66/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!
production in India, this is simply to the extent that it has
destroyed spinning and weaving, which form an age-old and
integral part of this unity of industrial and agricultural
production, through the low price of English commodities. In
this way it has torn the community to pieces. Even here, their
work of dissolution is succeeding only very gradually. These
effects are felt still less in China, where no assistance is provided
by direct political force. (Marx, Capital, volume III, pp. 451-2)The accumulation of capital also took place within the countries
of Europe; the bourgeoisie enriched itself through the impoverish
ment of other social classes (including the nobility). It expelled a
section of the peasantry from the lands peasants worked, to make
them work in factories. Thomas More described this process in
sixteenth-century England:In this way, a starving miser fences in thousands of acres of land
within a single enclosure; honest tillers are chased from their
homes, some through fraud, others by violence, the happiest
through a series of annoyances and troubles that force them to
sell their properties.Nor did this process occur without resistance in Europe. There
were very radical peasant revolts; the bourgeoisie had to oblige a
sizeable number of proletarians to work in the factories (hence the
laws against begging, punishable with forced labour).
Back to the international arena: the worldwide primitive accu
mulation of capital occurred not only through outright pillage but
also through unequal exchange. Marx describes this process in
Capital, volume III, in the section on foreign trade:Capital invested in foreign trade can yield a higher rate of profit,
firstly, because it competes with commodities produced by other
countries with less developed production facilities, so that the
more advanced country sells its goods above their value, even
though still more cheaply than its competitors. In so far as the
labour of the more advanced country is valorized here as labour
of a higher specific weight, the profit rate rises, since labour that
is not paid as qualitatively higher is nevertheless sold as such.
The same relationship may hold towards the country to which