Das Kapital

The final chapter of Volume 1 returns to a theoretical point by way of an empirical scandal. In the colonies — specifically Australia and North America — capitalism kept failing to establish itself in the expected form. Marx uses this failure to make a concluding argument about what capitalism actually requires. Political economy, Marx observes, systematically confuses two entirely different kinds of private property: property founded on the owner's own labour (the peasant's plot, the artisan's tools) and property founded on the employment of others' labour (the capitalist's factory). In Western Europe, the first type has been extinguished and replaced by the second so thoroughly that the distinction is invisible. Political economists describe capitalist property as if it were simply an expanded form of personal ownership, obscuring the expropriation on which it rests. In the colonies, this confusion was impossible. Land was abundant and accessible. Workers could simply leave their employers and claim their own farms. Many did. This made it extraordinarily difficult to maintain a supply of wage labour — the one input capitalism cannot do without. Capitalists arrived with money, tools, and ambition and found themselves unable to hire anyone on acceptable terms. E.G. Wakefield, the colonial theorist Marx examines in detail, studied this problem and proposed a solution: 'systematic colonisation.' Governments should sell colonial land at an artificially high 'sufficient price' — enough to prevent workers from accumulating the funds to buy their own land for years. The proceeds would finance the import of fresh pauper immigrants from Britain, maintaining a surplus of dependent labour. Worker poverty was not a side-effect to be mitigated; it was a condition to be manufactured. This is Marx's final exhibit. In the colonies, capitalism's apologists were forced to state plainly what they obscure at home: the system requires the deliberate dispossession of workers. When workers have genuine alternatives, they do not choose wage labour. The 'free' labour market is free only for those who have no other choice.