Primitive accumulation - comment for Melvin P.

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Melvin,

You are getting very polemical again. I realise that for you Marxism is like
the bible, and that the translated "letter" of Marx is important for you
rather than the theory itself, the history and concepts behind it, but your
stupid racist polemic against Mandel, Trotsky and myself fails completely,
and you make zero response to the actual argument. You know this anyway, and
so you focus on a few of my phrases such as "cartoon Marxism", lottery,
prostitution etc. blah-blah and then you want to have a good snigger and
jibe like an an ignorant redneck jerk.

In Dutch they say, "wat de boer niet kent, dat lust hij niet", meaning "what
the peasant has never heard of, he doesn't have an appetite for". In your
case, you are not a peasant, but an urban worker, but you are still acting
like a jerk. I am not raising this controversy for nothing, but for a very
good reason, but that reason escapes you entirely, because you confuse
"thinking" with "worship". I realise this happens a lot in the USA, but here
in Holland we think there is a difference.

Issues such as lottery fraud and scams and prostitution as sources for
primitive accumulation are not a joke, they are a serious issue among the
working classes, including black workers. It just adds to the parasites who
want to get rich off the back of the working classes. Likewise, the
inability of an entrepreneur to be able to set up a legitimate new venture
legally to produce something, because he lacks the start-up capital or is
actively prevented by the state or the corporations from doing it, is a
serious phenomenon and not a joke. The plunder of the ideas of other people,
through violation of their privacy, for the sake of financial and political
gain, is not a joke. You laugh and jibe now, but when it happens to you, you
will no longer be laughing, I can tell you that now.

If you study the history of the USA, you will find that there was a time,
when although capitalist industry was established on the Eastern seaboard,
large tracts of the mid-West and the West were not yet settled by the
whites. There was land there that either belonged to Indian tribes, or
belonged to nobody in particular - surveyors were sent in to measure up what
was there, because they didn't even know what was there. One of the first
things the capitalists did, was build railway lines through that land in
order to get easier access to it. There is a whole story in that as well,
the story of the railway monopolies and empires.

Subsequently, the land was seized or annexed in some way, where necessary
the Indians were pushed off or annihilated, the land was fenced or a
"private property" sign was tacked up. Suddenly unimproved land that nobody
had every heard of was owned by somebody, and had a price, and any Indian
who thought it was his, got shot or banished to a reservation.

According to your moronic textual interpretation, all this cannot happen in
the real world, because according to Marx's quote, you cannot have primitive
accumulation going on, when you already have capitalist industry. Therefore
it did not really happen. But primitive accumulation it was, the
expropriation and seizure of assets, accompanied by genocide, and the fact
that some New York employer in New York happened to have opened a factory
meantime producing apple pie, thereby proving that the capitalist mode of
production already existed, is completely irrelevant to the issue.

Next thing you are going to tell me, is that the expropriation of the Jews
and many others by the Nazis as a source of "primitive accumulation" within
a situation of mass poverty and mass unemployment did not really happen
either, you just cannot accept that people can get rich in bourgeois society
through confiscation and looting, even when the capitalist mode of
production is fully established. All you have is "the word, the word, and
nothing but the word", and if Marx did not scribble it somewhere in a holy
text, it is not true, and it did not happen.

Leon Trotsky described the process of the development of capitalist industry
existing side-by-side as a hybrid with ancient modes of production with his
concept of  "unequal and combined development", it meant, that the old modes
of production were suddenly confronted with the most advanced industrial
technology, that capitalist industry existed side-by-side with the ancient
Russian mirs in the Russian empire, a fact of enormous political and
cultural importance for a modernisation strategy. The Putilov steelworks in
Petrograd were the largest in the world, employing thousands of workers, yet
a few hundred miles down the road people couldn't even read and write and
were grubbing in the ground for a crust. This required a very specific
analysis, and not some general racist redneck black Marxist blah-blah from
Melvin P.

On the basis of his specific analysis, Trotsky was able to predict the
pattern and outcome of the Russian revolution a decade and a half before it
happened, and not only that, he played a leading role in the 1905 uprising
and later in the 1917 insurrection, and after that got together with some
officers to stamp the Red Army out of the ground in order to smash the
whiteguards and defeat invading armies. Compared to that effort, Melvin P.
is just an slimy insect crawling over the pages of Das Kapital.

Subsequent to the overthrown of Czarism, the question was raised, "what to
do now" in terms of economy policy, the bolsheviks were amazed to find that
they were still in power, and Evgeny Preobrazensky realised that you somehow
had to use agrarian surplus as an accumulation fund to develop industry. But
the bolsheviks had no genuine theory or strategy for the development of a
socialist economy, in the first instance they just improvised their
modernisation strategy as they went along. Preobrazhensky however tried to
theorise this, and wrote a book called "The New Economics" calling his
development strategy "primitive socialist accumulation", combining market
economy with state-directed development. He wrote several other books, for
example, "From NEP to Socialism." As a matter of fact, his strategy was not
adopted. Nor was the meaning of socialism in a Russian context well
understood.

A little further on in time, Stalin, who had conquered the apparatus, got a
bit impatient, and tried out a scheme of "primitive socialist
industrialisation" of his own, based on the mass murder of peasants and
forced labour by the working class (which also involved mass murder). He try
to justify this in many different ways, among others, he claimed the rich
kulaks were engaging in expropriation of the poor peasants and so on. But
his entire agricultural analysis was a fraud, he just needed to confiscate
agrarian product to feed the urban population, that is all. According to
you, this is all "certified Marxism". To me it is not, it is mass murder and
economic disaster, which set back the productivity of Russian agriculture
and industry until this very day, quite apart from being morally
indefensible. From my point of view, your Marxism is "cartoon Marxism", and
you would like to force your horrible cartoon on the American working class,
even if it takes mass murder and forced labour, because you don't know a
fart about "primitive accumulation" and the importance of it, and therefore
are in no position to talk any sense about socialist economics at all. As
far as you are concerned, anything goes to win the argument, even if it
takes mass murder and forced labour, you don't give a damn. And in previous
posts, you explicitly say so as well.

As regards Mandel, he never talks about "cartoon Marxism", "lotteries" and
""prostitution", I did, and now you, being a racist Stalinist black
pseudo-Marxist impute views to somebody that he does not even hold, in the
typical Stalinist style of the amalgam, lying, and false accusations. You
have not even read Ernest Mandel's work on this topic, so what do you know
anyway ? I jolly well translated it, so I ought to know. All you've got is
your stupid fake Marxist bible, and then you want to sow discord within the
socialist movement as a provocateur as well, splitting the socialist
movement. You are one of these provocateurs who give Marxism and socialism a
bad name. This is absolutely useless to me, and for that reason, our
dialogue, which I have patiently sought to foster through numerous mails,
taking a lot of crap from you in the process, is now at an end. I have a lot
of patience with people who want to learn something or have a genuine
dialogue. But your asshole polemics do not fall in that category.

Jurriaan