What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept
| Author | William Clare Roberts |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885117735961 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(4) 532–552
What was primitive
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117735961
Reconstructing the origin of
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a critical concept
William Clare Roberts
McGill University, Canada
Abstract
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two prem-
ises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the
earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified
primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article
argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contem-
poraneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criti-
cisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ does not
deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and
those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to
capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation
of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation
for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx
characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry
out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threa-
tened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the
specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state.
Keywords
Capitalism, exploitation, Karl Marx, primitive accumulation, settler colonialism, the state
It has been said that we are living in ‘an era of primitive accumulation’ (Federici,
2012: 138). Whether or not processes of primitive accumulation especially mark the
present, invocations of the term certainly do. When Taiaiake Alfred (2014: xi)
credits
Glen
Coulthard
with
having
‘rescued
Karl
Marx
from
his
Corresponding author:
William Clare Roberts, Department of Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St., W. Montreal,
QC H3A2T7, Canada.
Email: william.roberts3@mcgill.ca
Roberts
533
nineteenth-century hostage chamber’, he has in mind Coulthard’s mobilization and
reconstruction of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. When David Harvey
(2004: 64) claims that ‘the hallmark of [. . .] ‘‘the new imperialism’’’ of the 21st
century is ‘accumulation by dispossession’, he is rechristening and reformulating
Marx’s notion. When James Tully (2011: 154) is pressed to identify how he would
address the legacies of imperialism, he refers to the recent history of ‘dispossession,
primitive accumulation, centralised state building, militarization, economic exploit-
ation, and ecological destruction’ in order to refuse any appeal to strong states or
economic development, advocating instead a turn to ‘cooperative, community-
based, ecological and non-violent traditions of self-reliance’.
All of these users of Marx’s concept,1 however, want to sever the notion of
primitive accumulation from connections and connotations that burden it in
Marx’s text. They agree that, in order to be redeployed in the present, Marx’s
concept must be reformulated. And there is widespread agreement about the
changes that must be made. First, Marx mistakenly portrays primitive accumula-
tion as a bloody moment in the past, since replaced by the relatively bloodless
workings of the mature capitalist system. Second, as much as Marx condemns the
violent expropriation of the peasantry, he also justifies it as a necessary step on the
way to the communist future.
I would like to take issue with the current rehabilitation of ‘primitive accumu-
lation’. Rather than sever the concept from the context of its emergence, I propose
to examine it in that context. Doing so reveals the stakes of Marx’s discussion: a
proper disaggregation of the agencies responsible for capitalism. In the first
instance, Marx is concerned to specify the agency of capital. Marx (1976: 875,
928) identifies primitive accumulation as ‘the prehistory of capital’, not in order
to consign it to the past, but in order to underscore the distinction between hording
up wealth – money, land, products, whatever – and using it as capital. The violence
of primitive accumulation can amass the former, but cannot make the accumulated
wealth function as capital. This distinction – and the consequent distinction
between capital and capitalism – is, Marx thinks, essential for understanding
how capitalism operates, and what makes it different from other forms of society.
Within capitalism, capital is the agent of accumulation by exploitation, not the
agent of primitive accumulation.
This brings us to the second issue, for Marx, that of revolutionary strategy.
As most commentators note, the state is the overwhelming agent of primitive accu-
mulation. What goes unnoted is why. According to Marx, the state pursues policies
of primitive accumulation because it has become dependent upon capital
accumulation – economic growth – for its own existence and functioning.
Policies of primitive accumulation are attempts by the state to secure the conditions
of economic growth. This dependency of the state upon capital makes the state into
an enemy of all attempts to refuse, evade or escape capitalism. All such attempts
will, just to the extent that they are or promise to be successful, encounter the
armed agents of the state. This is where the state fits into capitalism. This epochal
change in the role of the state explains Marx’s insistence upon the historical inev-
itability of conquest and expropriation. He does not justify primitive accumulation
534
European Journal of Political Theory 19(4)
as a necessary step on the historical path to socialism. He argues, rather, that
existing forms of petty production, and the forms of social solidarity they foster,
are too vulnerable to the violent encroachments of capital’s mighty servant, the
state. Liberation requires a strategy of conquering the conqueror and expropriating
the expropriators.
Returning ‘primitive accumulation’ to the context of its origination, therefore,
actually brings Marx’s argument up to date. The recent reformulations of Marx’s
notion are provoked by very real and ongoing processes of coercive and violent
expropriation, the forceful separation of people from independent access to the
means of living. But these processes underscore both the complementarity of state
action and capitalist production and the irreducible difference between them.
The continuing salience of capitalist accumulation to state action, and vice versa,
indicates the contemporaneity of Marx’s analysis, not its obsolescence. Only by
clarifying what primitive accumulation was in Marx’s text can we determine what it
is and will be in the present and future.
The renovation of primitive accumulation
During the 20th century, Marxist debate over primitive accumulation was defined
by the contest between those who thought of it as an event in the past, and those
who conceived it as a continuous and ongoing process. For those who took primi-
tive accumulation to be ‘accumulation in an historical sense’ (Dobb, 1963: 178),
‘the adjective ‘‘primitive’’ correspond[ed] to a clear-cut temporal dimension (the
past)’ (De Angelis, 1999: Sec. 1).2 They focused, therefore, on pinpointing the
historical origin of capitalism in Western Europe, and especially in Britain.
Opposed to them were those who argued that ‘the mechanisms of primitive
accumulation [. . .] do not belong only to the prehistory of capitalism; they are
contemporary as well’ (Amin, 1974: 3).3 Those who forwarded this argument
focused on the ongoing relationship between a capitalist interior or core and a
non-capitalist frontier or periphery.
Despite their opposition to one another on political and historiographic
grounds, the parties to these debates shared the presupposition that primitive
accumulation marked the point of contact between capitalism and the non-
capitalist world. After all, there is no contradiction between calling primitive
accumulation ‘the pre-history of capitalism’ and agreeing that it is ongoing.
Rosa Luxemburg, the acknowledged fount of the thesis of continuous primitive
accumulation, understood capitalism to be ever-expanding into non-capitalist
zones. This is why she thought primitive accumulation to be ongoing; it
marks the process of capitalism ingesting non-capitalism (Luxemburg, 2003:
Chap. 26–32). The prehistory of capitalism is being continuously re-enacted at
the point of ingestion.
The new reading of primitive accumulation with which this article is concerned
departs in a crucial way from this common presupposition of the older debates.
Rather than allowing that processes of primitive accumulation mark the frontiers –
temporal and/or spatial – between capitalism and non-capitalism, the new accounts
Roberts
535
claim to locate primitive accumulation within capitalism itself. David Harvey’s
formulation is representative:
Marx’s general theory of capital accumulation is constructed under certain crucial
initial assumptions which broadly match those of classical political economy and
which exclude primitive accumulation processes. [. . .] The disadvantage of these
assumptions is that they relegate accumulation based upon predation, fraud, and
...
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