Marx in Moments 06 — “so-called” primitive accumulation

Welcome to the sixth entry in the Marx in Moments series. These are three-minute reads examining key Marxist concepts in a clear and accessible way. This week, we focus on so-called primitive accumulation–Marx’s account of the violence that made capitalism possible, and the reason he insisted on those first two words.

There is a story we are told about how some people came to own everything and others came to own nothing. The owners worked hard and saved. Everyone else didn’t. The story is moral, and it is almost always sanitized. Marx was working against a version of this same story almost two centuries ago, only it was being told about entire classes. Adam Smith called it “previous accumulation.” Long ago, there were two sorts of people: the diligent and frugal who saved, and the lazy who squandered what they had. The first became capitalists. The second had nothing left to sell but themselves.

Marx’s contempt for this story is the reason Part Eight of Capital is titled So-Called Primitive Accumulation. The “so-called” matters if you want to understand Marx’s goal. As Ian Angus has argued, Marx is not describing primitive accumulation–he is condemning the concept itself. The whole section is a polemic against the idea that capitalism arose through the slow, peaceful saving of the virtuous. What it actually arose through was force.

The English case is his classic example. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, peasants who had farmed common land for generations were driven off it. Wool was profitable, and arable land was converted into pasture for sheep. Thomas More, quoted by Marx, wrote that the sheep “swallow down the very men themselves.” The dissolution of the monasteries hurled another wave of people into the proletariat. When the dispossessed became “vagabonds,” the same state that had created them whipped them, branded them, and hanged them. Then came the colonial expansion. The looting of India, the genocides in the Americas, the Atlantic slave trade. “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there.”¹

This is the foundation.

What Marx is doing here is replacing a moral account of capitalism with a historical one. Capital did not come from virtue. It came from a separation that had to be manufactured: people on one side with nothing to sell but their labour, people on the other side with the means of production. That separation was made by fences, by parliaments, by ships, and by chains.

Once the separation is in place, capitalism has two ways of taking. Peter Linebaugh calls this X2.² The first is exploitation, which happens inside the wage relation. A worker is paid for their time and produces more value than they are paid for; the difference goes to the employer. This is robbery, but it is concealed by the appearance of an equal exchange. The second is expropriation, which happens outside the wage relation. Land is enclosed, knowledge is privatized, public assets are sold. There is no exchange at all. Capitalism has always relied on both, and expropriation never stops being available when exploitation alone runs short.

This is why the word “primitive” in the title is not a past tense. The same logic operates today. The privatization of public housing. The enclosure of seed varieties. The scraping of the General Intellect into proprietary models. The bourgeois story tells us the violence was the prologue, and the present is the orderly chapter that follows.

The present is the same chapter.

“And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”³

Marx in Moments Series:

• 01—The Materialist Conception of History
• 02—Alienation
• 03—Species-being
• 04—Metabolic Rift
• 05—The General Intellect