Article EJPT

European Journal of Political Theory

0(0) 1–21
What was primitive ! The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
accumulation? sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1474885117735961
Reconstructing the origin of journals.sagepub.com/home/ept

a critical concept
William Clare Roberts
McGill University, Canada

Abstract
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two prem-
ises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the
earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified
primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article
argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contem-
poraneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criti-
cisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ does not
deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and
those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to
capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation
of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation
for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx
characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry
out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threa-
tened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the
specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state.

Keywords
capitalism, exploitation, Karl Marx, primitive accumulation, settler colonialism, the state

It has been said that we are living in ‘an era of primitive accumulation’ (Federici,
2012: 138). Whether or not processes of primitive accumulation especially mark the
present, invocations of the term certainly do. When Taiaiake Alfred (2014: xi)
credits Glen Coulthard with having ‘rescued Karl Marx from his

Corresponding author:
William Clare Roberts, Department of Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St., W. Montreal,
QC H3A2T7, Canada.
Email: william.roberts3@mcgill.ca
2 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

nineteenth-century hostage chamber’, he has in mind Coulthard’s mobilization and

reconstruction of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. When David Harvey
(2004: 64) claims that ‘the hallmark of [. . .] ‘‘the new imperialism’’’ of the 21st
century is ‘accumulation by dispossession’, he is rechristening and reformulating
Marx’s notion. When James Tully (2011: 154) is pressed to identify how he would
address the legacies of imperialism, he refers to the recent history of ‘dispossession,
primitive accumulation, centralised state building, militarization, economic exploit-
ation, and ecological destruction’ in order to refuse any appeal to strong states or
economic development, advocating instead a turn to ‘cooperative, community-
based, ecological and non-violent traditions of self-reliance’.
All of these users of Marx’s concept,1 however, want to sever the notion of
primitive accumulation from connections and connotations that burden it in
Marx’s text. They agree that, in order to be redeployed in the present, Marx’s
concept must be reformulated. And there is widespread agreement about the
changes that must be made. First, Marx mistakenly portrays primitive accumula-
tion as a bloody moment in the past, since replaced by the relatively bloodless
workings of the mature capitalist system. Second, as much as Marx condemns the
violent expropriation of the peasantry, he also justifies it as a necessary step on the
way to the communist future.
I would like to take issue with the current rehabilitation of ‘primitive accumu-
lation’. Rather than sever the concept from the context of its emergence, I propose
to examine it in that context. Doing so reveals the stakes of Marx’s discussion: a
proper disaggregation of the agencies responsible for capitalism. In the first
instance, Marx is concerned to specify the agency of capital. Marx (1976: 875,
928) identifies primitive accumulation as ‘the prehistory of capital’, not in order
to consign it to the past, but in order to underscore the distinction between hording
up wealth – money, land, products, whatever – and using it as capital. The violence
of primitive accumulation can amass the former, but cannot make the accumulated
wealth function as capital. This distinction – and the consequent distinction
between capital and capitalism – is, Marx thinks, essential for understanding
how capitalism operates, and what makes it different from other forms of society.
Within capitalism, capital is the agent of accumulation by exploitation, not the
agent of primitive accumulation.
This brings us to the second issue, for Marx, that of revolutionary strategy.
As most commentators note, the state is the overwhelming agent of primitive accu-
mulation. What goes unnoted is why. According to Marx, the state pursues policies
of primitive accumulation because it has become dependent upon capital
accumulation – economic growth – for its own existence and functioning.
Policies of primitive accumulation are attempts by the state to secure the conditions
of economic growth. This dependency of the state upon capital makes the state into
an enemy of all attempts to refuse, evade or escape capitalism. All such attempts
will, just to the extent that they are or promise to be successful, encounter the
armed agents of the state. This is where the state fits into capitalism. This epochal
change in the role of the state explains Marx’s insistence upon the historical inev-
itability of conquest and expropriation. He does not justify primitive accumulation
Roberts 3

as a necessary step on the historical path to socialism. He argues, rather, that

existing forms of petty production, and the forms of social solidarity they foster,
are too vulnerable to the violent encroachments of capital’s mighty servant, the
state. Liberation requires a strategy of conquering the conqueror and expropriating
the expropriators.
Returning ‘primitive accumulation’ to the context of its origination, therefore,
actually brings Marx’s argument up to date. The recent reformulations of Marx’s
notion are provoked by very real and ongoing processes of coercive and violent
expropriation, the forceful separation of people from independent access to the
means of living. But these processes underscore both the complementarity of state
action and capitalist production and the irreducible difference between them.
The continuing salience of capitalist accumulation to state action, and vice versa,
indicates the contemporaneity of Marx’s analysis, not its obsolescence. Only by
clarifying what primitive accumulation was in Marx’s text can we determine what it
is and will be in the present and future.

The renovation of primitive accumulation

During the 20th century, Marxist debate over primitive accumulation was defined
by the contest between those who thought of it as an event in the past, and those
who conceived it as a continuous and ongoing process. For those who took primi-
tive accumulation to be ‘accumulation in an historical sense’ (Dobb, 1963: 178),
‘the adjective ‘‘primitive’’ correspond[ed] to a clear-cut temporal dimension (the
past)’ (De Angelis, 1999: Sec. 1).2 They focused, therefore, on pinpointing the
historical origin of capitalism in Western Europe, and especially in Britain.
Opposed to them were those who argued that ‘the mechanisms of primitive
accumulation [. . .] do not belong only to the prehistory of capitalism; they are
contemporary as well’ (Amin, 1974: 3).3 Those who forwarded this argument
focused on the ongoing relationship between a capitalist interior or core and a
non-capitalist frontier or periphery.
Despite their opposition to one another on political and historiographic
grounds, the parties to these debates shared the presupposition that primitive
accumulation marked the point of contact between capitalism and the non-
capitalist world. After all, there is no contradiction between calling primitive
accumulation ‘the pre-history of capitalism’ and agreeing that it is ongoing.
Rosa Luxemburg, the acknowledged fount of the thesis of continuous primitive
accumulation, understood capitalism to be ever-expanding into non-capitalist
zones. This is why she thought primitive accumulation to be ongoing; it
marks the process of capitalism ingesting non-capitalism (Luxemburg, 2003:
Chap. 26–32). The prehistory of capitalism is being continuously re-enacted at
the point of ingestion.
The new reading of primitive accumulation with which this article is concerned
departs in a crucial way from this common presupposition of the older debates.
Rather than allowing that processes of primitive accumulation mark the frontiers –
temporal and/or spatial – between capitalism and non-capitalism, the new accounts
4 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

claim to locate primitive accumulation within capitalism itself. David Harvey’s

formulation is representative:

Marx’s general theory of capital accumulation is constructed under certain crucial

initial assumptions which broadly match those of classical political economy and
which exclude primitive accumulation processes. [. . .] The disadvantage of these
assumptions is that they relegate accumulation based upon predation, fraud, and
violence to an ‘original stage’ that is considered no longer relevant or, as
with Luxemburg, as being somehow ‘outside of’ the capitalist system. (Harvey,
2004: 73–74)

