Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations – Marx

Right now I’m reading  Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations by Karl Marx.  These are my insights and notes.

The Process Which Precedes the Formation of the Capital Relation or of Original Accumulation

• The purpose of capitalist labor is to create value.  The purpose of pre-capitalist labor is to produce sustenance for the individual and the community.
• This idea of the individual as a worker divorced from the land and the means of sustenance except by commoditized labor is an artificial product of history.
• In pre-capitalist societies, the individual regards himself as an owner of property only in so far as he regards himself as a member of the community
  • Property ownership–”the relationship of the individual to the natural conditions of labor and reproduction”–is granted by membership and unity with the community
• Cities arise from villages when the location and geography are favorable to external trade.  The head of state exchanges the surplus of labor.
• Cities are owners of the surrounding supportive farm land in the same relationship as despots to labor.  Villages are appendages of the supporting land in the same relationship as the pre-capitalist laborer to the community.
• War is required for the perpetuation of non-transient occupation of land by a particular group and the society is naturally organized into military-like relationships.  War reinforces territorial notions and individual ownership of property.
• Private land ownership arrises as a result of validating membership in the community by acceptable maintenance and use of said property.  The individual is a member of the community by virtue of being in possession of land ultimately in the community’s possession.  
  • “Property formally belongs to the Roman citizen, the private owner of land is such only by virtue of being Roman, but any Roman is also a private landowner.”
  • The Germanic model consists of only communal property with private possession.
• “Ancient classical history is a history of cities,” as seats of land ownership and agriculture. Asian history is a history of town and country without differentiation.  The Middle Ages see history as the history of the countryside in opposition to the town.  ”Modern history is the urbanization of the countryside.”

Notebook V, Chapter on Capital (continued)

• A city is more than the composition of individual colocations.  The whole is a new entity, not the sum of its parts.  
  • In the Germanic model, the rural community is an association of members, more than a series of mere unions.  Membership involves shared language, history, etc.  The community is geographically sparse and therefore has no existence as a state, since it has no existence as a city.
  • In the Roman model, the community exists in the city, apart from colocation, in the polity.
• Individual households represent an entire micro-economy, having production (usually by women in domestic labor).  
  • In classical antiquity, the city is composed of many household economies occupying the territory attached thereto.
  • In the Germanic model, the individual home is independent from one another.  Land ownership is not a form of citizenship, but rather shared language, culture, history, etc is. 
  • In the Asian model, with only community property and private possession, the community is the individual economic unit. Citizenship is not a form of ownership.
  • In the Roman model, private landed property is mediated through state landed property, making private land owners citizens and members of the state owned property.
• Two elements are common to each of these land-worker-community relationships:
  • Appropriation of land - Appropriation of land is a precondition for labor.  The worker’s reproduction is a natural consequence of laboring on appropriated land.  
  • Attitude to the land - Man is more than a laborer.  His separate, independent existence is antecedent to the role of a laborer, even though the role as laborer is a necessary consequence of this existence.  One aspect of this land-independent existence is community membership.
  • Isolated individuals cannot possess land, but merely subsist off it.  
  • Land as property exists only through mediation of a community.
  • Community is formed by the contract in which men are cast as laborers through the appropriation of land.

… More to come…