Proletarianization

Primitive Accumulation as Proletarianization

According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production expands through two main processes, primitive accumulation and capital accumulation. Primitive accumulation, a form of privatization, is the process of separating producers from inputs—land, tools, machines, and other resources—that are necessary for subsistence production. Primitive accumulation is a precondition for capital accumulation. Primitive accumulation in Europe and its colonies frequently meant taking land away from peasants by force. Expropriation of traditional lands created commodities of labor and land, simultaneously making a labor and land market.

Enclosure, starting in England in the 16th century, was the first political project that turned peasants into proletarians. English peasants, as in many areas of the world, existed as subsistence producers with traditional usufruct rights to land for farming and shared rights to common areas for wood collection, hunting, and other subsistence activities. Enclosure transformed the English countryside from a society based on the two classes of the feudal mode of production, peasants and lords, to one with three classes, known as the triad of capitalist agriculture: workers (proletarians), tenant farmers, and landowners. In this triad, farmers rent land from landowners, employ workers, and use family members’ labor. The most efficient farmers were better able to maintain access to rental lands and outcompeted other units of production.

Proletarianization through primitive accumulation has progressed unevenly around the world with the spread of capitalism. It has been incomplete in part because of resistance from those whose resources and attendant ways of life are lost by elite expropriation. Colonialism involved attempts by colonial powers to transform independent producers from a subsistence orientation to production for market. This involved expropriation and taxation, which required producers to generate income by producing cash crops. Marxist scholars have shown that proletarianization and the more general expansion of capitalist relations of production, in combination with extreme weather events, caused massive famines in the colonized world.

Proletarianization and the Agrarian Question

Proletarianization as a concept is inextricably tied to the “agrarian question” of 19th- and early-20th-century Marxism. The debate centers on the question of the peasantry's place [Page 362]within the capitalist mode of production and the “delayed” transition from peasants to proletarians. Marx and Friedrich Engels thought agrarian petty commodity producers were doomed. In their view, the peasantry would be squeezed so hard by capital and onerous forms of indebtedness and be outcompeted by mechanized capitalist agriculture that it would disappear and join the urban proletariat. Following Marx, Lenin proposed that concentration and class differentiation would occur in agriculture as in other economic sectors, so that the less-efficient producers would be outcompeted, leaving farming to a small number of large-scale, productive farmers and freeing up a vast proletarian labor force for industry.

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