In Marxist economics and preceding theories,[1] the problem of primitive accumulation (also

previous accumulation, original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital, and
therefore (in at least the Marxist view) of how class distinctions between possessors and nonpossessors came to be.
Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process. David
Harvey summarized Smith's description of the process: "There were some people that were hard
working and some people who were not. Some people who could be bothered, and some people
who could not be bothered. And the result of that was that, bit by bit, those who were hard
working, and could be bothered, accumulated some wealth. And eventually, those who could not
be bothered, could not accumulate wealth, and in the end, in order to survive, preferred, actually,
to give up their labor power as a commodity, in return for a living wage." [2]
It became very important in Adam Smith's account, not to bring in the state as an agent of
primitive accumulation. As a core pillar of his argument, like for most classical political
economists, was to let the state withdraw and let it instead be laissez-faire, which would allow
the market to do his work, which would make things better off. James Denham-Steuart and other
classical political economists, argued instead for a crucial role for the state in the origin of
capitalism, holding that violence under the supervision of the state was needed in order for the
original accumulation to occur.[3]
David Harvey summarized Karl Marx description of it: primitive accumulation "entailed taking
land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and
then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation". [4]

Contents
[hide]

1 Naming and translations

2 Reason for the concept
3 The myths of Political Economy
4 Marx's case history
5 The link between primitive accumulation and colonialism
6 Primitive accumulation and privatization
7 The social relations of capitalism
8 Ongoing primitive accumulation
9 Ernest Mandel's theory of primitive accumulation and David Harvey's theory of
accumulation by dispossession
10 Schumpeter's critique of Marx's theory
11 See also
12 Notes
13 References

[edit] Naming and translations

The concept was initially called in different ways, and the expression of an "accumulation"
which is at the origin of capitalism, began to appear with Adam Smith.[5] Smith, in his English
language The Wealth of Nations spoke of a previous accumulation;[citation needed] Karl Marx, in the
German language Das Kapital, reprised Smith expression correctly translating it with
ursprnglich; Marx's translators rendered it back to English as primitive.[1] James Steuart, with
his 1767 work, is considered by some scholars as the greatest classical theorist of primitive
accumulation.[6]

[edit] Reason for the concept

Marx showed in Das Kapital how "money is changed into capital" and "how capital generates
surplus-value" forming more capital. But in doing so, he had already assumed that there exists a
mass of Capital available for investment, and there already exists exploitable Labor power. He
had shown how capitalist production could itself reproduce the conditions of its own existence
on an ever broader scale. But, as he says, "the whole movement seems to turn into a vicious
circle."
Capital is money that makes more money: value in search of Surplus value. In other words, it is
money that gets reinvested. It originates in the activity of buying goods in order to resell them at
a profit, and first emerges in commercial trade connecting different economic communities,
whose production is not yet capitalist. The existence of usury capital, bank capital, rentier capital
and merchant capital historically precedes capitalist industry.
To explain how the capitalist mode of production comes into being in the first place, Marx had to
study history to locate an original accumulation that facilitated capitalist relations. Adam Smith
had called this "previous accumulation" an accumulation which did not result from capitalist
production, but formed an external starting point to it.

[edit] The myths of Political Economy

In disinterring the origins of capital, Marx felt the need to dispel what he felt were religious
myths and fairy-tales about the origins of capitalism. Marx wrote:
"This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in
theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to
be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two
sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals,
spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. (...) Thus it came to pass that the former
sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And
from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to
now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they
have long ceased to work."

What has to be explained is how the capitalist relations of production are historically established.
In other words, how it comes about that means of production get to be privately owned and
traded in, and how the capitalists can find workers on the labor market ready and willing to work
for them, because they have no other means of livelihood; also referred to as the "Reserve Army
of Labor."

[edit] Marx's case history

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Karl Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation in part eight of Das Kapital, Vol. 1 has become
a cornerstone of the Marxian critique of 'bourgeois' political economy (in German: ursprngliche
Akkumulation, literally "original accumulation" or "primeval accumulation"). Its purpose is to
help explain how the capitalist mode of production came into being. According to Marx, before
there could be money with which to make more, i.e. capital, an original accumulation must take
place. This might take the form of resource extraction, conquest and plunder, and/or
enslavement.
As Marx writes:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder
of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins,
are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation."[7]
In a case history of England, Marx looks at how the serfs became free peasant proprietors and
small farmers, who were, over time, forcibly expropriated and driven off the land, forming a
property-less proletariat.

He also shows how more and more legislation is enacted by the state to control and regiment this
new class of wage workers. In the meantime, the remaining farmers became capitalists, operating
more and more on a commercial basis.