According to Harvey, however, ‘accumulation based upon predation, fraud, and

violence’ is immanent in the operations of capitalism as such.
The same conclusion is reached by Silvia Federici. She claims that Marx ‘was
deeply mistaken’ when he ‘assumed that the violence that had presided over the
earliest phases of capitalist expansion would recede with the maturing of capitalist
relations, when the exploitation and disciplining of labor would be accomplished
mostly through the workings of economic laws’ (Federici, 2004: 12). Glen
Coulthard concurs. Seconding Kropotkin’s (1995: 221) objection to Marx’s ‘erro-
neous division between the primary accumulation of capital and its present-day
formation’, Coulthard (2014: 9) argues that, in order to be ‘relevant’, the notion of
primitive accumulation must be ‘transformed’ so as to include ‘the persistent role
that unconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of
colonial and capitalist social relations’.4 Eschewing the terminology of ‘primitive
accumulation’ altogether – in favour of his own coinage, ‘war capitalism’ – Sven
Beckert (2015: 441) likewise argues that historians and theorists should emphasize
that ‘slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence, were
not aberrations in the history of capitalism, but were at its very core’.
All of these scholars agree, then, that Marx erred insofar as he conceived primi-
tive accumulation as a violent process ‘that obliterates all non-capitalist social
forms and institutes in their place relations of wage labor characteristic of
nineteenth-century British industrial capitalism’ (Ince, 2013: 8). They all seek to
reformulate the concept so as to name the ‘political violence operative in the cap-
italization of social reproduction’ (Ince, 2014: 106). As Massimo De Angelis (1999:
Sec. 5.2) put it in his influential early articulation of the new position, ‘the con-
tinuous element of Marx’s primitive accumulation could be identified in those
social processes or sets of strategies aimed at dismantling those institutions that
protect society from the market’. Since non-capitalist or non-market social rela-
tions are always reconstituting themselves,5 primitive accumulation must be con-
ceived as the ever-renewed work of dismantling these non-capitalist relations.
This critical intervention dovetails with a second. Marx’s conception of primi-
tive accumulation is supposed to have been integral to a ‘normative development-
alism’ that casts the violent expropriation of the peasantry and other practitioners
of ‘natural economy’ as a painful but necessary stage through which humanity
Roberts 5

must pass on the way to socialism.6 Thus, while ‘Marx was acutely aware of the
murderous character of capitalist development’, Federici (2004: 12) declares that
‘there can be no doubt that he viewed it as a necessary step in the process of human
liberation’. Likewise, Jim Glassman (2006: 611) claims that ‘for Marx, primitive
accumulation, however loathsome in its violence and hypocrisy, is a necessary step
in the direction of fuller human development’. Tully (2014: 238–239) insists, as well,
that ‘Marx’s specific explication of primitive accumulation’ enshrines several pro-
cesses ‘as unjust yet necessary and universal preconditions of the development of
capitalism to communism’, including ‘the dispossession of Indigenous peoples; the
destruction of non-capitalist modes of production; the individuation and commodi-
fication of human productive powers [. . .]; and the commodification of the earth’.
This criticism of Marx buttresses the first; both take him to task for the teleo-
logical Eurocentrism built into his conception of primitive accumulation. If capit-
alism looks like the Carolina slave plantation as much as the Manchester garment
factory, then the sense that the slave plantation gives way to the garment factory
disappears. If proletarian power is to be found in ‘a Quiche indian village in the
Guatemalan hills’ as much as in the strike organizations of London’s East End,
then ‘Marx’s righteous horror of ‘‘petty producers’’’ is just a vestige of providential
historicism, impatient for the rest of the world to catch up to Europe (Midnight
Notes Collective, 1990: 6). The colonial frontier is internal to capitalism’s most
intimate workings, and so cannot be set off against a ‘more developed’ metropol-
itan core, the operations of which foretell the future of the periphery. Any attempt
to renovate Marx’s concept, therefore, must grapple with ‘the historicist bias that
Marxism shares with mainstream developmentalism and globalization narratives’,
a bias that ‘judges the extent of capitalist maturation by the degree to which wage
labor regulated by free markets becomes the predominant form of organizing pro-
duction’ (Ince, 2014: 116).
These are powerful criticisms. It is easy to appreciate why they have won the
day. I will argue, however, that they miss the point of Marx’s argument in Part
Eight of Capital. Marx can – and does – affirm that processes of primitive accu-
mulation are internal to capitalism. He insists nonetheless that they constitute the
prehistory of capital because while plunder, fraud and theft can stock up wealth
that can be used as capital, they cannot actually make that wealth function as
capital. Capital works as capital by other means. The new reading of primitive
accumulation obscures the necessity of this displacement of wealth into capital,
and, with it, the distinction between capital and capitalism. Capital requires primi-
tive accumulation, but cannot accomplish this accumulation for itself. It needs
other agencies to act to its benefit. In this light, I argue, the historical trajectory
Marx sketches in Part Eight loses the aspect of universal history and reveals itself
to be, instead, an account of capital’s capture of the state, which undertakes cap-
ital’s dirty work because it has become dependent upon capital accumulation for its
own existence. This is a strategic reality that Marx urges his contemporary anti-
capitalists to confront, not a theoretical construction of historical development he
foists upon them.
6 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

The context of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation

Primitive accumulation is set off by Marx against the accumulation of capital, or
accumulation by exploitation. In order to understand his conception of the former,
we have to understand his conception of the latter. And in order to do this, we have
to appreciate that Marx was an outlier among 19th-century socialists.7 Most social-
ists echoed the theory of the Saint-Simonians, according to which the accumulation
of capital, and the attendant exploitation of the workers, are the direct consequence
of the conquest of the land and the extortion this allowed the landed to exact from
the poor producer. In the words of The Doctrine of Saint-Simon, ‘Physical force
and the exploitation of man by man are two coexisting, corresponding facts. The
latter is the consequence of the former’ (Bazard et al., 1972: 63).
In England, this theory was promulgated by the influential Owenite William
Thompson, who declared that the present system of commerce was an ‘empire of
force and fraud’ (Thompson, 1850: 255), and by the Chartist agitator Bronterre
O’Brien, who claimed that ‘profitmongers and landlords’ exercised an ‘unlimited
and irresponsible power of murder and robbery over the mass of mankind’
(O’Brien, 1885: 142). In Germany, Karl Heinzen argued that ‘the rule of force
dominates capitalistic property relations’ (Bessner and Stauch, 2010: 151). Later,
Eugen Dühring’s thesis, that all economic relations are founded in the violent
exclusion of some from the use of natural resources, was the subject of three
chapters of Engels’s Anti-Dühring (Engels and Marx, 1987: Chap. II.2–4). In
France, the greatest proponent of this view, after the Saint-Simonians themselves,
was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon argued that the ‘regime of exploitation’ is
‘synonymous’ with the ‘feudal regime, governmental regime, [or] military regime’,
and that, ‘whatever phraseology is used’, ‘doing away with farm-rent and lending
at interest’ would eliminate ‘the last vestiges of the ancient slavery’, and, with them,
‘the sword of the executioner, the hand of justice, the club of the policeman, [and]
the gauge of the customs officer’ (Proudhon, 1923a: 287; 1923b: 337).
Marx disagreed vehemently, and, during the time he was working on volume
one of Capital, was especially concerned to combat the influence of Proudhon’s
ideas within the International Workingmen’s Association.8 He thought this way of
thinking, by figuring capitalist exploitation as just another form of rent-seeking or
extortion, misled the labouring classes in their struggle for self-emancipation. The
Saint-Simonian theory made accumulation by exploitation into a moral problem of
rentiers accruing and abusing their power over the propertyless. It took no account
of the novel dynamism of capitalist exploitation, as opposed to the conservatism of
pre-capitalist labour relations. Neither could it account for the novelty of struggles
over the length and intensity of work.
Rather than being an index of the persistence of the pre-capitalist world, Marx
argued that exploitation takes a novel form under capitalism. As Marx (1976: 425)
puts it, ‘as a producer of alien industriousness, as a surplus-labour-pump and an
exploiter of labour-power, [capital] surpasses – in its energy, measurelessness, and
effectiveness – all earlier systems of production based on direct forced labour’. This
is what Marx wants to elucidate: modern workers freely – and more effectively and
Roberts 7

