"The actual history of the connection between capitalism
and the rise of the proletariat is almost the opposite of that which these
theories of the expropriation of the masses suggest. The truth is that, for the
greater part of history, for most men the possession of the tool for their work
was an essential condition for survival or at least for being able to rear a
family. The number of those who could maintain themselves by working for
others, although they do not possess the necessary equipment, was limited to a
small proportion of the population. The amount of arable land and of tools handed
down from one generation to the next limited the total number who could survive.
To be left without them meant in most instances death by starvation or at least
the impossibility of procreation. There was little incentive and little
possibility for one generation to accumulate the additional tools which would
have made possible the survival of a larger number of the next, so long as the
advantage of employing additional hands was limited mainly to the instances
where he division of the tasks increased the efficiency of the work of the
owner of the tools. It was only when the larger gains form the employment of
machinery provided both the means and opportunity for their investment that
what in the past had been a recurring surplus of population doomed to early
death was in increasing measure given the possibility of survival. Numbers
which had been practically stationary for many centuries began to increase
rapidly. The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have “created” was
thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and
which it had degraded to a lower level: it was an additional population which
was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism
provided. In so far as it true that the growth of capital made the appearance
of the proletariat possible, it was in the sense that it raised the
productivity of labor so that much larger numbers of those who had not been
equipped by their parents with the necessary tools were enabled to maintain themselves
by their labor alone; but the capital had to be supplied first before those
were enabled to survive who afterward claimed as a right a share in its
ownership. Although it was certainly not from charitable motives, it still was
the first time in history that one group of people found it in their interest
to use their earnings on a large scale to provide news instruments of
production to be operated by those without them could not have produced their
own sustenance."
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