The link between primitive accumulation and colonialism

At the same time as local obstacles to investment in manufactures are being overcome, and a
unified national market is developing with a nationalist ideology, Marx sees a strong impulse to
business development coming from world trade:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies,
the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of
primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with
the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant
dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China,
&c. The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in
chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England
at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies,
the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods
depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the
state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process
of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the
transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an
economic power." (chapter 31, emphasis added). [8]

[edit] Primitive accumulation and privatization

According to Marx, the whole purpose of primitive accumulation is to privatize the means of
production, so that the exploiting owners can make money from the surplus labour of those who,
lacking other means, must work for them.
Marx says that primitive accumulation means the expropriation of the direct producers, and more
specifically "the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner... Self-earned
private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent
laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property,
which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor." (chapter
32, emphasis added).
Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

[edit] The social relations of capitalism

Capitalism is a system of social relations, in which capitalists are fully human actors, and
workers are exploited. Primitive accumulation precedes capitalism in providing the accumulation
of wealth and resources to induce less fortunate people to enter into a highly unequal relationship
with a capitalist. In the last chapter of Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Marx illustrates the social conditions
necessary for capitalism with a comment about Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of
colonization:
"...Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence,
machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be
wanting the correlative the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his
own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons,
established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to
Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of 50,000.
Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men,
women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to
make his bed or fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything
except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!"
Capital, vol. I, ch. 33, at www.marxists.org.

[edit] Ongoing primitive accumulation

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"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.

[edit] Ernest Mandel's theory of primitive accumulation and

David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession
Ernest Mandel offers a Marxian theory which differs from orthodox Marxism stage theory. In his
theory, primitive accumulation is part of the uneven and combined development of capitalism on
a world scale.
Because business start-ups, forcible expansion of capitalist markets, and expropriation of
peasants are going on all the time, primitive accumulation is also a process which happens all the
time. The orthodox Marxism overlooked this social trend, possibly because they were fixated on
Marx's story about English peasants being thrown off the land, rather than studying the facts of
world history.
Mandel surveys the history of capitalist development from the early Middle Ages, and
distinguishes between primitive accumulation of money capital and primitive Industrial
capitalism. According to Mandel, one does not necessarily lead to the other. He calculates that
the transfer of value to Europe from the slave trade and colonial robbery between 1500 and 1750
amounted to a sum of capital larger than the total capital invested in European industries in the
year 1800.
The predicament of the "developing countries", Mandel says, expresses a double tragedy. Not
only did they pay the price for the international concentration of capital; they also had to
overcome industrial backwardness in a world economy already dominated by the industrial
goods of the advanced countries.
So, while the world market boosted industrialization between the 16th and 19th centuries in
Europe, North America and Japan, by about 1900 the same world market became an obstacle or
brake to the industrialization of the third world, which mostly could not compete with Europe,
North America and Japan. Some "intermediate" countries (e.g. settler colonies) did industrialize,
but typically in a one-sided way; many of the industrial goods were produced for export.

The integration of developing countries into the world market occurred mainly on the initiative
of the Western powers, in a way consistent with their interests. This created a hierarchy of
nations in the international division of labour.
Because local demand was lacking in the third world, and because investors were unwilling to
create colonial competition for the home country, investments focused mainly on agriculture and
extraction of minerals for export.
At best, the outcome of all this was half-industrialization, and an economy which does not
adequately serve the needs of the local population. There was plenty capital and unemployed
labour, but little possibility for local industrial development benefiting the local population.
Mandel concluded that because the third world bourgeoisie mostly doesn't really care about
developing the country, workers and peasants must take state power and carry out the necessary
economic changes.
David Harvey expands the concept of "primitive accumulation" to create a new concept,
"accumulation by dispossession", in his 2003 book, "The New Imperialism". Like Mandel,
Harvey claims that the word "primitive" leads to a misunderstanding in the history of capitalism;
that the original, "primitive" phase of capitalism is somehow a transitory phase that need not be
repeated once commenced. Instead, Harvey maintains that primitive accumulation
("accumulation by dispossession") is a continuing process within the process of capital
accumulation on a world scale. Because the central Marxian notion of crisis via "overaccumulation" is assumed to be a constant factor in the process of capital accumulation, the
process of "accumulation by dispossession" acts as a possible safety valve that may temporarily
ease the crisis. This is achieved by simply lowering the prices of consumer commodities (thus
pushing up the propensity for general consumption), which in turn is made possible by the
considerable reduction in the price of production inputs. Should the magnitude of the reduction
in the price of inputs outweigh the reduction in the price of consumer goods, it can be said that
the rate of profit will, for the time being, increase. Thus:
Access to cheaper inputs is, therefore, just as important as access to widening markets in
keeping profitable opportunities open. The implication is that non-capitalist territories should be
forced open not only to trade (which could be helpful) but also to permit capital to invest in
profitable ventures using cheaper labour power, raw materials, low-cost land, and the like. The
general thrust of any capitalist logic of power is not that territories should be held back from
capitalist development, but that they should be continuously opened up. (Harvey, The New
Imperialism, p.139).
Harvey's theoretical extension encompasses more recent economic dimensions such as
intellectual property rights, privatization, and environmental predation and exploitation.
Privatization of public services puts enormous profit into capitalists' hands. If belonged to the
public sector, that profit wouldn't have existed. In that sense, the profit is created by
dispossession of people. Destructive industrial use of the environment is similar because the
environment is supposed to belong to the public.

