Class 12 Portuguese

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Class 12

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» NEIL SMITH: Brings me back to your
your point earlier about the

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the last chapters in Capital.

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There's the primitive accumulation chapter
of course, but I was thinking as much about

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the chapter on colonies and Wakefield, and
the sense of you get from Marx's critique of Wakefield

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which is that the realities of the system

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become extraordinarily more vivid and apparent

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at a distance from the center.

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» DAVID HARVEY: Yeah, I think this is
Marx' answer to… Hegel had

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a little thing about the formation of colonies

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and some kind of level of imperialism might be a
solution to the contradictions of

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capitalism, 'cause Hegel had a sense that

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capitalism was a very contradictory force and
he thought there may be a resolution that way.

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What Marx does, is basically to say "no", there is no such thing

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all you do is replicate the contradictions of capitalism
on a broader scale,

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you make it global, you take the contradictions global and

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you see contemporary China, I think

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something of that sort is exactly happening know.

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So, in a sense again what Marx

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does back in 1867, is to write this thing which is

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incredibly prophetic about where the
world is gonna go and how it's gonna go.

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And it's just so (…)

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But again one of the things about teaching it all this time, if I could go back to that for a moment,

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is that it's far easier to take the text of Capital right now

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and integrate it with stuff from the newspapers, stuff going on around us,
all of the time.

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It's far easier to do that now than it was

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maybe in the early 1970s,

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when the struggles were anti-imperialist struggles, the civil rights struggle,

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some struggles around labor but labor was
relatively strong in that period

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not only in the United States but also in Europe.

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And there were these revolutions in Europe, like
in Portugal and so on, and most of us thought

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that socialism was just around the corner!

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The eighth part departs somewhat from

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the scenery as it's constructed earlier on.

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What's going on in the early part,

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the first seven parts, is a dialogue with

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what you would call Smithian utopianism.

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A world in which, as he puts it, "Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham"

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have their sway and do their thing.

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Now Marx knows perfectly well that we don't live in a world like that but

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it was, of course, the central argument of
classical political economy that, if only

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the world could be constructed like that
then the hidden hand of the market would ensure

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that capitalist development would work to the benefit of all.

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So Marx accepts Smith's assumptions as you'll recall in Chapter 2,

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where he says 'theres an atomistic market'

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and then later on there's that line about equality, freedom, property and Bentham.

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But what Marx shows is that step-by-step,

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logically - logically - logically,

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by the time you get to Chapter 25 you see two consequences

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of the implementation of such a utopian vision.

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And one is a minor consequence and the other
is a major consequence.

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The minor consequence is that we're likely to see

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this highly decentralized, individualistic system

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gradually displaced by an increasing centralization of capital.

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That, as he puts it elsewhere,

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the end result of competition is inevitably some form of monopoly or oligopoly,

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and that therefore the end result of the Smithian world is going to be to destroy

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the idea of individualism and the competitive basis of that individualism.

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The major consequence however is quite simply that the rich grow richer

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and the poor grow poorer.

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As he puts it, we see when this system is implemented,

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the accumulation of wealth at one pole, on the part of capital

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and accumulation of degradation, misery and the like,
on the part of that other pole

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i.e the part of the working class that has produced the wealth

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and has effectively been deprived of it by the dynamics of

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capitalist property relations and appropriation procedures.

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Now in a sense, I think you could summarize
this by saying 'this is an incredibly

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sophisticated essay on the theme

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that there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals'.

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In a sense, of course, he's made a lot of the fact that the market system is egalitarian.

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'Equality', 'freedom',

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and the reason there is nothing more unequal

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than being deprived under a system of that kind is that

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it's very easy to be gulled, as it were, into the illusions about liberty and freedom

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that this system promotes.

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That, indeed, the market system is about equality and freedom.

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And most of us would probably consider those primary virtues.

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We might go so far to say that there is indeed a case for private property.

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We might do without Bentham, but nevertheless

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this would look to us from the outside like a virtuous system.

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And its easy to persuade us all of the virtues of this system.

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And historically that of course is what capitalist class propaganda
and discourse has been very active in doing.

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But the consequences are this increasing inequality

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and this increasing centralization of power.

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I think it's interesting to reflect for a moment on
where we've been for the last thirty years

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since the beginnings of, if you like, the Neoliberal assault,

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which has precisely

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peddled the virtues of the free-market system, of private property rights

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and has constantly preached, as Bush has, about freedom and liberty,

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and to a lesser degree of equality

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and then consider what the consequences
have been and ask yourself the question:

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Is capital more centralized
now than it was thirty years ago?,

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in areas like pharmaceuticals, media, banking, energy, and all the rest of it.

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And I think you would pretty much come to the conclusion that

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on that score there has been

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a very marked trend towards increasing centralization

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of capital and an increasing centralization of power.

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When you look at the data on inequality

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you see the ratio between what the CEO got relative to

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the remuneration of an average employee in a corporation in 1970,

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and it was around 30 : 1.

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Now in the United States it is closer to 500 : 1 and
there have been times when it got closer to 1,000 : 1.

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The concentration of wealth in the top 0.1 percent of the population of the United States

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has doubled of the last twenty five years.

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The concentration of wealth among the top 0.01 percent has tripled
over the last twenty five years.

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And whenever Neoliberalism has struck,

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you immediately see the emergence of a fabulously wealthy elite.

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Mexico is one of my favorite examples,

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before the grand privatization schemes of Salinas in 1980 to '82-84

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you wouldn't find any Mexicans on the Forbes wealthiest list,

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now you'll find

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fourteen of them and the richest man in the
world is reputed now to be Carlos Slim,

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who made all his money out of the
privatization schemes of the Salinas administration.

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You will find many other examples as
you go around, the degree of Neo-liberalization

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has had immense impact on the distribution of wealth and income in society.

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So on this ground i think you would argue that

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Marx has made a plausible case,

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that the closer we get towards the implementation of the Neoliberal utopian dream,

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the more we are likely to realize these particular consequences.

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On that point at least we can see something very important in terms of the analysis.

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But now we come to part eight where there's nothing here about

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Freedom, Equality and Bentham and all the rest of it.

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It's really about a certain history of violent appropriation,
of predatory behaviors,

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none of which can be legitimized through the market,

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or understood as being legitimate

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in terms of the rules of market exchange,
that Adam Smith's utopia required.

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So we see a completely different world

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in operation and it's the world that Marx calls original accumulation.

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How did it all began?

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It begins with a tale of violence and violent appropriation, a violent dissolution

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of a pre-existing mode of production and it's supplanting by a capitalist mode of production.

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Now in this story, in this section there is an interesting side commentary.

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I have circulated to you some passages from Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'.

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Marx in one of his introductory notes to Capital, comments that

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he made his points on Hegel

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some twenty-odd years before,

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and what he's referring to there

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is lengthy piece he wrote called a 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'.

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Now when you go and read Marx's critique there's something very interesting about it,

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that it ignores the first part of Hegel's discussion entirely

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and starts with a consideration of paragraph 250 onwards.

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What follows is a critique of Hegel's theory of the state
and civil society and the like.

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What Marx has totally ignored in that critique are the preceding few paragraphs

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which are, actually, very strange paragraphs within Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'

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because suddenly when you get to this paragraph 243,

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Hegel suddenly launches into a very interesting discussion,

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in which he talks about "The amassing of wealth" on the one hand,

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which is being carried out through capitalistic forms of operation,

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which is coupled on the other
side with "the subdivision and restriction of particular jobs."

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This results in the dependence and distress of the class tied to work of that sort,

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and these again entail inability to feel and enjoy the broader freedoms and
especially the intellectual benefits of civil society."

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Then he goes on "When the standard of living of a large mass of people falls below a certain subsistence level

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– a level regulated automatically as the one necessary for a member of the society –
and when there is

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a consequent loss of the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and the self-respect

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which makes a man insist on maintaining himself by his own work and effort,
the result is the creation of a rabble of paupers.

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At the same time this brings with it, at the other end of the social scale, conditions

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which greatly facilitate the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands."

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This is astonishingly similar to Marx's passage about accumulation of wealth at one pole

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and accumulation of misery, degradation and toil at the other pole.

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Hegel then goes on to suggest

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that there's no way in which you can actually redistribute income from the rich
to the poor to ameliorate this problem.

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Furthermore, if you go to

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one of the footnote on next page, footnote 149,

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he makes some remarks about poverty and the rabble

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and he talks about how many of them become dependent and idle.

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But ends with I think a very important idea: "Against nature man can claim no right,

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but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to

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one class by another." -i.e. class struggle-

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"The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society."

