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From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion

Guilherme Leite Gonçalves State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sérgio Costa Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Abstract During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation (ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal vio- lence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accu- mulation throughout history.

Corresponding author:

Sérgio Costa, Freie Universität Berlin, Rüdesheimer Str. 54–56, Berlin 14197, Germany.

Email: [email protected]

European Journal of Social Theory 2020, Vol. 23(2) 146–164

ª The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1368431018825064

journals.sagepub.com/home/est

Keywords dependency theory, entangled accumulation, exploitation, expropriation, primitive accumulation

Various critical studies on capitalism, including the theory of regulation (Boyer and

Saillard, 2005) and of crisis (Harvey, 2005), all have a common thread: they recognize

a continuous driving process behind capitalist accumulation. During a given period,

capitalism produces the material conditions that guarantee its expansion and, conse-

quently, ensure its preservation as a mode of production in the subsequent phase of

expansion. That is, capitalism is a dynamic formation that depends on constant pressure

for growth and thus must perpetually overcome its self-imposed limitations generated

during the reproduction of capital. In a nutshell, capitalism is a machinery which is

highly sensitive to any limits to expansion – limits which, when reached, activate

processes that change its skin in order to generate a new cycle of dynamic stability,

expansion and growth (Dörre, Lessenich and Rosa, 2015: 28).

This process of continual expansion, although empirically evident, is not trivial from an

analytical point of view. Understanding its entire breadth and complexity demands recon-

structing some of the basic concepts of Marxist political economy from a global, decentring

perspective, which is precisely the aim of this article. Initially, we recover the variations and

reformulations which the concept of primitive accumulation has passed through since Marx

reflected upon it, also including contributions from the Global South, which are often

ignored in similar reconstructions. Then we discuss a less explored aspect of the Marxist

political economy, namely, the role played by regulatory instruments in constructing the

necessary conditions of capitalist accumulation. In our concluding section, the different

arguments developed crystallize around the concept of entangled accumulation.

Conceptual precursor of the notion of primitive accumulation

For Marx (1906 [1867]), primitive accumulation is treated as an original act prior to the

movement which is the central trademark of capitalism, namely, the uninterrupted circuit

in which money is transformed into capital and by means of which surplus value is

created, and vice versa. Thus, according to Marx (1906 [1867]: 507, 786), there exists a

previous accumulation that is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production.

As the premise for capitalist production is the transformation of material or immaterial

goods into value, which is only possible by means of the ‘complete separation of the

labourers from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour’, Marx

concludes that primitive accumulation is the ‘historical process of divorcing the producer

from the means of production’.

Primitive accumulation is thus an act of expropriation at two levels: in the spaces in

Europe, where industrial capitalism originally emerged, direct producers were stripped

of the means of guaranteeing their own physical and social reproduction. The immediate

consequence is the creation of a mass of workers who are ‘free’ to sell their labour.

Together with the separation of producers and means of production in Europe, capitalist

expansion was fed by the colonial expansion and concentration of merchant capital.

Gonçalves and Costa 147

For Marx (1906 [1867]: 786), both processes are part of a global process of accumula-

tion. It is also not an idylilic liberation as it is often described by the classics of political

economy, mainly Adam Smith (Boatcă 2016: 31 ff). On the contrary, it involves imperial

conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder and regulatory interventions, that is, non-

economic violence. As a result, the ownership of the means of production is monopo-

lized by a small group capable of purchasing labour that is ‘free’ on the market and thus

able to initiate the process of value creation.

Building on the concept of ‘previous accumulation’ coined by Adam Smith, Marx

(1906 [1867]: 741) refers to this process as so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ to high-

light both the violent character of accumulation and its persistence in the history of

capitalism. Throughout the development of capitalism, the exploitation of the worker

has become a ‘natural law of production’, according to which the workers are perma-

nently reproduced as workers, or sellers of their labour power, while the owners of the

means of production are lifted to the condition of appropriators of surplus value.

Although the logic of this economic law requires the simulated violence of the

fetishism, Marx (1906 [1867]: 809) argues that, in capitalist normality, ‘[d]irect force,

outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally’. Such

‘exceptionality’ is qualitative rather than quantitative. When capitalist production is

already established, Marx (1906 [1867]: 834) affirms that expropriation does not cease

but is reproduced on an ever-increasing scale, according to specific forms of concentra-

tion of capital and private property. That is, the logic of the violent, original or primitive

accumulation is repeated now as a continuous expropriation, a condition for the accu-

mulation of capital to concentrate even further.

Rosa Luxemburg (2003 [1913]) identifies this phenomenon as a determining factor in

the development of capitalism itself. She argues that only a part of the movement of

accumulation is realized in a purely economic process between capitalists and workers

where surplus value is produced. In this context, as she states, ‘peace, property and

equality prevail’, that is, ‘the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation

into appropriation of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into

exploitation and equality becomes class-rule’ (Luxemburg, 2003 [1913]: 432).

However, just a limited part of surplus value can be appropriated in this internal

circuit, that is, at the site of its production. For this reason, Luxemburg contends that

the system must always resort to a non-capitalist ‘exterior’ to appropriate the surplus

value completely. This other dimension of accumulation operates on the global stage and

cannot be scrutinized by means of social forms of dissimulation. On the contrary, in the

flow between capital and non-capitalist spaces, the methods employed do not dispense

explicit violence in the form of ‘colonial policy, an international loan system – a policy

of spheres of interest – and war’ (Luxemburg, 2003 [1913]: 432).

Using Luxemburg’s observations as a point of departure, Harvey (2004: 74 ff) argues

that accumulation based on violence is not an ‘original stage’ or a past act, but a process

which permanently repeats itself in the course of capitalist development. For this reason,

he deemed the phenomenon ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Harvey (2004: 64) argues

that ‘[o]veraccumulation within a given territorial system’ is the result of the excess of

labour, in the form of unemployment, and of capital, too, as materialized in the abun-

dance of goods that can neither be sold nor lost, as well as the destruction of productive

148 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

potentiality and the excess of capital lacking any possibilities of becoming profitable.

According to Harvey (2004: 64), this surplus can be absorbed either by employing

temporal adjustments (‘investment in long-term capital projects’), or spatial adjustments

(‘opening up of new markets, new production capacities and new resource, social and

labour possibilities’) or by combining both. When these temporal-spatial adjustments are

not possible by means of ‘expanded reproduction on a sustained basis’, Harvey (2004:

63–4) claims that accumulation resorts to other means, namely, accumulation by

dispossession.

It is thus a ‘vulture capitalism’ that recovers the predatory practices and political

violence of primitive accumulation, as described by Marx (Harvey, 2004: 72). Harvey

does not reduce accumulation by dispossession exclusively to ‘cannibalistic’, ‘fraudu-

lent’ or ‘predatory’ practices as characterized by Marx and Luxemburg (Dörre et al.,

2015: 30). Such practices may or may not manifest themselves in contemporary forms of

capitalist expansion. The decisive factor is that the accumulation of capital always

occurs via different means of state intervention. This is precisely the point of departure

for Dörre’s studies on the capitalist expropriation of space.1 His premise is that ‘capit-

alism is a self-negating market economy’ (Dörre et al., 2015: 19). Accordingly, liberal

economic thinking, based on the idea of competition and efficiency as the absence of

duress and regulation, masks both the capitalist dynamic and the political-state dimen-

sion of its very project. It is true that orthodox liberalism questions the view of the state

as a forum that determines the rules of the game and an arbiter, who ensures the

application of such rules. But it is also true that market actors operate according to

mechanisms of cooperation (as opposed to competition) and depend on predictability

and experience with elementary social stabilities in order to operate.

For this reason, Dörre argues that the thesis of a pure market economy performs

ideological functions by veiling, on the one hand, the relations of power and politics

that permeate the relations of exchange, and, on the other, strategic relationships, as in

situations of crisis: one can always blame the crisis on the errors of existing regulation

and call for waves of deregulation; movements which necessarily constitute regulation in

other terms (Dörre et al., 2015: 13 ff). In this way, political-regulatory intervention,

whether unleashed in the name of regulation or, paradoxically, in the name of deregula-

tion, is a constant in the development of capitalism.

Echoing Harvey, the model of capitalist expropriation developed by Dörre postulates

that the accumulation of capital always stumbles upon temporal-spatial barriers which

must be overcome for its continuity. He presents the idea that it is impossible to com-

pletely appropriate surplus value in the place of production, that is, there are limits to the

capacity to create demand and supply expanding economies if these remain restricted to

already commodified spaces. In this way, Dörre demonstrates that the accumulation of

capital demands new non-commodified territories for its perpetuation. These territories

can then supply new resources, raw materials and labour markets and also create new

consumption needs (Dörre et al., 2015: 27). Dörre assumes Harvey’s argument that non-

commodified spaces are not limited to non-capitalist territories and relations of produc-

tion. If they were, the process of capital expansion would be an irreversible phenomenon

which would tend to exhaust itself. Therefore, the permanent necessity of overcoming

the bounds of accumulation leads capitalism to produce non-commodified spaces which

Gonçalves and Costa 149

it subsequently expropriates. Hence, in Dörre’s words, ‘the chain of potential Landnah-

men is veritably endless’ (Dörre et al., 2015: 28).

The idea that capitalist accumulation is sustained by a continuous and permanent

creation and expropriation of non-commodified spaces finds support and empirical

inspiration in the move from Fordism to financial capitalism. Its axiom is a positive

interpretation of the post-war period spanning until the 1970s – the Trente Glorieuses –

in Western Europe, Japan and the USA. By investing in infrastructure, qualification of

the labour power, and factories and machines, Fordism created the conditions for eco-

nomic exploitation in a given space, as Harvey (2005: 147 ff) shows. These investments

could only be amortized over time, a fact which made the state the key for movements of

capital. By absorbing excess through investments in public goods in long cycles, the state

created a strategy to disarm the dispositive of overaccumulation (Dörre et al., 2015: 29).

Dörre understands state investment in the production of public goods as the formation

of an ‘exterior’ which, despite contributing to the execution of economic activities, is

initially ‘inaccessible for private accumulation’. This sets the stage for a new capitalist

takeover. In other words, as public investments (in roads, airports, the energy supply,

etc.) are amortized, they hinder the valorization of capital, thus the production of these

goods and services gradually passes into the hands of private market actors. When the

control of goods and services which were previously produced by the state falls into the

hands of private companies, new fields open up to the investment of surplus capital

which can then be converted into a means of surplus production. Yet, this is only possible

because the relations of property have changed and, consequently, the past producers of

public services (namely, state agencies) have been separated from the means of produc-

tion which, for their part, have been privatized by private companies.

Alongside privatizations, Harvey (2005: 147 ff) considers financialization to be one

of the central mechanisms of contemporary processes of accumulation by dispossession

in the context of neoliberal capitalism.2 Financialization, understood by Harvey as the

exponential increase of financial transactions from the 1980s onwards, has created new

instruments of dispossession of families and individuals, promoting a redistribution of

wealth from the bottom to the top of the social pyramid. The most evident case of this is

the real estate bubbles which occurred at the end of the 2000s in the USA and Spain.

These bubbles brought an unprecedented transfer of savings from middle- and low-

income families to financial institutions, causing these families to surrender their income

to pay off the debts they had incurred – debts which would continue even after the

financial and mortgage-related goods have been handed over to the financial system.

