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Tamar Diana Wilson Review of Radical Political Economics 2012 44: 201 originally published online 4 October 2011 DOI: 10.1177/0486613411423896 The online version of this article can be found at: http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/44/2/201

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RRPXXX10.1177/0486613411423896WilsonRe

Primitive Accumulation and the Labor Subsidies to Capitalism

Tamar Diana Wilson1

Review of Radical Political Economics 44(2) 201212 2012 Union for Radical Political Economics Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0486613411423896 http://rrp.sagepub.com

Abstract It is argued in this paper, following the insights of Rosa Luxemburg and others, that primitive accumulation is a constant and ongoing process integral to capital accumulation. Concentrating on workers who are raised and sustained in times of unemployment by subsistence agriculture or informal income-generating activities by self or family members, often women, it is seen how their labor is commodified.The recurrent migration of parts of this global reserve army of labor, whether internally or transnationally, provides a variety of subsidies to capitalist enterprise. JEL classification: J16, J61, D13 Keywords primitive accumulation, capitalist accumulation, labor migration, recurrent migration, labor subsidy to capitalism

1. Introduction
Primitive accumulation, as opposed to capitalist accumulation, was for Marx (1979: 713) value gleaned from outside of the capitalist sphere of production, and the original precondition for investment in the capitalist sphere of production. Capitalist accumulation, on the other hand, was based on extracting surplus labor, and thus profit, from the labor force employed by capitalist enterprise. The first form of primitive accumulation is that generated by divorcing peasants and other laborers from their means of production so that they have to become wage laborers for the capitalist system. The process . . . that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production, a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the
1

University of Missouri, St. Louis

Date received: April 13, 2010 Date accepted: June 15, 2010 Corresponding Author: Tamar Diana Wilson, Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, St. Louis Email: tamardiana@yahoo.com

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pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding to it. (Marx 1979: 714-15) Primitive accumulation was thus a two-fold process: first, the progressive disintegration of pre-capitalist modes of production, and second, the tapping of a workforce bred and raised to working age in a non-capitalist social formation. The latter constituted the looting of the labor force from previous modes of production. Primitive accumulation was the means whereby labor was converted into a commodity, to be bought and used by capitalist entrepreneurs. The second form of primitive accumulation involved the plunder of land and raw materials as well as the dispossession and sometimes enslavement of people through colonization and capture: The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the 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 1974: 751) In both forms of primitive accumulationexpropriation and exploitation of laborers at home or abroadthe acquisition of a labor force was (and is) central. The first form can be seen as a form of internal colonialism, whereby a countrys internal labor force, most usually tied to the land or employed in the informal sector, is tapped for labor in capitalist enterprise. However, as I will argue, sincein the specific case of Mexican recurrent migrantsthey intermittently return to the subsistence economy, primitive accumulation is ongoing. The second form consists of processes related to a pre-imperialist stage, imperialism proper being marked by the export of capital. In the present, processes of globalization unhinge laborers from the land and from petty industry, converting them into a pool of labor that can be tapped for capital accumulation. It is argued here that primitive accumulation is an ongoing process in tandem with the continual differentiation of the peasantry (due to crop failure, etc.) into small capitalist farmers and proletarians and with the refunctionalizationor constant recreationof the peasantry through the agency of semi-proletarianization as well as under state policies such as the granting of ejido rights after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17 (Bartra 1993). The differentiation of the peasantry leads to full proletarianization of a large part of rural populations: they are divorced from the mode of production and appear as free workers in the labor market. But primitive accumulation can swing back and forth, as those with a foot on the land and a foot in the wage labor market (the semi-proletarians) supply their labor power at lower cost to the capitalist system than the full proletarians receiving a social benefit package. It is important to point out that Roger Bartra (1993) was perhaps the first to identify a permanent primitive accumulation as occurring in Mexico. He conceives this as follows: A first concept useful in the analysis of the totality of the agrarian sector [in Mexico] is that of permanent primitive accumulation, which denotes the way in which capital is surrounded by noncapitalist modes and forms of production under such conditions of dependency on imperialism that the monopoly sector of the economy becomes a fundamental factor. This is a question, not of true primitive accumulation, but of a situation in which the monopoly sector controls and generates the relation of accumulation with noncapitalist modes of production. (Bartra 1993: 29, italics in original) The theory advanced in this article differs from Bartras conception in a number of ways. First, I hold that the historic recreation of the peasantry through state policies and subsidies since the

