of another parish granted him a permit to reside there. The state maintained work discipline by keeping laborers from voting with their feet. It was hard to persuade parish authorities to grant a man a certificate entitling him to move to another parish to seek work. Even on the rare occasion when such a certificate was granted, it amounted to a system of peonage in which the worker's continued residence in the new parish was conditioned on maintaining the good will of his employer. Workers were forced to stay put and sell their labor in a buyer's market. Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements."⁶⁹

At first glance this would seem also to be inconvenient for employers in parishes with a labor shortage.⁷⁰ Factories were built at sources of water power, generally removed from centers of population. Thousands of workers were needed to be imported from far away. But the state solved the problem by setting itself up as a middleman, and providing labor-poor parishes with cheap surplus labor from elsewhere, depriving workers of the ability to bargain for better terms on their own. This practice amounted, in nearly every sense of the term, to a slave market:

There you have it: the Tudor state without the whippings, ear-croppings and executions; the Black Codes without the lynchings.

Child laborers, who were in no position to bargain in any case, were a popular commodity in these poor-house slave markets. According to John Fielden ("The Curse of the Factory System, 1836),

Relief "was seldom bestowed without the parish claiming the exclusive right of disposing, at their pleasure, of all the children of the person receiving relief," according to the Committee on Parish Apprentices, 1815.⁷³ Frances Trollope estimated that 200,000 children, altogether, were pressed into factory labor.⁷⁴ Even when Poor Law commissioners encouraged migration to labor-poor parishes, they discouraged adult men and "[p]reference was given to 'widows with large families of children or handicraftsmen... with large families.'" In addition, the availability of cheap labor from the poor-law commissioners was deliberately used to drive down wages; farmers would discharge their own day-laborers and instead apply to the overseer for help.⁷⁵

Although the Combination Laws theoretically applied to masters as well as workmen, in practice they were only enforced against the latter.⁷⁶ "A Journeyman Cotton Spinner"--a pamphleteer quoted by E. P. Thompson⁷⁷--described "an abominable combination existing amongst the masters," in which workers who had left their masters because of disagreement over wages were effectively blacklisted. The Combination Laws required suspects to answer interrogations on oath, empowered magistrates to give summary judgment, and allowed summary forfeiture of funds accumulated to aid the families of strikers.⁷⁸ In other words, workers subject to the Combination Law magistrates were deprived of all the common law's due process protections. Workers, far from possessing the much-heralded "rights of Englishmen," were thrown into prerogative courts as arbitrary as Star Chamber.

At the same time, the laws setting maximum rates of pay amounted to a state enforced system of combination for the masters. In Adam Smith's immortal words, "[w]henever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters."⁷⁹

In the mid-19th century, a superficial examiner might conclude, the state's "progressive" reforms finally began to remedy all these evils. But as the historians of corporate liberalism have shown us in regard to the "progressive" reforms of the twentieth century, these "reforms" were in fact undertaken in the interests of the ruling class. Their ameliorating effect on working conditions, to the real but limited extent they occurred, were a side effect of their main purpose of increasing political stability and bringing the working class under more effective social control.⁸⁰

Regarding legislation for the ten-hour day, for example, Marx described it as an attempt by capitalists to regulate the "greed for surplus labour"; they served to regulate the economy in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole, in a way that could only be accomplished by acting through the state. With competition unlimited by the state, the issue of working conditions presents a prisoner's dilemma for the individual capitalist; it is in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole that the exploitation of labor be kept to sustainable levels, but in the interest of the individual capitalist to gain an immediate advantage over the competition by working his own labor force to the breaking point. As we shall see in Chapter 6 below on the rise of monopoly capitalism, the real effect of such regulations is to coordinate labor practices through a state-enforced cartel, so that those practices are no longer an issue of competition between firms.

Marx referred, later in the same chapter, to a group of 26 Staffordshire pottery firms, including Josiah Wedgwood, petitioning Parliament in 1863 for "some legislative enactment"; the reason was that competition prevented individual capitalists from voluntarily limiting the work time of children, etc., as beneficial as it would be to them collectively: "Much as we deplore the evils before mentioned, it would not be possible to prevent them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers.... Taking all these points into consideration, we have come to the conviction that some legislative enactment is wanted." Attempts by employers to limit the workday voluntarily to nine or ten hours, in their collective interest, always came to nought because the individual employer found it in his interest to violate the agreement.⁸²

As for trade unions: even after the Combination Laws were repealed in 1825, the position of workers was different from that of masters in regard to contract. "The provisions of the labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman, as to giving notice and the like, which only allow of a civil action against the contract breaking master, but on the contrary permit a criminal action against the contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873) in full force."⁸³

