2011_Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist

8/11/2019 2011_Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist

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Science & Society , Vol. 75, No. 3, July 2011, 379399

379

Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation: Notes on Social Constitution

and Expropriation

WERNER BONEFELD*

ABSTRACT : Primitive accumulation is not just the historical start-ing point of capitalism, but,qua coercive proletarianization, centralto its essence. It constitutes a specic mode of social labor and it isthis mode of labor that forms the concept of capital. Primitive accu-mulation is therefore not just a historical past from which capitalistsocial relations emerged, but also, and importantly, constitutive ofthese relations, once established. Marxs critique of political econ-omy expounds economic categories as social categories founded

on the logic of separation. The methodological implications of thisreading of the signicance of primitive accumulation in capitalismare profound and its political implications formidable.

M ANY COMMENTATORS HAVE ANALYZED neoliberalglobalization to include developments akin to what Marxreferred to as primitive accumulation.1 David HarveysbookThe New Imperialism (Harvey, 2003) brought this stance to widerattention and debate. He argues that primitive accumulation is thebasis of all further capitalist accumulation and that, in order to main-tain the wheels of accumulation, it has eventually to be repeated,especially in times of crisis. He calls this primitive accumulation withincapitalism accumulation by dispossession, and contends that in neo-liberal capitalism accumulation by dispossession represents not onlya specific attempt to overcome the capitalist crisis of overaccumula-

1 See, for example, de Angelis, 2001; Dalla Costa, 1995, 2003; Midnight Notes, 2008.

* I wish to thank two anonymous readers atScience & Society for their helpful comments andsuggestions.


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380 SCIENCE& SOCIETY

tion (2003, 14042, 14950, 158) but that it has in fact become thedominant form of accumulation (ibid ., 153, 172). Accumulation bydispossession appears not only at capitalisms periphery as a meansof developing capitalist social relations but also at its center. In his view, accumulation by dispossession includes not only those processesof expropriation that Marx identified as the violent separation ofthe producers from their means of production and subsistence butalso, for example, the privatization of nationalized industries (seeibid ., 146).

The empirical argument about accumulation by dispossession is well established, regardless of disagreements on detailed aspects ofinterpretation. In this context primitive accumulation is discussedas a permanent feature of capitalism either because it derives fromthe expansive nature of capitalist reproduction (Harvey) or becauseit is a capitalist means of subjugating labour (de Angelis, 2001). Ineither case, its aim is expanded proletarianization. Primitive accumula-tion is thus seen as a historical presupposition of capitalism and as anecessary element of its reproduction. There is, however, hardly anydiscussion in the literature about the constitutive presupposition ofprimitive accumulation for capitalist social relations. The historicalpresupposition of capitalist social relations is the doubly free wage

laborer, on the one hand, and the concentration of the means ofexistence in a few hands, on the other. Marxs account of primitiveaccumulation refers to a range of processes that led to the divorce ofthe direct producer from the means of production and subsistence. As he put it, it is the historical process of divorcing the producerfrom the means of production, transforming the social means ofsubsistence and of production into capital, and the immediate pro-ducers into wage laborers (Marx, 1983, 711). Capital dripping fromhead to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt (ibid ., 712), wascreated by the complete separation of the laborers from all propertyin the means by which they can realize their labor (ibid ., 668). Hesays that capitalism presupposes this separation and maintains it onan expanding scale (ibid .).

This paper focuses on this contention. It argues that capitalistreproduction rests on this separation. It is its constitutive premise andforms the concept of capital. The circumstance that its constitutivepremise in dispossessed, doubly free workers vanishes in its generalconcept value in process, money in process and, as such, capital


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PRIMITIVE AND CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION 381

says no more than, to begin with, that the violence of its becomingand being hides in its appearance as an economic thing.

I argue that primitive accumulation refers, on the one hand, tothe historical processes from which capital was born. On the other,it focuses the foundation of a certain mode of social labor a labordivorced from the soil, its means of subsistence, product, and exis-tence; a labor separated from its object, its results, and its conditionsof social being (Negt and Kluge, 1981; Fracchia, 2004).2 Labor in thecapitalistically organized form of social reproduction is labor divorcedfrom its conditions, and I argue that the conceptuality of capital isfounded on this labor. The logic of the original separation of themass of the population from the means of existence is the constitutivepresupposition of capitalist social relations.

Part I explores the foundations of capitalist production relationsin primitive accumulation. Part II expounds Marxs notion that thedivorce of social labor from its means assumes the form of capital.Part III examines the distinction between Forschung (research) and Darstellung (presentation) and shows the significance of this distinc-tion for Marxs development of economic categories. The Conclusionsummarizes the argument and emphasizes its political implications.

