So-called Primitive Accumulation Research Articles

Affixing the Nomads: Revisiting Marx’s Theory of “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” with a Deleuzo-Guattarian-Inspired Theory of the Colonial State

This essay tests Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation on nomadic and seminomadic populations. Drawing on a comparative historical-sociological analysis of nomadic communities in North Africa and North America, it argues that in primitive accumulation, the control of mobility is as central as that of land enclosure. It theorizes the role of the colonial state as an apparatus of capture that operates not only through enclosure but through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. For the colonized, this historical and continuous process of primitive accumulation operates through a double enclosure: land and mobility. For the empire, this process consolidates imperialism and statehood. Primitive accumulation deployed by a colonial state is empire making. This essay thus agrees with indigenous and critical scholars about the race-making function of primitive accumulation and provides a theoretical foundation regarding the primitive accumulation of mobility relevant to—but occulted by—the field of the sociology of migration.

Reframing So-Called Primitive Accumulation for Settler Colonial Contexts: Ancestral Enclosures and Spatial Conceptions of History

ABSTRACT The question of land must be centered if anti-capitalist and anticolonial camaraderies are to be sustained between settler and Indigenous peoples. This essay suggests that enclosures of Indigenous homelands, or what might be called primitive accumulations in the Marxist tradition, are not always understood by settlers who are inclined to transpose European experiences onto Indigenous ones. Enclosures of Indigenous homelands cut people off not only from the “means of production” and material foundations forming a way of life, but also from their national futurity, living kin, and spiritual relationships. For the purposes of this essay, this experiential difference is marked by the concept of ancestral enclosures. Theorizations of settler colonialism as a temporally fluid and ongoing system of domination synchronizes with recent Marxist scholarship on primitive accumulation from Harvey (accumulation by dispossession), De Angelis (the continuity of primitive accumulation), and others. My argument emphasizes that the temporal continuity of primitive accumulation must be understood alongside heterogeneous ontologies, attending not only to the "when" but also the "what" of primitive accumulation. The concept of ancestral enclosures is therefore crucial for settler colonial contexts where it is not only the “means of production” that is seized, but also a living, breathing ancestor.

Gold, Coffee, and Slaves: Brazil and “the So-Called Primitive Accumulation”

Gold, Coffee, and Slaves: Brazil and “the So-Called Primitive Accumulation”

The Meaning of 'So-Called Primitive Accumulation'

What did Marx mean in his discussion of "so-called primitive accumulation" in Capital? Here, Ian Angus argues that the term is widely misunderstood—but its illumination reveals great insight to the conditions of exploitation and expropriation.

Pathways to social development: Rosa Luxemburg’s studies on the anthropology and sociology of imperialism

ABSTRACT While Rosa Luxemburg is widely known for her critique of reformism and political authoritarianism, less attention has been paid to her anthropological and ethnographic studies of non-Western and precapitalist societies. This chapter examines Luxemburg’s work on this in her Introduction to Political Economy and writings composed between 1907 and 1914 at the school of the German Social-Democratic Party in Berlin. In doing so, it compares and contrasts Luxemburg’s studies on the non-Western world with the late writing of Marx (1872–1883), especially concerning “the so-called primitive accumulation of capital.”

“What does it mean to make a picture of the now?”

“What does it mean to make a picture of the now?”

‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

The article elaborates on Marx’s concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by extending it to the field of memory and introducing a new concept of the ‘primitive accumulation of memory’. The article argues that this concept gives us an innovative path to understand the relationship between memory and capital. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the break-up of Yugoslavia and its thoroughly revised memoryscape, this text combines a politicoeconomic analysis with the evaluation of memory-related ideological shifts that are in fact perceived as long-term mnemonic wars in (post-)Yugoslavia. The article analyses how nationalism and memory revisionism are internally linked to capitalist accumulation. More specifically, the article will observe how an ethnocentric mnemonic war sought to openly negate the socialist and anti-fascist past. Indeed, the creation of an anti-communist, and at times anti-antifascist, orientation was integral to the imagining of new nation-states. Juxtaposed to this creative and generative current of memory revisionism, the primitive accumulation of capital in post-Yugoslavia began with the ‘deaccumulation’ of social infrastructure and wealth, and with the dispossession of working people. The bigger the dispossession, the larger the nationalist accumulation of memory and displacement of class antagonism. Finally, the article discusses what at first glance seems to be a pacifying discourse of ‘national reconciliation’, which stoked a thorough revision of the public memory of World War II. This revision reconciled fascist collaborationists and anti-fascist Partisans, and it helped to challenge Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist consensus, while also framing the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

