Capital needs surplus-value, surplus-value needs capitalist production, and capitalist production needs piles of capital already sitting in someone's hands. Marx says the whole argument seems to run in a circle, and the economists climb out of it with a story. Long ago, they say, there were two sorts of people: a diligent, frugal elite and lazy rascals who spent everything they had. The thrifty ones grew rich. The idle ones ended up with nothing to sell but their own skins. Marx calls this economic original sin and mocks M. Thiers for repeating it to the French people with a statesman's solemnity. In real history, he answers, conquest, enslavement, robbery and murder played the great part.
So what had to happen first? Money and goods are not yet capital. Two kinds of owner must meet. On one side stand the people who hold money, tools and food and want to buy labour power. On the other stand workers who have only labour power to sell. These workers are free in a double sense. No master owns them, as with the slave or the bondsman, but no land or tools belong to them either, as with the peasant-proprietor. Once capitalist production stands on its own legs, it keeps this split going and widens it. That is why Marx defines primitive accumulation as the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It is called primitive only because it is the prehistoric stage of capital.
The story of that divorce has two faces. Bourgeois historians tell the first: serfs and journeymen were freed from the soil and from the rules of the guilds. Marx adds the second. The new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they were robbed of their means of production and of every guarantee the old feudal order had given them, and that robbery is written in letters of blood and fire. The industrial capitalists then had to push aside the guild masters and the feudal lords, and the chevaliers d'industrie replaced the chevaliers of the sword by means as vile as the Roman freedman used against his patron. The capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century, and the peasant torn from the soil is the basis of it all. Only in England does that process take its classic form, so England is where the evidence has to be read.
Coming Up in Chapter 27
Chapter 27 opens in fifteenth-century England, where most people are free peasants with their own plots, cottages and a share of the common pasture. Then Flemish wool prices climb. Great lords drive families off the land, raze their cottages and turn ploughland into sheep-walks, while Henry VII's Parliament passes Acts that try to stop it.