In 1871, trade unions were officially recognized by Act of Parliament. But another act of the same date (the Act to amend the Criminal Law relating to Violence, Threats, and Molestation), had the effect that "the means which the labourers could use in a strike or lockout were withdrawn from the laws common to all citizens, and placed under exceptional penal legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters themselves in their capacity as justices of the peace."⁸⁴ Thus, the state at the same time permitted collective bargaining, and prohibited collective bargaining outside the avenues prescribed and regulated by the state. In much the same way, the great "labor victory" of the Wagner Act was followed, in short order, by Taft-Hartley, which criminalized most of the tactics by which the CIO victories of the early Thirties had been won independently of the state. And in the process, as Hilaire Belloc so brilliantly explained, for the laborer contract was replaced by status--one step in the retrograde long march toward industrial enserfment of the wage-earning population.⁸⁵ A comment of Adam Smith a century earlier is worth quoting again: "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters."⁸⁶

The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar had still been heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were spurts of hard labor between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below that of our own day. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint.

As Oppenheimer suggested in the quote earlier in this chapter, the factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Steven Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative.

The problem with the old "putting out" system, in which cottage workers produced textiles on a contractual basis, was that it only eliminated worker control of the product. The factory system, by also eliminating worker control of the production process, introduced the added advantages of discipline and supervision, with workers organized under an overseer.

Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.).

This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it."⁹¹ And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism beyond the wildest hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control.

Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:

The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine was widespread among the radicalized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... conspicuously as a helot population.”⁹³

Peel's "bobbies"--professional law enforcement--replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disgruntled workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation."⁹⁵

Pitt's police state was supplemented by quasi-private vigilantism, in the time-honored tradition of blackshirts and death squads ever since. For example the "Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers"--an anti-Jacobin association of gentry and mill-owners-- conducted house-to-house searches and organized Guy Fawkes-style effigy burnings against Paine; "Church and King" mobs terrorised suspected radicals.⁹⁶

Thompson characterized this system of control as "political and social apartheid," and argued that "the revolution which did not happen in England was fully as devastating" as the one that did happen in France.⁹⁷

In addition to its transformation of society at home, the state aided the accumulation of capital through mercantilism. The modern "world market" was not created by free market forces. Like capitalist production in Western Europe, it was an artificial creation of the state, imposed by a revolution from above. The world market was established by the European conquest of most of the world, and by the naval supremacy of the Western European powers. Manufacturing to serve a global market was encouraged by state intervention to shut out foreign goods, give European shipping a monopoly of foreign commerce, and stamp out foreign competition by force. Since the process of creating a single world market has been so closely identified, since the mid-seventeenth century, with the hegemony of Great Britain over the other Western European powers, we will focus on British mercantilism and colonial policy in this section. Our survey here is not intended even as a systematic overview of the various subsidiary themes in the evolution of colonialism; as Marx's panoramic quote above suggests, the subject is too broad for us even to touch briefly on all its major sub-topics. The following is only a very uneven look at some of the more interesting aspects of the subject that have especially caught our attention.

The Dutch wars during the Interregnum and the reign of Charles II established England as the dominant mercantile power in the world. The Dutch carrying trade was largely eclipsed, and "the nucleus of all later settlements in India" were won from the Dutch. In the process, the value of stock in the East India Company increased nine-fold. The East India Company, established by charter from Cromwell, not only enjoyed close ties to the English state, but acted as proxy for it; it had the financial and military backing of the state behind its rule.¹⁰⁰

In addition to the naval supremacy arising from those wars, and the Dutch colonies added to English dominions, the British position was further cemented by the Navigation Acts.

Trade carried out under such monopoly conditions was a much more lucrative source of accumulation than industry, providing massive sums of capital for investment in the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century.¹⁰²

Modern exponents of the "free market" generally treat mercantilism as a "misguided" attempt to promote some unified national interest, adopted out of sincere ignorance of economic principles. In fact, the architects of mercantilism knew exactly what they were doing. Mercantilism was extremely efficient for its real purpose: making wealthy manufacturing interests rich at the expense of everyone else. Adam Smith consistently attacked mercantilism, not as a product of economic error, but as a quite intelligent attempt by powerful interests to enrich themselves through the coercive power of the state.

