Primitive Accumulation

The history of England, the history of the successive waves of people who, after the departure of the armies of imperial Rome, went on to establish themselves in England: on an island geographically marginalized with the respect to the much more populous continent, has traditionally been presented as though it were self-contained, as though it were of a separate people with particular origins, organisations, languages and national costumes. It has been presented as a history of political isolation, which despite frequent interruptions, has supposedly left a definite mark on the policies followed by the Governments of England as evidenced by their preference for, when possible, colonising new lands rather than engaging in the interminable wars of the old continent. This isolationist view has been raised to the level of official ideology by the English ruling classes.

We find ourselves unable to condone this view of English history, which depends on half-truths, because England has never really been isolated. It has always absorbed the most important influences from Europe, and reciprocally, Europe has been obliged to draw the most progressive consequences from political-economic events in England.

England, as first of the great national states, was also the first to emerge from the tunnel of feudalism and to develop such thoroughly modern phenomena as mercantile capitalism, imperialism, the revolutionary taking of power by the bourgeoisie, and the large-scale development of industry. This in itself is enough to highlight, besides the fact that these phenomena were sooner or later exported to the rest of Europe, the role that this small country has played in the history of humanity. However, for us, marxist revolutionaries, England is of particular interest because it was there the modern proletariat first emerged, along with its first trade unions and first political parties. Marx drew the material for Capital from his studies of English history, and the lessons drawn from the historical experiences of the English proletariat remain to this day keystones of the political doctrine of communism.

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One of the most repugnant features of Victorian society was its complete hypocrisy. The official ideology of that era wished to present English history as a painless progression of auspicious events which were all designed to produce the maximum welfare both of the English, and of all the peoples with whom they came in contact; all due, but of course, to the wisdom and magnanimity of a succession of kings and queens. Thus was the status quo exalted, and the crimes of English imperialism justified.

In 1848 the venerated bourgeois historian Macaulay wrote: ”It can easily be proved that, in our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centuries, been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the Stuarts than under the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges, and confiscations, it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the day when the Long Parliament met; that, in spite of maladministration, of extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful wars, of the Pestilence and of the Fire, it was greater on the day of the death of Charles the Second than on the day of his Restoration. This progress, having continued during many ages, became at length, about the middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity. In consequence partly of our geographical and partly of our moral position, we have, during several generations, been exempt from evils which have elsewhere impeded the efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry.
While every part of the Continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody and devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but as a trophy. While revolutions have taken place all around us, our government has never been subverted by violence. During more than a hundred years there has been in our island no tumult of sufficient importance to be called an insurrection; nor has the law been once borne down either by popular fury or by regal tyranny.”

No wonder that Macaulay would have the title of Baron bestowed on him by a grateful ruling class.

But let us look briefly at what Macaulay omitted to mention. Between the Plantagenets and the Tudors was a century of struggles for the monarchy between the houses of Lancaster and York, known as the Wars of the Roses. ”No hostile standard has been seen” means ignoring the invasions from Scotland, and considering them as a purely internal British affair. And if we are to take ”our government has never been subverted by violence” to mean that no rebellion has succeeded in conquering power, then what about the English Civil War of 1644-8?

As our class interests are opposed to Macaulays, and as we don’t have any queens to keep happy, nor expect any nice sinecures from the class currently in power, we are in a position to study the events which wrought such huge changes in England by sticking to the facts, and to our tried and tested critical method, i.e. historical materialism. That said, we aren’t staking any claim to a patent of objectivity⎯a myth of decadent bourgeois historicism⎯rather we aim to counter the truth of a class defending its power, with the truth of a class which history has placed in the situation of needing to attack it; the one class which, through the revolutionary taking of power, can impress on human history the last, decisive push towards a society without exploiters and exploited. We refer of course to the proletariat.

