| This question <510|503> overall <531-6|533> Yenom: <499|561-6>. graded A |
| Term Paper 833: Essay about Chapter Thirty-Three: Modern Theory of Colonization |
| [532] Yenom, IvanIvanovich, and Searose: Tombstone of Just Private Property. The focus of Chapter 33 is the two different types of private property and that the prerequisite for one is the destruction of the other. Marx uses the theory of colonization set forth by vulgar economics to reveal and criticize this phenomenon. The class of wage laborer is essential to capitalism and the focus of Wakefield's ideas was how to create such a class of laborers to be exploited, for otherwise capitalism cannot exist. |
| The first and original property type is that property which is owned and used by labor for its own (the laborer's) advantage and use. The second type is property which is owned by capitalists and used in the process of expropriating surplus value from labor. We shall call the first Just Private Property and the second Exploitative Private Property (i.e. capital) for this paper. There is no way to divide certain items into which are Just or Exploitative Private Property solely through their physical characteristics. The same item can be either. A plow owned by the farmer and used by the farmer to grow his own crops would be Just Private Property but a plow owned by a capitalist who pays a wage to someone who then uses that plow would be Exploitative Private Property. The reason Marx declares that Exploitative Private Property grows only on the tomb of Just Private Property becomes clear through this example, and the examples he gives of the colonies. Who would work for a capitalist for a wage if they were able to work for themselves for the whole of the value created by their labor? |
| Thus we come to the true body of chapter thirty-three. It should be obvious that in the Old World, Western Europe, or in the Mother Countries capitalism reigned supreme. Primitive accumulation had already been accomplished as the capitalists control the materials and land necessary for any type of production to be accomplished, just as they had a ready supply of eager wage-laborers. These had not been duplicated in the British colonies or in the new nation of the United States of America. Marx had always been fascinated with the capitalist production process because of its ability to continuously reproduce, not only goods, but also the wage laborers needed as a part of the production process. The capitalist system ensures favorable conditions to capitalist exploitation of workers and guarantees the social dependence of said workers on the capitalists. Referring back to the question of who would work for a capitalist for a wage if they were able to work for themselves for the whole of the value created by their labor, we find that workers don't! While it is true that in the mother country this relation of absolute dependence is turned into a contract between two commodity owners; owners of commodity capital and owners of commodity labor-power, such phenomenon does not take place in the colonies. This is due to the abundance of available soil or land in the new countries. |
| How does this make a difference you may ask? We would direct your attention to the account given to us by way of EG Wakefield, as quoted by Marx. Wakefield describes the misfortune of a Mr. Peel, capitalist extraordinaire of Western Australia. “Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of l50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’” (Marx, Capital I, ch. 33 p. 932:2/o.) What happened to the 3,000 wage-laborers? They obtain a parcel of land and quickly become independent producers working and enriching themselves instead of working for and enriching the capitalists. Wakefield argues that this constant transformation of wage-laborers into independent producers adversely affects the labor market in that they are now removed from the labor market. Property such as tools, farming, or mining equipment are now to be considered Just Private Property because they are used by the worker to enrich himself. As a result, the colonies reflect a low degree of exploitation and low dependence upon capitalists. |
| It seems important to pause for a moment and mention something that has been, up to this time, left unexplained by Marx and other Economics 5080 students -- exactly who is E. G. Wakefield? A careful understanding of who this man was, what he wrote, and why he wrote it, can add as much to our understanding of Marx's critique as the clear understanding of how Marx uses words such as commodities, wage, and labor. Edward Gibbon Wakefield was born in London on the Second of March 1776. Between that time and his death in 1862, Wakefield led the colorful life of a Quaker, a surveyor, a kidnapper, a colonial business manager and director, a special commissioner of New Zealand, advisor to New Zealand's Governor, and of course, an author. He started writing while in jail but unlike Marx, Wakefield wrote to ingratiate himself into the good graces of the ruling class. Wakefield intentionally and systematically explores how to maintain control over the influx of workers into British colonies such as Australia and New Zealand. This we believe is why Marx quotes Wakefield so often and so sarcastically. Wakefield is proving the point Marx would have the masses see, but Wakefield is prepared to sacrifice justice and fairness upon an altar to national wealth. “In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people.” (Marx, Capital I, ch. 33 pp. 932) |
| Again, this matter of land, the difference between the two types of private property, and the fact that means of production doesn't necessarily make you a capitalist, are the discoveries describing the colonies claimed to be made by Wakefield, but are really just the explanation of human interaction and exploitation under capitalism anywhere. Wakefield suggests that to correct for the problem of wage-labor turnover, the government should set out to: first, control all land in the new settlements; second, artificially set high prices for their sale; and third, break the land to be sold into smaller less usable plots. Having accomplished this, the workers would again be forced to labor for the capitalist, and then by necessity save extra long to purchase their own soil at an inflated price. Once the workers were able to purchase their own land, the government could then use the profits of land-sale to subsidize the immigration of new workers to the colonies, in effect, perpetuating the cycle. |
| The problem with Wakefield's policy suggestions was that in America there was plenty of land to be claimed and that once England enacted policies like Wakefield's, workers simply changed their destination. Up until the American Civil War this immigration of wage-laborers and their subsequent transformation into an independent land-owning populace continued. Why did the USA cease to be a worker's last real chance? Marx explains that the downfall of the cheap availability of land in the United States after the Civil war was due to taxes and granting land to capitalist speculators such as the railroads. What he doesn't mention is that the war and the carpetbaggers brought on by the South's loss destroyed much of the South's culture and its social relations of production which relied more upon individual farmers and less upon the industrialized wage labor that the North exhibited. The Union army was formed of wage laborers where as the Confederate army was formed for the most part of individual farmers. We would conjecture that the Napoleonic wars, the first wars to include mass conscription there by removing the peasants from the land, fulfilled this function in Europe in the early 1800s. |
| With the closing of new frontiers for land acquisition capitalism is losing any sort of release valve for disgruntled laborers. Without this new land that enables wage laborers to escape from their exploitation capitalism will, through its own natural impetus, eliminate more and more Just Private Property throughout the world. The path of capitalism as told by Marx leads to crushing oligarchy and monopoly before a worldwide revolution. The only question remaining in our race to the bottom is: how deep and how intolerable will the abyss be? |
|
|
|||||