social relations which lubricate and enforce it. These social relations have taken the historical form of the State, commodity production and the division of labor.
Because the accumulation of Capital began in Western Europe, and its initial agency appeared in the form of a commercial bourgeoisie, apologists for this class credited the accumulation of Capital to the institutions and ideas of this specific class. It was thought that Capital depended on entrepreneurial merchants attached to democratic political forms, an anti-religious ideology of science and enlightenment, and a social program of universal literacy. However, the launching of the primitive accumulation of Capital in Japan after 1868 demonstrated that the process could dispense with the West European bourgeoisie and with its liberal-democratic ideology. Japanese industrialization demonstrated that the social relations required for the primitive accumulation of Capital are a strong State, universal commodity production, and the division of labor. The remaining institutions and ideas of the West European bourgeoisie were not requirements of Capital accumulation; they reflected the peculiar historical origins of the European bourgeoisie. Japanese industrialization demonstrated that democratic political forms were not a requirement of Capital accumulation but a reflection of the bourgeoisie's struggle against feudalism. Japanese industrialization demonstrated that the anti-religious scientific ideology of the West European bourgeoisie was not a requirement of Capital accumulation but a reflection of the bourgeoisie's struggle against the anti-commercial ideology of the Catholic Church. Japanese industrialization demonstrated that the bourgeois program of universal literacy and humanist education was not a requirement of Capital accumulation but a reflection of the bourgeoisie's struggle against the obscurantism of Christianity. The fact is that the West European bourgeoisie itself abandoned its own initial institutions and ideas because they hampered the accumulation of Capital. Democracy undermined the authority of the State, and so the bourgeoisie detached the democratic forms from the exercise of sovereignty and reduced them to socially harmless rituals. The anti-religious ideology of science and elightenment hampered commodity production by removing the moral justification for the sacrifice of an individual's productive life to the service of a higher community, so the bourgeoisie resurrected religion. Universal literacy undermined the division of labor by making all branches of human knowledge available to all, so the bourgeoisie transformed literacy into an instrument for the mass production of historically unprecedented forms of ignorance.
The Bolshevik seizure of State power in 1917 confirmed the lessons learned from the Japanese restoration of the centralized State in 1868. The accumulation of Capital can dispense with the institutions and ideas of the West European bourgeoisie; what is required is the State, commodity production and the division of labor. Bourgeois
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