IThe separation of the means of labor from labor is the founda-tion of [capitalist] production (Marx, 1972, 272).

The understanding of primitive accumulation as a permanent featureof capitalist reproduction goes back to Rosa Luxemburg (Luxemburg,1963). She maintained that capitalism must always have somethingoutside of itself in order to stabilize, and that crises of capitalist accu-mulation find a temporary resolution in the imposition of conditionsof primitive accumulation upon new populations, creating new mar-kets, discovering new raw materials, and recruiting new and cheaperproletarians (cf. Marx, 1966, ch. 14). Writing in the 1970s, Amin (1974,3) reasserted this view. The mechanisms of primitive accumulation,he argued, do not belong only to the prehistory of capitalism; they

2 I have explored this double meaning in Bonefeld, 1988; 2001; 2002; 2008a. See also Krahl,1985.


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are contemporary as well. It is these forms of primitive accumulation,modified but persistent, to the advantage of the center, that formthe domain of the theory of accumulation on a world scale. Har- veys analysis follows on from Luxemburg and Amin, emphasizing theprocesses of primitive accumulation that the expansion of capitalisminto the periphery has brought about under neoliberalism, and heexpands on their analysis by arguing that it is also a contemporaryforce at capitalisms center (Harvey, 2003).

In this perspective primitive accumulation is a permanent accumu-lation. It is the basis of the capitalist mode of production in its infancy,and the result of expanded capitalist reproduction. However, this dia-lectical movement, in which the historical presupposition of capitalismbecomes a result of its reproduction, suggests that the relationshipbetween accumulation by means of dispossession and accumulationby means of making value expand itself (Marx, 1966, 237) throughexploitation of free labor is more intricate than Luxemburg-inspiredconceptions of the permanence of primitive accumulation allow. It isthe presupposition of capitalism and one of its effects. The dialecti-cal transformation of presupposition into effect suggests that itssignificance is innately capitalist. Indeed, Marx argued that primitiveaccumulation forms (bildet ) the concept (Begriff ) of capital (Marx,

1966, 246). In this view, the originality of primitive accumulation hasto do with its social contents, that is, the forceful separation of laborfrom her means; and therewith the constitution of the capitalist modeof labor that is founded on dispossessed labor. Capital rests on thisfoundation. Its werewolf hunger for surplus labor, appropriating sociallabor time without an equivalent, rests on and develops through theexpanded reproduction of dispossessed labor. The divorce of laborfrom her means of subsistence, primitive accumulation, is more than just an imperialist effect of expanded accumulation. It is the premiseof capitalist social relations, and as such determines the conceptualityof the capitalistically constituted mode of production.3

3 One reader asked that I clarify the term conceptuality (Begrifichkeit ) and wondered whetherit means something like essence (Wesen ). While I appreciate the need for a clarication,it is not as straightforward as it seems. What is the concept of essence, and how might itsconceptuality be conceived? Essence has to appear, for if does not, it is not the essence. What however appears in appearance? There is only one world, and that is the world ofappearance. Essence, that is human social relations, appears, say, as a metal, a stone, as apurely physical external thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indis-tinguishable in form from its natural existence (Marx, 1973, 239, writing on the money


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Labor divorced from its means is the precondition and contin-ued premise of capitalist social relations. As Marx put it, the exchangeof labor for labor seemingly the condition of the workers property restson the foundation of the workers propertylessness (1973, 515). Capitalistaccumulation reproduces its constitutive presupposition in disposses-sion as the result of its own operation. The laborer

constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capi tal,of an alien power that dominates and exploits [the labourer]: and the capi-talist as constantly produces labour-power, but in the form of a subjectivesource of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can alone

be realised; in short he produces the labourer, but as a wage-labourer. Thisincessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is thesine qua non of capitalist production. (Marx, 1983, 53536.)

Capitalism cannot divorce itself from its historical genesis thedivorce of labor from her means forms the concept of capital.

The separation of genesis from existence underlies discussionof primitive accumulation as a time-specific period of transition fromnon-capitalist modes of production to capitalism (cf. Zarembka, 2008;Bonefeld, 2008b). In this perspective primitive accumulation appearsprogressive. It is, says Glassmann (2006, 611), a necessary step in thedirection of fuller human development. Glassmans point is eitherbanal the present is the result of historical development or teleo-logical in its conception of historical laws that unfold with necessity forthe benefit of human development. He argues that Marxs discussionof primitive accumulation focuses largely on proletarianization, sincehe is pre-eminently concerned with the formation of what he takes tobe the most revolutionary subjects and the central issues over whichthey struggle (ibid .). Glassman seems to suggest that Marx was notconcerned with conceptualizing the social foundation of capitalismin free wage labor, but rather in developing the revolutionary subject.

