What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept

Abstract

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criticisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ does not deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threatened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state.