energetically – do what ancient peoples had to enslave others to get done. In the
French edition, he calls this ‘the great secret of modern society’ (Marx and Engels,
1989: 143).
This secret lies in the market for labour-power, and in capital’s exploitation of
labour-power via the wage contract. Labour-power is, Marx claims, a very special
commodity. It is ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it itself has’
(Marx, 1976: 301). This claim is now generally dismissed, even by many Marxists.
It has fallen before the criticism that, in a growing economy, any basic commodity
adds more value than is required to reproduce that commodity; corn, therefore, is
exploited at the same rate as labour-power (Roemer, 1982: Chap. 6, appendix).
This criticism is too clever by half, however (Schweikart, 1989). If we take the
method of production as given, the quantity of any non-labour material of pro-
duction will determine the quantities of all other non-labour inputs. For example, if
we know how shoes are manufactured, a given quantity of rubber for the soles, or
of leather for the uppers, will determine exactly how many shoes can be made, and
how much of each of the other material inputs will be required. The quantity of
labour-power purchased, however – for example, one day’s labour – will determine
nothing, since how much actual labour one can wring from the purchased labour-
power is a matter of work discipline, skill and other factors.
Therefore, Marx argues, the institution of the labour market motivates a
dynamic and expansive mode of production. Having purchased labour-power on
the market and for a fixed period, the capitalist wants to ‘extract the maximum
possible advantage’ from this purchase while he or she can dispose of it (Marx,
1976: 342). Because the length and intensity of the working day are indeterminate,
and because the capitalist can only realize a profit by selling the produce of labour,
and because the surplus realized by the capitalist takes the form of money, of which
one can always have more, capitalist production gives rise to a ‘boundless need for
surplus labour’. Cases of ‘frightful’ overwork were abnormal and exceptional in the
pre-modern world, but overwork is normal, proper and essential for the capitalist
world (Marx, 1976: 345). This conclusion is confirmed, Marx argues, by the exist-
ence of laws limiting labour-time. Even though it is in the general interest of capital
to keep the exploitation of labour-power within sustainable limits, the collective
action problem inherent in production for the competitive market makes it impos-
sible for capitalists to limit overwork voluntarily. Workers are equally powerless to
independently establish a limit to the workday. Only ‘a law of the state, an over-
powering social deterrent’, can control overwork under capitalism (Marx, 1976:
415–416). Marx thinks this is a complete historical novelty.
Setting limits to the working day is not the end of the story. The expenditure of
labour-power can be intensified, and the labour process can be transformed by
dividing and mechanizing the labour. This ongoing revolution in the mode of
production obliterates the traditional forms and cyclical time of labour (Booth,
1991; Postone, 1993: Chap. 5; Sohn-Rethel, 1978: Pt. III). Hence, according to
Marx, the capitalist use of labour-saving machinery, instead of reducing labour-
time, ‘sweeps away all customary and natural limits to the length of the working
day’ (Marx, 1976: 532). The fight to impose limits on work does not end with the
8 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

passage of eight- or 10-hours laws, but is endemic to capitalism because it stems

directly from capital’s use of labour-power (Philip, 2001).
Contrary to what other socialists argued, therefore, the capitalists’ exploitation
of labour is not of a piece with feudal extortion. The accumulation of capital by the
exploitation of labour-power roots capitalism in the labour market, not in the soil.
The mechanisms and dynamics of capitalist exploitation derive from the imper-
sonal domination of the labour market, not the personal domination of the local
monopolist.9 Hence, capitalist exploitation is open-ended and flexible, rather than
conservative and tradition-bound, and it contains a built-in drive towards over-
work that did not characterize previous forms of exploitation. Capitalist accumu-
lation by exploitation is a historical novelty.

The prehistory of capital

With this understanding of accumulation by exploitation in mind, it is easy to see
why primitive accumulation would pose a special problem for Marx.10 By tracing
the primitive accumulation of capital back to acts of forceful and fraudulent expro-
priation, Marx seems to be erasing his divergence from previously-existing socialist
theory. Indeed, many readers of Part Eight have noticed exactly this problem.
Michael Perelman (2000: 29–30) claims, for example, that, ‘Marx’s depiction of
primitive accumulation’ as unfair and brutal ‘stood in contradiction to the main
thrust of Capital’, according to which ‘the seemingly fair and objective rule of
capital necessarily leads to exploitation’.11 Jason Read is less categorical, but is
clearly exercised by the same concerns. ‘At times’, he claims:

Marx appears to argue that primitive accumulation and the overt violence it involves
disappear in the day-to-day relations of exploitation; while at other times it appears
that the violent lawmaking power of primitive accumulation is merely privatized and
brought indoors in the factory. (Read, 2003: 28–29)

Saint-Simonianism, which Marx threw out the front door, seems to have snuck
back in the window.
Given this concern, it is arresting that Saint-Simonian language crops up pre-
cisely in Marx’s summary statement of the history of primitive accumulation. Marx
says that the rise of the ‘industrial capitalists, these new potentates’:

presents itself as the result of a victorious struggle both against seigniorial power, with
its revolting prerogatives, and against the regime of the guilds, with the fetters it placed
on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. But the
knights of industry only supplanted the knights of the sword by exploiting events not of
their own making. They have succeeded by means as vile as those that served the
Roman freedman to become the master of his patronus. (Marx, 1976: 875)