Despite mercantilism's theoretical preoccupation with the balance of trade, its practical concern was with favorable terms of trade--buying cheap and selling dear.¹⁰³ And this was quite rational, given the existence of captive foreign markets. Modern free trade advocates assume a mythical world of consumer sovereignty, in which domestic capital has no compulsive power over foreign markets. But this is untrue even in today's world, let alone the world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Although opportunities for domestic plunder had been largely exhausted (at least for the time being), the possibilities for naked force in foreign dominions were breathtaking:

In their reliance on the state to enforce unequal exchange, the merchant capitalists were acting in the tradition of their ancestors, the oligarchs who had taken over the artisan guilds and towns in the late Middle Ages, and set themselves up as middlemen between the urban craftsmen and the rural peasants.

Ireland was an early dress rehearsal for a number of atrocious themes that were to recur throughout the history of colonialism. Ireland, during and after Cromwell's conquest, experienced a death-rate comparable to the killing fields of Pol Pot, or of East Timor after Suharto's invasion.

The settler societies of Australia and the New World relied heavily on slave labor of one kind or another. According to Wakefield, when cheap land was available in the colonies, the only way for the capitalist to obtain labor at a profit was to employ convict or slave labor. Although, as we have seen above, Wakefield preferred a government policy of artificially pricing laborers out of the land market, he recognized slavery as a necessary makeshift when labor was scarce relative to land.¹⁰⁷

As was the case with the use of full-scale terror war to secure control of Ireland and expropriate land from the natives, the large-scale use of slave labor in foreign colonies was pioneered (in British realms at least) by Cromwell. One of the earliest sources of slaves was the defeated Irish people, along with the Protectorate's internal enemies. To be "Barbadoesed" appeared as a new verb, referring to the massive traffic in transported political criminals to that island.

America was built on slave labor. Most people are more or less aware of the importance of African slavery in the New World (as Joshua Gee wrote in 1729, "[a]ll this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations."¹⁰⁸ For that reason, and not to downplay its significance or sheer brutality, we focus here on the coerced labor of convicts and indentured servants, about which much less is generally known. Given the scale of black slavery and of convict and indentured white labor, it is likely that the vast majority of Americans in 1776 were descended from those brought here in chains.

Abbot Smith, a specialist in the history of indentured and convict labor, estimates that one-half to two-thirds of white immigrants to the North American colonies belonged to one of those categories.¹⁰⁹ Although estimates of the extent of such immigration vary, all are quite high. According to Edward Channing's History of the United States, 10,000 members of the British underclass were kidnapped for transportation in 1670. A 1680 pamphlet gives the same figure.¹¹⁰ In Virginia alone, Thomas Wertenbaker estimated anywhere from 1500 to 2000 entered the colony annually from 1635-1705. Indentured labor was the foundation of production in the tobacco colonies throughout the seventeenth century.¹¹¹

From the late seventeenth century on, the tobacco economy shifted to a reliance mainly on black slaves, as a means of social control. The poorly developed legal distinctions between black and white labor, combined with the brutal treatment of both and their close association on the plantations, threatened the planter aristocracy with biracial class solidarity. This threat became concrete from time to time in the form of revolts--especially Bacon's Rebellion, in which white and black laborers together nearly overthrew the colonial government. As a result, the legal status of black slaves was legally formalized in slave codes in the 1670s, and "white skin privilege" and racist ideology were used as a means to divide and rule. The shift to black plantation labor reduced the threat of social war. Even so, indentures and convicts continued to be a major part of the white labor force, and the beginning of large-scale transportation of criminals after 1718 threatened the shaky social peace once more.¹¹²

As for the eighteenth century, leaving aside voluntary indentures, Arthur Ekirch estimated that "some 50,000" convicts were transported from the British Isles.¹¹³ Convict laborers alone represented "as much as a quarter of all British emigrants to colonial America...."¹¹⁴ Lest anyone object that such servitude was involuntary only for those guilty of crimes, we should keep in mind the nature of their offenses. The typical transportee was a petty criminal, "a young male labourer driven to crime by economic necessity...." The majority of crimes were theft of property, by members of the classes "most vulnerable to economic dislocation"--descendants of the same "sturdy vagabonds" thrown onto the highways by the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry two centuries before. During economic downturns, an estimated 20-45% of the English populace "may have lacked the means to buy sufficient bread or otherwise feed themselves." Even in comparatively good times, the proportion did not fall below 10%.¹¹⁵ Gregory King, "the pioneer statistician," estimated that over half of the population earned less than they consumed and were supported by poor rates.¹¹⁶

It is also worth bearing in mind that the legal system of that time was in the hands of justices of the peace, who represented the interests of the gentry against the overwhelming majority of the people. And once a pauper entered that legal system, guilt was by no means a necessary condition for transportation. J.P.s assumed the right to sentence to transportation even acquitted persons, if they could not find "sureties for good behaviour."¹¹⁷

