Marx on Colonization and Bonded Labor: The End of Capital and the Beginning of a Journey

1. Introduction

In a surprise to many commentators, Marx concludes Capital (volume 1) with a chapter on colonialism. A hoary myth had it that this final chapter was nothing but an attempt to confuse the German censors, who usually read only the opening and closing pages of books. But this is implausible. To begin with, Marx left that chapter in place when he oversaw the translation of a French edition. Although he introduced significant revisions into that edition, Marx kept the concluding chapter as it was, even though it would never be seen by German censors. Despite the significance that Marx obviously attributed to it, this chapter has attracted surprisingly little critical commentary. In addition to being the conclusion to his great work, Marx posed there a hugely important problem with respect to the world history of the capitalist mode of production. I say Marx posed a problem because he certainly did not resolve it there.

In thinking about Capital as a text that poses problems, I consider myself in tune with the work’s critical method. I approach Marx’s critique of political economy as a creative research program, one that remains far from exhausted. Rather than merely defending its core propositions, I am interested here in exploring a problem that is broached but not resolved by Marx’s monumental text. I want to suggest that it can—and should—be addressed within the open-ended framework it sets out. For an example of a dialectical move of this sort consider the work undertaken by Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). SRT identifies a critical absence in Capital: although Marx identifies human labor power as the “peculiar commodity” that discloses the secrets of the capitalist mode of production, he takes for granted that this commodity—embodied in living human beings—is daily and generationally produced and reproduced. At no point does he seriously investigate the labor processes necessary to this. SRT inserts itself right at this point. Rather than reject the method of the critique of political economy, however, it deepens it in order to bridge a gap in Marx. It does this by identifying a complex set of laboring practices, some waged (at daycare centers, schools, and hospitals, for instance) and many unwaged (a myriad of household activities), all of which constitute modes of life-making in capitalist society. It is in and through these practices that labor power is reproduced. For this reason, these activities can be referred to as labors of social reproduction. This, however, requires a more expansive concept of labor than that with which many Marxists have operated, one that includes unwaged work in the household. Without such work, the commodity that drives the whole of the capitalist mode of production—labor power—would not regularly be available for sale to capital. To be sure, not all of this work is directly productive of capital. But it is all socially necessary to the reproduction of capitalism (Vogel 2013; Ferguson and McNally 2013; Ferguson 2019). Michael Lebowitz intimated some of this when he posited a circuit of wage labor that intersects with the circuit of capital. Here he was concerned with the circuit through which the commodity labor power exchanges for money in order to purchase means of consumption that aid in the reproduction of life (Lebowitz 2003: 27–50). In Marx’s notation, this is a C–M–C circuit, which ends in human consumption, as opposed to the circuit of capital in which commodities, especially human labor power, are consumed in order to create ever-expanding amounts of money capital (M–C–M′). In the spirit of SRT, I amend Lebowitz and describe this as a circuit of labor power. With these considerations on method, let us return to the final chapter of volume 1 of Capital.

Entitled “The Modern Theory of Colonialism,” Capital’s final chapter broached the issue of how capitalist relations of production were to be transplanted to England’s overseas colonies. In exploring this question, Marx’s primary interlocutor is the English author and colonial official, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. In his commentary, Marx begins by ironically commending Wakefield. However, he quickly turns sarcastic. Let us see why.

Wakefield recounts a colonization project of the 1830s led by Thomas Peel to the Swan River Colony in West Australia. Dreaming of colonial riches, Peel settled hundreds of settlers on four million acres of land. It did not go well. Upon arriving, Peel’s “laborers” effectively ran away. Reading Wakefield’s dismayed account, Marx relishes the plight of the failed colonizer:

A Mr. Peel, he [Wakefield] complains, took with him from England to the Swan River District of Western Australia means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. This Mr. Peel even had the foresight to bring with him 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once he arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River. (Marx 1976: 932–33) ¹

After a bit more fun with all this, Marx explains that so long as laboring people can find land to work for themselves—as they could in the Western Australia of the 1830s simply by squatting—they are under no pressure to accept wage labor. In colonial conditions, if land has not been extensively (and expensively) privatized, the prospective wage laborer “vanishes from the labor market” and reappears as an “independent artisan or peasant, working for himself.” In short, capitalist relations of production can be consolidated only where land has been monopolized. Notwithstanding all his careful planning, unhappy Mr. Peel forgot that he could not export “English relations of production to Swan River.” As a result, his prospective workers disappeared, and he was “left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Wakefield proceeds to condemn the colonial situation where land is cheap for allowing workers to turn into “capitalists,” by which he means laborers in possession of land of their own. Marx now erupts with sarcasm at the plight of Wakefield and unhappy Mr. Peel, “Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come!” (Marx 1976: 936).

