>Naomi Klein, a white woman well under 50, makes a big deal of it.
Yeah. What's her story anyway?
>Though it seems to me that it's a pretty longstanding feature of capitalism.
I agree. Someone asked me offlist what I meant, and here was my quick, probably not-well-formulated response:
I think my problem with the concept is that it means to indicate that capital is in a mode of permanent primitive accumulation. But this is wrong for several reasons. For one, primitive accumulation is a constant feature of capitalism, not just during periods of crisis and certainly it can't act, as Harvey makes it, as the prime description of a whole era, i.e., neoliberalism. Saying p.i. is present is almost tautolgical, and saying that it is the prime determinant implies that capitalism has stopped producing. It is the end of history. Second, AxD--that's my clever abbreviation for accumulation by dispossession; you like?--unlike, p.i., says absolutely nothing about the central "issue" of capitalism: the relationship/antagonism between capital and labor. In AxD, not only is labor a pure, almost mute victim of capital's machinations, but when it does speak it speaks as a consumer, an investor, a pensioner. Never as a laborer.
[This is also why I'm tending to agree with Heartfield that this is more of an intramural crisis than a "real" one.]
I don't doubt that AxD exists, but I don't think it can tell us very much about the current era. Which is why even though I'm kind of skeptical about their article, Caffentzis and Federici at least bring up AxD in the context of a crisis. Because, as you imply, it might exist as a good indicator.