Primitive accumulation, part 4
In 1066, a French/Norman baron, William the Conqueror, invaded Saxon/Celtic England in response to a quarrel he had with a Capetian French king. He arrived with a band of noble followers and their dependents, as well as with merchants and artisans from his feudal holdings in Gascony. Once established, William began distributing the conquered lands as fiefs among his followers. Subduing the Saxon and Celtic kingdoms of England--as well as his own disgruntled barons--proved to be a lengthy process that continued long after William’s death.
One of William’s (Plantagenet) descendants, John I, made a temporary peace with his rebellious aristocrats in 1215 by signing the Magna Carta, considered the founding document for the “freedom” of all English speaking people--but, in essence, establishing the liberty of elites to do what they pleased. In the Magna Carta king John pledged to honor the feudal liberties of his barons to rule over their fiefs and their subject populations vis a vis the crown. Neither the kings nor the aristocrats observed the letter of this famous document. In what follows, I’ll try to show how absolute monarchs and venal aristocrats joined with wealthy merchants to jointly exercise their liberty to control and exploit peasants and artisans by “freeing” their labor from the feudal bonds that allowed them direct access to the means of life, the initial step in the accumulation of potential wage laborers.
The French connection of England’s Plantagenet kings involved them in feudal disputes with French kings. These disputes culminated in Edward III going to war with the Artois King Phillip 4th over Edward’s weak claim to the French throne. The war turned out to be a long series of wars: the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). The Hundred Years war has been called first modern war, in the sense that battles weren’t between groups of knights, but involved the armies (largely conscripted peasants) of competing dynasties for the control of “France.” Entire countrysides were laid waste. Weapons of war had become more destructive and expensive. Contending kings and their nobles piled up huge debts to merchants who provided the exotic weaponry and the merchant bankers, who provided the credit. Kings and great barons responded by increasing taxes and tithes on peasants, artisans and the lesser nobility. Merchants were granted patents to farm these taxes, and were backed by soldiers.
The bubonic plague broke out in the mid-14th century, and killed perhaps one half of the population of Europe. Labor became scarce. That landlords had already begun enclosing some lands for commercial farming is indicated by the existence of an agricultural proletariat, for whom the “black death” meant higher wages for those who survived. In England, Ordinances and Statutes (1349-51) were issued by the King to bring down the price of labor and to make it a crime to refuse to work. Yet the price of labor continued to rise. Unable to hold on to their fleeing serfs, English lords took to enclosing open, common lands and using them to raise cattle and sheep for market. To raise money, feudal lords tried to sell recalcitrant peasants their personal freedom, or by offering money for converting feudal forms of land tenure to leaseholds. Ironically, higher wages and “freedom” from feudal bonds were important motivational forces in the process of primitive accumulation. Many serfs and free peasants chose working for wages over secure feudal land tenure arrangements that had become burdensome because of the increasing labor demands made on them by the indebted nobility. Eventually, however, wages came down to subsistence level and below. Tithes and taxes increased.
The 14th century was marked by major peasant and artisan uprisings throughout Europe. Some of the more famous were: Bruges and Ghent (1323-1328), the Jacquerie in France (1353), the Ciompi uprising in Florence and its suburbs (1378), and the Lollard risings throughout England, led by John Wycliff and John Ball (1381). All of these uprising were in response to immiseration related to war: devastation of land and villages, enclosures and other forms of privatization, and high rents, and taxes. All involved visionary communitarian ideology that rejected both the decaying feudal powers (of the aristocracy and the Church)--and the ascendancy of money relations, as exemplified in the monetary nature of the privatization of feudal lands and the higher taxes and rents for which money (rather than exchange in kind) was increasingly being demanded.
The Hundred Years War was almost immediately followed in England by the dynastic Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). The “red rose” Lancastrian victory over the “white rose” York side signaled the eventual demise of feudalism in England. “Absolute” monarchies in Europe, like Henry VII’s (1485-1509) tried to co-opt the leading aristocrats of the realm by offering them privileged positions at the “Court” (i.e. the merchant capitalist backed monarchy) and the opportunity of becoming money rich as well as rich in land.
