Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Primitive or Original Accumulation

this is David Harvey and you're listening to the anti-capitalist chronicles a podcast that looks at capitalism through a Marxist lens this podcast is made possible by democracy at work I've taught Marx's capital volume one many many many times in my career and last night was the final session of yet another of course on this and the final session deals with what Marx calls primitive or original accumulation which is the story of how the capital came to power how it came to be what it is and one of the interesting things about capital is a book is that Marx changes his writing style depending upon the nature of the materials he's covering there are some passages which are very lyrical or some passages that are very sort of densely theoretical there are some passages which are sort of detailed historical materials but the final session on primitive accumulation is dealing with very short sharp chapters which are very brutal in their impact and I think what Marx is trying to do through his writing style is to emphasize the brutality and the violence through which capital de came to be what it is now this story that Marx tells of the origins of capital is one which goes against prevailing opinion Marx himself had to deal with the way in which political economy of the time recorded how capital began and it was a virtuous story there were some people who were kind of careful and thoughtful and in detail kind of looked after things and were responsible and then there were those who were kind of just wanted to spend their time in riotous living and so the origins of capital was depicted as a virtuous story where virtue one out and the virtuous people became the entrepreneurs they became the people who deferred gratification who look to the future and the riotous people were left with the possible only possibility of making a living which was to offer their labor power to the capitalists so this was the kind of story and Marx gana says that's a fantasy that never really happened that way the other story which with which we're now more familiar but which was around in Marx's time was that it was Christian virtue that Max Weber later on wrote the famous text about the Protestant ethic and the origins of capitalism and which an ethical Protestantism came to the rescue of an economic system by again Quaker virtue and deferred gratification and careful management of money and entrepreneurial skills and things of that kind now Marx takes both of these stories we obviously didn't have the Weber story but there was a virtue of a kind of argument around saying it had to have something to do with the nature of Christianity and Martin Luther and all the rest of it so Marx takes both of those who dismisses them with a kind of almost a brutal wave of one hand he kind of says look the reality was that capital came into being in as he says letters of blood and fire it was a violent violent thing the usurpation of a former system of governance a usurpation of power relations the the robbery thievery violence fraudulence the misappropriation of state power the utilization of almost every kind of criminal means that you could possibly imagine so this is the story that Marx wants to tell and maybe he ever does it a bit but on the other hand when we look back we see there was a good deal of what he was talking about going on throughout this history and he dismisses the religious story also by kind of saying you know the religious people if you want to see what they really did just look at the way in which the parish is organized the treatment of the poor in the poor houses and the orphanages and that and he says what you really see is that these were many prisons and there was an incarceration politics going around in a violent kind of repression of human dignity and the like given the way in which Christianity in practice dealt with problems of unemployment problems of lack of access to living standards but the main story Marx wants to do to tell is the violent means by which the mass of the population were deprived of access to the means of production to the ways of actually reproducing their daily life and this violent appropriation and this violent reorganisation of the social order was as far as Marx was concerned the original sin of what capital was about and I think that it's interesting to see the way in which he sets up this notion of an original sin because there are some thinkers for instance Derrida who would kind of say that any social order as it comes into being bears the marks of its violent origins and can never expunge that history and that therefore the violence of its origins continually haunt it and return return again and again and again to haunt us and I think this is a very good moment actually historically to look at the return of many of these violent forms of expropriation expulsion --zz evictions and the like which Marx describes as being present in the in the in the very origins of capitalism so this is a good moment to return to this moment of original sin of capital accumulation because it sees about evictions and expulsion and of course we're seeing a good deal of that going on and the fraudulence and the lying the telling of mystical kind of stories to cover over the egregious appropriation which is going on of wealth and power on the part of very small groups in the population this is a rather interesting moment then to kind of say there are we actually currently being haunted by this tale of violence and primitive accumulation so Marx's argument then is that the proceeding order the feudal order was undermined in a number of very distinctive ways it was undermined partly by merchants capitalist practices which were very much based on on buying cheap and selling deer and frequently the appropriation of commodities from populations which were not in a position to be able to resist the military and the financial power of a merchant capitalist order the order was also undermined by usury and and the moneylender and the like so if you put together the moneylender at the merchant capitalist together