Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist
society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment
from which it in fact sprang--the system of bondage in rural areas and
the guild system in the towns--and later, after having swallowed up the
feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and
artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both
in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by
vast territories of non-European civilisation ranging over all levels of
development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen,
hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans.
This is the setting for the accumulation of capital.
We must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against
natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the
competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the
remaining conditions of accumulation.
The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of
non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms
will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a
market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of
production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. For
all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are
of no use to capital. In all social organisations where natural economy
prevails, where there are primitive peasant communities with common
ownership of the land, a feudal system of bondage or anything of this
nature, economic organisation is essentially in response to the internal
demand; and therefore there is no demand, or very little, for foreign
goods, and also, as a rule, no surplus production, or at least no urgent
need to dispose of surplus products. What is most important, however,
is that, in any natural economy, production only goes on because both
means of production and labour power are bound in one form or another.
The communist peasant community no less than the feudal _corvée_ farm
and similar institutions maintain their economic organisation by
subjecting the labour power, and the most important means of production,
the land, to the rule of law and custom. A natural economy thus
confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid
barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle
of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it
encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive
communism, or patriarchal peasant economy. The principal methods in this
struggle are political force (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by
the state, and cheap goods; they are partly applied simultaneously, and
partly they succeed and complement one another. In Europe, force assumed
revolutionary forms in the fight against feudalism (this is the ultimate
explanation of the bourgeois revolutions in the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries); in the non-European countries, where it
fights more primitive social organisations, it assumes the forms of
colonial policy. These methods, together with the systems of taxation
applied in such cases, and commercial relations also, particularly with
primitive communities, form an alliance in which political power and
economic factors go hand in hand.
In detail, capital in its struggle against societies with a natural
economy pursues the following ends:
(1) To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive
forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones
and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc.
(2) To 'liberate' labour power and to coerce it into service.
(3) To introduce a commodity economy.
(4) To separate trade and agriculture.
At the time of primitive accumulation, i.e. at the end of the Middle
Ages, when the history of capitalism in Europe began, and right into the
nineteenth century, dispossessing the peasants in England and on the
Continent was the most striking weapon in the large-scale transformation
of means of production and labour power into capital. Yet capital in
power performs the same task even to-day, and on an even more important
scale--by modern colonial policy. It is an illusion to hope that
capitalism will ever be content with the means of production which it
can acquire by way of commodity exchange. In this respect already,
capital is faced with difficulties because vast tracts of the globe's
surface are in the possession of social organisations that have no
desire for commodity exchange or cannot, because of the entire social
structure and the forms of ownership, offer for sale the productive
forces in which capital is primarily interested. The most important of
these productive forces is of course the land, its hidden mineral
treasure, and its meadows, woods and water, and further the flocks of
the primitive shepherd tribes. If capital were here to rely on the
process of slow internal disintegration, it might take centuries. To
wait patiently until the most important means of production could be
alienated by trading in consequence of this process were tantamount to
renouncing the productive forces of those territories altogether. Hence
derives the vital necessity for capitalism in its relations with
colonial countries to appropriate the most important means of
production. Since the primitive associations of the natives are the
strongest protection for their social organisations and for their
material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the
systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social
units which obstruct its development. With that we have passed beyond
the stage of primitive accumulation; this process is still going on.
Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a
relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the
natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and
labour power. Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital
exclusively to 'peaceful competition', i.e. to regular commodity
exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries,
rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation
of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive
organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a
disintegrating natural economy. Accumulation, with its spasmodic
expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal
disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to
commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the
natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution
open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical
process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis,
but further on down to the present day. From the point of view of the
primitive societies involved, it is a matter of life or death; for them
there can be no other attitude than opposition and fight to the
finish--complete exhaustion and extinction. Hence permanent occupation
of the colonies by the military, native risings and punitive expeditions
are the order of the day for any colonial regime. The method of
violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between
capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would
restrict accumulation. Their means of production and their labour power
no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary to
capitalism. Yet the latter is fully determined to undermine their
independence as social units, in order to gain possession of their means
of production and labour power and to convert them into commodity
buyers. This method is the most profitable and gets the quickest
results, and so it is also the most expedient for capital. In fact, it
is invariably accompanied by a growing militarism whose importance for
accumulation will be demonstrated below in another connection. British
policy in India and French policy in Algeria are the classical examples
of the application of these methods by capitalism.
The ancient economic organisations of the Indians--the communist village
community--had been preserved in their various forms throughout
thousands of years, in spite of all the political disturbances during
their long history. In the sixth century B.C. the Persians invaded the
Indus basin and subjected part of the country. Two centuries later the
Greeks entered and left behind them colonies, founded by Alexander on
the pattern of a completely alien civilisation. Then the savage
Scythians invaded the country, and for centuries India remained under
Arab rule. Later, the Afghans swooped down from the Iran mountains,
until they, too, were expelled by the ruthless onslaught of Tartar
hordes. The Mongols' path was marked by terror and destruction, by the
massacre of entire villages--the peaceful countryside with the tender
shoots of rice made crimson with blood. And still the Indian village
community survived. For none of the successive Mahometan conquerors had
ultimately violated the internal social life of the peasant masses and
its traditional structure. They only set up their own governors in the
provinces to supervise military organisation and to collect taxes from
the population. All conquerors pursued the aim of dominating and
exploiting the country, but none was interested in robbing the people of
their productive forces and in destroying their social organisation. In
the Moghul Empire, the peasant had to pay his annual tribute in kind to
the foreign ruler, but he could live undisturbed in his village and
could cultivate his rice on his _sholgura_ as his father had done before
him. Then came the British--and the blight of capitalist civilisation
succeeded in disrupting the entire social organisation of the people; it
achieved in a short time what thousands of years, what the sword of the
Nogaians, had failed to accomplish. The ultimate purpose of British
capital was to possess itself of the very basis of existence of the
Indian community: the land.
This end was served above all by the fiction, always popular with
European colonisers, that all the land of a colony belongs to the
political ruler. In retrospect, the British endowed the Moghul and his
governors with private ownership of the whole of India, in order to
'legalise' their succession. Economic experts of the highest repute,
such as James Mill, duly supported this fiction with 'scientific'
arguments, so in particular with the famous conclusion given below.[356]
As early as 1793, the British in Bengal gave landed property to all the
_zemindars_ (Mahometan tax collectors) or hereditary market
superintendents they had found in their district so as to win native
support for the campaign against the peasant masses. Later they adopted
the same policy for their new conquests in the Agram province, in Oudh,
and in the Central Provinces. Turbulent peasant risings followed in
their wake, in the course of which tax collectors were frequently driven
out. In the resulting confusion and anarchy British capitalists
successfully appropriated a considerable portion of the land.
The burden of taxation, moreover, was so ruthlessly increased that it
swallowed up nearly all the fruits of the people's labour. This went to
such an extreme in the Delhi and Allahabad districts that, according to
the official evidence of the British tax authorities in 1854, the
peasants found it convenient to lease or pledge their shares in land for
the bare amount of the tax levied. Under the auspices of this taxation,
usury came to the Indian village, to stay and eat up the social
organisation from within like a canker.[357] In order to accelerate
this process, the British passed a law that flew in the face of every
tradition and justice known to the village community: compulsory
alienation of village land for tax arrears. In vain did the old family
associations try to protect themselves by options on their hereditary
land and that of their kindred. There was no stopping the rot. Every day
another plot of land fell under the hammer; individual members withdrew
from the family unit, and the peasants got into debt and lost their
land.
The British, with their wonted colonial stratagems, tried to make it
appear as if their power policy, which had in fact undermined the
traditional forms of landownership and brought about the collapse of the
Hindu peasant economy, had been dictated by the need to protect the
peasants against native oppression and exploitation and served to
safeguard their own interests.[358] Britain artificially created a
landed aristocracy at the expense of the ancient property-rights of the
peasant communities, and then proceeded to 'protect' the peasants
against these alleged oppressors, and to bring this illegally usurped
land into the possession of British capitalists.
Thus large estates developed in India in a short time, while over large
areas the peasants in their masses were turned into impoverished small
tenants with a short-term lease.
