But Dennis, consider the kinds of labour reproduction systems that, in a conference we hosted earlier this year, had David Whitehouse comparing Chinese rural/urban migrancy control to that of apartheid, surely one of the most profitable modes of prim-accumulation in its hey day: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/Whitehouse%20China.pdf
So it doesn't really matter that 'national capitalisms' are 'developmental' in the semi-periphery, given that their mainly comprador elites have increasing recourse to accumulation-by-dispossession, of the sort Harvey describes. That's the whole point of the 'new' imperialism (i.e., an update of that Luxemburg - not Lenin/Bukharin/Hilferding/Hobson - understood): even the fast-growing regimes of the 1960s-70s had to turn to fire-sale privatisations and commodification-of-everything in the subsequent years, from debt crisis giveaways in the early 1980s through the E.Asian (and Russian) looting of the late 1990s, with the environment taking the biggest hits more recently, especially with a temporary (2002-present) return to higher minerals, energy and base metal prices. (As I speak there's a fabulous Socialist Register/Historical Materialism conference underway in London on the latter theme.)
If anyone wants a glance at how this looks from this angle in South Africa, our Centre for Civil Society will be putting out an edited book on primitive accumulation - "The Accumulation of Capital in Southern Africa" - with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in a few weeks, and I can send along the .pdf of the galleys. Contributors you know include Altvater, DeAngelis, Ngwane, etc... and the Review of African Political Economy (March '07) will have other articles on the theme of primitive accumulation in southern Africa, featuring Gill Hart's brilliant comparison of Luxemburg, Harold Wolpe, Stuart Hall, etc. A further volume early next year we'll be publishing at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs will highlight Perelman's analysis of SA in relation to the Olde English Game Laws plus lots of organic intellectuals' work on combatting primitive accumulation. (And I also did a recent book based on this theoretical frame, *Looting Africa*, you can order here - http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=3598 - or in the US here: http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1842778110 )
This isn't a topic you can dismiss, lads, with reference to original primitive accumulation in Das K, it's all around us.
Cheers, Patrick
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