This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.
More famously, a few chapters later he writes:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.
With these two quote Marx gives us the essence of his view of how the primitive accumulation of wealth helped usher in, and construct, the basis of capitalism. Bringing that system into existence on the back of violent disposession and murder.
Marx's clarity on this process however was not matched by most of the classic economists upon whom he drew and developed his understanding of capitalism. Michael Perelman's excellent book The Invention of Capitalism is a deep dive into how classic economists, in capitalism's early period understood primitive accumulation. How they wrote about it, and what they thought. Remarkably he finds that the most well known of economic theorists, people like Adam Smith, thought, or wrote little about the process. Betraying their own lack of insight and prejudices.
While Perelman's book is a deep dive into classic economics and primitive accumulation, it never losses sight to two important facts. Firstly the brutality of the process and secondly that the process was long and continuing, rather than a "one time destruction of the peasant economy".
Many of us who have read and written about the development of capitalism, particularly in England, will have tended to focus on a process of peasant dispossession. The enclosure of common lands, the expulsion of peasants who formed the basis for wage labour in town and country (mostly in urban areas) and the destruction of rights of access to land and resources. These are important. But Perelman also explores how these processes extended into wider aspects of the economy. The Game Laws, for instance, and the destruction of household production. This process was resisted through peasant rebellion, uprisings and more passive actions. Perelman writes that the rate of exploitation of the producing classes rises dramaticallty when wage labour, rather than subsistence production, is introduced to households. He says:
When the working class had to exchange a great deal of labour to obtain a relatively small value of commodities in return, it resisted wage labour by producing for itself as much as apossible. In this way, labour would be able to shoten the working day in comparison to what it otherwise would be if workers had to produce luxury goods for members of nonworking classes in addition to their own subsistence.
He concludes that "much of the conflict between classes that occurred during this period, and that much of classical political economy was built around this very struggle". Perelmen quotes a "large" farmer John Arbuthnot in 1773 saying "by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation should wish for. We can add that it is one that bought suffering for tens of thousands of "little farmers" and their families.
Classic economics had to wrestle with the contradictions of this. Dispossessing little farmers from land created wage labour that could funnel surplus value into the pockets of rural and urban capitalists. But it meant that such producers no longer could easily produce for their needs. Basic necessities had to be paid out of wages. But how to best organise the economy so that such wages were adequate while also producing enough profits. Such debates were the ones that the economists debated and it was the one that classes fought over. Some econoists, such James Steuart were explicity on the need to disposess the masses, while also "frett[ing] that masses of people detached from the land could pose a serious political threat".
Steuart argued that the process of transition from rural producers to workers required politics (read state action) and unlike people like Adam Smith, he attempted to understand how this could happen. This required the construction fo the social division of labour, the (in Steuart's words) "appropriating a certain number of the inhabitants, for the production of food rquired by all, and by distributing the remainder into proper classes for supply every other want". For Steuart, and economists of his class, the reorganisation of people like this, on the whim of the ruling class resulted from a firm belief in the superiority of the rich, and the subordinate position of the dull workers. Perelmen writes that Steuart's "intention was that more and more people wold have no choice but to accept wage labour".
Steuart's contributions to classic economics are today much forgotten. Indeed at the time he was already obscure. But the eclipse of his ideas by those from writers also arises from how later writes understood the process of change - including an oft misunderstanding of Smith's own ideas. Perelmen tells us:
Today the majority of academic economists believe that market forces suffice to develop and economy. In contrast, until the time of Smith, economists almost universally accepted the necessity of government intervention. Smith vainly attempted to dispute it.
This review is not the place to fully explore how Perelmen shows this. It should be emphasised though that the belief in government intervention did not belay a benevolent view that the masses needed support. On the contrary, this was little considered. The process was brutal. The point was whether the state needed to intervene. Indeed Perelmen feels obliged to argue that Smith was not the benevolent person he is sometimes painted as. He "displayed an unpleasant contempt for the masses of workers and small farmers". But Smith
never squarely faced the issue of the change in the mode of production, as the self-sufficient household gave way to wage labour. He presumably left his analysis of the specific of the transition vague because he assumed that the institution of wage labour somehow came into existence prior to the initiation of the process of development.
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