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The Invasion of 1066 allowed the Norman adventurers, as ever in search of new prey, to get their hands on a country which, after the departure of the Roman legions, had for centuries pursued a course distinct from the rest of Europe. The 10th century had seen a significant concentration of power in the hands of central government, a concentration which, despite the continual highs and lows of the Danish invasions, would remain a feature of the English political structure. In Europe there was still nothing comparable to the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy. In England, notwithstanding the existence of the feudal estates, the country was divided into precisely defined shires, and the sheriffs who ruled over them were di nomina regia and owed allegiance to the king alone; the land was divided into units, the hundreds, for the purpose of land registration which allowed the central powers to count on a definite minimum income, as well as keeping the army directly dependent on the king; on the king depended, at least in theory, the fiscal system and the administration of justice.

The sheriffs, exercisers of the kings power at the local level, continually served to check the power of the feudal lords, and even if the sheriffs themselves could sometimes wield considerable power, they remained functionaries, and the post would never became hereditary.

The plantaganet dynasty therefore encountered a situation which was particularly favourable for the direct exercise of centralised power, and even if feudalism in its classical form was revived by the Normans, it never declined to the level existing at the time in France and Germany.

Even the Domesday book was essentially a reaffirmation of the right of the king to collect taxes directly from his subjects, of which at that time (1085) there were around a million and a half. If the appointment of feudal lords nevertheless continued, it was mainly in territories which had not been completely pacified, particularly the North and Wales.

In subsequent centuries, and despite foreign wars and famines, the economic situation in England improved considerably, and by the middle of the 1300s the population was around 4 million. Meanwhile, due to the extension of the monetary economy and continued Tax increases, a major social transformation was taking place: the commutation of goods and services into cash payments. The main impulse to this change came from the Lord rather than from the peasant, and it is calculated that in the first half of the 1300s around half of the feudal services had been commuted. It is important to note however that this didn’t signify immediate release from serfdom, since the lord, the serf’s owners, could still demand services instead of rent. Nevertheless, the legal status of the villain, who still remained in a state of intense subjection, was slowly improving.

This process was accelerated by the Black Death. In a few decades the population fell from 4 to 2 million people. Not until 1500 would the population be back to 4 million.

Land was often abandoned during this period, prices crashed, and in the countryside there was increasing anarchy. One of the first consequences was that the landed proprietors took on anyone they could find to work in the fields, and wages, for the first time in centuries, increased significantly (doubling and even trebling). Lower prices, restricted production and high salaries resulted in a fall in ground-rent. Land was no longer profitable for the landed proprietors⎯nobles, knights, high clergy, abbots etc.⎯and these sought to remedy the situation by selling off their land. Whilst this would increase the class of small landowners and contribute to the dissolution of feudalism, there was also the attempt (as exemplified by the Black Prince and his expeditions to hunt down runaway serfs) to go back to classical feudalism, a backward step which would merely provoke the rebellions which culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381.

One of the first reactions to these changes, was the promulgation by Parliament of the Statute of Labourers (1351) in which it was ordained that none could refuse to work for wages set at the 1347 level (that is pre-plague wages). This marked the first instance of state intervention in order to fix wages, an example which would be followed in other countries and in England and has continued ever since. But note that whilst salaries were fixed, prices were not.

Laws, if they are not backed up by a force at least equal to those against whom they are issued, are just so many scraps of paper. So even if branding was the penalty for transgressors (N.B. for those who received the wages, not those who paid it) the workers’ conditions saw a notable improvement. But that was not all. The increasingly favourable offers which the Workers were receiving made them aware of their economic weight in society, whilst the tenacity with which the proprietors sought to hold back these improvements highlighted how society was divided into horizontal strata; that is classes characterised by opposing interests. From this new state of affairs arose the first associations of workers, and these in particular, and not surprisingly, were attacked in all the statutes.

The power acquired by the subordinate classes became clearly visible in 1381 when London was occupied by thousands of insurgents rebelling against the famous Poll Tax which was in fact only the latest in a series of tax hikes. The rebellion was suppressed, but even so the readiness with which the insurgents had come together, the decision with which they had orchestrated their movements, and the programme of reform which they had advanced all serve as testimony to the fact that the social situation in England was taking giant strides into the modern world. Moreover, it is in this setting that Lollardism, ancestor of a long line of communistic heresies incubating on the continent since the crusades, spreads amongst the lowest levels of the clergy. The Lollards would survive as a marginalized force in English society for a long time to come, and a less revolutionary version of their doctrines would find great favour at the time of the first schism, and later on as Puritanism; a fact explained by the fact that aversion to the meddling of the Pope in English matters was already by this time a cause fully backed by the King and nobility. In the years which followed, Lollardism would come to be equated above all with a movement to secularise church property; a movement eagerly embraced by the nascent bourgeoisie with the catholic clergy trying in vain to suppress it.

