revolutionaryeye:

How a Self-Sufficient Peasantry was Whipped Into Industrial Wage Slaves

“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

—Arthur Young; 1771

Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and
free societies, right? Well, if you ever suspected that the logic is
full of shit, then I’d recommend checking a book called The Invention of Capitalism,
written by an economic historian named Michael Perelmen, who’s been
exiled to Chico State, a redneck college in rural California, for his
lack of freemarket friendliness. And Perelman has been putting his time
in exile to damn good use, digging deep into the works and
correspondence of Adam Smith and his contemporaries to write a history
of the creation of capitalism that goes beyond superficial The Wealth of Nations fairy
tale and straight to the source, allowing you to read the early
capitalists, economists, philosophers, clergymen and statesmen in their
own words. And it ain’t pretty.

One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists, who
needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a
good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.

Francis Hutcheson, from whom Adam Smith learned all about the virtue
of natural liberty, wrote: ”it is the one great design of civil laws to
strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature. … The
populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods
of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art.”

Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a
capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English
peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave
their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous
factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists.
And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory
wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have
to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced
shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own
leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting
wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of
cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of
slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading
business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they
enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of
the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of
self-support.

“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the
majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might
seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical
political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of
the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of
laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least
his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’

Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants
were forced off the land—from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that
prohibited peasants from hunting, to the destruction of the peasant
productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots—but by far the
most interesting parts of the book are where you get to read Adam
Smith’s proto-capitalist colleagues complaining and whining about how
peasants are too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited,
and trying to figure out how to force them to accept a life of wage
slavery.

This pamphlet from the time captures the general attitude towards successful, self-sufficient peasant farmers:

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese,
naturally exalts the peasant… . In sauntering after his cattle, he
acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole
days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the
aversion in- creases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed
calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.

While another pamphleteer wrote:

Nor can I conceive a greater curse upon a body of people, than to be
thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions for subsistence and
food were, in great measure, spontaneous, and the climate required or
admitted little care for raiment or covering.

John Bellers, a Quaker “philanthropist” and economic thinker
saw independent peasants as a hindrance to his plan of forcing poor
people into prison-factories, where they would live, work and produce a
profit of 45% for aristocratic owners:

“Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too
much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries
of Idleness and Insolence.”

Daniel Defoe, the novelist and trader, noted that in the Scottish
Highlands “people were extremely well furnished with provisions. …
venison exceedingly plentiful, and at all seasons, young or old, which
they kill with their guns whenever they find it.’’

To Thomas Pennant, a botanist, this self-sufficiency was ruining a perfectly good peasant population:

“The manners of the native Highlanders may be expressed in these
words: indolent to a high degree, unless roused to war, or any animating
amusement.”

If having a full belly and productive land was the problem, then the
solution to whipping these lazy bums into shape was obvious: kick ‘em
off the land and let em starve.

Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John
Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower
classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Sir
William Temple, a politician and Jonathan Swift’s boss, agreed, and
suggested that food be taxed as much as possible to prevent the working
class from a life of “sloth and debauchery.”

Temple also advocated putting four-year-old kids to work in the
factories, writing ‘‘for by these means, we hope that the rising
generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at
length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.’’ Some thought that
four was already too old. According to Perelmen, “John Locke, often seen
as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the
ripe age of three.” Child labor also excited Defoe, who was joyed at
the prospect that “children after four or five years of age…could every
one earn their own bread.’’ But that’s getting off topic…

Happy Faces of Productivity…

Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as
positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the
“poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:

“‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”

Reverend Joseph Townsend believed that restricting food was the way to go:

“[Direct] legal constraint [to labor] … is attended with too much
trouble, violence, and noise, … whereas hunger is not only a
peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive
to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions… . Hunger
will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility,
obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and
the most perverse.”

Patrick Colquhoun, a merchant who set up England’s first private “preventative police“ force
to prevent dock workers from supplementing their meager wages with
stolen goods, provided what may be the most lucid explanation of how
hunger and poverty correlate to productivity and wealth creation:

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual
has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means
of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of
industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most
necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which
nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It
is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty,
there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no
comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

Colquhoun’s summary is so on the money, it has to be repeated.
Because what was true for English peasants is still just as true for us:

“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient
in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there
could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort,
and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

Source:- http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_history_everyone_but_an_idiot_knows_that_the_lower_classes_must_be_kept_poor_or_they_will_never_be_industrious/