> That is, Marx does appears to have distinguished simply between
> capitalist
> accumulation (e.g. in the mature form of wage labour) and
> previous/primitive/primary/original accumulation, which could be a
> much more
> general the result of hoarding, unequal exchange, illegal activity,
> etc, as
> much as the more striking examples of state-sanctioned violence,
> starvation,
> etc of pre/non-capitalist peoples.
I think "primitive accumulation" specifies more than this when account is taken of the role Marx, following Hegel, assigns to "internal relations" and to "passions" in historical development. These concepts are linked. The nature of the self-consciousness characteristic of a stage is the product of the internal social relations that define the stage. This makes the self-consciousness characteristic of ancient Greece different from the self-consciousness characteristic of capitalism in general and the self-consciousness associated with "primitive accumulation" different from the self-consciousness associated with mature industrial capitalism.
Thus, according to Marx, "the ancients ... denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things." This distinguishes ancient from "modern society."
"With the possibility of holding and storing up exchange-value in the shape of a particular commodity, arises also the greed for gold. Along with the extension of circulation, increases the power of money, that absolutely social form of wealth ever ready for use. 'Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into Paradise.' (Columbus in his letter from Jamaica, 1503.) Since gold does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy. [43. Just as every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money, so money, on its side, like the radical leveller that it is, does away with all distinctions. [43a. But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things. [43b. Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, [44. greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm#S3a>
43b adds a citation from Sophocles to the citation from Aristotle I quoted earlier (43a quotes Shakespeare from Timon of Athens):
'Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villanies, and to know every godless deed.' (Antigone, lines 295-301)
Similarly, the "passions" characteristic of "primitive accumulation" differ from those of mature industrial capitalism. Primitive accumulation, which Marx associates with the coming into dominance of "new passions," " was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious."
"What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-laborers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are laborers or not laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, 'to decree universal mediocrity'. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm>
In particular:
"At the historical dawn of capitalist production, — and every capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage — avarice, and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3>
This is "the barbaric form of production for the sake of production":
"Our hoarder is a martyr to exchange-value, a holy ascetic seated at the top of a metal column. He cares for wealth only in its social form, and accordingly he hides it away from society. He wants commodities in a form in which they can always circulate and he therefore withdraws them from circulation. He adores exchange-value and he consequently refrains from exchange. The liquid form of wealth and its petrification, the elixir of life and the philosophers' stone are wildly mixed together like an alchemist's apparitions. His imaginary boundless thirst for enjoyment causes him to renounce all enjoyment. Because he desires to satisfy all social requirements, he scarcely satisfies the most urgent physical wants. While clinging to wealth in its metallic corporeality the hoarder reduces it to a mere chimaera. But the accumulation of money for the sake of money is in fact the barbaric form of production for the sake of production, i.e., the development of the productive powers of social labour beyond the limits of customary requirements. The less advanced is the production of commodities, the more important is hoarding -- the first form in which exchange-value assumes an independent existence as money -- and it therefore plays an important role among ancient nations, in Asia up to now, and among contemporary agrarian nations, where exchange-value has not yet penetrated all relations of production." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ ch02_3.htm>
As capitalism develops into mature industrial capitalism, the capitalist passions change their form:
"As capitalist production, accumulation, and wealth, become developed, the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital. He has a fellow-feeling for his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for asceticism, as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser. While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, and as 'abstinence' from accumulating, the modernised capitalist is capable of looking upon accumulation as 'abstinence' from pleasure.
'Two souls, alas, do dwell with in his breast; The one is ever parting from the other.' [21] " <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3>
Ted