De Angelis (2001) argues similarly but with a different emphasis. Hissubject is capital. He argues that primitive accumulation is a basicontological condition of capitalist production and he conceives of

fetish). Conceptuality focuses the essence of things in their appearance (see Backhaus,2005). Conceptuality expresses the fact that, no matter how much blame may attach to thesubjects contribution, the conceived world is not its own but a world hostile to the subject(Adorno, 1973, 167). For an exposition of this point, see Bonefeld, 2009. See also Reichelt,2005 on Marxs characterization of the commodity as a sensuous supersensible thing.


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primitive accumulation as a capitalist means to enforce market ruleon (new) populations. Capital, he suggests, employs primitive accu-mulation as a weapon to decompose societys natural desire to pro-tect itself from its rule. The separation of genesis from existenceconstitutes the blind spot of teleological, or in any case subjectivist,thought, in which social practice is conceived of as a functional agentin a structure of Being and Becoming. In contradistinction, I arguethat primitive accumulation is significant because it is the centrifugalpoint around which resolves the specific capitalist mode of existenceof social labor, that is, human purposeful productive activity in theform of a laboring commodity.

Commodity exchange and money pre-date capitalist produc-tion. For money, however, to be transformed into capital, the prereq-uisites for capitalist production must exist (Marx, 1972, 272). The firsthistorical presupposition is the separation of labor from her meansand therefore the existence of the means of labor as capital (ibid .).For Marx, this separation comprises a worlds history.

Commodity and money are transformed into capital because the worker. . . is compelled to sell his labour itself (to sell directly his labour power) asa commodity to the owner of the objective conditions of labour. This separa-

tion is the prerequisite for the relationship of capital and wage labour in thesame way as it is the prerequisite for the transformation of money (or of thecommodity by which it is represented) into capital. (Ibid ., 89.)

Expropriation freed the worker from the means of existence andthis separation between these inorganic conditions of human existenceand . . . active [human] existence is completely posited only in therelation of wage labor and capital (Marx, 1973, 489). It is both thefoundation of [capitalist] production . . . [and] given in capitalistproduction (Marx, 1972, 272). There is thus an inner connectionbetween the two forms of accumulation the historical presupposi-tion of mass expropriation is suspended in the necessity of the otheras its secret premise. Every pre-condition of the social reproduc-tion process is at the same time its result, and every one of its resultsappears simultaneously as its pre-condition (Marx, 1972, 507). Theconstitutive content of primitive accumulation seemingly disappears incapitalist accumulation but it does so only to reappear as the result ofits reproduction. It seems as if rationally acting individuals exchange


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on the labor market as equals in liberty and freedom, each pursu-ing their ends. In reality, however, the worker has sold herself to thecapitalist before they meet on the labor market. That is to say, theapparent freedom of wage labor amounts to the same old dodge ofevery conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with themoney he has robbed them of (Marx, 1983, 546).

The violence entailed in the separation of free labor from theobjective conditions of its realization from the means of produc-tion and the material of labor (Marx, 1973, 471)4 appears now, atleast for some, in the civilized form of contractual relations betweenequal legal subjects. For them direct coercion has been replaced by(silent) economic compulsion. The existence of sellers and buyerson the labor market presupposes the existence of the free worker asthe seller of his own labor power. A presupposition of wage labor,and one of the historic preconditions for capital, is free labor and theexchange of this free labor for money, in order to reproduce and to[valorize] money, to consume the use-value of labor not for individualconsumption, but as use-value for money (ibid ., 375, adapted fromthe German original). The conditions of work confront labor as aliencapital (Marx, 1972, 422) because they are lost to [the laborer]and have assumed the shape of alien property (ibid .). That is to say,

the existence of object-less, free workers (Marx, 1973, 507) is thefoundation of capitalist reproduction (Marx, 1983, 585). Capitalistproperty rights rest on the divorce of labor from her means, compel-ling the doubly free laborer to submit to the command of capital(Marx, 1973, 508).

II

What originally appeared as conditions of its becoming . . .now appears as results of its own realization, reality, as positedby it (Marx, 1973, 460).

In the German original, Marx does not speak about primitive accu-mulation. This term is offered in the English translation and, I sup-pose, it is as close to the German original as that is possible. Yet, it is

4 As documented for example in E. P. ThompsonsThe Making of the English Working Class ,Peter LinebaughsThe London Hanged , and Christopher Hill,The World Turned Upside Down ,all published by Penguin (Harmondsworth).