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Militant Landscape: Notes on Counter-Figuration from Early Modern Genre Formation to Contemporary Practices, or, Landscape after the Failure of Representation

Abstract In 1844, the year of Marx's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, J.M.W. Turner presented Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the first landscape painting to both articulate the ontological shifts brought about by new modes of extraction and production, but also to suggest concomitant transformation in perception. In this way, it collapsed the dialectical relation between perceiving subject and external landscape, suggesting the reciprocal relationship of reification. In 2013, the contemporary artist and filmmaker Zachary Formwalt produced a piece entitled Projective Geometry in which he read from Chapter 25 of Marx's Capital, the chapter on “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” This voice-over accompanies footage—each shot organized in rigorous single point perspective—of the railroad built by England, France, and Belgium extending from the Ivory Coast to the Cape. Formwalt also unearthed documents from archives in those Imperialist nation states and former/present empires casually mentioning the now unruly, now obedient, yet always “pesky” local African labor that lost life to the enterprise of transportation of local resource extraction to which they were utterly disposable. This essay will describe and analyze both works of art crossing Modernism, aka the culture wing of Modernity (itself a polite term for the ontological shifts brought about by the capitalist mode of production) through the theoretical matrix of Marx, Luxemburg, Sohn-Rethel, and Courtauld.

Seeing with the Pandemic: Social Reproduction in the Spotlight

492 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Leslie Salzinger Seeing with the Pandemic: Social Reproduction in the Spotlight The COVID-19 pandemic has inverted capitalism’s normal visibilities, bringing what were negative spaces to the fore and throwing the work of social reproduction into stark relief. Decades of neoliberal governance have scrapped state support for care and increased the pressures on families where every adult is working for pay. In response, reproductive labor has been commodified and racialized at scale, and those who care for and nourish others, whether unwaged or waged, have been left holding the bag for society as a whole. The virus’s incursion has thrown a harsh light on this non-system. From the New York Times to Twitter to grocery lines, both pundits and private citizens have begun to take note of the labor it takes to make and sustain human life as well as the unfreedom of those who perform that labor. But even as appreciation washes through, reproductive care workers are increasingly stepping out to say that garlands are not enough.1 This emergent public reckoning comes on the heels of an extended scholarly rethinking of capitalism, as a growing group of scholars argue that capitalism is always already embedded in gendered and racialized 1. Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, “Calling Me a Hero Only Makes You Feel Better,” The Atlantic, April 18, 2020. Leslie Salzinger 493 relations of extraction and expropriation.2 Especially generative has been Karl Marx’s remarkable historical account of capitalism’s origins in a process he dubbed “primitive accumulation.”3 Intent on forestalling moralistic justifications for the system’s origins, Marx argued that elites used a combination of land expropriation and violent vagrancy policing to produce both the starter capital and the “free labor” needed to bring that capital to life. Since Rosa Luxemburg, scholars have expanded that account to challenge the more abstract and teleological formulations contained in other parts of Marx’s larger oeuvre.4 Rather than see primitive accumulation as focused exclusively on domestic processes and ownership relations , subsequent theorists have pointed to the transnational, racialized , colonial, and gendered processes that characterized its emergence, along with the persistence of these putatively time-limited processes throughout capitalism’s existence.5 Prompted by the deep inequities of neoliberalism, David Harvey has argued that the present, in fact, is best understood as a new episode of primitive accumulation, which he names “accumulation by dispossession.”6 These historical rereadings suggest that national ownership relations have never exhausted the range of power relations under capitalism and that the relationships between capital and other structures of power are historically contingent . Marx’s more elegant formulations notwithstanding, exploitation operated from the outset on a bed of racialized, colonial, and gendered 2. See especially Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books, 1986); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Social Text 34, no. 3 (September 2016): 27–50. 3. Karl Marx, “Primitive Accumulation” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol. 1 of 8 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1867; New York: Vintage, 1977). 4. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (1913; New York: Routledge, 2003). 5. For an illuminating reanalysis of primitive accumulation, see Robert Nichols , Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 6. David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (March 2007): 22–44. 494 Leslie Salzinger relations, which were themselves reconfigured, solidified, and sustained by those interactions. This distinct understanding of capitalism as a system throws new light on the present. I will argue here that constitutively gendered and racialized social reproduction is one arena where primitive accumulation continues to operate within capitalism as a fundamental structural element of the system itself. The production of people is an arena of vital unpaid, underpaid, and formally unrecognized work that makes all the rest possible. It...