Lastly, one more striking fact shows the typically capitalist method of
colonisation. The British were the first conquerors of India who showed
gross indifference to public utilities. Arabs, Afghans and Mongols had
organised and maintained magnificent works of canalisation in India,
they had given the country a network of roads, spanned the rivers with
bridges and seen to the sinking of wells. Timur or Tamerlane, the
founder of the Mongol dynasty in India, had a care for the cultivation
of the soil, for irrigation, for the safety of the roads and the
provision of food for travellers.[359] The primitive Indian Rajahs, the
Afghan or Mongol conquerors, at any rate, in spite of occasional cruelty
against individuals, made their mark with the marvellous constructions
we can find to-day at every step and which seem to be the work of a
giant race. 'The (East India) Company which ruled India until 1858 did
not make one spring accessible, did not sink a single well, nor build a
bridge for the benefit of the Indians.'[360]
Another witness, the Englishman James Wilson, says: 'In the Madras
Province, no-one can help being impressed by the magnificent ancient
irrigation systems, traces of which have been preserved until our time.
Locks and weirs dam the rivers into great lakes, from which canals
distribute the water for an area of 60 or 70 miles around. On the large
rivers, there are 30 to 40 of such weirs.... The rain water from the
mountains was collected in artificial ponds, many of which still remain
and boast circumferences of between 15 and 25 miles. Nearly all these
gigantic constructions were completed before the year 1750. During the
war between the Company and the Mongol rulers--and, be it said, _during
the entire period of our rule in India_--they have sadly decayed.'[361]
No wonder! British capital had no object in giving the Indian
communities economic support or helping them to survive. Quite the
reverse, it aimed to destroy them and to deprive them of their
productive forces. The unbridled greed, the acquisitive instinct of
accumulation must by its very nature take every advantage of the
'conditions of the market' and can have no thought for the morrow. It is
incapable of seeing far enough to recognise the value of the economic
monuments of an older civilisation. (Recently British engineers in Egypt
feverishly tried to discover traces of an ancient irrigation system
rather like the one a stupid lack of vision had allowed to decay in
India, when they were charged with damming the Nile on a grand scale in
furtherance of capitalist enterprise.) Not until 1867 was England able
to appreciate the results of her noble efforts in this respect. In the
terrible famine of that year a million people were killed in the Orissa
district alone; and Parliament was shocked into investigating the causes
of the emergency. The British government has now introduced
administrative measures in an attempt to save the peasant from usury.
The Punjab Alienation Act of 1900 made it illegal to sell or mortgage
peasant lands to persons other than of the peasant caste, though
exceptions can be made in individual cases, subject to the tax
collector's approval.[362] Having deliberately disrupted the protecting
ties of the ancient Hindu social associations, after having nurtured a
system of usury where nothing is thought of a 15 per cent charge of
interest, the British now entrust the ruined Indian peasant to the
tender care of the Exchequer and its officials, under the 'protection',
that is to say, of those draining him of his livelihood.
Next to tormented British India, Algeria under French rule claims pride
of place in the annals of capitalist colonisation. When the French
conquered Algeria, ancient social and economic institutions prevailed
among the Arab-Kabyle population. These had been preserved until the
nineteenth century, and in spite of the long and turbulent history of
the country they survive in part even to the present day.
Private property may have existed no doubt in the towns, among the Moors
and Jews, among merchants, artisans and usurers. Large rural areas may
have been seized by the State under Turkish suzerainty--yet nearly half
of the productive land is jointly held by Arab and Kabyle tribes who
still keep up the ancient patriarchal customs. Many Arab families led
the same kind of nomad life in the nineteenth century as they had done
since time immemorial, an existence that appears restless and irregular
only to the superficial observer, but one that is in fact strictly
regulated and extremely monotonous. In summer they were wont, man, woman
and child, to take their herds and tents and migrate to the sea-swept
shores of the Tell district; and in the winter they would move back
again to the protective warmth of the desert. They travelled along
definite routes, and the summer and winter stations were fixed for every
tribe and family. The fields of those Arabs who had settled on the land
were in most cases the joint property of the clans, and the great Kabyle
family associations also lived according to old traditional rules under
the patriarchal guidance of their elected heads.
The women would take turns for household duties; a matriarch, again
elected by the family, being in complete charge of the clan's domestic
affairs, or else the women taking turns of duty. This organisation of
the Kabyle clans on the fringe of the African desert bears a startling
resemblance to that of the famous Southern Slavonic _Zadruga_--not only
the fields but all the tools, weapons and monies, all that the members
acquire or need for their work, are communal property of the clan.
Personal property is confined to one suit of clothing, and in the case
of a woman to the dresses and ornaments of her dowry. More valuable
attire and jewels, however, are considered common property, and
individuals were allowed to use them only if the whole family approved.
