# Class 18: Capital Chapter 23, The General Law of Capital Accumulation

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** YaleCourses
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music swells) - Expanding reproduction or how surplus value is transformed into capital. There's no magic to the way that happens, but it is a little bit deceptive, as Marx shows you when he does the calculations that the third time around that you're reinvesting, you're reinvesting on capital that was made from capital. So it has the feeling of having no foundation, just like the capital system has a feeling of having no foundation of being an engine that spins on its own. We'll start talking today and finish talking up on Wednesday about its real foundation in a history of violent dispossession. That is the chapter called on the so-called or original, what is it called in this version? (chuckles) "The So-called Original Accumulation. " We'll talk about so-called and original and accumulation from a historical perspective. There are processes that took place that were not inevitable and are not themselves capitalist, but we can begin to talk about how capitalism is somewhat dependent, although it looks quite autonomous, dependent on its outside and having an outside and continuing to plunder and continuing to expand. But are there any other questions about expanding reproduction? Things you don't understand? Maybe they'll come up as we go forward. I'm looking on page 589, I'm gonna read you a paragraph, and we'll try to unfold the implications of this paragraph and look into the assertions he makes during this lecture. Bottom of page 589. "The greater society's wealth, the greater the functioning capital, the extent and energy of that capital's growth and thus also the absolute size of the working population and labor's productive power, the larger the surplus population or industrial reserve army will be. The same things that increase capital's power to expand also cause the disposable labor power to increase, thus the proportional magnitude of the industrial reserve army. " An important term we're gonna learn about today. "Grows as the potency of wealth does. But the greater this reserve army is in proportion to the army of active workers, the more massive the consolidated surplus population whose misery stands in inverse relation to the amount of labor its members have had to suffer through. " Finally, "The greater the immiserated sections of the working class and the greater the industrial reserve army, the greater the amount of populism, official populism will be. " This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. As with all other laws, various circumstances modify it as it is realized, but we don't need to analyze that process here. There is a law. We will move here from this law to the end of this chapter and almost the end of the next chapter, book to a tendency. Marx is moving back and forth in this book between laws and tendencies. Laws are such that they have to be referred to constantly for capital to work. Tendencies may emerge from the way these laws govern capital but they don't have as much necessity. That doesn't mean that everything under capital will follow a law, will conform to a law, but the pressures in capital are always to conform to law. Capital is highly lawful. It's highly necessitary and we've learned a little bit about how that came to be. We can talk about it as well. That necessitarianism, Marx is going to argue in these chapters. Those necessities, because they're not given by God and pre-established as a harmony that will exist forever, give rise to certain tendencies that might lead to their dissolution. Might, tendency. Law, necessity. These are the two modalities we're dealing with, and Marx never really clarified the relation between the two, that was left for people to investigate after. He makes some important statements about it. But it is interesting that the necessity in capital, for it to keep revolving, for it to expand, for it to subjugate workers, for the surplus to move upward, for it to have to be reinvested, for the whole thing to take over, expand, move into other populations, for it to have an outside that it plunderers when it needs it, deposits its waste into, which is a topic that Marx doesn't deal with very extensively.

