‘Simple’ to ‘Expanded’ Reproduction
In Chapter 1, we saw how Ellen Wood, following Brenner, argued that prim-itive accumulation was an entirely domestic process, taking place through the dispossession of the peasantry in the English countryside and the creation of an internal market which could satisfy and reproduce market dependence.171 On the one hand, the reproduction of now dispossessed direct producers became based on obtaining a wage through which their means of subsistence could be purchased, establishing their market dependence as such. On the other hand, capitalist production in agriculture made the market a viable medium through which the means of subsistence could be secured. Technological improvements led to increases in productivity and the expansion of outputs per unit, lowering prices on goods that would have otherwise been affordable only to the wealthy or would require nonmarket access (through subsistence farming, for example).
Wood thus succeeds in tracing the historical origins of what Marx would come to term ‘simple reproduction’ (although Wood does not explicitly make this claim). As Marx put it:
[Capital’s reproduction] takes good care to prevent the workers, those instru-ments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away, by constantly removing their product from one pole [labour] to the other, to the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for the workers’ maintenance and reproduction: on the other hand, by the constant annihilation of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-appearance on the labour market.172
Marx’s argument here perhaps explains Wood’s own emphasis on dispossession and the creation of an internal market,173 for these appear to constitute the basic preconditions for the ‘simple reproduction’ of the capital–wage-labour relation.
However, Wood’s explanation remains wedded to a decidedly one-sided view of the capital–wage-labour relation. For not only is there a basic necessity for the means of subsistence to be produced, there is also a necessity for those products to be consumed. That is, the market can function as a medium for reproduction only insofar as the proletariat have the sufficient means to purchase the goods required for their reproduction. Capitalist crises occur, Marx argued, because that very means – (access to) a wage – is constantly undermined by capitalist accumulation, and more specifically by ‘expanded reproduction’.174
Marx’s argument about ‘expanded reproduction’ demonstrates that capital, because of inter-capitalist competition, must always return to the market and reinvest its surpluses into expanding its productive capacities. By introducing labour-saving techniques into production, individual capitals can reduce costs and reap super-profits, or reduce prices to obtain a greater market share. As inno-vations reduce costs, more and more products are transformed into consumer goods, thus spurring the expansion of markets and lines of production beyond already existing market capacity. While this creates the sort of ‘internal market’
envisaged by Wood, it also causes prices to fall more slowly than costs, creating conditions for high profitability; ‘capital then rushes to line, pulling labour with it’.175 However, as more and more capital is mobilised in expanding production, the market becomes saturated, and innovations cause productive capacity to rise beyond what the market is capable of absorbing. Hence, prices fall quicker than costs, and overall profitability tumbles. As a consequence, vast swathes of both capital and the working population are shed by productive lines seeking to drive down costs, and re-establish the conditions of profitability and continued accumulation.
This is exactly what happened to agrarian production in England over the course of the 17th century. The enclosures, and later the agricultural revolution,
introduced various labour-economising techniques such as the reclamation and engrossment of land, the reduction of fallow, and four-field crop rotation.176 This allowed for the expansion of food production to an unprecedented level, driving down costs and creating a domestic market for labourers to secure their means of subsistence.177 But once this expanded capacity reached the limits of what could be profitably absorbed by the domestic market, both labour and capital were systematically shed from agrarian production and pushed into urban areas.178 The rapid urbanisation of England and the expansion of London into the largest city in Europe were the consequence of an emergent
‘surplus’ population created by the limits of agrarian capitalism. In England, the emergence of this vast surplus population constituted a fundamental problem for the continued reproduction of capitalism. The 17th century was rife not only with the emergence of rural social movements such as the Diggers and Levellers that would challenge the status quo,179 but also with various ruling class lamentations over what to do with the ‘multitudes’ or ‘swarmes’ of
‘vagrants’ and ‘idlers’180 that had been shed by agrarian production in the course of the enclosures, and later the agricultural revolution.
And yet the capitalist dynamic of ‘expanded reproduction’ indicates that this surplus population shed by agrarian capitalism will eventually be reabsorbed into new productive lines elsewhere. Wood makes a similar argument, showing that the dispossession of the peasantry and their absorption into waged labour in urban areas further contributed to the expansion of the domestic market.