If the clan was not too numerous, meals were taken at a common table;
the women took it in turns to cook, but the eldest were entrusted with
the dishing out. If a family circle was too large, the head of the
family would each month ration out strictly proportionate quantities of
uncooked food to the individual families who then prepared them. These
communities were bound together by close ties of kinship, mutual
assistance and equality, and a patriarch would implore his sons on his
deathbed to remain faithful to the family.[363]
These social relations were already seriously impaired by the rule of
the Turks, established in Algeria in the sixteenth century. Yet the
Turkish exchequer had by no means confiscated all the land. That is a
legend invented by the French at a much later date. Indeed, only a
European mind is capable of such a flight of fancy which is contrary to
the entire economic foundation of Islam both in theory and practice. In
truth, the facts were quite different. The Turks did not touch the
communal fields of the village communities. They merely confiscated a
great part of uncultivated land from the clans and converted it into
crownland under Turkish local administrators (_Beyliks_). The state
worked these lands in part with native labour, and in part they were
leased out on rent or against payment in kind. Further the Turks took
advantage of every revolt of the subjected families and of every
disturbance in the country to add to their possessions by large-scale
confiscation of land, either for military establishments or for public
auction, when most of it went to Turkish or other usurers. To escape
from the burden of taxation and confiscation, many peasants placed
themselves under the protection of the Church, just as they had done in
medieval Germany. Hence considerable areas became Church-property. All
these changes finally resulted in the following distribution of Algerian
land at the time of the French conquest: crownlands occupied nearly
3,750,000 acres, and a further 7,500,000 acres of uncultivated land as
common property of All the Faithful (_Bled-el-Islam_). 7,500,000 acres
had been privately owned by the Berbers since Roman times, and under
Turkish rule a further 3,750,000 acres had come into private ownership,
a mere 12,500,000 acres remaining communal property of individual Arab
clans. In the Sahara, some of the 7,500,000 acres fertile land near the
Sahara Oases was communally owned by the clans and some belonged to
private owners. The remaining 57,000,000 acres were mainly waste land.
With their conquest of Algeria, the French made a great ado about their
work of civilisation, since the country, having shaken off the Turkish
yoke at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was harbouring the
pirates who infested the Mediterranean and trafficked in Christian
slaves. Spain and the North American Union in particular, themselves at
that time slave traders on no mean scale, declared relentless war on
this Moslem iniquity. France, in the very throes of the Great
Revolution, proclaimed a crusade against Algerian anarchy. Her
subjection of that country was carried through under the slogans of
'combating slavery' and 'instituting orderly and civilised conditions'.
Yet practice was soon to show what was at the bottom of it all. It is
common knowledge that in the forty years following the subjection of
Algeria, no European state suffered so many changes in its political
system as France: the restoration of the monarchy was followed by the
July Revolution and the reign of the 'Citizen King', and this was
succeeded by the February Revolution, the Second Republic, the Second
Empire, and finally, after the disaster of 1870, by the Third Republic.
In turn, the aristocracy, high finance, petty bourgeoisie and the large
middle classes in general gained political ascendancy. Yet French
policy in Algeria remained undeflected by this succession of events; it
pursued a single aim from beginning to end; at the fringe of the African
desert, it demonstrated plainly that all the political revolutions in
nineteenth-century France centred in a single basic interest: the rule
of a capitalist bourgeoisie and its institutions of ownership.
'The bill submitted for your consideration', said Deputy Humbert on June
30, 1873, in the Session of the French National Assembly as spokesman
for the Commission for Regulating Agrarian Conditions in Algeria, 'is
but the crowning touch to an edifice well-founded on a whole series of
ordinances, edicts, laws and decrees of the Senate which together and
severally have as the same object: the establishment of private property
among the Arabs.'