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The problem of course is still with us,

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read Jeffrey Sachs and 'The End of Poverty',

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which again is one of those arguments in which

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the free market, Equality and Property
are going to be the major vehicles.

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But then Hegel suggests that there may be a solution, as he says,

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-this inner tension if you like the dialectic of class struggle
inside of capitalist society-

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This is on top of p.151, passage 246: "This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it
– or at any rate drives a specific civil society –

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to push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence,

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in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has over-produced,
or else generally backward in industry"

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And then again the footnote:

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"Civil society is thus driven to found colonies."

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And the he talks about "Colonial independence

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proves to be of the greatest advantage to the mother country, just as

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the emancipation of slaves turns out to the greatest advantage of the owners."

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Now this I think explains something which otherwise seems somewhat peculiar about part eight,

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which is: why does it end with a discussion of colonization?

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When the penultimate chapter ends with the expropriators being expropriated,
the death knell of private property sounds and

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a revolution occurs,

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the kind of rhetoric that you would expect of the communist manifesto.

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Why suddenly is there this addendum?

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And I think it has a lot to do

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with Marx trying to not only square his accounts with Adam Smith,

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which he's going to do in part eight,

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but also to squares his accounts with Hegel and Hegel's account.

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In other words he feels some necessity to try to make clear

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that the colonial solution is no solution

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it will simply reproduce the social relations
of capitalism on a broader scale,

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particularly given the nature of colonial land policies as advocated by Wakefield.

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So we have to understand that Capital has always been written

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in the contexts of dialogues with these various people

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and of course the primary dialogue in part eight

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is Adam Smith's account of primitive or original accumulation,

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which was according to Adam Smith a peaceful affair (!)

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and it just happened that there were some people who were hardworking

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and some people who were not,

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some people who could be bothered

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some people who could not be bothered,

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and the result of this was (bit by bit)

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that those who were hard working
and who could be bothered

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accumulated some wealth,

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and eventually those who could not be bothered
could not accumulate wealth

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and in the end in order to survive,
actually preferred

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to give up their labor-power as a commodity

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in return for a living wage.

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So, as far as Adam Smith was
concerned, this was a peaceable process,

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it could almost be naturalized in terms of
human aspirations or the lack thereof

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and of course in all of this,

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it became very important in Adam Smith's account

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not to bring in the state as an agent of primitive accumulation.

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The reason being that Adam Smith's argument,

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like most of classical political economy,

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was trying to keep the state out of the story,
let there be laissez-faire, let the state withdraw.

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Let the state just act as a kind of night watchman of what's going on

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and then everything will be ok,
just let the market do its work.

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There were some areas,

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public investment and public health, where that didn't apply

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but overall this was the argument.

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So what Adam Smith and many of the other political-economists
tried to do is to naturalize

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the process of primitive accumulation.

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There were some political-economists who didn't do that.

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Marx mentions quite frequently the work of James Steuart.

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James Steuart recognized that there was a crucial role for the state

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in the formation of capital, and in fact

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there was a line of argument within classical
political economy which was subdued,

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which did indeed see a necessary violence which
would be visited by the state

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in order for original accumulation to occur.

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There was a book published, 2-3 years ago or maybe more,

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by Michael Perelman called 'The Invention Of Capitalism'

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and he does an extremely good job of going back
over all of the classical political economists

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and looking at them and saying 'what did they argue and what they did not argue?'

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and he focuses very strongly on James Steuart

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and he talks about the way in which

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Adam Smith spent a great deal of time evading and avoiding

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and in many instances voiding James Steuart's arguments

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in order to create this myth of original accumulation.

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Now, of course, for Marx this is a total myth,

0:23:55.900,0:24:06.920
so his account is one of fraud, of predatory behaviors, of violence, illegality,

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and eventually the appropriation of state power.

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So what he says here immediately,

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is that "the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

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It is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force,

0:24:32.230,0:24:36.730
play the greatest part."

0:24:36.730,0:24:47.120
Now here he's going to refer back to earlier passages in Capital.

0:24:47.120,0:24:59.470
Back around page 273,

0:24:59.470,0:25:03.440
Marx there is talking about the sale and purchase of labor power,

0:25:03.440,0:25:06.620
and on page 273 he says this:

0:25:06.620,0:25:13.410
"Why this free worker confronts him in the sphere of circulation
is a question which does not interest the owner of money,

0:25:13.410,0:25:18.160
for he finds the labour-market in existence as a particular branch of the commodity-market.

0:25:18.160,0:25:20.580
And for the present it interests us just as little.

0:25:20.580,0:25:25.380
We confine ourselves to the fact theoretically, as he does practically.

0:25:25.380,0:25:28.340
One thing, however, is clear:

0:25:28.340,0:25:31.970
nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities,

0:25:31.970,0:25:35.450
and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.

0:25:35.450,0:25:39.220
This relation has no basis in natural history,

0:25:39.220,0:25:43.420
nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history.
It is clearly

0:25:43.420,0:25:46.720
the result of a past historical development,
of a past historical development,

0:25:46.720,0:25:49.390
the product of many economic revolutions,

0:25:49.390,0:25:54.730
of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production."

0:25:54.730,0:25:58.930
What he's now doing is saying

0:25:58.930,0:26:03.049
that we need to look at this process of historical development

0:26:03.049,0:26:13.170
and it is this process that is being set up for examination in part eight.

0:26:13.170,0:26:18.860
He similarly invoked earlier, prior forms of capital,

0:26:18.860,0:26:25.000
usury and merchant's capital which he earlier described

0:26:25.000,0:26:34.340
as anti-diluvian forms of capital.

0:26:34.340,0:26:40.600
It is through the collision of those forms and the feudal system

0:26:40.600,0:26:49.020
that we see the emergence of a true capitalist class.

0:26:49.020,0:26:55.470
Because what we're seeing is the separation
of the workers from control over the means of production,

0:26:55.470,0:26:58.090
as he says on the bottom of page 874:

0:26:58.090,0:27:01.310
“The process which creates the capital-relation

0:27:01.310,0:27:04.800
can be nothing other than the process which
divorces the worker from the ownership of

0:27:04.800,0:27:07.340
the conditions of his own labour;

0:27:07.340,0:27:10.690
it is a process which operates two transformations,

0:27:10.690,0:27:14.840
whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital,

0:27:14.840,0:27:19.180
and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers.

0:27:19.180,0:27:23.640
So-called primitive accumulation, therefore,
is nothing else than the historical process

0:27:23.640,0:27:26.800
of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

0:27:26.800,0:27:30.760
It appears as 'primitive' because it forms a pre-history of capital

0:27:30.760,0:27:36.300
and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.”

0:27:36.300,0:27:38.880
Interesting point here,

0:27:38.880,0:27:43.270
Marx seems, even though he uses the word 'appears',

0:27:43.270,0:27:49.760
to be suggesting that primitive accumulation is part of the pre-history of capital.

0:27:49.760,0:27:52.200
And once it is over,

0:27:52.200,0:27:56.120
as he said on a previous page,

0:27:56.120,0:28:01.760
once these two classes are configured then their relation is set

0:28:01.760,0:28:06.840
then you don't need any more primitive accumulation.

0:28:06.840,0:28:15.510
He says: This "historical movement…" on the one hand was an emancipatory movement,

0:28:15.510,0:28:22.130
it was an emancipatory movement "from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds,

0:28:22.130,0:28:28.100
and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians."

0:28:28.100,0:28:31.040
You emphasize the good side.

0:28:31.040,0:28:34.559
"On the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves

0:28:34.559,0:28:37.920
only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production,

0:28:37.920,0:28:42.400
and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements.

0:28:42.400,0:28:51.520
And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals
of mankind in letters of blood and fire."

0:28:51.520,0:28:54.210
Most recent example of that

0:28:54.210,0:29:00.750
would be the taking away of the 'iron rice bowl' in China,

0:29:00.750,0:29:05.670
which guaranteed a certain standard of living for the mass of the population,

0:29:05.670,0:29:17.720
and the creation of a wage-labour force, again a lot of it
through considerable violence in the countryside.

0:29:17.780,0:29:22.800
So the history of primitive accumulation is this history

0:29:22.800,0:29:30.920
of violent separation of a population from its means of production.

0:29:30.920,0:29:36.680
But he does concede at the end of this chapter on page 876,

0:29:36.680,0:29:41.570
that "The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries,

0:29:41.570,0:29:46.809
and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession,
and at different historical epochs.

0:29:46.809,0:29:53.450
Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form."

0:29:53.450,0:29:58.150
Here too we should signal some questions.

