Accumulation by dispossession

In the last part of volume one of Capital, Marx described how capitalism began as "so-called primitive accumulation". English peasants were driven from the commons, church property and state lands were privatised, colonies were plundered and the national debt and tax system were built, so that on one side stood capitalists who monopolised the means of production and on the other propertyless people with nothing to sell but their labour power. Marx's general theory of capital accumulation assumes this process is over: the capitalist is established as producer and exchanger of commodities, labour power has become a commodity that trades generally at its value, and accumulation proceeds as "expanded reproduction" through the production of surplus value in the factory.

Harvey points to the weakness of this assumption. It relegates accumulation based upon predation, fraud and violence to an "original stage" no longer considered relevant or, as with Rosa Luxemburg, to something "outside of" the capitalist system. In The Accumulation of Capital Luxemburg distinguished two aspects of accumulation. One concerns the factory, the mine and the agricultural estate, where surplus value is produced and, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail. The other concerns the relations between capitalism and non-capitalist modes of production; its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system, a policy of spheres of interest and war, and force, fraud, oppression and looting are openly displayed. Harvey accepted her view that the two aspects are "organically linked" and called for a general re-evaluation of the continuous role and persistence of the predatory practices of primitive accumulation within the long historical geography of capital accumulation. "Since it seems peculiar to call an ongoing process 'primitive' or 'original'", he wrote, he would substitute for these terms the concept of "accumulation by dispossession".

Harvey listed again the processes Marx described as primitive accumulation: the commodification and privatisation of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of common, collective, state and other forms of property rights into exclusive private property rights; suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and suppression of indigenous forms of production and consumption; colonial, neo-colonial and imperial appropriation of assets, including natural resources; monetisation of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade; and usury, the national debt and ultimately the credit system. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in backing and promoting these processes.

For Harvey all these features remain powerfully present, and some have been fine-tuned to play an even stronger role. As Lenin, Hilferding and Luxemburg remarked, the credit system and finance capital are major levers of predation and fraud. Stock promotions, Ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, levels of debt that reduce whole populations even in advanced countries to debt peonage, corporate fraud and the raiding of pension funds are central to contemporary capitalism. The collapse of Enron dispossessed many people of their livelihoods and pension rights. Above all, the speculative raiding of hedge funds and other institutions of finance capital is the cutting edge of dispossession. When they created a liquidity crisis throughout South East Asia in 1997, profitable businesses were forced into bankruptcy and bought at fire-sale prices by surplus capitals in the core countries, in what Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso called "the biggest peacetime transfer of assets from domestic (i.e. South East Asian) to foreign (i.e. US, Japanese and European) owners in the past fifty years anywhere in the world."

Wholly new mechanisms of dispossession have opened up as well. The WTO agreement on intellectual property rights (TRIPS) lets the patenting and licensing of genetic materials and seed plasmas be used against the very populations whose practices developed them, and biopiracy is rampant. The depletion of the global environmental commons of land, air and water, the wholesale commodification of nature, and the commodification of culture and intellectual creativity are also dispossession. The corporatisation and privatisation of public assets such as universities, and the wave of privatisation of water and other utilities that has swept the world, are a new wave of "enclosing the commons". The reversion to the private domain of common property rights won through past class struggles, the right to a state pension, to welfare or to national health care, has been one of the most egregious policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neoliberal orthodoxy; the Bush administration's plan to privatise social security was a case in point.

As the English Wikipedia summarises, Harvey saw these policies as guided mainly by four practices: privatisation, financialisation, the management and manipulation of crises, and state redistribution. Margaret Thatcher's sale of council housing is cited as an example. At first it seemed to let low-income tenants buy homes cheaply and gain assets, but housing speculation followed, low-income people were pushed out to the periphery, and the new homeowners handed part of their income to the banks as interest on long-term mortgages.

Accumulation by dispossession belongs together with Harvey's "spatial fix" and his theory of overaccumulation. Dispossession, he held, is present in every period, but picks up strongly when crises of overaccumulation occur in expanded reproduction and no other exit seems available. Japan's plunder of Taiwan and Britain's of the Witwatersrand in the 1930s, and the structural adjustment programmes administered by the International Monetary Fund from the 1980s, are read as dispossession serving as an antidote to difficulties in expanded reproduction. Harvey saw the waves of dispossession that mark the new US-centred imperialism as sparking the anti-globalisation movement and resistance in countries such as South Korea.

A concept so widely used has drawn criticism. In "David Harvey's Theory of Accumulation by Dispossession: A Marxist Critique" (2017) the Marxist geographer Raju Das called the concept "chaotic", since it includes processes that bear no internal relations and separates processes that should not be separated, and argued that Harvey inflates its causal significance and mistakenly treats dispossession as the dominant moment of contemporary capitalism. Harvey, Das argued, fails to connect the dispossession of producers to the "accumulation by exploitation" of proletarians and semi-proletarians, abstracts imperialism from the exploitation rooted in production, and reaches reformist political conclusions that take a dim view of the working class. In 2015 the Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas noted that the appropriation of resources and the dispossession of indigenous people and peasants were nothing new in Latin America, and that the "Harvey fashion", which quotes an English author while neglecting Latin American thinkers such as Ruy Mauro Marini, was a kind of intellectual colonialism. He also charged that Latin America's progressive governments cite Harvey to gloss over the contradictions of their own extractivist policies.