Sexual Difference or the Desire to Change It All

Argentinean sociologist Verónica Gago argues for an expanded understanding of extractivism. Extending the conventional meaning of the term beyond the agricultural and mineral export economies of the former colonial world, Gago repurposes the word in order to refer to contemporary forms of accumulation via rent. The present text discusses the author’s recent account of the 2017 women’s strike in Argentina, one of whose aims is to reframe debates about the social reproduction of labor among an earlier generation of theorists. Reading with and against Gago, the present intervention asks how to conceive of the specifically feminine nature of the collective subject/object of contemporary accumulation beyond either descriptive notions of femininity or historicist approaches to the issue of so-called primitive accumulation. It goes on to argue that Lacan’s logical approach to sexual difference might serve as the starting point for a more nuanced historical view of the expropriation of feminine sociality, knowledge, and work.

“Ludicrous Anachronisms”

AbstractThis article proposes that eighteenth-century and Romantic-era accounts of dreams offer a useful model for understanding the phenomenon of enclosure, or what Marx famously labeled “so-called primitive accumulation.” Rather than a historical event or a set of particular laws, enclosure can be understood as a process by which gendered labor and criminalized mobility, two forms of what Marxist critics call “non-work,” became integral features of capital accumulation over the course of the Romantic period. This article pursues an analogy between what John Hunter defined as the “ludicrous anachronisms” of dreams and such forms of “non-work” as they appear in Mary Robinson’s 1791 poem “The Maniac.” Framed as an opium-induced dream that enables Robinson to share a psycho-physiological state akin to the wanderer “mad Jemmy,” Robinson forges relations between the poet and Jemmy that complicate any straightforward or sympathetic identification. Instead, her use of rhetorical indirection and inversion establishes analogies between the two through the effects of enclosure, highlighting the ambivalent ways in which subjects came to be indirectly related to one another through an historical inversion of their means of subsistence into conditions of vulnerability.

Pesca marítima y acumulación por desposesión en Argentina (1966-2018): extranjerización del recurso, crisis socio-ambiental, precarización laboral y redistribuciones estatales

Para el marxismo clásico, la llamada acumulación originaria o primitiva se limitó a moldear la prehistoria del sistema capitalista. Sin embargo, y dado que ese proceso continuó operando sin interrupción, el geógrafo inglés David Harvey propone redefinirlo en términos de “acumulación por desposesión”. Sobre la base de bibliografía especializada, fuentes oficiales, investigaciones independientes e información periodística, este artículo busca tender puentes entre lo teórico y lo empírico estudiando la compleja relación entre acumulación por desposesión y pesca marítima en Argentina durante el período 1966-2018. Para ello, se recurre a cuatro categorías de análisis propuestas por dicho autor: cercamiento, privatización y apropiación neocolonial imperial de recursos naturales; despojo ecológico y producción de crisis; precarización laboral y trabajo esclavo; y redistribuciones estatales. Los resultados muestran claramente que, al menos en el caso argentino, la pesca marítima debe ser considerada e interpretada como una modalidad de acumulación por derecho propio.

Primitive accumulation and Chinese mirrors

A consensus holds that the structure of Capital I is problematic. In particular, the section ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’ discusses the origins of capitalism but appears at the end of the volume rather than at the beginning. Even more anomalous, the forecast of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class is in the penultimate chapter. The final chapter, ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’, is regarded by commentators as enigmatic, if they refer to it at all. This article, on the other hand, shows that Marx considered the structure of Capital over a number of years and that his discussion of Wakefield’s theory of colonization is part of an account of the continuing centrifugal regeneration of capitalist relations beyond the sites of mature capitalism. The article addresses the failure of commentators from Mehring to Harvey to appreciate the logic of Capital’s chapter structure. The contemporary resonance of Marx’s account of capitalist development at the periphery of the global capitalist system is indicated by considering primitive accumulation in two distinct phases of China’s history.

Im Spiegel-Selfie-Stadium: The downloaded man

As a reference to Lacan’s »mirror stage«, the »Mirror-Selfie-Stadium« show a reflexive turn within subjectification. The individualization of image production through digital and dating platforms is the starting point to reveal as such. In the article reference to so-called primitive accumulation (Marx) the origin of the internal rupture of the bourgeois subject shows that the individual subject in a capitalist society must be an interface for its own capitalist socialization and originates from this quandary situation. The actual techniques of digitization continue this origin by forcing the subject to expand itself, but also its objects, by divisions, splits and valorizing. These divisions at once unleash the productive power of capitalist society

On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation

In light of recent historiography that increasingly emphasizes the centrality of slavery to the origins of capitalism, this essay returns to Marx, especially Capital, volume 1, to rethink the relationships among capitalist abstraction, violence, and racial differentiation.