they undermined feudal power and and generated the possibility of a vast accumulation of capital in very few hands and that vast accumulation of capital was then used to try to dis possess the mass of the population so the story of primitive accumulation as marx lays it out is really this formation of the working-class that is of a class that had no means of existence apart from selling its labour power in labor markets and this is if you like the secret that Marx wishes to own which is to reveal to us through various historical stages it occurs of course at first on the land so you get the appropriation of the land enclosure of the land the existence of private property on the land and the gradual Assembly of the land through the despoliation of the ecclesiastical estates the taking away of and the privatization of state ownership of the land and that privatization in the end produced a class of if you like agricultural capitalists landed capitalists who whose main task was to separate workers from the land so that they had were forced out into the streets and then what this meant Marx argues is a collapse of a social order that had been based upon the access to the Commons and so one of the big movements that we see is the enclosure of the Commons which is actually a legal process and Marx emphasizes the way in which illegal processes of expropriation eventually become legal processes of expropriation as the state is in effect commanded by capital to the point where the state is going to pass laws which are going to expropriate populations and privatize access to the land but the industrial capitalists of course arises in a different way the industrial capitalist takes landed property as its basis but then takes money power and starts to use money to make more money and that is if you like the real origins of what capital is about so this is a remarkable story that Marx tells in capital and he tells it in various in in various ways but one of the things that is very striking about it is the tremendous hypocrisy upon which this system is is founded and the hypocrisy really lies in this but on the one hand liberal theory takes the view the private property arises because individuals mix their labor with the land and they therefore have a right to the product of their own labor but of course workers do not have a right to the property product their own labor because the product of their labor belongs to capital and workers do not have a right either to control the labor process because the labor process is designed by capital so that there is a theory of liberal rights in the works of John Locke and the like which turns out to be completely perverted turned on his head by what happens in the 17th and 18th centuries as society begins to move towards a more capitalist social order now the reason I think this is important to look at is to ask the question and to what degree of these processes of primitive accumulation still with us because one of the ideas that comes out of Marx's capital is that once upon a time capital was as it were riddled with this illegal violent processes but once capital was as it were centered and and and has assumed power then all that illegal out illegality can be actually done away with and we left with a society where as marx puts it the the the the sort of the subtle economy of decision-making through an economic system precludes violent expropriations and alike so you would get the impression from the first part of Marx's capital there this piece was essentially a peaceful market process that market exchange is well established that the equalization of the rate of profit is well-established all of these things are well established and that therefore the system is going to be working out in a rather utopian way and in fact what Marx does is to take up the utopian visions of the the classical political economy and Adam Smith and Ricardo and the like and kind of say all right let's accept that a utopian vision and then try to sort of figure out how capital is actually going to be working on the basis of this free market exchange a legal system based on private property rights and and and the like so you get the impression that once upon a time there was this violent confrontation which led to the rise of capital but then afterwards Capitol sort of settled down and became a legal kind of kind of system and everything was being worked out according to the laws of motion of capital accumulation which of course did indeed benefit the rich visa B the poor but nevertheless it was a legal kind of process and and therefore violence and appropriation and expulsion and so on below no longer necessary but what I really want to argue is that right now if we look at the way in which society is being organized we see a great deal of violent expropriation going on we see a great deal of violence in relationship to to to labor we see a daily violence actually occurring in society and there's a sense in which we might kind of say this is the original sin of capital actually returning to haunt us and at this particular historical moment it's becoming a crucial kind of question and how to confront what in effect is the illegality of capital because it is unfortunately not the case that the theory of capital which to which we have been exposed by classical political economy and be economists the theory of capital as a peaceful system is no longer a reasonable position to take that in fact what we're dealing with or have to look at is the continuation and in fact the resurrection systems is a violent expropriation and a form of capital arising which is based not upon the equality of exchange but which is based upon the Equality of exchange which then leads to a certain violence of expropriation there has been some controversy over the degree to which the techniques and practices of primitive accumulation actually continue throughout a long history of capitalism a couple of thinkers have actually argued that you cannot envisage a society that would actually be stabilized without the continuation of some of these practices and this is particularly the case with Hannah Arendt and it's also