This archive contains 33 texts, with 167,609 words or 1,077,243 characters.
Section 3, Chapter 32 : The Historical Conditions of Accumulation: Militarism as a Province of Accumulation
MILITARISM fulfills a quite definite function in the history of capital, accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. It plays a decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the period of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of conquering the New World and the spice-producing countries of India. Later, it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organizations of primitive societies so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had been unfavorable to it, and to turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies. It is responsible for the creation and expansion of spheres of interest for European capital in non-European regions, for extorting railway concessions in backward countries, and for enforcing the claims of European capital as international lender. Finally, militari... (From : Marxists.org.)
Section 3, Chapter 31 : The Historical Conditions of Accumulation: Protective Tariffs and Accumulation
IMPERIALISM is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms of geography, this remaining field for the expansion of capital is yet insignificant as against the high level of development already attained by the productive forces of capital; witness the immense masses of capital accumulated in the old countries which seek an outlet for their surplus product and strive to capitalize their surplus value, and the rapid change-over to capitalism of the pre-capitalist civilizations. On the international stage, then, capital must take appropriate measures. With the high development of the capitalist countries and their increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas, imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitali... (From : Marxists.org.)
Section 3, Chapter 30 : The Historical Conditions of Accumulation: International Loans
THE imperialist phase of capitalist accumulation which implies universal competition comprises the industrialization and capitalist emancipation of the hinterland where capital formerly realized its surplus value. Characteristic of this phase are: lending abroad, railroad constructions, revolutions, and wars. The last decade, from 1900 to 1910, shows in particular the world-wide movement of capital, especially in Asia and neighboring Europe: in Russia, Turkey, Persia, India, Japan, China, and also in North Africa. Just as the substitution of commodity economy for a natural economy and that of capitalist production for a simple commodity production was achieved by wars, social crises and the destruction of entire social systems, so at present the achievement of capitalist autonomy in the hinterland and backward colonies is attained amid wars and revolutions. Revolution is an essential for the process of capitalist emancipation. The backward communities must shed t... (From : Marxists.org.)
Section 3, Chapter 29 : The Historical Conditions of Accumulation: The Struggle Against Peasant Economy
An important final phase in the campaign against natural economy is to separate industry from agriculture, to eradicate rural industries altogether from peasant economy. Handicraft in its historical beginnings was a subsidiary occupation, a mere appendage to agriculture in civilized and settled societies. In medieval Europe it became gradually independent of the corvée farm and agriculture, it developed into specialized occupations, i.e. production of commodities by urban guilds. In industrial districts, production had progressed from home craft by way of primitive manufacture to the capitalist factory of the staple industries, but in the rural areas, under peasant economy, home crafts persisted as an intrinsic part of agriculture. Every hour that could be spared from cultivating the soil was devoted to handicrafts which, as an auxiliary domestic industry, played an important part in providing for personal needs. It is a recurrent phe... (From : Marxists.org.)
Section 3, Chapter 28 : The Historical Conditions of Accumulation: The Introduction of Commodity Economy
The second condition of importance for acquiring means of production and realizing the surplus value is the commodity exchange and commodity economy should be introduced in societies based on natural economy as soon as their independence has been abrogated, or rather in the course of this disruptive process. Capital requires to buy the products of, and sell its commodities to, all non-capitalist strata and societies. Here at last we seem to find the beginnings of that ‘peace’ and ‘equality’, the do ut des, mutual interest, ‘peaceful competition’ and the ‘influences of civilization’. For capital can indeed deprive alien social associations of their means of production by force, it can compel the workers to submit to capitalist exploitation, but it cannot force them to buy its commodities or to realize its surplus value. In districts where natural economy formerly prevailed, the introduction of means of transport – railw... (From : Marxists.org.)
The Problem of Reproduction: Marx’s Attempt to Resolve the Difficulty
COMPLETE abstraction from the circulation of money, though making the process of accumulation so smooth and simple in the diagram of enlarged reproduction, has great disadvantages of its own, we see. There was much to be said for this method in the analysis of simple reproduction, where consumption is the be-all and end-all of production. Money there had an ephemeral part, mediating the distribution of the social product among the various groups of consumers – the agent for the renewal of capital. In the process of accumulation, however, the money form has an essential function: it no longer serves as a mere agent in the circulation of commodities – here it has come to be a feature of capital itself, an element in the circulatio... (From : Marxists.org.)
The Problem of Reproduction: A Criticism of Smith’s Analysis
LET us recapitulate the conclusions to which Smith’s analysis has brought us: There is a fixed capital of society, no part of which enters into its net revenue. This fixed capital consists in ‘the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade’ and ‘the produce of labor necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form’. By singling out the production of such fixed capital as of a special kind, and explicitly contrasting it with the production of consumer goods, Smith in effect transformed fixed capital into what Marx calls ‘constant capital’ – that part of capital which consists of all material means of production, as opposed to labor power. Ther... (From : Marxists.org.)
Historical Exposition of the Problem: A New Version of the Problem
THE third controversy about capitalist accumulation takes place in an historical setting quite different from that of the two earlier ones. The time flow is the period from the beginning of the eighties to the middle of the nineties, the scene Russia. In Western Europe, capitalism had already attained maturity. The rose-colored classical view of Smith and Ricardo in a budding bourgeois economy had long since vanished ... the self-interested optimism of the vulgarian Manchester doctrine of harmony had been silenced by the devastating impact of the world collapse in the seventies, and under the heavy blows of a violent class struggle that blazed up in all capitalist countries after the sixties. Even that harmony patched up with social reformi... (From : Marxists.org.)
Historical Exposition of the Problem: Rodbertus’ Analysis of Reproduction
To begin with, what does it mean that a decrease in the workers’ share is bound immediately to engender overproduction and commercial crises? Such a view can only make sense provided Rodbertus takes the ‘national product’ to consist of two parts, vide the shares of the workers and of the capitalists, in short of v + s, one share being exchangeable for the other. And that is more or less what he actually seems to say on occasions, e.g. in his first Letter on Social Problems: ‘The poverty of the working classes precludes their income from giving scope to increasing production. The additional amount of products from the entrepreneurs’ point of view lowers the value of the aggregate product so far as to bar product... (From : Marxists.org.)
Historical Exposition of the Problem: Bulgakov and His Completion of Marx’s Analysis
The second critic of ‘populist’ skepticism, S. Bulgakov, is no respecter of Struve’s ‘third persons’ and at once denies that they form the sheet-anchor for capitalist accumulation. ‘The majority of economists before Marx’ he declares, ‘solved the problem by saying that some sort of ‘third person’ is needed, as a deus ex machina, to cut the Gordian knot, i.e. to consume the surplus value. This part is played by luxury-loving landowners (as with Malthus), or by indulgent capitalists, or yet by-militarism and the like. There can be no demand for the surplus value without some such extraordinary mediators; a deadlock will be reached on the markets and the result will be over-production... (From : Marxists.org.)