Another large group who were liable to involuntary transportation without having committed any offense were children. Sir Thomas Smythe and Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company, petitioned the Council of London in 1618 to remedy the labor shortage in their American plantation by allowing the transportation of "vagrant" children. According to the terms of the consequent bill, chlidren eight or over were subject to capture and transportation. Boys were liable to sixteen years servitude, and girls to fourteen. The city aldermen were empowered to direct constables to seize children "loitering" on the streets and to commit them to Bridewell prison-hospital pending shipment to America. Besides these "vagrants," children of the indigent were also pressed into service, on pain of cutting off poor relief to recalcitrant parents. Although the bill ostensibly provided land to those who had completed their term of service, a muster of the Virginia colony in 1625 found almost of the 1619 and 1620 transportees still alive.¹¹⁸

The rates of death were high for indentured and convict laborers in general, adults as well as children. Beginning with the transatlantic voyage itself, a death rate of 20% was regarded as acceptable, although it was often much higher. The overhead cost of white laborers was much lower than that for African slaves, since the cost of capture was so much lower.¹¹⁹

The numbers of indentured servants successfully completing their terms of service and collecting the land guaranteed by law, if any, were likewise small. As was the case with the children in the previous paragraph, only a minority of indentured servants actually collected the land that was guaranteed to them under their contract. In Maryland, for example, of 5000 indentured servants entering that colony from 1670-1680, fewer than 1300 collected their 50 acres. Over 1400 had died in service, and the rest were defrauded.¹²⁰ Masters often deliberately worsened conditions of work for indentured laborers toward the end of their terms, in order to induce them to run away and forfeit their land or money. In addition, masters were able to add years to the term of service for relatively minor offenses. Once such offense was marrying without the master's permission, or having children out of wedlock--even when the master was the father. It goes without saying that such children were born into servitude, and stayed there until they reached adulthood. Half of indentured servants, in the colonies taken together, did not survive their term of service.¹²¹

One of the most lucrative services the state provided for British manufacturing was the suppression of competing production in the colonies.

Although he was wrong in describing them as "[a]n essential prerequisite" for the industrial revolution, Christopher Hill was correct in his assertion that "large and stable colonial monopoly markets" were an important means of promoting manufacturing interests.¹²³

The conquest of India, where the authorities in India, followed by the destruction of the Bengalese textile industry (makers of the highest quality fabric in the world), was motivated to a large extent by such concerns.¹²⁴ Although Bengalese manufacturers had not yet adopted steam-driven methods of production, they likely would have done so, had India remained politically and economically independent. At the time of conquest, as Chomsky describes it,

Under British rule, the textile center of Dacca was depopulated from 150,000 to 30,000.¹²⁵ Jawaharlal Nehru, in his 1944 work The Discovery of India, correlated the level of poverty in the various parts of India with the length of time the British had been there. The once prosperous territory of Bengal, the first to be colonized, is today occupied by Bangladesh and the Calcutta area.¹²⁶

The old mercantilist system having accomplished its mission, by the mid-19th century the official British ideology shifted to "free trade." Free trade ideology has been adopted by the capitalist class, historically, when they were securely in possession of the fruits of past mercantilism, and wished to competing commercial powers from arising in the periphery by the same methods. Of course, the "free trade" actually adopted by Great Britain, as we shall see in Chapter Seven, was much closer to the neo-mercantilist "free trade" of Palmerston than the genuinely liberal free trade of the Cobdenites. Although the U.S., as a latter-day conterpart of Great Britain, is quite vocal in its support of "free trade," the American, German and Japanese industrial systems were created by the same mercantilist policies, with massive tariffs on industrial goods. "Free trade" was adopted by safely established industrial powers, who used "laissez-faire" as an ideological weapon to prevent potential rivals from following the same path of industrialization.

Although we have concentrated in this section on the earlier waves of colonialism and their effects on the formative period of industrial capitalism, the record of enslavement, robbery, and devastation was at least as great under the "New Colonialism" of the late 19th century. Exploitation of the Third World under the latter form of colonialism involved large-scale transfers of wealth to the developed world, and resulted as a consequence in vast super-profits.

In the New as well as the Old Colonialism, a central object of policy was "to clear out of his way by force, the modes of production and appropriation, based on the independent labour of the producer." According to David Korten,

This was accomplished first of all by "dispossessing indigenous communities of the greater part of their traditional territories": claiming uncultivated or common lands, forests, and grazing lands as property of the colonial administration, and abrogating traditional rights of access; and second, by head taxes to compel subsistence farmers to enter the money economy.

