Dear Doug,
The following is an intervention from another list, in response to certain critics who argue that primitive accumulation in Marx was a one-off development of the early modern period and no longer exists. It follows my recent message about imperialism and, I think, deepens it. If you think it's worthwhile, I'd be grateful if you'd post it on your list.
Thanks
Loren
First, on the term "primitive accumulation". It may be the case that I, for one, cast the net a bit too wide in the use of the term "primitive accumulation". So let's find another one, if necessary. We need a concept that includes all forms of non-reproduction: in addition to the classical recruitment of petty producers to the wage- labor proletariat, the free inputs capital takes from the looting of nature, and the free inputs that come from non-reproduction of labor power, of capital plant and infrastructure, where they occur. The Marxian critique of capitalism insists on explaining capitalism in terms of "exchange of equivalents" (Marx's reply to the befuddlement of Smith and Ricardo over where profit came from, once one eliminated populist ideas about swindle, selling commodities above their value, etc.) and I have used the term "primitive accumulation" to describe those phenomena (as per above) which do not NOT involve the exchange of equivalents, but rather "loot" for the system.
That said, I think a few points are in order.
Vols. I and II of Capital are of necessity a hermetic model of a world in which there are only capitalists and wage laborers (or people being drafted to become wage laborers), and mainly describes capital from the viewpoint of the single enterprise. This is fundamental both for analyzing the relationship between actual capitalism (wage workers and capitalists in Depts. I and II) on one hand and both the large (and ever-growing) wage labor force made up of unproductive consumers, from civil servants to corporate bureaucrats to the military sector, as well as the petty producers (now primarily in the Third World) where classical "separation from the means of production" continues to this day. The vol. I and II pure capitalist model "draws a circle" around capitalists and wage laborers and sets the stage for showing how that "circle" interracts with the people and nature outside it. Only at the end of vol. II does Marx introduce the fundamental concept of the TOTAL SOCIAL CAPITAL and discard the vantage point of the single enterprise.
Marx never finished the book, and as Engels says in his preface to vol. II, Marx was most dissatisfied with the concluding chapter in the section on expanded reproduction. Rosa Luxemburg took up the unresolved issues where Marx left off, as she saw them, and proposed the solution of the sale of part of the surplus product to non- capitalist buyers as completing the circuit. Further, she emphasized the centrality of the international system of loans through which part of the non-capitalist product came "free" to the capitalist world. I don't see how anyone can argue with her portraits of the looting of American farmers by finance capital, of the Egyptian cotton crop by Anglo-French banks, and of Africa and China by the British as forms of primitive accumulation providing "loot" (in the form of concrete goods) to the "core", pure system.
Luxemburg was unique, of all the theoreticians mentioned in this debate, (I have not read Bonefeld on this) in insisting on the concrete material conditions of reproduction (see her Anti-Kritik, or reply to the critics of the Accumulation of Capital) as fundamental to the understanding of how expanded reproduction is possible. I have never seen in Grossmann or Bukharin or any of her other critics any comparable insistence on the limits of the abstract reproduction schema in settling this question. Luxemburg uses the example of an entrepreneur launching a new railroad based merely on mathematical calculations of its profitability, instead of an analysis of the real conditions for its potential operation, to show the folly of an approach that relies merely on some abstract solution to the schema of vol. II.
Luxemburg's model of imperialism was, in my opinion, far more convincing than Lenin's, who took the idea of export of capital because of flagging demand in the metropolis from the Fabian Hobson. For Luxemburg the issue was not the "export of capital" as such but both the external sale of part of the surplus product PLUS the "free" element (free in the sense of non-reproduction) that came back to the core system from the outside. Luxemburg's model explains better than Lenin's why subjection to primitive accumulation short-circuits any serious development in regions open to imperialist looting, as the 20th century so amply demonstrated.
