Assume simple reproduction. The capitalist class has, maybe, done some work a while ago to acquire their original capital. This entitles them to a share of production, forever. If we assume simple reproduction, they can keep putting in the same amount of capital and taking out the same surplus value.
Each year they get a fresh share of production by putting the coin in the vending machine, collecting their means of subsistence plus luxuries, and then yank it out so they can use the same coin next year!
By contrast, the proletarian has to bring a new coin every time, her labour power alienated over the year.
In the 33rd chapter of Volume I Marx uses the colonization of the "New World" to make an observation about the "Old". Marx quotes a mainstream political economic opinion that people organized themselves into the capitalist class and proletariat based on their behaviour - thrifty and ambitious on the one hand and over spending and lazy on the other.
If this is true, then when settlers pour into the American colonies, the same scene should play out. In these conditions of fluid class structure, a proletariat and a capitalist class should form without artificial inducement. This is not what happened at all.
New arrivals acquired ethnically cleansed Indigenous land as quickly as they could, and as much as they could. Those who had money bought it immediately and those who had work, saved their money to do so. In a way they undid their proletarianization, becoming immediate producers. The author remarks that in this "New World" settler-colonists can juggle many occupations. The price is Indigenous blood and they have successfully purchased their freedom from dependence on capital. Marx:
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Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They freq uently build their own houses, and carry to market, at what· ever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers, they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. |
The situation in the US was already progressing towards suitability for worker/capitalist social relations to develop by the time Marx is writing. The colonial process was swift and comprehensive. The land was cleared by a genocide of an apocalyptic scale. Many apocalypses have already happened in our world...
Thomas Peel hoped to set up a capitalist entreprise in Western Australia. He brought all the material requirements, but workers were not doubly free in Swan River. They had the first of the two freedoms, that to choose where and how they dispose of their labour power. In Europe to say this choice was limited would be an understatement, the worker would basically choose between multiple of the same situation, if that. They lacked the second freedom: being free of any means to survive on their own. In these settler colonial territories they could and did run off and find their own way like "free Americans".
That is what the theory would suggest is likely anyways. What actually happened? We will begin with Marx's anecdote.
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A Mr Peel, he complains, took with him from England to the Swan River district of Western Australia means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. This Mr Peel even had the foresight to bring besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women and children. Once he arrived at his destination, ' Mr Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.'5 Unhappy Mr Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River! |
This article is a work in progress. I will do some more research to see what really happened to Mr. Peel, and we will consider its significance.
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