Capital Volume 1
by Karl Marx


Chapter 30.

Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of
the Home Market for Industrial Capital

    The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural
population, intermittent but renewed again and again, supplied,
as we saw, the town industries with a mass of proletarians
entirely unconnected with the corporate guilds and unfettered by
them; a fortunate circumstance that makes old A. Anderson (not to
be confounded with James Anderson) in his History of Commerce,
believe in the direct intervention of providence. We must still
pause a moment on this element of primitive accumulation. The
thinning-out of the independent, self-supporting peasants not
only brought about the crowding together of the industrial
proletariat, in the way that Geoffroy Saint Hilaire explained the
condensation of cosmical matter at one place by its rarefaction
at another.(1*) In spite of the smaller number of its
cultivators, the soil brought forth as much or more produce,
after as before, because the revolution in the conditions of
landed property was accompanied by improved methods of culture,
greater cooperation, concentration of the means of production,
etc., and because not only were the agricultural wage labourers
put on the strain more intensely,(2*) but the field of production
on which they worked for themselves became more and more
contracted. With the setting free of a part of the agricultural
population, therefore, their former means of nourishment were
also set free. They were now transformed into material elements
of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast adrift,
must buy their value in the form of wages from his new master,
the industrial capitalist. That which holds good of the means of
subsistence holds with the raw materials of industry dependent
upon hone agriculture. They were transformed into an element of
constant capital. Suppose, for example, a part of the Westphalian
peasants, who at the time of Frederic II, all span flax, forcibly
expropriated and hunted from the soil; and the other part that
remained, turned into day labourers of large farmers. At the same
time arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in
which the men "set free" now work for wages. The flax looks
exactly as before. Not a fibre of it is changed, but a new social
soul has popped into its body. It forms now a part of the
constant capital of the master manufacturer. Formerly divided
among a number of small producers, who cultivated it themselves
and with their families spun it in retail fashion, it is now
concentrated in the hand of one capitalist, who sets others to
spin and weave it for him. The extra labour expended in
flax-spinning realized itself formerly in extra income to
numerous peasant families, or maybe, in Frederic II's time, in
taxes pour le roi de Prusse.(3*) It realizes itself now in profit
for a few capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered
over the face of the country, are now crowded together in a few
great labour barracks, together with the labourers and the raw
material. And spindles, looms, raw material, are now transformed,
from means of independent existence for the spinners and weavers,
into means for commanding them and sucking out of them unpaid
labour.2 One does not perceive, when looking at the large
manufactories and the large farms, that they have originated from
the throwing into one of many small centres of production, and
have been built up by the expropriation of many small independent
producers. Nevertheless, the popular intuition was not at fault.
In the time of Mirabeau, the lion of the revolution, the great
manufactories were still called manufactures reunies, workshops
thrown into one, as we speak of fields thrown into one. Says
Mirabeau: "We are only paying attention to the grand
manufactories, in which hundreds of men work under a director and
which are commonly called manufactures reunies. Those where a
very large number of labourers work, each separately and on his
own account, are hardly considered; they are place at an infinite
distance from the others. This is a great error, as the latter
alone made a really important object of national prosperity.. The
large workshop (manufacture reunie) will enrich prodigiously one
or two entrepreneurs, but the labourers will only be journeymen,
paid more or less, and will not have any share in the success of
the undertaking. In the discrete workshop (manufacture separee),
on the contrary, no one will become rich, but many labourers will
be comfortable; the saving and the industrious will be able to
amass a little capital, to put by a little for a birth of a
child, for an illness, for themselves or their belongings. The
number of saving and industrious labourers will increase, because
they will see in good conduct, in activity, a means of
essentially bettering their condition, and not of obtaining a
small rise of wages that can never be of any importance for the
future, and whose sole result is to place men in the position to
live a little better, but only from day to day... The large
workshops, undertakings of certain private persons who pay
labourers from day to day to work for their gain, may be able to
put these private individuals at their ease, but they will never
be an object worth the attention of governments. Discrete
workshops, for the most part combined with cultivation of small
holdings, are the only free ones."(4*) The expropriation and
eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set
free for industrial capital the labourers, their means of
subsistence, and material for labour; it also created the home
market.
     In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into
wage labourers, and their means of subsistence and of labour into
material elements of capital, created, at the same time, a home
market for the latter. Formerly, the peasant family produced the
means of subsistence and raw materials which they themselves, for
the most part, consumed. These raw materials, and means of
subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer sells
them, he finds his market in manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse
woollen stuffs -- things whose raw materials had ben within the
reach of every peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for
its own use -- were now transformed into articles of manufacture,
to which the country districts at once served for markets. The
many scattered customers, whom stray artisans until now had found
in the numerous small producers working on their own account,
concentrate themselves now into one great market provided for by
industrial capital.(5*) Thus, hand in hand with the expropriation
of the self supporting peasants, with their separation from their
means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic
industry, the process of separation between manufacture and
agriculture. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry
can give the internal market of a country that extension and
consistence which the capitalist mode of production requires.
Still the manufacturing period, properly so-called, does not
succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and
completely. It will be remembered that manufacture, properly
so-called, conquers but partially the domain of national
production, and always rests on the handicrafts of the town and
the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate
basis. It if destroys these in one form, in particular branches,
at certain points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it
needs them for the preparation of raw material up to a certain
point. It produces, therefore, a new class of small villages who,
while following the cultivation of the soil as an accessary
calling, find their chief occupation in industrial labour, the
products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or
through the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the
chief, cause of a phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student
of English history. From the last third of the fifteenth century,
he finds continually complaints, only interrupted at certain
intervals, about the encroachment of capitalist farming in the
country districts and the progressive destruction of the
peasantry. On the other hand, he always finds this peasantry
turning up again, although in diminished number, and always under
worse conditions.(6*) The chief reason is: England is at one time
chiefly a cultivator of corn, at another chiefly a breeder of
cattle, in alternate periods, and with these the extent of
peasant cultivation fluctuates. Modern industry alone, and
finally, supplies in machinery the lasting basis of capitalistic
agriculture, expropriates radically the enormous majority of the
agricultural population, and completes the separation between
agriculture and rural domestic industry, whose roots -- spinning
and weaving -- it tears up.(7*) It is therefore, also, for the
first time, conquers for industrial capital the entire home
market.(8*)

