| This question <542|545> overall <543|545> ChuckB: <497|548-13>. |
| Term Paper 832: Essay about Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation |
| [544] ChuckB and NHuggs: Marx poses the question in the first line of Chapter 32 saying, “What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into?” Then he goes on to discuss the transformation of the feudal period with serfs that worked the land of their lord to the coming to age of mercantilism. He explains that it was not an immediate transformation. It was a slow process to go to one extreme to the other. Where private property came into play he called it “the antithesis to social collective property.” Then the transformation came step by step. With private property being the means of production the start of petty industry was a key step to the development of social production and free individuality of the laborer himself. Marx goes on to say that this production was always going on it caught fire with private property and the laborer able to do whatever he needed to for a means of production. But this way cannot function under the old rules, Marx calls it, “moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds,” He says that to continue in this old methodology would be as Pecqueur says, “to decree universal mediocrity.” Finally, the old ways are broken and a new way is coming to the forefront. No more individualized and scattered means of production, now a socially concentrated one, where few hold the power and control the means of production. |
| He then goes on to discuss a few signs that “transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom.” These being: laborers are turned into proletarians, the means of labor for these laborers turned into capital, the new capitalist mode of production has been sufficiently established, and furthermore, a common means of production that happens through additional socialization of labor and socially exploited “transformation of the land and other means of production.” The next step in the process, as Marx explains it, is for the power to be controlled by a select few capitalists. This is allowed to happen “by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital.” As Marx puts it, “one capitalist always kills many.” As this centralization goes on, the scale of the common means of production widens and begins to go global. The labor process takes on a mutual form, the technical application of science is put into place, soil is cultivated methodically, instruments of labor are turned into instruments only usable in a universal sense, and with the economization of “all means of production of combined, socialized labour” people throughout the world become entangled in the net of the world market and the “international character of the capitalistic regime” is in place. |
| It is important to note that Marx declares that as the number of capitalists in power diminishes and the advantages of the means of production get more and more monopolized, at the same time “grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation.” But, at the same time, the revolt of the working class grows. The class that as Marx describes it is “always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.” In other words, the capitalists create their own worst enemy in a unified, oppressed, exploited, and quite angry group. The monopolization of capital ends up hindering the mode of production and the centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor get to a point where they cannot be controlled by the few capitalists in power. Something has to give, and in Marx's words “the knell of capitalist private property sounds.” What he is basically saying is that the capitalist regime will eventually fall and the working class will rise up and begin to reverse the cycle. |
| Marx answers his own question in the first paragraph, “What does the primitive accumulation of capital resolve itself into?” It's best stated by Marx himself in the last paragraph “We had the expropriation of the mass of people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.” That brings us full circle back the “genesis” or the beginning. |
| Hans: It does not go full circle back to the beginning, but in the end state the advantages of both forms of private property are preserved: the worker is given back the control over his means of production, but now he works in collaboration with many others, using scientific methods. |
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