0:29:58.150,0:30:01.500
Why is England the classic form?

0:30:01.500,0:30:08.059
What does it mean to say 'it could take different forms in different places
and different times?

0:30:08.059,0:30:11.470
Is there a general process of primitive accumulation?

0:30:11.470,0:30:19.350
Or are we dealing with a great deal of diversity of historical transformations?

0:30:19.350,0:30:20.770
What he makes clear here

0:30:20.770,0:30:28.810
is that he is going to use England, as the case which he is going to appeal to,

0:30:28.810,0:30:30.880
as the exemplary case,

0:30:30.880,0:30:36.170
in much the same way that he used the Manchester industry

0:30:36.170,0:30:45.140
as the exemplary case for understanding the development of the factory system.

0:30:45.290,0:30:54.480
Chapter 27 then takes up the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land.

0:30:54.480,0:30:56.570
And there are two aspects to this,

0:30:56.570,0:31:02.600
and here he does indeed quote Sir James Steuart on p.878,

0:31:02.600,0:31:08.480
first off, you've got to dispossess the peasant population,

0:31:08.480,0:31:12.070
but then the dissolution of the feudal system

0:31:12.070,0:31:18.620
also released a whole mass of feudal retainers

0:31:18.620,0:31:22.500
who had nowhere to go and who had lost, in a sense,

0:31:22.500,0:31:32.380
their protections and their protected system/situation within house and castle.

0:31:32.380,0:31:37.940
The feudal lords, he suggests, to degree they could do so

0:31:37.940,0:31:43.549
not only got rid of their retainers, which turned them into wage-labourers,

0:31:43.549,0:31:46.190
but also appropriated the common lands

0:31:46.190,0:31:58.159
and set themselves up, in a way, as landed capitalists.

0:31:58.159,0:32:01.190
Now at first,

0:32:01.190,0:32:06.080
this is where I think Marx's story is particularly interesting,

0:32:06.080,0:32:14.650
in the initial phases of this, this process occurred illegally

0:32:14.650,0:32:21.520
through individual exploitation, expropriation, predation and violence.

0:32:21.520,0:32:27.130
And so for the first 150 years after Henry the Seventh,

0:32:27.130,0:32:35.500
there was an attempt by state law to control that process, to roll it back,

0:32:35.500,0:32:44.250
but it didn't work, the lawlessness was too powerful.

0:32:44.250,0:32:49.740
Then after the 16th century and the Reformation, as he says on p.881:

0:32:49.740,0:32:56.450
"The process of forcible expropriation…received a new and terrible impulse…

0:32:56.450,0:32:59.700
colossal spoliation of church property."

0:32:59.700,0:33:02.010
And the formation again

0:33:02.010,0:33:10.560
of a landed aristocracy that was concerned with commodity production.

0:33:11.769,0:33:16.960
On p.883 he talks about how "After the restoration of the Stuarts,

0:33:16.960,0:33:21.100
the landed proprietors carried out, by legal means…"

0:33:21.100,0:33:24.040
That is: they got control of the state apparatus

0:33:24.040,0:33:30.810
and they used the state apparatus to engage in enclosure of common lands

0:33:30.810,0:33:35.620
and the usurpation of common property rights.

0:33:35.620,0:33:41.230
And this was consolidated as he says on p.884

0:33:41.230,0:33:45.510
by what historians like to refer to as the Glorious Revolution

0:33:45.510,0:33:50.730
"which brought into power, along with William of Orange,
the landed and capitalist profit-grubbers.

0:33:50.730,0:33:55.610
They inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands

0:33:55.610,0:33:58.210
which had hitherto been managed more modestly.

0:33:58.210,0:34:05.059
These estates were given away, sold at ridiculous prices,
or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure.

0:34:05.059,0:34:11.489
All this happened without the slightest observance of legal etiquette.
The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated,

0:34:11.489,0:34:13.599
together with the stolen Church estates,

0:34:13.599,0:34:16.810
in so far as these were not lost again during the republican revolution,

0:34:16.810,0:34:22.589
form the basis of the present princely domains of the English oligarchy."

0:34:22.589,0:34:24.629
Then comes a consolidation

0:34:24.629,0:34:31.409
of English bourgeois power over the state apparatus

0:34:31.409,0:34:36.309
and the landed aristocracy, he says, moved into an alliance with the new bankocracy,

0:34:36.309,0:34:45.539
"of newly hatched high finance, and of the large manufacturers,
at that time dependent on protective duties."

0:34:45.539,0:34:57.709
So all of this meant that communal property disappeared,

0:34:57.709,0:35:07.539
private property began to dominate and the state moved in behind that system.

0:35:07.539,0:35:11.869
And the result -again interesting to think about-

0:35:11.869,0:35:16.109
on p.886: "The 18th century, however, did not yet

0:35:16.109,0:35:25.049
recognize as fully as the 19th the identity between the wealth of the
nation and the poverty of the people."

0:35:25.049,0:35:30.390
I think this is a very useful thing to reflect upon.

0:35:30.390,0:35:34.659
How many nations which have grown extremely wealthy

0:35:34.659,0:35:38.079
in the last thirty years have done so as

0:35:38.079,0:35:48.059
their populations have become increasingly impoverished?

0:35:51.249,0:35:54.079
This then proceeds

0:35:54.079,0:35:59.569
not only through the enclosure of the common lands,
but after the common lands are enclosed,

0:35:59.569,0:36:08.449
you actually start to expel people from their villages.

0:36:08.449,0:36:18.700
This is where you start to get elegiac poetry,

0:36:18.700,0:36:23.479
Gray and Oliver Goldsmith etc. about

0:36:23.479,0:36:30.150
the loss of the rural culture of Britain as a result of

0:36:30.150,0:36:35.249
the expulsions and the destruction of village life.

0:36:35.249,0:36:40.799
What Marx does is to prefer to use the famous example of the Duchess of Sutherland

0:36:40.799,0:36:45.410
who on the one hand, as he says in the footnote on p.892,

0:36:45.410,0:36:50.390
"entertained Mrs Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, with great magnificence

0:36:50.390,0:36:54.249
in London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the American republic…"

0:36:54.249,0:37:01.779
while expelling all of the crofters from the highlands in one of the huge

0:37:01.779,0:37:08.379
highland clearances which cast people away from their

0:37:08.379,0:37:13.419
traditional forms of livelihood and led them to emigrate,

0:37:13.419,0:37:23.249
as many of them did, or end up as proletarians in the cities.

0:37:23.249,0:37:27.619
So the summary of this argument is given at the end of this chapter on page 895,

0:37:27.619,0:37:31.659
where he says: "The spoliation of the Church's property, the fraudulent alienation
of the state domains,

0:37:31.659,0:37:35.579
the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property

0:37:35.579,0:37:40.769
and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism,

0:37:40.769,0:37:45.359
all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.

0:37:45.359,0:37:52.019
They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital…"

0:37:52.019,0:37:57.809
Interesting notion: the commodification of the land, the commodification of the soil,

0:37:57.809,0:38:04.579
actually makes the soil a medium through which capital starts to circulate.

0:38:04.579,0:38:12.949
"…and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians."

0:38:12.949,0:38:22.039
In Chapter 28 we see what happens to these people when they get thrown off the land.

0:38:22.039,0:38:28.309
What happens is they become vagabonds, they become paupers,

0:38:28.309,0:38:37.189
in some cases they go into becoming highwaymen and robbers and all the rest of it.

0:38:37.189,0:38:40.109
So what we here find

0:38:40.109,0:38:46.089
is that the power of the state starts to be utilized as a disciplinary apparatus

0:38:46.089,0:38:55.220
in relationship to those people who have been dispossessed of their livelihoods.

0:38:55.220,0:38:58.739
And the story which Marx tells here

0:38:58.739,0:39:04.399
is quite simply that state power is used,

0:39:04.399,0:39:12.489
state powers of incarceration, of violent punishment etc.

0:39:12.489,0:39:16.539
become actually standard practices.

0:39:16.539,0:39:19.619
In fact you're saying to all the people who have been dispossessed

0:39:19.619,0:39:25.119
that you either become good proletarians or else you're going to suffer

0:39:25.119,0:39:28.979
from the disciplines of this state apparatus!

0:39:28.979,0:39:38.979
Along with that, you have legislation over wages, so wages can't become too high,

0:39:38.979,0:39:43.650
legislation on the minimum length of the working day,

0:39:43.650,0:39:47.900
which we encountered earlier as opposed to the maximum length,

0:39:47.900,0:39:54.649
and we get a whole series of barbarous laws against combinations of workers

0:39:54.649,0:40:02.519
which accuse them of treasonous activity if they try to combine together to improve their lot.

