CHAPTER XXXI.
GENESIS OF THE INDUSTRIAL CAPITALIST.
The genesis of the industrial[1] capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer. Doubtless many small guild-masters, and yet more independent small artisans, or even wage-labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and (by gradually extending exploitation of wage-labour and corresponding accumulation) into full-blown capitalists. In the infancy of capitalist production, things often happened as in the infancy of medieval towns, where the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which servant, was in great part decided by the earlier or later date of their flight. The snail’s-pace of this method corresponded in no wise with the commercial requirements of the new world-market that the great discoveries of the end of the 15th century created. But the middle age had handed down two distinct forms of capital, which mature in the most different economic social formations, and which, before the era of the capitalist mode of production, are considered as capital quand même—usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital.
“At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the possession of the capitalist … he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed the largest, and a continually augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour for himself. The capitalist may now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no law has conferred on him the right to this property … this change has been effected by the taking of interest on capital … and it is not a little curious that all the lawgivers of Europe endeavoured to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes against usury.… The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a
- ↑ Industrial here in contradistinction to agricultural. In the “categoric” sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist as much as the manufacturer.
