| This question <550|563> overall <550-2|551-1> Copenhagen: <317|557-21>. |
| Term Paper 832: Essay about Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation |
| [551] Copenhagen: Chapter 32 is called Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. Chapter 32 poses the question: What does the primitive accumulation of capital resolve itself into? In so far as it is not the immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage laborers, and therefore a mere change of form, it means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner. What this is saying is that historically we cannot define the accumulation of primitive capital as the exploitations of slaves and serfs it is much more than that. |
| The accumulation of private property is one of the means that brings about capitalist accumulation. Without private property labor could not exist for the capitalist. Private property exists where the means of labor and the external condtions of labor belong to private individuals. Each private property has a different character. According to Marx, The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, such as manufacturing, or agricultural, and it is an essential condition for the development of social production and the free individuality of the laborer himself. |
| The same is true under slavery and serfdom. The petty mode of production exists and it does well, but under the classical mode where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor it really thrives. The land that he cultivates or the tools that they use to make crafts truly become works of art because they are the ones responsible for the outcomes of their product. The private property owner has sole control over the situation, there is no co-operation that needs to be taken care of, or no labor that needs to be divided. |
| However this cannot last. Pecquer says that to perpetuate this type of private property labor would be a “universial mediocrity.” And at a certain stage of development this sole proprietorship, private property labor begins its own dissolution. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor. |
| After this transformation has taken place and as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, and the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the socialization of labor and other transformations of the land into means for production can be exploited. The laborer then no longer works for himself, but he is now a capitalist and he is exploiting many laborers for his production. |
| Finally the capitalist mode of appropriation produces capitalist private property. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, it gives him individual property based on the co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production. In the transformation of private property into capitalist private property it is much more difficult than it seems. We have the expropriation of the mass by a few dictators and in another situation we have the expropriation of a few dictators to the mass of the people. Which is to say that the advance of industry replaces the isolation of laborers. So in essence the lower and middle classes can fight aganist the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, but they are unable, because as Marx said it would be “like trying to roll back the wheel of history.” |
| Hans: You missed the important fact that the end result is not capitalist private property but control of the means of production by the working class. |
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