0:40:02.519,0:40:09.459
So the bloody legislation against the expropriated is a pretty awful tale,

0:40:09.459,0:40:14.619
where you cut out people's tongues and do violent things of this sort

0:40:14.619,0:40:21.979
just to simply demonstrate to people that they have to join the proletariat or else!

0:40:21.979,0:40:26.359
This leads into a very short chapter on the genesis of the capitalist farmer,

0:40:26.359,0:40:37.519
where we find that bailiffs and managers of farms became sharecroppers

0:40:37.519,0:40:40.989
but then can start to use increases in productivity

0:40:40.989,0:40:44.479
to make themselves independently wealthy.

0:40:44.479,0:40:48.180
So whereas we had before

0:40:48.180,0:40:50.999
a landed aristocracy that was interested in

0:40:50.999,0:40:56.269
using the land for commercial purposes, particularly sheep rearing and wool etc.,

0:40:56.269,0:41:02.549
we now find, not a landed aristocracy anymore, but a class of

0:41:02.549,0:41:11.959
farmers who are emerging out of this system as they pay rents to a landed aristocracy

0:41:11.959,0:41:14.999
and at the same time manage to utilize

0:41:14.999,0:41:19.160
their position on the land and their employment of wage-labour to accumulate

0:41:19.160,0:41:26.199
wealth for themselves and start to become an independent wealthy class.

0:41:26.199,0:41:31.609
Which then leads into Chapter 30.

0:41:31.609,0:41:39.499
Because in Chapter 29 the necessary condition for
that to occur was rising productivity on the land.

0:41:39.499,0:41:42.509
Rising productivity on the land meant

0:41:42.509,0:41:45.899
less employment of labour on the land

0:41:45.899,0:41:54.459
and increasing commodification of agricultural labor.

0:41:54.459,0:41:56.119
In other words,

0:41:56.119,0:42:02.009
whereas you may have had a lot of small peasant proprietors,
they have now been pushed off the land,

0:42:02.009,0:42:05.309
even the small proprietors who

0:42:05.309,0:42:10.659
paid rent to the landlord become bigger proprietors and smaller proprietors disappear.

0:42:10.659,0:42:15.799
They start, because of the improvement in agricultural productivity, to release labor.

0:42:15.799,0:42:19.989
So you get a landless agricultural proletariat.

0:42:19.989,0:42:26.930
And the only way that landless agricultural proletariat can survive is by buying commodities,

0:42:26.930,0:42:32.859
which increases the demand for commodities

0:42:32.859,0:42:40.920
at the same time as it pushes this landless proletariat to seek

0:42:40.920,0:42:43.419
employment as wage-labourer, either

0:42:43.419,0:42:52.739
elsewhere in agriculture, or else in the towns within industry.

0:42:52.739,0:42:57.869
So the commodification of rural relations

0:42:57.869,0:43:02.150
becomes a critical moment in this transformation,

0:43:02.150,0:43:05.759
and its the commodification of products,

0:43:05.759,0:43:11.910
so that instead of the products being consumed by those who produced them,

0:43:11.910,0:43:14.630
as in self subsistence agriculture,

0:43:14.630,0:43:17.489
you find the products have been sent to market

0:43:17.489,0:43:23.089
at same time as the demand comes from the market

0:43:23.089,0:43:25.919
and the demanders are those who

0:43:25.919,0:43:35.589
have to sell their labour-power in order to live.

0:43:36.039,0:43:48.199
This creation of the home market is something which is, I think, worth noting.

0:43:52.859,0:43:59.919
In the first part of Capital, you remember he suggested there is no problem in the market

0:43:59.919,0:44:06.299
but here he is saying that the creation of the market is a crucial step.

0:44:06.299,0:44:09.999
I think it's interesting right now that one of the major things that is being said to

0:44:09.999,0:44:17.609
the Chinese, is that you should stimulate your home market

0:44:17.609,0:44:19.879
and in many instances

0:44:19.879,0:44:26.159
the politics of conquest of the home domestic market has become a very important

0:44:26.159,0:44:31.459
part of political projects.

0:44:31.459,0:44:35.669
So that this general argument that Marx is making about

0:44:35.669,0:44:40.609
the significance of home market formation

0:44:40.609,0:44:42.209
and the colonization of the home market,

0:44:42.209,0:44:50.460
is something which we really need to pay very general attention to it.

0:44:50.679,0:44:56.089
And it is this home market which is going to be crucial

0:44:56.089,0:45:00.249
for the development of industrial capitalism,

0:45:00.249,0:45:04.649
because without it, where would the capitalists sell their products to?

0:45:04.649,0:45:11.709
You can't, as he has done in the earlier part of capital, assume there's no problem,

0:45:11.709,0:45:14.279
you have to assume there's a big problem

0:45:14.279,0:45:23.639
and here Marx is talking about the way in which it can be solved.

0:45:23.639,0:45:29.729
Now, when we get to the industrial capitalist in Chapter 31,

0:45:29.729,0:45:33.399
we're going to be talking in the first instance, of

0:45:33.399,0:45:37.140
another form of revolution,

0:45:37.140,0:45:43.709
which is not about small

0:45:43.709,0:45:48.799
craft workshops becoming slightly bigger and the concentration of capital,

0:45:48.799,0:45:57.399
it's going to be about the way in which usurers capital and merchant's capital

0:45:57.399,0:46:04.009
become transformed, and as it were, become the vehicle

0:46:04.009,0:46:09.499
for formation of the industrial capitalist.

0:46:09.499,0:46:16.499
As he says on p.915: "The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce

0:46:16.579,0:46:22.609
was prevented from turning into industrial capital by the feudal organization of the countryside

0:46:22.609,0:46:28.249
and the guild organization of the towns.

0:46:28.249,0:46:33.379
These fetters vanished with the dissolution of the feudal bands of retainers,

0:46:33.379,0:46:37.379
and the expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population.

0:46:37.379,0:46:43.249
The new manufactures were established at sea-ports, or at points in the countryside
which were beyond the control

0:46:43.249,0:46:46.789
of the old municipalities and their guilds.

0:46:46.789,0:46:53.759
Hence, in England, the bitter struggle of the corporate towns against
these new seed-beds of industry."

0:46:53.759,0:47:02.149
This was a very interesting observation on Marx's part.

0:47:02.149,0:47:05.619
The trade guilds were very powerful,

0:47:05.619,0:47:14.059
many city corporations were governed by Burghers and by the guilds.

0:47:14.059,0:47:18.459
And it was very difficult to break the power of the guilds.

0:47:18.459,0:47:26.669
So cities like Bristol, Norwich and many others of that sort

0:47:26.669,0:47:35.420
had very powerful institutions to maintain the status quo of political economic power,

0:47:35.420,0:47:38.310
both on the part of the merchant capitalists

0:47:38.310,0:47:44.569
but also on the part of the guild workers.

0:47:44.569,0:47:47.069
So what did you do?

0:47:47.069,0:47:53.679
What you find was the movement to what we now call 'greenfield sites'.

0:47:53.679,0:48:04.069
You went to villages with names like Manchester, Birmingham, Bolton, Blackburn or Leeds

0:48:04.069,0:48:10.889
and in these villages you started building factories.

0:48:10.889,0:48:15.160
There was no way in which the guilds could control you,

0:48:15.160,0:48:22.579
their control was strictly confined within the city jurisdiction.

0:48:22.579,0:48:25.549
The merchant capitalist couldn't control you either

0:48:25.549,0:48:29.189
and in very short order the merchant capitalists decided there was a great deal of business

0:48:29.189,0:48:35.239
to be done, and were prepared to do business

0:48:35.239,0:48:42.709
with the Manchester industrialists, the Birmingham industrialists,
the Leeds industrialists and the like.

0:48:42.709,0:48:47.069
So the whole pattern of industrialization in Britain

0:48:47.069,0:48:53.299
occurred outside of the leading city-centers

0:48:53.299,0:48:56.539
and I think it's extremely interesting

0:48:56.539,0:48:59.969
to look at the long history of capitalism

0:48:59.969,0:49:08.279
in terms of this perpetual seeking out of greenfield sites

0:49:08.279,0:49:15.279
where political and economic powers can be bypassed.

0:49:16.319,0:49:21.079
What did the Japanese auto companies do when they came to the United States?

0:49:21.079,0:49:25.719
Did they go to Detroit?

0:49:25.719,0:49:29.819
What did they do when they went to Britain?

0:49:29.819,0:49:32.229
Did they go to Birmingham?

0:49:32.229,0:49:43.129
No, they set up on greenfield sites where labour organization was weak,

0:49:43.129,0:49:50.190
where regulatory restrictions were relatively modest.

0:49:50.190,0:49:54.799
So the whole history of capitalism has been

0:49:54.799,0:50:00.219
about a perpetual move away from concentrations
of political and economic power which are

0:50:00.219,0:50:03.999
inimical to a certain form of development,

0:50:03.999,0:50:10.039
and looking for some place where you could

0:50:10.039,0:50:15.979
actually do whatever you wanted to do.

0:50:15.979,0:50:21.639
The deindustrialization of New York city began in the 1960s

0:50:21.639,0:50:24.199
because union power was very strong here,

0:50:24.199,0:50:27.189
in the first wave of deindustrialization

0:50:27.189,0:50:30.089
it was simply a move to the suburbs.

0:50:30.089,0:50:32.949
Get out of the city where

0:50:32.949,0:50:40.289
there's too much political and economic control by labor. Go to the suburbs.

0:50:40.289,0:50:46.079
Then you find one better, let's go to North Carolina instead,

0:50:46.079,0:50:52.849
and you could go one further and say let's go to Alabama, let's go to American west.

0:50:52.849,0:51:02.910
Go beyond that. Let's go the Makita zone of Mexico, let's go to China.

0:51:02.910,0:51:09.910
So what Marx is talking about here is a very important process

0:51:10.469,0:51:21.229
of geographical shifts which are fundamental to what bourgeois capitalism is about.

0:51:21.229,0:51:30.959
And, of course, geographical shifts are at the heart of uneven geographical development.

0:51:30.959,0:51:43.599
What follows is a more general discussion

0:51:43.599,0:51:53.499
of how the industrial capitalist came to dominate so quickly and so fast.

0:51:53.499,0:52:01.249
The first thing you notice is the role that the colonies play, as he says on p.915:

0:52:01.249,0:52:08.219
"the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection.

0:52:08.219,0:52:13.479
These matters depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system.

0:52:13.479,0:52:17.369
But they all employ the power of the state,

0:52:17.369,0:52:21.049
the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten,

0:52:21.049,0:52:25.619
as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of

0:52:25.619,0:52:29.239
production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition.

0:52:29.239,0:52:33.279
Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one.

0:52:33.279,0:52:35.700
It is itself an economic power."

0:52:35.700,0:52:37.509
And of course it is the state

0:52:37.509,0:52:43.279
which can be the primary agent in utilization of that force.

0:52:43.279,0:52:46.239
Now I would make an argument that

0:52:46.239,0:52:53.329
far from the state being irrelevant in the rise of a neo-liberal order,

0:52:53.329,0:52:55.529
as some people claim,

0:52:55.529,0:53:03.339
the state has played a crucial role as the 'midwife' of history

0:53:03.339,0:53:10.459
by using state force to try to absolutely ensure

0:53:10.459,0:53:13.259
something akin to a neo-liberal utopian dream

0:53:13.259,0:53:25.749
was going to be constructed via things like the national debt, the modern tax system and the like.

0:53:26.849,0:53:35.390
Marx talks about the way in which state power got utilized.

0:53:35.390,0:53:41.419
In the first instance state monopoly power through the East India Company,

0:53:41.419,0:53:45.319
the way in which money was made from the opium trade,

0:53:45.319,0:53:49.219
the way in which they created a famine in order to

0:53:49.219,0:53:53.859
jack prices up so that they could profit immensely.

0:53:53.859,0:53:57.769
Then we get these very important statements

0:53:57.769,0:54:03.599
on p.918: "The colonial system ripened trade and navigation as in a hot-house.

0:54:03.599,0:54:07.259
The colonies provided a market for the budding manufactures, and a vast increase

0:54:07.259,0:54:13.089
in accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country's monopoly of the market.

0:54:13.089,0:54:21.299
The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting,
enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country…"

0:54:21.299,0:54:26.069
And then he talks about the way in which commercial supremacy produces

0:54:26.069,0:54:31.429
industrial predominance in the period of manufacture

0:54:31.429,0:54:36.369
and how the system of public credit, national debt and so on,

0:54:36.369,0:54:43.549
played a very important role in all of this.

0:54:43.549,0:54:45.449
As he says, you should take this on board:

0:54:45.449,0:54:49.799
"with the rise of national debt-making, lack of faith in the national debt

0:54:49.799,0:54:57.719
takes the place of the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness."

0:54:57.719,0:55:02.209
You know the ticker tape board that takes note of the national debt,

0:55:02.209,0:55:06.069
seen it down union square,

0:55:06.069,0:55:13.329
total national debt, you see it going up like this .. like crazy

0:55:13.329,0:55:17.239
its absolutely astonishing. And you've got to have faith in it, right?

0:55:17.239,0:55:23.889
If you don't have faith in it .. if you get scared by it… wow.

0:55:23.889,0:55:30.889
"The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation."

0:55:31.389,0:55:36.310
Furthermore, it gives rise to an emergence, as he says on p.920,

0:55:36.310,0:55:41.899
of a "brood of bankocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, stock-jobbers…"

0:55:41.899,0:55:46.160
"Along with the national debt there arose an international credit system…"

0:55:46.160,0:55:49.279
-this is very prescient analysis-

0:55:49.279,0:55:55.009
"One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701 to 1776, was the lending out
of enormous amounts of capital,

0:55:55.009,0:55:58.309
on the part of Holland, especially to its great rival England.

0:55:58.309,0:56:04.059
The same thing is going on today between England and the United States."

0:56:04.059,0:56:10.299
So that transfers of capital, capital exports, capital movements

0:56:10.299,0:56:14.849
and then the modern system of taxation, on p.921,

0:56:14.849,0:56:21.849
and we see very clearly how that's been working today.

0:56:26.619,0:56:31.979
Page 922, he summarizes it in the following way:

0:56:31.979,0:56:37.900
"Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc.,

0:56:37.900,0:56:41.849
these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period

0:56:41.849,0:56:45.109
of infancy of largescale industry.

0:56:45.109,0:56:51.219
The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Herod-like slaughter of the innocents."

0:56:51.219,0:57:02.910
A Herod-like slaughter however which absorbs masses of otherwise redundant labor
into the factory system.

0:57:02.910,0:57:06.519
And finding those laborers, as he points out on p.923,

0:57:06.519,0:57:14.079
became part of the state organization.

0:57:18.019,0:57:21.949
"the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere.,"

0:57:21.949,0:57:27.489
sent their surplus populations to the industrial districts.

0:57:27.489,0:57:32.199
Furthermore, he points out

0:57:32.199,0:57:36.059
that trade in labour didn't even stop with that.

0:57:36.059,0:57:39.289
On p.924 he talks about the way in which

0:57:39.289,0:57:44.529
"England acquired the right to supply Spanish South America until 1743

0:57:44.529,0:57:47.859
with 4,800 negroes a year."

0:57:47.859,0:57:53.489
"this threw an official cloak over British smuggling.
Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade.

0:57:53.489,0:58:01.839
This was its method of primitive accumulation."

0:58:04.339,0:58:12.559
Which ends, much as the Hegelian argument comes back in,

0:58:12.559,0:58:17.439
on p.925 where he talks of the 'eternal natural laws' of the capitalist mode of production.

0:58:17.439,0:58:23.499
'The eternal natural laws…' in inverted commas(!).

0:58:23.499,0:58:28.170
"to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour,
to transform,

0:58:28.170,0:58:30.019
at one pole,

0:58:30.019,0:58:33.619
the social means of production and subsistence into capital,

0:58:33.619,0:58:37.060
and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers,

0:58:37.060,0:58:39.229
into the free 'labouring poor',

0:58:39.229,0:58:44.029
that artificial product of modern history."

0:58:44.029,0:58:45.969
"If money 'comes into the world

0:58:45.969,0:58:50.609
with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek', capital comes dripping from head to toe,

0:58:50.609,0:59:01.409
from every pore, with blood and dirt."

0:59:01.409,0:59:08.409
Which leads into Chapter 32,

0:59:11.779,0:59:20.009
he summarizes his argument, and again I want to come back to this.

0:59:20.009,0:59:23.229
Page 928: "At a certain stage of development,

0:59:23.229,0:59:27.349
it brings into the world the material means of its own destruction. From that moment,

0:59:27.349,0:59:31.400
new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society…"

0:59:31.400,0:59:35.399
Again, Marx is always saying that

0:59:35.399,0:59:42.399
you don't see radical breaks. You always see something emerging from within.