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inaccurate. The German word is ursprnglich . This term can also betranslated as original, initial, unspoiled, as well as beginning,first manifestation, and springing to life. The term does not con-note causality, where, say, an historical event causes the formationof a distinct mode of social relations. Instead the term asks aboutthe genesis of the existent. The significance of primitive accumula-tion is capitalist accumulation. In other words, and with referenceto Marx (1973, 105), the anatomy of Man can explain the anatomyof the ape, but not conversely, the anatomy of the ape does not explainthe anatomy of Man. If the anatomy of the ape would really explain theanatomy of Man than the ape would already possess Man as the innatenecessity of its evolution a natural teleology or an already writtenfuture. That is to say, and drawing on Marxs critique of the econo-mists naturalization of economic categories, such an approach wouldpresent the capitalist mode of production as encased in eternal natu-ral laws independent of history, and it is this conception that allowsthe economists to smuggle capitalist relations in as the inviolablenatural laws on which society and history in the abstract are founded(Marx, 1973, 87). Primitive accumulation is primitive only from thestandpoint of capitalist accumulation. Conceived as anursprngliche accumulation it is not primitive at all its terror that has been writ-

ten into the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire (Marx,1983, 669) led to the complete separation of labor from its meansof existence, and this separation, which capitalist reproduction per-petuates and maintains on an expanding scale, forms the conceptof capital (Marx, 1966, 246).

Capitalisms original beginning weighs like a nightmare on thecapitalistically organized form of social labor. Not only is it free laborunder the command of capital (cf. Marx, 1973, 507, 508). It also vanishes in its own social world, and appears in economic categories,such as capital, profit and rate of interest, that, devoid of humansocial content and purpose, make themselves manifest behind thebacks of the producers. Thus, the capitalist and wage-laborer are assuch merely embodiments, personifications of capital and wage-labor;definite social characteristics stamped upon individuals by the processof social production (ibid .). Capitalist and wage-laborer appear ashuman derivatives of those same economic categories that resultedfrom the class struggle over the original expropriation of the mass ofthe population from their means of subsistence.


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Instead of relations of personal dependency, capitalist socialrelations are governed by abstract forms of dependency. Economiccompulsion appears to issue directly from the things themselves. Itseemsas if the social world existed twice, once as economic thingthat imposes itself on the acting subjects as if by the force of nature,and then as human personification of that thing. Society makes itselffelt behind the backs of the acting individuals, as if it were a worldapart. The logic of separation is such that the human subject subsistsas a personification of her own social world. Capital is thus not onlythe form assumed by the conditions of labor (Marx, 1972, 492).It also appears as if commodities are a product of capital (Marx,1966, 880) rather than of capitalistically constituted living labor. Inessence, capital

is the existence of social labour the combination of labour as subject as well as object but this existence as itself existing independently oppositeits real moments hence itself a particular existence apart from them. Forits part, capital therefore appears as the predominant subject and owner ofalienated labour , and its relation is itself as complete a contradiction as is thatof wage labour. (Marx, 1973, 471.)

The extreme expression of this contradiction is interest-bearing capi-

tal: the most externalized and most fetish-like form of capital (Marx,1966, 391). And the wage the defining characteristic of wagelabor? Labor-wages , or price of labor is an expression that is just asirrational as a yellow logarithm (ibid ., 818). What, then, needs to beexplained is not the relation between capital and wage labor in itsdirect and immediate sense say, capital as subject or as structuralpower but rather the social constitution upon which the capitalrelation is founded and through which it subsists (cf. Marx, 1966,ch. 48). The capitalistically organized form of social labor presupposesthe expropriation of the direct producer, and is itself the posited socialform of that expropriation. It originally appeared as conditions ofits becoming and hence could not spring from itsaction as capital now appears as results of its own realization, reality, as posited byit not as conditions of its arising, but as results of its presence (Marx,1973, 460). As a result of its own realization, primitive accumulationis a permanent accumulation.

