[lbo-talk] Marx on historical origin of national debt

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Thu Jul 21 07:00:32 PDT 2011


On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:41 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

I ran across this passage a few weeks ago and forgot about how much I dig it, even if he sounds a little populist at times ("lazy annuitants") and even if, contra Arrighi (who seems almost wholly inspired by the paragraph below), it's a mistake to reduce the history of capitalism to the rise and fall of empires.


> With the national debt arose an international credit system, which
> often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or
> that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system
> formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to
> whom Venice in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it
> with Holland and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the
> Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the
> nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of
> business, therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous
> amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same
> thing is going on today between England and the United States. A great
> deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any
> certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood
> of children.



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