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

These are outcomes. I lost the dream of my thought there. That was a long Marxian sentence. You have to be German to be able to come back around at the end. All of those things are effects of a necessitarian core, but the necessitarian, those are effects that, you know, it doesn't care about. It produces them. But there are effects that arise from this, these laws that may work against it, and those he calls tendencies. Like in volume three, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Well, there he is equivocating, again, he calls it a law of a tendency. And this may be what he's getting at, that within all the necessity and the system, it produces things it can't expect, because it's an earthly, human, historical phenomenon in the end. So what is the general law of capital accumulation? is, in very short terms, the richer capital gets as a whole, the poorer the people get as a whole. There is no getting around this, unless capital as a system dissolves. It will always be this way, even if what poor means rises slightly. So how does this happen? Well, we started by talking about how surplus value is transformed into capital. That capital goes back to the starting point. It isn't just about the production of surplus that then can distribute outward, distribute downward, it has a requirement that is ironclad that follows this law that it go back to the beginning. That is that it be reinvested. Accumulate, this is the Moses and prophets. But accumulation doesn't mean get rich, get fat, get greedy, get luxurious. Even though at the heights of capital accumulation there's a lot of luxury spending. That's just because the amounts are so obscene that it can't all be reinvested yet. What capitalists do is they make new markets, they go to outer space, they invade economically other countries. So we're talking about the accumulation of capital. This is the ultimate level of this book that makes the rest of it make sense. The reason you have commodities, the wage form, all of this is because accumulation is the goal and the engine and it has a set of consequences. So we're talking about the consequences from accumulation in a sense we've risen to the highest level of abstraction in this book of discussion, and now we're gonna see what effects this characterization of the whole has on the whole. When the effort of production is turned back into its starting point or accumulation happens. Well, we know it isn't just reproducing itself each year. It is expandingly reproducing itself. Expandingly? It's expanding. When we get to, are there questions about this? Very general. Let's turn to the chapter, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," chapter 23. We know that a couple of things happened. The capital goes back to the starting point and reinvested, and that reinvestment goes into obviously more of everything you needed to begin with, right? Everything you needed in reproduction, that means labor power, that means of production which divides into raw materials and what do they call the other thing? Means of labor. You need more of those. You probably need bigger factories. You certainly need more agricultural support for labor power. So agriculture has to expand. You see it has a rippling effect or a chain reaction, and Marx doesn't know anything about nuclear power, obviously, but he is talking about chain reactions here that spread across the system. So it needs this sort of expansion to begin. The big mistake of the political economists who preceded him, Adam Smith and Ricardo, was they thought, "Well, this must go back to the workers in some form. " That if not all, but the majority

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

goes back to hiring more people or raising the standard of living somewhat. Marx says what the political economists missed was the rising organic composition of capital. Did you get that? Let's talk about this topic for a minute. It's confusing. Marx doesn't lay it out so clearly in this book, though he does in volume three much more clearly. What is the composition of capital? You can look at it in three ways. These are all the same thing, just looked at in three ways. One is the value composition. And that is the relation of constant capital to variable capital, right? There's two types of value. One is value that is variable and fixed. It just gives itself out in exactly the same amount as was put into it. And the other increases itself. That's value composition. Another way to look at this is as technical composition, which is the ratio of the means of production to labor power or the size of the workforce needed to put a certain amount of means of production into motion, right? You get all this money back, you're like, "What am I gonna do with it? " Buy a yacht? No. The imperative of capital is to put it back into the business. You business and you need to make a certain amount of products. You say at the same ratio you did before, so you have to get means of production. This is a question really of how much means of production you have vis-a-vis the labor power. A rising organic composition is obviously more means of production in a ratio to labor power. And organic composition is that. This is how it's written. It's sometimes hard to tell how different it is from the other things. It's the ratio of constant to variable capital in relationship to the entirety of capital. What percentage of that entirety of capital goes into means of production. What Marx recognizes, that the political economists Smith and Ricardo did not, was that in industrial capital the ratio rises. You have much more constant capital at work and much less variable capital at work, and so it's much harder to get value out of it. We talked about this when we talked about productivity. We know why the technical revolutions happen. We know why they spread everywhere. We know the answer for that. Why you can't avoid it. Why you couldn't say, "Well, I'm just gonna employ more workers and use less machinery. " Can't do that because competition dictates that your productivity has to be as high as the neighboring firm, otherwise you won't sell your products, 'cause they're selling it at a lower value each unit. Yeah. - How can we understand they see it? - That's just the total capital. Yeah, for your notes. So these are really not so important for us right now. What's important is organic, the organic composition. That's what he talks about here. That is, you could put it in words as the relationship of living labor to dead labor. That's why he calls it organic. The organic composition rising, for whatever reason, is a rising percentage of dead labor. That is to say a diminishing amount of surplus value for the same amount of hours. So what happens when you accumulate and as capital gets bigger and the only place you can push more surplus value out is through productivity, and there's competition, and the machines take over, is you have a rising organic composition of capital. And this has a whole set of consequences. Rising organic composition of capital you could describe as labor being displaced by technical change with the consequence that you have a diminishing return of surplus value, an ever value.