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1910 revolution has enabled a constant primitive accumulation through its enabling the exploitation of the labor power that is produced and partially reproduced in the noncapitalist agricultural or informal economy. Second, Bartra refers to monopoly capitalism within Mexico, whereas I feel the concept by nodes of capitalist accumulation (whether within the nation or across borders) advanced by Robinson (2008) is more valuable. Third, although Bartra (1993: 141) sees entrance into the informal economy and bracerismo (i.e., the temporary migration of laborers to the United States) as necessary for the employment of the surplus de-peasantized population, he does not theorize the exploitation of semi-proletarianized peasants and peasants in the process of proletarianization as central to capitalist accumulation both in Mexico and the United States. In a similar vein, unlike Luxemburg (2004), Bartra does not see how the capitalist system is not only surrounded by but dependent upon precapitalist sectors for its continued growth. Finally, Bartra (1993: 166) views the refunctionalization of small noncapitalist units through such devices as the ejido program which recreated the minifundista, or small-propertied peasant-farmer, as due to the inability of the Mexican economy to employ a dispossessed peasantry, i.e. that it was in answer to a problem of a surplus population that exceeds its functions as a reserve army of labor. In essence this rests on the idea of overpopulation, and ignores the value of this reserve for capital accumulation, especially in times of expansion. It also ignores the fact that the informal economy, to which many of the depeasantized recuramong its other supportative functions for capitalprovides important products and services which become absorbed by formal capitalist firms (e.g., Davies 1979; Portes and Walton 1981; Wilson 2005). William I. Robinson (2008: 7, 169, et passim), who sees capitalist accumulation as dependent on pre-capitalist social relations, argues that under the relatively new epochal shift to globalization, the peasantry is dying a slow but agonizing death and being forced to migrate internally or transnationally to nodes of capitalist accumulation. He points out that it is not only peasants and artisans who have become part of the global labor reserve, but also the old middle class, once subsidized by government run programs, but now leveled downward by the structural adjustment policies of neoliberal states (Robinson 2008: 186-88). Notably, in Mexico many of the members of this old middle class belong to declining sectors of the economy or have been replaced by new elites who can survive in the face of cutbacks in social welfare programs. Robinson (2008: 186) sees this removal of traditional subsidies (and this is as applicable to the peasantry as to the old middle class) as a form of primitive accumulation that results in the commodification of formerly public spheres by states. Despite the slow death of the peasantry, he underscores that millions still survive. Robinson argues, as I do here, and as did Luxemburg (see below), that primitive accumulation is constant and ongoing and a necessary part of capitalist accumulation. Samir Amin (1974a: 382-83) also argued that primitive accumulation was a constant and ongoing process, with benefits going to dominating foreign capital while restricting accumulation by local, peripheral capital. Yet he held that this primitive accumulation was occurring primarily though unequal exchange whereby manufactured products from the center commanded higher prices than raw materials and exotic foodstuffs produced by the periphery. Thus value is systematically transferred from periphery to center. While Amin saw this transfer as due to market dynamics, it could be argued that differences in prices were due to the differential wages paid in center and periphery. As an explanation for these differential wages, Quijano (1983: 118-19), looking at the case of Peru prior to 1930, argues: The value of labor as a commodity is measured by the value of the products the worker uses to reproduce his labor power. In the countries which were the centers of monopoly accumulation, such products come from industry or capitalist agriculture and livestock production, and for this reason more value was incorporated into commodity labor. In Peru, on the other hand, the limited significance of internal industrial production consumed by the workers in the enclaves and the high prices of imported goods which restricted their access to these