Something similar has been occurring with many pension funds which, after successive

losses in their financial applications, are no longer capable of guaranteeing the livelihood

of pensioners who have contributed to the respective funds their whole working lives. In

the same way, the recurring manipulation in transactions based on stock values is a

mechanism which, in the process of financialization, has ‘brought immense wealth to

a few at the expense of the many’ (Harvey, 2006: 154).

Dörre also studies financialization, treating it as a new capitalist social formation

characterized by neoliberal politics of austerity and the precarization of labour. Dörre’s

merit consists in conferring macrosociological features to the thesis advanced by Harvey.

That is, grounded in the postulate that capitalism involves the permanent expansion of

150 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

capital accumulation via the expropriation of non-commodified spaces (whether they

previously existed or were actively produced), Dörre deduces that capitalism functions

on the basis of an inside-outside dialectic, according to which the limits of its internal

capacity of accumulation demand the permanent expropriation of a non-commodified

‘exterior’ (i.e. territorial and social spaces or spheres which do not yet produce primarily

value) (Dörre et al., 2015: 28).

The main problem of Harvey’s and Dörre’s models is the risk of presenting expro-

priation or dispossession as a process operating outside of capitalism (Callinicos, 2009).

As already seen in Marx’s work, the concentration and centralization of capital itself

demand permanent violence against living labour. In this sense, expropriation cannot be

seen as a distinct dynamic, but as an integral part of capital accumulation itself. Pradella

(2014) shows that this incorporation of primitive accumulation into the development of

capitalism is related to the concentration of money worldwide. At the same time as this

process contributes to the constitution of British industry, it transforms global production

relations. If from a theoretical point of view, this means that Marx had already included

primitive accumulation in his concept of capital, from an empirical point of view, it is

possible to assume that expropriations, as well as non-free labour, perform an essential

role in the accumulation of capital on a global scale (Pradella, 2014; 2017: 155–6).

The assumption that expropriations are part of the capital accumulation is important

in understanding in depth the violence of financialization. As seen, it is the main char-

acteristic of this advanced stage of capitalism, when the accumulation baseline gives

preference to the imperatives of property, increasingly associated with the reproduction

of fictitious capital, to the detriment of direct productive revaluation. Capitalism thus

becomes essentially rentier. Under such conditions, stockowners claim the rent owed to

their property and, thereby, appropriate the increasing share of profits drawn from

production.

Simultaneously, due to the tendency of capital concentration, capitalists are increas-

ingly becoming investment groups associated with funds and trusts. Withdrawn from

productive activities, they comfortably await their gains, taking part of the surplus value

created in the economy. If these players delegated the exploitation of wage labour to

third parties, they cannot refrain from the production of the surplus that will be appro-

priated as rent. The result has been well known since the 1980s: a decrease in the share of

wages in the national income of most countries and attacks on workers’ rights.

Financialization releases capitalists from the drawbacks of productive accumulation:

extracting surplus value from the living force. At the same time, due to the consortium of

competing capitals, it needs to enlarge such extraction to remunerate such a large amount

of concentrated capital. If something is new now, it must only be the pace and scale of

expropriation.

Dispossession, expropriation and the ‘rest’ of the world

The inside-outside dialectic of capitalist accumulation, which emerges from the combi-

nation of postulates developed by Harvey and Dörre, helps explain the contemporary

dynamics of capitalism with a classical, yet refurbished lens, especially in the Northern

Hemisphere. Still, this dialectic needs to be broadened and complemented in order to

Gonçalves and Costa 151

grasp different bundles of processes and relations which have historically confronted

capitalism since the colonial period.

As we saw earlier, for Marx, the point of departure of accumulation implied the

need to supply labour power for the construction of the capitalist system by differ-

entiating between producers and means of production. In addition to this internal

capitalist expansion, Marx (2013 [1867]: 779 ff) refers to the fact that primitive

accumulation also depended on external expansion, whose driving force was colo-

nialism. In his words:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment

in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East

Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins,

signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are

the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. (Marx, 1906 [1867]: 823)

Marx understood that, parallel to the transition from feudalism to wage labour in West-

ern Europe and with the drive toward industrialization, primitive accumulation gradually

shifted from Europe to the colonies. Through colonialism, previously unimaginable

spaces opened up for expansion, along with the capitalist annexation of non-capitalist

territories which, physically, were many times greater than those first spaces of capitalist

expansion in Europe itself. Today, a fierce debate among primitive accumulation theor-

ists is taking place regarding Marx’s understanding of the role of colonialism in capit-

alism, as well as the most adequate way of interpreting the place of the colonies in the

expansion of accumulation. For some authors, colonialism can be treated as part of the

process of accumulation of capital, but not as capitalist accumulation itself, given

the fact that the aspect that is most distinctive in capitalism (namely, the extraction of

surplus value) does not take place in the context of colonialism. For other authors,

capitalist accumulation could have indeed taken place in the extraction of surplus value

in the colonies as well (Roberts, 2017).

