{"id":3489622,"date":"2021-12-16T10:39:30","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T10:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3489622"},"modified":"2021-12-16T14:02:20","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T14:02:20","slug":"dispossessed-origins-of-the-working-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2021-12-16\/dispossessed-origins-of-the-working-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed. note: Part 1 can be read on Resilience.org\u00a0here<\/a>, Part 2 can be found here<\/a>, and Part 3 can be found here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
\nThe books are filled with names of kings.
\nWas it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
\n\u2014Bertolt Brecht, \u201cA Worker Reads History\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much academic debate about the origin of\u00a0capitalism<\/em>\u00a0has actually been about the origin of\u00a0capitalists<\/em>. Were they originally aristocrats, or gentry, or merchants, or successful farmers? Far less attention has been paid to Brecht\u2019s penetrating question:\u00a0who did the actual work?<\/em><\/p>\n

The answer is simple and of world-historic importance. Capitalism depends on the availability of large numbers of non-capitalists, people who are, as Marx said, \u201cfree in the double sense.\u201d Free to work for others because they are not legally tied to a landlord or master, and free to starve if they don\u2019t sell their labor-power, because they own no land or other means of production.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe possessor of labor-power, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labor has been objectified \u2026 [is] compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labor-power which exists only in his living body.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article outlines some key experiences of the first great wave of commoners who were torn from their means of subsistence in England in the 1500s and 1600s.<\/p>\n

Some commoners went directly from following a plough to full-time wage-labor, but many, perhaps most, tried to avoid proletarianization. Christopher Hill has shown that \u201cacceptance of wage labor was the last resort open to those who had lost their land, but many regarded it as little better than slavery.\u201d[2]<\/sup>\u00a0Not only were wages low and working conditions abysmal, but the very idea of being subject to a boss and working under wage-discipline was universally detested. \u201cWage-laborers were deemed inferior in status to those who held the most minute fragment of land to farm for themselves,\u201d so \u201cmen fought desperately to avoid the abyss of wage-labor. \u2026 The apotheosis of freedom was the stultifying drudgery of those who had become cogs in someone else\u2019s machine.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/p>\n

The social order that capital\u2019s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is \u201cthe product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.\u201d[4]<\/sup>\u00a0Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.<\/p>\n

The Dispossessed<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some people worked for wages in feudal society, but it wasn\u2019t until feudalism disintegrated that the long-term growth of a proletarian\u00a0class<\/em>\u00a0began. It developed, directly and indirectly, from the destruction of the commons.<\/p>\n

As we saw in\u00a0Part One<\/a>, there was significant economic differentiation in English villages long before the rise of capitalism. By the 1400s, in most communities there was a clear division between those whose farms were large enough to sustain their families and produce for the market, and the smallholders and cottagers who had to work full- or part-time for their better-off neighbors or the landlord.<\/p>\n

Between the two groups was a surprisingly large category known as\u00a0servants in husbandry<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 young people who lived with farm families to gain experience, until they could save enough to rent land and marry. They lived and ate with the farmer\u2019s family, often had the right to keep a few sheep or other animals, and usually received a small annual cash payment. \u201cBetween one-third and one-half of hired labor in early modern agriculture was supplied by servants in husbandry, and most early modern youths in rural England were servants in husbandry.\u201d At any time until about 1800, some 60 percent of men and women aged 15 to 24 were living-in as farm servants.[5]<\/sup><\/p>\n

In class terms, servants in husbandry were a transitional and temporary category, similar to apprentices or college students today. \u201cServants did not understand themselves, and were not understood by early modern society, to be part of a laboring class, youthful proletarians.\u201d[6]<\/sup>\u00a0I stress that because many authors have interpreted a late seventeenth century estimate that more than half the population were servants to mean that most people were wage-laborers. In fact, most servants could best be described as peasants-in-training. A substantial layer of people who had to sell their labor-power existed in the late 1600s, but they were still a minority of the population.<\/p>\n

In the 1400s and early 1500s, most enclosures involved the physical eviction of many tenants, often entire villages. After about 1550, it was more usual for landlords to negotiate with their larger tenants to create bigger farms by dividing up the commons and undeveloped land. \u201cIt became typical for wealthier tenants to be offered compensation for the loss of common rights, while the landless poor, whose common rights were often much harder to sustain at law, gained little or nothing in return.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/p>\n

Loss of common rights was catastrophic for smallholders and cottagers. The milk and cheese from two cows could generate as much income as full-time farm labor, and their manure was fuel for the cottage or fertilizer for a garden. None of that was possible without access to pasture. Jane Humphries has shown that, before enclosure, in families where the men worked as day-laborers, the women and children worked on the commons, caring for animals, cutting turf and gathering wood for fuel and building, gathering berries, nuts and other wild foods, and gleaning leftover grain after harvest. \u201cSince women and children were the primary exploiters of common rights, their loss led to changes in women\u2019s economic position within the family and more generally to increased dependence of whole families on wages and wage earners.\u201d[8<\/sup>]<\/sup><\/p>\n

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At the same time, England was experiencing a baby boom \u2014 between 1520 and 1640, the population more than doubled, from about 2.4 million to over 5 million. That was still about a million fewer people than in the 1300s, before the Black Death, but the system that formerly fed 6 million people no longer existed. Population growth, rising rents, and the trend towards much larger farms were making it impossible for the poor to live on the land. It\u2019s estimated that the proportion of agriculture laborers who had no more than a cottage and garden jumped from 11 percent in 1560 to 40 percent after 1620.[9]<\/sup><\/p>\n

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Forced Labor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Turning the dispossessed peasants of Tudor and Stuart England into reliable wage workers required not just economic pressure but state compulsion. \u201cThroughout this period compulsion to labor stood in the background of the labor market. Tudor legislation provided compulsory work for the unemployed as well as making unemployment an offence punishable with characteristic brutality.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/p>\n

The most comprehensive of those laws was the 1563\u00a0Statute of Artificers<\/em>. Among its provisions:<\/p>\n