Marx was regularly amused by stories such as this. In his Grundrisse notebooks, for instance, he delighted in a report from the Times of London which outlined the dismay of West Indian planters after the end of British colonial slavery. Rather than accepting wage labor on the plantations, the “free blacks of Jamaica,” Marx writes, “content themselves with producing only what is necessary for their own consumption.” Abjuring the capitalist work ethic, they spend their leisure time “loafing” (Marx 1973: 325–26). To “loaf,” of course, is to work for oneself rather than for a capitalist employer. So it is wherever land is abundant and available: “They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage laborers.” To the consternation of their former owners, these free people “do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations.” Like the story of Thomas Peel, this “delightful” one from Jamaica confirms the artificiality of capitalist relations of production. For such relations to become entrenched, millions of workers must be dispossessed of access to land. Only then can “the silent compulsion of economic relations”—enforced by dispossession and the threat of starvation—replace the overt compulsions of force (Marx 1976: 899).

And this is the conclusion Marx takes away from Peel’s plight in Australia. The latter’s failure—along with Wakefield’s program of colonization to which we turn in a moment—demonstrates in the New World the “secret” of the capitalist mode of production in the Old World: that capitalism rests “upon the expropriation of the worker,” their dispossession from the soil (Marx 1976: 940). This is the violence naturalized by the fully developed capitalist mode of production. It was only through the violence of dispossession that human labor power was commodified on a mass scale. But once accomplished, that violence lives on in the dread of starvation that drives millions to sell their laboring capacities in return for a wage. Without the structural relations that reproduce the dispossessions of wage labor, colonial capitalism needed the more overt forms of direct violence characteristic of bondage.

This is, of course, a revolutionary insight. It completes Marx’s account of the originary accumulation of capital and the economic coercion upon which it rests. However, it falls short as a comprehensive explanation of the global development of capitalism. This is because Marx looks back from the colonies to Europe; he uses the failure of colonial experiments such as Peel’s to explain what made capitalism possible in Europe. But if we look forward, rather than backward, very different issues come into view. Among other things, it is then quickly apparent that, unlike Peel’s Australian debacle, not all New World experiments were failures. In fact, some colonies soon became the world’s primary sites for the production of commodities like sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and more. And this obliges us to account for how capital could develop in the colonies without widespread wage labor. This may not have been Marx’s question in Capital. But it is a crucial historical question. And Marx was well aware of these distinctive labor dynamics of the New World. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain laborers from Spain,” he wrote. “But, without laborers, their capital must have perished” (Marx 1976: 934). No laborers, no capital. This is why New World colonizers enslaved Indigenous peoples and then purchased bonded Africans. Marx saw this, but he did not probe further. In order to delve fully into this colonial trajectory, we need to stay with Wakefield and the colonial context a bit longer than did Marx.

2. “No Free Man Would Work”

Wakefield was not the first to grasp the unique labor problem confronting colonial capitalism. Alexander McDonell laid it out in Considerations on Negro Slavery (1824). Having spent five years in the British slave colony of Demerara, McDonnell returned to England to work as secretary to the Committee of West India Merchants, a pro-slavery lobby group. Yet, with abolitionism growing in influence, he could not afford to be a crude apologist. Instead, he made a case for colonial slavery by appealing to principles of liberal political economy.

In chapter 4 of his Considerations, McDonnell argues that emancipated slaves show no inclination to become “a free peasantry working for hire.” This is due to “the abundance of food throughout the West Indies,” which allows free people to enjoy “the privilege of being idle.” In other words, where food is abundant, free laborers are under no compulsion to work for an employer. As if channeling Marx, McDonnell claims that people will not work for others “without compulsion.” He continues: “that compulsion is of two kinds, the coercion of a master, and the dread of starvation” (McDonnell 1824: 59, 63, 71). Given that free people will always be able to feed themselves in the West Indies, the terror of starvation is a nonfactor. It follows that “the coercion of a master” is necessary to economic development in the colonies.

This is the problem that Wakefield sought to resolve. He grasped that McDonnell’s worry about the abundance of food is irrelevant if people cannot easily acquire land. The key question, therefore, is access to land on which food can be grown or procured. In England and America, Wakefield informs us that “the original and permanent cause of slavery in America is superabundance of good land.” Conveniently, he forgets to point out that this “superabundance” was made possible by the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples. But he is nevertheless right to argue that where cheap land is available, as it was in the mainland colonies of North America, poor immigrants will avoid the labor market; they will generally prefer to farm their own land. Like McDonnell, Wakefield saw slavery as the obvious solution. He pointed out that development in the US South “could not have taken place without slavery.” In fact, he argued that until his time (the 1830s), “not a single society” with a “superabundance of good land” has prospered “without slavery.” Faced with a lack of wage laborers when they arrive in the colonies, wealthy European settlers “want slaves” because “they want labor which shall be constant.” And “constant” means labor that does not willy-nilly exit the market; it is labor that must stay in place. This is the overriding virtue of bonded labor. One form of the latter, a familiar one in Australia, was convict labor. But the latter was not always available in adequate supplies. So, “not having convict labor, they will long for African slaves” (Wakefield 1833: 15, 29, 191, 36, 35). ² The alternative, as we shall see, is what Wakefield will call “natural slavery,” or wage labor. So “natural” is wage labor that it requires artificially high land prices to take hold. This is the heart of the Wakefield system of colonization.

