Forwarded from Anthony (primitive accumulation--introduction)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Primitive Accumulation of Capital in the United States

by Ted Baker

Introduction

I wrote the long essay which follows in early 1990. It was published under
my political pen name, Ted Baker, in a one-issue theoretical magazine that
very few people ever read, called - in vain hopes - Iskra. While the
article focuses on the ?primitive accumulation of capital? in the United
States of America, its perspective is global.

While there are details, including important ones, I might change today, I
think the main ideas of the essay are historically, empirically, and
theoretical correct. The most important focus of the essay is that the
formation of modern social classes and class relations was the product in
the first place of the process of ?primitive accumulation of capital?. And
that in the second place that global took place in different ways, with
different results, in different parts of the world and at different times.
And, in the third place I defend Marx?s origiinal conception of primitve
accumulation of capital against one sided interpretations of that process. 

When I wrote this piece my intention was to extend the work of Marx and
Engels on this subject from where they had left off in Capital. My reasons
were many, but in the first place was my strong feeling that Marxist theory
had never seriously focused its attention on the historical development of
the USA, starting with the issue of ?primitive accumulation?.

I had read the works of Foner, and of George Novak, and of important
non-Marxists like the Beards and Turner, (and even  recieved a degree in
history from the University of California at Berkeley). I was convinced
that the Marxists had only presented honest but empirical - and not very
theoretical- history of the working class and the oppressed, in the case of
the Foners. And in the case of others, like Novak, the work consisted of
very shallow attempts to paste theory derived from European history
directly on top of the history of  the United States, without stopping to
think about the glaring contradictions that emerged (or without thinking
those contradictions through very thouroughly. (The Foners and Novak are
always far more interesting than the pretencious, but even shallower than
Novak, works of writers like Gus Hall and Tim Wohlforth.)

In fact, I always thought that the few things that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and
Trotsky had written about the United States - as distant as they were from
the sensuous reality - were usually closer to the mark than the ?American
writers refered to above. I wanted to know the answers to questions like,
"Why is the working class of the USA so backward and even reactionary?"
"Why didn?t the working class in the USA ever form a mass independent
political party?" " How did the US conquest of Native American lands relate
to imperialism?" "How did the US conquest of Mexican territory relate to
Lenin?s idea of imperialism?" and so on. Not such new questions, and ones
which have been addressed time and time again, but ussually answered with
the same shallowness characteristic of most Marxist writing about US
history and politics.

I thought then, and continue to think now, that unraveling the way in which
world capitalism really evolved, meant subjecting the development of
capitalism in the USA to analysis on the theoretical level of Capital. I
thought then, and I think now, that such a historical analysis could also
-in turn - enrich and advance beyond, the kind of abstract theory of
capitalism that Marx and Engels also tried to advance in Capital.

Although at the time I was familiar with dependency theory, and with some
of the ?world systems? writers, I was outside of the charmed circles of
academic Marxism, and of the even more charming circles of the Communist
Parties of the world. For me Marxism basically began with Marx and Engels,
and ended with Trotsky. 

In other words as a matter of time and space, I was happily ignorant of the
debates that occur on the Marxism list, and those they derive from in
places like PEN-L.

1990 was a time of great political crisis on both the global scale, and on
the very personal scale. The revolutionary upheavals of the 60?s and 70?s
had run their courses. Counterrevolutionary changes were sweeping the
workers states, and the left the world over was in confusion and retreat.
The political current to which I had belonged, the International Workers
League (Fourth International) -?the Morenites? to most of you- had just
splintered into fragments with every national section divided in factions,
with international factions, and deep confusion everywhere. A few little
groups - all with less than 20 people each - were all that remained of the
small party we had built in the USA in the 1980?s. The remnant I was in
published the Iskra in which this essay was included.

Since this is a long piece I can not submit it in just one or a few posts
(and scanning and correcting for mistakes introduced by scanning takes a
long time). I will post it in sections: The Primitive Accumulation of
Capital in the United States; The Dissolution of European Feudalism and the
Conquest of the Americas; Puritanism and New England; A Settler State Based
Upon Plunder; Plunder the Basis of Unity and Conflict Between North and
South; A Privileged Settler State Working Class; The Civil War: Capitalism
Victorious; Conclusion; Epilogue.

All the best, Anthony 


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/