The Temporality of Violence in Primitive Accumulation: A Soviet Subsidy to the Capitalist Transition

Abstract

Marx argued that transitions to capitalism require the violent dispossession of direct producers from their means of production. Many scholars have gone beyond the violence of transition to argue that state force is continuously used to maintain market relations. A major debate focuses on whether Marx’s “so-called” primitive accumulation was an historical or continuous process. This paper contributes an empirical puzzle to this debate: the dispossession of peasants across the former Soviet Union after 1991, which resulted from land privatization, was predominantly non-violent. This is due, I argue, to a temporal separation between violence, which occurred during the process of Stalinist collectivization, and the subsequent dispossession of cultivators in the 1990s. Peasant dispossession could unfold peacefully after 1991 only because historical violence was embedded in the structure of the collective farm—a structure that was maintained in the process of dispossession—thus constituting a Soviet “subsidy” to the capitalist transition.