During the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547), the interpenetration of the “progressive,” commercially-minded aristocracy and merchant capitalism began in earnest. Henry’s Protestant “reform” was chiefly the privatization of the vast holdings of the Catholic Church (1530) and their distribution, for a price, among the king’s noble and bourgeois favorites. Aristocrats invested in government granted monopolies trading commodities in Europe and the newly discovered Americas. Leading merchant banker families bought noble titles and the land that came with them. Things were being turned upside down, with money on top.
Meanwhile, in the countryside, the dismantling of the feudal order--the enclosure of lands (under newly minted private property laws drawn up in London), the tearing down of villages, the forcible evictions of inhabitants--to make way for profitable farming enterprises like raising sheep for wool--caused the narrator of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to exclaim that the sheep were eating men.
The first of the “Old Poor Laws” was passed under Henry VII in 1495. It criminalized the homelessness of the dispossessed, who were put in stocks and sent back to the parish from which they had been uprooted! After 1530, things got much worse. The Catholic church had provided the basic social services until its expropriation. Responsibility for indigent and homeless rural men, women, and children now fell on the almost non-existent resources of parish towns that were overwhelmed. Henry, who habitually cut the heads off of troublesome, principled advisors like Sir Thomas More and inconvenient wives like Ann Boylen, the mother of future queen Elizabeth, reacted to the social disaster he unleashed by issuing the Vagabond Act (1531,) which did not distinguish between vagrants and the unemployed, and replaced the stocks with the whipping post. The tortured, homeless victim was then returned the last “100” from which he was probably uprooted and banished. (The term, 100, came from feudal times to designate a settlement of at least 100 cottages.)
Queen Elizabeth’s Poor Relief Act (1601) established a land tax at the parish level throughout the land and attempted, somewhat humanely for the time, to address this new social problem of mass poverty. A new class in society was invented: the “poor”. Different categories were created. The “deserving poor” were the old, the lame, etc., for whom the parish provided minimal food and shelter. The largest category was the “undeserving poor”: unemployed, able bodied men and women (and children) who were forced to do the sort of work (they were assumed to have disdained) in work houses that were really prisons: unpaid brute labor. Conditions in urban England’s dark, fetid warrens of destitution and crime were aggravated rather than improved by Elizabeth’s 1563 Statute of Artificers. All of the guilds of the major towns were consolidated under state governance, which set hours of work and maximum (not minimum) pay. Certain trades were reserved for the families of prosperous guild members. Guild masters were permitted to hire and fire “freedmen,” which is to say, refugees “freed from feudalism by privatizations in the countryside. Trades that came into existence after the time of the statute were outside its regulations. The effect was to break up the guild system by turning the wealthiest guild masters into capitalists, establishing distinctions and competition between waged workers and apprentices and journeymen, and establishing competition between the lesser guilds and merchant-organized producers. The Statute attracted precarious labor from the countryside to the cities, drove down wages, and increased the numbers of the unemployed, homeless, and desperate. By the 17th century one could be condemned to death in England for stealing just about anything. Very cruel public executions were a common form of state terror against this growing reserve army of cheap labor.
The 16th and 17th centuries featured the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as well as the dynastic wars and social disturbances related to the transformation of feudal, personal relations to money-mediated social relations. These were also the centuries of hysterical state and church organized campaigns throughout Europe and the “New World” directed at “heretics”--most particularly women who were accused of being witches.
Feminist scholar, Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch presents a well documented, persuasive argument that this terrorist campaign was integral to the process of primitive accumulation because it undermined the egalitarian solidarity among and between the sexes in village life. This solidarity had existed throughout the middle ages in antithesis to the aristocratic and church elite who ruled, but produced nothing themselves. Such solidarity was an impediment to the monetary penetration of the rural economy, which required (as we can consciously articulate only in hindsight) a new kind of human being: the socially alienated individual.