Alongside the contrast between the new industrials and the old ‘knights of the
sword’, a staple of Saint-Simonian writing, this is the only place in Capital
Roberts 9

where Marx uses the Saint-Simonian phrase ‘the exploitation of man by man’. That
he makes these borrowings at just the point where he begins to discuss the origins
of modern private property in the forcible seizure of common lands and the violent
expropriation of both the small proprietors of Britain and the native peoples of
Africa and the Americas calls for closer attention. What close attention reveals,
however, is that, while Marx’s language echoes Saint-Simonianism, his claims
contradict the Saint-Simonian theory in two ways.
First, Marx reverses the historical tendency, for he denies the Saint-Simonian
thesis that feudalism was more exploitative than capitalism: the rules of the guilds,
on the contrary, placed ‘fetters’ on ‘the free exploitation of man by man’.
The Saint-Simonians thought of feudalism as the rule of military force, a rule
that was gradually dismantled by the peaceful rise of the industrials, which left
intact only the feudal remnants of the state and landed property. This is the nar-
rative taken over and exaggerated by Proudhon. On Marx’s telling, however, ‘the
old order of things’ involved both an ‘industrial hierarchy’ and ‘guarantees of
existence’. While the direct producers were ‘bound to the soil, or [. . .] vassals to
another person’, they also had immediate possession of ‘their own means of pro-
duction’, and this gave them a measure of protection. This older economic order
collapsed into ‘the constitutive elements’ of the ‘capitalist economic order’ only
because it was undermined by its prime beneficiaries, the lords of the land (Marx,
1976: 875). The feudal order gave rise in England, during and after the Wars of the
Roses, to the military means and the pecuniary motives by which the lords would
abolish feudal land tenures and dispossess the peasantry. They thereby also
abolished their own personal, feudal power. In its place, they obtained monetary
wealth and private property, and the new forms of impersonal, social power that
came with these. The knights of industry did not supplant the knights of the sword,
as the Saint-Simonians thought. Rather, the knights of the sword turned them-
selves into modern landlords.
Marx’s second intervention is more decisive, and is contained in the cryptic
finale of his precis. He says there that the industrial capitalists ‘have succeeded
by means as vile as those that served the Roman freedman to become the master of
his patronus’. This analogy is obscure but precise. When Roman slaves were man-
umitted, their relationship to their master was not broken, but was transformed
into one of a client to a patron. For a freedman to become the master of their
patronus – their former master – would be a rank betrayal of the client-patron
bond, a betrayal that can only be compared, in Roman law, to a child murdering
their own parent. By the act of manumission, the patron gave to the freedman civil
and social life. For the freedman to then enslave their patron, to take away their
civil and social life, is inconceivable.12
Marx, with this striking analogy, claims that the capitalists were the prime
beneficiaries of the lords’ dispossession of the peasantry, that they owe their
status and powers to the lords’ abolition of feudalism, but that the capitalists,
instead of becoming the lords’ clientele, usurped the lords’ place. The lords may
have destroyed feudalism in their pursuit of money and private property, but the
rise of capitalism, in turn, subjected the lords of the land to the rule of the
 10 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

emancipated capitalists, on whom they are now dependent. This dependency arises
from the fact that, ‘whatever the proportion of surplus-value which the capitalist
entrepreneur retains for himself, or transmits to others [e.g. landlords], he is the one
who in the first place appropriates it in its entirety and he alone converts it into
capital’ (Marx, 1976: 710).13 In short, Marx’s story insists that, after the lords
betrayed their vassals, abolished feudal power, amassed landed estates and created
the modern proletariat, the rising capitalists, emancipated by the abolition of feu-
dalism, seized dominion over the landlords who had freed them.
esto es xq Therefore, contrary to both the Saint-Simonian story and the usual reading of
se terminóPart Eight, Marx does not argue that capitalists originally amassed capital via
una relac primitive accumulation, and then, having monopolized the means of production,
soc; la clase
no puede
switched over to accumulation by exploitation. Instead, Marx argues that land-
persistir lords amassed land through enclosure and expropriation, thereby creating also the
modern class of wage labourers; the capitalists then rose up between these two
(los land
lords ya classes, coming to dominate both by exploiting the newly available resource of
no puedenunattached labour-power. The process of primitive accumulation ‘incorporated
existir the soil into capital’ (Marx, 1976: 895), but not by making the capitalists the
como owners of the soil. Instead, the owners of the soil, the landlords, became dependent,
clase) for the cultivation of their land, upon the capitalists’ mediation. The producer no
longer had possession of the soil, and the possessor of the soil no longer had access bueno
pero ojo!
to labour. What had been torn asunder must be reunited. This is what the capitalist es q ya no
accomplishes by stepping between the landlord and the workers. The capitalists’ existe más
power does not grow from conquest and plunder. The capitalists’ power comes esa
from being neither the conquerors nor the plundered. relación
Marx confirms this reading at the beginning of Chapter 29, when he claims that social y se
crea una
the story of expropriation so far told has left unanswered the question, ‘where did nueva
the capitalists originally spring from?’. Marx answers by claiming that they arose ontología
from bailiffs, share-croppers and free peasants who were lucky enough to not be social
expropriated by the land-grabbers, and who were able to capitalize on the enclos-
ures of common lands and the expropriation of their neighbours by expanding their
field of production, utilizing the commons for pasturage, manuring larger plots and
employing larger gangs of farm-hands in cooperative labour. Their produce went
to market, where it met the demand created by the ‘annihilation of the domestic
industry of the countryside’ (Marx, 1976: 905–906, 908, 911).
This interpretation is further supported by what Marx wrote elsewhere. Already
in 1845, Marx and Engels had criticized the ‘True Socialists’ for seeing ‘‘‘the
extremes of our society’’ in the opposition of rentiers and proletarians’, an oppos-
ition ‘belaboured by all moralists since time immemorial’ and ‘resurrected’ by
writers like Saint-Simon (Marx and Engels, 1975: 464). Thirty years later, Marx
would insist that the landowners and the capitalists are distinct classes, noting that,
‘in England, the capitalist is mostly not even the owner of the land on which his
factory stands’ (Marx, 2010: 343).14 In this relationship between capitalist and
landlord, capital dominates. Thus, Marx criticized Malthus and Ricardo for failing
to recognize that industrialization and cooperative labour – the capitalist mode of
production – made rent differentials dependent upon differential employments of
Roberts 11

the land, and on the development and distribution of the forces of production.
Landlords do not dictate terms to capitalists; on the contrary, the rent they can
charge depends upon the capitalists’ development of industry (Ramirez, 2009).
Ricardo (1973: 38) famously argued that ‘corn is not high because a rent is paid,
but rent is paid because corn is high’. Marx rejoins that exploitation is not high
because rent is paid, but rent is paid because exploitation is high. Landlords can
skim off the top only because the capitalist exploitation of labour-power accumu-
lates a mass of surplus-value sufficient to feed even a class of idle rentiers. In Marx’s
own words:

Even though landed property can drive the price of agricultural products above their
price of production, it does not depend on this, but rather on the general state of the
market, how far market price rises above the price of production. (Marx, 1981: 898)