0:59:43.789,0:59:47.519
but these "forces and passions which feel themselves to be fettered by that society.

0:59:47.519,0:59:50.019
It has to be annihilated; it is annihilated.

0:59:50.019,0:59:53.279
Its annihilation, the transformation of

0:59:53.279,0:59:58.399
the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated
means of production,

0:59:58.399,1:00:02.959
the transformation, therefore, of the dwarf-like property of the many
into the giant property of the few,

1:00:02.959,1:00:06.199
and the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil,

1:00:06.199,1:00:08.279
from the means of subsistence and from the instruments of labour,

1:00:08.279,1:00:18.419
this terrible and arduously accomplished expropriation of the mass
of the people forms the pre-history of capital.

1:00:18.419,1:00:21.539
It comprises a whole series of forcible methods,

1:00:21.539,1:00:31.259
and we have only passed in review those that have been epoch-making
as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital."

1:00:31.259,1:00:37.299
"As soon as this metamorphosis has sufficiently decomposed the
old society throughout its depth and breadth,

1:00:37.299,1:00:41.309
as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of
labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode

1:00:41.309,1:00:43.699
of production stands on its own feet,

1:00:43.699,1:00:47.759
the further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil
and other means of production

1:00:47.759,1:00:50.179
into socially exploited

1:00:50.179,1:00:54.279
and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form.

1:00:54.279,1:01:01.329
What is now to be expropriated is not the self-employed worker,
but the capitalist who exploits a large number of workers."

1:01:01.329,1:01:04.299
So now we come to the idea

1:01:04.299,1:01:10.329
of the revolt of the working-classes!

1:01:10.329,1:01:15.539
The recognition, as he says, "the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market,

1:01:15.539,1:01:20.989
and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime."

1:01:20.989,1:01:24.949
"The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point

1:01:24.949,1:01:28.309
at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

1:01:28.309,1:01:32.859
This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.

1:01:32.859,1:01:39.859
The expropriators are expropriated."

1:01:40.339,1:01:42.599
The revolution occurs!

1:01:42.599,1:01:46.949
What Marx does here is talk about the theory of colonization,

1:01:46.949,1:01:52.059
actually it has very little to do with the actual processes of colonization in Australia,

1:01:52.059,1:01:58.719
it really has to do with the ideas of Wakefield about colonization.

1:02:02.380,1:02:08.389
Marx refrains from noting that Wakefield wrote his

1:02:08.389,1:02:12.759
expositions on the colonial system in jail for having tried to kidnap the daughter

1:02:12.759,1:02:15.569
of a very wealthy individual.

1:02:15.569,1:02:17.719
What he was planning to do with her we don't know…

1:02:17.719,1:02:22.400
but anyway he spent three or four years in jail,
and while he was in jail he decided to do something

1:02:22.400,1:02:31.569
to amuse himself, so he wrote this book about colonization.

1:02:31.569,1:02:39.799
What Marx is making of this is that Wakefield at least recognizes

1:02:39.799,1:02:49.679
that if you have a colonial system where the immigrants are free

1:02:49.679,1:02:52.969
to gain land for themselves and do whatever they want,

1:02:52.969,1:02:57.829
than there is there's no labour for the capitalist.

1:02:57.829,1:03:01.069
And so Marx enjoys the case of the

1:03:01.069,1:03:04.640
capitalist who went there with all the capital

1:03:04.640,1:03:07.650
and all of the stock and all of the seeds,

1:03:07.650,1:03:12.389
but found he couldn't use it as he couldn't find any labor.

1:03:12.389,1:03:14.069
So what Wakefield

1:03:14.069,1:03:18.069
insisted was that colonial land policy should do two things. It should

1:03:18.069,1:03:23.709
put a reserve price on land, i.e. make land scarce

1:03:23.709,1:03:28.339
so there is a barrier to free occupancy of the land,

1:03:28.339,1:03:37.649
and that secondly you would put restrictions on labour movement, on labour migration

1:03:37.649,1:03:44.079
in such a way that there was always a surplus of labour available to you.

1:03:44.079,1:03:51.199
And what Marx does is to recognize that in the United States

1:03:51.199,1:03:55.759
there was a problem of this kind. That people were coming to the United States

1:03:55.759,1:04:00.179
and given this free land on the frontier, they were disappearing.

1:04:00.179,1:04:07.849
Okay, some residual groups were left in the cities

1:04:07.849,1:04:13.209
but still there was a labour scarcity, a labour shortage

1:04:13.209,1:04:15.400
and what you needed to take care of this was

1:04:15.400,1:04:18.579
to do something different with the land.

1:04:18.579,1:04:21.979
And, of course, what starts to happen with the granting of

1:04:21.979,1:04:25.709
rights to railroads and all those kind of things is that you start to allow

1:04:25.709,1:04:27.989
the monopolization of the land,

1:04:27.989,1:04:29.389
commodification of the land

1:04:29.389,1:04:31.639
and expropriation of the land

1:04:31.639,1:04:36.529
by larger and larger groups in the population. So again in the United States,

1:04:36.529,1:04:38.969
there is a fight as it were between

1:04:38.969,1:04:46.409
free labor on the frontier and wage-labour in the cities

1:04:46.409,1:04:46.939
and balance is there…

1:04:46.939,1:04:52.479
and what Wakefield is going to talk about is that in places like Australia

1:04:52.479,1:05:00.709
the colonial office should have a clear land policy.

1:05:00.709,1:05:06.929
Which totally undermines the argument of Adam Smith

1:05:06.929,1:05:11.489
about the peaceable way in which this would happen.
If Adam Smith was correct

1:05:11.489,1:05:15.539
then what you would see happening in Australia would presumably be

1:05:15.539,1:05:19.249
an Adam Smith story over again. But it doesn't happen that way,

1:05:19.249,1:05:24.049
it doesn't happen at all that way.

1:05:24.049,1:05:27.539
So what Marx is appreciative of is the fact that

1:05:27.539,1:05:36.659
Wakefield at least understands what you need, in order to accumulate.

1:05:36.659,1:05:38.619
As he says on page 932:

1:05:38.619,1:05:43.009
"Wakefield discovered that, in the colonies, property in money, means of subsistence,

1:05:43.009,1:05:47.859
machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist

1:05:47.859,1:05:51.519
if the essential complement to these things is missing: the wage-labourer,

1:05:51.519,1:05:57.999
the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will.

1:05:57.999,1:06:02.129
He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons

1:06:02.129,1:06:04.539
which is mediated through things."

1:06:04.539,1:06:07.789
Sound familiar?

1:06:07.789,1:06:16.659
This idea that capital is a social relation mediated through things
is fundamental to Marx's argument.

1:06:16.659,1:06:28.779
He goes into Wakefield's argument and gives some examples

1:06:30.099,1:06:39.749
and recognizes that state land policy, as I suggested,

1:06:39.749,1:06:44.589
as he says on p.938, is "to kill two birds with one stone.

1:06:44.589,1:06:50.539
Let the government set an artificial price on the virgin soil,
a price independent of the law of supply and demand,

1:06:50.539,1:06:54.709
a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages

1:06:54.709,1:06:59.569
before he can earn enough money to buy land and turn himself into an independent farmer.

1:07:01.789,1:07:06.190
The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-labourers,

1:07:06.190,1:07:08.909
this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour

1:07:08.909,1:07:12.029
by a violation of the sacred law of supply and demand,

1:07:12.029,1:07:15.149
is to be applied by the government, in proportion to its growth,

1:07:15.149,1:07:18.469
to the importation of paupers from Europe into the colonies,

1:07:18.469,1:07:23.949
so as to keep the wage-labour market full for the capitalists."

1:07:23.949,1:07:30.949
"Under this plan, Wakefield exclaims triumphantly,
'the supply of labour must be constant and regular'…"

1:07:33.229,1:07:36.759
The lesson, he says right at the end, is that

1:07:36.759,1:07:40.519
"The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy

1:07:40.519,1:07:43.609
of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it:

1:07:43.609,1:07:48.739
that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation,
and therefore capitalist private property as well,

1:07:48.739,1:07:52.809
have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property

1:07:52.809,1:07:59.329
which rests on the labour of the individual himself;
in other words, the expropriation of the worker."

1:07:59.329,1:08:06.449
In other words, John Locke has to be perverted, inverted

1:08:06.449,1:08:10.149
into a system of expropriation

1:08:10.149,1:08:16.409
and the Lockean vision supplemented by the Adam Smith story

1:08:16.409,1:08:20.739
is not an adequate discussion of primitive accumulation.