A little more than a century after Wakefield, Eric Williams pinpointed this issue in Capitalism and Slavery. “Other things being equal,” Williams argued, “free men would be preferred.” But, he continued, “in the early stages of colonial development other things are not equal. When slavery is adopted, it is not adopted as the choice over free labor; there is no choice at all” (Williams 1964: 6). As Sidney Mintz put it, “Since such a labor force would not materialize ‘freely,’ it would have to be dragooned” (Mintz 1989: 48). Or as a traveler to Texas in 1840 explained, the prevalence of slavery there derived from the fact that “land is so cheap. . . no one could cultivate it by means of free labor” (quoted in Campbell 1989: 67). This is what Wakefield discerned. “Without servants,” as he saw in the case of unhappy Mr. Peel, “capital perished.” In European colonies, capital would accumulate largely through bonded labor, or not at all. Yet, Wakefield was writing on the eve of abolition in the British Empire. The dominant form of coerced labor—chattel slavery—was about to disappear. He thus needed a route to the other form of coercion, “the dread of starvation” identified by McDonnell. To this end, Wakefield’s scheme for systematic colonization advocated raising colonial land prices. If these were to be increased enough, poor immigrants would be compelled to work for wages before they could contemplate buying land. They would be economically coerced into entering the labor market.

Wakefield thus addressed the colonial labor question in the spirit of the new age of industrial capitalism. It was this—his attempt to chart a colonial model appropriate to the era of liberal industrialism—that gave him such influence over liberal political economists in Britain, and this at a time when the latter had an important impact on ruling class circles. Wakefield was also the product of a larger “revolution in colonial thought” in which colonization was no longer imagined merely as an outlet for paupers, but as a grand project for fashioning a bourgeois world (Belich 2009: 148–65). Liberals seeking a colonial program free of the taint of slavery were profoundly drawn to “the Wakefield principle,” the proposal that expropriated colonial lands should be offered at a price “sufficient” to prevent poor laborers from acquiring it on arrival in the New World. By forcing poor immigrants into the labor market for years, all in hopes that they could eventually earn enough to buy land, “free” labor would be provided, rather than bonded. This was all liberal political economists needed to hear. John Stuart Mill would declare himself a disciple of Wakefield on this matter in the 1830s, as would Herman Merivale, the Oxford professor of political economy who became Britain’s permanent under-secretary for the colonies in the following decade. In abjuring the old mercantile system with its reliance on slavery, Wakefield had laid a course for “a middle-class empire,” one that accorded with the revamped interests of the industrial bourgeoisie (Semmel 1970: 82–89, 95–98, 110). As we have observed, Wakefield referred to his policy as promoting “natural slavery,” that is, the “natural” poverty of wageworkers forced to labor for capitalists, in place of full-fledged bondage (House of Commons 1841: 234). This is why Marx drew attention to Wakefield’s argument. The British writer had disclosed the secret of primitive accumulation: the separation of laborers from the land that induces economic coercion. Having highlighted this, Marx then returns to the analysis of Europe with Wakefield’s insight in hand. But I want to stay with the colonies a bit longer. And this means attending to the two centuries in which bondage was the key to planter capitalism.

3. Blocking the Turnover of Labor: Forms of Bondage in New World Capitalism

Aspiring settler capitalists in New World colonies were constantly plagued by the rapid turnover of “free” hired labor. In Maryland in the mid-seventeenth century, even with an exceptionally high wage rate, employers could not retain workers. A study of 158 wage earners in that colony showed that only a handful turned to waged work on a full-time basis. Most worked their own land and merely supplemented income with episodic waged employment (Jonas 1956: 27–38). The transience of wageworkers deeply frustrated employers and incentivized the use of bondpeople. This is why early colonists relied on indentured workers. Between 1580 and 1775, at least 350,000 “white” servants arrived in colonial British America, representing about two-thirds of all Europeans immigrating during those centuries (McCusker and Menard 1985: 242). The proportion is higher when we add in the tens of thousands of convicts sentenced to forced labor in the English colonies. Like slaves, indentured servants were personally commodified, albeit on a temporary rather than permanent basis. New World indentured servants were regularly bought and sold and were legally defined as “commodities” in a variety of statutes. The Barbadian historian Hilary McD. Beckles has thus described indentured service as a form of “proto-slavery” (Beckles 1985). But by the 1660s in Barbados and somewhat later on the English mainland, enslaved Africans were displacing European servants as the primary form of unfree labor (Menard 1988–89). Chattel slavery was becoming the principal solution to labor turnover. Writing in 1760, Benjamin Franklin conceded that colonists bought enslaved Africans “because slaves may be kept as long as a man pleases, or has occasion for their labor, while hired men are continually leaving their master. . . and setting up for themselves” (Franklin 1751). Factory owners in the Northern United States routinely struggled with worker turnover rates of 100 percent, that is, with the effective loss of every worker inside twelve months (Rosenthal 2018: 50–71). This played enormous havoc with production and profits.

