The Rise of Capitalism
The capitalist system is the most productive mode
of production in the history of humankind. In the space of a few
centuries the world has been transformed beyond all recognition. Average
life expectancies have more than doubled. Technological developments
occur at a rate that would have been previously unimaginable. More food,
clothing and shelter can be produced using less labour than ever
before. It would seem that the material problems of survival have
finally been solved.
Yet capitalism is a system at odds with itself.
The need for constant accumulation is the driving force of society,
determining where and in what way human energies will be used. Instead
of humankind controlling the fulfilment of its own development, humanity
is at the mercy of an economic system which it has itself created. It
is the conflict between the need to accumulate capital and the need to
fulfil human want that is at the heart of all social problems today.
Enough food could be produced to feed all of the
world’s population, yet people go hungry. Why? Because those in need of
food do not have the money to pay for it. Industry pumps pollutants into
the environment yet less destructive methods of production could easily
be utilised. Why? Because more profit is to be made this way. Vast
wealth co-exists with abject poverty leading to an ever-widening gap
between rich and poor. Why? Because capitalist accumulation is dependent
on the exploitation of the wage labourer.
Transition from feudalism
The transition from feudalism to capitalism is
often viewed as the result of a gradual and rising progress of
technology, urbanisation, science and trade – inevitable because humans
have always possessed “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange”
(Adam Smith). However, as writers such as Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert
Brenner have demonstrated, the rise of capitalism depended on very
specific and localised conditions and was the result of a process that
was far from automatic.
The relatively recent change from a primarily
agricultural society of petty producers to a society of commodity
production and market dependence required a change in the social
relations at the heart of society. The central relationship instead of
being between landlords and un-free peasants became one between
capital-owners and propertyless wage-labourers. Such a change could only
be bought about by a complete rupture with the old relations of human
interaction.
By the 17th century trade, mercantilism and money
lending had grown and developed in Europe but these by themselves did
not undermine the foundations of feudal society. The mere existence of
commodity production, merchants’ capital and money lenders capital are
necessary but not sufficient conditions for the full development of
capitalism. “Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have ended their
history with free labour and capital” (Karl Marx).
Only in England were conditions right for the
essential prerequisite to take hold, capitalist relations in
agriculture. The later industrial revolution would have been extremely
unlikely without an agricultural sector that was productive enough to
support it.
These changes can be explained by looking for the
‘prime mover’ in society. In capitalist societies this is the need to
accumulate capital. In feudalism the need to maintain class position
takes this role.
In order to maintain and improve their position
as members of the ruling class and to defend it against their rivals,
their underlings and moneylenders, the pressure was on feudal landlords
to increase rents. In capitalism surplus wealth is extracted through
economic means; it is because of the market-dependency of the
wage-labourer that labour-power is sold. In feudal society, as the
peasants have their own means of production, surplus must be extracted
via ‘extra-economic’ methods through the real or ultimate threat of
force, which explains their un-free status.
By the mid 15th century through ongoing
resistance and evasion the peasantry of much of western Europe including
England, were able to break the shackles of serfdom and gain their
freedom. This proved a problem for landlords as they could now no longer
depend on arbitrary peasant labour or duties and income from rents
fixed long-term by custom, the value of which tended to decrease in the
face of rising costs.
In order to counter this tendency in England,
more easily than in other western European countries, landlords were
able to appropriate peasant holdings that had became vacant due to a
falling population. These properties were able to be leased at rates in
excess of customary rent.
Another option available to landlords was the
imposition of fines and levies. Charges could be made whenever land
changed hands or was inherited and many landlords used these as a method
for removing customary peasants from their land so that competitive
commercial rents could be charged. However this process did not go on
unchallenged; widespread and fairly successful peasant uprisings were a
recurrent theme for much of the 15th century. This trend continued into
the 16th century with security of tenure and the question of fines being
core to what became know as Kett’s rebellion of 1549. If successful
such events may have “clipped the wings of rural capitalism” (Stanley
Bindhoff), but they were not and by the end of the 17th century around
70-75 percent of cultivatable land was under the control of English
landlords.
In France the property rights of peasants
developed along a different line. The monarchical state had evolved into
an independent collector of tax and had the power to draw revenues from
the land; it had an interest in curbing the rents of landlords, so that
peasants could pay more in taxes. The state was thus in competition
with the lords for surplus peasant product and for this reason often
intervened to secure peasant freedoms and property. French landlords had
a legal difficulty in occupying vacant peasant lots and so the majority
of the land remained under customary rents. The state used peasant
production as a direct source of revenue and increased its power by
intervening in matters between peasants and landlords to guarantee the
continuity of the system.
