Marx:
Today’s wage-labourer is tomorrow’s independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market - but not into the workhouse.
Sakai:
A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian
many English farmers and artisans couldn’t face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor.
Is it the difference of time periods? I just noticed now that the time period Sakai is talking would be a pretty early period of colonization, wouldn’t it? So it may be that by Marx’s time of writing (late 1860s-early 70s?) it was proletarians headed to America and had been in recent historical memory?
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