As he put it in The Civil War in France, ‘the landlord is now but the sleeping
partner of the capitalist’ (Marx, 2010: 212).
Therefore, Marx’s account of primitive accumulation does not undermine his
account of accumulation by exploitation, since capitalists neither carried out the
original expropriation of the producers nor inherited the monopoly power of the
landed proprietors who did carry it out. Capitalists are able to exploit labour-
power because they are situated between the expropriated masses and the few
landed proprietors. It is from their position of relative freedom, vis-a-vis feudal
constraints, that they were able to subjugate not only the poor labourers but also
their old lords, who had delivered capital from its bondage only to become its
clients.
Marx calls primitive accumulation ‘the prehistory of capital’, in short, not
because capital (or capitalism) has its historical origin in acts of violence and
theft, but because modern industrial capital originates in the opportunistic exploit-
ation of new forms of freedom created by acts of violence and theft. Violence and
theft are prehistoric because they cannot create capital, but only capital’s precon-
ditions.15 Acts of violence and theft are not yet the process of capitalizing upon the
conditions created by violence and theft. Capital requires others to do the dirty
work of creating its preconditions. As we will now see, this is crucial for Marx’s
understanding of capitalism’s colonial and imperial reach, and for the practical
lesson of Part Eight, how the labouring classes might overcome capital and estab-
lish a new mode of production.

The dependency of the state

The element of Marx’s argument in Capital that looks like ‘normative develop-
mentalism’ is his claim, in Chapter 32, that to continue the old system of small
domestic industry and petty agriculture ‘would be, as Pequeur says judiciously, ‘‘to
decree mediocrity for all’’’ (Marx, 1976: 928). This leads into his infamous claim
that capital is the negation of private property grounded in labour, and that the
proletarian revolution will be ‘the negation of the negation’ (Marx, 1976: 929).
12 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

Hence, Marx seems to inscribe capitalism in a Hegelian progressive history, within

which primitive accumulation plays the role of the so-called bad side by which
reason works itself out. Elsewhere in Part Eight, however, Marx attacks ‘the stoical
peace of mind’ of those defenders of the enclosures who argued that they were
necessary in order to produce ‘more labour’, or else to establish ‘the due proportion
between arable land and pasture’ (Marx, 1976: 888–889). These arguments excuse
the atrocities of primitive accumulation by reference to the economic progress they
made possible, precisely what Marx is accused of doing. Since it seems churlish to
accuse Marx of such blatant self-contradiction – and in the span of a mere 30 pages
– it is only fair to see if Chapter 32 might be better interpreted in a different light.
If one leaves aside all preconceptions – everything one ‘knows’ about Marx’s
Hegelian historicism – Marx’s point in Chapter 32 is simply that there is no going
back. The workers’ movement has to accept socialized production and organize to
expropriate the capitalist class, not attempt to retrieve the modes of production
capital has displaced. The question is: what, if not ‘normative developmentalism’,
provides the directionality here? What has happened that imposes a backward and
a forward on history?
Here it is crucial to note that Chapter 32 is sandwiched between two chapters in
which Marx outlines the role of the modern state in primitive accumulation. There
is a massive literature devoted to Marx’s understanding of the state. The better
representatives of this literature distinguish between two models of the state in
Marx (Hunt, 1984: Chap. 2–3; Sanderson, 1963). The first, most commonly asso-
ciated with ‘the Marxist theory of the state’, figures the state as an instrument of
class domination. The second figures the state as a parasite, striving for or achiev-
ing a sort of independence vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie (Hunt, 1984: 4). I argue that
Part Eight of Capital contains a third model of the state, one that integrates elem-
ents of the instrumental and parasitic models: the state as dependent agent of cap-
ital. The state is parasitic in that it depends upon the accumulation of capital (as I
will discuss below), and this dependency accounts for both the state’s ‘relative
autonomy’ from the actually existing class of capitalists, and for its very imperfect
instrumental relation to capital as such. The state under capital is self-activating
but subservient, a servile and corrupt henchman rather than a free agent. This
relationship between the state and capital is crucial for understanding what
Marx (1976: 915) calls ‘systematic primitive accumulation’, one manifestation of
which is EG Wakefield’s proposal for ‘systematic colonization’.
Marx claims that the state has been the agent of ‘all’ the methods of systematic
primitive accumulation, ‘without exception’ (Marx, 1976: 915). Under the colonial
regimes, the states of Europe plundered the rest of the world, stealing means of
production and labour-power on a massive scale. They thereby ‘gave a great boost
to navigation and commerce’. Also, ‘the treasures directly extorted outside Europe
by the forced labour of indigenous peoples reduced to slavery, by embezzlement,
pillage, and murder flowed back to the mother-country in order to function as
capital there’. Colonial expeditions and commercial wars were financed by the
selling of public bonds. This system of state finance gave rise to a market for
speculators, to national banks and to a system of taxation that ‘contains within
Roberts 13

itself the germ of automatic progression’. Taxes, in turn, together with protective
tariffs, ruined the remnants of the petty producers (Marx, 1976: 916–922).
Artisans, peasants and indigenous peoples were simply overwhelmed by these
state-led initiatives, in the mother country and in the colonies. As even so com-
mitted a partisan of the petty producers as Craig Calhoun has admitted, radical
mobilizations of traditional communities fell apart whenever they extended ‘much
beyond the range of direct, person-to-person communal ties’ (Calhoun, 2012: 98).
Local resistances were not in the same league as the powers they sought to resist,
which were organized at the national and international level and were capable of
employing to great effect the impersonal bond of monetary payments.
Marx does not try to explain how the state came to have an interest in the
accumulation of capital. He does, however, indicate mechanisms by which this
interest is preserved and recreated. The relationship between tax revenues and
public indebtedness is one such mechanism. Once the feudal ties have been severed,
the central state can only act insofar as it can pay its agents, and buy the weapons
and other implements with which those agents enact the state’s sovereign will.16
The modern state acts with money. It can acquire the money with which it acts only
if capital continues to accumulate within the territory it controls. This dependency
of the state upon capital accumulation holds whether one looks to tax revenues or
to public borrowing, and whether the government is ‘despotic, constitutional, or
republican’ (Marx, 1976: 919). In Michael Heinrich’s (2012: 212) formulation, ‘the
material foundation of the state is thus directly connected to the accumulation of
capital; no government can get past this dependency’.
Dependency is not passivity; the state is not a passive instrument of the
bourgeois class, but a servant of capital. Servants might anticipate their master’s
desire, or try to stay on the master’s good side while doing as little as possible, or
try to play one master off against another. Servitude demands strategic and
opportunistic action, not passivity (Scott, 1990). Hence, whenever the conditions
of capital accumulation are threatened, we should expect the modern state to act
for the sake of securing those conditions, however irrational or superstitious its
strategy may be.
Marx argues, against the doux commerce thesis, that colonial and imperial con-
quest are the predictable outcome of this dependence of the state upon capital.
Capital can only pursue accumulation by exploitation where the conditions created
by primitive accumulation exist. As capital’s dependent agent, the state executes
and enforces the expropriations that capital needs but cannot itself carry out.
Hence, Marx’s sarcastic invocation of ‘doux commerce’ to characterize the ‘treach-
ery, bribery, massacre, and meanness’ of Dutch colonial administration in Celebes,
Java, and Malacca (Marx, 1976: 916). The methods of systematic primitive accu-
mulation – colonialism, protectionism, confiscatory taxation and so forth – are not
crude anachronisms in an era of peaceful commerce. They are predictable conse-
quences of the state’s having ‘entered into the service of the makers of surplus-
value’ (Marx, 1976: 922).17
This account of the state’s role in primitive accumulation is the crucial context
for Marx’s Chapter 32. The negation of the producers’ possession of the means of
14 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

