The Beginnings of Capitalism

Side by side with the predominant handicrafts there was no lack of variety in the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production in Germany.

Despite the general impoverishment, a considerable remnant of capital had been preserved in the old trading centres and ports. Then in the eighteenth century the despotism’s insatiable need for money for the court and for the army, its growing appetite for taxes and its growing state debts, its economic system of monopolies, privileges and protection, had become powerful levers for the capitalist mode of production. In part, the industrialist’s capital flowed directly from the state treasury: Mirabeau explained the brilliance of Saxony’s manufactories from the country’s 180 million talers of state debts. The mercantilist policies of the Hohenzollerns are known. The Prussian taxes, excises and military contributions squeezed blood out of the peasants and craftsmen only to throw away the lion’s share on the army and the Junkers; but many a round little sum fell into the laps of the capitalists, who in those days were delighted to embrace the principle of ‘state aid’. The proletarianization of the peasantry provided budding capital with ever new masses for the transformation of muscles and nerves into surplus value, and the draconian abolition of the ‘blue Monday’ and the summary shortening of religious holidays set the capitalist pump into faster and faster motion. The smaller despots made countless millions from the mass sales of their countries’ sons for foreign wars. The original accumulation of capital in Germany was only carried out in blood, misery and shame.

German capitalism always lagged far behind that of France, not to speak of that of England. It was obliged to undercut its stronger competitors in the world market by paying starvation wages and by petty business intrigues. Its broad basis was cottage industry. Manufacturing based on manual labour was less advanced, and the mechanized factory still less so.

Now cottage industry, as well as being the oldest, is also the most backward form of the capitalist mode of production. In its beginnings it often appears as a boon to the poor peasants and craftsmen; it lulls its victims in a comfortable lethargic slumber of the spirit to wake them up to the grossest atrophy of body and soul. Once cottage industry was overtaken by manufacturing or mechanized industry, it could only be kept alive by the most feverish intensification of labour power. The dispersion of cottage workers weakens their power of resistance to capital, and the continual pressure on wages forces them to stretch the working day to the limit of what is physically possible, to harness their wives and children to the same yoke, to sacrifice themselves and their families rapidly to chronic illness and an early death, not only from overwork, but also from the lack of light, air and ventilation in a narrow lodging that is at the same time home and workshop, and often enough from the work itself being injurious to health. In addition there are the irregularity of the work, the truck system, profiteering, parasitic middlemen and a hundred other evils. The most hopeless of all proletarians, the cottage workers are nevertheless the furthest away from proletarian class-consciousness. They flaunt their apparent independence while their pennyweight of possessions drags them like a lead weight into the abyss. Their kind of enterprise throws them the more defencelessly into the destructive bustle of the world market the more firmly it binds the peasant to his few acres and the craftsman to his tools.

German cottage industry arose essentially in two ways. In part, capital lodged in the cracks in the guild system and broke up the rotting structure, so that individual craftsmen became capitalist distributors while the majority became wage labourers in cottage industries. Here too the state power gave its friendly assistance. Prussian state law subjected the whole guild organization to the sovereign. Only the King could set up new guilds, and he could open or close the existing guilds as he pleased. For the most part, however, capital threw itself upon the countryside, where it was free from the still irksome limitations of the guilds. It threw itself upon the bondsman, whom the Junker had already made defenceless, on the small peasant, who, in infertile areas where the land was excessively divided up, squatted on his bare few acres, could not live from agriculture alone, and had already long since sought a side occupation in spinning and weaving and carving more or less artistic household articles.

It is characteristic that capitalism flooded the heights and the slopes of the German mountain ranges with the misery of cottage industry, the Eulen, Riesen, Erz and Fichtel Mountains, the Thuringian Forest and the Rhone, the Taunus, the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps. But it did not spurn what the lowlands offered; broad stretches of the Lower Rhine and Westphalia were old strongholds of cottage industry.