Primitive Accumulation of Capital - Ongoing Primitive Accumulation

Ongoing Primitive Accumulation

"Orthodox" Marxists see primitive accumulation as something that happened in the late Middle Ages and finished long ago, when capitalist industry started. They see primitive accumulation as a process happening in the transition from the feudal "stage" to the capitalist "stage".

However, this can be seen as a misrepresentation of both Marx's ideas and historical reality, since feudal-type economies existed in various parts of the world well into the 20th century.

Marx's story of primitive accumulation is best seen as a special case of the general principle of capitalist market expansion. In part, trade grows incrementally, but usually the establishment of capitalist relations of production involves force and violence; transforming property relations means that assets previously owned by some people are no longer owned by them, but by other people, and making people part with their assets in this way involves coercion.

In his preface to Das Kapital Vol. 1, Marx writes "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future". The less developed countries also face a process of primitive accumulation, it is an ongoing process of expropriation, Proletarianization and Urbanization.

Because it is a fundamental tool of capitalist initiation and restoration, and because the rate of profit always begins to fall, sooner or later, primitive accumulation hits us all. Marx comments that "if, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, "De te fabula narratur ! (the tale is told of you!)".

Marx was referring here to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production (not the expansion of world trade), through expropriation processes. He continues, "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonism that results from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results."

The way that the process by which foreign economic communities are subordinated to the laws of motion of capital is "primitive accumulation": the plunder or Privatization of the commons and the Proletarianization of the working population.