Part Eight — So-Called Primitive Accumulation Chapters 26–33. The historical presupposition of capital: the divorce of the producer from the means of production, and the expropriation of the expropriators.

The whole analysis has assumed the two classes it needs — a capitalist with money and means of production, a worker with nothing to sell but labour-power — as already present. Part Eight asks where that separation came from, and answers the question historically. Accumulation presupposes surplus-value, surplus-value presupposes capitalist production, and capitalist production presupposes masses of capital and free labour-power: the movement appears to turn in a circle, broken only by a "primitive" or previous accumulation that precedes the whole process. Chapter 26 states the secret. Chapters 27 through 31 narrate the actual history — the expropriation of the agricultural population, the bloody legislation against the expropriated, the genesis of the capitalist farmer and the industrial capitalist. Chapter 32 draws the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation to its conclusion, and Chapter 33 confirms the thesis from the colonies. This is the historical foundation of the entire volume: the reader who has followed the logic from the commodity forward here learns the violence that laid its ground.

Marx opens by demolishing the economists' fable — primitive accumulation as the reward of a frugal elite and the punishment of lazy rascals, the "original sin" of political economy. Actual history tells another story: "conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force." And it strips the phenomenon to its essence. Capital is a relation, and what had to be created was the separation of the worker from the conditions of his labour.

The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

Marx, Capital I, pages 874–875.

The historical form of the divorce is dual: the producer is freed from serfdom and the guilds — the emancipation the bourgeois historians celebrate — but freed also from all means of production and all the guarantees of the old feudal order. The two freedoms are one process, and its record is written in blood.

But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

Marx, Capital I, page 875.

The historical core of the Part, running across four chapters, reconstructs the making of the English proletariat. Chapter 27 documents the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land — the forcible dissolution of the feudal retinues, the usurpation of the common lands, the enclosures given legal form as "Bills for the Inclosure of the Commons," the clearing of estates culminating in the Highland Clearances and the Duchess of Sutherland's evictions. Chapter 28 traces the "bloody legislation against the expropriated" — the Tudor statutes that whipped, branded, and hanged the vagabonds that expropriation had created, forcing the dispossessed into the discipline of the wage under pain of mutilation and death, and the later legislation depressing wages by decree. Chapter 29 gives the genesis of the capitalist farmer, who rose on the long inflation and the expropriation of the peasantry; Chapter 30 shows how the agricultural revolution created both the home market for industrial capital and the "free" proletariat to work it. This documentary record — the statutes, the enclosure figures, the case histories — is reconstructed here rather than quoted whole; its function in the argument is to show that the "free labourer" of the earlier Parts is a historical product of force, not a fact of nature.

Turning from the making of the proletariat to the making of capital, Marx traces the sources of the money that became industrial capital: the colonial system, the public debt, the modern tax system and protectionism, and above all the plunder of the colonies and the slave trade. The "primitive accumulation" of capital was the systematic combination of these forcible methods, and Marx states the dependence of European wage-labour on New World slavery with deliberate bluntness.

While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.

Marx, Capital I, page 925.

The chapter ends on the image that condenses the whole Part's account of capital's origins.

If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Marx, Capital I, page 926.

The volume's theoretical climax reads primitive accumulation as the first term in a dialectical sequence. Its violence dissolved the small-scale private property of the self-employed producer — property founded on the union of the worker with his conditions of labour — and replaced it with capitalist private property founded on the exploitation of formally free labour. That was the first negation. But capitalist production, by concentrating and socializing labour, generates the conditions and the agent of its own negation.

Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Marx, Capital I, page 929.

Marx frames this as the negation of the negation, and marks the asymmetry between the two transformations: the first expropriated the many for the few by force; the second expropriates the few by the many.

But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.

Marx, Capital I, page 929.

In the former case, it was a matter of the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; but in this case, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.

Marx, Capital I, page 930.

The volume closes, almost as an appendix, by confirming its central thesis from the negative case of the colonies. Marx reads E. G. Wakefield, who complained that in a colony with abundant cheap land the immigrant worker will not stay a wage-labourer but sets up on his own account, so that capital cannot find the propertyless labour it needs. Wakefield's "systematic colonization" — pricing colonial land artificially high to bar workers from it — is, for Marx, an inadvertent confession of the whole secret of primitive accumulation: that capital is not a thing but a social relation, requiring the prior expropriation of the worker. What the metropolis conceals, the colony exposes. So the volume ends where Part Eight began, having shown, from the far side of the world, that the "free labourer" on whom the entire analysis rests is manufactured, not given.