the case with Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg actually went out of her way to say that Marx's account of the continuity of capitalist production is missing out on something and that the expansion of the system which is required for capital accumulation could not be orchestrated through processes of accumulation which were internalized within the dynamic of capitalism so Laura Luxembourg sort of said look the only way in which Ashley capital continued is by having a place outside of the dynamics of capitalism upon which capital accumulation can feed and that outside of was actually registered through colonial and imperialist practices that the expansion of capital depended upon primitive accumulation occurring on the margins of a capitalist society and that would be a permanent condition of what capital was about so in a sense she was saying imperialism is a necessary feature of a capitalist society primitive accumulation on the periphery but when the periphery is totally absorbed and there's no place to go then that would be the end of capitalism that's what basically she was she was arguing but meanwhile she said there's a real difference between understanding the dynamics of capital as a sort of sort of system which is kind of smoothly kind of working and the rough-and-tumble which is going on on the periphery so that the absorption of areas on the periphery into the capitalist system was always going to be based upon violent appropriations and expropriations and the violence of imperialist interventions now this thesis is I think an interesting one to look at because to some degree Marx accepts that because he recognizes in the expansion of the system requires an expansion of access to raw materials as well as an expansion in the market and when he punched this out he immediately kind of says well actually when we look at it tactically in in Britain at the time when Marx was writing this meant India that India was going to be the big market for the expansion of the Lancashire cotton industry but in order for that to happen the sort of over caught the the textile industry indigenously set up in India had to be destroyed and it was part of what British power was about was to destroy the Indian textile industry in such a way that just as to make the way that the Indians would have to consume Lancashire cotton goods and so the market was taken care of by the opening up of the India market through the destruction of indigenous pop industrial capacity but then India needed to have some way to pay for all of those cotton goods which were coming and that then led to the August roll castration of much of Indian production around it for production of raw materials so cotton raw cotton hemp jute and the like became export products but as Luxemburg pointed out these were not really sufficient to cover the total value of the of the cotton which was being imported and so India needed some other way to pay for it and here we get into the kind of again a violence of primitive accumulation because what Luxembourg points out is that India in fact was forced by the British to start to grow opium in large quantities and then opium was taken to China and forced upon China through the opium wars Chinese didn't want opium but there were forth in Shanghai and although it was forced open as a treaty port through which opium could be sold to the Chinese in large quantities and the that opium was paid for by silver which the Chinese had in abundance so in effect Chinese silver then flowed to India and they're from India back to Britain so this was kind of it so so what Luxembourg describes is an imperial system which is about primitive accumulation going on on the periphery and that that would continue indefinitely until all of the periphery is is absorbed within the capitalist dynamic in which case then capital would not actually allow for itself would not find be able to find an adequate market to itself so that this this story of how imperialism is the perpetuation of primitive accumulation on the periphery and actually to this day we will still find what the sorts of things that Marx was talking about going on and in in the periphery for example the mobilisation of the Chinese peasantry into a global capitalist production after sort of nineteen eighty or so is a classic case of primitive accumulation of the sort the Marx describes back in the 17th and 18th centuries just as happening in China similarly the dispossession of the of the peasantry in India and the increasing wage labor structures in in that country and the destruction of peasant forms of organization all around the world suggest that the primitive accumulation that Marx was talking about back then has continued as being a feature of a capitalist society but again Marxist theory of primitive accumulation is primarily geared and not so much to them to market questions and more material questions so that the primitive accumulation was not so much about the market question and the raw material question as it was about the formation of a global wage labor force and I think it's significant that the global wage labor force has increased by about 1 billion people since 1980 or so and so that primitive accumulation in that classic sense still has remains with us and there is some credence to be given to the Luxembourg question of what happens when the whole of the world has been organized internally within capitalism and there is no external space for primitive accumulation to to go on in which case we will need I think an alternative form a parallel to primitive accumulation which is going to allow for the stabilization of the system and that is what I will be talking about next time thank you for joining me today you've been listening to David Harvey's anti-capitalist chronicles a democracy at work production a special thank you to the wonderful patreon community for supporting this project

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 22,214

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, socialism, Marx, Capital, power, wealth, profits

Id: a_I5QryN9go

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019