Primitive Accumulation: Conceptes and Debates

Karl Marx engaged with the notion of primitive accumulation to contest the dominant “bourgeois” history of his times, which sought to naturalize, eternalize and legitimize the emerging capitalist economy. Marx argued that the historic transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism involved the reorganization of society which required violence—including wars, robbery and coercion by the state to undermine existing pre-capitalist modes of production. Marx’s critique of the bourgeois notion of primitive accumulation is centred on the notion of “dispossession”— that is separation of direct producers from any property or control over means of production. In the scheme of historical materialism, primitive accumulation plays a very distinct role. Primitive accumulation refers to those processes within a non-capitalist social formation that produced the conditions of existence of the capitalist mode of production and thus belongs to the pre-history of capital, or in Marx’s words, forms “the prelude to the history of capital”.