So-called Accumulation by Dispossession

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the notion of primitive accumulation has been reemerging within studies of historical capitalism. Nonetheless, most research on contemporary dispossessions has related them to capitalist accumulation proper without sufficient theoretical care, in a way that virtually collapses the concepts of dispossession and accumulation into one another. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some theoretical distinctions to better understand how contemporary dispossessions and their variations, forms and mechanisms relate, contribute, or even do not contribute, to capitalist accumulation proper. To do so, I discuss the concept of classical primitive accumulation and its alleged continuity until today. I then propose the concept of redistributive dispossession which, unlike primitive accumulation, does not create any condition for the expansion of capital. Such conditions are created through the processes I discuss under the label of expanding dispossession, which I split into expanding capitalizing dispossession and expanding commodifying dispossession.

The Logic of Dispossession

“…Another group of scholars argue that (classical) primitive accumulation ended in the pre-history of capitalism-what now exists is merely dispossession (Bin 2016(Bin , 2017Levien 2012Levien , 2015Zarembka 2002). They also argue that the theoretical assumptions of ongoing primitive accumulation are ambiguous; that they cannot explain the relationship between contemporary dispossession and capitalist accumulation.…”

Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space

“…While there is evidently a connection here to the ‘ mode of production’ broadly understood, rent is not extracted from the process of production, and as such does not necessarily contribute to the ‘expanding reproduction’ of capital. In contrast to the ‘expanding reproduction’ characteristic of accumulation through rounds of production, ‘redistributive dispossession’ extracts surplus from outside the production process and involves ‘redistributions of surpluses already produced’ (Bin 2018: 80; see also Andreucci et al 2017: 30). This is similar to the view of rent as a ‘residual category’ (Ball 1977: 380), which on its own however is insufficient for the analysis below.…”

“…If there is something striking about neoliberalism as a regime of political economy, it is how crypto-feudal its operations, asymmetries and essential structures have turned out in practice (Harvie 2000). In a regime that seems increasingly incapable of enlarging the productive forces, the neoliberalisation of social relations appears to have rather more successfully emplaced ‘rent-seeking’ and ‘redistributive dispossession’ as idiomatic strategies of accumulation (Andreucci et al 2017: 31; Bin 2018; Harvey 2004; Hudson 2012). In this political economy, the commons of the university have become one of the ‘frontiers to capital’ (Kamola & Meyerhoff 2009: 9; see also Harvie 2000, 2006; Szadkowski 2019b), placing the academic space front and centre as a strategic site of accumulation and labour subsumption (Hall 2018; Szadkowski 2016b).…”

Dispossessing academics: The shift to ‘appropriation’ in the governing of academic life

“…That exploited surplus, both ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’, is then redeployed in fresh rounds of production, resulting in an expansion of the stock of capital. This kind of ‘expanding dispossession’ entails an ‘increase in aggregate surplus value’ and thus an enlargement of the productive forces (Bin, 2018: 80). It has been a standard argument in defence of capitalist organization that this expansion, especially when accumulated from ‘relative surplus value’ (Harvey, 2010: 163–88), benefits labourers as well as capitalists in both material and civilizational terms by virtue of the great increase in the stock of capital (value-in-motion).…”