production is also the creation of agencies with both the power and the interest to
destroy petty production. On the one hand, the development of capitalist large
industry erodes the skill base of petty production and decimates demand for its
products. On the other hand, the modern state, bound to the fortunes of capital,
pursues tax, tariff and colonial policies that ‘abridge the transitional phases’ to the
capitalist economic order by means of ‘a pitiless vandalism, spurred on by the most
infamous motives, the passions most sordid and most hateful in their pettiness’
(Marx, 1976: 928).
‘The negation of the negation’, the destruction of these agencies of industrial
capital and the modern state, cannot, argues Marx, be achieved by petty producers,
traditional communities or experiments in communitarian cooperation. Rather, it
can only result from the creation of a new agency, with the power and the interest
to destroy capitalist industry and the modern state. Marx thinks that the increasing
concentration of capitalist wealth, the progressive deskilling and collectivization of
labour and the relative immiseration of the class of labourers dependent upon
wages all conspire to make that class of labourers, and only that class, capable
of overthrowing capitalism. ‘The masses’, unable to satisfy their needs except
through cooperative, industrialized labour, have the means, via their ‘revolutionary
combination’, to expropriate ‘a few usurpers’ (Marx, 1976: 929–930). This coinci-
dence of motive and means is the material condition for overcoming capitalism.
For Marx, this conclusion is underscored by the situation in the British settler
colonies, to which he turns in the final chapter of Capital. As EG Wakefield dis-
covered in Australia, machinery and money cannot command labour – that is, act
as capital – where ‘the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it
can therefore turn part of it into his private property and his individual means of
production’ (Marx, 1976: 934). Capital, to be capital, needs primitive accumulation
to occur. The cure for the ‘anti-capitalist cancer of the colonies’ (Marx, 1976: 938),
according to Wakefield, is for the government of the mother country to set an
artificially high price on the land at the frontier, and use the money generated from
the sale of this land to import new labouring settlers. Thereby, the government can
establish the conditions of capital accumulation. This is ‘systematic colonization’, a
policy taken up for a time by the British government (Ince, 2013).
Wakefield’s plan carries a political lesson for Marx. The state’s interest in capital
accumulation implies that, wherever worker colonies or other efforts to escape
from wage-labour might actually endanger capital, worker separatists will confront
not only the difficulties inherent in the organization of a ‘new moral world’, but
also governmental policies backed by force of arms. Hence, the story of Wakefield’s
discovery is an allegory about the necessity of large-scale political action to over-
come capitalism. From the founding of the International Workingmen’s
Association (IWMA), Marx’s hope was that the organization might ‘succeed in
re-electrifying the political movement of the English working class’ (Marx and
Engels, 1987: 150, Marx to Engels, 1 May 1865). Marx incessantly promoted
within the IWMA the view that labourers should organize themselves by and for
the sake of intervening in politics at the level of the state for the sake of dismantling
the state. The end of Capital is one more piece of this advocacy. Without openly
Roberts 15

calling for a revolutionary movement to seize and overthrow the state, Marx none-
theless builds a case for the necessity of such a confrontation.18

Conclusion
To sum up: the criticism directed at Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation
misses the mark. Marx does not confine primitive accumulation to the past, or to
the frontiers of capitalism. He argues, rather, that primitive accumulation is an
ongoing necessity internal to capitalism, but always anterior to the specific oper-
ations of capital. Capital cannot carry out primitive accumulation, even though it
needs primitive accumulation in order to create the conditions in which alone it can
operate. Hence, capital cannot be the only agent of capitalism; some other agency
has to do the dirty work. In the case of England, the original agents of primitive
accumulation were the lords of the land. In general, however, the primary agent of
primitive accumulation has been and continues to be the state. Hence, also, Marx
does not inscribe primitive accumulation in a normatively developmentalist his-
tory. Rather, he urges his fellow socialists to adopt a realist conception of the
modern state. Dependent upon capital accumulation for its operations, the state
can be expected to outflank and destroy efforts to escape from or stave off the
capitalist mode of production. The magnitude of the state’s power, and the reli-
ability with which that power is utilized to foster the conditions of capital accu-
mulation, indicate to Marx that the workers must unite in large numbers and carry
out a political struggle to dismantle the state and expropriate the capitalist class.
If the stakes here were only the interpretation of Marx’s chapters on primitive
accumulation, this defense of Marx would be of limited import. But if Part Eight of
Capital is not as Eurocentric and developmentalist as the new standard reading
claims, then the conclusions of Marx’s argument cannot be dismissed. Perhaps
Marx did not produce, in ‘primitive accumulation’, a useful conceptual tool
which can be taken out of its context, sharpened and cleaned up, and then put
to our own uses. Perhaps his argument regarding primitive accumulation ought
instead to challenge us to reformulate our theoretical understanding of and prac-
tical attitude toward both capital and the state.
Indeed, Marx’s argument directly challenges the theoretical and political ten-
dencies of the contemporary critics of primitive accumulation. To be clear, these
critics hold diverse – not to say contradictory – views. They do not form a single
theoretical school or political party. Nonetheless, the framework of their critique of
primitive accumulation indicates certain broadly-shared assumptions. They assume
that capitalism is inherently and violently expansive, or imperialistic, and that anti-
capitalist politics is, on the contrary, essentially a matter of securing zones of
independence from the violent processes by which capitalism develops. Anti-capit-
alism is thereby figured as independence, sovereignty, autonomy or secession from
capitalism. This suggests a ‘strategy of exit’, or an emphasis upon ‘changing the
world without taking power’. Hence, also, capitalism appears to be a moral prob-
lem, in the sense that a morally-problematic recourse to violence is its linchpin. It
can be overcome only by converting violent others to the view that non-violent
16 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