Despite its relevance, this debate seems to miss the essential point, namely, the

indisputable interpenetration between the processes of capital accumulation (whether

we call it capitalist or not) that occurred within the scope of colonialism and the expan-

sion of industrial capitalism in Europe. As has been abundantly documented, since the

pioneering work carried out by Williams (1983 [1944]) at the latest, capital accumulated

through colonial exploitation and the slave trade financed not only the construction of

libraries, operas and other jewels of the European Enlightenment, but also the develop-

ment of inventions such as the steam engine (Blackburn, 1988). In many cases, ships

fuelled the trilateral trade in a single voyage, bringing guns and goods manufactured in

British factories to be exchanged for enslaved humans on the African coast, who were

then traded for tropical commodities sold in Europe or even processed in the same

British factories. In the same way, the one-sided trade agreements with the colonies and,

even with faltering colonial empires, as was the case of the Treaty of 1810 between

Britain and Portugal, established a global division of labour which guaranteed British

industrial accumulation by transferring capital from the colonies and weaker European

national economies to Britain.3

152 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

The inseparability of the processes of accumulation observed in the colonies and in

Western Europe was the object of a vast discussion among dependency theorists in the

1970s, particularly in the work of Frank (1978). Frank departs from the notion of super-

exploitation, developed by Marx (1906 [1867]: 654) and taken up by Marini (1967: 129

ff) to refer to the conversion of the minimum required for the worker’s subsistence into

the foundation of capital accumulation.

For Frank, superexploitation can occur both in the context of wage work and in other

relations of production, or, alternatively, in the connection between these two spheres. In

the context of wage labour, this implies the payment of a salary below what would be

required for the reproduction of the labour power. In the context of other relations of

production, as in the case of slavery or contemporary forms of bonded labour, capital

accumulation robs producers of part of workers’ necessary funds for consumption.

Ultimately, in the context of the connection between wage and non-salaried work, this

means understanding that this pillage taking place in non-capitalist production is directly

related to the necessary funds for consumption and the reproduction of the labour power

of the wage worker, thus constituting an important factor in the creation of extra surplus

value (Frank, 1978: 240 ff).

The key issue here is therefore to identify how processes of superexploitation in non-

capitalist relations contribute to the capitalist dynamic of accumulation. To do so, Frank

(1978: 241) recovers the concept of primitive accumulation, conceptualizing it as ‘accu-

mulation on the basis of production with non-capitalist relations of production’. For him,

primitive accumulation is, in fact, a non-capitalist accumulation of capital. Using this

idea as a springboard, Frank differentiates between three types of primitive accumula-

tion: (1) pre-capitalist; (2) non-capitalist contemporary with capitalist accumulation; and

(3) post-capitalist. The first corresponds to the ‘prehistoric stage of capital’ and thus

refers to the original accumulation which occurred inside or outside of Europe three or

more centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. According to Frank, this mode of

accumulation led to the accrual of a large mass of capital hoarded within pre-

capitalist relations of production, including colonialism, slavery and servitude (Frank,

1978: 242–3).

The second type of primitive accumulation is related to the idea of a permanent kind

of primitive accumulation which Frank (1978: 243 ff) calls primary accumulation,

precisely to distinguish it from pre-capitalist production and primitive accumulation.

It invariably accompanies the capitalist process of accumulation of capital, creating the

superexploitation of wage labour by linking the basis of consumption of the latter to a

non-capitalist relation of production. Finally, post-capitalist accumulation concerns the

socialist economies of the twentieth century. According to Frank (1978: 247–8), these

also enabled capitalist accumulation by transferring part of the value generated by the

labour of planned economies via the trade of goods and raw materials between socialist

and capitalist countries, thus guaranteeing profit.

Frank particularly emphasizes the role that pre-capitalist primitive accumulation and

primary accumulation have played in the formation and development of capitalist rela-

tions of production. Regarding the first, based on Marx’s affirmation (1906 [1867]: 833)

that ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery

pure and simple in the New World’, he asserts the idea that the extreme exploitation of

Gonçalves and Costa 153

non-capitalist social formations in its pre-industrial stage, which materializes in the form

of the violent pillage of the consumption funds needed for the reproduction of the

worker, is a fundamental precondition for capitalist accumulation. The degree of exhaus-

tion of the workers provoked by this superexploitation can be observed, for example, in

[t]he seven ‘useful’ years of a slave’s life in many parts of the New World, [in] the decline in

Indian [indigenous] population in Mexico from 25 million to 1.1 million (and the rise in

labour costs for mining) in little more than a century after the Conquest. (Frank, 1978: 243)

Departing from the concept of primary accumulation, Frank affirms that many of these

relations of production remain fundamental to the capitalist development of the accu-

mulation of capital. However, it is not simply a matter of acknowledging that they serve

as a basis of development. Frank (1978: 244) goes a step further by contending that

primary accumulation is a constitutive element of the process of capitalist accumulation,

given that the separation of producers in relation to the means of production have

contributed to the concentration of capital, thus producing surplus value. Here, once

again, the dimension of superexploitation plays a fundamental role as it ensures that

non-capitalist relations of production remain integrated in the development of salaried

work itself. Therefore, these persist despite ‘the process of divorcing owners from their

means of production’ (Frank, 1978: 244). How? Through the payment of wage labour

at levels lower than what is necessary for the reproduction of the labour power and for

the maintenance of an ever-available reserve army of labour (Frank, 1978: 246).

Hence, Harvey, Dörre and Frank all follow in Luxemburg’s footsteps, though each in

their own way. However, some recent contributions, such as Roberts (2017) and Pradella

(2014), have pointed towards a different semantic precursor for the concept of primitive

accumulation. They defend Marx in the face of possible insufficiencies suggested by the

tradition that takes up Luxemburg’s line of thought. For Roberts, Marx clearly identifies

expropriations as a perpetual engine of capitalist development, not just as an original

moment separating workers from the means of production. For Pradella (2014), as we

have seen, Marx describes a permanent history of violence in the global process of

accumulation. In developing research on the notion of expropriation, Fontes (2010;

2017) follows a similar line of argument by seeking in the work of Marx itself the roots

for a critique of the reformulated concept of primitive accumulation based on Luxem-

burg’s work.