1:08:20.739,1:08:26.920
Now quite a lot of people since then have suggested that it's not part of the pre-history.

1:08:26.920,1:08:32.029
It's an ongoing part of what capital accumulation is about.

1:08:34.469,1:08:39.109
Rosa Luxemburg for example, here's what she has to say…

1:08:41.539,1:08:48.539
If I can find my right glasses,

1:09:00.939,1:09:05.960
…put my glasses somewhere…
This is what Rosa Luxemburg says,

1:09:05.960,1:09:08.189
she suggests that capital accumulation,

1:09:08.189,1:09:11.879
the history of capital accumulation has a dual character.

1:09:11.879,1:09:16.569
"One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced;

1:09:16.569,1:09:20.209
the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate.

1:09:20.209,1:09:25.249
Regarded in this light accumulation is a purely economic process
with its most important phase a transaction

1:09:25.249,1:09:29.239
between the capitalist and the wage-labourer.

1:09:29.239,1:09:31.109
Here, in form at any rate,

1:09:31.109,1:09:34.329
peace, property and equality prevail

1:09:34.329,1:09:39.409
and a keen dialectic scientific analysis of society were
required to reveal how the right of ownership

1:09:39.409,1:09:41.359
changes in the course of accumulation

1:09:41.359,1:09:43.849
into appropriation of other people's property,

1:09:43.849,1:09:49.309
how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class rule."

1:09:49.309,1:09:55.219
This of course is what Marx did in Volume One of Capital.

1:09:55.219,1:09:59.539
"The other aspect of the accumulation of capital
concerns the relations between capitalism and

1:09:59.539,1:10:02.219
the non-capitalist modes of production

1:10:02.219,1:10:05.719
which start making their appearance on the international stage.

1:10:05.719,1:10:10.380
It's predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loans system,

1:10:10.380,1:10:17.829
a policy of spheres of interest and war.
Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed

1:10:17.829,1:10:20.709
without any attempt at concealment and requires an effort

1:10:20.709,1:10:25.579
to discover, within this tangle of political violence and contest of power,

1:10:25.579,1:10:28.479
the stern laws of the economic process."

1:10:28.479,1:10:31.269
In her view,

1:10:31.269,1:10:36.130
there was an organic connection between these two forms of accumulation,

1:10:36.130,1:10:40.519
and in her view the whole history of capitalism had to be read through

1:10:40.519,1:10:46.949
the duality of the continuation of primitive accumulation

1:10:46.949,1:10:55.309
alongside of this expanded reproduction process which Marx has outlined in volume one of Capital.

1:10:55.309,1:11:00.909
Now she had some good theoretical reasons for making that argument.

1:11:00.909,1:11:05.179
I won't go into them but you can find them out on your own;

1:11:05.179,1:11:10.260
but nevertheless there are many people, including me, who would argue that

1:11:10.260,1:11:14.340
primitive accumulation has never gone away

1:11:14.340,1:11:19.590
and indeed it has taken on new forms and

1:11:19.590,1:11:21.989
played a very significant role

1:11:21.989,1:11:26.570
in the way in which capitalism functions.

1:11:26.570,1:11:33.210
In Rosa Luxemburg's argument primitive accumulation
largely occurred at the periphery of capitalism.

1:11:33.210,1:11:37.010
The sort of thing being done to India and China.

1:11:37.010,1:11:43.650
It's the sort of thing being engaged in in the colonies

1:11:43.650,1:11:50.019
but later on, when you get decolonization and
you start to get Neocolonialism and the like,

1:11:50.019,1:11:56.429
you start to find completely different methods entering into the picture.

1:11:56.429,1:12:01.269
You find the forcible extraction of resources,

1:12:01.269,1:12:08.009
the violent appropriation of rights to the land,

1:12:08.009,1:12:13.260
the violent dispossession of peasant populations.

1:12:13.260,1:12:20.050
And if you go back and look at Marx's categories of primitive accumulation:

1:12:20.050,1:12:26.469
the dispossession of peasant populations, when did that stop?

1:12:26.469,1:12:29.309
Is it still going on?

1:12:29.309,1:12:35.840
Isn't this actually what's been happening in Mexico and much of Latin America?

1:12:35.840,1:12:39.799
Dispossession of rural populations in China,

1:12:39.799,1:12:44.659
Hasn't this been going on pretty much everywhere?

1:12:44.659,1:12:47.099
So that hasn't gone away.

1:12:47.099,1:12:53.989
and when Marx talks about the international credit system and the public debt:

1:12:53.989,1:12:57.389
have they disappeared?

1:12:57.389,1:13:04.940
Or are they in fact major means for extraction of surpluses from all around the world?

1:13:04.940,1:13:06.449
In other words,

1:13:06.449,1:13:15.949
when you start to look at the bankocracy, the financiers,
all that predatory behavior, has that gone away?

1:13:15.949,1:13:20.340
If it had gone away Wall Street would not exist.

1:13:20.340,1:13:25.650
So in fact all of the mechanisms that Marx talks about in there,

1:13:25.650,1:13:29.500
when you extract from this idea that it all went on back then

1:13:29.500,1:13:31.759
and you projected into the present, you would say

1:13:31.759,1:13:36.480
'it's going on right now, all around us'.

1:13:36.480,1:13:42.989
Money is being expropriated, rights are being taken away

1:13:42.989,1:13:44.630
and we're not only talking about rights to land,

1:13:44.630,1:13:56.340
we're talking about rights which have been very hard won through political struggle.

1:13:56.340,1:13:58.479
I'll give you an example.

1:13:58.479,1:14:04.630
United Airlines declares bankruptcy. In order to

1:14:04.630,1:14:10.319
come out of bankruptcy it goes to the judges and says

1:14:10.319,1:14:15.929
'we can't honor our pensions or our healthcare programs'.

1:14:15.929,1:14:17.760
The judge says 'fine'

1:14:17.760,1:14:23.809
and suddenly people find themselves no longer
with assets which they thought they had.

1:14:23.809,1:14:32.039
That is thievery, it is robbery,
it is legalized robbery sanctioned by the courts.

1:14:32.039,1:14:34.550
Result is that when you go

1:14:34.550,1:14:38.530
and hear interviews with United Airlines employees who thought they were going to retire

1:14:38.530,1:14:45.860
on 80,000-90,000 dollars a year or something like that, suddenly find that

1:14:45.860,1:14:51.289
the government insurance program only gives them 30,000 dollars a year.
So what do they have to do?

1:14:51.289,1:15:02.139
They have to reproletarianise themselves at age 65 in order to live.

1:15:02.139,1:15:05.280
This is what primitive accumulation is like and so

1:15:05.280,1:15:08.800
I don't like the term 'primitive' because it makes it sound like it went on 'back there' so that's

1:15:08.800,1:15:13.800
why I call it 'accumulation by dispossession'.

1:15:13.800,1:15:19.209
And if you look at what's happened to family farms in this country,

1:15:19.209,1:15:22.170
if you look at what's happened to pension rights,

1:15:22.170,1:15:25.349
if you look at what's happened to healthcare rights,

1:15:25.349,1:15:27.069
all of those things,

1:15:27.069,1:15:31.299
in a sense it is 'accumulation by dispossession'.

1:15:31.299,1:15:36.079
If you ask yourself the question:

1:15:36.079,1:15:40.469
if a hedge-fund owner last year made 1,7 billion dollars in one year

1:15:40.469,1:15:44.659
were the hell did that money come from?

1:15:44.659,1:15:48.709
It came from somewhere

1:15:48.709,1:15:57.699
it came from, I would argue, 'accumulation by dispossession'.

1:15:57.699,1:16:00.599
People being thrown off the land.

1:16:00.599,1:16:03.499
We see legal ways in which this is done.

1:16:03.499,1:16:05.729
Eminent domain, for example,

1:16:05.729,1:16:10.999
is being used to displace whole neighborhoods with boxed stores.

1:16:10.999,1:16:17.019
This is a legalized form of 'accumulation by dispossession'.

1:16:17.019,1:16:20.699
If we look at the despoliation of environments,

1:16:20.699,1:16:26.110
the destruction of natural resources, this is again 'accumulation by dispossession'.

1:16:26.110,1:16:30.199
In this case you are despoiling the global commons

1:16:30.199,1:16:39.250
and what we see with global warming is just the despoliation of
the global commons through pollution and the like.

1:16:39.250,1:16:46.250
All of this is going on now.

