Chapter XXXI.- Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
The genesis of the industriall; capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer. Doubtless many small guild masters, and yet more independent small artisans, or even wage labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and (by gradually extending exploitation of wage labour and corresponding accumulation) into full-blown capitalists. In the infancy of capitalist production, things often happened as in the infancy of mediaeval towns, where the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which servant, was in great part decided by the earlier or later date of their flight. The snail's pace of this method corresponded in no wise with the commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries of the end of the 15th century created.[580] But the Middle Ages had handed down two distinct forms of capital, which mature in the most different economic social formations, and which, before the era of the capitalist mode of production, are considered as capital quand même — usurer's capital and merchant's capital.
"At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the possession of the capitalist ... he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed the largest, and a continually augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour for himself. The capitalist may now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no law has conferred on him the right to this property ... this change has been effected by the taking of interest on capital ... and it is not a little curious that all the law-givers of Europe endeavoured to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes against usury.... The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a complete change in the right of property, and by what law, or series of laws, was it effected?"-[1]
The author should have remembered that revolutions are not made by laws.
The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital, in the country by the
&c, and liberal manufacturers like John Bright, & Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked Cain after Abel,[654] Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But where do you come from, then? From the destruction of those freeholders. Why don't you ask further, where are the independent weavers, spinners, and artisans gone?
feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild organisation.[1]' These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were established at sea-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence in England an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.
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. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain,[655] assumes giant dimension in England's Anti-Jacobin War,[464] and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.[656]
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e. g., the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
Of the Christian colonial system. W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says:
"The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth."[21] The history of the colonial administration of Holland — and Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century —
"is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness".[1]
Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships.[659] An official report says:
"This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families."
To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to "abstain" from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 8,000. Sweet commerce!
The English East India Company,[124] as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employés of the company. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employés themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a part of India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Benn for £40,000; Benn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the contract declared that after all he realised an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £5,940,498 from the Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufac-tured a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.[11]
The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1722 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £55, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, [660] who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as "means that God and Nature had given into its hand".
The colonial system ripened, like a hothouse, trade and navigation. The "societies Monopolia" of Luther [2 6 5] were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, in 1648 stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness.
It was "in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce between the south-east and north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, marine, manufactures, surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put together."[661]
Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more overworked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.
Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was "the strange God" who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus value making as the sole end and aim of humanity.[662]
The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages, took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state — whether despotic, constitutional or republican — marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is — their national debt.': Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blas-phemy against the Holy Ghost,[663] which may not be forgiven.
The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand, it en-dows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the im-provised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation — as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven — the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.
At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stock of these banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began with lending its money to the Government at 8%; at the same time it was empowered by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again to the public in the form of banknotes. It was allowed to use these notes for discounting bills, making advances on commodities, and for buying the precious metals. It was not long ere this credit money, made by the bank itself, became the coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to the State, and paid, on account of the State, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back more with the other; it remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal creditor of the nation down to the last shilling advanced. Gradually it became inevitably the receptacle of the metallic hoard of the country, and the centre of gravity of all commercial credit. What effect was produced on their contemporaries by the sudden uprising of this brood of ban-kocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, stock-jobbers, &c, is proved by the writings ofthat time, e.g., by Bolingbroke's.1)665
With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital wealth of Holland to whom Venice in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States.[666] A great deal of capital which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.
As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue, which must cover the yearly payments for interest, &c, the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses, without the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence, increased taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulation of debts contracted one after another, compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for new extraordinary expenses. Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of subsistence (thereby increasing their price), thus contains within itself the germ of automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an incident, but rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first inaugu-rated, the great patriot, De Witt, has in his Maxims extolled it as the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and overburdened with labour.[667] The destructive influence that it exercises on the condition of the wage labourer concerns us less however, here, than the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of peasants, artisans, and in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not two opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy is still further heightened by the system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts.
The great part that the public debt, and the fiscal system corresponding with it, has played in the capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett, Doubleday and others,[668] to seek in this, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the modern peoples.