Fontes argues that Luxemburg’s thesis – that capitalist development requires a non-

capitalist exterior – may be attentive to certain relevant aspects at the beginning of the

twentieth century, but it is also problematic. First, it obfuscates the understanding of the

internal dynamic of capitalist expansion itself as a process that aggravates the conditions

of its own social base (Fontes, 2017: 2205, 2208). Moreover, this difficulty is exacer-

bated by the fact that the imperialist expansion of capitalism significantly reduced the so-

called external borders of accumulation in the course of the twentieth century.

For Fontes (2017: 2201 ff), the idea of continued primitive accumulation, particularly

the way Harvey reformulates it, runs into at least three problems in the face of such

a transformation: (1) the lack of empirical plausibility on account of the creation of a

global market and the globalization of capitalism; (2) dualist reductionism between a

154 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

normalized capitalism and a predatory capitalism; and (3) the reproduction of a teleology

of modernization which, contained in the conceptual construction of an ‘exterior’,

reproduces a dichotomy between (normalized) capitalist and (primitive) non-

capitalist countries. The main problem with this thesis of externality is thus the attri-

bution of a dual character to capitalist accumulation, its result being to imbue a

different ‘quality’ to the (supposed) two forms of accumulation. On the one hand, the

broadened (more advanced) economic duress which, though subject to crises, would be

based on ‘free’ workers; on the other hand, the open and archaic violence of primitive

accumulation (Fontes, 2017: 2205).

Instead, Fontes (2017: 2202 ff) maintains that the expansion of capitalism never

occurred in the form of a fully normalized accumulation, but rather was always grounded

in speculation, pillage, fraud and blatant theft. Put another way, productive and estab-

lished accumulation under a legal form of contract between capital and labour was

always accompanied by expropriations. This overlap can be seen, for example, in the

‘brutal colonisation of Asia towards Industrial Capital in the nineteenth century, [in the

coexistence of] the so-called Welfare State “glorious years” [and] fierce dictatorships

imposed throughout the most distant parts of the planet’ etc. (Fontes, 2017: 2202).

According to Fontes (2017: 2203), fraud and theft are inherent to capitalist expansion,

but have historically been practised most frequently and openly in the colonies and post-

colonies. Both have only recently become evident to observers of the development of

capitalism in the pioneering industrial nations of the Global North, since the most

predatory forms of capitalism have now spread to these societies. As the author told her

Marxist colleagues from the Global North: ‘Welcome to real global capitalism as we, in

the Global South, have known it since the colonial expansion!’

In order to demonstrate that capitalism has never exhibited a normalized economic

form separate from explicit violence, Fontes refers to Volume III of Capital, in contrast

to the other cited authors who emphasize Chapter 24 of Volume I. She shows that Marx

already understood that, once they are generalized, capitalist relations of production are

grounded in expropriations.

However, Fontes (2010: 44) argues that these expropriations are not the outlet or

commodification of a non-capitalist exterior, but the ‘expansion of the conditions that

exasperate the availability of workers for [the usage of] capital’. Such expansion accom-

panies the scale of concentration of capital. Thus, at any given historical moment,

specific connections develop in which dominant capitalist forces intensify the means

by which disparate social situations and populations already incorporated into capitalism

in unequal relations are rendered subaltern (Fontes, 2017: 2202).

For Fontes (2010: 44 ff), these multiple expropriations can be placed into two cate-

gories: primary and secondary expropriations. The former refers to the loss of the direct

ownership of the means of production, mainly land. This is especially true in the case of

land taken from peasants in the agrarian frontiers. Secondary expropriations, on the other

hand, refer to the contemporary concentration of capital and materialize in the privatiza-

tion of the provision of goods and public services as well as in the suspension of workers’

rights. These expropriations may also concern natural resources, such as the conversion

of fresh and salt water, forests, etc. into monopolized property. Yet, for Fontes, the most

Gonçalves and Costa 155

worrisome facet of secondary expropriations is the private appropriation of life itself,

both non-human and human, by means of patents and other methods.

By stressing the expropriation of nature, Fontes revisits, albeit implicitly, discussions

developed by Marxist feminists starting in the 1970s, who see an important point of

reference in the so-called Bielefeld School. The Bielefeld School seeks to offer a theory

of repression and exploitation of the so-called ‘three colonies’ (women, nature and the

‘Third World’) in capitalist accumulation. In other words: they seek to grasp why violent

capitalist oppression is directed at these three spheres, as well as which roles reproduc-

tive work and informal subsistence production play in the development of capitalism

(Von Werkhof, Mies, and Bennholdt, 1985).

There remains one more fruitful avenue for the contemporary study of phenomena

which could easily be classified, using Fontes’s categories, as a form of secondary

expropriation: knowledge created by virtual social networks. Here, expropriation takes

place in at least two forms: the sharing economy and the expropriation of the work and

data of users.

The most striking feature of large companies such as Uber or Airbnb which exploit

the sharing economy, as an illuminating study by Fairweather (2017) illustrates, is that

the extraction of surplus value is possible without the divorce of workers from the means

of production. On the contrary, the preservation of property or at least the right to use

one’s own vehicle to transport passengers or to use real estate leased seasonally is a

necessary condition for the driver or the accommodation provider to be able to produce

surplus value for the giants Uber and Airbnb. Albeit these firms have equipped offices

and employed personnel in the form of a ‘conventional wage-labour paradigm’ (Fair-

weather, 2017: 54) and also maintain control over the software that connects the provi-

ders and users of their services, it seems obvious that the lion’s share of the surplus these

companies appropriate does not stem from their own employees, but rather from the

‘autonomous’ providers of transport and accommodation.