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The 15th Century was the century of the Wars of the Roses and the battles between the Yorkers and Lancastrian dynasties. The final result of this civil strife which drenched England in blood was the instalment of a third dynasty, the Tudors, which would govern England throughout the 16th Century.

But other events of far greater import and duration were taking place during these centuries, the most important of which was the great agricultural revolution.

This is how Engels, (in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific – special introduction of 1892) sums up the process: ”Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during the Wars of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them by sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscations of estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the same result. Consequently, ever since Henry VIII, the English ”Aristocracy,” far from counteracting the development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners willing, from economical or political reasons, to co-operate with the leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie.”

The religious schism which occurred under Henry VIII reign was of small significance in theological terms (leaving aside the fundamental refusal of papal authority) since the differences between the churches were very subtle and superficial whilst the economic impact was very deep, in that it both accelerated the process of the formation of bourgeois landed property, and buried feudalism, of which the high prelates were an integral part. These changes marked the loss of the Church’s political and economic power for good. All that would remain would be a vestigial aversion towards Catholicism during the successive centuries caused by the rising bourgeoisie’s fear that there might be a reversal in the economic, and thus the political, process.

In Capital, in the section on primitive accumulation, Marx outlines the economic transformations occurring in England during this period: ”In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. In the larger seigniorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage-labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage-labourers, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, &c. In all countries of Europe, feudal production is characterised by division of the soil amongst the greatest number of sub-feudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent-roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors. Although, therefore, the English land, after the Norman conquest, was distributed in gigantic baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant properties, only here and there interspersed with great seigniorial domains. Such conditions, together with the prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed of that wealth of the people which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his ”Laudes legum Angliae”; but it excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth.
The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour-market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers (…) Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it.
In insolent conflict with the king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his ”Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles”, describes how the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country. ”What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. ”If”, says Harrison, ”the old records of euerie manour be sought (…) it will soon appear that in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk (…) that England was neuer less furnished with people than at present (…) Of cities and towns either utterly decayed or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of towns pulled down for sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them (…) I could say somewhat” The complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the conditions of production. A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working-class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
(…) What the capitalist system demanded was (…) a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital.
(…) The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The states of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poor folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. ”Pauper ubique jacet” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England.
A system of assistance for the poor had to be instituted which in one form or another would become a permanent feature of English capitalism, and would in itself be enough to put to shame any claims made on behalf of a peaceful and progressive evolution of capitalism. It’s worth remembering that at the time proposals were made to reintroduce slavery in order to eliminate the plague of poverty.
The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ”free” proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufacturers as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ”voluntary” criminals and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed (…) Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.
It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working-class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist mode of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic relations, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the ”natural laws of production”, i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to ”regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus-value making, to lengthen the working-day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation.”

The process of expelling peasants from the land wasn’t however a smooth and continuous process; even the State was frequently involved in attempting to stem the tide of the enclosure movement with laws which were nevertheless entirely ineffective. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie during the 16th century drew strength from its own successful attempts to impose its will on the Executive. During the reign of Henry VIII alone 72,000 vagabonds were put to death, and there would be peasant rebellions under his successors. The most important of these rebellions occurred in 1549 in Norfolk, the so-called Kett rebellion. Before its defeat, this movement managed to organise a small army which inflicted a lot of damage on the King’s troops. The rebels’ demands were quite moderate, but certainly not inspired by Catholicism: the demands were for fair rents and, amongst other things, that priests should not be allowed to own land.

More revolts would follow during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), but these were all crushed either through the direct exercise of state power or by the local armies of the landed aristocracy.

