What Was Primitive Accumulation Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept (2017)

What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept (2017)
William C. Roberts

As Massimo De Angelis put it in his influential early articulation of the new position, “the continuous element of Marx’s primitive accumulation could be identified in those social processes or sets of strategies aimed at dismantling those institutions that protect society from the market.” [21] Since non-capitalist or non-market social relations are always reconstituting themselves, [22] primitive accumulation must be conceived as the ever-renewed work of dismantling these non-capitalist relations.

He argues, rather, that primitive accumulation is an ongoing necessity internal to capitalism, but always anterior to the specific operations of capital. Capital cannot carry out primitive accumulation, even though it needs primitive accumulation in order to create the conditions in which alone it can operate. Hence, capital cannot be the only agent of capitalism; some other agency or agencies has to do the dirty work. In the case of England, the original agents of primitive accumulation were the lords of the land. In general, however, the primary agent of primitive accumulation has been and continues to be the state. Hence, also, Marx does not inscribe primitive accumulation in a normatively developmentalist history. Rather, he urges his fellow socialists to adopt a realist conception of the modern state. Dependent upon capital accumulation for its operations, the state can be expected to outflank and destroy efforts to escape from or stave off the capitalist mode of production. The magnitude of the state’s power, and the reliability with which that power is utilized to foster the conditions of capital accumulation, indicate to Marx that the workers must unite in large numbers and carry out a political struggle to dismantle the state and expropriate the capitalist class.

If the state is the servile agent of capital, then we can expect that alternative ways of life will be easily tolerated so long as they pose no threat to the accumulation of capital, and will face the full repressive power of the state if they do seem to threaten that accumulation.