What is to be understood by permanent in this context? InLatin, per means through, way; and manere means to remain, to be


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continuous; permanent then connotes a lasting character, somethingmaintained through and also in time. Regarding primitive accumula-tion, permanence means that the divorce of labor from the means ofproduction is the innate necessity of capitalist social relations, whichcapital has to reproduce as the foundation of its existence. Capital-ist accumulation entails reproduction of the fundamental processof separation, a process of separation in which nothing remains inthe way it was and in which, and at the same time, the essential rela-tions between the classes remains unchanged: capital on the onehand, and the doubly free laborer, on the other. Adornos concept ofdynamic within stasis focuses this well (Adorno, 1975): capitalism isa dynamic, ever-developing and changing configuration of social rela-tions, where everything that is solid melts, at the same time as whichthe law of development remains unchanged: expansive reproductionof the object-less, free worker as the foundation of the exploitationof living labor, sacrificing human purposeful practice on the altar ofprofit. That is to say, the freedom of labor from its conditions entailsthe capitalist property right to preserve abstract wealth through thesacrifice of human machines on the pyramids of accumulation(Gambino, 1996, 55). The law of capital can thus be summarizedas follows: the law is what remains in disappearance. Whatever the

specific and changing historical forms of capitalism, it rests on anddevelops by force of the logic of separation.5I have argued that primitive accumulation is the historical pre-

supposition of capital, and that its systematic content forms thefoundation of capitalist social relations. Its content is suspendedin capitalist economic forms. The critical issue here is the precisemeaning of suspended. Suspended is usually used as the English

5 One reader noted that my argument points towards some sort of stadial analysis in order togive an account of how, why and when the reproduction of the class relationship requiressupplementation by social power outside of the spontaneous market (value) system. Iargue that free wage labor is constituted through its separation from the means of produc-tion, and such separation is the presupposition, continuous result and constitutive premiseof generalized commodity production. It is for this reason that the so-called spontaneousmarket system represents the appearance of the separation of labor from the means ofproduction (see Bonefeld, 2004). Capitalism is of course a very dynamic mode of production which entails constant re-conguration of its fundamental social relations. It would howeverbe wrong to distinguish between the abstractly conceived social laws of capital and theirhistorically concrete manifestations. Social praxis does not take place within the frameworkof the abstract laws of capitalist development. There is only one world. The reality in whichthe social individual moves day in and day out has no invariant character, that is, something which exists independently from it. On this, see the debate in Bonefeld and Holloway, 1991.


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translation of the German aufgehoben or aufhebung .Aufhebung is aterm that is most difficult to translate into English, and suspendeddoes not carry the full meaning of this typically many-sided Ger-man term. The notion that primitive accumulation is suspendedin capitalist accumulation does not collapse two distinct concepts,as if there were no difference between accumulation by expropria-tion (dispossession) and accumulation by means of exploitation offree labor. This difference is important, but so, too, is the innerconnection between them.

In Hegelian language,Aufhebung connotes a dialectical process ofdeterminate negation. That is, the determination of a term negates it,at the same time as the so-negated term transforms into a new term.In this process, the negated term loses its independent existence andit does so at the same time as its essence is retained in the new term the new term is informed by the negated term. The circumstancethat the essence of the negated term is maintained in the new termmeans that the essence of the old term is also the essence of the newterm. Aufhebung has more than just different meanings; they are alsocontradictory. The concept entails all these different and contradic-tory meanings.Aufheben has three main meanings: to lift up or toraise; to make invalid or to cancel/eliminate; and to keep or to

maintain. In our context,Aufhebung means that the historic form ofprimitive accumulation is raised to a new level where its original formand independent existence is eliminated (or canceled) at the sametime as its substance or essence (Wesenshaftigkeit ) is maintained in thenew form. In other words, the notion that the essence of primitiveaccumulation isaufgehoben in accumulation proper means that theprinciple of primitive accumulation is raised to a new level, eliminat-ing the history of primitive accumulation as a specific epoch. At thesame time its essential character is maintained in the new form, thatis, the historical presupposition of capitalism becomes the premiseof its existence: labor divorced from its means becomes the result ofa process of accumulation that is based on the appropriation of thesurplus labor that capital is able to extract, and validate in exchangein terms of socially necessary labor time, from the free laborer in thehidden abode of production. Paraphrasing Marxs treatment of thecommodity, the process of the disappearance of primitive accumula-tion in accumulation proper must, therefore, appear at the sametime as a process of the disappearance of its disappearance,i.e., as


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a reproduction process (Marx, 1987, 497): capitalist reproductionperpetuates the doubly free laborer as its necessary condition of exis-tence (see Marx, 1983, 53536). In short, the notion that primitiveaccumulation is suspended in capitalist accumulation emphasizes thatthe logic of separation is the constitutive presupposition of capitalistsocial relations (cf. Krahl, 1971, 223).

III

Presentation must differ from inquiry (Marx, 1983, 28).

