The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx's Analysis of “So-called Primitive Accumulation”

Abstract

The essay discusses Marx's analysis of “so-called primitive accumulation” starting from the idea that contemporary global capitalism is characterized by new enclosures and by a set of other processes long considered characteristic of the historical transition to capitalism. A reflection on this temporal short circuit leads the author to an investigation of some of the peculiarities and difficulties of Marx's method as, for instance, the relationship between the historical and the logical order of exposition. Reading the temporal structures of capitalism against the backdrop of Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation suggests an emphasis on temporal heterogeneity, on the intertwining of continuity and rupture, of progress and catastrophe, that is far from any “historicist” interpretation of Marx. From this point of view, the author investigates some of the key questions connected to primitive accumulation: the production of labor power as a commodity as a specific and strategic form of the production of subjectivity, the concept of transition, the role of violence in capitalist development, and the relationship between formal and real subsumption of labor under capital.