Skipping over the Bourgeoisie Moment of Expropriation: Who is the Neo-Expropriater?

Primitive accumulation - a concept Marx previously used for addressing the initial inhumane stage of capitalism at which both the expropriation of the producers from the means of production and transformation of them into wage-labourers took place - has long been an absent reference point within the social sciences. Given that the academics affiliated with the bourgeoisie sociology always attribute the transition to capitalism to the innovative steps of a few hardworking entrepreneurs, the lack of interest into the bloody period of primitive accumulation on their part is not surprising. It may also be that one reason for the common neglect of this aspect of the matter among those academics has been the implicit assumption that the appearance of a progressively larger reserve army of labour was a simple product of population growth, which created more hands than could be given employment in existing pre-occupation and more mouths than could be fed from the then-cultivated soil. Both of these arguments are predicated upon some ungrounded assumptions veiling the true history of the fascistic pre-phase of capitalism, namely, primitive accumulation.

Interestingly, academics in the Leftist tradition have also paid little, if any, attention to this definite starting point of the capitalist mode of production in Marx’s writings. Although Marxists are well aware of the bloody stage at which the state forcefully dispossessed millions of producers, and turned them into mere wage-labourers, some understand this stage as the already finished phase of the capitalism. Accurately speaking, they are wrong. Such Marxist arguments are predicated upon a misunderstanding of the primitive accumulation on the world-historical stage in two interrelated ways. First, Marxist academics, believing that primitive accumulation has no contemporary relevance, ignore that the transformation towards a capitalist sociality - a process that has been termed “primitive accumulation”, has possessed an international dimension. Specifically, when the imperatives foisted by the capital relation were imported into differentially developed socio-political orders to that of the English ‘heartland’, such different correlations of social forces gave rise to different forms of social transformation.¹ To put it differently, capitalism has developed in an uneven manner - in such a way as to prevent the replication of the original characteristics of primitive accumulation such as occurred in the English ‘heartland’ and in the same sequential order in different national contexts. The second deficiency in their argument directly follows from first: namely, the treatment of these two phases of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation as consecutive rather than as concurrent. If all the nations of the world had been moved from the primitive stage of accumulation to that of capitalist expanded reproduction at the same time, then it would be appropriate to argue for the consecutiveness and thus the irrelevancy of the primitive accumulation in the present context. Since the inauguration of capitalist relations have been a far cry from this image of the world, we must face the different mutations of primitive accumulation - along with the different mechanisms, disciplines, and actors in this drama - and the concurrent presence of the capitalist mode of production.

Accordingly, this work seeks to elucidate the continuing relevance of primitive accumulation, while at that same time remaining attentive to the variance of its characteristics (as depicted by Marx) according to time and spatiality. This essay will begin with an analysis of ‘primitive accumulation with socialist characteristics’ with a special focus on the USSR. Following this, we will deal with the ‘primitive accumulation with global hegemonic state characteristics’ and the role of the neo-liberal phase of capitalism and its hegemonic institutions in the Third World’s primitive accumulation phase.

Marx and the Problematic Of Primitive Accumulation

‘Classical political economy,’ according to Marx, “..looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of nature.”² Arguing against classical political-economy Marx claimed that capitalist sociality, rather than being a natural condition of humanity, had, in fact, a specific historical genesis that lay in the violent and conflictual ‘process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.’³ Before the history of their expropriation - in other words, before they had been robbed of all their own means of production - producers were entitled to all of the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements because they themselves not only form part and parcel of the means of production (as in the case of slavery/serfdom) but also the means of production belong to them (as in the case of peasant-proprietors).⁴ Thus, the production organized under feudalism had a particularistic sociality as such that direct access to the means of production—typified by the peasant mode of existence—tended to result in a division of labour that was constituted through relations of personal dependency. In this type of production, surplus value appropriated by estates would remain undifferentiated even as the mode of production expanded at large scales over the world. This is because appropriation was mediated through personal dependency, with particular characteristics of social division of labour at a given location. Even the spatial dimension of this mode of production became unfettered from its boundaries; the social relation would remain particular since it was based on the particular serf’s production and particular appropriation by the lord.

