A presentation to Misneach.abu in Anagaire , Donegal Gaeltacht 2021

1. Anagaire, Tír Chonaill
Misneach
5ú – 7ú Mí Samhain

3. What is the history of
worker’s movements?
• Pre-industrial craftsmen who controlled secrets of traditional
technology, the "arts" or "mysteries" of their crafts.
• Medieval guilds protected members' livelihoods and oversaw
progression of members - apprentice to craftsman to
journeyman to master and grandmaster.
• ‘Guild’ comes from ‘gold’, held collectively for members
interests.

4. The Great Transformation
 “man’s propensity to barter, truck
and exchange” (Adam Smith
Wealth of Nations 1776)
 “Before capitalism no economy
has ever existed, that was
controlled by markets, though
they existed they were
incidental....In such a community
the idea of profit is barred;
haggling is decried; giving freely is
acclaimed as a virtue...” (K.
Polanyi
 Early societies characterised by
reciprocity and redistribution.

5. Potlatch – The ‘gift’ economy
• An example of this in a non-market society is the potlatch
of North western America where resources are
ceremonially given away to others according to social
status, with the tacit expectation of reciprocation. Status is
raised not by who has the most resources, but by who
distributes the most resources.
• Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 "a worse
than useless custom, wasteful, unproductive, and contrary
to civilized values” and "by far the most formidable of all
obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even
civilized."

6. Workshop - What events formed the ‘Long Journey to
Capitalism’
 The Great Famine 1315 ; The Avignon Papacy 1308 –
1378, the Papal Schism (1378–1416), the Black Death.
 “for more than a century, the continent suffered a massive
decline in population and a regression in productive
capacity.... it had no known historical precedent. It took
place in an atmosphere of catastrophe, ceaseless
epidemics, endemic war, spiritual disarray, social and
political disturbances” (Bois 1984:1)
 Between 1301 and 1325, average life expectancy was 29
 Between 1348 - 1375 it was 17

7. • Islamic Golden Age (c.750 CE - c.1258 CE) Ibn
Sīnā, or Avicenna.
• The Renaissance classical antiquity, Arabic
mathematics, printing.
• Humanism condemned corruption and held that
true religion was a matter of inward devotion
rather than an outward symbol and ritual
• The Reformation - Corruption; purgatory; limbo;
sacraments; translation of and access to the bible;
rejection of church authority

8. Political and economic reformation
Equality - Unskilled labourers and peasants embraced the most radical
theological options preaching against landowners and kings.
Wandering monks preached that the ‘holy poor’ were entitled to
wage war on the ‘corrupt rich’.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. ...
The Hungarian Peasants' War(1514), the revolt against Charles V in
Spain (1520), the great Peasant’s War in Germany (1524) “the most
important mass uprising of pre-modern Europe”

9. A ‘Political’ Reformation
Individual Property Rights Merchants and minor princes saw
potential for confiscating church property; avoiding taxes; more
trade and profit.
"Thus you shall live with us, and the land shall be open before
you; live and trade in it and acquire property in it.”
Luther wrote on “Against the murdering, thieving hordes of
peasants”
Drawn to humanist individualism and free trade, merchants were
convinced that their earnings were the result of their individual
merit and hard work, unlike the inherited wealth of traditional
aristocrats

10. The Emergence of
Modern Banking

11. Deuteronomy 23:19 “Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy
brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any
thing that is lent upon interest”
Quran "O you who have believed, do not consume usury,
doubled and multiplied, but fear Allah that you may be
successful" (3:130)
Profit - Pope Sixtus V (1521-1590) condemned the charging of
interest as "detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred
canons and contrary to Christian charity.
Charging interest on loans of up to 10% was made legal in
1545 by Henry VIII.

12. prohibited
them from
prohibited
them from
taking
profits

13. The Age of Exploration, slavery & colonialism
 Dum Diversas, a papal bull in 1452 by Pope Nicholas that
authorized King of Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and
“consign them to perpetual slavery”
 By the time the 17th century had ended perhaps 200,000 Spaniards
had moved to the Indies, to Mexico, to Central America…In contrast
somewhere between 60,000,000 and 80,000,000 natives from
those lands were dead.” (American Holocaust. by D. Stannard.
Oxford University Press, 1992.)
 Depopulation leads for demand for labour for the plantations,
Europeans turned to Africa for a supply of slave labour.
 ....VideosMandateA Brief History of the USA by Michael
Moore.flv

16. The Company and International Markets
• Merchants risking fortunes in these adventures need a special
level of support, the result is the chartered company, with
charter issued by crown.
• Tied up large sums for money for long periods before any profit,
so speculators needed to share the risk.
• The resulting organization is the joint-stock company, in which
investors hold shares, shareholders
• Their share in the company's stock can be sold at whatever price
buyer and seller may agree upon.
• The emergence of specialist stock-brokers, to arrange deals
between buyers and sellers s in return for a cut on each
transaction.
• In London the brokers gather at first in Jonathon’s Coffee House
and began to call themselves (from 1773) the Stock Exchange.
•

18. Black skin
becomes
associated with
slavery, savagery,
immorality and
ignorance.
A colour line
begins to be
drawn

19. Enclosures, Plantations,
Clearances
Primitive Accumulation

23. Enclosure - a revolution of the rich – a redefinition of
property rights
Collective common law and tradition was replaced by law and
individual and exclusive property rights.
Elimination of use-rights and block on access to shared land,
privatization of common land
Improving land was becoming the basis of property rights, failure
to improve could mean forfeiting the right of property
John Locke 1689 ‘Second Treatise of Government – theory of
property based upon ‘improvement’
“Between 1760 and 1820 are the years of wholesale enclosure in
which, in village after village, common rights are lost…enclosure
was a plain enough case of class robbery."

24. Proletariansation
A ‘productive’ agricultural sector could not sustain agricultural workforce.
The dispossessed masses obliged to sell labour power back to landlords and
to new industries.
AND.......they provide a new consumer market for food and textiles that in turn
drive industrial production.
Creates a new working class that was market dependent with no alternative
resources.
Capitalism creates its own form of poverty that did not previously exist, mass
unemployment
“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or
they will never be industrious.”
Arthur Young; 1771

25. Proletariansation
“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the
people of the means of producing for themselves” Perelman, M (2000) The
Invention of Capitalism, Duke Univ Press, 2
The real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural
peasantry from their access to land.
Marx called it Primitive Accumulation how a new class gain the necessary
assets and control to employ another class, through a system of wage labour,
as a new mode of production displaces an earlier mode of production
“thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven
from their homes turned into vagabonds and then whipped branded and
tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary
for the system of wage labour after which of course this violence is replaced
by the silent compulsion of economic relations”

26. Manufactories
• Arkwright combined power, machinery, semi-skilled labour and the new raw
material (cotton) to create mass-produced yarn.
• It brought the first widespread industrial employment of women and children.
The establishment of the mill
system and the first manufactories
Wage earners by 1900:
United Kingdom 90%
United States 63%
Germany 66%
France 58%

27. The Irresistible rise of capitalism
1780 - 1880
• Exploitation of peasant labour
• Colonial exploitation, pillage and slavery
• Development of domestic and international
‘markets’
• Enclosure and the Industrial Revolution:
• (cottage industry → mill → manufactories)
• A system based upon the formal submission
of labour to capital

28. Imperialism & Ireland
“the new imperial project of the English state was to subdue the
Irish by transforming their social property relations and by
introducing agrarian capitalism (Meiksins –Woods:152 )
Those Irish chieftains who remained in power would become
“improving and expropriating landlords” and of course
encourage settlement.
“In Ireland it was now possible to impose a new economic order
with coercion of its own, perhaps the worlds first structural
adjustment programmes.” (Meiksins-Woods: Woods 154 )
Needless to say military force and conquest always remained
central to imperial projects , with or without settler colonies

29. Imperialism & Ireland
• Sir john Davies 1610 in justification of the Ulster plantation
“civility cannot possibly be planted by this mixed plantation of some of the
natives…[who] would never, to the ends of the world, build houses, make
townships or villages, or improve the land”
• William Petty 1671 ‘An Essay on Political Autonomy’,
Cromwell’s surveyor general.
Like students of medicine who ”practice their inquiries upon cheap and
common animals”

30. “At Culloden the British
government first defeated a
tribal uprising and then
destroyed the society that had
made it possible.
The exploitation of the country
during the next 100 years
was within the same pattern
of colonial development –
new economies introduced for
the greater wealth of the
few, and the unproductive
obstacle of a native
population removed”
(Prebble, J 1963)
Highland Clearances
Fuadach nan Gàidheal

31. 1792, known to Gaelic-speaking Highlanders as
the Bliadhna na Caorach ("Year of the Sheep").
1851 The Scotsman
“Collective emigration is, therefore, the removal of a
diseased and damaged part of our population. It is a
relief to the rest of the population to be rid of this part.
Karl Marx in Das Kapital - Primitive Accumulation
“…the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of
feudal and clan property, and its transformation into
modern private property under circumstances of reckless
terrorism”

32. “without English capitalism there would
probably have been no capitalist system
of any kind”
“Thereafter...from Britain’s European
neighbours to the farthest corners of the
colonial world, would be determined by
the new imperatives of capitalism”
(Woods 145)

33. “Manchester did not remain an enclave...in
the general backwardness, but became the
model”
(Hobsbawm 26)
“conquering markets by war and colonization
required not merely an economy capable of
exploiting those markets…
but also a government willing to wage war
and colonize for the benefit of British
manufacturers”
(Hobsbawm 27-8)

34. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the
extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of
the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of
Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of
black skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production….
…celebrated by a vast, Herod like slaughter of the
innocents”
….a system which comes into the world “dripping from
head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” xxv

35. In 1600, East India Company was established, Britain was
producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, India was generating
some 23%
"a new dark age of colonial war, indentured labour,
concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and
disease."
By 1940 India was a society with 16% literacy, a life
expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over
90% living below the poverty line.
"Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in
the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its
economic and political structures. They died in the golden age
of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the
theological application of the sacred principles of Smith,
Bentham and Mill.“ Davis, M (2002) Late Victorian Holocausts

36. The Age of Enlightenment and the Conflict of Ideas –
Equality and Property
18th century European philosophy - human reason could be used to combat
ignorance, superstition, tyranny of hereditary aristocracy.
Voltaire opposed tyranny but was highly suspicious of equality “It is not the
labourers one should educate, but the good bourgeoisie, the tradesmen”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that inequality was unnatural “it is therefore
one of the main functions of government to prevent an extreme inequality
of wealth...”
1776 American War of Independence; 1789 French Revolution; 1798 United
Irish Rebellion
The Law of Chapelier (1791) “all crowds composed of artisans or
workers, or incited by them will be considered to be riots”

37. Ideology
Destutt de Tracy 1754-1836, the science of ideas, idea-ology. It is
generally considered as a coherent set of ideas that provide the
basis for some kind of political action.
Comprising a
• (1) critique of the current social order;
• (2) values and a model for a new social order;
• (3) a strategy to bring that about.
The origin of the terms LEFT and RIGHT date back to the French
Revolution and the seating arrangements adopted by aristocrats
and radicals at the first meeting of the Estates General in 1789.

38. Raw
Materials
Means of
production
Industrial
Capital
Labour
Goods
Market
competition
decides price
Price
Profit
What is
Capitalism?
Finance
Capital
Wages

39. Contradictions in capitalism
Before capitalism, crises were ones of underproduction (famine or scarcity)
During a boom, capitalists rush to invest in profitable enterprises, the result can be
excess capacity when goods and services cannot be sold a ‘Crisis of over production’
This tendency leads to the paradox of “poverty in the midst of plenty,” or more
precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.
Limited purchasing-power of the working class to buy back all the goods and services
their labour produces.
Accumulation of wealth leads to speculation, bubbles & crashes in financial markets.
The solution is to destroy the value of existing capital (plant, machines and
employees) in order to cut costs and so restore profitability.

42. The Age of Capital

43. Workshop - Laissez-faire, The Depression, The
Berlin Conference
• Laissez-faire, a 19th century term to describe an economic
system where the government intervenes as little as possible
and leaves the private sector to organise economic activity
through markets.
• In 1843, the newspaper The Economist was founded, an
influential voice for the promotion of laissez-faire capitalism. In
response to the Irish Famine, they argued that for the
government to supply free food for the Irish would violate
natural law and destroy the ‘natural’ workings of the market.

44. The Long Depression
• 1873 Collapse of Vienna Stock Exchange and the German Banking
Collapse; shares in German companies lose 60% of value.
• 1873–1879 USA 18,000 businesses, 491 banks, and ten states went
bankrupt, 89 railroad companies.
• 1882 French banking collapse;
• Price of iron and cotton halved and triggered mass emigration.
• The booming economies of Europe and USA were awash with surplus
capital had flowed into speculative investments, creating a bubble of
inflated asset-values

45. The Response to the Long Depression
(1) Monopolisation – As markets became dominated by a small
number of giant corporations, ‘monopolies’, and ‘cartels’.
(2) Protectionism – a process was most advanced in Germany and
the US
(3) Imperialism - In pursuit of cheap raw materials, captive
markets, and new investment outlets, the great powers turned
much of the ‘underdeveloped’ world into a geopolitical
battleground.

46. The Scramble for Africa
Berlin Conference 1884
Principle of Effective
Occupation
10% in European hands by
1900 90%
Belgian Congo - between 5
& 10 million deaths by 1910
Herero and Nama-qua
Genocide 1904 - over
100,000
(1) Political EconomyMandateMANDATE
videosColonialism in 10 Minutes The Scramble
For Africa2.flv

47.  (4) Rising arms expenditure - arms spending ended the Long
Depression and heralded the coming World War
 British military expenditure rose from £32 million in 1887 to £77
million in 1914.
 German naval spending rose from 90 million marks in the mid
1890s to 400 million in 1914.
 Krupps at Essen employed 16,000 workers in 1873, but 70,000 in
1912.
 Armstrong –Whitworth employed 40% of the all the engineering
workers on Tyneside in 1914.
 The Long Depression started the countdown to the First World War

48. “Carried away by the search for profits
and enlarged production, national
capitalisms searched throughout the
world for space in which to expand
confronting one another with increasing
severity” (Beaud, M 1999)

49. Manifest Destiny
Indian Removal

51. Workshop – What is Fordism? What is Taylorism
• Fordism craft production to assembly line mass production
• Workers as consumers
• Emergence of ‘New Unionism’
• Combine mass consumption with mass production to produce
sustained economic growth
• Taylorism is a technique of labour discipline and workplace
organization, based upon supposedly scientific studies of
human efficiency and incentive systems.
• The principles of scientific management broke down each
labour process into organised if fragmented tasks according to
rigorous time and motion studies
(1) Political EconomyMandateMANDATE videos(2) Fordism
1920s USA.flv

52.  Unemployment 15%
throughout the ‘roaring
twenties’.
 1929 40% of US families had ¾
of income for basic necessities.
 Huge profits created speculative
bubbles in USA.
 Share prices doubled in two
years then halved in two
months.
 Unemployment rose and wages
fell, exports collapsed.
 Mass communist movements
and militant trade unionism.
 Rise of Fascism