The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of expropriating independent labourers, of capitalis-ing the national means of production and subsistence, of forcibly ab-breviating the transition from the mediaeval to the modern mode of production. The European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention, and, once entered into the service of the surplus value makers, did not merely lay under contribution in the pur-suit of this purpose their own people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through export premiums. They also forcibly rooted out, in their dependent countries, all industry, as, e. g., England did with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the continent of Europe, after Colbert's example,[669] the process was much simplified. The primitive industrial capital, here, came in part directly out of the state treasury. "Why," cries Mirabeau, "why go so far to seek the cause of the manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? 180,000,000 of debts contracted by the sovereigns!"[1]
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c, these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of modern industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents.[670] Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang. Blasé as Sir F. M. Eden is as to the horrors of the expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil, from the last third of the 15th century to his own time; with all the self-satisfaction with which he re-joices in this process, "essential" for establishing capitalistic agriculture and "the due proportion between arable and pasture land" (1)— he does not show, however, the same economic insight in respect to the necessity of child-stealing and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing exploitation into factory exploitation, and the establishment of the "true relation" between capital and labour power. He says:
"It may, perhaps, be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by turns during the greater part of the night and robbed ofthat rest which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected together in such a manner that the con-tagion of example cannot but lead to profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national felicity?"[2]'
"In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly in Lancashire," says Fielden, "the newly-invented machinery was used in large factories built
[1] Mirabeau, 1. c, [De la monarchie prussienne...,] t. vi, p. 101. [2] Eden, 1. c , Vol. I, Book II, Ch. I, pp. 420-422.
on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel. Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from towns; and Lancashire, in particular, being, till then, comparatively thinly populated and barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small and nimble fingers of little children being by very far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices from the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these little, hapless creatures were sent down into the north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13 or 14 years old. The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to feed and lodge them in an "apprentice house" near the factory; overseers were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence.... In many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong //Lancashire//, cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their work and ... even in some instances ... were driven to commit suicide.... The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder. The profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any possibility of limit; they began the practice of what is termed "night-working", that is, having tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the day, they had another set ready to go on working throughout the night; the day-set getting into the beds that the night-set had just quitted, and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the beds that the day-set quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in Lancashire, that the beds never get cold." ''>
With the development of capitalist production during the manu-
[1] John Fielden, 1. c , [The Curse of the Factory System..., London, 1836,] pp. 5, 6. On the earlier infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), 1. c, p. 219; and Gisborne, Enquiry into the Duties of Men, 1795, Vol. II. [6 7 1] When the steam-engine trans-planted the factories from the country waterfalls to the middle of towns, the "abstemious" surplus value maker found the child material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek slaves from the workhouses. ' [9 3] When Sir R. Peel (father of the "minister of plausibility"), brought in his bill[672] for the protection of children, in 1815, Francis Horner, lumen of the Bullion Committee [673] and intimate friend of Ricardo, said in the House of Commons: "It is notorious, that with a bankrupt's effects, a gang, if he might use the word, of these children had been put up to sale, and were advertised publicly as part of the property. A most atrocious instance had been brought before the Court of King's Bench two years before, in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible had come to his knowledge while on a //Parliamentary// Committee ... that not many years ago, an agreement had been made between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every 20 sound children one idiot should be taken."[67]* facturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the naive Annals of Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson.[651] Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht,[675] England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty [6 7] [6] the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. And, even to the present day, Liverpool "respectability" is the Pindar of the slave trade which — compare the work of Aikin [1795] already quoted — "has coincided with that spirit of bold adventure which has characterised the trade of Liverpool and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has occasioned vast employment for shipping and sail-ors, and greatly augmented the demand for the manufactures of the country" (pp. 338-339). Liverpool employed in the slave trade, in 1730, 15 ships; in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792,
132.677
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world."
Tantœ molis erat,[678] to establish the "eternal laws of Nature" of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into "free labouring poor", that artificial product of modern society.[21]
[1] In 1790, there were in the English West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen for one, in the Dutch twenty-three for one (Henry Brougham, An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers. Edin. 1803, vol. II, p. 74).
[21] The phrase, "labouring poor", is found in English legislation from the moment when the class of wage labourers becomes noticeable. This term is used in opposition, on the one hand, to the "idle poor", beggars, etc., on the other to those labourers, who, pigeons not yet plucked, are still possessors of their own means of labour. From the Stat-
If money, according to Augier," "comes into the world with a con-genital blood stain on one cheek, .capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.2!