NOTES:

1. In his Notions de Philosophie Naturelle, Paris, 1838.

2. A point that Sir James Stewart emphasises.

3. "Je permettrai," says the capitalist, "que vous avez l'honneur
de me servir, a condition que vous me donnez le peu qui vous
reste pour la peine que je prends de vous commander." (J.J.
Rousseau: Discours sur l'Economie Politique.)

4. Mirabeau, l.c. t. III, pp. 20-109 passim. That Mirabeau
considers the separate workshops more economic and productive
that the "combined," and sees in the latter merely artificial
exotics under government cultivation, is explained by the
position at that time of a great part of the continental
manufactures.

5. "Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into the yearly
clothing of a labourer's family by its own industry in the
intervals of other work -- this makes no show; but bring it to
market, send it to the factory, thence to the broker, thence to
the dealer, and you will have great commercial operations, and
nominal capital engaged to the amount of twenty times its
value... The working class is thus emerced to support a wretched
factory population, a parasitical shop-keeping class, and a
fictitious commercial, monetary, and financial system. (David
Urquhart, l.c., p. 120)

6. Cromwell's time forms an exception. So long as the Republic
lasted, the mass of the English people of all grades rose from
the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors. 

7. Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen industry has sprung,
with the introduction of machinery, from manufacture proper and
from the destruction of rural and domestic industries. "The
plough, the yoke, were 'the invention of gods, and the occupation
of heroes;' are the loom, the spindle, the distaff, of less noble
parentage. You sever the distaff and the plough, the spindle and
the yoke, and you get factories and poorhouses, credit and
panics, two hostile nations, agricultural and commercial." (David
Urquhart, l.c., p. 122) But now comes Carey, and cries out upon
England, surely not with unreason, that it is trying to turn
every other country into a mere agricultural nation, whose
manufacturer is to be England. He pretends that in this way
Turkey has been ruined, because "the owners and occupants of land
have never been permitted by England to strengthen themselves by
the formation of that natural alliance between the plough and the
loom, the hammer and the harrow." (The Slave Trade, p. 125)
According to him, Urquhart himself is one of the chief agents in
the ruin of Turkey, where he had made free trade propaganda in
the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great
Russophile by the way, wants to prevent the process of separation
by that very system of protection which accelerates it. 

8. Philanthropic English economists, like Mill, Rogers, Goldwin,
Smith, Fawcett, etc., and liberal manufacturers like John Bright
& Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked Cain
after Abel, Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But
where do you come from, then? From the destruction of those
freeholders. Why don't you ask further, where are the independent
weavers, spinners, and artizans gone?