Part Eight — So-Called Primitive Accumulation Chapters 26–33. The historical presupposition of capital: the divorce of the producer from the means of production, and the expropriation of the expropriators.

The whole analysis has assumed the two classes it needs — a capitalist with money and means of production, a worker with nothing to sell but labour-power — as already present. Part Eight asks where that separation came from, and answers the question historically. Accumulation presupposes surplus-value, surplus-value presupposes capitalist production, and capitalist production presupposes masses of capital and free labour-power: the movement appears to turn in a circle, broken only by a "primitive" or previous accumulation that precedes the whole process. Chapter 26 states the secret. Chapters 27 through 31 narrate the actual history — the expropriation of the agricultural population, the bloody legislation against the expropriated, the genesis of the capitalist farmer and the industrial capitalist. Chapter 32 draws the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation to its conclusion, and Chapter 33 confirms the thesis from the colonies. This is the historical foundation of the entire volume: the reader who has followed the logic from the commodity forward here learns the violence that laid its ground.

Marx opens by demolishing the economists' fable — primitive accumulation as the reward of a frugal elite and the punishment of lazy rascals, the "original sin" of political economy. Actual history tells another story: "conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force." And it strips the phenomenon to its essence. Capital is a relation, and what had to be created was the separation of the worker from the conditions of his labour.

The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

Marx, Capital I, pages 874–875.

The historical form of the divorce is dual: the producer is freed from serfdom and the guilds — the emancipation the bourgeois historians celebrate — but freed also from all means of production and all the guarantees of the old feudal order. The two freedoms are one process, and its record is written in blood.

But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

Marx, Capital I, page 875.