On Dec 9, 2006, at 3:35 PM, bitch wrote:
> At 01:14 PM 12/9/2006, James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> 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').
>
> I'm unclear what you're saying here Jim. Which examples of
> primitive accumulation from Goldner did you object to? I didn't get
> the sense that he was talking about extraordinary theft and con
> tricks, but ordinary ones.
I'm with James on this - Marx's use of p.a. is precise and limited, and there's not much in current capitalist practice that's like it. No doubt people everywhere are seeing common property privatized, but the bulk of capitalist profits come from exploiting labor. Those get obscured by financial machinations, but finance is about distributing those profits, not creating them out of thin air, or by regularly appropriating big gobs of primitively accumulated material. I don't like the way David Harvey uses p.a. either.
I asked Loren if he thought all the money that the People's Bank of China lends the US was an example of this sort of plunder and he said yes. But they're making us loans, not sending us boatloads of stolen goods.
Doug