However, primitive accumulation, which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears as a positive force on the one hand, as producers are emancipated from serfdom and from the fetters of the guild. On the other hand, this appears as a negative force insofar as these new freedman became sellers of themselves.⁵ They simply turned into wage-labourers who produce commodities with their abstracted labour. Once reconstituted as commodities— as hands for hire—personal attributes and personal dependencies were purged from the constitution of the new worker.⁶ This new sociality of individual independence based on dependence through exchange relations mediated by the commodity form re-rendered the division of labour into a universe of atomised, abstracted individuals, all ontologically equal through their mediation as commodities.⁷ Once this happens, then transition from particularistic sociality to universalistic sociality has a chance to flourish truly on a world scale. This is because now the new expropriator has a chance to exploit the abstract universal labour independent of the particular form it takes in a social relation. It is unique and universal. Thus, bourgeoisie expropriators, contrary to all previous expropriators, have now a tendency to universalize capitalist sociality in such a way as to capture any forms of sociality within its orbit. The pre-condition of such a universalization, however, entails the complete eradication of primitive accumulation on the world scale.

Now, what concerns us at this point is how this universal expansion would work. Marx asserted that the universalising tendencies of the capital relation would work to produce a world ‘in its image’. Indeed, the only complete schema that he elucidated was that of a unilinear, ‘stagiest’ history leading to a complete and successful resolution of primitive accumulation. Here, home market after home market would be conquered by the bourgeoisie, concomitantly generalising capitalist sociality on a world-historical scale.⁷ However, such a stagiest history approach, to me, has little explanatory power. The reason for this, if we recall from the introduction, is the following: when the imperatives foisted by the capital relation were imported into differentially developed socio-political orders to that of the English ‘heartland, they encountered weak legal structures, societies without capitalist farmers, and non-colonizer states- a very different picture of social formation and history to that which had originally unfolded in the English ‘heartland’. In his discussion of primitive accumulation in the ‘heartland’, Marx incessantly emphasized the role of the state in the robbery of common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property; on the role of capitalist farmers who freed thousands of producers from the land and thus deprived them of the means of production; on the role of the bourgeoisie class in extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large-farm system, and increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to hand.⁸ Marx was correct in arguing that capital relations would produce the world in its image, but failed to recognize that this imported image would be a distorted one in the absence of such state policies, the capitalist farmers, and bourgeoisie class necessary to dissolve primitive accumulation and to carry on the process of capitalist accumulation in different national contexts. Thus, home market after home market was not conquered by the bourgeoisie, concomitantly generalising capitalist sociality on a world-historical scale in a way not foreseen by Marx. Rather, the periphery of this process was urged to deal with this capitalist sociality - which rapidly projected outward from the English ‘heartland’- without being able to pass through the primitive accumulation stage properly. Thus, on the world-historical scale, we end up with distorted images in which the peripheral social formations have to deal with primitive accumulation in different ways.

THE USSR and Skipping over the Bourgeoisie Moment of Expropriation

The praxis that was formed by Marx’s assumption of an unproblematic process of primitive accumulation was rudely challenged–—theoretically and practically—by events in early 20th century Russia.⁹ For at the time of the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, the prevailing sociality in Russia was still that of peasant production: the bourgeoisie seemed to have excused themselves from their world historical destiny of replacing the sickle with the hammer.¹⁰ To put it differently, the conditions of the universal sociality - the realization of abstract labour for producing commodities - and the class responsible for carrying on this process was absent in the USSR. The deviance from the heartland norms inevitably pushed the Russian Marxists to find a substitution for a missing universalistic sociality, and, at the same time, a project to create such a sociality conducive to socialism by essentially skipping over the bourgeois moment of expropriation.¹¹ To foster a common project and universalistic sociality from differential modes of production that existed contemporaneously in one polity: this was the challenge for leadership that lay behind the Bolshevik slogan of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and peasant.’¹¹