I argued above that it is not the anatomy of primitive accumula-tion that explains the anatomy of capitalist accumulation but thatit is instead the anatomy of capitalist accumulation that explainsthe anatomy of primitive accumulation. This contention rejectsboth teleological explanations, such as Adam Smiths stages theoryof history, and natural law explanations of history, such as, again, Adam Smiths natural propensity of Man to barter and truck. Thecircumstance that Marx discusses primitive accumulation at the endof Volume I ofCapital might therefore not be an afterthought, asGlassman (2006, 610) believes. In his view, Marx came to the issue

of primitive accumulation late in the day. . . . [A]fter having spenthundreds of pages analysing the labor process through which com-modities and surplus value are produced in capitalist society, theprocess of expanded reproduction, he backtracks to consider theorigins of the surplus that made the first process of accumulationpossible the so-called primitive accumulation. In distinctionto Glassman, dispossession does not create a surplus in wealth, it ismere robbery of the many by the few. It changes the distribution ofthe means of existence and in this process creates the social founda-tion of private property, that is, the doubly free laborer. Primitiveaccumulation, as I have argued, is the constitutive presupposition ofcapital. Marxs presentation of the historical presupposition of thecommodity form in Part VIII of Volume I ofCapital is thus in partexplained by the insight that the significance of primitive accumu-lation does not lie, as Glassman argues, in primitive accumulationas the first capitalist surplus, but, rather, in the development ofthe capitalist mode of social reproduction. That is to say, capitalist


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accumulation illuminates the historical significance of primitiveaccumulation, and not the other way round.6

According to Marxs own understanding ofCapital , it was to traceout the inner connection among the capitalist economic categories(Marx, 1983, 28). Its subject matter is capitalist social relations ofproduction. It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let theeconomic categories follow one another in the same sequence as thatin which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined,rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society(Marx, 1973, 107). The chapter sequence ofCapital I does not followhistorical events and the mode of presentation does not parallelany actual course of events. Historical generation is analyzed in termsof the fundamental categories of the existent social relations. Theconstituted categories of capitalist economic forms presuppose theformation of the wage laborer, a laborer free of the means of produc-tion, free to sell his/her ability to work, and a laborer in whom labordiscipline has been instilled, more often than not by means of terrorand always abject poverty. This historical presupposition is the premiseof the capitalist economic categories that Marx seeks to decipher inhis critique of political economy.

With the exception of Horkheimers essays of the 1930s, the dis-

tinction between inquiry ( Forschung ) and presentation ( Darstellung )has by and large been ignored by commentators on MarxsCapital (Horkheimer, 1992; see, however, Schmidt, 1968; Psychopedis, 1992).Following Alfred Schmidts account, the understanding ofCapital stands and falls with the concept of presentation (Schmidt, 1968,356). For SchmidtCapital s mode of presentation ( Darstellungweise )does not follow the narrative history of its development but begins with the finished forms commodity, exchange value, abstract labor,money, etc. the fundamental categories of capitalistically consti-tuted social relations. He discusses their historical presupposition atthe end of the volume. Marxs argument is thus in reverse order tothe actual, historical sequence in which the social relations underlyingthese categories developed. That is,

6 In Hegelian language, capitalist accumulation posits its presupposition. On this in thecontext of Marxs dialectical development of economic categories, see Fineschi, 2009; Psy-chopedis, 1992.


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the method of presentation must differ from that of inquiry. The latter has toappropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of develop-ment, to trace out the inner connection. Only after this work is done, canthe actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, ifthe life of the subject-matter is ideally reected as in a mirror, then it mayappear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction. (Marx, 1983, 28.)

The logical development of the decisive economic forms takes acourse directly opposite to that of their actual historical development(ibid ., 80). That is to say, the analysis begins, post festum , with theresult of the process of development already in hand. . . . The char-

acters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishmentis a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, havealready acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms ofsocial life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character. . . but their meaning (ibid .). The categories of abstract labor, value,exchange value, money, capital, exploitation, surplus value, capitalaccumulation, etc., presuppose the systematic content of primitiveaccumulation in their conceptuality a conceptuality of separation(see Backhaus, 2005).

At the very end ofCapital I Marx argues that the capitalist modeof production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist privateproperty, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation ofself-earned private property; in other words: the expropriation of thelaborer (Marx, 1983, 724). The separation of labor from the meansof production is given in capitalist production (Marx, 1972, 272)and capitalist production . . . of itself reproduces the separationbetween labor-power and the means of labor (Marx, 1983, 541). Itdoes so by perpetuating the

conditions for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell hislabour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour

power. . . . it is the process itself that incessantly hurls back the labourer onto the market as a vendor of his labour-power, and that incessantly convertshis own product into a means by which another man can purchase him.(Ibid ., 54142).