This can be contrasted with the form of state
that developed in England during the Tudor period (1485-1603). Here
monarchical centralisation was dependent on the support from landlords,
evident from the growth of parliamentary institutions of the period. The
weakness of the English peasantry deprived the monarchical powers of a
means of generating an income independently of landlords. Powerful
elements of the nobility and gentry would support the monarchy’s
centralising efforts in the hope of achieving the stability and order
necessary for their own economic growth. It was however these same
elements from the landlord class who had the strongest interest in
freeing themselves from customary peasants and replacing them with
commercial tenants.
The nature of the two different states can be
illustrated by the content of peasant revolts in the two countries. In
England, revolts were directed against the landlords in an attempt to
protect peasant ownership against the encroachment of capitalistic
property relations. In France the crushing taxation of an absolutist
state was the source of the peasants’ grievances.
Market dependency
English landlords controlled a large proportion
of the best land but didn’t have, or need, the kinds of extra-economic
powers that other European feudal ruling classes depended on. Instead
they largely depended on the increasing productivity of tenants and
required the state only as a means of protecting their private property
and enforcing contractual obligations. In England, unlike anywhere else,
an increasing amount of rents took the form of economic leases being
fixed not by law or tradition but variably priced according to market
conditions. For tenants this meant having to respond to market
imperatives and taking an interest in agricultural ‘improvement’ and
increasing productivity, often involving enclosure of common lands and
increased exploitation of wage labour. Both producers and landowners
were becoming dependent on the market for their own self-reproduction.
Market imperatives rather than market
opportunities were the driving force of the process. Tenant farmers were
specialising in competitive production for the market because they
needed to in order to be able to continue leasing. This can be
contrasted with the peasant who may have had the opportunity to sell
surplus product on the market but, as they owned their own means of
subsistence, was in no way dependent on it.
Peasants who were unable to keep up with fines or
tenants that failed to compete successfully were pushed into a mere
subsistence existence and eventually made landless. Some became
vagabonds, wandering the roads looking for food or others became wage
labourers on large farms. The landless became not only labourers but
also consumers as they needed to buy goods in the market which they had
previously been able to produce themselves. This was one of the reasons a
healthy home market was able to develop in England.
Until 1640 the state operated in the interest of
the old feudal order, restricting the full development of capitalist
relations in the countryside. During the turbulent events of the English
civil war the commercial classes, favouring capitalist development
against the traditional rights of peasants and monarchy, managed to take
hold of Parliament. The rate of change now rapidly accelerated with the
‘improving’ capitalist tenant farmer becoming typical by 1660.
State-sponsored enclosure of common lands increased and became
commonplace, forcing more and more peasants into becoming landless
wage-labourers.
The emergence of the landlord/capitalist
tenant/wage-labourer triad made the agricultural revolution possible and
laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Growing agricultural
production provided rising incomes for not only the middle but the
lower classes, fuelling the growth of the home market. “Industry fed on
agriculture and stimulated in turn further agricultural improvement – an
upward spiral that extended into the industrial revolution” (Robert
Brenner)
Worldwide market
Once English capitalism reached its industrial
phase the world-wide market with its competitive pressures became the
means for the spreading of capitalist social relations. Economies that
depended on trade would be subject to the market imperatives of
competition and increasing productivity. These market imperatives
transformed social property relations leading to a new wave of
dispossession and commodification of labour-power, both small
agricultural and independent industrial producers faced the same fate.
As more and more people were brought under the sphere of market
dependence the strengths of these imperatives grew. Capital was able to
remake the world in its own image.
The social changes of the 17th century freed
technology and science from the shackles of feudal backwardness, making
possible the advances that began in the 18th century. Yet the direction
of technological development is dictated by the profit motive, the need
to accumulate capital for its own sake. Could the 21st century see a
further period of social change, where humanity as a whole takes control
of the productive powers and where human need becomes the guiding force
for a new age of technological and scientific progress?
By studying capitalism we learn that human
society is not the result of some eternal logic or divine laws but is
created through our own actions as we produce the things we need and use
every day. The historical conditions that set in motion the social
changes that have transformed the world were in no way inevitable. We
must fully understand the full power of market imperatives, of the need
to accumulate capital and of the need to raise the productivity of
labour. We must also have a clear idea of their origins. Once we can
begin to answer how and why society works in the way it does we are
already some way towards understanding what could be done to change it.