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products meant that the reproduction of labor was based on production originating in the precapitalist part of the economy. Therefore, less value was incorporated into labor power in relation to that of the central countries. As will be seen later on, this lesser value is related to the phenomenon of social disarticulation (de Janvry 1987). Notably, Amin (1974a: 530) did not see the primitive accumulation resting on unequal exchange as necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist system nor the sale of consumer or producer goods in the periphery as central to its expansion and development: Exchange between developed and underdeveloped countries in no way constitutes the solution to overproduction by the capitalist countries. Development of the capitalist countries is perfectly possible even when there are no precapitalist societies to be disintegrated. Nor is the extension of the capitalist mode of production from center to periphery a necessary component of core capitalist development; however, Although the extension of the capitalist mode of production to the periphery is not essential to the working of the mechanism of [capitalist] accumulation, this extension plays the role of a catalyst and accelerator of growth in the center (Amin 1974a: 531). By rejecting the proposal that capitalist expansion and constant primitive accumulation are central to the development of core capitalism, Amin (1974a: 488) was arguing against Rosa Luxemburgs theoretical approach (as outlined in her The Accumulation of Capital, first published in German in 1913). Luxemburg (2004) pointed out that the capitalist system required linkages with pre-capitalist socio-economic organizations for its expansion, and assumed that its survival depended on such expansion; she thus viewed linkages with the pre-capitalist economies as integral for the functioning of the capitalist system. Luxemburg identified three such linkages: members of pre-capitalist social organizations were consumers of capitalist products, providers of raw materials for capitalist industry, and reservoirs of labor. It was especially in the colonies, Luxemburg (2004: 343) held, that capitalist production cannot manage without labour power from other social organizations. Her argument could be extended to say that, in terms of labor, the capitalist system requires an on-going process of primitive accumulation (in Marxs sense) for its expansion and survival, and that this primitive accumulation partially rests on the mobilization of the reserve army of labor wherever it is found in the world.

2. The Labor Subsidy to Capitalism

This type of primitive accumulationbased on the expropriation of labor from pre-capitalist formations, or as I will argue later, even from peripheral capitalist formations, can best be seen as a labor subsidy to core capitalist concerns, or as Robinson would have it, to nodes of capitalist accumulation. The greatest labor subsidy, whether internal to developing countries, or international between periphery (and its hinterlands) and core, comes when processes of production are separated from the processes of reproduction and maintenance, i.e. when they take place in different social formations. That means essentially that the laborer is employed in an economy differing from the one in which he was raised and to which he returns in times of illness, unemployment, or retirement. By subsidy I mean an economic provisioning that comes from outside the dominant capitalist system but becomes integral and necessary to the functioning and expansion of that system. Laborers who partially supported and support themselves in both the informal economy and in sub-subsistence, subsistence, and even the petty capitalist farming economy embody this economic provisioning to capitalist agro-, manufacturing, construction, and service industries, whether within Mexico or across its northern border. In other words, their bodies encase the labor power that will be exploited by dominant capitalist enterprises. Because they are partially

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supported in the non-capitalist economy (whether agricultural or informal sectors) within which no social wage is received, the surplus labor power they provide to capital is greater than among those who are fully proletarianized. Although not identifying the labor subsidy from non-capitalist formations as an instance of primitive accumulation, de Janvry (1981) explores the dynamics of social disarticulation common in Latin America and the Third World in general. Challenging the view that pre-capitalist social formations were important in consumption of capitalist products, he argues that the following is typical of disarticulated economies: Of the two motives for proletarianization of labor that exist in articulated economies, the first (reducing labor costs), but not the second (creating a home market out of rising wages), applies to disarticulated economies. As a result, labor costs can be further reduced by perpetuating the subsistence economy that partially assumes the cost of maintaining and reproducing the labor force. Functional dualism between modern and traditional sectors thus makes it possible to sustain a level of wage below the cost of maintenance and reproduction of the labor forcea cost that would determine the minimum wage for a fully proletarianized labor force. (de Janvry 1981: 36-37, italics in original) Just as Mexico, for example, shows social disarticulation internally, so too is there social disarticulation between the functions of the labor force from Mexico in the United States. In the United States Mexican labor is seen simply as a commodity to be exploited, and its consumer function is ignored. Speaking of the commodity identity of Mexican workers in the United States, Vlez-Ibaez (1996: 7) notes that: In a capitalistic economic system, things such as labor, materials, and processes can be bought and sold for a price, and conditions are created in which some populations may be regarded primarily as a type of price-associated group to be used and discarded not unlike disposable materials or any used manufactured goods. According to Mitchell (1996: 60), looking at the role of California farmworkers: Agricultural labor power in California was quintessentially a commodity. Who embodied it was always less important than the fact that it materialized at appropriate places and appropriate times, and at the appropriate price, to make sure the crops were harvested. Thus labor power partially supported in subsistence economies is commoditized both internally and internationally. Primitive accumulation does not occur once and for all, but is an ongoing process in this case. Meillassoux (2001 [1975]), examining intermittent migration from self-provisioning agricultural communities in Africa to centers of capitalist enterprise on that continent, was among the first to argue that such a pattern involved a divorce between processes of production and processes of reproduction/maintenance. Endorsing Marxs insight that the value of labor power is determined by the labor time necessary for the reproduction of the worker and his children, Meillassoux (2001: 100) argues that there are three elements making up the value of labor power: sustenance of the workers during periods of employment (i.e. reconstitution of immediate labour-power); maintenance during periods of unemployment (due to stoppages, ill-health, etc.); replacement by breeding of offspring (I in O). However, for the seasonal or temporary migrant worker, these costs are borne by employers only during the period of employment, whereas