‘commoning’ is both morally superior and practically sustainable. The ligaments of

a non-capitalist world are present, therefore, in existing practices of resistance and
common-living. The task at hand is to scale up these local practices, and to knit
them together in networks of solidarity and mutual aid. In short, only ‘the
diabolical global complex of war and militarization’ prevents ‘the structural
causes’ of ‘poverty, exploitation, environmental destruction and climate change’
from being subjugated to ‘the democratic authority of the billions who suffer and
die from them’ (Tully, 2014: 244).19
Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation casts grave doubts on this set of
assumptions. If, as per Marx, primitive accumulation is not carried out by capital,
then condemning the former need not touch on the latter. If primitive accumula-
tion is the prehistory of capital, then the disavowal of violence is just as essential to
capitalism as the continuation of plunder is its predictable consequence (Ince, 2013:
Chap. 1). If the state is dependent upon capital accumulation, then we should
expect both that the more sovereignty communities enjoy, the more pressure
these communities will face ‘to open up their settlement lands to exploitation as
an economic solution’ (Coulthard, 2014: 77), and that the prevalence of democratic
authority will not make a whit of difference in this dynamic. If the state is the
servile agent of capital, then we can expect that alternative ways of life will be easily
tolerated so long as they pose no threat to the accumulation of capital, and will face
the full repressive power of the state if they do seem to threaten that accumulation.
If this is a credible hypothesis about state action, then it is not a meta-narrative of
historical development but a counsel of prudence that anti-capitalists organize and
plan with the likelihood of this eventual confrontation in mind.
Finally, if Marx was right about primitive accumulation, it is not the desire to
secure a form of life outside of capitalism that contains the germ of a post-capitalist
world, but the need for large-scale, even global, cooperation. Making this world
requires not a refusal of the technologically- and institutionally-mediated inter-
dependency capitalism has foisted upon us, but an acceptance of it as our fate.
Pre-capitalist modes of life and cooperation may well inform and inspire both anti-
capitalist struggle and post-capitalist society, but since they grew up in response to
conditions that were, by definition, untouched by capitalist accumulation, it would
be extremely surprising if they were, as such, up to the task of governing a post-
capitalist world. In short, there is no reason to think that any of us know how to
live in a post-capitalist and post-imperialist way. Hence, there is no reason to think
that converting others is the political task at hand. To what would we convert them?
Capitalism poses not a moral or ethical problem, but a practical and political one.
Surmounting this problem does not require a new or common ethical sensibility, or
a change of heart, but a novel set of institutions.
It should not surprise us that Marx’s argument runs so directly against current
concerns with primitive accumulation. The contemporary critique is, after all, a
reiteration of the socialism and mutualism against which Marx constructed his own
critical theory of capital, the Saint-Simonian theory of exploitation cast in new
language. This is the evergreen anti-capitalism of ‘reactionary radicalism’
(Calhoun, 2012). As Tully points out, it is the anti-capitalism of William
Roberts 17

Thompson, William Morris and Peter Kropotkin (Tully, 2014: 235, 239). He does
not mention that it is also the anti-capitalism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. This
anti-capitalism declaims against all ‘predation, fraud, and violence’, and imagines
that it thereby rejects capital. Marx’s argument, however, is that capital, too, con-
demns all predation, fraud and violence. Unlike reactionary radicalism, however,
capital knows how to benefit from that which it condemns, and the state’s depend-
ency upon economic growth guarantees that predation, fraud and violence will
continue to be regularly visited upon those without the institutional resources to
prevent it.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Notes
1. Robert Nichols has recently argued that an irony of the debates over primitive accu-
mulation is that, while this is supposed to be ‘a Marxist concept’, it actually ‘derives
from Adam Smith’. As Nichols (2015: 27, n. 1) writes: ‘In The Wealth of Nations, Smith
spoke of an ‘‘accumulation of stock’’ that must be ‘‘previous to the division of labour’’.
When Marx translated this into German, he rendered it as ‘‘die sogenannte ursprüngliche
Akkumulation,’’ and then, when Das Kapital was translated into English, it became
‘‘primitive accumulation.’’ Not only are the main terms (‘‘previous,’’ ursprünglich and
‘‘primitive’’) not direct equivalents, but Marx distances himself from association with
the idea through his use of the qualifier ‘‘so-called’’’. I think a close look at the textual
history indicates, on the contrary, that ‘primitive accumulation’ – as opposed to ‘previ-
ous’, ‘original’ or ‘sogennante unrsprüngliche’ accumulation – is a Marxist concept
through-and-through, deriving none of its sense from Smith. While Nichols may well
be right that ‘ursprüngliche Accumulation’ originated as Marx’s translation of Smith into
German, this did not become ‘primitive accumulation’ when Das Kapital became
Capital, but when it became Le Capital. This matters because the French translation
of 1872–1875 was ‘entie`rement revise´e par l’autour’ (Marx and Engels, 1989: 3). Marx
himself, then, bears responsibility for the transformation of what had been the second
section of Chapter six, ‘Die s.g. Ursprüngliche Accumulation’, and then chapter 24, ‘Die
sogen. ursprüngliche Akkumulation’, into a full-fledged Part Eight, ‘L’accumulation
primitive’.
2. In this camp, De Angelis includes Lenin, Dobb, Sweezy and Brenner, among others.
3. In addition to Amin, the Subaltern Studies Group, Luxemburg and Wallerstein are
important theorists of the continuous character of primitive accumulation.
4. These debates are ably reconstructed by Nichols (2015: 18–20).
5. The influence of Karl Polanyi is patent in this formulation of the issue.
6. ‘Normative developmentalism’ is Coulthard’s (2014: 9) phrase; ‘natural economy’ is
Luxemburg’s (2003: Chap. 26).
18 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

