Banaji and Balibar, as seen in chapter 5, read the chapters on primitive accumulation as a retrospective account of the historic emergence of the elements that make up the capitalist teleology. However, if we avoid considering the account in these chapters from the perspective of its result, we will see that the text, contrary to the common reading, deals not only with the 'accumulation' on opposite sides of the two components of the capital-relation, but with a struggle over the reproduction of the proletarians. This starts with the repression of alternative forms of reproduction such as vagabondage, theft and poaching, and proceeds to extra-economic regulation of wages and the working day. Already in the Grundrisse Marx notes that the 'propertyless are more inclined to become vagabonds and robbers and beggars than workers.'546 In the chapter
545 And as argued in Bue Rübner Hansen, “The Value-Form as Real Synthesis” (MA Dissertation, Kings College, 2009).
546 Marx, Grundrisse, p.736.
on the 'Bloody Legislation' in Capital, he shows how it took an extensive use of force to drive the poor into the workplaces. In Marx's description, the pauperised peasants only become wage workers en masse through the activity of the state.
Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour.547
Marx lists a number of laws, issued in England by Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, James I, and in France and the Netherlands, by Louis XVI and Charles V respectively. He makes clear that these laws were needed to restore social order, and to instil labour discipline into the vagabonds and 'idlers'. Thus, vagabonds were arrested and forced to work at a given wage, or to work as slaves for food.548 Mobile 'free labour' under these conditions thus had to be coerced through violence and labour discipline.
Yann Moulier-Boutang describes the response to this spread of free labor as the 'great fixation of labour.'549 Silvia Federici, as well as Papadoupoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, invite us to read the history of vagabondage in this period as a mode of resistance against feudalism, and the Bloody Legislation as a means of the ruling class to regain control in the face of popular movements and micro-resistances. Thus Papadoupoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos write that '[p]eople do not escape their control.
People escape. Control is a cultural–political device which comes afterwards to tame and eventually to appropriate people’s escape.'550 However, while escapes from feudal bondage were surely an ongoing cause of migration throughout the Middle Ages, in Marx's interpretation only the expropriation of the agricultural population and the enclosure of the commons can explain the sudden explosion in vagrancy in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Marx stresses here the protocapitalist motives of the new nobility551 in this not-yet-capitalist society as a reason for the expropriations: a changing economic situation – the growth of wool manufacture in Flanders and the rise in wool prices – gave the feudal lords of England a means to bypass their dependence
547 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 899.
548 Ibid., 897.
549 Yann Moulier Boutang, De L’esclavage Au Salariat : Economie Historique Du Salariat Bridé (Presses Universitaires de France - PUF, 1998), 291.
550 Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 43.
551 'The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers.' Marx, Capital: Volume I, 879.
on the labour of a large section of the bonded peasantry and the struggles that came with this dependence. It became more profitable for them to fill the land with sheep than feudal serfs growing crops for direct consumption on the manor by themselves and the lord.552 But the mobility of the new proletariat was not total and often not sufficient for capital. In many cases, former feudal serfs would now pay rents for their dwellings, and receive wages for the work on the lands of the lord. 'Free labour' was in this case indirectly coerced into work, a coercion made possible by their lack of mobility.553 This particularly hit women, whose mobility, as Silvia Federici notes, was constricted by their greater risk of sexual assault while travelling, and by their caring duties towards children and the elderly.554 On the other hand, the excessive number of hands in relation to work caused a surge in crime, while hitherto accepted activities became criminalised.
The problem was not, strictly speaking, that there was not enough work for these workers, but that they were not “nomadic” enough; to solve this problem the otherwise imprisoned workers were kindly turned into immigrants, that is forcibly deported to the colonies as convict and indentured servant labour.
It may easily seem that the Bloody Legislation, introduced over several hundred years,555 was at first merely a means to deal with the destabilising effects of proletarian migration and crime, and only later became a way to drive proletarians into wage capitalist labour. However, the fact that such laws were necessary brings our attention to two further aspects of the proletarian condition, at least at this historical conjuncture:
that proletarians had the will and the capacity to refuse work. While the profoundly abject and degrading character of work at the time explains their will to escape work, only the existence of alternative practices of survival and reproduction explains the ability to refuse. We are thus not only dealing with resistance in a relation of Gewalt but also with alternative attempts to organise reproduction. The central, merely implicit yet inescapable argument in Marx's account of the Bloody Legislation, is not the attempt to control the escape of labour (as claimed by Moulier-Boutang) or to appropriate its flight (Papadoupoulos et al.), but another example of an attempt to direct the capacity of proletarians to reproduce themselves. The separation of labour from the means of (re)production was not itself sufficient to secure the imposition and stability of the
552 Ibid., 878–79.
553 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), The Pelican Marx Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 736; “Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated” Marx, Capital: Volume I, 896–904.
