Abstract
Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation has traditionally been understood as pre-history to the emergence and eventual universalization of capital in the social formation. I argue, to the contrary, that “primitive accumulation” can be a theoretical category only in the presence of a theorized notion of an “outside” to capital. This “outside” of capital in a social formation is populated by a “surpluspopulation”—another concept that needs to be delinked from the capitalocentric notion of “reserve army of labour”. Once we recognize an ever-present non-capitalist “outside” in a social formation, primitive accumulation becomes central to dominance of capital over a social formation.
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Notes
- 1.
“The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” (Marx 1912: 786. Italics mine).
- 2.
Also see Read (2002) who presents similar arguments. “These elements of dissolution, such as usury, often stem from the margins and pores of the old society, and only begin to occupy center stage in terms of their effects—the effects of constituting a new economy and a new mode of production. Whatever intelligibility or unity they have is produced after the fact when they retroactively become the conditions of the capitalist mode of production.” (Read 2002: 32).
- 3.
“This [petty] mode of production pre-supposes parceling of the soil, and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be…. “to decree universal mediocrity”. At a certain stage of development it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. …….but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the masses of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital.” (Marx, 1912: 835, italics mine).
- 4.
This Hegelian being-becoming distinction has dominated latter Marxist writings on primitive accumulation. Marxists have generally tended to treat primitive accumulation as a concrete historical process that has no theoretical bearing on the ontology of capital. The concept of “primitive accumulation” has thus long come to be confined to the field of economic history, except occasional application in studies of capitalism in developing economies, and that too because it is assumed that the developing countries are still undergoing the process of transition similar to the one already completed in the West.
- 5.
See Deleuze and Guattari (2004). “The only universal history is the history of contingency.” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 244). Negri, too, makes the same point. “A feature of aleatory materialism is the destruction of every teleological horizon—therefore, the positive assertion of a logic of the event” (Negri, 1996: 61).
- 6.
See Kay (1989). “This modern so-called domestic industry has nothing, except the name, in common with the old-fashioned domestic industry, the existence of which pre-supposes independent urban handicrafts, independent peasant farming, and above all, a dwelling-house for the labourer and his family. That old-fashioned department has now been converted into an outside department of the factory, the manufactory, or the warehouse. Besides the factory operatives, the manufacturing workmen and the handicraftsmen, whom it concentrates in large masses at one spot, and directly commands, capital also sets in motion, by means, of invisible threads, another army; that of the workers in the domestic industries, who dwell in the large towns and are also scattered over the face of the country” (Marx 1912: 504).
- 7.
“One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity….speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of labourers……pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth.” (Marx, 1912: 706–707).
- 8.
- 9.
This is not true for all categories of surplus population. For example, the self-employed/petty producer sub-contractor may earn his subsistence through performance of labor. But in so far as her performance of labor is at the mercy of the (parent) capitalist enterprise, she is dependent on capital for the maintenance of her labor power.
- 10.
“Overdetermination implies uneven development” (Resnick and Wolff 1979: 10).
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Bhattacharya, R. (2019). Primitive Accumulation and Surplus Population: A Critique of Capitalocentrism in Marxian Theory. In: Chakraborty, A., Chakrabarti, A., Dasgupta, B., Sen, S. (eds) ‘Capital’ in the East. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9468-4_9
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