Primitive accumulation of capital
Encyclopedia
In Marxist economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation (also previous accumulation, original accumulation) of capital
concerns the origin of capital, and therefore (in at least the Marxist view) of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Adam Smith
's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process. David Harvey summarized Smith's description of the process: "There were some people that were hard working and some people who were not. Some people who could be bothered, and some people who could not be bothered. And the result of that was that, bit by bit, those who were hard working, and could be bothered, accumulated some wealth. And eventually, those who could not be bothered, could not accumulate wealth, and in the end, in order to survive, preferred, actually, to give up their labor power as a commodity, in return for a living wage."
It became very important in Adam Smith's account, not to bring in the state as an agent of primitive accumulation. As a core pillar of his argument, like for most classical political economists, was to let the state withdraw and let it instead be laissez-faire
, which would allow the market to do his work, which would make things better off. James Denham-Steuart
and other classical political economists, argued instead for a crucial role for the state in the origin of capitalism, holding that violence under the supervision of the state was needed in order for the original accumulation to occur.
David Harvey summarized Karl Marx
description of it: primitive accumulation "entailed taking land, say, enclosing
it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation".
. Smith, in his English language The Wealth of Nations
spoke of a previous accumulation; Karl Marx
, in the German language Das Kapital
, reprised Smith expression correctly translating it with ursprünglich; Marx's translators rendered it back to English as primitive. James Steuart, with his 1767 work, is considered by some scholars as the greatest classical theorist of primitive accumulation.
how "money is changed into capital" and "how capital generates surplus-value" forming more capital. But in doing so, he had already assumed that there exists a mass of Capital
available for investment
, and there already exists exploitable Labor power. He had shown how capitalist production could itself reproduce the conditions of its own existence on an ever broader scale. But, as he says, "the whole movement seems to turn into a vicious circle."
Capital
is money
that makes more money: value in search of Surplus value
. In other words, it is money that gets reinvested. It originates in the activity of buying goods in order to resell them at a profit, and first emerges in commercial trade connecting different economic communities, whose production is not yet capitalist. The existence of usury
capital, bank
capital, rentier
capital and merchant
capital historically precedes capitalist industry.
To explain how the capitalist mode of production
comes into being in the first place, Marx had to study history to locate an original accumulation that facilitated capitalist relations. Adam Smith
had called this "previous accumulation" – an accumulation which did not result from capitalist production, but formed an external starting point to it.
"This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. (...) Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work."
What has to be explained is how the capitalist relations of production
are historically established. In other words, how it comes about that means of production
get to be privately owned and traded in, and how the capitalists can find workers on the labor market
ready and willing to work for them, because they have no other means of livelihood; also referred to as the "Reserve Army of Labor
."
's discussion of primitive accumulation in part eight of Das Kapital
, Vol. 1 has become a cornerstone of the Marxian critique of 'bourgeois' political economy (in German: ursprüngliche Akkumulation, literally "original accumulation" or "primeval accumulation"). Its purpose is to help explain how the capitalist mode of production
came into being. According to Marx, before there could be money with which to make more, i.e. capital
, an original accumulation must take place. This might take the form of resource extraction
, conquest
and plunder
, and/or enslavement
.
As Marx writes:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation."
In a case history of England, Marx looks at how the serfs became free peasant proprietors and small farmers, who were, over time, forcibly expropriated and driven off the land, forming a property-less proletariat.
He also shows how more and more legislation is enacted by the state to control and regiment this new class of wage workers. In the meantime, the remaining farmers became capitalists, operating more and more on a commercial basis.
:
"The discovery of gold
and silver
in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa
into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain
, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin
War, and is still going on in the opium war
s against China
, &c. The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal
, Holland, France
, and England
. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the state
, the concentrated and organized force of society
, to hasten, hot-house fashion
, the process of transformation of the feudal
mode of production
into the capitalist
mode
, and to shorten the transition. Force
is the midwife
of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power." (chapter 31, emphasis added).
of those who, lacking other means, must work for them.
Marx says that primitive accumulation means the expropriation
of the direct producers, and more specifically "the dissolution of private property
based on the labor of its owner... Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor." (chapter 32, emphasis added).
Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
, Vol. 1, Marx illustrates the social conditions necessary for capitalism with a comment about Edward Gibbon Wakefield
's theory of colonization:
"...Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!"
Capital, vol. I, ch. 33, at www.marxists.org.
see primitive accumulation as something that happened in the late Middle Ages
and finished long ago, when capitalist industry started. They see primitive accumulation as a process happening in the transition from the feudal "stage" to the capitalist "stage".
However, this can be seen as a misrepresentation of both Marx's ideas and historical reality, since feudal-type economies existed in various parts of the world well into the 20th century.
Marx's story of primitive accumulation is best seen as a special case of the general principle of capitalist market expansion. In part, trade grows incrementally, but usually the establishment of capitalist relations of production
involves force and violence; transforming property relations means that assets previously owned by some people are no longer owned by them, but by other people, and making people part with their assets in this way involves coercion.
In his preface to Das Kapital
Vol. 1, Marx writes "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future". The less developed countries also face a process of primitive accumulation, it is an ongoing process of expropriation
, Proletarianization
and Urbanization
.
Because it is a fundamental tool of capitalist initiation and restoration, and because the rate of profit always begins to fall, sooner or later, primitive accumulation hits us all. Marx comments that "if, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, "De te fabula narratur ! (the tale is told of you!)".
Marx was referring here to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production
(not the expansion of world trade), through expropriation processes. He continues, "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonism that results from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results."
The way that the process by which foreign economic communities are subordinated to the laws of motion of capital is "primitive accumulation": the plunder or Privatization
of the commons and the Proletarianization
of the working population.
offers a Marxian theory which differs from orthodox
Marxism
stage theory. In his theory, primitive accumulation is part of the uneven and combined development of capitalism on a world scale.
Because business start-ups, forcible expansion of capitalist markets, and expropriation of peasants are going on all the time, primitive accumulation is also a process which happens all the time. The orthodox Marxism overlooked this social trend, possibly because they were fixated on Marx's story about English peasants being thrown off the land, rather than studying the facts of world history.
Mandel surveys the history of capitalist development from the early Middle Ages, and distinguishes between primitive accumulation of money capital and primitive Industrial capitalism. According to Mandel, one does not necessarily lead to the other. He calculates that the transfer of value to Europe from the slave trade and colonial robbery between 1500 and 1750 amounted to a sum of capital larger than the total capital invested in European industries in the year 1800.
The predicament of the "developing countries", Mandel says, expresses a double tragedy. Not only did they pay the price for the international concentration of capital; they also had to overcome industrial backwardness in a world economy already dominated by the industrial goods of the advanced countries.
So, while the world market boosted industrialization between the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe, North America and Japan, by about 1900 the same world market became an obstacle or brake to the industrialization of the third world, which mostly could not compete with Europe, North America and Japan. Some "intermediate" countries (e.g. settler colonies) did industrialize, but typically in a one-sided way; many of the industrial goods were produced for export.
The integration of developing countries into the world market occurred mainly on the initiative of the Western powers, in a way consistent with their interests. This created a hierarchy
of nation
s in the international division of labour
.
Because local demand was lacking in the third world, and because investors were unwilling to create colonial competition for the home country, investments focused mainly on agriculture
and extraction of mineral
s for export.
At best, the outcome of all this was half-industrialization, and an economy which does not adequately serve the needs of the local population. There was plenty capital and unemployed labour, but little possibility for local industrial development benefiting the local population.
Mandel concluded that because the third world bourgeoisie mostly doesn't really care about developing the country, workers and peasants must take state power and carry out the necessary economic changes.
David Harvey expands the concept of "primitive accumulation" to create a new concept, "accumulation by dispossession", in his 2003 book, "The New Imperialism". Like Mandel, Harvey claims that the word "primitive" leads to a misunderstanding in the history of capitalism; that the original, "primitive" phase of capitalism is somehow a transitory phase that need not be repeated once commenced. Instead, Harvey maintains that primitive accumulation ("accumulation by dispossession") is a continuing process within the process of capital accumulation on a world scale. Because the central Marxian notion of crisis via "over-accumulation" is assumed to be a constant factor in the process of capital accumulation, the process of "accumulation by dispossession" acts as a possible safety valve that may temporarily ease the crisis. This is achieved by simply lowering the prices of consumer commodities (thus pushing up the propensity for general consumption), which in turn is made possible by the considerable reduction in the price of production inputs. Should the magnitude of the reduction in the price of inputs outweigh the reduction in the price of consumer goods, it can be said that the rate of profit will, for the time being, increase. Thus:
Harvey's theoretical extension encompasses more recent economic dimensions such as intellectual property rights, privatization, and environmental predation and exploitation.
