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https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm


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" In Chapter Twenty-Eight of Capital, Volume I, Karl Marx examines how European states deployed brutal legal measures and violent punishments, such as whipping, branding, and enslavement, to force the newly displaced rural population into the emerging wage-labor system. He details how governments criminalized vagrancy among the dispossessed peasantry to break their resistance to factory and agricultural discipline.<


Furthermore, Marx explains how the state actively intervened in the labor market by enacting statutes that legally enforced maximum wage caps and criminalized worker coalitions and strikes. Ultimately, the coercive power of the state was utilized to keep wages low and accelerate primitive capitalist accumulation. ® You can read the complete text of this chapter on the Marxists Internet Archive or explore the broader work in Capital Volume One. &