The latter theme continued even in post-colonial times, when corporate agribusiness relied on authoritarian Third World regimes to evict peasants from land needed for large-scale cash crop production.¹²⁹

At the same time, to relieve the labor shortage, colonial authorities (especially in British and French West Africa) resorted to forced labor to solve the labor shortage. Taxation was found, however, to be a much more efficient way of accomplishing the same end. In colonial Africa and Asia, poll taxes or excise taxes on staple commodities were used to force subsistence farmers to sell their labor in the cash economy in order to pay them.¹³⁰

Capitalism was not, by any means, a "free market" evolving naturally or peacefully from the civilization of the high Middle Ages. As Oppenheimer argued, capitalism as a system of class exploitation was a direct successor to feudalism, and still displays the birth scars of its origins in late feudalism.

Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc recounted a process in the high Middle Ages by which serfdom had gradually withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating and being replaced by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been "a system of relatively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures."¹³¹

Although such medievalists no doubt idealized that world considerably, it was still far superior to the world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Kropotkin described, in terms evocative of William Morris, the rich life of the High Middle Ages, "with its virile affirmation of the individual, and which succeeded in creating a society through the free federation of men, of villages and of towns.¹³² "In those cities, sheltered by their conquered liberties, inspired by the spirit of free agreement and of free initiative, a whole new civilization grew up and flourished in a way unparalleled to this day."¹³³ The free cities were virtually independent; although the crown "granted" them a charter in theory, in reality the charter was typically presented to the king and to the bishop of the surrounding diocese as a fait accompli, when "the inhabitants of a particular borough felt themselves to be sufficiently protected by their walls...."¹³⁴

The technical prerequisites of the industrial revolution had been anticipated by skilled craftsmen in the urban communes, scholars in the universities, and researchers in the monasteries;¹³⁵ but the atmosphere of barbarism following the triumph of the centralized state set technical progress back by centuries. The nineteenth century was, in a sense, a technical and industrial "renaissance," built atop the achievements of the High Middle Ages after a prolonged hiatus; but because of the intervening centuries of warfare on society, industrial technology was introduced into a society based on brutal exploitation and privilege, instead of flowering in a society where it might have benefited all.

The Renaissance as it happened, G.K. Chesterton argued, was only an anemic ghost of what it might have been had it taken place under a democracy of guilds and peasant proprietors. Had Wat Tyler and John Ball been successful, Chesterton speculated,

The real advancement, the real humanism and progress of the High Middle Ages, has been neglected, and the barbarism and regression of the age of the absolute state disguised as a rebirth of civilization. In short, history has been not only rewritten, but stood on its head by the victors.

By 1650 the earlier egalitarian trend Wallerstein remarked on had been reversed. In the meantime, what he calls the "capitalist world-system" had been established in response to the crisis of feudalism and rising wages.

On this latter point, according to Maurice Dobb, the strategy was successful indeed. In the two centuries before the Tudor dynasty, wages had doubled in terms of wheat. After 1500, they fell more than enough to reverse that gain. Part of this fall in real wages was the result of the price revolution of the 1500s, which amounted to a program of forced investment: "To the extent that money-wages failed to rise as the commodity price-level rose, all employers and owners of capital were abnormally enriched at the expense of the standard of life of the labouring class."¹³⁹

There was, as Wallerstein wrote, "a reasonably high level of continuity between the families that had been high strata" in 1450 and 1650. Capitalism, far from being "the overthrow of a backward aristocracy by a progressive bourgeoisie," "was brought into existence by a landed aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old system was disintegrating."¹⁴⁰ In The Modern World-System, he described the process as one of "embourgeoisment" of the nobility¹⁴¹--especially in England, where "the aristocracy to survive had to learn the ways of and partially fuse with the bourgeoisie."

As Wallerstein suggested above, some families in the old landed aristocracy lost out; those adaptable elements who survived absorbed large elements of the bourgeoisie into their ranks. The new agricultural class arose in the fifteenth century as a result of the fact that the landed aristocracy had failed to become a caste, and the gentry had failed to become a lesser nobility. In this new class, the old distinction between aristocracy between aristocracy and gentry was losing its significance. Wallerstein cited Perez Zagorin on the tendency for men "in a position to deploy capital in agriculture, trade, and industry" to acquire "the command of social life." This combined class, which also included the old merchant oligarchs who were canny enough to invest in modern methods of production, enriched itself at the expense of the increasingly proletarianized peasantry.¹⁴²

