From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion

Abstract

During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation ( ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal violence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accumulation throughout history.

The Fate of Social Modernity

“…This insight is anathema to Marxist thinking and more recent scholarship focusing on the role of capital ownership in the shaping of the (late) modern world (Sum and Jessop 2013;Kessler-Harris and Vaudagna 2018;Bloom 2023). Capitalistic agency, it is observed, often clashes with emancipatory values, with this clash becoming more pronounced in recent times (see Lambert and Herod 2016;Dörre et al 2018;Fraser and Jaeegi 2018;Gonçalves and Costa 2020;Ayres 2020;Hathaway 2020;Rhodes 2022). However, it should not go unnoticed that, during the twentieth century, Western societies were trying to reconcile capitalism with democracy (see Azmanova 2020, Chapter 4).…”

Reassessing Soviet industrialization as primitive Soviet accumulation: Social reproduction, collectivization and peasant women's revolts under Stalin

“…In this way, the expropriation of reproductive labour is inherent to the international division of labour (trade and production) or the ‘combined and uneven’ spread of global capitalism and its specifically ‘peripheral’ expressions. As engagements with Marxist Dependency Theory show, global capitalism is defined by the subalternized incorporation of some nations and the super‐exploitation of their workers, in other words their cheap reproduction (Fontes, 2017; Gonçalves and Costa, 2019). Understanding the relationship between expropriation and exploitation, then, must move beyond the gendered division of labour to the structural significance of lifemaking in sustaining of the economy (Vogel, 2013; Ferguson, 2020; Bhattacharya, 2017).…”

Analysis of the influence path of Marx’s thought in contemporary college students’ Civic Education based on regression analysis

“…The core concept of university ideological and political theory courses is Marxism and socialist culture, and its fundamental task is to make college students grasp, recognize, and support Marxism, socialism, and the Communist Party, especially nationalized Marxism, socialism with national characteristics and the Communist Party [6][7]. Its immediate goal is to enhance college students' faith, trust, belief confidence, and trust in Marxism, socialism, and the state.…”