Concept Of Primitive Accumulation Research Articles

Primitive Accumulation in the East Africa Groundnut Scheme

ABSTRACT This paper revisits the Groundnut Scheme, a postwar colonial development project in East Africa infamous for its catastrophic failure. It examines the plans made by British state managers and the Scheme’s planners at both the United Africa Company and the Overseas Food Corporation to transform African colonial subjects into stabilized wage-labourers. The paper seeks to understand this social transformation in the context of the contradictory nature of capitalist social relations. This is achieved by using Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation: the separation of the worker from their means of subsistence. The paper focuses on two aspects of this process. Firstly, the creation of remote villages for the Scheme’s workers, physically separating them from traditional support structures. Secondly, the creation of a new gendered division of labour that would have transformed the homelife of the Scheme’s workers.

Circular economy disclaimers: Rethinking property relations at the end of cheap nature

Converging environmental crises have inspired a movement to shift dominant economic forms away from linear “take-make-waste” models and toward more circular forms that reimagine discarded materials as valuable resources. With the coming “end of cheap nature”, this invitation to reimagine waste as something more than “the political other of capitalist value” is seen as both an environmental necessity and an opportunity for green growth. Less often discussed is that the circular economy, in its reconfiguration of value, also has the potential to reshape contemporary property relations and dismantle existing forms of circularity. In this paper, we explore potential shifts in property relations through an analysis of three strategies often imagined as key to facilitating the transition to circularity—extended producer responsibility, repair, and online resale. Each case synthesizes existing research, public discourse, and findings from a series of focus groups and interviews with circular economy professionals. While this research is preliminary and demands additional research, all three cases suggest caution given the possibility that some circular economy strategies can concentrate value and control of existing materials stocks, dispossess those most vulnerable, and alienate participants in existing reuse, recycling, and repair markets. Drawing on and adapting Luxemburg's concept of primitive accumulation, Tsing's ideas about salvage accumulation, Moore's work on commodity frontiers and recent research which encourages more attention to processes of commoning—we argue that without careful attention to relations of power and justice in conceptualizations of ownership and the collective actions necessary to transform our economic forms in common, transitions toward the circular economy have the potential to enclose the value of discards and exacerbate inequality.

Kapitalizmin Güncel Eğilimlerini ve Kapitalist Devleti Anlamada İlkel Birikimin Güncelliği

Today the social functions of the state and commons, which have been able to escape capital’s transformative effect so far, are under attack around the world. Discussions around the concept of primitive accumulation are attempts to understand the reasons, mechanisms and results of such attacks. Primitive accumulation in historical sense refers to a precapital separation of peasants from the means of production, which created the necessary conditions for capitalist development. On the other hand, many scholars since Luxemburg argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous process throughout capitalism’s history and it is intertwined with capitalist accumulation. Bringing primitive accumulation from precapital to contemporary era created theoretical problems. Since the state is traditionally the perpetrator of primitive accumulation, the proposed way to solve them is to revisit the capitalist state debate and scrutinize its role in contemporary developments, such as land, water and resource grabbing, simultaneously happening around the world.

Introduction: Primitive Accumulation and Socialism

AbstractIn this dossier, Marx's concept of primitive accumulation is applied to socialist development in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania, three countries in which socialist revolution occurred before the full development of capitalism. The introduction profiles the ideas of Evgenii Preobrazhensky, the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist, who first applied Marx's concept to the problems of socialist development, and was executed under Stalin in 1937. Preobrazhensky advanced the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, a process that would fund industrialization by extracting surplus through planned, non-coercive transfers from market-based and state sectors. Preobrazhensky's ideas sparked debates within communist parties over collectivization and the tempo of development. The introduction and articles in the dossier point the way towards future comparative research, suggesting that the processes of primitive capitalist and socialist accumulation shared painful similarities.

Blood on the Red Banner: Primitive Accumulation in the World's First Socialist State

AbstractThis article provides a reinterpretation of Stalinism through the lens of Marx's concept of primitive accumulation. It connects a series of defining events that are usually viewed separately – the debates and oppositional movements of the 1920s, industrialization, collectivization, and the “Great Terror” – to the state's need to accumulate capital for development. Using the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, first introduced by the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, it examines the challenges of building socialism in an underdeveloped, overwhelmingly peasant country. It argues that the emergence of the left and right oppositions in the 1920s and the grain crisis in 1927–1928 resulted from the state's struggle to create a stable balance between rural and urban exchange. The hastily implemented move to collectivize resulted in a cascade of unintended consequences, including a disastrous famine, decrease in food supplies, and a precipitous fall in real wages that impelled record numbers of women into the labor force. Against a background of social instability and discontent, the Kirov murder proved a fearful trigger, igniting fears among Party leaders that ultimately resulted in mass political and social repression. The article is part of a dossier, comprising an introduction and three articles, which offers a new approach to our understanding of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania.

From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion

During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation ( ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal violence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accumulation throughout history.

Introduction: Enclosures and discontents

Book synopsis: The contributions in this volume all revisit and reformulate Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation from diverse empirical contexts in the present global age. The chapters present research drawn from Gaza, Syria, Greece, the Philippines, DR Congo, and the Yucatan; global locations that have in common the ongoing, varied, and often repetitive occurrence of dispossession forced by violent conflict, crisis and austerity politics, and corporate expansion. Each chapter also examines changing forms of resistance from across the political spectrum; responses which in themselves serve to demonstrate the deeply embedded, historically specific, class, race and gendered relations implicit in contemporary capitalist expansion. This collection of original work also pushes us to reconsider the old distinct mappings of urban and rural by comparing dispossession and resistance to it inside and outside of the city and within sites which call for a reconstituted understanding of ‘the urban’. Overall, the scholars included use rich and detailed research to variously correct and adjust Marx from their sites of study and through engagements with theoretical reformulations ranging from modernity/coloniality, through to autonomous Marxism. The chapters originally published as a special issue in City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action.

