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Thursday, August 27, 2009 - 11:48 PM
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Although the formation of capital and the capitalist mode of
production rest essentially on both the ending of the feudal mode of
production and the expropriation of the peasants, handicraftsmen, and in general on the ending of the mode of production which rests on the private property of the direct producer in his conditions of production;
although the capitalist mode of production, once it is introduced,
develops in the same proportion as that form of private property is
done away with, along with the mode of production founded on it, hence
to the degree that those direct producers are expropriated in the name of the concentration of capital (centralisation); although that process of expropriation which is later repeated systematically in the clearing of estates, in part introduces; as an act of violence, the capitalist mode of production, both the theory of the capitalist mode of production (political economy, the philosophy of law, etc.) and the capitalist himself in his conception
of the matter like to confuse the capitalist’s form of property and
appropriation, which rests on the appropriation of alien labour in its
progress and, essentially, on the expropriation of the direct producer,
with the above-mentioned mode of production which on the contrary presupposes the private property of the direct producer in his conditions of production
— a presupposition under which the capitalist mode of production in
agriculture and manufacture, etc., would be impossible — and therefore
also like to present every attack on the capitalist form of appropriation as an attack on the other kind of property, the property that has been worked for, indeed an attack on all property.
Of course they always experience great difficulty in presenting the
expropriation of the mass of working people from their property as the
vital condition for property which rests on labour. [By the way,
private property of that form always implies at least slavery for the members of the family, who are used and exploited to the full by the head of the family.] The general legal conception, from Locke to Ricardo, is therefore that of petty-bourgeois property, while the relations of production they actually describe belong to the capitalist mode of production. What makes this possible is the relation of buyer and seller, which remains the same formally in both forms. With all these writers one finds the following duality:
1) economically they oppose private property resting on labour, and show the advantages of the expropriation of the mass [of workers] and the capitalist mode of production;
2) but ideologically and legally the ideology of private property resting on labour is transferred without further ado to property resting on the expropriation of the direct producer. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“It was under Frederick II that subjects” (peasants)
“were first granted hereditary tenure and property rights in most of
the provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia. And this Ordinance helped to
end a misfortune suffered by the country people which was threatening
to depopulate the countryside. For it was precisely in the
last” (18th) “century that the landowners, once they had started to
concern themselves with raising the yield of their estates, began to find it advantageous to drive out some of their subjects and add the peasants’ fields to their own demesnes. The
people who had been driven out fell victim to poverty, being homeless;
moreover, those who remained on the land were now subjected to
completely intolerable burdens, since they were now expected by the
landowners to cultivate the previous peasants’ fields as well, the
owners of which would otherwise have facilitated through their labour
the cultivation of the demesne too. This ‘expropriation of the peasants’ was especially severe in the eastern part of Germany.
When Frederick II conquered Silesia, many thousand peasant farms there
were without any farmers; the cottages lay in ruins, and the fields
were in the hands of the landowners. All the confiscated lands
had to be redistributed, placed in the hands of farm managers, provided
with cattle and implements, and granted to peasants in hereditary and
private ownership. The same abuses on the island of Rügen
were still causing uprisings of the rural inhabitants when Moritz Arndt
was a young man; soldiers were sent, the rebels were imprisoned, and
the peasants sought revenge, ambushing and murdering individual members
of the nobility. In Electoral Saxony too, the same abuses were a source of disturbances as late as 1790”
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