The primitive accumulation of capital. Violent robbery.

The primitive accumulation of capital.

I am having a wee Powers here tonight so I might not get this all right. I am thinking about the primitive accumulation of capital. You see a friend of mine was out walking in Ireland with his Jack Russell. He took a short cut across some fields. He was approached by a man who said he owned the fields and therefore my friend had no right to walk on them.

My friend asked but how did he get to own them. The other man answered that his father gave them to him. How did his father get them asked my friend, his father gave them to him was the reply, how did he get them, his father gave them to him, and how did he get them, his father gave them to him, and so it went on until the man who claimed he was the owner said well his great great great grand father had fought for them. So on this note my friend said okay I will fight you for them.

Needless to say the self styled owner refused this invitation. Capitalists steal what is not nailed down and then change the laws to make their ownership "legal." When the lands of North America were stolen by US capitalism it decreed that because the native American people were nomadic they could not own the land so US capitalism had the right to take it. That was a good one.

We working class people, if we are lucky, have money that we spend for things we need to live on. But there is money that is different from that. It is not needed to live on. It is used to speculate and invest with. It is not money, it is capital. The primitive accumulation of capital was achieved through robbing and stealing and murdering on a mass scale. And not only in the former colonial countries.

I was reading recently about the taking over of the common land in England and how it was privatized and with this the masses of the population were driven off the land and into absolute poverty. Then to keep the masses in their place, to keep them hungry, to force them to work in the factories and for the large land owners it was made a capital offense to kill a rabbit and eat it or gather firewood to burn. Starve them in to accepting what capitalism wanted from them. The later accumulation of capital was through exploiting the labor power of the working class in the work places. In one form of robbery or another the capitalist class got their capital.

I was talking to a man recently who was a civil engineer all his life. He had worked in countries such as Algeria, India, Venezuela and Mexico. He was talking to me about Algeria and he said when the French left it went to hell. His conclusion was that the Algerians were inferior. It was a racist conclusion. I said to him that when the French were driven out they took massive amounts of capital with them. This was the problem. The Algerian people had practically no capital. This man traded in antiques. He had a lot of knowledge. But he was hanging on by a thread to his business. The reason why? He had practically no capital. He was not inferior in his knowledge, in fact he knew more than many who made more money than him in the antique business, but he did not have the capital to buy goods and sell them and so he was all but bankrupt.

I think too about the African American population. Hundreds of years and never paid a wage. Such a staggering crushing blow. Such damage was done. I am not in favor of capitalism. I am a democratic socialist. But we have to recognize that when a people is not paid any wages for a couple of hundred years this has a negative affect on their ability to accumulate some resources. And when slavery was ended and the KKK was unleashed on the black people one of the reasons was to prevent the large numbers of skilled former slaves from getting jobs in the skilled trades. And it would have been very hard for them to open their own shops and businesses as they had no capital.

Yes capitalism is a rotten system, a nasty business. Whenever we end it and establish democratic socialism life will be much better. Of course the workers and consumers of Power's whiskey will have to ensure that product is kept up to scratch. And of course also that we just have a little drink and not go to excess. And those that have a problem with it we will have to help to fight this problem.

Sean.