system, with no way out except the eventual collapse of the biosphere. But
this would be the case only if capital were indeed able to found itself, if the
foundation of its logic – labor that posits capital – were also its historic foun-
dation. Luckily, this is not so. The foundation of political economy rests upon
a historical foundation it does not comprehend.^18 Political economy as a sci-
ence expresses the logic of capital, but this logic was itself born into the world
and given some power over the world by a very specific set of circumstances.
Descending through this logic, Marx has led us to the point where the logic
betrays its a-logical condition. Only through contact with this condition can
the katabasiscome to an end.
This condition, the origin of both political economy and of the capitalism
it reflects, is the forceful rending of the peasant from the land, “the expro-
priation of the agricultural producer,” and in these events “the knights of
industry” “played no part whatsoever.” Capitalists did not create capitalism,
and certainly not through their own labor. “The dissolution of [feudalism]
set free the elements of [capitalism]” (1976:875–6). The deterioration of feu-
dal power in England, brought on by the growth of cities, on the one hand,
left most of the land in the hands of free peasants, and, on the other, made
money into “the power of all powers” (1976:879). This provided the old feu-
dal lords with the incentive to drive the peasants off the land, in order that
it might provide sheep for the wool market in Flanders. The expropriation
of the peasants, in turn, created workers who mustposit exchange-value,
workers who cannot work for themselves, but must sell their labor-power
and create value for another. It is the creation of these free workers that makes
political economy possible, for it is this labor force that founds the possibil-
ity of the abstractions with which economics deals. It is this violent “abstrac-
tion” of the workers from the land and tools by which they could sustain
themselves that makes possible scientific abstractions like labor-power,
exchange-value, and capital. These conceptual abstractions, in their inter-
relations, compose the Hell of political economy, but they cannot account for
50 • William Clare Roberts
(^18) Compare this to Alfred Schmidt’s discussion of Marx’s systematic presentation
of capitalism: “Certainly an immanent presentation of the system has its limits, for
when carried out rigorously, it immediately refers back ‘toward a past lying behind
this system.’ Conversely – and here Marx goes beyond Hegel – the analysis leads ‘to
the point at which the suspension of the present form of production relations gives
signs of its becoming – foreshadowing of the future’” (1981a:31–2). My argument
maintains that it is only because Marx brings us up to the first limit that he is also
able to point us toward the second.