Your Money or Your Life!

THE DEBT CRISIS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE/71

In the same chapter, Marx coins a phrase that makes a dialectic
link between the oppressed in the centre and those in the colonies: 'In
fact the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the
unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal' (ch. 31, p. 925).
He concludes the chapter: 'capital comes dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood and dirt' (ch. 31, p. 926).
According to Marx:

The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned

in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in

more or less chronological order. These different moments are sys­

tematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth

century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the

national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection,

(ch. 31, p. 915)

He devotes several pages to colonial pillage and then examines the
question of international credit:

The system of public credit, i.e. of national debts, the origins of

which are to be found in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle

Ages, took possession of Europe as a whole during the period of

manufacture. ... The national debt, i.e. the alienation

[ Verdusserung = alienation by sale] of the state - whether that state

is despotic, constitutional or republican - marked the capitalist era

with its stamp.... The public debt becomes one of the most powerful

levers of primitive accumulation. ... Along with the national debt

there arose an international credit system, which often conceals

one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people.

... A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States

without any birth-certificate, was yesterday, in England, the

capitalised blood of children, (ch. 31, pp. 919-20)

Twentieth-century Marxist scholars have expanded on this
question of global primitive accumulation (Amin, 1993; Gunder
Frank, 1971; Mandel, 1962, 1968). Ernest Mandel's 1968 article
'L'accumulation primitive et l'industrialisation du Tiers Monde'
('Primitive accumulation and the industrialisation of the Third
World') provides a particularly interesting summary. On the basis of
calculations made by other researchers, he estimates that, between