Then you won't like Harvey on Marx on p.a. (from his 2004 Socialist Register article The New Imperialism):
A closer look at Marx's description of primitive accumulation reveals a wide range of processes. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights; suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neo-colonial and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation (particularly of land); slave trade; and usury, the national debt and ultimately the credit system. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes and there is considerable evidence (which Marx suggests and Braudel confirms) that the transition to capitalist development was vitally contingent upon the stance of the state -- broadly supportive in Britain, weakly so in France and highly negative, until very recently, in China.[i] <#_edn1> The invocation of the recent shift towards primitive accumulation in the case of China indicates that this is an on-going issue and the evidence is strong, particularly throughout East and South East Asia, that state policies and politics (consider the case of Singapore) have played a critical role in defining both the intensity and the paths of new forms of capital accumulation. The role of the 'developmental state' in recent phases of capital accumulation has therefore been the subject of intense scrutiny.[ii] <#_edn2> One only has to look back at Bismarck's Germany or Meiji Japan to recognize that this has long been the case.
All the features that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present within capitalism's historical geography. Some of them have been fine-tuned to play an even stronger role now than in the past. The credit system and finance capital have, as Lenin, Hilferding and Luxemburg all remarked, been major levers of predation, fraud and thievery. Stock promotions, ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, the promotion of levels of debt encumbrancy that reduce whole populations, even in the advanced capitalist countries, to debt peonage, to say nothing of corporate fraud, dispossession of assets (the raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses) by credit and stock manipulations -- all of these are central features of what contemporary capitalism is about. The collapse of Enron dispossessed many people of their livelihoods and their pension rights. But above all we have to look at the speculative raiding carried out by hedge funds and other major institutions of finance capital as the cutting edge of accumulation by dispossession in recent times. By creating a liquidity crisis throughout South East Asia, the hedge funds forced profitable businesses into bankruptcy. These businesses could be purchased at fire-sale prices by surplus capitals in the core countries, thus engineering what Wade and Veneroso refer to as 'the biggest peacetime transfer of assets from domestic (i.e. South East Asian) to foreign (i.e. US, Japanese and European) owners in the past fifty years anywhere in the world.'[iii] <#_edn3>
Wholly new mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession have also opened up. The emphasis upon intellectual property rights in the WTO negotiations (the so-called TRIPS agreement) points to ways in which the patenting and licensing of genetic materials, seed plasmas, and all manner of other products, can now be used against whole populations whose environmental management practices have played a crucial role in the development of those materials. Biopiracy is rampant and the pillaging of the world's stockpile of genetic resources is well under way, to the benefit of a few large multinational companies. The escalating depletion of the global environmental commons (land, air, water) and proliferating habitat degradations that preclude anything but capital-intensive modes of agricultural production have likewise resulted from the wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms. The commodification of cultural forms, histories and intellectual creativity entails wholesale dispossessions (the music industry is notorious for the appropriation and exploitation of grassroots culture and creativity). The corporatization and privatization of hitherto public assets (like universities) to say nothing of the wave of privatization of water and other public utilities that has swept the world, constitute a new wave of 'enclosing the commons'. As in the past, the power of the state is frequently used to force such processes through even against the popular will. As also happened in the past, these processes of dispossession are provoking widespread resistance and this now forms the core of what the anti-globalization movement is about.[iv] <#_edn4> The reversion to the private domain of common property rights won through past class struggles (the right to a state pension, to welfare, or to national health care) has been one of the most egregious of all policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neo-liberal orthodoxy. The Bush administration's plan to privatize social security (and make pensions subject to the vagaries of the stock market) is a clear case in point. Small wonder that much of the emphasis within the anti-globalization movement in recent times has been focussed on the theme of reclaiming the commons and attacking the joint role of the state and capital in their appropriation.
Capitalism internalizes cannibalistic as well as predatory and fraudulent practices. But it is, as Luxemburg cogently observed, 'often hard to determine, within the tangle of violence and contests of power, the stern laws of the economic process.'
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[i] <#_ednref1> K. Marx, /Capital/, Volume 1, New York: International Publishers, 1967, Part 8; F. Braudel, /Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism/, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
[ii] <#_ednref2> Wade and Veneroso, 'The Asian Crisis', p. 7 propose the following definition: 'high household savings, plus high corporate debt/equity ratios, plus bank-firm-state collaboration, plus national industrial strategy, plus investment incentives conditional on international competitiveness, equals the developmental state.' The classic study is C. Johnson, /MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-75/, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982; while the empirical impact of state policies upon relative rates of economic growth has been well-documented in M. Webber and D. Rigby, /The Golden Age Illusion: Rethinking Post-war Capitalism_,_/ New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
[iii] <#_ednref3> Wade and Veneroso, 'The Asian Crisis'.
[iv] <#_ednref4> The extent of resistance is indicated in B. Gills, ed., /Globalization and the Politics of Resistance/, New York: Palgrave, 2000; see also J. Brecher and T. Costello, /Global Village or Global Pillage? Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up/, Boston: South End Press, 1994. A crisp recent guide to the resistance is given in W. Bello, /Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy,/ London: Zed Books, 2002. The idea of globalization from below is presented most succinctly in R. Falk, /Predatory Globalization: A Critique/, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
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