In spite of the ups and downs of internal French politics French
colonial policy persevered for fifty years in its systematic and
deliberate efforts to destroy and disrupt communal property. It served
two distinct purposes: The break-up of communal property was primarily
intended to smash the social power of the Arab family associations and
to quell their stubborn resistance against the French yoke, in the
course of which there were innumerable risings so that, in spite of
France's military superiority, the country was in a continual state of
war.[364] Secondly, communal property had to be disrupted in order to
gain the economic assets of the conquered country; the Arabs, that is to
say, had to be deprived of the land they had owned for a thousand years,
so that French capitalists could get it. Once again the fiction we know
so well, that under Moslem law all land belongs to the ruler, was
brought into play. Just as the English had done in British India, so
Louis Philippe's governors in Algeria declared the existence of communal
property owned by the clan to be 'impossible'. This fiction served as an
excuse to claim for the state most of the uncultivated areas, and
especially the commons, woods and meadows, and to use them for purposes
of colonisation. A complete system of settlement developed, the
so-called _cantonments_ which settled French colonists on the clan land
and herded the tribes into a small area. Under the decrees of 1830,
1831, 1840, 1844, 1845 and 1846 these thefts of Arab family land were
legalised. Yet this system of settlement did not actually further
colonisation; it only bred wild speculation and usury. In most instances
the Arabs managed to buy back the land that had been taken from them,
although they were thus incurring heavy debts. French methods of
oppressive taxation had the same tendency, in particular the law of June
16, 1851, proclaiming all forests to be state property, which robbed the
natives of 6,000,000 acres of pasture and brushwood, and took away the
prime essential for animal husbandry. This spate of laws, ordinances and
regulations wrought havoc with the ownership of land in the country.
Under the prevailing condition of feverish speculation in land, many
natives sold their estates to the French in the hope of ultimately
recovering them. Quite often they sold the same plot to two or three
buyers at a time, and what is more, it was quite often inalienable
family land and did not even belong to them. A company of speculators
from Rouen, e.g., believed that they had bought 50,000 acres, but in
fact they had only acquired a disputed title to 3,425 acres. There
followed an infinite number of lawsuits in which the French courts
supported on principle all partitions and claims of the buyers. In these
uncertain conditions, speculation, usury and anarchy were rife. But
although the introduction of French colonists in large numbers among the
Arab population had aimed at securing support for the French government,
this scheme failed miserably. Thus, under the Second Empire, French
policy tried another tack. The government, with its European lack of
vision, had stubbornly denied the existence of communal property for
thirty years, but it had learned better at last. By a single stroke of
the pen, joint family property was officially recognised and condemned
to be broken up. This is the double significance of the decree of the
Senate dated April 22, 1864. General Allard declared in the Senate:
'The government does not lose sight of the fact that the general aim of
its policy is to weaken the influence of the tribal chieftains and to
dissolve the family associations. By this means, it will sweep away the
last remnants of feudalism [_sic!_] defended by the opponents of the
government bill.... The surest method of accelerating the process of
dissolving the family associations will be to institute private
property and to settle European colonists among the Arab families.'[365]
The law of 1863 created special Commissions for cutting up the landed
estates, consisting of the Chairman, either a Brigadier-General or
Colonel, one _sous-préfet_, one representative of the Arab military
authorities and an official bailiff. These natural experts on African
economics and social conditions were faced with the threefold task,
first of determining the precise boundaries of the great family estates,
secondly to distribute the estates of each clan among its various
branches, and finally to break up this family land into separate private
allotments. This expedition of the Brigadiers into the interior of
Africa duly took place. The Commissions proceeded to their destinations.
They were to combine the office of judge in all land disputes with that
of surveyor and land distributor, the final decision resting with the
Governor-General of Algeria. Ten years' valiant efforts by the
Commissions yielded the following result: between 1863 and 1873, of 700
hereditary estates, 400 were shared out among the branches of each clan,
and the foundations for future inequalities between great landed estates
and small allotments were thus laid. One family, in fact, might receive
between 2·5 and 10 acres, while another might get as much as 250 or even
450 acres, depending on the size of the estate and the number of
collaterals within the clan. Partition, however, stopped at that point.
Arab customs presented unsurmountable difficulties to a further division
of family land. In spite of Colonels and Brigadiers, French policy had
again failed in its object to create private property for transfer to
the French.
But the Third Republic, an undisguised regime of the bourgeoisie, had
the courage and the cynicism to go straight for its goal and to attack
the problem from the other end, disdaining the preliminaries of the
Second Empire. In 1873, the National Assembly worked out a law with the
avowed intention immediately to split up the entire estates of all the
700 Arab clans, and forcibly to institute private property in the
shortest possible time. Desperate conditions in the colony were the
pretext for this measure. It had taken the great Indian famine of 1866
to awaken the British public to the marvellous exploits of British
colonial policy and to call for a parliamentary investigation; and
similarly, Europe was alarmed at the end of the sixties by the crying
needs of Algeria where more than forty years of French rule culminated
in wide-spread famine and a disastrous mortality rate among the Arabs. A
commission of inquiry was set up to recommend new legislation with which
to bless the Arabs: it was unanimously resolved that there was only one
life-buoy for them--the institution of private property; that alone
could save the Arab from destitution, since he would then always be able
to sell or mortgage his land. It was decided therefore, that the only
means of alleviating the distress of the Arabs, deeply involved in debts
as they were because of the French land robberies and oppressive
taxation, was to deliver them completely into the hands of the usurers.
