Marx Primitive Accumulation Quotes

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.

As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt complicated both Polanyi’s and Marx’s notion. She observed that primitive accumulation wasn’t just a one-time primal explosion that gave birth to capitalism. Rather, it is a recurring phase in a repeating cycle as more aspects of the social and natural world are subordinated to the market dynamic. Marx’s “original sin of simple robbery,” she wrote, “had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of capital accumulation suddenly die down.

As a historical materialist and African Internationalist, Yeshitela is not a Marxist, but uses his critique of the works of Karl Marx as a building block for the theory of African Internationalism. Chairman Omali quotes Marx to show that, limited by his own European viewpoint on the pedestal of colonialism and slavery, Marx was not capable of understanding the significance of his own words. Marx summed up the ruthless and bloody enslavement of African people, genocide of the Indigenous people, the conquest and looting of India with the term “primitive accumulation” of capital. If Marx had comprehended his own words, he would have “been forced to declare that the road to socialism is painted black,” the Chairman argues.

Karl Marx recognized colonialism as the genesis of what he called “primitive accumulation,” connecting colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. He wrote, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies,