Rosa Luxemburg in Mexico: On the Return of Primitive Accumulation

Abstract

Perhaps no concept has shaped discussions of capitalism and its contemporary transformations more than that of ongoing primitive accumulation. This paper examines, accounts for, and unpacks how primitive accumulation came, within a certain genre of conversations, to be so central. While there have been prior critiques of its usage, notably by Robert Brenner, few have returned to the source of the modern framing of the concept, Rosa Luxemburg. Through a discussion of David Harvey’s updating of primitive accumulation as accumulation by dispossession, I return to Luxemburg in order to extract two methodological principles from her work: follow the production of aspects of accumulation and think their organic link and track violence. I then deploy these methodological principles in a discussion of certain critical processes of accumulation in contemporary Mexico to demonstrate the spatialized “organic link” of Luxemburg and Harvey has been violently reconstituted.