> 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.
Moreover, "Marx's use of p.a. is precise and limited" because, following Hegel, his political economy treats history as an internally related set of stages in a process of "bildung" through which human subjectivity develops the capabilities required for the actualization of "freedom." This includes appropriation of Hegel's idea of the subjective motive force of this development as "passions" (itself an appropriation of Adam Smith). A particular form of these dominate subjectivity in each stage of this process (see §26 in Hegel's Philosophy of History). http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm
They are the motive force behind positive development, i.e. as Hegel puts it, they "supply the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large." Hegel has them operate through "Great Men" such as Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon; Marx has them operate through "classes" such as the capitalist class.
The particular "passions" dominant in each stage are the product of the internal social relations that define each stage. They are transformed by changes in these relations. They also change within a stage.
"Primitive accumulation" is explicitly tied by Marx to "passions" specific to the early stage of capitalist development. It is motivated by "new passions" that "spring up" within "the petty mode of production" and "annihilate" it, producing results "shared in by the community at large." These new passions are "passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious."
"What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-laborers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are laborers or not laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co- operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, ‘to decree universal mediocrity’.
"At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring- individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm#n1
He explicitly claims that the passions dominant in late capitalism differ significantly from these. For instance:
“At the historical dawn of capitalist production, - and every capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage – avarice, and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the ‘unfortunate’ capitalist. Luxury enters into capital's expenses of representation. Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life's enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the capitalist never possesses the bonâ-fide character of the open-handed feudal lord's prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his expenditure grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm
The uses of the concept to which James is objecting ignore this essential feature of Marx.
Ted