The originators of classical political economy - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others - created a discourse that explained the logic, 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. Michael Perelman shows that 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. 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.
The originators of classical political economy - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others - created a discourse that explained the logic, 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. Michael Perelman shows that 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. 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.
Rethinks the history of classical political economy by assessing the Marxian idea of primitive accumulation," the process by which a propertyless working class is created."
Introduction: Dark Designs
1. The Enduring Importance of Primitive Accumulation
2. The Theory of Primitive Accumulation
3. Primitive Accumulation and the Game Laws
4. The Social Division of Labor and Household Production
5. Elaborating the Model of Primitive Accumulation
6. The Dawn of Political Economy
7. Sir James Steuart’s Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
8. Adam Smith’s Charming Obfuscation of Class
9. The Revisionist History of Professor Adam Smith
10. Adam Smith and the Ideological Role of the Colonies
11. Benjamin Franklin and the Smithian Ideology of Slavery and Wage
Labor
12. The Classics as Cossacks: Classical Political Economy versus
the Working Class
13. The Counterattack
14. Notes on Development
Conclusion
References
Index
Michael Perelman is Professor of Economics at California State
University, Chico. His books include The Natural Instability of
Markets: Expectations, Increasing Returns, and the Collapse of
Markets.
"This study is to be admired for its comprehensiveness, scope, and the amount of unearthing and excavation Perelman provides The indictment of political economists who addressed themselves to the matter of primitive accumulation is masterful."--H. T. Wilson, York University
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