Primitive accumulation of capital
In Marxian economics and preceding theories,[1] the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, prior accumulation, or original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital and therefore how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Concept[edit]
Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process in which some workers laboured more diligently than others and gradually built up wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living wages for their labour.[2] Karl Marx rejected such accounts as 'insipid childishness' for their omission of the role of violence, war, enslavement, and conquest in the historical accumulation of land and wealth.[3] Marxist scholar David Harvey explains Marx's primitive accumulation as a process which principally "entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation".[4]
Marx viewed the colonization of the Americas, the African slave trade, and the events surrounding the First Opium War and Second Opium War as important instances of primitive accumulation.[5]: 14
In The German Ideology and in volume 3 of Capital, Marx discusses how primitive accumulation alienates humans from nature.[5]: 14
Naming and translations[edit]
The concept was initially referred to in various different ways, and the expression of an "accumulation" at the origin of capitalism began to appear with Adam Smith.[6] Smith, writing The Wealth of Nations in his native English, spoke of a "previous" accumulation;[7] Karl Marx, writing Das Kapital in German, reprised Smith's expression, by translating it to German as ursprünglich ("original, initial"); Marx's translators, in turn, rendered it into English as primitive.[1] James Steuart, with his 1767 work, is considered by some scholars to be the greatest classical theorist of primitive accumulation.[8]
Privatization[edit]
According to Marx, the purpose of primitive accumulation is to privatize the means of production, so that the exploiting owner class can profit from the surplus labour of those who, lacking other means, must work for them.
Marx says that primitive accumulation means the expropriation of the direct producers and, more specifically, "the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner... Self-earned private property, that is based, so to speak, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring-individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on the exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., wage labour (emphasis added).[11]