This farce was expounded in all seriousness before the National Assembly
and was accepted with equal gravity by that worthy body. The 'victors'
of the Paris Commune flaunted their brazenness.
In the National Assembly, two arguments in particular served to support
the new law: those in favour of the bill emphasised over and over again
that the Arabs themselves urgently desired the introduction of private
property. And so they did, or rather the Algerian land speculators and
usurers did, since they were vitally interested in 'liberating' their
victims from the protection of the family ties. As long as Moslem law
prevailed in Algeria, hereditary clan and family lands were inalienable,
which laid insuperable difficulties in the way of anyone who wished to
mortgage his land. The law of 1863 had merely made a breach in these
obstacles, and the issue now at stake was their complete abolition so as
to give a free hand to the usurers. The second argument was
'scientific', part of the same intellectual equipment from which that
worthy, James Mill, had drawn for his abstruse conclusions regarding
Indian relations of ownership: English classical economics. Thoroughly
versed in their masters' teachings, the disciples of Smith and Ricardo
impressively declaimed that private property is indispensable for the
prevention of famines in Algeria, for more intensive and better
cultivation of the land, since obviously no one would be prepared to
invest capital or intensive labour in a piece of land which does not
belong to him and whose produce is not his own to enjoy. But the facts
spoke a different language. They proved that the French speculators
employed the private property they had created in Algeria for anything
but the more intensive and improved cultivation of the soil. In 1873,
1,000,000 acres were French property. But the capitalist companies, the
Algerian and Setif Company which owned 300,000 acres, did not cultivate
the land at all but leased it to the natives who tilled it in the
traditional manner, nor were 25 per cent of the other French owners
engaged in agriculture. It was simply impossible to conjure up
capitalist investments and intensive agriculture overnight, just as
capitalist conditions in general could not be created out of nothing.
They existed only in the imagination of profit-seeking French
speculators, and in the benighted doctrinaire visions of their
scientific economists. The essential point, shorn of all pretexts and
flourishes which seem to justify the law of 1873, was simply the desire
to deprive the Arabs of their land, their livelihood. And although these
arguments had worn threadbare and were evidently insincere, this law
which was to put paid to the Algerian population and their material
prosperity, was passed unanimously on July 26, 1873.
But even this master-stroke soon proved a failure. The policy of the
Third Republic miscarried because of the difficulties in substituting at
one stroke bourgeois private property for the ancient clan communism,
just as the policy of the Second Empire had come to grief over the same
issue. In 1890, when the law of July 26, 1873, supplemented by a second
law on April 28, 1887, had been in force for seventeen years, 14,000,000
francs had been spent on dealing with 40,000,000 acres. It was estimated
that the process would not be completed before 1950 and would require a
further 60,000,000 francs. And still abolition of clan communism, the
ultimate purpose, had not been accomplished. What had really been
attained was all too evident: reckless speculation in land, thriving
usury and the economic ruin of the natives.
Since it had been impossible to institute private property by force, a
new experiment was undertaken. The laws of 1873 and 1887 had been
condemned by a commission appointed for their revision by the Algerian
government in 1890. It was another seven years before the legislators on
the Seine made the effort to consider reforms for the ruined country.
The new decree of the Senate refrained in principle from instituting
private property by compulsion or administrative measures. The laws of
February 2, 1897, and the edict of the Governor-General of Algeria
(March 3, 1898) both provided chiefly for the introduction of private
property following a voluntary application by the prospective purchaser
or owner.[366] But there were clauses to permit a single owner, without
the consent of the others, to claim private property; further, such a
'voluntary' application can be extorted at any convenient moment if the
owner is in debt and the usurer exerts pressure. And so the new law left
the doors wide open for French and native capitalists further to disrupt
and exploit the hereditary and clan lands.
Of recent years, this mutilation of Algeria which had been going on for
eight decades meets with even less opposition, since the Arabs,
surrounded as they are by French capital following the subjection of
Tunisia (1881) and the recent conquest of Morocco, have been rendered
more and more helpless. The latest result of the French regime in
Algeria is an Arab exodus into Turkey.[367]