On the So-Called Primitive Accumulation

["Jay Moore" <research@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm down with what Charles (and Louis) have said about Wood's Eurocentric
(that's really giving her too much credit -- Anglocentric is really what it
is!)  theory of the origins of capitalism.  I've thought so ever since I
read her book.  This is really different from Marx's approach with sees
various "momenta", including in other parts of Europe like Italy and
Holland.  But in reference to the discussion below about Marx's use of the
phrase "the so-called primitive accumulation", I think why Marx is saying
"so-called" is that the term is not Marx's original term but is taken from
Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations".   Marx is going to give it a different
meaning than Smith. "So-called" is probably also meant in this context
ironically by Marx (a master of irony), as other times when "so-called" gets
used rhetorically in conversation or writing.  We've all done it.  Smith's
view of the original (or primitive) accumulation, of course, had already
been trashed by Marx earlier in Das Kapital when he (Marx) made fun of the
bourgeois idea that capital comes originally from certain hard-working
individuals scrimping and saving.  Marx agrees with the Proudhonian notion
that "property [meaning capitalist property] is theft."

On primitive accumulation itself, I think it's valuable to look at the works
of the French Marxist anthropologist Claude Meillasoux who stresses in his
works about Africa that primitive accumulation is not only an original stage
of capitalism but is also a continuing factor in its cancerous development.
He uses Luxemburg some, but without the notion of Luxemburg that exhausting
this non-capitalist reservoir will finally lead to The Crisis.

best,
jay
www.neravt.com/left/

**********

Wood: The point of Marx's critique of "the so-called primitive accumulation"
(and people too often miss the significance of the phrase "so-called") is
that no amount of accumulation, whether from outright theft, from
imperialism, from commercial profit, or even from the exploitation of labor
for commercial profit, by itself constitutes capital, nor will it produce
capitalism.

((((((((

CB: An interesting point here is that I too have long noticed the term
"socalled". However, it is also interesting that in the passage above
"socalled " is not used before "primitive accumulation" . We might infer
from that the colonial holocaust was the REAL, not socalled, primitive
accumulation. But I think Wood misunderstands the status of the "wealth"
that was accumulated in the primitive accumulation. It is a necessary and
critical premise to fully capitalist wealth and accumulation.