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reproduction and maintenance occurs outside of the sphere of capitalist production, and in the bosom of the family (Meillassoux 2001: 101-2). For those workers who return to the precapitalist (or peripheral capitalist) economy when they are not employedfor any personal or structural reasoncapital pays no indirect wage, i.e. fringe benefits such as social security or unemployment compensation, as it does for its fully proletarianized native work force (Meillassoux 2001: 102-3). The migrant from another mode of production (or from a peripheral capitalist economy) earns only a direct wage, while he is working, and is the beneficiary of no social wage to aid him in times of unemployment. During such times he returns to the economy that bred and raised him and also maintains him when he is not a wage laborer for core capitalist enterprises. It must be pointed out, however, that with foreign investment, core capitalist enterprises such as the maquiladoras in Mexico, and domestic capitalist enterprises such as mining and export agriculture, may form pockets of capitalist endeavor in the peripheral capitalist economy. In the case of subsistence farmers who become recurrently or intermittently proletarianzed (and have thus been labeled semi-proletarians), capitalist sectors receive a labor subsidy resting on the fact that it claims no responsibility for the laborer or his family during his periods of unemployment. Unemployment usually means return to the endeavors that have often been maintained by family members, whether working in agriculture or the informal sector. With the differentiation of the peasantry into landless and petty capitalist farmers, there has been an erosion of subsistence farming toward the end of the last century. Nonetheless, the worker returns to the peripheral capitalist economy where his maintenance becomes the responsibility of himself alone, his family, or his social network. In another work, Meillassoux (1980: 198) shows the dependence of the intermittent proletarian from agricultural self-sustaining communities on those communities and kin: [E]conomic investigation shows clearly that, once people are compelled to undertake wage-earning activities in order to pay taxes and gain some cash, if the capitalist system does not provide adequately for old-age pensions, sick-leave and unemployment compensations, they have to rely on another comprehensive socio-economic organisation to fulfill these vital needs. Consequently, preservation of the relations with the village and familial community is an absolute requirement for wage-earners, and so is the maintenance of the traditional mode of production as the only one capable of ensuring survival. Survival may no longer hinge on subsistence agriculture, engaged in by the worker when not employed, and his family year round, but may be extended to informal sector employment in the country of origin by the worker or his family members, or even formal-sector employment by the kin he relies upon. In all cases, he is dependent for his survival on other than continuing employment in a core capitalist enterprise. Like Meillassoux, de Janvry (1987: 396) explores the dynamic of intermittent internal migration into wage-labor, but focuses on Latin American economies such as that of Mexico: Peasants with insufficient land resources to absorb family labor productivity typically rely on survival strategies that lead them to engage in a variety of activities outside of the home plotparticularly wage labour. These semi-proletarianized peasants are, thus, able to cover part of the cost of maintenance and reproduction outside of the wage economy. Wages paid can fall below this cost and employers benefit from a subsidy that originates in unpaid household labour applied to the peasant plot. Besides the peasant subsistence economy, de Janvry (1981: 84) includes the informal sector as an economy providing subsistence to workers temporarily unemployed in the formal (or as he

