Political economy, Marx says, mixes up two kinds of private property: one earned by the producer's own labour, the other built on employing the labour of others. The second grows only on the tomb of the first. In Western Europe the process that created it is mostly finished, so the economist can preach his notions of law and property over a ready-made world. In the colonies it is otherwise. There the settler who owns his own land and tools works to enrich himself, not a capitalist, and the capitalist has to fight him. The economist's armour falls off bit by bit, and E. G. Wakefield becomes the man who discovered in the colonies the truth about capital at home: that it is not a thing but a social relation between persons. Marx's example is Mr. Peel, who took £50,000 of food, tools and equipment to Swan River in West Australia, along with 300 workers, and was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch his water. Peel had brought everything except English modes of production.
Why could Peel not keep his workers? Wakefield's own pages answer. Where land is cheap and public, and anyone who wants a plot can take one, labour is dear and combined labour cannot be had at any price. A wage-worker today is an independent peasant or craftsman tomorrow. Free Americans build their own houses and make soap, candles and shoes for themselves, which leaves capital with neither enough workers nor a home market. Wakefield complains that the supply of labour is never constant, regular or sufficient, and that even workers the capitalist imports at his own cost soon turn into landowners and rivals. Marx mocks the horror of the capitalist who has shipped over his own competitors. Wakefield's disciple Merivale admits that what is wanted is a class to whom the capitalist can dictate terms, and that in the colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means. Wakefield even concedes that slavery is the natural basis of colonial wealth.
His cure is the sufficient price. The government fixes an artificial price on virgin land, high enough that the immigrant must work for wages for a long time before he can buy a plot. The money raised pays to ship over more have-nothings from Europe, so the labour market stays full. Marx calls the price a ransom the labourer pays the capitalist for leave to quit wage labour: he must first make capital for his master, then pay for the replacement who takes his place. The English government tried the scheme for years and it failed. The stream of emigrants simply turned to the United States, until the Civil War brought national debt, heavy taxes and public land handed to railway and mining companies, while Australia filled with a glut of labour. Marx then cuts the colonies loose. What interests him is the secret that the political economy of the old world shouted from the housetops in the new: capitalist private property depends on the annihilation of self-earned private property, which means the expropriation of the labourer.