In her book, Federici describes the status of women in medieval villages as being at least equal to men. Women, especially older women, were central to the village economy and culture. Women worked as herbalists and pharmacists, as doctors, counsellors, and above all, as mid-wives who controlled the reproduction of human beings by other women. The public persecutions, degradation and burning of witches was intended to terrify the populace and destroy the egalitarian bond between men and women. Between 1550 and 1650 over 100,000 women were publicly burned at the stake. But many more died from torture and other abuses. Witches were portrayed not only as agents of the devil but as dangerous, superstitious practitioners who should be punished and replaced by men. In these ways, women were attacked as dangers to society by both the reactionary Inquisitor and the progressive bourgeois philosopher/scientist. Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the empirical, scientific method advocated these persecutions. “Magic,” he stated, “kills industry.” He believed the truths of nature should be “tortured” out of her in order to make her the “slave” of man. Thomas Hobbes considered witchcraft a crime against the state that should be punished.
Like the demonized women of the Paris Commune, and the courageous women of Kobane in Isis- and NATO-tortured Syria today, medieval peasant women stood in the way of privatization.
In Caliban and the Witch, Federici also compares the demonization of women during the transition in Europe from feudalism to mercantilism to the demonization, during the same time period, of the uprooted native peoples in merchant capitalism’s New World colonies: for both 'Caliban and the Witch' violent degradations were imposed in the service of privatization and super-exploitation. I hope to take up that aspect of colonialism within the discussion of the labor theory of value in my next post. But I’ll end this essay on primitive accumulation with a brief discussion of Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders, a book in which Moll’s career unintentionally exemplifies how colonialism allowed capitalism to develop, expand, and prosper despite of and because of the social chaos and misery the processes of primitive accumulation of the privatized means of production and uprooted cheap were creating.
Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in 1722. By then he was a famous author, having published Robinson Crusoe in 1719. DeFoe’s life as a shady merchant, political conspirator, spy, journalist, genteel land owner (thanks to a fortuitous marriage), bankrupt, and famous author was as colorful as the eponymic heroine of Moll Flanders, who narrates her wild adventures in a straightforward, earnest tone, without a trace of irony. DeFoe’s purpose, obviously, was not satire, but to market a moral tale for an audience (like ours) that could find no contradiction between commerce and morality, nor between both of those and salacious entertainment. The book is still popular and a “great read”.
The moral of the tale is stated on the title page: “...the famous Moll Flanders...who was born in Newgate [prison] and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years...was twelve years a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother), twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, and at last rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent. Written from her own Memorandum.” ...In other words, all is forgiven the penitent if, in the end, she achieves the salvation of a secure, honest income of at least 100 pounds per annum, as did Moll, from her plantation in Virginia.
DeFoe implicitly defends Moll’s behavior by establishing both the purity of her heart and the venality of the world, within which she, as a woman, is absolutely dependent on men to make her way. But as the creator of Moll’s simple, positive narration, Defoe, in effect defends Moll’s guarded, venal pursuit of security--not because as a woman in a man’s world she must behave so, but simply because greed is good. This centrality of money as the social medium--so subliminally ingrained and stunting in our post modern, bottom-line consciousness--is presented so baldly and earnestly by Defoe/Moll, because, commerce for DeFoe, a chandler’s son and would-be monied land baron, was liberating.
Moll’s adventures are bracketed by two visits to the Virginia colony and throw light on how colonialism made Defoe’s dream possible in merchant capitalist England. Moll was born in Newgate prison to a woman condemned to death for either petty theft or prostitution or both. Her mother “pleaded her belly” and rather than being hanged was transported to the Virginia Corporation’s newly established colony, probably as an indentured servant. She eventually purchases her freedom and marries another freed felon. Together they find “servants” (other transported felons, or natives) and become rich and respectable growing tobacco.