What Wood does not account for convincingly is precisely how and where this surplus population was absorbed:
the English city, London in particular, was disproportionately enlarged by the poor dispossessed by agrarian capitalism. In any case, what made the English market for basic goods distinctive was not simply the demographic distribution between town and country but also the growing proportion of the population, whether urban or rural, that was dispossessed and reliant on wages for survival, together with the more direct relation of production to consumption of this kind.181
However, the reliance on a wage does not guarantee access to it; in fact, one of the primary results of expanded reproduction is the increasing superfluity of labour, and a growing surplus population with no direct access to a wage.
So a proper understanding of why English capitalism was able to survive the agrarian limits suffered by prior protocapitalist social formations would neces-sitate some historical account of what made England exceptionally attuned to absorbing populations rendered superfluous by this prior round of capitalist transformation. Wood’s omission of any such account is undoubtedly not intentional, but it is a crucial one. For it was specifically those sectors attached to the Atlantic that eventually provided the outlet for capitalists to absorb
the surplus population created by the expulsion of peasants from agrarian production.
First, a large mass of proletarians were integrated into forms of work that presupposed colonies – shipbuilding, harbour building, and later sugar refin-eries and textile production. For example, huge quantities of labour were required to clear forests and transport timber, which would subsequently be used to build the ships that formed the backbone of English colonial expan-sion.182 Similarly, colonial enterprises were the precondition for the extensive construction of ports for long-distance trade. Pre-existing towns and cities such as Bristol and London expanded significantly in the 17th century, while entirely new conurbations – Liverpool most notably, but also Glasgow and Derry – later sprang up as nodes in the growing network of international shipping spurred on by the Atlantic trading system.183 The construction of ports and harbours was based on the labour-intensive activities of reclaiming marshy coastal lands, felling and transporting timber and rubble, and constructing seawalls, breakwaters, piers, quays and jetties. As Adam Ferguson noted in 1767:
The pestilent marsh is drained with great labour, and the sea is fenced off with mighty barriers …. Harbours are opened, and crowded with shipping, where vessels of burden, if they are not constructed with a view to the situation, have not water to float. Elegant and magnificent edifices are raised on foundations of slime.184
Second, where the internal market could not absorb them, the dispossessed were exported en masse to the colonies as settlers or indentured servants. In particular, those considered indebted, poor, dispossessed, criminal, vagrant or rebellious were targeted – what propagandists of the time described as the ‘rank multitude’, those ‘who cannot live at home’. Richard Hakluyt, a propagandist for English colonialism, noted the concurrence of the emergent surplus popu-lation with England’s ‘late entry into the European scramble for New World colonies .... England, unlike Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, or France, had a huge and desperate population that could be redeployed overseas’.185 In 1606, Francis Bacon advised James I that in exporting such ‘surplus’ populations, England would gain ‘a double commodity, in the avoidance of people here, and in making use of them there’.186 Similarly, in 1609 the Virginia Company argued that its colonisation project would serve ‘to ease the city and suburbs of a swarme of unnecessary inmates, as a contynual cause of death and famine, and the very originall cause of all the plagues that happen in this kingdome’.187 These claims were reflected in state legislation. The Beggars Act in 1597 and 1598 authorised the transportation of vagrants and criminals to work in penal servitude in the colonies.188 By 1652, another legislative act was passed that enabled magistrates to ship vagrants and beggars to the colonies. Over the
course of the 17th century, some 200,000 people were moved to the Americas, thus ‘removing out of the city’ the ‘matter of sedition’.189
The absorption of the surplus population, and the expanded reproduction of capital as such, was therefore dependent – as its precondition – on the exploita-tion of a widened sphere of activity beyond the boundaries of the domestic market. That is, if it were not for the specifically international conditions created by Europe’s expansion into the Atlantic, it is likely that capitalism would have been choked off by the limits of English agrarian capitalism. In this respect, we might be able to construct an ‘inside-out’ argument that attributes the growth of English (and later British) colonialism to the ways in which it overcame the limits of domestic capitalist production. But it is also possible to go beyond this orthodoxy, and demonstrate how intersocietal determinations arising from the Atlantic fed back into and decisively reordered the configuration of a capitalism based on agrarian production, and prefigured the industrial capitalism that drove Britain to global dominance. In particular, the combination of the sociologically uneven sources of English capital, African (slave) labour and American land – concentrated in the institution of plantation slavery – would provide both the international conditions and the spur to British domestic development. We now explicate these international determinations in turn: first, by tracing the combina-tion of American land with African slave labour; and second, by examining how plantation slavery fed back into and determined the course of British development.