In the case of companies that sell the data of social network users, search engines, and

music and video portals, such as Google, Facebook and YouTube, the expropriation of

‘produsers’, as Ekman (2012) shows, occurs on various levels. The most obvious is the

expropriation, that is, the lack of payment for inherent work or any online activity of the

produsers, as these activities are monitored and transformed into conglomerates of data

about users and preferences, which are then sold to other companies or used as a

reference for the allocation of paid advertisements. One could also add all the uninter-

rupted information in the personal archives and about users’ families that are published

on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram that the companies monitor, sell or imitate.

From the perspective of accumulation, it is also relevant that companies are integrated

into virtual personal networks insofar as followers or likes represent not only the pos-

sibility for companies to communicate with potential customers in a direct and focused

way, but also because likes and followers aggregate value to the wealth of companies and

brands (Ekman, 2012).

Both the companies involved in the sharing economy, as well as those that transform

the information of their online users into commodities, have been capable of incorporat-

ing an array of activities, resources, and social relations previously situated outside the

circuit of capitalist accumulation – such as a guest room offered by a family, honeymoon

156 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

photos or a friend’s list of favourite songs – into the dynamic of surplus value production.

The commercial value that these companies have acquired in a very short period of time

– they are already among the most valuable companies of contemporary capitalism –

reinforces the plausibility of the theory of capitalist expropriation.

Violence and political-regulatory interventions in capitalist expropriations: bloody legislation and public-private partnerships

As we have just seen, the process of primitive accumulation and the ongoing expropria-

tions can only be brought to fruition by means of non-economic violence, and indeed, it

was non-economic violence that was historically exercised by the state with its expro-

priations and political-regulatory interventions. That is, it was and is due to the force and

violence of regulatory interventions that external, non-commodified spaces could and

can be incorporated into the dynamic of capitalist accumulation (Gonçalves, 2018). Of

course, this aspect is not new to the discussion about primitive accumulation and was

already widely developed in the work of Marx (1906 [1867]: 786), who emphasized the

state’s role in promoting expropriation during colonialism, when ‘the states of Europe

plundered the rest of the world, stealing means of production and labour power on a

massive scale’ (Roberts, 2017: 12). However, some dimensions of the nexus between

states and legal violence and primitive accumulation have been not yet sufficiently

explored.

Both Harvey (2005: 147) and Dörre (Dörre et al., 2015: 25), while recognizing the

pertinence of Marx’s affirmations regarding the role played by the state in primitive

accumulation, make an important caveat when it comes to understanding accumulation

by dispossession and expropriations as a constant in the process of the reproduction of

capital. These two authors believe that the regulatory interventions carried out by the

state are not necessarily marked by the character of usurpation or brutality and thus do

not, at least not integrally, reproduce the characteristics of this original process of

separation between workers and the means of production described by Marx. This in

and of itself should not come as a surprise, considering that the model of the state Marx

knew in the nineteenth century contrasts with the democratic and – in many cases –

welfare state contemporarily observed by Dörre and Harvey. In this context, Dörre

(Dörre et al., 2015: 25) believes that political violence should not only be sought in

authoritarian conditions, but in the use of a ‘politically motivated precarity’ to ‘disci-

pline’ labourers for precarious work in the new spaces of accumulation. However, one

must ask: what does this form of politically motivated precarity consist of? A combi-

nation of legislations aimed at social control and commodification and privatization.

To understand this combination within the area of Marxist political economy requires

returning to Marx himself. When laying out his analysis of primitive accumulation, Marx

creates a fairly complex picture of different and contradictory uses of state regulation. It

is not our aim to reconstruct the entire picture in the present article; for our argument,

however, what is striking is the emphasis he places on penal law. In the context of the

violent usurpation of common property in England, Marx identified two historical-legal

Gonçalves and Costa 157

phases regarding the regulation of the rights to land. The first stretches from the end of

the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, when usurpation was practised illegally and

against the legislation that was meant to restrain it. The second phase began in the

eighteenth century, the moment when this usurpation became legal and the law itself

became ‘the instrument of theft’ (Marx, 1906 [1867]: 796).

Both moments, however, were marked by those elements of penal law that Marx

called ‘bloody legislation’. These laws operated parallel to the expropriation of the

peasantry from their lands. As a result of their expulsion, they began to experience the

realm of necessity in a different way at the same time that they became completely ‘free’

to sell their labour power to the capitalist, yet they could not be automatically absorbed

by the industrial economy. On the one hand, manufacturing did not grow at a rate

comparable to the elevated number of expropriated peasants; on the other, these pea-

sants, socialized into other practices, did not fit into the newly required patterns of labour

and modes of life. There thus formed a mass of people not economically absorbed who

needed to ‘adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition’ (Marx, 1906 [1867]:

806). It is from this perspective that Marx (1906 [1867]: 808) explained the rise of

various bloody legislation in England and France directed against vagrancy and pauper-

ization, starting in the sixteenth century. In his words, ‘[t]hus were the agricultural

people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into

vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the

discipline necessary for the wage system’.

As we have seen, parallel to the internal circuit of accumulation (in Britain and

France), Marx stresses the role of colonialism as a complementary, although external,

circuit of accumulation. Accordingly, this external accumulation implies subjugation,

plunder, pillage and the enslavement of nations and non-European peoples. Therefore,

for Marx, as with the expropriation of peasants in Europe, colonization implied a high

degree of force and political intervention. Penal law, more broadly speaking, fulfilled the

role of disciplining the labour power and taking spaces and goods not yet commodified

during the process of primitive accumulation in Europe. In the processes of colonization,

although Marx himself does not explore this aspect in more detail, it is necessary to

recognize the nodal role occupied by international law, seeing as it guaranteed the

partition of the non-European world among the European colonial powers and sustained

the racial classifications that made possible the enslavement of Africans and their des-

cendants (Góngora-Mera, 2017; Knox, 2013).