Reproductions, cultural capital and museums: aspects of the culture of copies

The concept of cultural capital is well known in museum studies from pioneering visitor research conducted and reported by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s. This paper examines the concept in the light of the criticism that, whilst it illuminates the dynamics of cultural consumption and inequality in advanced capitalist societies, its socio-genesis is less well understood. It is argued that the historical sociology of fine art reproduction provides an opportunity to (i) enlarge our understanding of its formation and (ii) to explore the cultural character of the copy and the sociology of the body. The paper draws on Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, on Connerton’s distinction between incorporated and inscribing practices and on Bourdieu’s distinction between three states of cultural capital.

Primitive Accumulation

This article examines the emergence of indigenous art in postcolonial India as a contradictory process and phenomenon. The article traces the career of Gond art, from its discovery in the jungles of central India to its state institutionalization and its presence in the contemporary international art scene. Through the example of the life and the untimely death of Jangarh Singh Singh, arguably the first Gond painter, the article interrogates the postcolonial Indian state's relationship to indigeneity and indigenous art, and the social and economic conditions of the production, circulation and accumulation of this art in the world. Using the Marxist concept of Primitive Accumulation as an analytical framework, the article makes a case for Gond art to be understood as providing allegories of global capitalism's desecration of tribal lands and culture, but also as engaging in a critique of, and providing resistance to, the ongoing accumulation through dispossession.

The logic of settler accumulation in a landscape of perpetual vanishing

As Glacier National Park celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2010, a storm of uncertainty loomed on the horizon. The park's signature glaciers, which are vanishing at an astonishing rate, were the greatest source of anxiety. Scientists now predict that all the remaining glaciers will be gone by the year 2020. The intensity of the storm was also fed by the specter of the vanishing Indian, which haunted the centennial, provoking a different sort of (colonial) anxiety. One hundred years ago, the vanishing Indian, not the glacier, served as the park's icon. The specter ruptured a temporal border that had kept the story of yesterday's vanishing Indian separate from that of today's vanishing glacier. In this landscape of perpetual vanishing, this article will focus on the concept of primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession). Of particular interest is how its conventional meaning within political economic theory is modified by settler-colonial studies and indigenous critical theory. Patrick Wolfe, for example, argues that settler colonialism – as “a complex social formation and as a continuity through time” – is “a structure rather than an event”. Like settler colonialism, accumulation by dispossession is also a structure, not an event. As an ongoing process, it cannot be relegated to a pre-capitalist past. The continuity of the vanishing logic in the Alberta/Montana borderlands sheds light on the structural dimensions, often intersecting, of settler colonialism and accumulation by dispossession. Moreover, it raises the question: Is it possible to identity a unique set of processes that we might call settler accumulation? In other words, does a distinct form of accumulation emerge from the dialectic between primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, which cannot be reduced to either of its constitutive elements?

Land grabs and primitive accumulation in deltaic Bangladesh: interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance

This essay provides theoretical and empirical analysis of the interrelationships between land grabs, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) in the context of capitalist development. Evidence from a multi-class peasant formation in deltaic Bangladesh indicates that land grabs have been propelled by interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance. Key roles have been played by illegal violence and de-linking of poor peasants from production organization and clientelist relations providing access to land. Establishment of a shrimp zone for export production has led to systematic eviction of the poor, backed by state power. Poor peasant resistance has shifted towards overt forms involving coalition-building and collective action. It is argued that the concept of primitive accumulation can subsume both market and non-market mechanisms as well as voluntary and involuntary transactions involving different degrees of intentionality, inclusive of deliberate dispossession, unintended consequences and negative externalities. Primitive accumulation and ABD correspond to distinct historical phases of capitalism and are subsumable under a generic concept of ongoing capitalism-facilitating accumulation. The dynamics of ‘actually existing capitalism’ display a two-way and recursive causal relationship in which continuing primitive accumulation is as much a consequence of expanding capitalist production as its precondition.

Comment: primitive accumulation in modern China

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

Primitive accumulation and the Scottish clann in the Old World and the New

In the Highlands of Scotland the clan system was destroyed in two or three generations after the Rising of 1745, but Scottish emigrants reconstituted clan settlements in Cape Breton and southwest Newfoundland that persisted until the first world war. This study compares kinship relations and territorial organization in the Old World and the New, examining their social structures and economic bases from the bottom up, using the concept of primitive accumulation as an analytic tool. Both in Scotland and in British North America the clan was tribal, an extended family, that held territory in common. Settlements were characteristically agglomerated and property was commonly owned by the whole kinship group. In sixteenth-century Scotland, clansmen took a tribal view of their territorial possessions and resisted feudal claims of landlordship. The assumption of ownership rights by clan chiefs in the eighteenth century undermined the clansmen's free enjoyment of the use of their communal lands and resources. Those who emigrated to Cape Breton and Newfoundland sought out their own kin and settled alongside them. Farms passed from one branch of a family to another through succeeding generations but continued to be occupied by members of the same clan and they shared labour and tools when the need arose. In the New World, the clan system was preserved by marriage, mutual aid and communal tenure not for sentimental reasons but for survival and efficiency in a harsh pioneering environment.

The concept of primitive accumulation: Lenin's contribution

The concept of primitive accumulation: Lenin's contribution