> None of this, by the way, has any bearing on the wholly unrelated
> category of primitive accumulation.
On the contrary, a great deal of primitive accumulation is driven by the
search for countervailing profitability once surplus value becomes
harder to realise under conditions of overaccumulation. Under such
conditions, over the past three decades or so, we have seen a great deal
more primitive accumulation of the sort Marx/Harvey listed (in my
earlier post), and hence renewed interest in studying it.
> And of course you are right to say that the real course of events will
> not be decided by books. But in that we are discussing Marx's concept
> of primitive accumulation, it seems to the point to say that it is
> being misapplied, no more meaning 'fictitious capital'
But please connect the dots, James. When a great deal more capital takes
a fictitious form (translation: paper representations of capital) and
gets bid into the stratosphere in terms of paper asset values and
expected returns and even the creation of derivatives on returns, then
there's that much more pressure coming from the holders of the paper for
capital to squeeze harder not only on workers, but also on society and
nature, in a primitive kind of way, not so?
> than it does 'finance' or 'cuckoo clocks' for that matter. And one
> might indeed say that it does not matter if you use these terms in a
> different way from Marx's meaning, but then why call it "primitive
> accumulation", a coinage quite patently meant to explicate the common
> political economy term "original accumulation"?
Because primitive it is, when capitalists have to depart from the
surplus value circuitry and steal. Harvey talks about 'accumulation by
dispossession' - no problem with that, then?
> Elsewhere you invoke Rosa Luxemburg's name in support of the theory of
> primitive accumulation. And that is right, in that she argued that
> insofar as Capital creates values greater than it consumes then it
> would need to conquer ever greater markets in which to realise this
> surplus product. But Luxemburg was wrong, as Grossmann indicates on pp
> 164-5 of the Law of Accumulation... saying that she imagined that she
> had found a gap in Marx's system and 'then constructs a theory to fill
> this so-called gap' a procedure, he says that 'shatter the underlying
> unity of the [that's Marx's theoretical] system and creates a hundred
> new problems'. I suspect that Grossmann would have endorsed Paul
> Mattick's view that Luxemburg's theory of 'noncapitalist markets' 'had
> nothing to do with Marx's theory of accumulation', and that
> furthermore 'Imperialism ... can be treated in connection with
> accumulation, without reference to the need for noncapitalist markets
> for the realisation of surplus value' (Economic Crisis and Crisis
> Theory, 1981, p 90)
Indeed, she was definitely wrong on the reproduction schema (but then
again how much weight does one put on those sketchy scraps which Engels
put in Das K out of context). Our new book goes into all the gory
details, in a tough critique by Arndt Hopfmann, who is an excellent
comrade and now the recently departed head of the Rosa Luxemburg
Stiftung's Joburg office. She may also have been incorrect here or there
on historical detail. Never mind, the thrust of her sensibility about
how capital expands under imperialist circumstances stands the test of
time better than Lenin's, doesn't it?
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