Primitive Accumulation

What story did the economists tell about the beginning of capitalism?

For a capitalist economy to run, two kinds of people must meet in the market: owners of money, means of production and means of subsistence who want to increase the value they hold by buying other people’s labour-power, and workers with nothing to sell but their own labour-power. Marx called such workers “free in the double sense”: neither do they themselves belong directly to the means of production, like slaves or serfs, nor do the means of production belong to them, as with the self-employed peasant; they are “free, unencumbered and rid of” them. But how did these two groups come into being in the first place?

Classical political economy, Adam Smith among others, assumed an accumulation preceding capitalist production, a “previous accumulation”. Marx summarised the story like this: long, long ago there was on the one side a diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite, and on the other lazy rascals who squandered everything they had. So the former accumulated wealth and the latter finally had nothing to sell but their own skins. This story, Marx scoffed, “plays in political economy approximately the same part as original sin in theology”: as Adam bit the apple and sin fell upon the human race, the origin is explained by being told as an anecdote of the past.

Marx called it a nursery tale and went on at once: “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short force, play the great part.” That is why he put “so-called” (sogenannte) into the chapter title: to set his own account against the picture of “primitive accumulation” painted by classical political economy. In an 1865 lecture to the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, later published as Value, Price and Profit, he had already described the process as a series of historical processes resulting in the dissolution of the original union between the labouring man and his means of labour.

What exactly does primitive accumulation refer to?

Marx’s definition is concise: “The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” On one side the process turns the social means of subsistence and production into capital; on the other it turns the immediate producers into wage-labourers. It appears “primitive” because it forms the prehistory of capital and of the mode of production corresponding to it. Despite the word “accumulation”, the core is not that someone patiently piled up wealth but that a great many people were deprived of their means of livelihood.

The chapter holds a special place in the structure of Capital. According to the economist Elmar Altvater, chapter 4 had set out the logical presuppositions, the “doubly free” wage-labourer and a class of owners of the means of production, and chapters 21–22 had shown how capitalist production constantly reproduces this class division. Chapter 24 deals with the historical and empirical conditions of what chapter 4 had simply presupposed.

How did it happen in England?

Marx’s main stage is England. From the end of the fifteenth century the feudal retinues were broken up; as Flemish wool manufacture flourished and wool prices rose, landlords turned arable land into sheep pasture and drove out the peasants. In the sixteenth-century Reformation, church property was sold off cheaply or handed to royal favourites. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 state lands were given away or simply stolen without restraint, and in the eighteenth century Parliament passed “Bills for Inclosures of Commons”, turning land that villagers had used in common into private property. The last great phase was the “Clearing of Estates” in the Scottish Highlands, sweeping people off the land to make way for sheep and hunting grounds. The spoliation of church property, the fraudulent alienation of state domains, the theft of common land, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism: Marx called them all “idyllic methods of primitive accumulation”, with heavy irony.

Those driven from the land could not be absorbed by the rising manufactures as fast as they were set free, nor could they suddenly adapt to the discipline of their new condition. Many became beggars, robbers and vagabonds. From the end of the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, a “bloody legislation” against vagabondage spread across Western Europe. “The fathers of the present working class,” Marx wrote, “were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers.” Whipping, branding, imprisonment and, for repeat offenders, execution drilled people into the discipline of wage labour. The historian E. P. Thompson called enclosure “a plain enough case of class robbery”. The history of this expropriation, Marx concluded, “is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”

What part did colonies and the slave trade play?

Primitive accumulation was not confined to the English countryside. “The discovery of gold and silver in America,” Marx wrote, “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, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Then followed the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe as its theatre. By the end of the seventeenth century these moments were systematically combined in England in the colonial system, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation and the protectionist system. Some, like the colonial system, rested on the most brutal force, but all used the power of the state, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse-fashion, the transformation of the feudal into the capitalist mode of production.

Here Marx wrote two of his most quoted sentences: “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.” And capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Yet in an 1877 letter to the editors of the Russian journal Otechestvennye Zapiski he insisted that the chapter only sought to trace the path by which the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal one in Western Europe; it was not a philosophy of history prescribing the same road for every country. Even so, the economic historian Andre Gunder Frank criticised Marx, along with every view that dates the birth of capitalism to around 1500, as Eurocentric.

Why several Korean renderings?

Korean has several translations for the same concept. The German ursprünglich means “original”, “originating”, which the English edition rendered as “primitive”. Kang Shin-joon’s translation of Capital from the German edition (Gil, 2008) renders the title of chapter 24 as “이른바 본원적 축적” (bonwonjeok, “original”) and its first section as “본원적 축적의 비밀”. Kim Soo-haeng’s translation (Bibong, revised 2015), which follows the English edition’s division into Part 8, chapters 26–33, renders the part title as “이른바 시초축적” (sicho, “initial”) and chapter 26 as “시초축적의 비밀”. The Korean edition of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch likewise uses 시초축적 in its subtitle. Korean Wikipedia titles its article 자본의 본원 축적 and also gives 원시 축적, and 원시적 축적, a calque of the English “primitive”, is also widely used.