In the relations between colonies and metropoles, the colonial state formed the pillars

that sustained the pillage of the colonies and slavery. The regulatory repertoire spanned

from one-sided tax regimes to the prohibition on developing activities in the colonies

which could compete with metropolitan priorities. The legislation also guaranteed mas-

ters the right of disposing over the work and body of slaves while bloody penal laws

served to reprimand flight and slave rebellions (Souza, 1999).4

In the debates of the last decades on privatization, other relevant legal instruments

have been given prominence for capitalist expropriations which are closely linked to the

role of state regulation in the current regime of financial accumulation. In its present

form, all of the actions orientated towards privatizing the market of goods and services

hitherto produced by the state were developed by means of regulatory interventions and

158 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

legal reforms. These mechanisms enabled expropriation by means of privatizations and,

at the same time, created a precarized mass of individuals by promoting ‘flexibilizations’

of labour laws (Dörre et al., 2015: 42–51). Effectively, incorporating sectors dedicated to

the production of goods that, until the 1980s, were in the hands of the state into the

dynamic of private accumulation demanded the creation of a comprehensive institutional

architecture and new regulatory instruments – with emphasis, as Harvey highlighted

(1989: 7), on public-private partnerships. For Harvey (1989: 7–8), these partnerships

remodelled the previously existing conditions of accumulation that had served as barriers

to capitalist expansion. For Harvey, if during the Fordist period the prevailing model of

stewardship was based on the transfer of resources and the direct involvement of public

actors in productive activities and investments, the macro-institutional transformations

initiated in the 1970s constructed a new economic environment which became dependent

upon the direct negotiation of the financial market and reconstruction of a physical and

social landscape that would enable competition for resources and jobs. Hence, public-

private partnerships have emerged as essential for pillage, dispossession and usurpations

that temporally and spatially readjust the necessary conditions towards the accumulation

of finance capital.5

Given that in the phenomena of expropriation observed by Marx, penal law played the

central role in ensuring the separation between producers and the means of production,

the restructuring of spaces towards accumulation now also depends on the reconfigura-

tion of other regulatory spheres. In addition to civil law and specific legislation con-

cerning public-private partnerships, the adjustment of urban law and the laws governing

the use and occupation of the ground are also relevant as they redefine conducts and uses

accepted and punishable in a given urban or rural area.

Theoretically, public-private partnerships can come into being in complete obser-

vance of standing laws, i.e. without having to generate any illicit advantages, whether

economic or of any other nature, for the parties involved in such negotiations. Never-

theless, the recurrence of corruption scandals involving public-private partnerships

forces us to acknowledge that the execution of these partnerships creates an environment

that is particularly favourable to the illicit sale of decisions, given the degree of articu-

lation between political decisions and economic advantages. Corruption, understood as

an unlawful purchase or sale of political decisions or actions by state actors, thus appears

to be part of a systematic mechanism accompanying a dynamic of expropriation carried

out in non-commodified spaces (in the case of state resources) to facilitate the expansion

of circuits producing surplus value. By way of example, when a building company bribes

a minister in order to win an overpriced contract, the former is at the same time expro-

priating the state and creating conditions to exploit surplus value in the sphere of services

sold to the state via the contract that was obtained unlawfully.

Besides the political-regulatory, one last important aspect of contemporary processes

of expropriation (which could be contemplated in a historical review and has not yet

been adequately explored in the works of Harvey and Dörre) is their linguistic-discursive

dimension, as the timely study by Backhouse (2015) shows. When studying so-called

‘green grabbing’ (grüne Landnahme), enabled by the introduction of environmental

protection legislation in the state of Pará in Brazilian Amazonia, the author shows that

the construction of the rhetorical figure of ‘degraded land’ – derived from deforestation –

Gonçalves and Costa 159

was fundamental to the transfer of land belonging to small rural producers to concerns

such as the giant mining company Vale. Accordingly, after promoting the eviction of

small landholders from areas already deforested, concerns successfully applied for sub-

sidized credits and fiscal advantages offered by the Brazilian government to companies

which transform this allegedly ‘degraded areas’ into palm oil plantations.

Conclusion: towards entangled accumulation

The different developments in the Marxist discussion about primitive accumulation and

the concept of expropriation briefly reconstructed above, inasmuch as they focus on

distinct moments and processes in capitalist expansion, can be merged into a more

comprehensive category which we call entangled accumulation. The expression was

inspired by the idea of entangled modernity, coined by Conrad and Randeria (2002) and

further developed by Therborn (2003), and its incorporation into the study of global

social inequalities under the concept of entangled inequalities.

The concept of entangled modernities expresses the fact that, despite being repre-

sented in a separate and isolated way in national historiographies, modernity has been

global from the time of its very origin, seeing as it links and entangles the different

regions of the world. In the notion of entangled inequalities, conceptually derived from

entangled modernities, at least three levels of interpenetration and interdependence of

social inequalities can be highlighted, namely: (1) social inequalities found in different

regions of the world are always interrelated; (2) inequalities observed in different his-

torical periods are, necessarily, interconnected; and (3) inequalities, expressed by means

of different systems of stratification (class, race, gender), condition each other (Jelin,

Motta and Costa, 2017).

Similarly, entangled capitalist accumulation implies interconnection and interpene-

tration not only of different regions of the world, but also of different historical periods

and even dimensions of capitalist expansion. To systematize this, though by no means

exhaustively, we identify at least five levels of interdependencies inherent to entangled

accumulation:

1. The incorporation of new non-commodified spaces into the process of accumula-

tion – as much as these spaces seem to be local – always reflects global dynamics,

characterizing what Luxemburg (2013 [1913]: 331–4) qualified as the disappear-

ance of the local. This does not imply the complete absorption of the dynamics

inside and outside of the process of accumulation observed in the local sphere

into one single global dynamic. Though related and interrelated, the multiple

scales of accumulation exhibit dynamics of disconnecting and integrating new

spaces into the accumulation process with some degree of autonomy.

