themselves. Political economy, when followed into its inner sanctum, must
give up its secret: property is founded on theft, order on violence, “the exclu-
sive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” on “the expropria-
tion of the mass of the people by a few usurpers” (1976:280, 930).
In his coup de grace, Marx shows us how political economy itself confesses
these inversions. The final chapter, “The Modern Theory of Colonization,”
seems superfluous, coming, as it does, after Marx forecasts the expropriation
of the expropriators. But it is in this chapter that Marx wrings from political
economy’s own mouth – in the person of E. G. Wakefield – the admission,
not only of the fact of expropriation, but of the continued necessity of expro-
priation wherever conditions are such that people can easily establish them-
selves as self-subsisting. Reading Wakefield’s advice on how to prevent
colonists from obtaining any property from their labor, one finds oneself in
the same state as Dante: “I raised my eyes, thinking to see Lucifer as I had
left him, and I saw that he extended his legs upward; and if I labored in
thought then, let the gross people ponder it who do not see what point it is
that I had passed” (Inf. 34.88–93).
5. From Critique to Revolution
The tendency of my presentation, thus far, has been to insist upon a strong
separation between political economy as a science and the actual workings
of capitalism, since Marx’s critique descends through the former, rather than
offering a “better description” of the latter. Nonetheless, by the time we reach
the so-called primitive accumulation, it has become much harder to hold the
science of political economy separate from the world of capitalism. Political
economy’s ideal premise – the labor theory of value and property – has been
exchanged for its actual premise – original expropriation – but this is alsothe
historical premise of capitalism itself. Science and the world seem to have
merged in this point of origination. Because it leads us to confront this dou-
ble origin, Capitaltakes on a double existence; it is a critique of political econ-
omy, but it is also a critique of “actually existing” capitalism.^19
The Origin of Political Economy and the Descent of Marx • 51(^19) Compare Reuten (2000: 140): “Marx had a double object: critique of the economy,
and critique of the economists (in the German ‘Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, it is
even clearer that the object is two-fold).” Despite this formulation, Reuten, in the very
same article, complains about precisely this duality; “Within a general systematic
dialectical structure, we find a number of deficient transitions as well as many histo-
rical excurses that are not accounted for as such and that seem to replace systematic