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designates it, modern) sector, pointing out that the informal sector and the peasant economy are important sources of subsidies for the modern capitalist sector (see also Veltmeyer 1983). What is true for internal migration is also true for international migration. Burawoy (1975), comparing the system of migrant labor in apartheid South Africa and Mexican immigration to the United States, found that in both cases capitalist employers benefit from migrant labor because part of the costs of maintenance of the labor force is borne by the subsistence economy in regions where standards of living are lower. Analyzing the earlier system of South African migratory labor, Burawoy (1975: 1,058; see also Amin 1974b: 109-10) claims that wages were calculated on the basis of the workers ultimate dependence on the subsistence economy. Although noting that the exploitation of Mexican immigrant labor in the United States had not been so total an institution as in the South African casebecause of the greater role of the state in recruitment in South Africa (though during World War II this was also true in the Mexican case)Burawoy (1975: 1,066) nevertheless made the point that the systems were similar in that both externalized the costs of renewal and maintained workers only while they were employed (see also Wilson 1999, 2000, 2006). As concerns Mexican migration to the United States, which until relatively recently proceeded overwhelmingly from rural communities, Cornelius (1989: 2) underscores that: the source communities function mainly as nurseries, rest-and-recreation centers for migrants temporarily worn out by their labors in the United States, and nursing homes for retired migrant workers and their spouses who did not opt to settle permanently in the United States. In this case, Mexican workers in the United States may often have been a more permanent or semi-permanent labor force, rather than a seasonal or intermittent one. In this they resemble the 19th century Chinese immigrants to the United States. This also became true of the Irish migrants in Britain from the 19th century to the present. In any case, in such source communities new generations of workers destined for the fields, factories, railroads, mines, and construction projects are raised. Much the same can be held for the rural Irish who, though the land systems they sprung from were different, labored in the same capacities in England and Scotland from the 18th century onward. The labor force associated with an ongoing primitive accumulation can be envisioned as providing a subsidy to capitalist enterprise, whether this enterprise is located within the boundaries of the nation of their birth, or in core capitalist countries to which they migrate. This labor subsidy exists whether workers drawn from pre-capitalist or peripheral capitalist social organizations are seasonal, temporary, or permanent. Migration scholars have underscored this subsidy both in Western Europe and in the United States. Castles and Kosack (1985 [1973]: 409), looking at migration from poor countries to Europe both under guest-worker programs and after these were discontinued, argue that the country of origin is transferring a valuable economic resource in the form of human labor to the countries of destination. Concerning the costs to the origin country of a migrant, Castles and Kosack (1985: 409) sustain that: Most workers migrate around the age of twenty, just when they reach the peak of their working capacity. The costs we are concerned with are those of feeding, clothing, and housing a person and providing health and educational and other services, until he reaches working age. Some of the costs are borne by the parents, others (depending on what social services exist) by the community. Whatever the proportions borne by parents and community, the cost of raising a child is a charge on the countrys national income. They point out that these migrants contribute to production and capital accumulation in their countries of destination while at the same time constituting a flexible labor force that can be recruited and discarded at will, with no cost to the receiving country (Castles and Kosack 1985: 410).

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Concerning Mexican migration to the United States, Gmez-Quiones (1981: 17) also maintains that, Immigrant labor represented a direct subsidy from Mexico to the United States. He estimates that (prior to 1980 when costs were lower than at present), Each worker cost the Mexican economy $40,000 to produce, a savings for the U.S. economy (Gmez-Quiones 1981: 17).1 Notably, overall wages are lower for those who venture into the broader capitalist system from the subsistence economy or from peripheral social formations for at least two reasons. First, for those who tend to work only seasonally (as in agri-business) or temporarily (as in construction or flexible manufacturing), their annual earnings are lower than those of the fully proletarianized employed in relatively stable jobs. Second, even if not purposefully temporary or seasonal workers, because they have historically (and contemporaneously) tended to be employed in flexibilized, lowwaged, unstable, and dead-end jobs in what was once called the secondary sector of the economy (e.g. Piore 1979), or within what has been characterized as a balkanized, segmented labor market (Gordon et al. 1982).

3.The Contribution of Family Members to the Labor Subsidy

Immigrants from poorer countries, whether extended visas as guest-workers or crossing borders without documents, tend to fill low-waged jobs that remain low-waged because of a potentially immigrating reserve army of labor. These low wages are accepted not only because the immigrants are accustomed to a lower standard of living at home, but also because the wages earned under capitalist relations of production do not represent all the resources at their disposal. If they do not have a foot on the land, to which they recurrently return to sow and harvest or let out for sharecropping, they still have a social network at home that they can turn to in times of unemployment. A portion of the resources of this social network, marked by generalized and reciprocal exchange, is found in the work of wives and children in the country of origin (and sometimes in the country of destination, when wives and children join their husbands across borders). Whereas a male labor force emanating from pre-capitalist or peripheral capitalist formations and employed by capitalist enterprise provides a labor subsidy to such enterprise, womens and childrens labor may provide resources that aid in the reproduction of the family and maintain their menfolk in times of disability, unemployment, or old age. Where migration across borders or into local capitalist enterprise (e.g., mining, export-oriented agri-business) is primarily male, women are left behind to make do until remittancesoften intermittent or inadequatearrive. Often they are central, along with their children, in maintaining the subsistence economy to which the worker returns. The gendered nature of the subsidy provided by the subsistence economy, whether involving agricultural production or livestock raising, has been documented for Latin America (e.g., Deere 1976; Hecht 1985). It is wives as well as children left behind who contribute to the maintenance of the family household or farm, assuring day-to-day reproduction of themselves and their underaged or over-aged dependents, and providing a home-base for their recurrently migrating husbands and sons (de Janvry 1981: 88-90). Wives and daughters of landless men who migrate may seek wage work in their husbands or fathers absence (Arias 1994; Mummert 1994). Wives and
1