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

Does that make sense? Along with this, however, you can see that if the return of surplus value diminishes, you need ever more laborers to increase that surplus value or you need ever more intensity to increase that surplus value when the machines are taking over, to put it that way. That's why he says a very important line on 563, "The accumulation of capital is therefore the propagation of the proletariat. " You will see he has an idea that this history is moving in a fateful way as the organic composition rises and the numbers of the proletariat increase, as they get immiserated and their skills get lower and lower, there's a concomitant process which is as the organic composition of capital rises, what happens to capitalists? Any idea? - There's less of them? - Yeah, there's fewer of them, because along with this happens concentration. Concentration is the operation within the capital system that happens kind of inevitably, because not everyone can afford that amount of machinery. And you can't go from having no machinery to having a lot of machinery without capital. Where do you get that capital? You have to be one of the people who has a lot of machinery. So capitalists tend to be fewer and have monopolies. Monopolies are, there's more and more monopoly activity. So you have these two, his two processes. Let's talk about what happens next. Let's just mention on page 567. Marx is not a doomsayer, he really looks at history. If you look at the top, "There are times at which these conditions of accumulation are comparatively good for workers. Under some conditions, workers' relations with capital is dressed in bearable forms or easy and liberal ones. In fact, there are cycles in which wages rise somewhat and some of these strictures ease. Instead of becoming more intense as capital increases, this relation becomes more extensive. " So when capital spreads, rather than becoming more intensive in one place, people are worked less hard compared to the wages they make. "If capital sphere of exploitation and domination merely expands, when capital itself is enlarged, the number of its wage laborers increases. " That means people can move in from informal economy or even poverty, and actually have a wage. "In the form of means of payment, a bigger part of the worker's own constantly increasing surplus product comes back to him from the surplus value, enabling workers to extend the range of their enjoyments. " Here's how Marx puts it. "The weight and length of the golden chain the worker has already forged for himself allow him to loosen it just a bit. " And this happens all the time, that there are comparatively better industries. It's also the case, obviously, that workers move to those industries where wages are higher and work is less intense. This is all at the command of the cycles of the system. He reminds us on the next page, just to point this out, lest we think there's something benevolent or beneficent about capital, "that a rise in wages indicates at best, a merely quantitative decrease in the amount of unpaid labor the worker has to perform," right? Against the rosy celebrators of capitalism, he's reminding us that anything that goes back to the workers that's more than the absolute minimum before they starve to death, is coming out of their own unpaid labor anyway. The appearance is that resources to pay labor might go up, but in fact this is accumulation

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

bringing new workers into the workforce. When the crunch comes and competition happens and the technical side increases, then the wages will go down again. Intensity will rise and the same cycle will begin again. At the same time, there is a process, so you have entry of large amounts of people into the workforce. Capital is expanding, right? More people are involved in the system, more people are dependent on the system. What is happening on the capitalist side as he describes on 573 and other pages, is that there's competition happening there. As capital accumulates where it's accumulating, they are then able to either destroy other businesses competitively, or absorb them by buying them. And these forces that I mentioned last time of repulsion of capitals and attraction of capitals begins to take an important role. Capitalists expropriate other capitalists. It turns out that for Marx, capitalism is expropriation all the way down. Someone's always taking something from someone without paying them back. And these are a whole set of battles. They're battles to have technical dominance, they're battles to produce cheaper goods, which we know is a route to surplus value. And along the way, as I said, the share that goes to variable capital keeps decreasing. "As the means of production become larger and more concentrated and their technical efficiency increases, they function less and less as means of employing workers. " So there's a kind of panic in the system to produce value because of the increasing organic composition of capital which looks something like this. Say it starts out like this. - What? - It increases and this, where it should really be something like 3-2, just to show you that you have to bring more laborers in, but the ratio is going up. That is to say this is constant capital. You start out here in a relatively un-technicized labor mode. As soon as you technicize it, you have a 3-2 ratio, let's just say, I'm pulling this out of the air, of constant capital to variable capital, of technical means and labor. This keeps going up, and this goes down relatively. This is his argument. What Marx says here is that the absolute need for labor goes up when capital enlarges. You need to have an absolutely more larger number, larger workforce in total. But it's ratio to machinery falls. And what this produces is what he calls, first, he calls it a surplus population. What is the surplus population? is the population that is needed for capital to work. We're gonna enlarge, we need surplus value, we need surplus labor. We also need this population that's just hanging out somewhere that we can bring it in. Where are we gonna get that from? Well, we can colonize, we can use the state and we can colonize and bring the colonized subjects into our work project. Does that make sense? Capital develops a need for surplus population as it expands and also as the value production becomes a trap. Under productivity, it has to bring in these people from somewhere. So it has an idea that, first of all, it has an idea, capital as a system has an idea of populations, it's now dealing with populations. Where can we get a population to do all this ship building? forge all this steel? to pick all these fruits and vegetables to feed our workers? Well, there has to be something outside of the already working population. It turns the outside of capital into its own image of its usable surplus.

