expropriation is not a matter of conjecture; it is inscribed in the annals of humanity in indelible letters of blood and fire."[1]
Farther on Marx shows how the dawn of modern times was marked by the conquest of America, the enslavement of negroes and the colonial wars: "The different methods of primitive accumulation which the capitalist era brought about are divided in a more or less chronological order first of all [between] Portugal, Spain, France and England, until the latter combined the lot, during the last thirty years of the seventeenth century, into a systematic whole, embracing simultaneously the colonial system, public credit, modern finance and the protectionist system. Some of these methods are backed by the employment of brute force; but all, without exception, exploit the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, in order to precipitate violently the passage from the feudal economic order to the capitalist economic order, and to shorten the phases of the transition." It is on this occasion that he compared force to a midwife, and says that it multiplies the social movement.[2]
Thus we see that economic forces are closely bound up with political power, and capitalism finally perfects itself to the point of being able to dispense with any direct appeal to the public force, except in very exceptional cases. "In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the action of the natural laws of production, i.e. to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from
- ↑ Capital, Eng. trans. p. 738.
- ↑ Capital, Eng. trans. p. 776. The German text says that force is an oekonomische Potenz (Kapital, 4th edition, p. 716); the French text says that force is an agent économique. Fourier calls geometric progressions puissancielles (Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, p. 376). Marx evidently used the word Potenz in the sense of a multiplier; cf. in Capital, p. 176, col. 1, the term travail puissancié for labour of a multiplied productivity. [The English translation has economic power.—Trans. Note.]