554 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 127.
555 Marx's chapter on the Bloody Legislation covers the period from 1530 to 1825.
capital-relation, i.e. the regularity and sufficiency of the real abstraction or alienation of labour. Here we might mention three such forms of proletarian self-reproduction outside and inside the wage relation, all of which were addressed by the bloody laws, even if not mentioned by Marx.
Firstly, as noted by Federici, women of the growing proletarian masses regulated inter-generational reproduction through different forms of birth-control, the repression of which is the subject of her analysis of the early modern obsession with demographics, the nascent state and church regulation of reproductive health, and the witch hunts.556 Secondly, vagabonds as well as the less mobile could refuse wage labour because they found strategies of collectively or individually appropriating means of subsistence (theft, poaching, land occupations, food riots, etc.). Indeed, England was shaken by strong egalitarian and landless movements (the Levellers and the Diggers) and a large number of food-riots across the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, i.e.
forms of what we can call re-appropriative and antagonistic reproduction.557 Finally, as mentioned by Marx, the anti-combination acts which were effective from the fourteenth century to 1825, were introduced very early on to ban workers' combinations (trade unions). In this lies a whole history of forms of solidarity and struggle to improve work conditions.558 Furthermore, Marx notes,
[t]he rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to 'regulate' wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation.559 The issue common to struggles around mobility and wage labour was the struggle for or against the alternative or parallel relations of reproduction, as well as the struggles for improved reproduction waged by proletarians. The atomisation and separation of workers did not automatically lead to their mutual indifference, or to their organisation by capital. When separated, these atoms swerved and composed in configurations of self-organised reproduction beyond the family. If we see the introduction of these laws
556 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, particularly 87-91.
557 See Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 15–29. For the Diggers, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, new ed. (London:
Penguin, 1991), 110ff.; on riots, see Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
558 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 901, 903. For 18th century riots, see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present no. 50 (February 1, 1971): 76–136.
559 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 899–900 .
and the institutional arrangements necessary to implement them as core moments of the development of the modern state, we begin to understand this state as a solution to the problem brought about by primitive accumulation, namely the separation of a great mass of people from the means of their reproduction. As a solution, the laws are crucially premised on not questioning the result of primitive accumulation. Rather they are attempts to ameliorate consequences of primitive accumulation, through organising the dispossessed into a system of social reproduction, thereby perpetuating the separation. Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos point in this direction when they write that
national sovereignty is not primarily organised around the oppression of singular potentialities. Its main objective is not the suppression of those social groups which attempt to escape. Rather, modern national sovereignty attempts to absorb unruly potentialities by including them in its social reproduction.560 However, the fact that core functions of the modern state, such as the police, labour law, and workhouses (as an example of an institution that pacifies, profitably or not, the unemployed) were created to deal with the destabilising impact of a proletarian class not fully and organically integrated into social reproduction, must also be related to the subversive effects of its self-reproduction. Thus, the repressive depotentialisation of labour's self-reproduction, its subordination under the wage, did play a role as a means to guide the actualisation of the potentiality of labour into capitalist social reproduction, through the wage. Before the power of the mass can be exploited, it must be disorganised, turned into a mass. The moment of depotentialisation is essential because it allows us to recognise a proletarian power which could not be included into the reproduction of capitalist social relations, a collective negativity vis-a-vis capitalist relations. The proletarian power was antagonised and antagonistic, first because it demanded reproductive autonomy, and only later political participation. Whereas early resistance against expropriations can be seen as a defensive struggle, the demands for land and access to the commons made by the Diggers at a point where the enclosures for many was an established fact, meant that what had been a reactive struggle for concrete communities (with all their internal hierarchies), mutually separated by distance, could become a generalised affirmative struggle for 'the abstract' – i.e. as yet unactualised – idea of the commons, of egalitarian communes.561 Furthermore, such
560 Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 8.
561 On the relation between the memory of the commons and the emergence of a utopian imaginary in
demands were immediately radical insofar as they could only succeed through immediate appropriation of wealth.
A similar, but non-antagonistic development is described in the last chapter of Capital, titled 'The Modern Theory of Colonization.' Here Marx sarcastically shows how colonial administrators – who at home and in principle were proponents of the free market – had to set an artificial price on 'virgin soil' in the colonies in order to force new immigrants and colonists into wage labour. The aim was to 'prevent the labourers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.'562 Marx describes this drive to the land as the 'anti-capitalist cancer of the colonies', However, he doesn't draw wider theoretical consequences from this example, except to illustrate a point about political economists. This chapter is not really about the colonies, but about the secret discovered in the New World by the economists of the Old World, namely that 'capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things' and that this mediation has as a fundamental condition the 'expropriation of the worker', i.e. the destruction of alternative ways of reproduction.563