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Published by EH.NET (March 2001)
Michael Perelman, _The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political
Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation_. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 412 pp. 2,95 (paper), ISBN:
0-8223-2491-1; 4.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8223-2454-7.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Gregory Clark, Department of Economics,
University of California-Davis. <[log in to unmask]>
One of our popular diversions here in California is "channeling" the
thoughts of those who have passed on to the spirit world. Michael
Perelman has seemingly by these methods made contact with Karl Marx
himself. For his book is a lively polemic directed at the Classical
political economists, full of allegations of double dealing and bad
faith, that the master himself would have been proud to deliver. Marx
lives. He lives in Chico, California.
Perelman interprets Classical political economy as a political
program in search of an intellectual justification. Classical
economists wanted to promote the interests of the new capitalist
class. To this end the Classical system celebrated the virtues of the
free market. But free markets were of no use if the capitalist class
could not recruit the wage slaves they needed for their factories. So
Classical economists simultaneously promoted intervention in markets
to strip the peasantry and handicraft workers of the vestiges of
their independence and reduce them to the wage labor. They advocated
in Marx's terms (or at least in the terms of Marx's English
translators) "primitive accumulation" as necessary to make a market
economy. But they did not advocate this openly: thus the "secret
history of primitive accumulation." Free competition was optimal,
unless it produced an independent peasantry unwilling to submit to
wage labor. "While energetically promoting their laissez-faire
ideology, they championed time and again policies that flew in the
face of their laissez-faire principles" (pp. 2-3).
Exhibit A in Perelman's indictment of the Classical mob is the case
of the Game Laws. The Game Laws banned the landless and small owners
in the countryside from taking game animals. Thus in England by the
laws of 1670 to take game even on your own land a person had to meet
a very substantial property qualification. In both England and
Scotland these laws became more severe as the eighteenth century
progressed, and more people were convicted under the laws. Why, asks
Perelman, did the new capitalist class and their PR agents, the
Political Economists, support these feudal restrictions in favor of
the country squires? They did so because it took away the sources of
support that kept the poor in the countryside from the factory door.
They did so because a hunting peasant was an idle peasant and an
insolent peasant, not a docile and dependable worker.
That is the Perelman claim. What is his evidence? The main evidence
that Classical political economy promoted the game laws to dispossess
the peasantry is their almost complete silence on the subject! Adam
Smith, "that great master of capitalist apologetics" (p. 49), was,
writes Perelman, the only Classical Economist to ever mention the
Game Laws. Smith, however, condemned the game laws as a feudal relic,
noting that "The reason they give is that the prohibition is made to
prevent the lower sort of people from spending their time on such
unprofitable employment; but the real reason is that they delight in
hunting" (p. 50). In light of this Perelman concludes this discussion
by noting generously that "Although Smith refuses to acknowledge any
association between the Game Laws and the interests of capital, he
deserves some credit for broaching the subject, since all other
political economists failed to make any mention whatsoever" (p. 51).
Since Classical writers cunningly concealed their support and
promotion of the Game Laws by not discussing them, or pretending to
be opposed to them, their guilt is established by the silence of
their friends in Parliament on the issue. "When Parliament debated
the Game Laws again in 1830, not one prominent spokesperson for
political economy called for their abolition" (p. 54). The
alternative hypothesis, that Classical economists really thought the
Game Laws were a feudal relic too minor to bother with, is not
explored.
Exhibit B in the indictment of the Classical mob is their treatment of household "self
provisioning" or as Perelman also refers to it
"the social division of labor." Here again we know of their bad faith
in this matter in the contrast between their obvious desire to
destroy self-provisioning and force all workers into the market and
their public silence on the issue. Thus "Smith, insofar as he
addresses the subject, treated the social division of labor as the
result of voluntary choices on the part of free people" (p. 90). On
the other hand any random statement by anyone criticizing sloth or
indiscipline by independent producers is sign of a plan to
eliminating independence and create a proletariat.
It is true that Classical economists often wrote about the indolence
of the poor and of smallholders. But was this casual moralizing just
a relic of earlier modes of discourse, on the way to a more
systematic way of thinking about the economy? Here I read their
general silence on the issue very differently. It is the silence that
shows that concern with forcing the poor to labor for wages was a
peripheral element of their system. Perelman, has to transform this
casual silence into a much more sinister conspiracy to conceal. The
book makes little progress in that direction. Indeed the bold links
drawn on the most tenuous of evidence are one thing that
distinguishes the Chico Marx from the original. Those connections are
so bold that this book might better be placed on the shelf with the
"grassy knoll" and "Roswell" genres.
As a historian who has written on England in the Industrial
Revolution period I have a more innocent interpretation of the
Classical conspiracy of silence on the alleged expropriation of the
peasantry. This is that the process whereby independent peasants and
artisans became wage laborers was already largely complete in England
by the time the Classical economists arrived on the scene in the
eighteenth century. Their silence on the issue is a silence of true
indifference. They had no need to conspire in the expropriation of
the means of subsistence by capitalists, because a free labor market
was in place. The issue of common rights, access to land, and
self-provisioning had been settled in favor of wage labor by 1700 in
all but the rural fastnesses of the Scottish highlands. Even before
the formal Parliamentary enclosure movement of 1750 and later common
rights had mainly become private tradable rights of access unlikely
to be owned by the poorest workers. Truly common areas with free
access were limited and of little value (see Leigh Shaw-Taylor, "Did
Agricultural Laborers Have Common Rights?" forthcoming, _Journal of
Economic History_, and "Labourers, Cows, Common Rights and
Parliamentary Enclosure: The Evidence of Contemporary Comment, c.
1760-1810" forthcoming, _Past and Present_).
Perelman, like Marx, suffers from a wildly romantic vision of a
pre-industrial England of laughter and leisure that accords little
with reality. Marx had the excuse that he was writing at a time when
little was known about that past.
Gregory Clark is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis.
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