Christopher Hill's analysis of the transformation of the landed class parallels that of Wallerstein to a large degree. The great landowners who thrived in the new economy were those who adapted to "the new society in which money was king." The took less interest in court affairs, ostentatious expenditure, and hospitality, and instead turned their attention toward estate management, rack-renting, the leasing of mining rights, etc. By the seventeenth century, the elements of the old landed aristocracy who had been unable to make this transition had largely disappeared. The surviving aristocracy consisted almost entirely of those "capable of taking advantage of the intellectual and technical revolution in estate management."¹⁴³

The Civil War, as Wallerstein understood it, was between the old and the new landed class. The former, the decadent rentier class that infested the royal court, was defeated; the latter went on, as the Whig oligarchy, to achieve political supremacy in 1689.¹⁴⁴ Although the Civil War was followed by a resurgence of the landed interest, this interest consisted of the new capitalist agricultural class: those elements of the old landed aristocracy who had adopted capitalist methods of agricultural production and learned to thrive in a capitalist economy, along with merchant-capitalists, yeomen, and gentry who had had sufficient capital to invest in the capitalist revolution. Wallerstein contrasted this to France, in which the old court aristocracy had retained its supremacy.¹⁴⁵ These points are echoed in part by Arno Mayer,¹⁴⁶ who argued for continuity between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist ruling class.

Some apologists for capitalism try to minimize the continuity between the landed and industrial ruling classes, and stress the plebian origins of industrial capitalists in the nineteenth century. For example:

As Maurice Dobb pointed out, however, although much of the entrepreneurship of the industrial revolution was indeed carried out by "new men..., devoid of privilege or social standing," they were nevertheless heavily reliant on old money for their investment capital. Although the new industries were, to an extent, built by men from the humble ranks of master craftsmen and yeomen farmers with small savings, the great bulk of capital by which industry was financed came from "merchant houses and from mercantile centres like Liverpool." These humble upstarts were able to make money off their own small savings only through the favor and patronage of the old ruling class. "[A]ntagonism between the older capitalist strata and the nouveaux riches of the new industry never went very deep."¹⁴⁸

The investment capital available for the industrial revolution was the accumulated loot from centuries of previous robbery by the ruling class. It was accumulated by the merchant capitalist oligarchies of the late Middle Ages, that took over the democratic guilds and robbed both urban craftsmen and rural peasants through unequal trade. It was accumulated by the mercantilists who carried out a similar policy of unequal exchange on a global scale. It was accumulated by a landed ruling class of capitalist farmers who expropriated the peasantry and became the Whig oligarchy. It was into this old money elite that the new money men of the nineteenth century were co-opted.

But whatever their class origins, the industrial capitalists of the nineteenth century benefited massively from the previous coercion of the landed and mercantilist oligarchies. The prejudicial terms on which the British laboring classes sold their labor were set by the expropriation of their land, and by authoritarian social controls like the Laws of Settlement and the Combination Law. And the favorable terms on which the British textile industry sold its output were set by the role of British armed force in creating the "world market," and suppressing foreign competition.

One might argue that the industrial capitalists were passive beneficiaries of such policies, and played no role in their formation: for example Mises, who portrayed them as offering "salvation" to those reduced to misery by the enclosure movement, a legacy in which they were innocent of any complicity.¹⁴⁹ One might argue that the industrial capitalists would have preferred to operate in an environment where laborers had independent access to the means of production and subsistence, could take work or leave it, and could therefore afford to drive harder bargains in the wage market. One might argue that they would have preferred selling their wares in the face of vigorous competition from Indian and Egyptian textile industry. One might make such arguments, no doubt, and find plenty gullible enough to believe them.

Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a ruling class with its origins in the Old Regime--or as Christopher Hill or Immanuel Wallerstein might put it, by a pre-capitalist ruling class that had been transformed in a capitalist manner. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon III's bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a "natural" bourgeois evolution, industrialization was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords.¹⁵⁰

The process by which the high medieval civilization of peasant proprietors, craft guilds and free cities was overthrown, was vividly described by Kropotkin.¹⁵¹ Before the invention of gunpowder, the free cities repelled royal armies more often than not, and won their independence from feudal dues. And these cities often made common cause with peasants in their struggles to control the land. The absolutist state and the capitalist revolution it imposed became possible only when artillery could reduce fortified cities with a high degree of efficiency, and the king could make war on his own people.¹⁵² And in the aftermath of this conquest, the Europe of William Morris was left devastated, depopulated, and miserable.