2. None of the various patterns of accumulation described up to now – neither the

historical divorce of workers and means of production which Marx referred to,

nor the accumulation by dispossession described by Harvey, the financial expro-

priation described by Dörre, the superexploitation in the terms formulated by

Frank, nor the secondary expropriations or expropriation of nature and life under-

scored by Fontes – have a rigid or fixed chronology, nor are they historically

160 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

exclusive. That is, these different forms of accumulation can coexist in a single

period and in a single geographical space. One form of accumulation can also re-

emerge after having disappeared in a preceding phase.

3. Stemming from this, discrete mechanisms associated with capitalist accumula-

tion, including the mobilization of law, the state and politics, culture and corrup-

tion as well as discursive production also coexist spatially and temporally.

4. While requiring the intervention of the state, capitalist accumulation, seen from a

global perspective and not simply within a particular nation-state, tends to erase

the borders between the state and the market, and even legality and illegality.

This can be verified very clearly by looking at the systematic and recurring cases

of favouritism and corruption that accompany the public concession of services,

processes of privatization and even the formulation of laws and public policies

for the different economic sectors. Even the actions of governments in favour of

national companies in the area of foreign policy and their operation in multi-

lateral organs such as the WTO indicate the fluidity of the borders between state

and private companies with regard to capitalist accumulation.

5. In the course of the various cycles of accumulation, social categorizations rela-

tive to class, gender, ethnicity and race have been interpenetrated, so that socio-

economic hierarchies take on a form which more and more resembles that of

entangled inequalities as described above. As a result, the positions assumed by a

given person in the social structure are always a result of the interpenetration of

social hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.

As seen thus far, entangled accumulation has not just been based on the taking of pre-

existing physical settings, for this would imply its exhaustion once the geographic expan-

sion of capitalism around the entire world was completed. What we do see is rather

capitalism’s permanent capacity to produce new capitalist spaces whenever accumulation

encounters a barrier to its expansion. The production of new spaces of accumulation has in

this a concrete and specific meaning. It refers to the complete reconfiguration of the

physical, legal and social characteristics of the already occupied setting, according to

variations in the types of technology, capital and labour power employed there. It is here

that previous relations, forms and patterns of production, consumption, regulation, culture

and life are modified. We hope that the present reconstruction and expansion of the

discussions on primitive accumulation, which also integrate experiences and debates that

occurred outside the Global North, contribute to encourage new theoretical and empirical

studies interested in understanding past and contemporary dynamics of capital accumula-

tion from a truly global and interdependent perspective.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/

or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

Gonçalves and Costa 161

Notes

1. The German term Landnahme literally means ‘land grabbing’. However, as applied by Dörre,

this notion takes on a broader meaning: It is the invasion, seizure and occupation of a space or

social sphere for the exploitation of all its commodification potential. It is a macrosociological

concept, that not only refers to the appropriation of a geographical territory, but also the

incorporation of social relations with the aim of integrating them into capitalist accumulation.

Although Dörre keeps the German term also in translations into English (Dörre et al., 2015: 4),

we assume that the expression ‘capitalist expropriation’ refers to the same macrosociological

processes that the concept Landnahme encompasses.

2. For an overview of the broad debate on financialization and capital accumulation, see among

others, Chesnais (2016) and Lavinas (2017).

3. The 1810 Strangford Treaty, ratified at a moment when Portugal was being thrashed by the

Napoleonic Wars, guaranteed unprecedented and unilateral advantages for British products to

enter Portuguese territories. Virtually, a market reserve was created for British industrial

products bought with revenues obtained from the sale of slaves and commodities produced

by slaves in the colonies (Caldeira, 2011: 186).

4. The role of the state in colonial exploitation was not limited to regulation. It also was the co-

founder and financer of the colonial enterprise, as Roberts (2017: 12) argues: ‘Colonial expedi-

tions and commercial wars were financed by the selling of public bonds.’

5. Originating in the objective to transform the landscape by orientating it towards the market,

public-private partnerships became the means to the instrumentalization of space within finan-

cialized capitalist accumulation, as has recently been observed in the provision of infrastructure

for mega-events such as Olympic Games and World Cups (Branski et al., 2013).

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Gonçalves and Costa 163

Author biographies

Guilherme Leite Gonçalves is professor of Sociology of Law at the Rio de Janeiro State Uni-

versity (UERJ) and researcher at the Brazilian Council of Research and Development (CNPq). He

is interested in social theory, particularly in issues of law, social control and inequalities. Among

his recent publications are “Capitalist Landnahme. A New Marxist Approach to Law”, Global

Dialogue 8, 2018; “Functional differentiation as ideology of the (neo)colonial society”, Thesis

Eleven 143(1), 2017; “The Global Constitutionalization of Human Rights: Overcoming Contem-

porary Injustices or Juridifying Old Asymmetries?”, Current Sociology 64(2), 2016.

Sérgio Costa is Trained in economics and sociology in Brazil and Germany, Sérgio Costa is a

professor of sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is speaker of Mecila: Maria

Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America and the editor of the series: Global

Entangled Inequalities (Routledge). His areas of interest are social theory, postcolonial socio-

logies, inequality research, conviviality and difference. His publications include four monographs,

about 100 articles and book chapters as well as 13 edited volumes - the most recent is Global

Entangled Inequalities. Conceptual Debates and Evidence from Latin America, Routledge, 2017,

co-edited with Elizabeth Jelin and Renata Motta.

164 European Journal of Social Theory 23(2)

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