The originators of classical political economy -
Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others -
created a discourse that explained the logic, the
origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness
of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that
discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial
requirement for capitalism's creation: for it to
succeed, peasants would have to abandon their
self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a
factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they
did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they
were forced into the factories with the active support
of the same economists who were making theoretical
claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism
that thrived without needing government
intervention.Directly contradicting the laissez-faire
principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated
government policies that deprived the peasantry of the
means for self-provision in order to coerce these small
farmers into wage labour. To show how Adam Smith and the
other classical economists appear to have deliberately
obscured the nature of the control of labour and how
policies attacking the economic independence of the
rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster
primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries,
letters, and the more practical writings of the
classical economists.He argues that these private and
practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals
of classical political economy - to separate a rural
peasantry from their access to land. This rereading of
the history of classical political economy sheds
important light on the rise of capitalism to its present
state of world dominance. Historians of political
economy and Marxist thought will find that this book
broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold
in the industrial age.
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