Even in the towns the social situation was changing. The old gild system was starting to break down as the journeymen started to organise to obtain better conditions, and the masters to put obstacles in the way of their promotion to master. This scission in its turn brought about changes in the technical organisation of labour. Instead of everybody working in the traditional workshop, the master gave out work to be completed by the journeyman in his home, and a piecework rate was paid on the finished article. In the end, the master is transformed into a contractor who acquires raw materials, distributes them, and sells the finished product to merchants, or he may even cut out the merchant altogether and sell directly, even abroad. Thus on the one hand struggle between master-capitalist and labourers through strikes and lock-outs, and on the other rivalry between industrialists and merchants. The latter contest remains at a kind of Mexican stand-off, with considerable overlapping of roles, especially within the internal market, whilst the battle between labourers and contractors is resolved in favour of the contractors.

Thus the gild, at least understood as a free corporative association, slowly disappears. For its richest members is substituted the industrial and commercial companies in all their variety of forms and structures. By now the general framework is definitive: proprietors of cash and materials on the one hand, the workers on the other. Neither of these protagonists is particularly interested in production remaining in the towns. As far as the worker is concerned, the town is no longer a place where he is a freeman supported by an organisation. And the entrepreneur prefers to assemble a more easily supervisable workforce, away from the riotous environment of the city, in the provinces, which eventually become industrial centres. The workers are collected together in factories until even the distinction between autonomous workers engaged in piecework and day workers disappears as both become wage workers.

Parallel with these developments the State introduces increasingly comprehensive regulations to govern the relation between masters and workers. In agriculture and in industry, salaries and working conditions are fixed, but always in such a way as to protect the master from the worker rather than the other way around. The most serious consequence of this policy is the decline in real wages during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, with the resultant widespread poverty and, worse than poverty itself, the laws regulating assistance to the poor.

The development of merchant capital doesn’t conflict with landed capital. Both go hand in hand and are entirely bourgeois insofar as both seek to achieve that eternal aim of the bourgeoisie; the realization of profit. The strength of the navy, boosted by Henry VIII’s famous naval shipyards, and the loss of European possessions, along with the opening of the Atlantic routes, gave England a decisive push towards commerce, a move favoured by its advantageous geographical position. Opposed to begin with by other powers, mainly Spain, England had no qualms about using pirates to beat off the competition, with the most exalted of the corsairs licensed to plunder by Queen Elizabeth herself.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) marked a change of pace in England’s march towards ruling the waves. Having got rid of the irregulars (pirates and corsairs), commerce (and robbery) was regulated directly by the government by means of taxes and the granting of monopolies. All this had favourable repercussions on national industry, but still not to the extent that it was favoured in a decisive way. Power still remained in the hands of the capitalist landed proprietors and the big commercial companies.

The bourgeoisie was still prevented from exercising political power directly, power it felt entitled to because of the privileged economic power it had acquired. On the other hand, the absolute monarchy started to represent an obstacle to the freedom of commerce, due in part to the corruption and favouritisms that distinguished the Court. Finally the fear of a restoration of the catholic religion, with all the economic consequences that would have involved, constituted a permanent feature of the period before and after the revolution. The conflict, which for various reasons was placated under Elizabeth, came clearly to the fore under the first of the Stuarts.

The bourgeois movement of opposition to the Anglican church formed by the Puritans soon became one of opposition to the monarchy itself. Initially introduced by protestants returning from Holland after the persecutions of Bloody Mary, it sought converts above all amongst the middle classes. It was in fact a kind of Calvinism, «true religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time». The cities were puritan, as were the industrialised country districts; the economically active classes, the middle classes, were puritan; and Puritanism saw a steady progress in the course of the 17th century and identified ever more closely with the bourgeois interests.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels depicts the intimate connection between the Calvinist religion and capitalism as follows: ”Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred articles of economic faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England.”

We will see later on how the English bourgeoisie didn’t hesitate to use Puritanism as a pliable instrument in order to adapt it to its changing requirements.

With the ascent to the throne of James 1 in 1603, Scotland and England are united under one crown. The English bourgeoisie now has at its disposition a large national state, a flourishing trade sustained by a powerful navy, an international position almost on a par with France and Spain, and last but not least, an ideology for which its adherents will fight to the death. Nothing remains but for it but to take the power which will allow it to structure society according to its needs, and to sweep away the last vestiges of feudalism. This historical task will be carried out in the course of the 17th century.