Privatization of public services puts enormous profit into capitalists' hands. If belonged to the public sector, that profit wouldn't have existed. In that sense, the profit is created by dispossession of people. Destructive industrial use of the environment is similar because the environment is supposed to belong to the public.
Multinational pharmaceutical companies collect information about how herb or other natural medicine is used among natives in less-developed country, do some R&D to find the material that make those natural medicines effective, and patent the findings. By doing so, multinational pharmaceutical companies can now sell the medicine to the natives who are the original source of the knowledge that made production of medicine possible. That is, dispossession of intellectual property right.
David Harvey also argues that accumulation by dispossession is a temporal or partial solution to over-accumulation. Because accumulation by dispossession makes raw materials cheaper, the profit rate can at least temporarily go up.
Harvey’s interpretation has been criticized by Brass (2011), who disputes the view that what is described as present-day primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, entails proletarianization. Because the latter is equated by Harvey with the separation of the direct producer (mostly smallholders) from the means of production (land), Harvey assumes this results in the formation of a workforce that is free. By contrast, Brass points out that in many instances the process of depeasantization leads to workers who are unfree, because they are unable personally to commodify or recommodify their labour-power, by selling it to the highest bidder.
disagreed with the Marxist explanation of the origin of capital, because Schumpeter did not believe in exploitation
. In liberal economic theory
, the market returns to each person the exact value she added into it; capitalists are just people who are very adept at saving and whose contributions are especially magnificent, and they do not take anything away from other people or the environment. Liberalists believe that capitalism has no internal flaws or contradictions; only outside threats. To liberalists, the idea of the necessity of violent primitive accumulation to capital is particularly incendiary. Schumpeter wrote rather testily:
"[The problem of Original Accumulation] presented itself first to those authors, chiefly to Marx and the Marxists, who held an exploitation theory
of interest and had, therefore, to face the question of how exploiters secured control of an initial stock of 'capital' (however defined) with which to exploit – a question which that theory per se is incapable of answering, and which may obviously be answered in a manner highly uncongenial to the idea of exploitation" (Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, Vol. 1, New York; McGraw-Hill, 1939, p. 229).
Schumpeter argued that imperialism
was not a necessary jump-start for capitalism, nor is it needed to bolster capitalism, because imperialism pre-existed capitalism. Schumpeter believed that, whatever the empirical evidence, capitalist world trade could in principle just expand peacefully. If imperialism occurred, Schumpeter asserted, it has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of capitalism
itself, or with capitalist market expansion. The distinction between Schumpeter and Marx here is subtle. Marx claimed that capitalism requires violence and imperialism—first, to kick-start capitalism with a pile of booty and to dispossess a population to induce them to enter into capitalist relations as workers, and then to surmount the otherwise-fatal contradictions generated within capitalist relations over time. Schumpeter's view was that imperialism is an atavistic impulse pursued by a state independent of the interests of the economic ruling class.
"Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits... Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The "inner logic" of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even export monopoly
is not imperialism and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands of the pacific bourgeoisie. This happened only because the war machine, its social atmosphere, and the martial will were inherited and because a martially oriented class (i.e., the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling position with which of all the varied interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally themselves. This alliance keeps alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social relations which perhaps ultimately are to be explained by relations of production
but not by the productive relations of capitalism alone." (Joseph A. Schumpeter: The Sociology of Imperialism, 1918).
Capital (economics)
In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process...
concerns the origin of capital, and therefore (in at least the Marxist view) of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process. David Harvey summarized Smith's description of the process: "There were some people that were hard working and some people who were not. Some people who could be bothered, and some people who could not be bothered. And the result of that was that, bit by bit, those who were hard working, and could be bothered, accumulated some wealth. And eventually, those who could not be bothered, could not accumulate wealth, and in the end, in order to survive, preferred, actually, to give up their labor power as a commodity, in return for a living wage."
