The history of capitalism’s origins

The capital-relation arises out of an economic soil that is the product of a long

process of development.(p. 647)

Marx is poking fun at bourgeois historiography, according to which the wealth of the few is historically based on the diligence and frugality of a small number of people.

The so-called primitive accumulation:

The «idyllic methods» (p. 895) of so-called primitive accumulation

If money […] «comes into the world with a congenital

blood-stain on one cheek», capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every

pore, with blood and dirt.(pp. 925–26)

Expulsion of peasants and small tenants from their plots; appropriation of common land and transformation of farmland into pasture; enclosure, monopolization and concentration of large plots of land;

transformation of feudal clan property into capitalist private property; imprisonment and imposition of forced labour on the poor.

expropriation of the Catholic Church pauperism of its clientele;

The silent compulsion …

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class

which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production

as self-evident, natural laws. […] The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the

seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used,

but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the «natural

laws of production».(p. 899)

The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation

… as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the

further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form. […] This expropriation is

accomplished […] through the centralization of capitals. […] The centralization of the means of production and the socialization

of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst

asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

(pp. 928–29)