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

Yeah. - Can capitalists make like a value out of population entry or like segmenting populations? - Sure, of course. And has historically done that. The question was can capital make value, or is it useful to capital to segment populations or to manage populations? Of course it does, and the next step in his development can explain some of that. Surplus population becomes, in his analysis, what he calls an industrial reserve army, because it is not only needed the first time capital expands, like, "Where are all the people we're gonna get to do this? " "Oh, we'll get you all. You are the surplus value. The surplus population. " But when it contracts, it throws those people out of work. That's what Marx calls the industrial reserve army, and I find it one of the most harrowing parts of the book. Really like Halloween all the time in capital. It turns whole populations into ghosts that don't get to go away to something better, have to hang around waiting to be employed again when the cycle changes. You can see, Richard, just to go back to your point, that this would generate competition among populations designated in other ways by gender, race, and other things. Ethnicity, nationalism, competition among these groups, to be the next hired in the industrial reserve army. This is not the only explanation for racism, but it's a strong economic explanation for why racism hangs around. - Why... - Say again. - Why is it promoted? - Why it's promoted? By certain groups? Yep. Why racial thinking is promoted. Some group has to say, "Well, we're the ones you should hire next, not them. " What it produces is a population or a set of populations constantly on standby for capital's needs. And this is a kind of extension of what I was calling the satanic ratio where the more you work, the less you make, proportional to the amount the capitalist makes from your labor. This extends to the size of the capital relation. The workforce is subject to the satanic relation as well. And instead of just paying you less, the more intensely you work or the more you work, the more productive you are, it may well throw you out of work regardless of how productive you are. As a byproduct of the more it grows, the bigger the size of the industrial reserve army. The more there is a population in waiting immiserated to a certain point, sometimes propped up by the state for the sake of capitalism, certainly propped up through social programs, which if you cut them, you don't have your industrial reserve army. So that's just a silly idea. But those social programs are subsidized by workers, by the rest of workers. So Marx would say workers are subsidizing capital's ability to throw them out of work. Contradiction number, what, 533? Okay. This expansion and contraction goes in something like a cycle. He talks about this on page 579. There's something like what he is, he's starting to study this late in his life, but what we now call business cycles, but these are boom and bust cycles. These are cycles of crisis and repair. expansion and contraction. There's many ways to talk about them. A lot of people in the 20th century tried to study their periodicity. Marx is just indicating that modern industry's characteristic path, a 10-year cycle of periods of average activity, high intensity production crises and stagnation, turns on the constant formation, the more or less extensive absorption and replenishment of an industrial reserve army or surplus population. So these things are not just at the whim of capitalists or with some internal motivation by a particular industry, like "We have to expand. " But apparently there's an overall cycle of the capital system as a whole, some of which is explained in volume two and three not explained in Marx, but as explained later by 20th century economists.

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

Here's a good little tip about how working populations work with one another. On page 585, you can see he's developing the consequences of this problem, the rising organic composition of capital. That's how he works from a kind of kernel argument to its consequences in the world. He's very much interested in kind of, say, essentialist explanations, let's say. It's not that other phenomena don't count, they will come in and trouble his main argument, but he thinks arguments can explain empirical things. "During periods of stagnation and average prosperity," this is top of page 585, "the industrial reserve army or relative surplus population has the effect of putting pressure on the active army. And during periods of overproduction and peroxisome, the former army causes the latter one to keep its hopes in check. The relative surplus population thus conditions how the law of labor supply and demand operates. " So when you think it's just a free market and anyone can go out and get their job, it's not the case. There's a much larger force at play, and that is that how many people are in the industrial reserve army at any one time puts pressure on the active army to keep their jobs and allows capitalists to drive down their wages to even lower lows. Does that make sense? You wouldn't want to give up your job. There's 100,000 people waiting for it. Don't give it up. In periods of relative health and prosperity, the wages can go up. In stagnation and average prosperity, the industrial army puts pressure on the active army. They should really work well, otherwise they're gonna be traded out for someone else. So you can see how the law has its effects on other people. I'll just reiterate that in looking at the system as a whole, there are new forces. Those forces are attraction and repulsion, where capitals attract each other and repel each other, and where capital attracts and repels whole labor populations. This is the, let's say highest philosophical level here. Are there questions about the general law? He gives a lot of illustrations of it. Richard? - I'm trying to get a better understanding of industrial army and active army. Isn't, like, the mean that you're gonna be in for this semester how capital is a sort of phenomenology? Doesn't capital itself require a distortion of what it looks like to be an active worker, and not active worker, an additional worker? Yeah, like as, what I would ask is that like, like would it be like a gate worker who is not exactly like a wage worker, but like, you know, is also on the brink of poverty, or like how people, they are undocumented, or people who are at the brink of poverty but aren't, you know, fully employed? Like, does capital like distort like how we think of a claimant, or activity in terms of being a wage in labor? - Hmm. Well, what Marx is laying out, I don't know if this helps answer your question, what Marx is laying out is the need for a big pool of un- or under-employed. Now they may be working in the informal economy, so let's say without benefits, without union protections, maybe they're making more money, that could be. In any case, capital needs them and there is an interaction between these two populations. What, let's say cultural markers, might help you join the wage work population or keep you in an undocumented status in an informal economy like, you know, fruit and vegetable pickers in the United States, we know that supports capital but it's not fully integrated into capital. Those cultural markers are historical, and they're not regulated by capital. Though you could say there is a law of cultural markers by which these populations have to be justified, and all of that is highly mystified. Why should one group be capitalists and one group be workers? Why should one group of workers be working in one particular industry and not in another, depending on the markers? Why should one group be out of work

