VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 1
Why the Farmer Left the Countryside
At the end of the last chapter, that person truly left. He left that ground, walked into the city, walked into a room called the factory. But the first question this chapter asks is this. Why did he leave. The answer in the textbook is that there was work in the city. This section is out to make clear that this answer leaves a whole thing out.
First, set out the textbook version
The mainstream account goes like this.
In the eighteenth century, on a certain island nation of the modern West, a great transformation of technology took place. The steam engine, the spinning frame, the power loom, one after another were built. These machines had to be worked in one gathered place, and so the factory appeared. The farmers heard there was work in the factory, and poured out of the countryside into the cities, and became workers.
Advance in technology brings industrialization, industrialization brings prosperity, prosperity brings modern life.
This account, each line taken alone, is not wrong.
But it leaves one question out. Why did the farmer want to leave the countryside.
Think about it. If life in the country were still livable, no one would be willing to leave the ground of his forefathers, to run off to a strange city, to move into a slum, to work a dozen and more hours a day in a factory loud and dangerous.
The farmer left the countryside, not because the city was good.
It was because the country had become unlivable.
The thing that made the country unlivable is one thing
That thing is called the enclosure.
The enclosure of this island nation appeared here and there from the fifteenth century, became a systematic movement in the second half of the eighteenth, and was in the main complete by the early nineteenth.
Its way of working was this.
The countryside of that country had, by tradition, great stretches of common land. Forest, pasture, waste ground, riverbank. This land was not held sole by any one lord, and the farmers of the village could all use it. Grazing, gathering firewood, foraging, hunting.
See this layer clear. For the poor, the common land was the last guarantee of staying alive. Even with no tilled ground of his own, on the yield of these commons he could barely hold out.
That was the last board under his feet. Think back to the fourth chapter of this semester, Mencius’s line. With no steady holding there is no steady heart. This common land was the poor man’s last share of steady holding.
What the enclosure did was, by the means of law, to turn these commons into private property.
How the law did this thing
The way was legislation by parliament.
A squire of some place handed parliament an enclosure bill. Parliament passed it, and that stretch of common land was assigned to the squire as private property. On his newly gotten ground the squire raised a fence, a wall, and drove out the villagers who had used this ground generation after generation.
Across the whole of the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth, the parliament of this country passed something like four thousand and more enclosure bills. The common land enclosed came to a total area of about seven million acres, more than a quarter of the country’s tilled ground.
Hear the tone of this passage clear.
No one robbed. No one broke into the village. Not one fierce character.
Hand in a bill, parliament votes, it passes, the seal goes on. When the fence was raised, the law stood on the side of the one raising the fence.
Think back to the eighth chapter of this semester, that Zhou manager of the condemned who opened his register and said, the men into the bond of crime, the women off to pound the rice.
Think back to the ninth chapter, that article of Rome. Kill another’s slave, make good his market value.
One same hand. It is calm, it is orderly, it speaks of procedure.
It only pulled the board out from under a whole village’s feet.
Where the driven-out people went
These villagers had no compensation, no resettlement, no other livelihood.
Their ways out came to only a few.
Either starve.
Or become vagrants, beggars. In the late eighteenth century that country’s vagrancy problem was exceedingly grave, and the prisons were stuffed with people charged with so-called wandering. See this layer clear. First pull his ground out from under him, then lock him up, and the charge is that he is wandering.
Or go to the city to find work.
And this batch, going to the city to find work, filled exactly the new-sprung factories’ demand for labor.
This is no coincidence.
Two premises, made ready at one stroke
Some important political-economy studies of the nineteenth century examined this process on purpose, and gave it a name, primitive accumulation.
Its core observation is this. For the factory system to turn, two premises are needed.
One, a great mass of gathered capital.
Two, a great mass of laborers with no means of production in their hands.
And the enclosure, that one thing, made both premises ready at a stroke.
The land enclosed set into gathered capital. The villagers driven out became labor power with no means of production.
Hold this line. That free laborer did not spring up of nature. He was manufactured, by the means of law, structurally.
The measure this section keeps
Said this far, stop, and set the volume’s position straight, or this section becomes an indictment.
This observation is not a moral judgment. It is a structural description.
The enclosure was not a plunder of the poor by the wicked. It is a legal mechanism by which the ceding relation shifted from one form to another.
From the sharing of common land, to private land plus a market in labor power.
This mechanism is neither good nor evil. It is simply the concrete shape of wei in that age.
Join it to the chapters before. The Shang held the person directly. The Zhou held the person by law. The Han held the person by the market. Serfdom held the output. By here, what does it hold.
It holds nothing at all. It only pulls the board out from under your feet, and then opens a door, and asks you to walk in yourself.
You walked in of your own will. You signed. No one drove you.
Hold this line, and use it from here on. The factory was never a place people walked into of their own will. The factory is the one road left after every other road out was blocked.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section set up three things.
The first. The textbook account leaves a whole thing out. The farmer left the countryside not because the city was good, but because the country had become unlivable.
The second. The thing that made the country unlivable is the enclosure. It has not one fierce character in it, it is four thousand and more bills, the vote of a parliament, fences and walls. What it pulled out was the poor man’s last board.
The third. That free laborer was manufactured. This is not an indictment, it is a structure. This mechanism is neither good nor evil, it is the shape of wei in that age.
And this move is cleverer than the chapters before. It no longer holds you. It only leaves you nowhere else to go.
Then, after he walks through that door, what does he see. The next section walks in with him. Be ready, for the numbers in there are hard to read.
Sixteen hours a day. A five year old child, sitting alone by a pitch-dark ventilation door underground.
The next section, sixteen hours a day, the five year old at the bottom of the mine.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 2. Sixteen Hours a Day, the Five Year Old at the Bottom of the Mine