Of course, the urban communes were also subverted from within. With the help of the rising absolute monarchs, the guilds and towns were gradually taken over by oligarchies of merchant capitalists and wholesalers, and transformed from democratic associations of master craftsmen, into "close corporations of the richer merchants, which sought to monopolize wholesale trade" between town craftsmen and peasants. These merchant capitalists came to control the town governments as well as the guilds. The democratic governance of the town communes was replaced by oligarchy, in which the franchise was increasingly restricted and public offices formally barred to all but wealthy burghers. These oligarchs grew rich on unequal exchange, profiting at the expense both of town laborers and the peasants who bought their goods; craftsmen were prohibited by law from directly marketing their goods outside the city walls.¹⁵⁵

The outcome of the process, both internal subversion and external assault, was that Europe was spoiled as a conquered territory, and the people living in it were treated as an occupied enemy. The contrast between the Europe before and after this spoilation could not have been greater:

Peter Tosh had a song called "Four Hundred Years." Although the white working class suffered nothing like the brutality of black slavery, there has nevertheless been a "four hundred years" of oppression for all of us under the system of state capitalism established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ever since the birth of the first states six thousand years ago, political coercion has allowed one ruling class or another to live off other people's labor. But since the early modern period the system of power has become increasingly conscious, unified, and global in scale. The current system of transnational state capitalism, without rival since the collapse of the soviet bureaucratic class system, is a direct outgrowth of that seizure of power, that revolution from above, "four hundred years" ago. Orwell had it backwards. The past is a "boot stamping on a human face." Whether the future is more of the same depends on what we do now.

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.

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:

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.

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).

That the working classes' own forms of self-organization could not have been the basis for industrialization, went without saying:

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.

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,

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.

1. Franz Oppenheimer, "A Post Mortem on Cambridge Economics (Part II)," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 2:4 (1943) 533.

2. Franz Oppenheimer, The State, trans. By John Gitterman (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1997) li-lii.

3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital vol. 1, vol. 35 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1996) 704-5.

4. Oppenheimer, The State 5-6.

5. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chicago: Regnery, 1949, 1963, 1966) 619-20.

7. Art Carden, "Sweatshops," Mises Economics Blog, May 6, 2004. http://www.mises.org/blog/archives/001956.asp#more Captured May 6, 2004.

8. Oppenheimer, The State 6.

9. Ibid. 7-8.

10. Ibid. 8.

11. Ibid. 8.

12. The term "primitive accumulation" (or "original accumulation"), was originally used by the classical economists in reference to the process by which, in the mists of time, capital had been originally accumulated by an owning class distinct from laborers (Adam Smith’s "accumulation of stock"); it was assumed to have been the result of success in the marketplace. Marx used the term ironically, standing it on its head. The term, succinctly, referred to "an accumulation not the result of the capitalist mode of production, but its starting point." Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 704.

13. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 705-6.

14. Ibid. 179-80.

15. Ibid. 706.

16. Ibid. 709.

17. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (1760-1832) (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913) 27-8, 35-6.

18. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 711.

19. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1926) 120.

20. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1971, 1993) 3-42.

21. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1963) 224-5, 224-5n.

22. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Part I (New York: Academic Press, 1974) 251n.

23. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1961) 147.

24. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 172.

25. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 713.

26. Christopher Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution, 1603-1714. Vol. 2 of Pelican History of Great Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1967) 116.

27. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Walter J. Black, 1942) 320.

28. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 714.

29. Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation and the Social Division of Labour (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld; London: F. Pinter, 1984, c 1983) 48-9.

30. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 226; Considerations Concerning Common Fields and Enclosures (1653), in Ibid. 226.

31. The Hammonds, Village Labourer 42.

32. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1968) 27.

33. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 227.

34. "Development as Enclosure: The Establishment of the Global Economy," The Ecologist (July/August 1992) 133.

35. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 715.

36. Qt. In Ibid. 610.

37. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 275.

38. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 231.

39. Perelman, Classical Political Economy 38.

40. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963, 1966) 219-20, 358.

41. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 716.

42. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1998) 205.

43. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 222.

44. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 222.

45. Trevor Ashton, An Economic History of England: the 18^th Century (London: University Paperbacks, 1972) 115, qt. in Perelman, Classical Political Economy 38.

46. Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980) 162.

47. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 717-8.

48. Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisc.: Hallberg Publishing Corp., 1983) 106n.

49. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 121.

50. Perelman, Classical Political Economy 41-2.

51. Ibid. 42.

52. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 752.

53. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago, London, Toronto: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1952).

54. E. G. Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization. Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969 (1849)) 166.

55. E. G. Wakefield, England and America II:5, qt. in Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 755.

56. Wakefield, England and America I:131, qt. in ibid. 756-7.

57. Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies, qt. in Ibid. 757.