Such a development was, I suppose, beyond the imagination of Marx. According to Marx, the historical duty of the proletariat to revolutionize the country and propel the movement toward socialism would begin after the bourgeoisie class and its state completely erased the self-sufficient producers from the earth and consolidated the universal sociality in the home market. Thus, the Bolsheviks had to attempt to ‘right’ the developmental trajectory of Russia - to remedy the ‘skewed’ trajectory produced by the problematic development of primitive accumulation – through the replacement of the bourgeoisie moment of expropriation with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and peasant’.

However, to my knowledge, the Russian Marxist’s mutated model of primitive accumulation, and the appropriate course of state action prevented many of the bloodiest stages through which the English ‘heartland’ passed. Marx described how the peasantry were first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds and then whipped and tortured by laws, in order to manufacture the discipline necessary for the wage system. The labourers also suffered because of the fact that the bourgeoisie must always seek to fix the wages as near as possible to subsistence by freeing more producers from the land than they can employ in the factories. Excessive labour supply in the market pushed some of the wage-labourers to bear the worst living conditions, and wages even below the absolute minimum. None of these bloody and humiliating techniques were deployed to accomplish primitive accumulation in the USSR. On contrary, every wage-labourer received equal wages and had the opportunity to access proper housing and education. With strictly applied Five year Plans - a series of nation-wide centralized exercises in rapid economic development in the Soviet Union – the supply and demand side of the labour market were kept in balance to prevent high rates of unemployment. Neither the forceful deportation of people from their lands, nor the massive privatization of the land was pursued. Thus, skewing the bourgeoisie moment of expropriation entailed a mutated primitive accumulation in the USSR with socialist characteristics, which were, no doubt, more humane and more labour friendly. More importantly, it aimed to realize the pre-conditions conducive to socialism.

Transnational Bourgeoisie Class, Transnational State and the Bloodiest Primitive Accumulation Ever

The collapse of communism in the USSR also meant the death of this alternative management of primitive accumulation, characterized by the widespread involvement of the state in the process. Most of the African countries, as well as the Eastern European states and some in Asia were left without an alternative. In the ideologies of the new era, as in the example of Fukuyama’s ‘the end of ideologies’, liberal democracy is applauded as the victorious side of the rivalry. In this age, the socialist strategies of dealing with primitive accumulation in different nation-states were ideologically despised and replaced with the strategies of development imposed by the transnational bourgeoisie class and its global institutions. Development as imposed by those global formations is no more and no less than the always ‘original’—and always bloody—but structurally similar process of primitive accumulation.¹² Rather than anointing the process as such, and revealing the truth that development is merely tantamount to tearing people from their means of production, however, global ideologues of capitalism present ‘development’ as an all encompassing panacea for the problems of the Third World. This discursive power of the ‘development’ agenda - supposedly neutral - leaves no other options to the Third World rather than following the instructions of the good-willed ‘masters’.

Beyond this ideologically initiated semiotic shift from primitive accumulation to development, what distinguishes the post-socialist era is the transnationalization of the bourgeoisie class, and transnationalization of the state on a world scale. What do we mean by these concepts, and what kind of ramifications do they have with respect to primitive accumulation in the Third World? First, transnationalization of the bourgeoisie class entails the detachment of the bourgeoisie activities from their nation states and the re-organization of various investment and finance activities at the global level within different nation-states. As we discussed, the Bolsheviks had to attempt to ‘right’ the developmental trajectory of Russia - to remedy the ‘skewed’ trajectory produced by the problematic development of primitive accumulation - by the replacement of the bourgeoisie moment of expropriation with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and peasant’. However, with the defamation of the socialist methods of primitive accumulation, the Third World is now forced to replace the ‘skewed trajectory of national bourgeoisie’ with the ‘transnational bourgeoisie’. To hasten the primitive accumulation for facilitating the passage to universal sociality – i.e. capitalist sociality - in the Third World only seems possible with the investment of transnational capital and with the employment and other opportunities they provide. But it only seems so. The transnational bourgeoisie in the Third World cannot be trusted to carry on the process of primitive accumulation in the direction of capitalist accumulation unlike the national bourgeoisie of the English ‘heartland’. They are only responsible to resolve the accumulation impasse they encountered in the capitalist lands through expanding their activities to the spaces of primitive accumulation where it is likely to find freshly dispossessed wage-labourers. In the absence of any regulatory framework for their activities, they can remove the employment opportunities they provide to the dispossessed Third-World wage-labourers regardless of its bloody devastating effects in primitive accumulation. In this sense, the concurrent and conflictual presence of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation on the world historical-scale becomes more visible with the transnationlization of the bourgeoisie class and in the absence of a socialist alternative, as this imposes more devastating and bloody effects in the primitive accumulation of the Third-World.

*Photo by T. Knox

The replacement of the national bourgeoisie expropriation with the transnational bourgeoisie expropriation in the process of primitive accumulation is not the only tragedy to befall the Third World in the post-socialist era. For over a quarter of a century, neoliberalism has delegitimized Third World states as agents of primitive accumulation, deriding them as repositories of ‘rent-seekers’—protective cabals for the ruling classes capable only of conspicuous consumption.¹³ Neoliberalism’s apostles proclaimed that development (passage from primitive accumulation to capitalist accumulation) could emerge in the Third World only with the removal of what they called state impediments.¹⁴ Thus, this thinking resulted in the hollowing out the Third-World State, and replacing it with a transnational state. The transnational state simply functions as the political arm of the transnational bourgeoisie class through institutions such as the World Bank and WTO, which are responsible to “lock in” the power gains of capital through the extension and institutionalisation of (intellectual) property rights and contract law in diverse areas such as computer software and the output of life science corporations, and the centralisation of ownership patents over seeds or even parts of the human genetic structure, etc. In this way, they aim to prevent any erstwhile socialist or even Keynesian strategy that the Third-World could apply to manage primitive accumulation or development.

Conclusion

To conclude, this present work argues that primitive accumulation, even as it disguises itself as development now, is still a very important concept in order to understand the new methods of capitalist accumulation pursued by the transnationalized bourgeoisie class and its political arms. In the second example of ‘primitive accumulation with global hegemonic characteristics’, this paper discussed the devastating influence of the transnational state and the transnational bourgeoisie class upon the primitive accumulation of the ‘Third World’. In its mission to exploit the freshly dispossessed wage-labourer for profit sake, the transnational state and bourgeoisie class has no interest in managing the primitive accumulation of the Third World in a humane fashion. No doubt, ‘primitive accumulation with socialist characteristics’ was more successful in ameliorating the devastating effects of primitive accumulation, and used it as a conducive pre-stage to socialism. Thus, instead of believing the delusive development agenda of capitalist ideologues, we have to re-build our societies and economies to deal with primitive accumulation in a more humane way.

Notes:

1. Robbie Shilliam. ‘Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of ‘Primitive Accumulation’. Millenium: Journal of International Studies, Volume 32:1, 2004, p. 56. [↩]
2. Karl Marx. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Unwin Brothers Limited: Third German Edition, 1957, p.761. [↩]
3. Shilliam, p. 64. [↩]
4. Marx, p. 737. [↩]
5. Ibid, p. 738. [↩]
6. Shilliam, p. 65. [↩]
7. Ibid, p. 65. [↩] [↩]
8. Marx, p. 757. [↩]
9. Shilliam, p. 66. [↩]
10. Ibid, p. 66. [↩]
11. Ibid, p. 67. [↩] [↩]
12. David Moore. ‘The second age of the Third World: from primitive accumulation to global public goods?’, Third World Quarterly, 25:1, p. 89. [↩]
13. Moore, p. 88. [↩]
14. Ibid, p. 88. [↩]

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