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

or claiming the right to work, while another one is actually doing the work? Why these shouldn't be totally unmarked categories. Capital doesn't care if they're marked or unmarked, but the competition, this is Marx's argument, the competition leads to a very, very strong emphasis on these markers. Other questions about the law? That is the climax of the book. Ta-da. Huge populations waiting around for bad work. Waiting around for wages. Yeah. - I mean I was just like thinking of like the increasing organic position and like ways out of like forms of protests. I feel like the state and capital like stay in control of everything as a laborer so that we... But now, in like modern society, with like the rise of contraceptives, the only thing the laborer might be able to control is like reproduction of human beings. In that sense, I'm curious, like has there been literature, manifestos that you've read that describe like educated laborers? Like once you understand this organic, right, like what if laborers just choose to not have kids, not mandated by the state, but from the self as a form of protest to reduce the reserve army league? Will the capitalists do that, like forcing you to reproduce? - Good question. Yeah. Good person to read on this is Sophie Lewis. She has two great books on non-reproductivity. But non reproductivity is a resistance to the system, and there's many. There's as many sites for resistance as there are sites of oppression. The issue has been a collective resistance. And capital also seems to, by its laws, not really by any single human's intention, scatter workforces, industries, and supply chains across the globe in such a way that it's very hard to collect. This is something that Marx and Engels discovered in the 1850s. Very hard to collect. Workers of the world unite. They didn't even understand how big the world was. But points of resistance, there are infinite. How did we get to capitalism? Well, there was so-called original accumulation. I'm gonna start this now and we'll finish it up on Wednesday. So-called. So there are three secrets in this book that Marx is exposing to you. The commodity forum and its fetish and its secret. The wage form, and original, in quotation marks, accumulation. Why does he put it in quotation marks or call it so-called? Because it's the kind of term that political economists used to whitewash the violence over hundreds of years to move people off their lands, to move them into the workforce and to drive their wages down to a subsistence level so they were dependent but had no wealth of their own. That's what this cheery chapter is about. Adam Smith called it prior accumulation and Marx calls that an IDL. He's really going to debunk a myth here and give you a history that nobody remembers. Some people remember them, but he's putting this history in a political context, putting it to work to understand that capitalism is not natural. 500 years of machinations spread out had to happen for it to come into effect. So that's the so-called, whenever he writes original, you shouldn't understand original as really like it just grew up out of the earth or it was born out of a virgin birth or it was like a paradise, you should understand that is an ironic term. So-called original. It didn't just pop up in history, it caught on and then it happened as a result of force by many actors. He's gonna tell you in this section where they got all the different pieces that came together to be capital. Original accumulation. Why does there need to be pieces? Well, it's actually just stuff, it's actually capital. Because as we know, we got to the point at which we were thinking of the third time around, where the capital was producing capital. Where does the first time happen? The very first time. It's mythical, it's hypothetical, but in fact there needed to be some sort of wealth that could be used as capital. They needed to have all the ingredients. So he's gonna ask in this chapter, "Where did the land come from?

