Robinson Crusoe and the secret of primitive accumulation: Stephen Hymer (1971)

Abstract

The solitary and isolated figure of Robinson Crusoe is often taken as a starting point by economists, especially in their analysis of international trade. He is pictured as a rugged individual – diligent, intelligent and, above all, frugal – who masters nature through reason. But the actual story of Robinson Crusoe, as told by Defoe, is also one of conquest, slavery, robbery, murder and force (Defoe 1948). That this side of the story should be ignored is not at all surprising, “for in the tender annals of political economy the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.” The contrast between the economist’s Robinson Crusoe and the genuine one mirrors the contrast between the mythical description of international tradefound in economics textbooks and the actual facts of what happens in the international economy. The paradigm of non-Marxist international trade theory is the model of hunter and fisherman who trade to their mutual benefit under conditions of equality, reciprocity and freedom. But international trade (or, for that matter, interregional trade) is often based on a division between superior and subordinate rather than a division between equals; and it is anything but peaceful. It is trade between the center and the hinterland, the colonizers and the colonized, the masters and the servants. Like the relation of capital to labor, it is based on a division between higher and lower functions: one party does the thinking, planning, organizing; the other does the work. Because it is unequal in structure and reward, it has to be established and maintained by force, whether it be the structural violence of poverty, the symbolic violence of socialization or the physical violence of war and pacification. In this essay, I would like to go over the details of Crusoe’s story – how, starting as a slave trader, he uses the surplus of others to acquire a fortune – in order to illustrate Marx’s analysis of the capitalist economy, especially the period of primitive accumulation which was its starting point. For capitalist accumulation to work, two different kinds of people must meet in the market (and later in the production process); on the one hand, owners of money eager to increase their capital by buying other people’s labor power; on the other hand, free laborers unencumbered by pre-capitalist obligations or personal property. Once capitalism is on its legs, it maintains this separation and reproduces it on a continuously expanding scale. But a prior stage is needed to clear the way for the capitalist system and get it started – a period of primitive accumulation. In the last part of Volume 1 of Capital (1967), Marx sketched the historical process by which means of production were concentrated in the hands of the capitalist, leaving the worker no alternative but to work for him. He showed how a wage labor force was created through the expropriation of the agricultural population and he traced the genesis of the industrial capitalist to, among other things, the looting of Africa, Asia and America “in the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” In the story of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe describes how a seventeenth-century Englishman amassed capital and organized a labor force to work for him in Brazil and in the Caribbean. Of course what Crusoe established was not a market economy such as emerged in England but a plantation and settler economy such as was used by capitalism in the non-European world. It might therefore be called the story of primitive underdevelopment. Defoe (1659-1731) was particularly well placed to observe and understand the essence of the rising bourgeoisie and the secrets of its origins. The son of a London butcher, he was engaged in the business of a hosiery factor and a commission merchant until he went bankrupt. During his life, he wrote many essays and pamphlets on economics, discussing among other things, banks, road management, friendly and insurance societies, idiot asylums, bankruptcy, academies, military colleges, women’s education, social welfare programs and nationalworkshops. He was one of the first writers to rely on the growing market of the middle class to earn his living (Robertson 1933; Fitzgerald 1954; Van Ghent 1961; Novak 1962; Watt 1963; Macherey 1966; Richetti 1969).