Primitive Accumulation

Primitive Accumulation

Primitive Accumulation

In Capital I, having explained the laws of development of capitalism, and the distinctive features of the capitalist mode of production, Marx turns to the process by which capitalism historically established itself. To pose this historical question - how did capitalism arise? - Marx focuses not simply upon the way in which one set of relations of production is transformed into another - the transition from feudalism to capitalism - but on how one class of workers, defined by their lack of property, came to confront another, capitalists, who monopolized the means of production. The 'so-called secret', as Marx terms it, of primitive accumulation resides not in the simple expansion of the provision of the means of production in a quantitative sense but, rather, in a revolutionary reorganization of the relations of production (Bukharin, 1973).

Primitive accumulation for Marx was, in other words, the process by which a pre-capitalist system of largely agrarian relations and small-scale property holding - a peasantry having some form of direct control over the means of production, namely land - was dispossessed. The origins of capitalism are to be found in the process by which the peasants are freed - there is much irony in Marx's use of this word - to become wage laborers in agriculture (on large commercial estates) and in industry. Marx turns to the case of the enclosure movement in Britain - in effect, the violent expropriation of forms of common property - and the political and extra-economic means by which this long process of the creation and disciplining of a proletariat was achieved. Marx made it clear that this process always required the powers of the state and was necessarily violent - written in blood and fire, as he put it (Frank, 1978).

In seeing the enclosure movement as paradigmatic of primitive accumulation, Marx opens up a complex debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism and how other parts of europe, and subsequently the colonial and post-colonial world, stood in a different relation to the 'original sin' of primitive accumulation. The debate between Dobb and Sweezy (see Hilton, 1976) turns precisely on the interpretation of other European experiences and the weight attributed to the role of exchange and market transactions as the force in the disintegration of pre-capitalist relations, or whether the pre-capitalist solidity was broken by the dynamics of class structure and struggle over property (see brenner thesis). These debates were, of course, central not only to the origins of capitalism in Europe but to the dynamics of capitalism at the 'periphery'; that is to say, how forms of capital took hold of agrarian societies in the context of European empire (the first age of empire) and the genesis of a mercantile world system (Lenin, 1963).

Marx broke theoretically with the basic principles of classical political economy, but did not decisively break on the issue of accumulation of capital. While he does address accumulation in other parts of his work, the main discussion is found in Part VII ...