The peasants thrown off the land did not simply move to town. Fewer hands now worked the soil, yet it gave as much as before, because farming methods improved, the means of production were gathered together and the farm labourers still on the land were worked harder. The food the evicted families once grew for themselves was set free as well, and they now had to buy it back, in the form of wages, from the industrial capitalist. Raw materials changed in the same way. Take the Westphalian peasants who, in Frederick II's time, all spun flax. Some were driven off, others became day labourers for big farmers, and large spinning and weaving works rose where the freed men now worked for wages. Not a fibre of the flax changed, Marx says, but a new social soul had popped into its body. Once the extra income of many peasant families, it became the profit of a few capitalists. Spindles and looms that had been scattered over the country were crowded into a few labour-barracks, where they commanded the spinners and sucked unpaid labour out of them.
A visitor to the big factories and big farms would never guess that each was many small producers thrown into one. Popular speech knew better. In Mirabeau's day the large workshops were still called manufactures réunies, as one speaks of fields thrown into one. Mirabeau warned that such a workshop would enrich one or two entrepreneurs while its labourers stayed journeymen with no share in the success, whereas scattered workshops tied to small holdings were the only free ones. The same events also created the home market. Yarn, linen and coarse woollen cloth, whose raw materials every peasant family had once handled for its own use, now became goods made by manufacturers, and the country districts became their customers. The many scattered buyers of the stray artisan became one great market served by industrial capital.
The age of manufacture did not finish the job. It destroyed rural domestic industry in one place and called it up again in another, because it needed villagers to prepare raw material. That produced small villagers who farmed on the side and lived by industrial labour. It is one reason why historians find complaints about the ruin of the peasantry from the late fifteenth century onwards, and yet find the peasantry turning up again, fewer and poorer. The chief reason, Marx adds, is that England swung between growing corn and raising cattle, and peasant farming swelled and shrank with it. Only modern industry, with its machinery, uproots the farming population for good, tears out the spinning and weaving that were the roots of rural industry, and wins the whole home market for industrial capital. In a footnote Marx mocks the economists who now ask the landowners where all the freeholders have gone. They come, he answers, from the destruction of those freeholders. Why, he asks, do they never ask where the independent weavers, spinners and artisans have gone?
Coming Up in Chapter 31
Chapter 31 asks where the industrial capitalist came from, and says the story was not as slow as the farmer's. A few guild masters and artisans did rise, but that snail's pace could not meet the world market opened by the discoveries of the late fifteenth century. The Middle Ages had handed down two ready forms of capital: the usurer's and the merchant's.
