The people thrown off the land had nowhere to go. The new manufactures could not absorb them as fast as they were driven out, and men dragged from their old way of life could not suddenly accept factory discipline. Many became beggars, robbers and vagabonds, mostly because they had no other way to live. From the end of the fifteenth century, states across Western Europe answered with bloody laws that treated them as voluntary criminals, as if they could simply return to conditions that no longer existed. Under Henry VIII the sturdy vagabond was tied to a cart-tail and whipped until the blood streamed, and a third relapse meant execution. Under Edward VI in 1547 an idler could be condemned as the slave of whoever denounced him. The master could feed him on bread and water, chain him, brand him with an S and sell him like cattle, and he could take vagabonds' children as apprentices. Elizabeth and James I added flogging, branding and the gallows, and France sent such men to the galleys as late as 1777. In Marx's words, the people first thrown off the land were then whipped, branded and tortured into the discipline the wage system needed.
Once capitalist production is fully grown, he says, this terror is no longer needed. Education and habit teach the working class to treat the conditions of capital as laws of nature, a standing surplus population keeps wages in a rut, and the dull compulsion of economic relations does the rest. Direct force stays in reserve. At the start, though, the rising bourgeoisie wanted the state to force wages down, lengthen the working day and keep the labourer dependent. England's Statute of Labourers of 1349 fixed a wage tariff for town and country. Paying more was an offence and taking more was punished harder, and the law set a maximum wage but never a minimum. Masons and carpenters who swore to stand together found their oaths void, and combination stayed a heinous crime until 1825. In the sixteenth century prices outran money wages, so real wages fell, yet the laws that held them down stayed in force. In 1796 Whitbread proposed a legal minimum wage for farm labourers. Pitt refused, though he admitted the condition of the poor was cruel, and the wage laws were finally repealed in 1813.
The rules on contracts stayed. A master who broke a contract faced only a civil action, a worker who broke one faced a criminal charge, and that was still the law in 1873. The laws against trade unions fell in 1825 only in part. In 1871 one Act recognised the unions, and another passed the same day put strikers under special penal rules, read by the masters themselves as magistrates. Two years earlier a bill to end those penalties had been stopped at its second reading, and the judges then dug up old laws against conspiracy. For five hundred years, Marx says, Parliament had acted as a permanent trade union of the capitalists. France did the same in 1791. The reporter of the Chapelier law admitted that wages ought to be higher and that the workers' dependence was almost that of slavery, then banned them from combining to lessen it, because that would injure the freedom of their former masters, the present employers.
Coming Up in Chapter 29
Chapter 29 asks where the capitalists came from, since driving peasants off the land creates only great landowners. Marx follows the English farmer through several centuries: first the bailiff, himself a serf, then a farmer supplied with seed and cattle, then the half-farmer who splits the crop, and finally the tenant who hires wage labourers and pays rent.