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

Where did the workers come from, and where did the capitalists come from? " This is a genealogical chapter. It comes at the end, because he didn't want you to mistake this as a history. You can only look at the history when you understand how different capitalism is than the historical processes. Capitalism, capital system, is not a historical process, it's a system that is necessitarian. History that leads up to it is a set of disparate activities that could only come to this through acts of force. These acts of force are violent processes he will lay out for you in his genealogy of a social form. A beautiful genre that everyone should practice, the genealogy of a social form. The violent processes are dispossessing, uprooting, impoverishing, criminalizing a whole set of processes you can read in this chapter. Chapter 24, the so-called original accumulation. It's like a fireside chat. I get to read out passages to you. Also a little bit like a gothic Halloween evening. "The secret of recruit, of original accumulation. " We have seen how money is transformed into capital, how capital makes surplus value and how surplus value makes more capital. "The accumulation of capital presupposes surplus value and surplus value presupposes capitalist pre-production. While capitalist production presupposes that individual commodity producers have large amounts of capital in their hands. " Uh-oh, it's a circle. You have to have capital to make capital. You have to be capitalist to be capitalist. Surplus value needs surplus value. You need living labor to have surplus labor, to have surplus value. The whole process thus seems to imply that capitalist accumulation must be proceeded by a quote, original accumulation, or what Adam Smith calls previous accumulation. An accumulation that doesn't stem from capitalist production but instead serves as a starting point. And he agrees with this, but will challenge the orthodoxy. Let's see. Do we have five more minutes? Okay. Okay, let's do this. Let's get started. So what do you need here to get capital started? You need land free of anyone owning it other than capitalists. You need workers free of means of subsistence. That is to say free as a bird and free of rights as he says, or free to work or starve. But totally free to sell their work to whomever they want to. This required a historical process of separating producers from the means of production, both in agriculture and in craft work. A historical process of separating producers from the means of production on farms and in manufacturing's locations. In order for this to come to pass, there were other historical events that happened that weren't, again, there's no capitalist mastermind behind this, they happened to happen, from this perspective. History is a field with so many causes that you can never say why in history. But you can chart what happened and you can say retrospectively, "Well, if these things hadn't have happened, we wouldn't have capitalism," and that's what he's doing here. Two practices needed to be ended, and they were ended through feudal wars and the fall of feudal systems. The rise of money as the means of exchange, when new nobles came in and didn't have land. So you can read about the demise of the feudal systems. For separating producers from the means of production, you needed to end two practices, serfdom and private ownership of land and cattle. Those both had to be ended. That is the feudal age had to go into a phase of dissolution. Marx notes that in histories, especially in liberal histories, the dissolution of feudalism is often portrayed as the emancipation of workers. But as he will say ironically, over and over again, "Free as a bird, free to die. Free of rights. "

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvKE7GB7J0&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 47:00)

Free to sell their labor or be immiserated. So he's gonna track here three movements, the movement off of the land, the movement into work, and the move to wage labor. Within labor is the move to move wages down as low as possible. An astounding fact in here is that they had to put in laws for maximum wages in the 15th and 16th centuries so people wouldn't pay their workers too much, they wouldn't be too satisfied, and you wouldn't have the right kind of circulation of workers. Okay, we're starting and talking about where land came from. Well... Should I do this now? Yeah, why not? Let's say where the land came from. Why do you need land? Why do you have to free land of its traditional ownership and production systems? Anybody? No idea? Just for fun? For parks? Any idea? Yeah. - To be all-purpose, able to get used. - Uh-huh, it needs to be free to be put to certain uses. Go ahead. - Anyway, people can grow their needs of theirs and systems, and they have some capacity to make decisions. Like in the core base system, for example, people understood, like, they had cheapest, but they had that fuel back home. - Right, where would the pressure be to go to work if you were growing your own stuff? So that's true. That's why people need to be moved off the land. But why does the land need to be made available? Well, you're gonna have to feed all these workers. You need capitalist agriculture to do it. Why do you need capitalist agriculture? 'Cause you can't have subsistence agriculture, 'cause then you don't have workers. You see how the necessity extends itself across these fields. So it wasn't just the enclosure of the commons or the dispossession of former serfs or former peasants from their vassal relationships and the land that they could sustain themselves on. It was the need for big tracts of land to feed industrial workers. Okay, we started, we'll finish this up on Wednesday, and then we will have finished capital, people. That is an accomplishment. Very few people can say they have done that. We'll applaud ourselves. (bright music) (electricity humming)

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/24371*