Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct anti-thesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only.
He declares that the United States is not a capitalist country. He describes the economic conditions that prevailed here as in fact an “anti-capitalist cancer.” America has this character as a colonial economy, but except for a glancing allusion to Australia, it is his single example, the foil against which he defines capitalism by contrast. He opposes the American social order to capitalism on the grounds that “the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital, only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer.” The last words of Capital—the “Come quickly, Lord Jesus”—of this supposed fountainhead of socialist thought, are “Capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.”
In Marx’s view, the laborer in America escapes expropriation because he can acquire land, basically. But the essential thing is not the availability of land but the value of his labor, the fact that he can sell it for a wage that significantly exceeds subsistence. “So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible.” Risking hubris, I must say that Marx seems to have things backward here, since accumulation in the first instance is the result of a high wage, and wages of course go to those who are not possessors of means of production. (If he means to include money among the means of production, as it would be entirely reasonable to do, then of course I withdraw my objection.) As he says a little later, in America “the wage-worker of to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant or artisan, working for himself.” In other words, the value of his labor allows him to become a possessor of means of production—not, as Marx makes very clear, a capitalist, however, for the same reason that his own employer was not, in Marx’s terms, a capitalist. The demand for labor precludes “the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist,” that indispensable requisite of capitalist production. Marx says, “In the Colonies property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.” The “man … compelled to sell himself of his own free-will” is an apt description of the British worker from the dawn of the Poor Laws through the rise of Fabian socialism.
Marx failed so miserably in his effort to put an end to the confusion he found in Wakefield that America, where the population retains still its relative immunity to “expropriation,” and where wealth is still broadly dispersed, is considered to be the ultimate capitalism on precisely those grounds, by Marxists first of all.
Of course the argument will be made that America has changed since Marx wrote. This is certainly true. It has changed so utterly as to make comparison futile, in all but the broadest terms. Broadly speaking, then, it remains true that the American economy is characterized in a high degree by the accumulation of “self-earned private property,” sufficient in most cases to allow people to change jobs, acquire skills, strike, move into a better labor market, become self-employed. This minimal independence, an effect of relatively high pay, allows those who work for wages to demand relatively high pay. Marx saw capitalism growing on the tomb of the “colonial” economy, and it may yet. When it does, the signs will be a marked decline in independence, mobility, and standard of living — the things we Americans associate with “capitalism.”
It will be objected that we have already suffered a decline in these things — by those who know nothing at all about America in the nineteenth century. It is hardly likely that a reader as voracious as Marx was would not have come across accounts of crises, bankruptcies, and so on in the United States. They were neither rare nor unremarked, nor was the poverty that attended them.
Clearly, however, there was a degree of difference which amounted to a qualitative difference in Marx’s view. Marx, repeating Wakefield’s comparison of what Marx wishes to show are antithetical systems, says that Wakefield “depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising and comparatively cultured, whilst ‘the English agricultural labourer is a miserable wretch, a pauper … In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labour employed in agriculture, much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? … Undoubtedly, farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.’” Marx argues that the margin above subsistence which allows for culture and independence — and he is speaking here of farm laborers and “peasants” as such, hardly a prosperous group — makes an absolute difference in the character of the society. This conclusion is prepared by the eight hundred or so pages that precede it: a rehearsing, in large part, of the parliamentary reports, which document again and again expropriation and immiseration of an order so extreme that we might measure the relative happiness of our history by the difficulty we have believing it could be true. Capitalism, as Marx used the word, is very well described as growing on a tomb. I mention Sellafield here, how it thrives on poverty and unemployment, and never alleviates it, despite the great returns it boasts of bringing home to Britain. Marx, paraphrasing Wakefield, says, “But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.”
Americans are surprised when they learn that they are mentioned in Capital at all. They think of themselves, at best, as rather like Virgil and Plato, excluded from the scheme of salvation by accident of birth among the pagans. At the same time, oddly, they have appropriated the myth entirely to themselves, to the extent that, rather than looking into Capital to find out what Marx had in mind, they use themselves as the definition of capitalism and judge Marx as they feel kindly or unkindly disposed toward themselves.
Americans are startled to learn that Karl Marx was employed as a foreign correspondent by the New York Daily Tribune, from 1853 to 1861, during the years in which he was preparing Capital. His Tribune articles, of which there are a great many, describe European and British affairs, the possible entry of the British government into the Civil War on the side of the South being an especially urgent interest of Marx. At the same time, though for a shorter period, Marx wrote about American affairs for Die Presse, a newspaper in Vienna. The articles were based on wide reading in American periodicals. Indeed, Marx said a great deal to Americans, and about them. He was in almost every instance more than generous, doing his American readers a courtesy to which they are now little accustomed, by addressing them always as humane and intelligent people.