The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production . . . 33
But by itself this could not lead to capitalist production. There had, after all, been pillage of one sort or another throughout the history of class society, going back to Babylonian times, without it leading to the rapid accumulation that characterises capitalism. The forcible separation of masses of people from any control over the means of production-and so from any possibility of making a livelihood without selling their labour power-was indispensable. "The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process" .34 For this reason, it can be misleading to refer to any forcible seizure of wealth by capitalists as "primitive accumulation" .35
In Marx's writings it has two aspects: on the one hand the "freeing" of the mass of population from any direct access to the means of making a livelihood; on the other the accumulation of wealth by a class that can use economic necessity to make such "free labour" toil for it.
Once capitalism had established itself, its own economic mechanisms pushed the process of separating people from control over the means of production even further, without necessarily needing intervention by the state or the use of force to bring it about. Thus in Britain in the late 1 8th century there were still hundreds of thousands of handloom weavers, who worked for themselves weaving cloth to sell. Within 50 years they had all been driven out of business by capitalist firms using power looms. In Ireland in the 1 840s a terrible famine caused by the requirement that hungry peasants pay rent to (mainly British) landlords led a million to die of hunger and another million to abandon their holdings and seek work in Britain and the US. The market could achieve such horrors without the direct help of the state (except, of course, in protecting the property of the landlords). Capitalism had become a self-sustaining and self-expanding system destined to absorb the whole world into its workings.
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond