Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/15

 accumulated Capital: pre-capitalist communities and capitalism's own wage laborers.

The Empire of Capital attacks pre-capitalist forms of productive activity, peasant economies, and transforms them into sources of primitive accumulation, into external and internal colonies of capitalism. Crude Ottoman methods of coercion are abandoned, not for moral reasons, but because refined capitalist methods prove historically more effective. Brute force gives way to the more civilized form of economic coercion. Kidnapping takes the more humane form of alienation, or sale, of the surplus product of the pre-capitalist community. The return of the children as a foreign occupying army takes the subtler form of a return of the alienated surplus product in the shape of foreign Capital, a foreign administration, a foreign army, plus an assortment of educators and missionaries. The bewildered invaded community cannot possibly recognize its alienated surplus product in the transformed shape in which it returns, incorporated in Capital, administration and army, even in the weapons, teachers and priests.

The other, predominant, and proper capitalist form of accumulation supercedes the peculiar institution of the Ottoman Empire as a method for turning the life of a community against itself. In this type of Capital accumulation, kidnapping takes the unremarkable form of a normal, uneventful capitalist working day. During the regular course of an average day, what is alienated by the producer is not a child; it is the producer's own self, the productive power, the producer's labor. This productive power, this living activity materialized in products of labor, does not return to the community of producers in the form of a foreign occupying power. On the contrary, it surrounds the producer from birth to death. It is the environment. It is home, work, play, and the spaces in between. The producer's estranged activity turns against the producer in the form of the dominant institutions of modern social life: the State, commodity production and the division of labor. The communities occupied by the Ottoman army reproduced the next generation of oppressors in the act of reproducing themselves. The wage laborers of capitalism reproduce the State, commodity production and the division of labor in the act of reproducing themselves.

The two different forms of capital accumulation—estrangement of pre-capitalist producers' surplus product, and estrangement of industrial workers' labor—have led to two different historical situations for the human beings who are the sources of this accumulation. In one case the producer is excluded from the contemporary level of humanity, in the other the producer is deprived of human self-powers.

In the case of a pre-capitalist community transformed into a source of accumulation of Capital, a colony, the stable and comforting harmony of the traditional ways is destroyed, but not replaced. The colonized is severed from the form of humanity that had previously