{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","uuid":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","normalized_title":"marxandtheconceptofhistoricaltime","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":216,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Marx%20and%20the%20Concept%20of%20Historical%20Time","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/search"},"page":{"printed_page":173,"pdf_page":177,"physical_index":177,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e340157b627e7d7f058c00b32236654cab2f340f92f83117167449676eaedec1"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Yet there is undeniably something – something quite significant – which is lost by this reading of originary accumulation. What is lost (and this is increasingly a point of emphasis, if not consensus, in the secondary literature) are the various dimensions of the continuous, in fact the permanent, character of originary accumulation within capitalism, such that originary accumulation is a necessarily ongoing feature of the capitalist mode of production. And this is not – or at least not primarily – an empirical point, which is to say a point about the ongoing introduction and expansion of capital into parts of the world (China being the contemporary exemplar) previously outside, if only ever relatively, the reach of capital. Although important, this point merely reproduces the conception that ‘originary accumulation’ is a chronologically distinct span of historical time, and thus a ‘one-off act’ (no matter when, where, nor how long this act lasts, and despite the fact that it contains innumerable singular acts within itself). The point, rather, is one which must be understood at the level of ‘capital in general’ or ‘universal capital’ (which, to be sure, dialectically manifests itself through singular capitals): this is the sense in which originary accumulation stands in an ontologically, and thus logically, necessary relationship to capitalist accumulation (‘proper’<sup>126</sup>), such that originary accumulation marks an essential and constantly reproduced foundation of the systematic dialectic (and thus, as we will soon consider, the historical dialectic) expressed by Marx’s concept of ‘capital’. The crux of the issue here, as earlier alluded to, is the separation (between the producer and the means of production, and between the wage-labourer and the capitalist) without which there can be no commodification of labour-power, and thus no production-process of capital. There are a number of passages across Marx’s work that reveal the sense in which capitalist accumulation ontologically and logically relies on originary accumulation.<sup>127</sup> In the third volume of Capital, as part and parcel of his analysis of the centralisation of capital, whereby big capital ‘swallows up’ – it ‘decapitalises’ – small capital, Marx contends that ‘this is simply the separation of the conditions of labour from the producers raised to a higher power.’<sup>128</sup> In the third volume of the Theories of Surplus-Value (the 1861-63 Manuscripts), he depicts capitalist accumulation – the ‘accumulation of capital on the basis of capital itself’ – as ‘[reproducing] the separation and the independent existence of objective wealth [gegenständlichen Reichtums] as against labour on an ever expanding scale’, such that capitalist accumulation ‘merely presents as a continuous process what in originary accumulation appears as a distinct historical process. 129 And finally, in the Grundrisse, he suggests that ‘once this separation is given, the productionprocess can only produce it anew, reproduce it, and reproduce it on an expanded scale.’<sup>130</sup> These passages trigger De Angelis’s statement that ‘the difference between accumulation and primitive accumulation, not being a substantive one, is a difference in the conditions and forms in which this separation is implemented.’<sup>131</sup> This argument has its limits – unlike originary accumulation, the substance of capitalist accumulation is far more complex, determined by a series of relations and dynamics irreducible to the separation of the means of production from the producers – but it is, nevertheless, a provocative way of framing the relationship between originary and capitalist accumulation. On one (albeit a restricted) level, we might assert that the only difference between these two accumulations is the social conditions and forms under which separation is enforced (be it a gun, for instance, or a handshake).\n\n<sup>122</sup> Marx’s analysis of the credit-system, the modern system of taxation, and the political economic function of debt is notable: ‘the national debt, i.e. the alienation [Veräußerung] of the state – whether that state is despotic, constitutional or republican – marked the capitalist era with its stamp. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is – the national debt.’ Marx, Capital 1, 919. If there is a ‘subject’ of originary accumulation, it is the state, not capital. To my knowledge, there is to date no work that looks at the capital-state relation from the standpoint of the relation between capitalist and originary accumulation.\n\n<sup>123</sup> ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extermination, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which signify the dawn of capitalist production. These idyllic processes are the chief moments of originary accumulation.’ Marx, Kapital 1, 779 (Capital 1, 915).\n\n<sup>124</sup> De Angelis, ‘Marx and primitive accumulation: The continuous character of capital’s “enclosures”’, 2-4. The standard conception of originary accumulation still exercises a fair amount of influence. For instance, in his recent review of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981) (translated in 2014 as ‘History and Obstinacy’), Stewart Martin questions Negt and Kluge’s declaration that ‘primitive accumulation not only stands at the beginning of modern human development, but also permanently renews itself in every moment.’ See Stewart Martin, ‘Political economy of life: Negt and Kluge’s History and Obstinacy’, Radical Philosophy 190 (March/April 2015), 33. <sup>125</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 873.\n\n173","previous_page":172,"next_page":174}