A critique of new materialism: ethics and ontology

This article seeks to offer a critical assessment of the conception of ethics underlying the growing constellation of ‘new materialist’ social theories. It argues that such theories offer little if any purchase in understanding the contemporary transformations of relations between mind and body or human and non-human natures. Taking as exemplary the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, this article asserts that a continuity between ethics and ontology is central to recent theories of ‘materiality’. These theories assert the primacy of matter by calling upon a spiritual or ascetic self-transformation so that one might be ‘attuned to’ or ‘register’ materiality and, conversely, portray critique as hubristic, conceited, or resentful, blinded by its anthropocentrism. It is argued that framing the grounds for ontological speculation in these ethical terms licences the omission of analysis of social forces mediating thought’s access to the world and so grants the theorist leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought. In particular, the essay points to ongoing processes of the so-called primitive accumulation as constituting the relationship between mind and body, human and non-human natures.

Ludowe państwo dobrobytu

The article is an attempt to reconstruct the transformation of poor laws in precapitalist England based on Lorie Charlesworth’s work Welfare’s Forgotten Past. The substantial contexts of this reconstruction are the history of enclosures and commons as well as the concept of so-called primitive accumulation, originating from Karl Marx. The major scope of interest is the conjunction of the loss of the poor’s subjective rights and the penalization of the poor according to vagrancy laws.

LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime

Over the last decade civil society organizations and activist-scholars have pointed to “land grabbing” as one of the central issues to have emerged in the world food system. In particular, land grabbing was identified as a new and immediate international development issue by the non-governmental organization GRAIN in 2008 (www.farmlandgrab.org). Since that time land grabbing has generated a voluminous literature of a highly variable quality—some scholarship is outstanding and some is shoddy (Oya, 2013). This contribution seeks to clarify what constitutes land grabbing and why it takes place, as well as the key challenge that scholars and civil society activists face in confronting land grabbing in the context of the question of feeding the world. The central argument is that when a structuralist political economy is used to interpret the land grab phenomenon, it becomes analytically clear that contemporary land deals demonstrate that dispossession by displacement, or what has historically been known as the “so-called primitive accumulation”, has been resurrected as an accumulation strategy of global capitalism witnessing, for the first time in decades, the limits to the market. It is an accumulation strategy that cannot, however, deliver food justice or deal with the climate emergency.

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard (review)

RED SKIN, WHITE MASKS: Rejecting Colonial Politics of Recognition. By Glen Sean Coulthard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014.In her 2005 essay, Recognition, Joanne Barker concludes that the point of indigenous sovereignty struggles is get outside political legacies of plenary power doctrines, colonialism, and racism and to reimagine possibilities for Native governance and social relationships (155). Her sense that federal of tribal and tribal citizenship serves to shore up white privilege and power over Native lands and bodies gives lie, of course, to notion that liberal takes place between equals. In his first monograph, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) takes up where Barker's essay leaves off by not only further developing a critique of recognition, but also by arguing for the role that critically revitalized traditions might play in (re)construction of decolonized Indigenous nations (148).Coulthard begins by interrogating temporality of reconciliation, demonstrating that structure of present-day settler-colonialism remains untouched by reconciliation's focus on past harms of state. In this reading, reconciliation appears as an alibi for ongoing extraction of indigenous land, labor, and resources, as does its counterpart, recognition. Coulthard situates this important critique in relation to Marx's notion of so-called primitive accumulation, arguing that primitive accumulation's temporality is ongoing, and that there is nothing historically beneficial, let alone inevitable, about it. While this reworked version of primitive accumulation is not especially original to indigenous and settler-colonial studies, it serves usefully to illustrate Coulthard's commitment to be in critical dialogue with a tradition of European political philosophy.And it works well to situate Coulthard's key intervention, which is to lay out theoretical alternatives to liberal in what Coulthard calls a resurgent of recognition based in a grounded normativity, or place-based ethics (53). In Coulthard's view, this reorientation toward land and toward principles of reciprocity, nonexploitation, and respectful coexistence (12) would provide alternatives, on one hand, to commodified forms of relation, and on other hand, to essentialist conceptions of indigenous subjectivity.In original and provocative ways, Coulthard develops meanings of such a resurgent politics by retooling Fanon's critique of in contexts of Coulthard's own Dene Nation (Chapter 2), potential exclusions of essentialist (Chapter 3), Canadian state's reconciliation discourses during 1990s (Chapter 4), and finally, in a genealogy of Fanon's anticolonialism (Chapter 5). …