Re: Primitive accumulation and Bitch: puppet master to the socks!
On Dec 9, 2006, at 3:35 PM, bitch wrote:
At 01:14 PM 12/9/2006, James Heartfield wrote:
The concept he critiqued was that of “original accumulation”.
Under that term a rag bag of ideas were put together to explain
(or more properly to explain away) the existence of the original
fund of capital, from which all subsequent accumulation starts.
Marx says it is capitalism’s dirty secret that the original
accumulation fund is not got by ‘abstinence’ but by theft,
enslavement and plunder. (Following the hints put forward by
Rousseau, who said that property begins when one man puts a fence
around some land and others recognise it [badly remembered], or
from Prudhon who says ‘all property is theft’).I’m unclear what you’re saying here Jim. Which examples of
primitive accumulation from Goldner did you object to? I didn’t get
the sense that he was talking about extraordinary theft and con
tricks, but ordinary ones.
I’m with James on this - Marx’s use of p.a. is precise and limited,
and there’s not much in current capitalist practice that’s like it.
No doubt people everywhere are seeing common property privatized, but
the bulk of capitalist profits come from exploiting labor. Those get
obscured by financial machinations, but finance is about distributing
those profits, not creating them out of thin air, or by regularly
appropriating big gobs of primitively accumulated material. I don’t
like the way David Harvey uses p.a. either.
I asked Loren if he thought all the money that the People’s Bank of
China lends the US was an example of this sort of plunder and he said
yes. But they’re making us loans, not sending us boatloads of stolen
goods.
Doug