Marx's concept of primitive accumulation (and I think it is his original coinage), is like so many of his concepts, a re-working of a category of the political economy of his day, but understood as historically transient rather than naturalised.
The concept he critiqued was that of "original accumulation". Under that term a rag bag of ideas were put together to explain (or more properly to explain away) the existence of the original fund of capital, from which all subsequent accumulation starts. Marx says it is capitalism's dirty secret that the original accumulation fund is not got by 'abstinence' but by theft, enslavement and plunder. (Following the hints put forward by Rousseau, who said that property begins when one man puts a fence around some land and others recognise it [badly remembered], or from Prudhon who says 'all property is theft').
Marx of course had in mind a very definite stage in the development of capital, namely its origins, and he would be surprised to see the way that his theory has been expanded to include a whole gamut of contemporary trends in theft and other con-tricks.
But then Marx was not really interested in the extraordinary acts of theft, but the day to day exploitation that arises out of the monopoly over the means of production exercised by the capitalist class, and the expense of the working class.
Subsequently, various opportunists have tried to get a hearing for their ideas by showing up the extra-ordinary acts of theft or corruption that individual capitalists get up to from time to time. These writers are eager to discover 'super-exploitation' or hidden monopolies, or other such skull-duggery, imagining that if they heap more and more evidence of wrong-doing up at the capitalists' door that they will finally convince the world that socialism is the answer. The trouble with such an approach is that it is entirely compatible with reforming capitalism.
As the arch-tory Frank Johnson wrote about the late Trotskyist Paul Foot, in the Spectator, who urged his readers not to 'misunderstand Mr Foot's usefulness to our public life. He is a caster-down of the mighty from their places. He doubtless thinks that he thus helps undermine the bourgeois order. .... In playing upon our disapproval of wrongdoing, he is not using us bourgeois, we are using him. His exposures help strengthen the bourgeoisie by making it more respectable.' 4 April 1998
What Johnson was saying was that Foot's expose[/]s of wrong-doing only had purchase because they reasserted a moral framework, an idea of justice, that was itself a reflex of exchange on the market. Striking down super-exploitation only reinforces the correctness of ordinary exploitation, striking down primitive accumulation only emphasies the contrast with ordinary accumulation, striking down corruption only makes common-or-garden exploitation look virtuous.
LASTLY, there is one place where one can indeed say that primitive accumulation is a reality... And that is in former soviet bloc. I have had occasion recently to look at the process of creating a capitalist class where there was none previously in the ex-USSR. The process is pretty much like primitive accumulation. The way that the so-called Russian Oligarchs enriched themselves at the expense of society was pretty much plunder, without much relation to production - and of course that is what you would expect where there is no capitalism extant, but one that needs to be brought into being.
* The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Michael Perelman, 2000