1:16:47.799,1:16:52.359
In the history of what Marx is talking about is this period of the 16th and 17th centuries,

1:16:52.359,1:16:54.130
there's some fabulous accounts of the

1:16:54.130,1:16:58.489
class struggles that went on around then. The Levellers and
the Diggers and all those other elements

1:16:58.489,1:17:05.369
of British society which were violently resisting 'accumulation by dispossession',

1:17:05.369,1:17:08.009
though not yet in the wage-labour force,

1:17:08.009,1:17:11.449
they were resisting the dispossession that was occurring to them.

1:17:11.449,1:17:17.039
In fact, in the 17th and 18th century the primary forms of class struggle

1:17:17.039,1:17:27.739
were anti-proletarianisation, were anti primitive accumulation or anti dispossession.

1:17:27.739,1:17:38.050
And the same thing works today, a lot of global struggles are being waged against dispossession.

1:17:38.050,1:17:43.849
This comes back to the question of which form of class struggle

1:17:43.849,1:17:48.449
is going to be at the heart of any kind of revolutionary movement.

1:17:48.449,1:17:54.409
I've made the argument in 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism'

1:17:54.409,1:18:02.610
that capitalism since the 1970's, under Neoliberalism,
has not been very good at generating growth.

1:18:02.780,1:18:05.749
Therefore the immense quantities of money

1:18:05.749,1:18:10.549
which have accumulated in the upper classes,

1:18:10.549,1:18:14.750
has almost certainly not come out of growth,

1:18:14.750,1:18:18.809
a lot of it has come through 'accumulation by dispossession' .

1:18:18.809,1:18:22.550
And I would argue that there's much more

1:18:22.550,1:18:28.369
'accumulation by dispossession' going on since the 1970's

1:18:28.369,1:18:32.650
relative to what occurred in the 1950's and 1960's. Even though, what occurred in

1:18:32.650,1:18:36.760
the 1950's and 1960's, it was there, no question.

1:18:36.760,1:18:45.309
Particularly in terms of robbery of resources and environmental transformations.

1:18:45.309,1:18:48.829
But what we've seen is a resurgence of mechanisms

1:18:48.829,1:18:52.399
of 'accumulation by dispossession' in which the credit system,

1:18:52.399,1:18:57.920
which Marx mentions here as a primary vehicle for this, the credit system has become

1:18:57.920,1:19:03.520
the cutting edge for 'accumulation by dispossession.'

1:19:03.520,1:19:09.199
What is going on in the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

1:19:09.199,1:19:14.949
What we are seeing is people losing their homes.

1:19:14.949,1:19:18.389
Who are losing their homes?

1:19:18.389,1:19:20.630
Relatively poor people,

1:19:20.630,1:19:23.889
the majority African-American or Hispanic,

1:19:23.889,1:19:29.099
highly concentrated in certain zones of certain cities.

1:19:29.099,1:19:37.840
This high concentration of foreclosures is a massive dispossession

1:19:37.840,1:19:42.250
which is affecting, of course, the whole financial system

1:19:42.250,1:19:47.719
and you might like to think 'at least some of the people on Wall Street are being hurt',

1:19:47.719,1:19:51.130
but actually, I don't know if you've noticed
something, but all of those leaders of Merrill Lynch

1:19:51.130,1:19:54.690
and Citibank and so on, that have been forced to step down,

1:19:54.690,1:20:02.510
they've kept every penny of the remuneration they had during all those years

1:20:02.510,1:20:09.070
when they were backing this mortgage and sub-prime mortgage bonanza.

1:20:09.070,1:20:15.050
Not only that as they step down they get a golden handshake of a hundred million dollars

1:20:15.050,1:20:20.479
whereas the poor person in Cleveland who loses their home gets nothing.

1:20:20.479,1:20:24.539
This is the dynamics of 'accumulation by dispossession'

1:20:24.539,1:20:27.570
and part of my argument would be

1:20:27.570,1:20:31.969
that the political struggles against 'accumulation by dispossession'

1:20:31.969,1:20:39.159
are just as important as the traditional proletarian movements have been.

1:20:39.159,1:20:42.900
But the traditional proletarian movements, and the unions

1:20:42.900,1:20:47.429
and the political parties which have sprung out of that,

1:20:47.429,1:20:56.479
have not been very cognizant of, or even concerned with, 'accumulation by dispossession'.

1:20:56.479,1:21:02.939
So when you hear about the World Social Forum,
when you go to any of the World Social Forums,

1:21:02.939,1:21:08.699
what you're likely to hear is a lot of talk about 'accumulation by dispossession'

1:21:08.699,1:21:15.989
and quite a lot of antagonism towards traditional union forms of organization.

1:21:15.989,1:21:18.709
So that you'll find in Brazil, for example,

1:21:18.709,1:21:26.359
an organization which is against dispossession, the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement

1:21:26.359,1:21:34.789
is not necessarily in alliance with the PT, the workers party,

1:21:34.789,1:21:40.389
which has more of a traditional urban proletarian base.

1:21:40.389,1:21:44.870
And part of my argument would be is that if Rosa Luxemburg
is right and there is an organic relation

1:21:44.870,1:21:49.010
between these two forms of accumulation

1:21:49.010,1:21:54.719
and if the history of capitalism is about these two
forms of accumulation working together

1:21:54.719,1:21:58.069
then we have to look at our contemporary era in that way

1:21:58.069,1:22:03.249
but we also have to construct the idea of an oppositional force.

1:22:03.249,1:22:08.719
If you like, an oppositional force of the dispossessed, workers who are dispossessed

1:22:08.719,1:22:11.630
of surplus capital in the labor process,

1:22:11.630,1:22:16.979
and people who have been dispossessed of their assets and rights

1:22:16.979,1:22:20.449
through 'accumulation by dispossession' elsewhere.

1:22:20.449,1:22:25.030
And I think the idea that comes out of Marx

1:22:25.030,1:22:31.320
that primitive accumulation is something in the prehistory is erroneous and

1:22:31.320,1:22:35.359
has to be modified into a different configuration

1:22:35.359,1:22:40.159
if we are to come up with any kind of politics of the current moment.

1:22:40.159,1:22:43.499
But then I would argue, that this was true

1:22:43.499,1:22:46.649
even back then. And Mao recognized that

1:22:46.649,1:22:51.849
when you start to talk about peasant/worker alliances,

1:22:51.849,1:22:55.260
Gramsci recognized that, when he started to talk about

1:22:55.260,1:23:00.210
a northern block alliance with a southern block alliance.

1:23:00.210,1:23:05.719
In other words there is a history within Marxism
of taking these kinds of ideas seriously,

1:23:05.719,1:23:07.479
and I would want to push them

1:23:07.479,1:23:10.539
even further than they have been taken historically, because I think

1:23:10.539,1:23:12.679
this is a terribly important conjuncture.

1:23:12.679,1:23:19.989
To get the idea of who the dispossessed are and what political possibilities

1:23:19.989,1:23:23.629
come out of their mobilization is crucial

1:23:23.629,1:23:30.629
for finding ways out of the current impasse as to what capitalism is about.

1:23:30.779,1:23:35.369
With that we've come to the end of our reading of Capital!
So next time,

1:23:35.369,1:23:41.599
what I want you to do is to read the first chapter again

1:23:41.599,1:23:44.959
and think about what Marx is doing there.

1:23:44.959,1:23:47.769
See how well you understand it,

1:23:47.769,1:23:54.130
and in particular to think about fetishism. And think of

1:23:54.130,1:23:57.549
the number of times in which the idea of fetishism,

1:23:57.549,1:24:00.590
that is 'it seems this way but it's actually another',

1:24:00.590,1:24:03.969
how many times does that crop up throughout this text?

1:24:03.969,1:24:06.969
I think what you will find is that it occurs

1:24:06.969,1:24:10.210
again and again and again,

1:24:10.210,1:24:15.010
and you will start to see that as you go through. So do a revision

1:24:15.010,1:24:20.969
and at the same time speculate a little bit about where this analysis

1:24:20.969,1:24:24.060
is going to help us understand

1:24:24.060,1:24:27.690
the political economy of capitalism more generally

1:24:27.690,1:24:29.659
and actually

1:24:29.659,1:24:32.959
help us predict a little bit where Marx is going to go

1:24:32.959,1:24:36.789
in volumes two and three because, as I suggested,

1:24:36.789,1:24:39.009
Volume One is a foundation

1:24:39.009,1:24:42.409
for volumes two and three and it doesn't cover
everything in volumes two and three

1:24:42.409,1:24:47.020
but it certainly highlights some of the problems which need to be taken up

1:24:47.020,1:24:48.329
in volumes two and three.

1:24:48.329,1:24:56.189
So we'll talk about that next time.

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