The logic of separation determines the class antagonism as a rela-tionship of negative dependency no capital without dispossessedlabor. That is,


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capital pre-supposes wage-labour, and wage-labour pre-supposes capital.One is a necessary condition of the other; they mutually call each otherinto existence. Does an operative in a cotton-factory produce nothing butcotton goods? No, he produces capital. He produces fresh values that givefresh command over his labour, and that, by means of such command, createfresh values. (Ibid ., 542, fn. 3.)

Commodities must be realized as values.

The fact that value whether it exists as money or as commodities andin the further development the conditions of labor confront the workeras the property of other people , as independent properties, means simply thatthey confront him as the property of the non-worker or, at any rate, that, as acapitalist, he confronts them [the conditions of labor] not as a worker butas the owner of value, etc., as thesubject in which these things possess theirown will, belong to themselves and are personied as independent forces.(Marx, 1972, 47576.)

Capital appears here as the subject incarnate of the invisible hand a transcendental subject that is neither this nor that, and yet bothat the same time. Marxs critique of commodity fetishism does notreject the reality of the invisible hand that, with unyielding steadiness,

regulates the relations of abstract value by reproducing the inequalityin property between capital and labor on an expanding scale. Indeed,fetishism is real. What the critique of the fetishism of commoditiesseeks to reveal is its social constitution in the peculiar mode of sociallabor. The world of things manifests itself behind the backs of theindividuals, yet it is their work their sensuous practice subsiststhrough the reified world of things as manifestation of their alienatedsocial practice.7

Having developed the categories of value, value form, use-valueand exchange value, abstract labor and concrete labor, Marx developshis argument from the transformation of money as money into moneyas capital, to the analysis of the buying and selling of labor power. Thenit follows the free laborer into the factory, analyzing the relationshipbetween necessary labor and surplus labor, the constituent parts ofthe working day. Here capital sets the free laborer to work, attemptingto appropriate as much labor time as possible in effect an attempt

7 See footnote 3.


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at expropriating the life-time of the laborer, seeking to reduce it tolabor-time in its entirety. From the production of surplus value wearrive at the re-conversion of surplus value into capital. This conver-sion reveals the law of equal exchange as fiction: the separation ofproperty from labor has become the necessary consequence of a lawthat apparently originated in their identity (ibid ., 547). On the otherhand, the individual capitalist has constantly to expand his capital,in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means ofprogressive accumulation (Marx, 1983, 555). The risk is bankruptcy.Thus, mediated through competition, personified capital is spurredinto action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, [thepersonified capitalist] ruthlessly forces the human race to produce forproductions sake, increasing the mass of human beings exploitedby him (ibid .). In sum, the law of private property entails that laborcapacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditionsof necessary labor the means of subsistence for actively produc-ing labor capacity,i.e., for its reproduction as mere labor capacityseparated from the conditions of its realization and it has positedthese conditions themselves asthings, values , which confront it in analien, commanding personification (Marx, 1973, 45253). Capital-ist reproduction thus reproduces the class antagonism by positing

capital as the owner of the means of existence on the one hand, andthe doubly free laborer on the other. It posits its own presupposition a presupposition that transformed from historical presuppositioninto the constitutive premise of the conceptuality of a capitalisticallyorganized mode of social reproduction.

Turning finally to capitalist accumulation, Marx argues that itmerely presents as acontinuous process what in primitive accumulation ,appears as a distinct historical process, as the process of the emergenceof capital (Marx, 1972, 272; 1983, 688). Capital accumulation repro-duces the underlying relationship between capital and labor, and theanalysis of the fate of the worker shows primitive accumulation as anessential concept for the analysis of the ongoing process of capitalistaccumulation. It also continues the process of expropriation in itsown terms, as capital centralization. Centralization of capital is notaccumulation by means of value expansion. Instead, centralization is aform of expropriation. One capitalist kills many (Marx, 1983, 714). At the same time, the capitalist reproduces himself as capital as wellas the living labor capacity confronting him (Marx, 1973, 458). Each


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reproduces itself, by reproducing the other, its negation. The capitalistproduces labor as alien; labor produces the product as alien (ibid .).Leaving aside his desperately triumphal remarks when analyzing thehistorical tendency of capitalist accumulation the centralizationof the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach apoint where they become incompatible with their capitalist integu-ment. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist privateproperty sounds. The expropriators are expropriated (Marx, 1983,715) his development of the economic forms reveals the logic ofseparation as the condition of capitalist social relations at every turnof the development of capitalist economic categories. It is the con-stitutive premise of capital and as such forms the concept of capital(see Marx, 1966, 246).