Multinational pharmaceutical companies collect information about how herb or other natural
medicine is used among natives in less-developed country, do some R&D to find the material
that make those natural medicines effective, and patent the findings. By doing so, multinational
pharmaceutical companies can now sell the medicine to the natives who are the original source
of the knowledge that made production of medicine possible. That is, dispossession of
intellectual property right.
David Harvey also argues that accumulation by dispossession is a temporal or partial solution to
over-accumulation. Because accumulation by dispossession makes raw materials cheaper, the
profit rate can at least temporarily go up.

[edit] Schumpeter's critique of Marx's theory

The economist Joseph Schumpeter disagreed with the Marxist explanation of the origin of
capital, because Schumpeter did not believe in exploitation. In liberal economic theory, the
market returns to each person the exact value she added into it; capitalists are just people who are
very adept at saving and whose contributions are especially magnificent, and they do not take
anything away from other people or the environment. Liberalists believe that capitalism has no
internal flaws or contradictions; only outside threats. To liberalists, the idea of the necessity of
violent primitive accumulation to capital is particularly incendiary. Schumpeter wrote rather
testily:
"[The problem of Original Accumulation] presented itself first to those authors, chiefly to Marx
and the Marxists, who held an exploitation theory of interest and had, therefore, to face the
question of how exploiters secured control of an initial stock of 'capital' (however defined) with
which to exploit a question which that theory per se is incapable of answering, and which may
obviously be answered in a manner highly uncongenial to the idea of exploitation" (Joseph
Schumpeter, Business Cycles, Vol. 1, New York; McGraw-Hill, 1939, p. 229).
Schumpeter argued that imperialism was not a necessary jump-start for capitalism, nor is it
needed to bolster capitalism, because imperialism pre-existed capitalism. Schumpeter believed
that, whatever the empirical evidence, capitalist world trade could in principle just expand
peacefully. If imperialism occurred, Schumpeter asserted, it has nothing to do with the intrinsic
nature of capitalism itself, or with capitalist market expansion. The distinction between
Schumpeter and Marx here is subtle. Marx claimed that capitalism requires violence and
imperialismfirst, to kick-start capitalism with a pile of booty and to dispossess a population to
induce them to enter into capitalist relations as workers, and then to surmount the otherwise-fatal
contradictions generated within capitalist relations over time. Schumpeter's view was that
imperialism is an atavistic impulse pursued by a state independent of the interests of the
economic ruling class.
"Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned
limits... Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The
"inner logic" of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the
princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even export monopoly is not imperialism
and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands of the pacific bourgeoisie. This

happened only because the war machine, its social atmosphere, and the martial will were
inherited and because a martially oriented class (i.e., the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling
position with which of all the varied interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally
themselves. This alliance keeps alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social
relations which perhaps ultimately are to be explained by relations of production but not by the
productive relations of capitalism alone." (Joseph A. Schumpeter: The Sociology of Imperialism,
1918).

[edit] See also

History of capitalism
enclosure
capital accumulation
Common land
relations of production
accumulation by dispossession
Socialist accumulation

[edit] Notes
^ a b Perelman, p.25 (ch. 2 )
^ David Harvey, class 12, time range 20:0022:00
^ David Harvey, class 12, time range 22:0023:00
^ David Harvey (2005), ch. 4 "Accumulation by Disposition", pp.149, 1456
^ Smith 1776, 2.3 (Book Two, Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock.,
Introduction) quote: "... the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be
previous to the division of labour..."
6. ^ Perelman, p.170 (ch. 7 )
7. ^ Karl Marx. Capital, vol. 1, Chapter XXXI, Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," in
Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2005), 738.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm.
8. ^ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

[edit] References

David Harvey (2005) The new imperialism Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199278083,
9780199278084
Perelman, Michael The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the
Secret History of Primitive Accumulation Published by Duke University Press, 2000
ISBN 0822324911, 9780822324911
Adam Smith [1776] The Wealth of Nations [1]
James Denham-Steuart [1767] An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1, chapter 26 [2]

James K. Glassman (2006) Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession,

accumulation by extra-economic means Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 30, No.
5, 608625 (2006) DOI: 10.1177/0309132506070172
Masimo de Angelis paper [3]
Paul Zarembka paper [4]
Bill Warren, Imperialism, pioneer of capitalism.
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism.
Ernest Mandel, Primitive accumulation and the industrialisation of the third world.
R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism
Andre Gunder Frank, World accumulation, 14921789. New York 1978
Guardian article, "The New Liberal Imperialism"[5]
Raymond Aron, "What Empires cost and what profits they bring" (1962), reprinted in
Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History. New York: Basic Books, 2002,
pp. 407418.
Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy
of Development.
Ankie Hoogvelt interview: [6]
Jeffrey Sachs, The end of poverty; how we can make it happen in our lifetime (with a
foreword by Bono). Penguin Books, 2005.
David Harvey, Reading Marx's Capital, Reading Marxs Capital Class 12, Chapters 26
33, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation (video lecture)
Midnight Notes "The New Enclosures"
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