“Primitive accumulation” is a somewhat confusing Marxist term for pre-capitalist modes of accumulation. Primitive accumulation is the accumulation, and breaking of social bonds, necessary to raise the capital to make private investments. The term points out that capitalism does not start off with a blank slate and that the accumulation of capital did not simply arise because some people worked harder, or had more talent, than others.
Capital/capitalism arose out of several pre-existing processes, such as:
None of these processes by themselves guarantee capitalism, but the people who can do this violence to create capital, can come to make a ruling class, capture the State, and instigate legislation to allow their violence to be sanctified by law.
Ideals of private and bounded property are developed to stop those who have been dispossessed from taking their property back. Wages become ways of the business owning what the wage earner produces or creates. The ecology becomes something to be plundered and dumped on until it starts to fail. The ruling class usually get a religion, or form of economics, to support all this violence as non-violent evidence of God’s will and the natural talent of the despoilers etc.
Primitive accumulation does not stop with the birth of capital, and even today wealthy people are given public lands cheap, the power to pollute and poison, companies can use the courts to deprive others of property, they bribe state operatives for powers to despoil and steal etc.
Inquiries in Australia suggest that it is standard for businesses to defraud customers, and defraud their workers of promised wages. Yet despite this, it seems rare for someone at a high level in the business to suffer for this theft; the worse that happens is that the business has to pay it back sometimes. On the other hand, theft from employers is treated quite seriously, people go to jail for that. Capitalism legitimates and encourages ongoing primitive accumulation. In the 2008 financial crisis we could frequently read about forged, or heavily misleading, contracts, and it was the customer who lost their homes, the banks were given taxpayer bailouts and sold the homes from under people.
Corporations are tools whereby the owners and controllers avoid responsibility and liability for the results of their actions, frauds and thefts. Who benefits from this system is clear.
Competition can exist, but only to the extent that it does not threaten the rulers and buyers of state power, as a whole. Businesses often collaborate to charge the maximum price and the lowest wages, as that is what the system rewards. They try and repeal any legislation which may have given workers or independents any comeback against them.
Supporters of corporate power, argue that the State should support even fewer people in their ability to challenge capitalist power, and that the state should give more power and more rewards to those with wealth, and we end up with something like we have now.
Capitalism requires a State, and will always build a State, in order to function and protect its capital and its property. There is no such thing as anarcho-capitalism, other than as an ideology which functions to hand over more of the State to the corporate sector
Tags: Disinformation, economics, free markets
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