58. Wakefield, View of the Art of Colonization 332-3.

59. Gary B. Nash, Class and Society in Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970) 23, 33, 46.

60. Nock, Our Enemy, the State 67.

61. Ibid. 67n.

62. Ibid. 69.

63. Ibid. 71.

64. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 222.

65. Ibid. 23-4.

66. Six Centuries of Work and Wages, qt. in Ibid. 233.

67. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 723-6.

68. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 141-2.

69. Smith, Wealth of Nations 59-61.

70. Ibid. 60.

71. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 273; all material in quotes is from Ferrand’s Speech in the House of Commons, April 27, 1863.

72. Qt. in ibid 746.

73. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer (1760-1832) (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1917) 1:44, 147.

74. Michael A. Hoffman II, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America. 4^th ed. (Dresden, N.Y.: Wiswell Ruffin House, 1992) 16.

75. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class 223-4.

76. Smith, Wealth of Nations 61; Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:74.

77. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class 199-202.

78. The Hammonds, Town Labourer 123-7.

79. Smith, Wealth of Nations 61.

80. See Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, on how these purposes were served by 20^th century welfare and labor legislation.

81. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 247.

82. Ibid. 276n.

83. Ibid. 729.

84. Ibid. 729-30.

85. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1913, 1977).

86. Smith, Wealth of Nations 61.

87. Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-4.

88. Steven A. Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production--Part I" Review of Radical Political Economics (Summer 1974) .

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid.

91. Andrew Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson, Making of the English Working Class 360.

92. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) xi-xii.

93. Hammonds, Town Labourer 72.

94. Ibid. 80.

95. Ibid. 91-2.

96. "Planting the Liberty Tree," Chapter Five of Thompson, Making of the English Working Class.

97. Ibid. 197-8.

98. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 741.

99. Cecil Rhodes, qt. In "Development as Enclosure" 134.

100. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 129.

101. Ibid. 127.

102. Ibid. 128.

103. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 202.

104. Ibid. 203-4.

105. Ibid. 210.

106. Ibid. 206.

107. Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization 324-6.

108. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 185.

109. James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1962) 176.

110. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves 55, 77.

111. Thomas Wertenbaker, The First Americans: 1607-1690 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971) 24-5.

112. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1987) 134-40.

113. Ibid. 1.

114. Ibid. 27.

115. Ibid. 55, 58.

116. Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) 34-5.

117. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 143.

118. Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves 72-3.

119. Ibid. 80.

120. Ibid. 85-6.

121. Ibid. 85-90.

122. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 205.

123. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 191.

124. Ibid. 191.

125. Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 115.

126. Noam Chomsky, Keeping the Rabble in Line (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994) 87.

127. David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1995; San Francisco, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1995) 252.

128. "Development as Enclosure" 134.

129. Ibid. 138-9.

130. Ibid. 135-7.

131. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London, New York: Verso, 1983) 41-2.

133. Ibid. Sec. V.

134. Ibid. Sec. IV.

135. See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1977); also Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909) 297-8.

136. G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (New York: John Lane Company, 1917) 163-4.

137. Kropotkin, The State Sec. VII.

138. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Part II (New York: Academic Press, 1980) 31.

139. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 235-6.

140. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism 105-6.

141. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Part I 62, 286.

142. Ibid. 245-6, 256; Perez Zagorin, "The Second Interpretation of the English Revolution," Journal of Economic History (September 3, 1959) qt. in ibid. 256.

143. Hill, Reformation to the Industrial Revolution 50.

144. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Part I 283.

145. Ibid. 290.

146. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime

147. Mises, Human Action 622.

148. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 22, 277-8.

149. Mises, Human Action 620.

150. Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (Simon and Schuster, 1976)

151. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid 215-22, 226-7, 230

152. See, for example, John S. Pettingill, "Firearms and the Distribution of Income: A Neoclassical Model," Review of Radical Political Economics (Summer 1981) 1-10.

153. Kropotkin, The State Sec. VI.

154. Ibid. Sec. VIII.

155. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism 88-124.

156. Kropotkin, The State Sec. VII.

157. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 263.

158. In fairness, Michael Harrington argued that that work was a deliberate simplification and did not do justice to the complexity of Marx’s thought as a whole. Twilight of Capitalism 37-41.

159. Six Lectures at Manchester, qt. in Karl Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 29 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987) 99.

160. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, vol. 6 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976) 132.

161. Ibid. 159.

162. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, vol. 25 of Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987) 168.

163. Marx, Grundrisse 435.

164. Marx and Engels, Capital vol. 1 749.

165. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid 297.