This dictionary uses 본원적 축적 as the Korean headword, as closest to the German and as used in translations from the German edition and in reference works, and lists the others as alternative translations of the same concept. “Primitive” here means “first”, not “backward”. Primitive socialist accumulation, the term used by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, is a separate concept modelled on this one.

A phase of history or an ongoing process?

Marxists have read primitive accumulation in two ways. Vladimir Lenin, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), treated it as a historical phase, the precondition of the capitalist mode of production. He insisted that the so-called primitive accumulation must be distinguished from the accumulation of capital on the basis of capitalism, and summed it up as the forcible separation of the working people from the means of production, the expulsion of peasants from their land, the seizure of common lands, the system of colonies, the national debt, protective tariffs and the like.

Rosa Luxemburg opened another path in The Accumulation of Capital (1913). To realise the surplus value it produces, capitalism needs societies and markets outside itself, peasants and small producers. Exchange with them collides with non-capitalist social relations, and capital overcomes the resistance with military and political force. The extra-economic coercion that could be called primitive accumulation is thus a permanent, inherent element of modern societies, and its radius extends to the whole world. In Luxemburg’s words, capitalism is the first economic form “which cannot exist by itself, without other economic forms as its milieu and its breeding ground.” She concluded that once the whole world was capitalist, accumulation would reach its historical end, a theory of breakdown that proved controversial.

Louis Althusser counted primitive accumulation as Marx’s second great discovery after surplus value: the “incredible” means, the most brutal violence, by which capitalism was born in the West, and which capitalism has gone on using in its colonial and ex-colonial “margins” well into the twentieth century. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge likewise stressed that the process is permanent.

From the 1970s on the idea acquired a new name. The geographer David Harvey argued in The New Imperialism (2003) that the process Marx called primitive accumulation had never ended, and called it “accumulation by dispossession”. Its main instruments in the neoliberal era, he argued, are privatisation, financialisation, the management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions. The Thatcher government’s sale of council housing is often cited as an example: low-income tenants seemed to gain assets by buying their homes cheaply, but speculation followed, they were pushed out to the periphery, and the new owners ended up paying mortgage interest to the banks. The “Bielefeld group” around Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof likewise analysed the expropriation of small producers, the expulsion of peasants, the patenting of production processes, the privatisation of public property and the precarisation of work (“housewifisation”) as primitive accumulation continuing on a world scale.

Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), pointed to what Marx’s account left out. She set out to rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist viewpoint while avoiding the limits of a “women’s history” separated from that of the male working class. On her account the great witch hunts of early modern Europe were an attack on women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and on the power women had gained through their sexuality, their control over reproduction and their ability to heal. Primitive accumulation was also a process of subordinating women’s bodies and reproductive labour to the needs of capital accumulation. Federici noted that there is no record of witch hunts in Ireland and the Scottish Western Highlands, where collective land tenure and kinship ties provided a safety net.

Which reading one adopts has political consequences. If primitive accumulation is a past phase, analysis and struggle centre on exploitation within established wage relations, on the workplace and class struggle. If it is an ongoing process, struggles over land and the commons, privatisation and debt, housework, and the resistance of Indigenous peoples and peasants to dispossession by oil and mining companies all become part of the same anti-capitalist struggle. That is why Luxemburg’s analysis of “permanent primitive accumulation” still informs such struggles today.

There are critics as well. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, held that Marx’s mockery of the “nursery tale” of intelligence and thrift was merely the politician’s trick of getting the laughers on his side: the tale contains a good deal of truth, and Marx’s account, that force and robbery made exploitation easier, does not explain how certain people acquired the power to rob in the first place. From another direction Étienne Balibar argued that the analysis of primitive accumulation is a “genealogy” tracing back, element by element, the components of the capitalist structure, not a history of the preceding mode of production as a whole.

How does it differ from “primitive socialist accumulation”?

The revolution of 1917 took place in Russia, an industrially backward agrarian country. The Bolsheviks regarded industrialisation as the precondition of both communism and national defence, and while the New Economic Policy stabilised the economy it did not bring rapid industrialisation. In The New Economics (1926) Yevgeni Preobrazhensky therefore called for a “primitive socialist accumulation”: building up state-run industry at the expense of the largely private agricultural sector, by analogy with the concept Marx had used to explain the birth of capitalism.

Under Stalin the demand was carried out, but with a degree of violence beyond what Preobrazhensky himself had called for: agriculture was forcibly collectivised and subordinated to industrialisation and the planned economy. Assessments diverge. Leo Kofler interpreted Stalinism as a belated, catch-up primitive accumulation on which the rule of the “cadre bureaucracy” rested. Tony Cliff, who regarded the Soviet Union as state capitalist, argued that collectivisation “freed” the peasants from their means of production and turned part of them into an industrial labour reserve, and wrote that Stalin accomplished in a few hundred days what had taken England a few hundred years. Wolfgang Abendroth, by contrast, held that after the defeat of the German workers in 1923 and the stabilisation of world capitalism from 1924, with the European revolution postponed for a long period and no large investment aid to be expected from industrialised countries, primitive accumulation for rapid catch-up industrialisation was bound to be a “central task” of the USSR. In the event the Soviet Union rose to the rank of an industrial nation within a very short time, at the cost of millions of victims.