Comment: primitive accumulation in modern China

Abstract

Michael Webber's essay is an important contribution to our understanding of the transition from a bureaucratic, post-capitalist society (Post 1999, pp. 138-146) to capitalism in China, with implications for the study of the transition to capitalism in other former so-called "socialist" societies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Webber's deployment of the concept of primitive accumulation?"the process (or set of processes) through which capitalist production emerges from pre-existing conditions of work" (Webber 2008, p. 3)?allows him to use his extensive research to analyze the extent and limits of capitalist development in contemporary China. However, Webber's use of the concept of primitive accumulation displays problems common to most uses of Marx's theory of the origins of capitalist social property relations. On the one hand, Webber at times equates the primitive accumulation of capital with the accumulation of stocks of wealth for investment. On the other hand, his discussion of primitive accumulation as the transformation of existing means of production into capital fails to specify the conditions under which means of production become capital. Webber's theoretical imprecision leads him to under-analyze the limited emergence of capitalist social property relations in the contemporary Chinese countryside. The limits of capitalist development of Chinese agriculture, along with the Chinese ruling groups' embrace of neo-liberal economic policies, is crucial to understanding the subordinate character of Chinese industrial development over the past three decades. Webber does adopt a relatively standard Marxian definition of primitive accumulation?"the process through which emerge capitalists, who advance capital to purchase means of production in the hope of making a profit, and workers who, separated from the means of production, have only their commodity labor power to sell." (Webber 2008, p. 3) However, at points in the essay he tends to equate