TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE, MARXIST CONTRADICTIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTIONS: A HISTORICAL

The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. [...] Marx lists a number of events that ‘deprived the peasant of the ownership of the means of production,’ but the crucial one in his mind was clearly the enclosure of the open fields. [...] In the open fields, the cultivators had the power to prevent the conversion to grass since the management of the land was vested in the farm community as a whole. [...] The invention of spinning machinery in the eighteenth century was the result of the successful expansion of the cottage mode of production in the seventeenth. [...] One of the virtues of Schumpeter’s metaphor is that it unites the two faces of the Industrial Revolution: the progress was the ‘creative’ consequence; the poverty the ‘destructive’ consequence.