It became very important in Adam Smith's account, not to bring in the state as an agent of primitive accumulation. As a core pillar of his argument, like for most classical political economists, was to let the state withdraw and let it instead be laissez-faire
Laissez-faire
In economics, laissez-faire describes an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies....
, which would allow the market to do his work, which would make things better off. James Denham-Steuart
James Denham-Steuart
Sir James Steuart, 3rd Baronet of Goodtrees and eventually 7th Baronet of Coltness; late in life Sir James Steuart Denham, also called Sir James Denham Steuart was a prominent Jacobite, who wrote one of the first noteworthy books in English about economics...
and other classical political economists, argued instead for a crucial role for the state in the origin of capitalism, holding that violence under the supervision of the state was needed in order for the original accumulation to occur.
David Harvey summarized Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
description of it: primitive accumulation "entailed taking land, say, enclosing
Enclosure
Enclosure or inclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land. Once enclosed, these uses of the land become restricted to the owner, and it ceases to be common land. In England and Wales the term is also used for the...
it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation".
Naming and translations
The concept was initially called in different ways, and the expression of an "accumulation" which is at the origin of capitalism, began to appear with Adam SmithAdam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
. Smith, in his English language The Wealth of Nations
The Wealth of Nations
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, generally referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations, is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith...
spoke of a previous accumulation; Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, in the German language Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, reprised Smith expression correctly translating it with ursprünglich; Marx's translators rendered it back to English as primitive. James Steuart, with his 1767 work, is considered by some scholars as the greatest classical theorist of primitive accumulation.
Reason for the concept
Marx showed in Das KapitalDas Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
how "money is changed into capital" and "how capital generates surplus-value" forming more capital. But in doing so, he had already assumed that there exists a mass of Capital
Capital (economics)
In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process...
available for investment
Investment
Investment has different meanings in finance and economics. Finance investment is putting money into something with the expectation of gain, that upon thorough analysis, has a high degree of security for the principal amount, as well as security of return, within an expected period of time...
, and there already exists exploitable Labor power. He had shown how capitalist production could itself reproduce the conditions of its own existence on an ever broader scale. But, as he says, "the whole movement seems to turn into a vicious circle."
Capital
Capital (economics)
In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process...
is money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
that makes more money: value in search of Surplus value
Surplus value
Surplus value is a concept used famously by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Although Marx did not himself invent the term, he developed the concept...
. In other words, it is money that gets reinvested. It originates in the activity of buying goods in order to resell them at a profit, and first emerges in commercial trade connecting different economic communities, whose production is not yet capitalist. The existence of usury
Usury
Usury Originally, when the charging of interest was still banned by Christian churches, usury simply meant the charging of interest at any rate . In countries where the charging of interest became acceptable, the term came to be used for interest above the rate allowed by law...
capital, bank
Bank
A bank is a financial institution that serves as a financial intermediary. The term "bank" may refer to one of several related types of entities:...
capital, rentier
Rentier capitalism
Rentier capitalism is a term used in Marxism and sociology which refers to a type of capitalism where a large amount of profit-income generated takes the form of property income, received as interest, intellectual property rights, rents, dividends, fees, or capital gains.The beneficiaries of this...
capital and merchant
Merchant
A merchant is a businessperson who trades in commodities that were produced by others, in order to earn a profit.Merchants can be one of two types:# A wholesale merchant operates in the chain between producer and retail merchant...
capital historically precedes capitalist industry.
To explain how the capitalist mode of production
Mode of production
In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
comes into being in the first place, Marx had to study history to locate an original accumulation that facilitated capitalist relations. Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
had called this "previous accumulation" – an accumulation which did not result from capitalist production, but formed an external starting point to it.
The myths of Political Economy
In disinterring the origins of capital, Marx felt the need to dispel what he felt were religious myths and fairy-tales about the origins of capitalism. Marx wrote:"This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. (...) Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work."