7. A fuller version of the argument of this section can be found in my book, Marx’s Inferno
(Roberts, 2017: Chap. 4).
8. Marx’s antipathy to Proudhon’s system has been surveyed by McNally (1993). The
influence of Proudhon’s ideas within the IWMA is the subject of Puech (1907).
9. Marx does not dismiss concerns about accumulated economic power and exploitation
by extortion. He denies only that these capture the capitalist exploitation of labour-
power in its specificity. This is not the place to enter into a full reconstruction of Marx’s
understanding of capitalist exploitation and its relation to force and compulsion. This
issue is a fraught one within Marxological debates. One of the important current debates
pits those who focus on the specificity of capitalist property relations and the exploit-
ation of wage labour (Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, George Comninel and
others) against those who insist upon the heterogeneity of forms of labour within cap-
italism’s global ambit (Jairus Banaji, Neil Davidson, Ashley Smith and others). Without
imagining that it gets to the bottom of the differences dividing these scholars, drawing
the distinction between capital and capitalism as this article does illuminates the debate,
which can be more polemical than edifying. Those who follow Brenner tend to reduce
capitalism to the operations of capital, and thereby to cast anything involving ‘extra-
economic coercion’ as non-capitalist or pre-capitalist. Their critics rejoin that capitalism
obviously encompasses all manner of slave labour, debt servitude and colonial preda-
tion, and then draw the inference that capital may just as well enslave labour as hire it.
Both sides, in short, collapse Marx’s distinction between capital and capitalism. Clearly
distinguishing between the two may, therefore, allow for a more productive exchange.
For a sense of the debate, see the recent symposium on Banerji’s work in Historical
Materialism (Campling, 2013).
10. The arguments of this and the following section draw upon those presented more fully in
Marx’s Inferno (Roberts, 2017: Chap. 6).
11. Perelman’s account has been repeated by David Harvey (2010: 289; Perelman is cited on
p. 293), who claims that Part Eight ‘goes against the central presumption of the rest of’
Capital, the immanent criticism of political economy.
12. For details about Roman manumission and patronage, see Mouritsen (2011) and
Patterson (1982: Chap. 9).
13. See also the citation of Thomas Hodgskin in Chapter 31: ‘The capitalist may now be
said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community’ (Hodgskin, 1973: 98;
quoted by Marx, 1976: 914).
14. Marx’s statement, in this context, that ‘the monopoly of land ownership’ is ‘the basis
of the monopoly of capital’ may appear to contradict my thesis, but does not. Only
where the land has been consolidated into private property in the hands of a few are
the mass of people reduced to propertylessness, and only then can the capitalist,
owning the means of labour and renting the land, arise. As a necessary concomitant
of mass expropriation, and a necessary condition for capitalist intermediation, the
monopoly in landed property is a basis for capitalism without being constitutive of
capital.
15. Unlike Amin and Harvey, Marx never calls primitive accumulation ‘the prehistory of
capitalism’. Only this phrase, and not Marx’s, would imply that primitive accumulation
is historically antecedent to capitalism.
16. The extent to which state agents will carry out their mandates simply because they are
paid to do so should not be underestimated. Legitimation and patriotic fervour are,
often enough, simply side effects of sending the checks out on time.
17. Fowkes mistranslates Marx’s Plusmacher as ‘profit-mongers’.
Roberts 19

18. Maximillian Rubel was convinced that Marx had ‘deliberately reversed the last two
chapters’ of Capital in order to disguise its revolutionary conclusion from German
censors (Marx, 1968: 541, 1705–1709). Despite the lack of any positive evidence for
this thesis, Rubel could not believe that Marx’s final words would be ‘a historical
chapter that ended and concluded the work with the defeat of the proletariat’ (Marx,
1968: 1706). It did not occur to him that defeat also holds political lessons.
19. My characterization of these shared assumptions is obviously broad, but I have drawn
the language of this characterization from across the range of the authors discussed (see,
especially: Coulthard, 2014: 165–179; Harvey, 2004: 75–83; Midnight Notes Collective,
1990: 7–9; Tully, 2014: 238–244).

References
Alfred T (2014) Foreword. In: Coulthard GS (ed.) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the
Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
pp.ix–xi.
Amin S (1974) Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of
Underdevelopment. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bazard A, Enfantin BP and Barrault E (1972) The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition;
First Year, 1828–1829. New York: Schocken Books.
Beckert S (2015) Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Bessner D and Stauch M (2010) Karl Heinzen and the intellectual origins of modern terror.
Terrorism and Political Violence 22(2): 143–176.
Booth WJ (1991) Economies of time: On the idea of time in Marx’s political economy.
Political Theory 19(1): 7–27.
Calhoun CJ (2012) The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early
Nineteenth-Century Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Campling L (ed.) (2013) Debating modes of production and forms of exploitation: A sym-
posium on Jairus Banerji’s theory as history. Historical Materialism 21(4): 3–143.
Coulthard GS (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
De Angelis M (1999) Marx on primitive accumulation: A reinterpretation. Available at:
http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/M.DeAngelis/PRIMACCA.htm (accessed 2 February 2017).
Dobb M (1963) Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Engels F and Marx K (1987) Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Vol 25.
New York: International Publishers.
Federici S (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.
Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
Federici S (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle.
Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Glassman J (2006) Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by
‘‘extra-economic’’ means. Progress in Human Geography 30(5): 608–625.
Harvey D (2004) The ‘‘new’’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. Socialist Register
40: 64–87.
Harvey D (2010) A Companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso.
Heinrich M (2012) An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Hodgskin T (1973) The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. Clifton, NJ:
A.M. Kelley.
20 European Journal of Political Theory 0(0)

Hunt RN (1984) The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels. Vol 2. Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
Ince OU (2013) Colonial capitalism and the dilemmas of liberalism: Locke, Burke, Wakefield,
and the British empire. PhD thesis, Cornell University, USA.
Ince OU (2014) Primitive accumulation, new enclosures, and global land grabs: A theoretical
intervention. Rural Sociology 79(1): 104–131.
Kropotkin PA (1995) The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Luxemburg R (2003) The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge.
McNally D (1993) Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist
Critique. London: Verso.
Marx K (1968) Œuvres: Économie. Paris: Gallimard.
Marx K (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol 1. New York: Penguin.
Marx K (1981) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol 3. New York: Vintage Books.
Marx K (2010) Political Writings: The First International and After. London: Verso.
Marx K and Engels F (1975) Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Vol 4.
New York: International Publishers.
Marx K and Engels F (1987) Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Vol 42.
New York: International Publishers.
Marx K and Engels F (1989) Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Vol. II.7. Berlin: Akademie
Verlag.
Midnight Notes Collective (1990) Introduction to the new enclosures. Midnight Notes 10: 1–9.
Mouritsen H (2011) The Freedman in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nichols R (2015) Disaggregating primitive accumulation. Radical Philosophy 194: 18–28.
O’Brien J (1885) The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery: How It Came into the
World and How It Shall Be Made to Go out. London: William Reeves and Martin James
Boon.
Patterson O (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Perelman M (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret
History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Philip B (2001) Marxism, neoclassical economics and the length of the working day. Review
of Political Economy 13(1): 27–39.
Postone M (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical
Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Proudhon P-J (1923a) General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. London:
Freedom Press.
Proudhon P-J (1923b) Ide´e ge´ne´rale de la re´volution au XIXe sie`cle, Ouvres comple`tes de
P.-J. Proudhon, nouvelle édition. Paris: Marcel Rivière.
Puech JL (1907) Le Proudhonisme dans l’Association internationale des travailleurs. Paris:
F Alcan.
Ramirez MD (2009) Marx’s theory of ground rent: A critical assessment. Contributions to
Political Economy 28(1): 71–91.
Read J (2003) The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Ricardo D (1973) The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. London: Dent.
Roberts WC (2017) Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Roberts 21

Roemer JE (1982) A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Sanderson J (1963) Marx and Engels on the state. The Western Political Quarterly 16(4):
946–955.
Schweikart D (1989) On the exploitation of cotton, corn, and labor. The Canadian Journal of
Philosophy supplementary volume 15: 281–297.
Scott JC (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Sohn-Rethel A (1978) Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. London:
Macmillan.
Thompson W (1850) An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most
Conducive to Human Happiness Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary
Equality of Wealth. 2nd edn. London: Longman.
Tully J (2011) Dialogue. Political Theory 39(1): 145–160.
Tully J (2014) Responses. In: Nichols R and Singh J (eds) Freedom and Democracy in an
Imperial Context. London: Routledge, pp. 223–276.