Endnotes
[580] The revolution of the world market. Marx refers here to the sharp decline, at the end of the 14th century, of the role of Genoa, Venice and other cities of Northern Italy in transit trade as a result of the great geographical discoveries of those times: the discovery of North and South America, and of the sea route to India round the southern tip of Africa. Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain and England now played the leading role in world trade.— 707, 738
[654] Genesis 4 : 9 . - 7 3 8
[6 5 5] The revolution in the Netherlands in 1566-1609 was a combination of a national-liberation war against absolutist Spain and of anti-feudal struggle. The revolution ended in a victory for the North, where Europe's first bourgeois republic — the United Provinces (the Dutch Republic) —was established, and in a defeat for the southern provinces, which remained under Spanish rule.— 739
[464] Anti-Jacobin War—a reference to the wars which England waged as a member of the European coalitions against the French Republic and Napoleonic France. During these wars, which lasted, with intervals, from 1792 to 1815, the British ruling circles established a brutal regime of terrorism in their country, several revolts were put down and laws were adopted banning workers' associations.— 555, 598, 666, 739
[6 5 6] The Second Opium War—the war of Britain and France against China in 1856-60. See Note 388.— 739
[659] Genesis 1:27.-740
[124] The British East India Company was founded at the beginning of the 17th century and existed till 1858. It enjoyed a monopoly of trade with the East Indies and played a decisive part in the establishment of the British colonial empire.— 145, 458, 740
[11] 1 ' The plan outlined here was not realised by Marx. The work referred to here as Book II, was published by Engels as Volume II of Capital (1885) after Marx's death, and Book III as Volume III of Capital (1894). Book IV was not published in Marx's or Engels' lifetime. See also Note 2.— 11, 565
[6 6 0] Pilgrim fathers — the English Puritan settlers in North America; they landed in America in 1620, bringing their faith with them.— 741
[265] See M. Luther, Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher. In: Der Sechste Teil der Bücher des Ehrn-wirdigen Herrn Doctoris Martini Lutheri..., Wittembergk, 1589, S. 296.— 314, 741
[661] G. Güjich, Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels, der Gewerbe und des Ackerbaus..., Bd. 1, Jena, 1830, S. 371.—742
[662] D. Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau.— 742
[6 6 3] Matthew 12:31.-742
[666] Marx borrowed these data from G. Gülich, Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels..., Bd. 1, Jena, 1830, S. 377.-744
[667] Q. Cunningham,] An Essay on Trade and Commerce..., London, 1770, p. 49. Jan de Witt, mentioned here, to whom the authorship of Aanwysing der heilsame polilike gronden en maximen... is ascribed, wrote, as has been established, only two chapters of this book. It was primarily written by the Dutch economist and businessman P. de la Court.—744
[668] Marx probably refers to W. Cobbett's A History of the Protestant "Reformation"..., London, 1824; T. Doubleday, The True Law of Population..., London, 1842.— 744
[669] Colbert, a champion of Mercantilism, was Controller-General of Finances under Louis XIV. His economic policy was criticised by the Physiocrats (Mirabeau and others), who formulated new economic and political tasks.— 745
[670] 6 , 0 Cf. Matthew 2:16-18.-745
[671] Marx borrowed these data from F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor..., Vol. I, London, 1797, pp. 420-21, notes.—746
[93] J. Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money, in: The Works, Vol. II, 1777, p. 15.—101
[672] The bill was brought in by Sir Robert Peel oh June 6, 1815, and got Royal Assent from George III (Act 59, c. 66) in July 1819.—746
[6 7 3] See present edition, Vol. 29, pp. 400-01.—746
[651] Cf. A. Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, Vol. I, London, 1764, p. 226.— 734, 747
[675] The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 was one of a series of peace treaties which concluded the war of the Spanish succession; this began in 1701 between France and Spain, on the one hand, and the countries of the anti-French coalition — Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Savoy and Habsburg Austria — on the other.— 747
[6] The American War of Independence (1775-1783) — a revolutionary war fought by 13 British colonies in North America. As a result of their victory an independent state was formed, the United States of America. This war had a great impact on the development of the European revolutionary-democratic movement, in particular on the French revolution of the end of the 18th century.—9, 748
[678] The full quotation is tantae molis erat Romanam conderegenlem (so great was the effort required to found the Roman race) —an expression from Virgil's Aeneid, Book I, verse 3 3 . - 7 4 7
[1] Capital—Marx's major work to which he devoted four decades (from the early 1840s till the end of his life). Marx started studying political economy at the end of 1843 in Paris. His aim was to write a treatise containing a critical analysis of political economy. As a result of his research in this field appeared such works as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Wage Labour and Capital, Manifesto of the Communist Party and others. After an interval caused by the 1848-49 revolution, Marx continued his economic studies in London, where he lived as a refugee from August 1849. Here he studied the works of different economists, the history of economic development and the economics of his time in various countries, especially in England which was then a classic example of a capitalist country. He investigated theories of money, credit and the causes of economic crises, the history of landownership and the theory of ground rent, the socio-economic condition of the working class and questions of population, the history of technology and other problems. -By 1857 he had completed his enormous preparatory work and then proceeded to the final stage — the systématisation and generalisation of the collected material. From January 1857 to June 1858, Marx wrote a manuscript containing 50 signatures, which was, in fact, the first rough draft of Capital. In the present edition it was published in vols 28 and 29. At first Marx intended to publish his work in separate instalments, and the first instalment, as he wrote, "should form a relative whole" (see present edition, Vol. 40, p. 287), which embraces only the first section of Book I — the section consisting of 3 chapters: 1) The Commodity; 2) Money or Simple Circulation and 3) Capital. However, the final variant of the first instalment — A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — does not contain the third chapter. Marx wrote the chapter on commodity especially. He wrote the chapter on money for "the first instalment" on the basis of the manuscript of 1857-58. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One was published in 1859 (present edition, Vol. 29). It was to be followed by "the second instalment", i. e. by the chapter on capital. However, soon afterwards, Marx had to postpone this work for a year and a half as he was occupied in writing the pamphlet Herr Vogt (present edition, Vol. 17) and in other urgent matters. Only in August 1861, did he begin work on "the second instalment". By the middle of 1863, he had written a new rough draft which was considerably longer than the manuscript of 1857-58 — 23 notebooks, having a total volume of about 200 signatures. The complete manuscript of 1861-63, which is considered to be the second rough draft of Capital, is reproduced in vols 30-34 of the present edition. Later on Marx decided to divide the theoretical part of the work on capital into 3 parts. The historico-critical section was to be the fourth and concluding part, and was to be based on the part of the 1861-63 manuscript entitled "Theories of Surplus Value". In his letter to Kugelmann dated October 13, 1866, Marx writes, "The whole work is thus divided into the following parts: Book I. The Process of Production of Capital. Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital. Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole. Book IV. On the History of the Theory" (see present edition, Vol. 42, p. 328). Marx also gave up his plan to publish the work in separate instalments and decided first to complete the whole work and then to publish it. Marx continued his work, concentrating mainly on those parts that were not sufficiently elaborated in the 1861-63 manuscript. He studied an enormous quantity of economic and technical literature, including books on agriculture, on credit and money and turnover. He also studied statistical material, various parliamentary documents, official reports on child labour in industry, on housing conditions of the British working class, etc. Marx then wrote a new manuscript (from August 1863 to the end of 1865), which constituted a more detailed variant of the three theoretical volumes of Capital. Only after the whole work was completed (January 1866), did Marx begin preparing it for the press, having decided, on Engels' advice, not to prepare the whole work but only Volume I of Capital. The final touches were made by Marx with great thoroughness and, in fact, became yet another recasting of Volume I of Capital as a whole. To ensure the integrity, completeness and clarity of the exposition, Marx thought it necessary to reproduce in a comparatively short form the major problems dealt with in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (published in 1859) at the beginning of Volume I of Capital—they now constitute the whole of the first part "Commodities and Money" (in the first edition which was not yet subdivided into parts the first chapter bore this title). After the publication of Volume I of Capital (September 1867), Marx continued work on it in preparation for publication in German and translation into foreign lan-guages. For the second edition (1872) he made more subdivisions and also a lot of changes in the text (see this volume, pp. 12-13), gave important instructions for the Russian edition, published in Petersburg in 1872 and the first foreign translation of Capital, once more changed the book's structure and thoroughly edited the French edition (1872-75). Marx intended to take into consideration most of the changes made in the French edition when preparing the third German edition of Volume I. At the same time, after the publication of Volume I of Capital Marx continued his work on the subsequent volumes, intending to finish the whole edition as soon as possible. However, he was unable to do so. A lot of time was taken up by his activities in the General Council of the First International, and his work was increasingly hampered by poor health. After Marx's death, Engels finished preparing the third (1883) German edition of Volume I of Capital for press, which was taken as the basis for the translation into English made by Samuel Moore and Eduard Aveling and edited by Engels (1887).— 1,311
[21] The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1838 by the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright. Defending the interests of manufacturers, the League secured the repeal of the Corn Laws which provided for the limitation and prohibition of grain imports, which served the interests of the landed aristocracy. The Corn Law adopted in 1815 prohibited the import of corn while the price of bread in England itself remained less than 80 sh. per quarter. In 1822 this law was slightly altered, and in 1828 a sliding scale was introduced, according to which there was a rise in import duties on corn when its price fell on the home market and vice versa. Trying to achieve the repeal of corn laws and to establish trade in corn, the League aimed at reducing domestic prices for corn and thus at reducing wages for wage-workers.The slogan of free trade was widely used by the League in its advocacy of the unity of interests of workers and manufacturers. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846.'— 15, 296, 458, 462, 667, 703
[2] Marx is referring to the sections "Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities" and "Theories of the Medium of Circulation and of Money" in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One (present edition, Vol. 29, pp. 292-302, 389-417), which he later abandoned as he intended to prepare a special historico-critical concluding volume of Capital (see Note 1).— 7, 532
[67] feudal liberation movement in the form of a large-scale peasant war (the Taiping revolt).—82 6' See D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, Ch. I, Sect. III. Marx describes the Robinsonades, beloved of bourgeois political economists, in the "Introduction" (present edition, Vol. 28, pp. 17-18).— 87