Cameron Hughes
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Capital did not magically emerge from the mists of prehistory. Instead, like all things, it has a historical-material genealogy that can be traced. Classical political economists like Adam Smith however, glossed over the kind of archaeological work that would be necessary to uncover where and how capital first came into being. As Smith states in The Wealth of Nations: “A weaver cannot apply himself entirely to his peculiar business, unless there is beforehand stored up somewhere […] a stock sufficient to maintain him. […] the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour” (Smith 2003, emphasis added). This is short shrift to be sure, but according to most contemporary scholars, it’s the first reference to a type of accumulation that is a necessary precondition for the advent of capitalism (Perelman 2004).

The central feature powering the nascent capitalist economy, as depicted by Smith, was that of diligent individuals who, by thrift and ingenuity, came to accrue wealth by locating or creating markets where commodities could be sold. These individuals, more precisely merchants, were simply turning to their advantage another process portrayed by Smith as naturally emergent; that of the division of labor. While Smith doesn’t discount the possibility of conflict, exploitation, or conquest in the course of this process, he fails to recognize their presence as essential midwives in the birth of capitalism.

Rather than obscuring the arrival of capitalism by casting its appearance as natural, Marx insists that we must investigate the specific material forces that led to this particular outcome. Unlike Smith, Marx turns our attention to the 16th and 17th century’s mass dispossession of European peasants from their lands. It was these acts of de jure expropriation — which Marx finds exemplified in the English enclosure movement — that transformed the feudal peasant into the proletarian and thus began to consolidate the constituent elements of a capitalist mode of production:

Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (Marx 1992)

Marx, contravening Smith, asserts that this was not a process of mostly peaceful evolution driven by innovation. Instead it combined the legal and physically coercive powers of the state with the private will of landlords. The reality of this mass dispossession entailed the obliteration of traditional feudal lifeways, the divorcing of peasants from their means of subsistence, and the quite literal uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people from the land that they had lived on for generations.

This new “double freedom” that Marx points to — freedom from old obligations to the feudal system, but also freedom from the means of production — forced the pupal proletariat class to become purveyors of the only thing that it retained claim to: labor power. In supplanting serfdom, this new arrangement, Marx posits, is the intinus of the entire capitalist system. In his own words: “The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. […] The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process” (Marx 1992).

It was not lost on Marx that this process of dispossession and seizure had been exported globally in the form of European colonialism. As Marx saw it, though the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples had begun as a project galvanized by aspirations of national enrichment and glory, the birth of the market gave colonialism new purpose. The material spoils of colonial accumulation worked to supercharge the end-stage transformation of European economies from feudal to market based. Put bluntly by Marx: “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital” (Marx 1992).

Fundamentally Marx is making the assertion that violence, dispossession, and coercion — in short, primitive accumulation — were not ancillary to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but that these were its definitive features. Recent scholarly contributions have challenged the orthodox understanding of primitive accumulation as a temporally confined event. Of particular interest is Silvia Federici’s Marxist-Feminist interpretation of primitive accumulation in her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch. In it, she argues that capitalism requires a constant influx of looted capital in order to function. Moreover, she challenges Marx’s thesis that the supplantation of feudalism by capitalism was a positive and necessary historical stage on the road to socialism. Instead, Federici asserts that the birth of capitalism represented a reaction to efforts by peasants who sought to further expand the commons. Within this argument she draws special attention to the constant and continuous expropriation of women’s social reproductive labor as the primary example of historical and ongoing primitive accumulation (Federici 2014).

Bibliography

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2014.

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1992.

Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Duke University Press, 2004.

Smith, Adam, and Andrew S. Skinner. The Wealth of Nations. Penguin, 2003.