The Social Relations of Capitalism
Capitalism is a system of social relations, in which capitalists are fully human actors, and workers are exploited. Primitive accumulation precedes capitalism in providing the accumulation of wealth and resources to induce less fortunate people to enter into a highly unequal relationship with a capitalist. In the last chapter of Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Marx illustrates the social conditions necessary for capitalism with a comment about Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonization:
"...Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!"
Capital, vol. I, ch. 33, at www.marxists.org.
Read more about this topic: Primitive Accumulation Of Capital
Famous quotes containing the words social, relations and/or capitalism:
“Throughout the 1980’s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)
“All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“When man has nothing but his will to assert—even his good-will—it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)