We might conclude, therefore, by suggesting that the modern, philosophical concepts of history and historical time are inherently violent concepts, insofar as originary accumulation is woven into the very fabric of valorisation and hence the production of historical time. The seemingly indifferent, if not benign, character of historical time as the self-expansion of time, as the background, in Marx’s terms, in which change within and between modes of production occurs, is in fact predicated on a systematic violence – specific to capitalism – that is not only ‘immediately justified within and by the new order that it constitutes’, but is actively recreated by this order. The temporal intelligibility of the ongoing creation of new needs – the temporal intelligibility of the ongoing first historical act – is in fact predicated on a peculiar temporality of violence that not only ‘always presents itself as preaccomplished’<sup>160</sup>, but does so precisely because it is reproduced by a mode of production that presents itself as preaccomplished, that presents itself as the self-sufficient condition of its own being.
<sup>156</sup> Read, ‘Primitive Accumulation: the Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’, 38.
<sup>157</sup> Marx, Kapital 1, 779 (Capital 1, 915).
<sup>158</sup> Read, ‘Primitive Accumulation: the Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’, 38.
<sup>159</sup> Therefore, ‘capitalist accumulation is nothing other than primitive accumulation continued onto the shop floor, thus nothing other than a continuation of the modification of violence begun with “bloody legislation” and the enclosure acts.’ Ibid.
<sup>160</sup> Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 447.
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