Economic tangles; industrial problems explained through lessons drawn from passing events - Softcover
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... villages and villages into cities, other conditions forced upon the lords of the land the problem of serfdom, when a worker wasn't exactly a slave, yet he could not without the consent of someone in authority, generally the land owner, leave the vicinity of the place where he was born. But not all the people were fools. Some of them welcomed the hard lines of a freedman without a master to the comparative safety and protection of a lord, who ministered to their physical and spiritual needs; and they fled to the free walled cities growing up, and united with other bondsmen to produce and exchange their wealth in their own way and at their own option. Whence came the capitalists originally? They had their foundation in the expropriation of the agricultural population. The class began in England in the usurpation of the common lands, and gradually there grew up capitalist farmers, who grew rich at the expense of their laborers. The small peasants were transferred into wage-laborers, and their means of subsistence and of labor into material elements of capital. "The spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism," says Marx, "were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of 'free' and outlawed proletariat." These expropriated people could not be absorbed by the towns as fast as they were made. Manufactures did not advance rapidly enough. So the laborers were turned into beggars,...
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