Critics of Luxemburg have focused on flaws in her model of the internal dynamic of the pure system, and seen her (as Comrade Antonio does in the letter I translated) as being concerned with "markets". (I'm glad he didn't drag out the old canard of her "underconsumptionism") I think this is a caricature, because she clearly argues that the system of international loans (not particularly voluntary, as the case of the Egyptian cotton crop shows) supplements the weak buying power of the colonial or (today) under-developed world. What is fundamental to Luxemburg, following Marx's closed (vols. I and II) and open (last section of vol. II and vol. III) models, is the exchange of non-equivalents between the core of the system and labor power resources outside it. The advanced countries sell commodities to the petty producers, and lend them money to buy such commodities, and then get an important segment of loot in the commodities which return to the center for debt repayment.
Further, to the extent it was possible in her lifetime, Luxemburg shows how capitalism solves the problems of "markets" for a time with finance (in her case, once again, international finance). She was writing long before capitalism discovered consumer credit for the working class as another temporary supplement to "underconsumption". The only sense in which Luxemburg was an "underconsumptionist" in the usual use of the term is in her demonstration of how taxation for armaments pushes workers' wages below a reproductive level.
Obviously, credit has increased a thousand times in significance since Luxemburg's time, as a way of temporarily prolonging business cycles, while changing nothing of the fundamental contradictions of the system.
So I'll try out my own theory, a modified version of Luxemburg, which I have been developing since the 1970's. What I have called permanent "primitive accumulation' (or any other appropriate term we might decide upon) is necessary to capitalism because the closed system (only capitalists and wage laborers) necessarily in the course of a cycle, because of the anarchic character of the system, develops an ever increasing gap between the total capitalist valuation of assets and their actual value in terms of their cost of reproduction in the present. A capitalist depression or crisis is a kind of retroactive "planning' where a huge shakeout re-equilibrates capitalist valuations and real reproductive value in a deflationary crash. This was obvious in the 19th century when such a crisis occurred every ten years or so (1808- 1819- 1827- 1837- 1846- 1857- 1866- 1873, etc.) It is less obvious in the period since 1914 when the state has much more actively attempted to preserve capitalist valuations against devalorization by techniques usually associated with "Keynesianism'. We are of course in 2006 in the midst of probably the biggest fictitious credit bubble in the history of capitalism.
We have to remember that capital appears to capitalists as claims on future cash flow from whatever asset, in the form of profit (stocks) interest (bonds, and the myriad new "financial products") and rent (deeds and other titles to real property). For long periods of 'normality' these pieces of paper are "valued' as a capitalization of the anticipated cash flow in an environment ultimately determined by the prevailing rate of profit, but only ultimately.
During these periods, and above all in the run-up to the crisis when the bloated paper values are far out of alignment with real reproductive values in the closed system (capitalists and wage laborers) THIS GAP IS COVERED BY LOOT, i.e. primitive accumulation in the broad sense I use it. Hence its permanence: because capitalism is an anarchic system, it necessarily generates that gap, and it must cover it by sucking in material wealth (labor power, commodities) wherever they can be found, to compliment the surplus value generated in the pure system, or cannibalize existing labor power, plant and infrastructure inside the closed system.
One can declaim all one wants about "Luxemburg's errors", but I don't see how anyone can deny how her problematic, posed in this way, is a reality.
People puzzled by my personal fascination with these forms of FICTITIOUS CAPITAL, as in international monetary questions, or the evolution of new forms of "money" created in the post-1980's world of hedge funds and new "financial products", might now better understand that I am interested in them precisely because they are fundamental to the shift of value from c and v to s (particularly where c and v are not being reproduced) as well as in sucking loot from sources outside the pure system, all to save the paper values from deflationary collapse.
The implicit final stage of this process is the self-cannibalization of the system, if and when the sources of loot outside the "closed system" are exhausted. We have not yet seen this in dramatic form in the case of the era of U.S. world hegemony. But history does provide the example of the Nazi period in Germany, when Hjalmar Schacht ran up a huge debt pyramid to finance German rearmament in the 1933-1938 period, while holding real wages at 50% of 1929 levels. The difference between Germany then and the U.S. today is that Germany had been shorn of most of its external sources of loot after 1918, and hence had to seize some new ones militarily after 1938.
Without wanting to sound apocalyptic, something similar could happen in the U.S.-centered system if and when the U.S. loses its ability to tap wealth throughout the world with dollar-denominated accumulation.
Comments, anyone?
Loren lrgoldner at yahoo.com