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Concept
Primitive accumulation of capital
Summary
In Marxian economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, prior accumulation, or original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital and therefore how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process in which some workers laboured more diligently than others and gradually built up wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living wages for their labour. Karl Marx rejected this account as "childish" for its omission of the role of violence, war, enslavement, and colonialism in the historical accumulation of land and wealth. Marxist scholar David Harvey explains Marx's primitive accumulation as a process which principally "entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation".
The concept was initially referred to in various different ways, and the expression of an "accumulation" at the origin of capitalism began to appear with Adam Smith. Smith, writing The Wealth of Nations in his native English, spoke of a "previous" accumulation; Karl Marx, writing Das Kapital in German, reprised Smith's expression, by translating it to German as ursprünglich ("original, initial"); Marx's translators, in turn, rendered it into English as primitive. James Steuart, with his 1767 work, is considered by some scholars to be the greatest classical theorist of primitive accumulation.
In disinterring the origins of capital, Marx felt the need to dispel what he felt were religious myths and fairy tales about the origins of capitalism. Marx wrote:
This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past.
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