What has to be explained is how the capitalist relations of production
Relations of production
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
are historically established. In other words, how it comes about that means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
get to be privately owned and traded in, and how the capitalists can find workers on the labor market
Labour economics
Labor economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the market for labor. Labor markets function through the interaction of workers and employers...
ready and willing to work for them, because they have no other means of livelihood; also referred to as the "Reserve Army of Labor
Reserve army of labour
Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It refers basically to the unemployed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that the unemployed can be defined as those actually looking for...
."
Marx's case history
Karl MarxKarl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's discussion of primitive accumulation in part eight of Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, Vol. 1 has become a cornerstone of the Marxian critique of 'bourgeois' political economy (in German: ursprüngliche Akkumulation, literally "original accumulation" or "primeval accumulation"). Its purpose is to help explain how the capitalist mode of production
Mode of production
In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
came into being. According to Marx, before there could be money with which to make more, i.e. capital
Financial capital
Financial capital can refer to money used by entrepreneurs and businesses to buy what they need to make their products or provide their services or to that sector of the economy based on its operation, i.e. retail, corporate, investment banking, etc....
, an original accumulation must take place. This might take the form of resource extraction
Resource extraction
The related terms natural resource extraction both refer to the practice of locating, acquiring and selling natural resources....
, conquest
Conquest (military)
Conquest is the act of military subjugation of an enemy by force of arms. One example is the Norman conquest of England, which provided the subjugation of the Kingdom of England and the acquisition of the English crown by William the Conqueror in 1066...
and plunder
Looting
Looting —also referred to as sacking, plundering, despoiling, despoliation, and pillaging—is the indiscriminate taking of goods by force as part of a military or political victory, or during a catastrophe, such as during war, natural disaster, or rioting...
, and/or enslavement
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
.
As Marx writes:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation."
In a case history of England, Marx looks at how the serfs became free peasant proprietors and small farmers, who were, over time, forcibly expropriated and driven off the land, forming a property-less proletariat.
He also shows how more and more legislation is enacted by the state to control and regiment this new class of wage workers. In the meantime, the remaining farmers became capitalists, operating more and more on a commercial basis.
The link between primitive accumulation and colonialism
At the same time as local obstacles to investment in manufactures are being overcome, and a unified national market is developing with a nationalist ideology, Marx sees a strong impulse to business development coming from world tradeInternational finance
International finance is the branch of economics that studies the dynamics of exchange rates, foreign investment, global financial system, and how these affect international trade. It also studies international projects, international investments and capital flows, and trade deficits. It includes...
:
"The discovery of gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
and silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
in America, the extirpation, enslavement
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
Looting
Looting —also referred to as sacking, plundering, despoiling, despoliation, and pillaging—is the indiscriminate taking of goods by force as part of a military or political victory, or during a catastrophe, such as during war, natural disaster, or rioting...
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain
Dutch Revolt
The Dutch Revolt or the Revolt of the Netherlands This article adopts 1568 as the starting date of the war, as this was the year of the first battles between armies. However, since there is a long period of Protestant vs...
, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin
Jacobin (politics)
A Jacobin , in the context of the French Revolution, was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary far-left political movement. The Jacobin Club was the most famous political club of the French Revolution. So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue St. Jacques ,...
War, and is still going on in the opium war
Opium Wars
The Opium Wars, also known as the Anglo-Chinese Wars, divided into the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842 and the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860, were the climax of disputes over trade and diplomatic relations between China under the Qing Dynasty and the British Empire...
s against China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, &c. The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, Holland, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, and England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the state
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
, the concentrated and organized force of society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
, to hasten, hot-house fashion
Greenhouse
A greenhouse is a building in which plants are grown. These structures range in size from small sheds to very large buildings...
, the process of transformation of the feudal
Feudalism
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...
mode of production
Mode of production
In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
into the capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
mode
Mode (statistics)
In statistics, the mode is the value that occurs most frequently in a data set or a probability distribution. In some fields, notably education, sample data are often called scores, and the sample mode is known as the modal score....
, and to shorten the transition. Force
Force
In physics, a force is any influence that causes an object to undergo a change in speed, a change in direction, or a change in shape. In other words, a force is that which can cause an object with mass to change its velocity , i.e., to accelerate, or which can cause a flexible object to deform...
is the midwife
Midwifery
Midwifery is a health care profession in which providers offer care to childbearing women during pregnancy, labour and birth, and during the postpartum period. They also help care for the newborn and assist the mother with breastfeeding....
of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power." (chapter 31, emphasis added).
Primitive accumulation and privatization
According to Marx, the whole purpose of primitive accumulation is to privatize the means of production, so that the exploiting owners can make money from the surplus labourSurplus labour
Surplus labour is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It means labour performed in excess of the labour necessary to produce the means of livelihood of the worker . According to Marxian economics, surplus labour is usually "unpaid labour"...
of those who, lacking other means, must work for them.
Marx says that primitive accumulation means the expropriation
Eminent domain
Eminent domain , compulsory purchase , resumption/compulsory acquisition , or expropriation is an action of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent...
of the direct producers, and more specifically "the dissolution of private property
Private property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...
based on the labor of its owner... Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor." (chapter 32, emphasis added).
Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
The social relations of capitalism
Capitalism is a system of social relations, in which capitalists are fully human actors, and workers are exploited. Primitive accumulation precedes capitalism in providing the accumulation of wealth and resources to induce less fortunate people to enter into a highly unequal relationship with a capitalist. In the last chapter of Das KapitalDas Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, Vol. 1, Marx illustrates the social conditions necessary for capitalism with a comment about Edward Gibbon Wakefield
Edward Gibbon Wakefield
Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a British politician, the driving force behind much of the early colonisation of South Australia, and later New Zealand....
's theory of colonization:
"...Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!"
Capital, vol. I, ch. 33, at www.marxists.org.
Ongoing primitive accumulation
"Orthodox" MarxistsOrthodox Marxism
Orthodox Marxism is the term used to describe the version of Marxism which emerged after the death of Karl Marx and acted as the official philosophy of the Second International up to the First World War and of the Third International thereafter...
see primitive accumulation as something that happened in the late Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
and finished long ago, when capitalist industry started. They see primitive accumulation as a process happening in the transition from the feudal "stage" to the capitalist "stage".
However, this can be seen as a misrepresentation of both Marx's ideas and historical reality, since feudal-type economies existed in various parts of the world well into the 20th century.
Marx's story of primitive accumulation is best seen as a special case of the general principle of capitalist market expansion. In part, trade grows incrementally, but usually the establishment of capitalist relations of production
Relations of production
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
involves force and violence; transforming property relations means that assets previously owned by some people are no longer owned by them, but by other people, and making people part with their assets in this way involves coercion.
In his preface to Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
Vol. 1, Marx writes "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future". The less developed countries also face a process of primitive accumulation, it is an ongoing process of expropriation
Eminent domain
Eminent domain , compulsory purchase , resumption/compulsory acquisition , or expropriation is an action of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent...
, Proletarianization
Proletarianization
Proletarianization is a concept in Marxism and Marxist sociology. It refers to the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer...
and Urbanization
Urbanization
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008....
.
Because it is a fundamental tool of capitalist initiation and restoration, and because the rate of profit always begins to fall, sooner or later, primitive accumulation hits us all. Marx comments that "if, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, "De te fabula narratur ! (the tale is told of you!)".
Marx was referring here to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production
Mode of production
In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
(not the expansion of world trade), through expropriation processes. He continues, "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonism that results from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results."
The way that the process by which foreign economic communities are subordinated to the laws of motion of capital is "primitive accumulation": the plunder or Privatization
Privatization
Privatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency or public service from the public sector to the private sector or to private non-profit organizations...
of the commons and the Proletarianization
Proletarianization
Proletarianization is a concept in Marxism and Marxist sociology. It refers to the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer...
of the working population.
Ernest Mandel's theory of primitive accumulation and David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession
Ernest MandelErnest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter , was a revolutionary Marxist theorist.-Life:...
offers a Marxian theory which differs from orthodox
Orthodoxy
The word orthodox, from Greek orthos + doxa , is generally used to mean the adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds, especially in religion...
Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
stage theory. In his theory, primitive accumulation is part of the uneven and combined development of capitalism on a world scale.
Because business start-ups, forcible expansion of capitalist markets, and expropriation of peasants are going on all the time, primitive accumulation is also a process which happens all the time. The orthodox Marxism overlooked this social trend, possibly because they were fixated on Marx's story about English peasants being thrown off the land, rather than studying the facts of world history.
Mandel surveys the history of capitalist development from the early Middle Ages, and distinguishes between primitive accumulation of money capital and primitive Industrial capitalism. According to Mandel, one does not necessarily lead to the other. He calculates that the transfer of value to Europe from the slave trade and colonial robbery between 1500 and 1750 amounted to a sum of capital larger than the total capital invested in European industries in the year 1800.
The predicament of the "developing countries", Mandel says, expresses a double tragedy. Not only did they pay the price for the international concentration of capital; they also had to overcome industrial backwardness in a world economy already dominated by the industrial goods of the advanced countries.
So, while the world market boosted industrialization between the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe, North America and Japan, by about 1900 the same world market became an obstacle or brake to the industrialization of the third world, which mostly could not compete with Europe, North America and Japan. Some "intermediate" countries (e.g. settler colonies) did industrialize, but typically in a one-sided way; many of the industrial goods were produced for export.
The integration of developing countries into the world market occurred mainly on the initiative of the Western powers, in a way consistent with their interests. This created a hierarchy
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
of nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
s in the international division of labour
Division of labour
Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
.
Because local demand was lacking in the third world, and because investors were unwilling to create colonial competition for the home country, investments focused mainly on agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
and extraction of mineral
Mineral
A mineral is a naturally occurring solid chemical substance formed through biogeochemical processes, having characteristic chemical composition, highly ordered atomic structure, and specific physical properties. By comparison, a rock is an aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids and does not...
s for export.
At best, the outcome of all this was half-industrialization, and an economy which does not adequately serve the needs of the local population. There was plenty capital and unemployed labour, but little possibility for local industrial development benefiting the local population.
Mandel concluded that because the third world bourgeoisie mostly doesn't really care about developing the country, workers and peasants must take state power and carry out the necessary economic changes.
David Harvey expands the concept of "primitive accumulation" to create a new concept, "accumulation by dispossession", in his 2003 book, "The New Imperialism". Like Mandel, Harvey claims that the word "primitive" leads to a misunderstanding in the history of capitalism; that the original, "primitive" phase of capitalism is somehow a transitory phase that need not be repeated once commenced. Instead, Harvey maintains that primitive accumulation ("accumulation by dispossession") is a continuing process within the process of capital accumulation on a world scale. Because the central Marxian notion of crisis via "over-accumulation" is assumed to be a constant factor in the process of capital accumulation, the process of "accumulation by dispossession" acts as a possible safety valve that may temporarily ease the crisis. This is achieved by simply lowering the prices of consumer commodities (thus pushing up the propensity for general consumption), which in turn is made possible by the considerable reduction in the price of production inputs. Should the magnitude of the reduction in the price of inputs outweigh the reduction in the price of consumer goods, it can be said that the rate of profit will, for the time being, increase. Thus:
“Access to cheaper inputs is, therefore, just as important as access to widening markets in keeping profitable opportunities open. The implication is that non-capitalist territories should be forced open not only to trade (which could be helpful) but also to permit capital to invest in profitable ventures using cheaper labour power, raw materials, low-cost land, and the like. The general thrust of any capitalist logic of power is not that territories should be held back from capitalist development, but that they should be continuously opened up.” (Harvey, The New Imperialism, p.139).
Harvey's theoretical extension encompasses more recent economic dimensions such as intellectual property rights, privatization, and environmental predation and exploitation.
Privatization of public services puts enormous profit into capitalists' hands. If belonged to the public sector, that profit wouldn't have existed. In that sense, the profit is created by dispossession of people. Destructive industrial use of the environment is similar because the environment is supposed to belong to the public.
Multinational pharmaceutical companies collect information about how herb or other natural medicine is used among natives in less-developed country, do some R&D to find the material that make those natural medicines effective, and patent the findings. By doing so, multinational pharmaceutical companies can now sell the medicine to the natives who are the original source of the knowledge that made production of medicine possible. That is, dispossession of intellectual property right.