Moll grows into a girl in prison and becomes a servant in a respectable middle class family. She is good looking, well mannered, and, wise in the ways of the world, plans her seduction by her seducer --the family’s older son (she likes but doesn’t trust for a second) who promises marriage, gets her pregnant (the first in about 12 pregnancies), and then sloughs her off on his younger brother, whom Moll also likes. They marry. Moll is securely middle class and respectable!
In quick order, she has two more children, one dies, and then so does her husband. Moll is now insecure! She gets her in-law employers to take the remaining children, and with some severance money, Moll smartly sets out in quest of another husband. She quickly attracts a “gentleman trader” to marry, but they part on amiable terms when he has to run to the Continent to avoid his creditors. Another child is found a home.
Moll’s adventures really begin at this point. She meets an American planter finishing up business with his London banker. He falls in madly in love with Moll, who gets him to convince her to come back with him to Virginia. There Moll becomes close to her husband’s mother, who, like her own mother, was once a transported felon--and who, in fact, turns out to be her own real mother! This startling fact makes Moll’s husband (whom she truly loves, and with which she now has two living children)--her half brother! Moll’s mother convinces her to stay on, but, after a year, Moll’s conscience drives her to find an excuse to return to London, but with commercial papers representing a stock of goods she can invest with a banker to keep her in style enough to find another husband...
We’ll have to skip the many adventures in Molls quest for at least 100 pound per annum respectability...but she eventually falls in with rather decent thieves, is caught and sentenced to death. In Newgate once more, she is reunited with a long-lost husband/soul mate--also sentenced to death after many adventures of his own following his original encounter with Moll at a country estate where they were both pretending to be personages of great wealth and quickly deceived one another--only to discover each other’s duplicity--which only intensified their passion, which they enjoyed while the money lasted,before parting, broken-hearted, but on amiable terms... The reunited pair of elderly con-artists get their sentences commuted to transportation to Virginia, where the son of Moll’s incestuous relation with her brother--his father--generously gives the property he’s inherited from his grandmother to rightful owner, Moll, his mother. The son takes on the stewardship of the plantation.
Moll, rich and repentant, and her true love eventually return to England and the salvation of something more than 100 pounds per annum (from earnings on certificates on stocks of goods produced by “servants” (slaves).
Moll’s adventures and final salvation are founded on the following: the Elizabethan court’s granting a monopoly to the investors who formed the Virginia Corporation, the policy of transportation rather than the gallows (though public executions were many into the late 18th century), the expropriation, enslavement and decimation of native Americans, and the production and sale of tobacco and other products of forced labor. In microcosm, Moll represents the symbiosis between merchant capitalism and colonization, without which English (and European) capitalism could never have survived the demographic crises created by the primitive accumulation of its uprooted workforce. Eventually, the system of transportation, and the spread of colonies world-wide resulted in the emigration of the tens of millions of Europeans. Between 1600 and 1800, for example, the Dutch East India Company alone sent one million Dutchmen (out of an average population of between 5 and 8 million inhabitants of the Netherlands) to Asia. England, of course, populated North America with her poor. Nor could the development of the system of industrial capitalism and European world domination have been possible without the accumulation of wealth produced in its expanding colonies by uprooted, forced labor.
The new world order of monopoly finance capitalism continues the same process. But the brutal methods of primitive accumulation practiced by the colonial system of merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism’s imperial system have been digitally and financially, hocus-pocus-democratized. Laboring populations in the neoliberal Periphery of global capitalism--encouraged by humanitarian World Bank directives and their own democratically engineered, security governments, or responding to NATO’s protective bombings of artificially created terrorists--voluntarily uproot themselves! The fortunate find their way out of capital’s vast, world reserve army of labor to providentially provided factories, and to wage labor. They earn a lot less, and are even less secure in their security states, than the lucky 99% at the militarized Center of it all.
Change is imperative and will come when human consciousness bridges the gap between the workers of the world. Nature and human nature have nothing to lose but their chains.
My next post will not explain how all this might come about. It will just be about Marx’s labor theory of value, which might help a bit, but will conclude this seminar on my understanding of marxist theory.
