The Place Of War In Marxist Analyses Of Primitive Accumulation

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.13.4.0430
• Pages: 430-448
• Published date: 20 October 2022
• Date: 20 October 2022
• Author: Daniel Egan
• Subject Matter: primitive accumulation,accumulation by dispossession,imperialism

WRPE Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/wrpe/

THE PLACE OF WAR IN MARXIST ANALYSES OF

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

Daniel Egan

Daniel Egan is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He has written

numerous articles on Marxist theory and is the author of The Dialectic of Position and Maneuver:

Understanding Gramsci’s Military Metaphor (Haymarket Books, 2017). He is currently writing a book

examining how Marxism has understood the relationship between war, capitalism and revolution. Email:

Daniel_Egan@uml.edu

Abstract: It has long been understood by Marxists, including Marx himself, that

primitive accumulation was not limited to the historical origins of capitalism. Instead,

extra-economic processes of capital accumulation continue to be relevant throughout

the subsequent development of capitalism. An examination of the classic analyses of

primitive accumulation made by Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg suggests that the most

significant contemporary interpretation of the concept—David Harvey’s accumulation by

dispossession—fails to properly account for the role played by war and military power

in capital accumulation today. This is the product of both a problematic interpretation

of Marx’s and Luxemburg’s analyses of primitive accumulation as well as a problematic

interpretation of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. I argue that Marx and Luxemburg continue

to offer a more fruitful foundation from which to address this question.

Key words: primitive accumulation; accumulation by dispossession; imperialism

In the slave and feudal modes of production, the process of accumulation was

based on the ruling class’s possession of explicitly coercive political—that is,

extra-economic—power. In this context, the role of military power as a means of

accumulation was especially important. In the slave societies of classical antiq-

uity, for example, the military defeat of “barbarian” peoples was the principal way

in which enslaved labor could expand. As for feudalism, the lord’s property rights

over land and ability to extract surplus from the peasantry were based on a hierar-

chy of social relations based on the provision of military service. In both cases,

accumulation through extra-economic power was clearly visible socially, whether

it be through the legal ownership of enslaved labor or through the corveé labor and

DOI:10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.13.4.0430

THE PLACE OF WAR IN MARXIST ANALYSES OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION 431

World revieW of Political economy vol. 13 no. 4 Winter 2022

rents extracted from the peasantry (Wood 2005). It was with the emergence of the

doubly-free labor associated with the capitalist mode of production—free of any

means of production, and free to sell its labor power—that the centrality of

extra-economic coercion was replaced by the “silent compulsion of economic

relations” (Marx 1976, 899). The extraction of surplus from the proletariat by the

bourgeoisie was much harder to see, as it took place in the context of an apparently

free and equal exchange of labor power for wages. The dialectical nature of this

process, however, must be acknowledged, as it was through forms of extra-eco-

nomic coercion wielded by the state—such as military power—that this transition

was accomplished. At the same time, though, this transition does not eliminate the

significance of extra-economic power in general, and military power in particular,

in the reproduction of capitalism.

The purpose of this article is to examine how Marxists have discussed the role

played by war and military power in primitive accumulation. Doing so highlights

the essential contribution of the state to the process of capital accumulation. I first

examine the classic analyses of primitive accumulation made by Karl Marx and

Rosa Luxemburg, and then the contemporary interpretation of the concept—

accumulation by dispossession—offered by David Harvey. I argue that the way in

which Harvey incorporates war into his analysis of accumulation by dispossession

is problematic, and that the perspective of Marx and Luxemburg offers a more

fruitful foundation from which to address this question.

Marx and Luxemburg on Primitive Accumulation

In the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx

outlined the plan for his analysis of the “system of bourgeois economy in the fol-

lowing order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade,

world market” (Marx 1970, 19; italics original). Having only started but never

completed the first part of this outline, his promise of an analysis of the state was

left unfulfilled. It is here, presumably, where Marx would have had the opportu-

nity to examine in detail the role played by war in the process of capital accumula-

tion. This is not to say that the state failed to appear in his analysis of capitalism.

In Part VIII of the first volume of Capital, Marx defined primitive accumulation

as “an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but

its point of departure” (Marx 1976, 874).1 Capital, recall, was Marx’s critique of

bourgeois political economy. Marx’s pejorative reference to “so-called primitive

accumulation” reflected his disdain for the assumptions of Adam Smith and others

that capitalism’s “point of departure” was the result of the creation, as a result of

the forward-thinking exertions of soon-to-be capitalists, of a hoard of privately-

held wealth which could be invested for purposes of earning a profit.2 Capital for