In 1829, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company, for instance, imported 500 indentured servants from England. Faced with low wages and brutal working conditions, large numbers simply ran off. Twenty years or so later, the Cape Fear Navigation Company of North Carolina introduced 180 German and Hungarian immigrants from New York. They all fled as quickly as they could (Cecelski 2001: 115). For this reason, many industrial enterprises in the antebellum South—ironmaking, lumbering, mining, ropemaking, tobacco processing, and more—relied on Black bonded labor. So desperate for workers were employers in North Carolina’s forest and naval stores industries that they knowingly employed runaway slaves on a regular basis (Starobin 1970; Cecelski 2001: 131–32).

Whether they were purchasing servants on multiyear indentures or chattel slaves, planters were procuring guaranteed access to labor power, that is, to the physical and intellectual capacities for work inherent in human beings. In conditions where land was not systematically monopolized, and where “surplus populations” scarcely existed, dominant classes, as Wakefield saw, frequently elected to bind bearers of labor power to owners. Across the New World, this settler colonial project of bonded labor was a multiracial one embracing indigenous peoples, poor Europeans, and Africans.

Even after the abolition of chattel slavery—and sometimes alongside it in the decades before abolition—other forms of servile labor expanded. Laboring next to slaves in Cuba by the last quarter of the nineteenth century were at least 125,000 indentured workers from China. These toilers were wage earners. Yet, their eight-year contracts could be bought and sold; they worked in the fields and mills under armed drivers; they could not leave their employment; they were routinely whipped; and they could not leave the estate without their master’s written consent. Such conditions applied to hundreds of thousands of bonded workers from Asia through the British and Spanish colonies across the West Indies and to “coolie” laborers in Louisiana canefields after the Civil War (Lai 1993; Jung 2006). Despite receiving wages, these indentured laborers too lacked most forms of legal freedom. As one historian observes, “It was an odd form of ‘wage labor’ indeed in which the worker had almost the same effective legal status as a slave” (Scott 2000: 30).

This is a reminder that the wage form could coexist with bondage and semi-bondage. It is arguable that this was true of millions of workers in Britain and the United States well into the nineteenth century too (Craven and Hay 1994: 72, 83, 80; Rockman 2007: 6; Steinfeld 2001: 9, 29). What is clear, however, is that for centuries of capitalist development, especially in colonial settings, the pattern discerned by Wakefield predominated. Given the availability of cheap land expropriated from indigenous peoples, capitalists—particularly planters—resorted to bonded labor to produce commodities and the surplus value attendant on them.

In India, to take one final example, British colonialism used forms of indentured labor on both cotton and tea plantations. In justifying the use of indentureships, the Secretary of State for India, Charles Wood, mocked liberal political economists for their dogmatic reliance on the laws of supply and demand. The problem was that even when British investors created a demand for labor, they could not find it. There was, in short, no “supply” to match demand. This, he claimed, was because Indian peasants preferred leisure to working for wages. The Economist found itself in reluctant agreement. In India, it conceded, there were “very particular difficulties” that obstructed “the primary motives upon which political economy depends” (quoted in Beckert 2014: 254). Put plainly, possessing land of their own, Indian cultivators did not behave like the “rational market actors” beloved of bourgeois economic theory. Relieved of the dread of starvation that accompanies expropriation from the land, they elected not to become wage-seeking market actors. This is where indentured labor came in. Coercion was the substitute for the ostensibly automatic workings of the market.

4. Conclusion: Bondage and Colonial Capitalism

It is time that Marx’s engagement with Wakefield on colonialism receive more attention from critical scholars. On the verge of exploring the distinctive dynamics of settler capitalist development, Marx returned his gaze to Europe to complete the story of the birth of the capitalist mode of production there. Those of us seeking a more multidimensional account of the global history of capitalism today need to pursue the story Marx did not tell. In so doing, we extend, develop, and deepen historical materialist accounts of the history of our world. We reinstate the centrality of coercion to the construction of full market relations. And we recenter bondage, slavery, colonialism, and racism as constitutive elements of capitalism as a global system.