David Harvey also argues that accumulation by dispossession is a temporal or partial solution to over-accumulation. Because accumulation by dispossession makes raw materials cheaper, the profit rate can at least temporarily go up.
Harvey’s interpretation has been criticized by Brass (2011), who disputes the view that what is described as present-day primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, entails proletarianization. Because the latter is equated by Harvey with the separation of the direct producer (mostly smallholders) from the means of production (land), Harvey assumes this results in the formation of a workforce that is free. By contrast, Brass points out that in many instances the process of depeasantization leads to workers who are unfree, because they are unable personally to commodify or recommodify their labour-power, by selling it to the highest bidder.
Schumpeter's critique of Marx's theory
The economist Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-Hungarian-American economist and political scientist. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.-Life:...
disagreed with the Marxist explanation of the origin of capital, because Schumpeter did not believe in exploitation
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
. In liberal economic theory
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, the market returns to each person the exact value she added into it; capitalists are just people who are very adept at saving and whose contributions are especially magnificent, and they do not take anything away from other people or the environment. Liberalists believe that capitalism has no internal flaws or contradictions; only outside threats. To liberalists, the idea of the necessity of violent primitive accumulation to capital is particularly incendiary. Schumpeter wrote rather testily:
"[The problem of Original Accumulation] presented itself first to those authors, chiefly to Marx and the Marxists, who held an exploitation theory
Exploitation theory
The exploitation theory is the theory, most associated with Marxists, that profit is the result of the exploitation of wage earners by their employers....
of interest and had, therefore, to face the question of how exploiters secured control of an initial stock of 'capital' (however defined) with which to exploit – a question which that theory per se is incapable of answering, and which may obviously be answered in a manner highly uncongenial to the idea of exploitation" (Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, Vol. 1, New York; McGraw-Hill, 1939, p. 229).
Schumpeter argued that imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
was not a necessary jump-start for capitalism, nor is it needed to bolster capitalism, because imperialism pre-existed capitalism. Schumpeter believed that, whatever the empirical evidence, capitalist world trade could in principle just expand peacefully. If imperialism occurred, Schumpeter asserted, it has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
itself, or with capitalist market expansion. The distinction between Schumpeter and Marx here is subtle. Marx claimed that capitalism requires violence and imperialism—first, to kick-start capitalism with a pile of booty and to dispossess a population to induce them to enter into capitalist relations as workers, and then to surmount the otherwise-fatal contradictions generated within capitalist relations over time. Schumpeter's view was that imperialism is an atavistic impulse pursued by a state independent of the interests of the economic ruling class.
"Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits... Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The "inner logic" of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even export monopoly
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
is not imperialism and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands of the pacific bourgeoisie. This happened only because the war machine, its social atmosphere, and the martial will were inherited and because a martially oriented class (i.e., the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling position with which of all the varied interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally themselves. This alliance keeps alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social relations which perhaps ultimately are to be explained by relations of production
Relations of production
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
but not by the productive relations of capitalism alone." (Joseph A. Schumpeter: The Sociology of Imperialism, 1918).
See also
- History of capitalismHistory of capitalismThe history of capitalism can be traced back to early forms of merchant capitalism practiced in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, though many economic historians consider the Netherlands as the first thoroughly capitalist country. In Early modern Europe it featured the wealthiest trading city ...
- enclosureEnclosureEnclosure or inclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land. Once enclosed, these uses of the land become restricted to the owner, and it ceases to be common land. In England and Wales the term is also used for the...
- capital accumulationCapital accumulationThe accumulation of capital refers to the gathering or amassing of objects of value; the increase in wealth through concentration; or the creation of wealth. Capital is money or a financial asset invested for the purpose of making more money...
- Common landCommon landCommon land is land owned collectively or by one person, but over which other people have certain traditional rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect firewood, or to cut turf for fuel...
- relations of productionRelations of productionRelations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
- accumulation by dispossessionAccumulation by dispossessionAccumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey, which defines the neoliberal capitalist policies in many western nations, from the 1970s and to the present day, as resulting in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing...
- Socialist accumulationSocialist accumulationSocialist accumulation was a concept put forth in the early Soviet Union as a counterpart of the concept of primitive accumulation of capital that took place in previous capitalist economys...