Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randroids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.
But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism--a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expro- priation of surplus value--i.e., capitalism--cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market anarchist Benjamin Tucker--from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow--regarded himself as a libertarian socialist.
It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely available in every country without patents, and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work--as different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.
THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY. Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale cor- porate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centur- ies.
For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation." "What the capitalist system demanded was... a degraded and almost servile con- dition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercen- aries, and of their means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which the
has the same feudal rights as the lord himself."
To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.
J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was "taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government." .
When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one." . This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry.
Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform" of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until then "only a feudal title," into "rights of modern private property." In the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under the "reform," tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit .
Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England . E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." .
The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." . Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsis- tence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, be- cause there will be more compulsion to it." .
---------
Read more at: http://www.mutualist.org/id4.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(475 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
