Colonialist primitive accumulation

Abstract

The concept of primitive accumulation was formulated by Marx in his magnum opus, Capital, Volume I. Actually, it should have been translated as “primary accumulation” as Marx probably intended. Because there is nothing primitive about the capitalists' accumulation process, it goes on so long as capitalism lasts. When capitalism was making its debut, especially in relatively large states such as England, the Netherlands, and France, primary accumulation was taking place along two trajectories, with land and labor playing a central role in both cases. At home, people were being thrown out of their lands by various devices such as legal enclosure measures, so as to use the land to yield more profit for capitalist landlords and to drive them into factories. This process started in England in the sixteenth century and spread to most Western European countries in the nineteenth century. Abroad it consisted of grabbing other peoples' lands and turning the previous owners into wage workers or virtually turning them into slaves. Alternatively, where there was a large peasant population, the conquering power extracted as much surplus value from the subjects as it could, very often not even leaving them with their subsistence requirements and causing large‐scale famines. In relation to India, which had a large artisanal population and which was the largest exporter of cotton textile down to the 1780s, the English East India Company used that artisanal populace as another base of exploitation. In the Western hemisphere until capitalism came to its full flowering in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the United States, Canada, and Australia, genocide of the indigenous population was the principal instrument for grabbing their land and all the resources attached to it.