In sum, the logic of separation, which as Marx insists is consti-tutive of capital, begins with primitive accumulation, appears as apermanent process in the accumulation and concentration of capital,and expresses itself finally as centralization of existing capitals in a fewhands and a deprivation of many of their capital (to which expropria-tion is now changed) (Marx, 1966, 246). It is now also in the processof transforming the individual owner of redundant or, in any case,superfluous labor power into a bodily thing that can be hired out or

dissected into saleable parts. Paraphrasing Dalla Costa (1995, 12),humanity is turned topsy turvey, vivisectioned, and made a commod-ity. Marxs notion of the doubly free wage laborer appears to havebeen transformed. The doubly free wage laborer has indeed become,at least for a growing part of humanity, more than just a laboring com-modity. It has also become a carrier of body substances that, like anyother commodity, can be sold on the market (see Bonefeld, 2006).

CONCLUSION

I have argued that the violence of capitals original beginning is theformative content of the civilized forms of equality, liberty, free-dom, and utility.8 These forms mystify the real content of bourgeoisequality violence hides in civilized forms (cf. Benjamin, 1965).

8 Or as Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, put it when recommending that children beput to work at four rather than fourteen years of age: ten precious years in which nothingis done! Nothing for industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual! (Bentham,quoted in Perelman, 2000, 22). Ten lost years for progress, for civilization, for prot!


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The rule of the law of value presupposes the force of the law of private property that primitive accumulation established in antithesis tosocial, collective property (Marx, 1983, 713) once the laborer hasbeen set free from her means to become the owner of labor power, sheis free to sell her labor power for a wage, and the capitalist acquiresthe right to consume what he has bought by making the worker submitto his command in the production process. Once the wage contractis signed, the factory floor beckons. The labor contract focuses wellthe class content of bourgeois freedom and equality. It connects theexchange of commodities ostensibly undertaken between equal legalsubjects in freedom and liberty with exploitation. In contradistinctionto de Angelis (2001) and Harvey (2003), I have argued that primitiveaccumulation is not a weapon that capital can employ to subjugatelabor (de Angelis), and that it is more than a necessary outcome ofimperialist forms of expanded reproduction (Harvey). I have arguedthat capitalist accumulation is founded on, and depends on the con-tinued reproduction of, a certain historically specific mode of sociallabor, a labor divorced from its means of existence, and that thislabor is the constitutive presupposition of capitalist social relations.The logic of separation has its reality not in primitive accumulationas capitalisms prehistory and/or as imperialist effect of expanded

reproduction, at home and abroad. It has its reality in capitalist socialrelations relations of separation that form the concept of capital.For the community of revolutionary proletarians (Marx and

Engels, 1962, 74), the overcoming of capitalisms constitutive presup-position in dispossessed labor is decisive in order to transform the meansof production into means of emancipation, into the common, socialproperty of the associated producers themselves. It is not by means ofthe nationalization of the means of production but instead by meansof their socialization that Man recognizes and organizes his forcespropres as social forces and thus no longer separates social forces fromhimself in the form of political and economic forces (Marx, 1964, 370).That is to say, the society of the free and equal (see Agnoli, 2000) or, asMarcuse (2000) put it, the association of communist individuals can-not be built on the basis of separation of the social forces into politicalforces and economic forces. Instead, it is precisely necessary to avoidever again to counterpose society as an abstraction, to the individual(Marx, 1959, 93). The community of revolutionary proletarians tacklesthe secret foundation of capitalist social relations in the expropriation


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of labor by extending their own control over the conditions of theirown existence (Marx and Engels, 1962, 74).

However simple the idea of human emancipation, its practiceis most difficult. I doubt that history contains an objective logic ofdevelopment, in which primitive accumulation figures as a necessarystep in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from capital-ism to socialism. The second and third Internationals subscribed tonaturalized conceptions of society and history, as if history containeda developmental objective, which akin to Smiths stages theory of his-tory moves relentlessly through the ages until transition to socialismbecomes an objective possibility. The revisionists did so to arguethat revolution was unnecessary; the orthodox that revolution was aproduct of natural necessity. If history does not, however, follow someobjective abstract historical laws of development, then it really is theactivity of Man pursuing his ends (cf. Marx and Engels, 1980, 98). Inthis perspective, nothing is certain and history is not predetermined.It takes no sides. Nevertheless, what is certain is that the victory ofthe political economy of labor over the political economy of prop-erty, if it is to come about, will come about by means of the collectivepower of labor, a power that demonstrates by its cooperative effort,especially cooperative factories, that social reproduction can be car-

ried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a classof hands (Marx, 1976, 1011).9 The critique of class society finds thepositive only in the classless society, in communism.

Department of Politics University of York York YO10 5DD United Kingdom [email protected]

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