Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation and Capital's Violence

Abstract

This paper attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent analyses have adopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating the forcible methods by which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced in the present. I argue that the analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation can be better performed by a pair of new concepts: “capital-positing violence” and “capital-preserving violence.” I refine the conceptual core primitive accumulation (coercive capitalization of social relations of production) by focusing on the role of colonial violence in the history of capitalism, which I then elucidate with reference to Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on law-making and law-preserving violence. The resultant concepts of capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, I conclude, can illuminate both the historical and the quotidian operations of the politico-juridical force that has been constitutive of capital down to our present moment.