One reviewer of this paper suggested that remittances back to Mexico might make up for this cost to the Mexican economy. Given that, according to a World Bank report, the average remittance to Mexico in 2003 was $321 annually (Hernndez Coss 2005: 5), it would take this average remitter about 124 years of employment in the U.S. labor market to replace his/her cost to the Mexican economy. Since the economic crisis that began in 2008, remittances have fallen to even lower levels (e.g. Lopez et al. 2009; Wilson 2009).

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older daughters provide a subsidy to the household economy (which in turn provides a subsidy to capitalist enterprise), through a variety of local income-producing activities apart from maintaining the family plot. Such income-producing activities may take place in either formal or informal sectors of the economy; among those documented they include artisanry such as weaving or embroidery (Arias 1994; Stephen 1993), employment in local garment workshops and other decentralized industries (Wilson, F. 1991), and working in strawberry and other food-packaging plants (Arizpe and Aranda 1986; Mummert 1994; see also Wilson 2000). These inputs provided by women and children to the household economy represent a subsidy to capitalist enterprise by allowing the maintenance of male workers in times of unemployment, and the reproduction of the family which will be the nursery for future workers. Womens work on the family potato plot also allowed for the maintenance of seasonal and temporary Irish workers to England and Scotland in the 19th and early 20th centuries in cases where women and children did not accompany the head of household in the migration stream. In China, where wives became part of the patri-clan, their labor was included in that of the patri-family which would provide sustenance to the immigrant worker in case of his ultimate return from the country to which he had migrated.

4.Types of Labor Subsidy

The subsidy that low-waged immigrant labor provides to the capitalist system and to capitalist enterprises differs according to economic sector. One direct subsidy for capitalist production consists in immigrant employment in factories and foundries, whether that being manufactured is producer goods (e.g., machinery for textile plants), intermediate goods (e.g., car transmission systems), or consumer goods (e.g. automobiles, agricultural produce, and livestock). Because lower wages are usually paid to immigrant labor, and because immigrant labor in competition with native labor helps to keep wages low, profits are higher. This is true whether the immigrant laborers are temporarythus less likely to organize and fight for higher wages and better working conditionsor permanent. This direct subsidy rests solidly on the fact that immigrant workers were bred and raised in another social formation and present themselves to labor at working age, while often being unable to access the social wage due to legislation prohibiting them to do so (such as the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Individual Responsibility Act and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act in the United States) and/or lack of documents permitting such access. A second subsidy comes in the form of supplying raw materials to manufacturing and other industry at low cost; this includes agricultural work in the cotton fields or in mining, lumbering, or oil drilling. Because the immigrant labor force can be paid low wages, this input again permits the acquisition of higher profits, or in other words, feeds into capital accumulation. A third subsidy comes when immigrant labor is utilized to build infrastructure for the use of capitalist industry, whether in the form of capital goods or as a distribution network. Temporary workers and a floating permanent labor force of high immigrant composition have been employed in all kinds of construction projects in Britain and the United States: dams, canals, ports, highways, railroads, warehouses, factory buildings. These temporary jobs might last years, and many temporary workers, after finishing one job, move on to another construction project, sometimes continuing to do so over their working lives. These three subsidies are related into inputs into fixed capital controlled or utilized by capitalist enterprise. There are also subsidies of consumption goods whose prices are lower because wages paid or income earned for their production are lower than the going wage of workers in the formal sectors of the economy. Lower prices for these consumption goods translate into lower pressures for higher wages on the part of laborers employed by capitalist enterprise. Thus agricultural fieldworkers, the low-waged immigrant niche par excellencefrom Ireland to England since the 18th century and

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from Mexico to the United States since the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848provide low cost fruit and vegetables to consumers throughout the society, including the native working class. Many may also work in dairy farming, and livestock or poultry raising. In like manner, low-cost goods and services are provided by immigrant owned small capitalist businesseswhether formal, semi-formal, or formalto the working class, thus also reducing pressures for a higher wage. Many of these goods and services, for example grocery stores selling foods common in the source country, are aimed at the immigrant workers themselves, though some (small construction firms, carpentry or plumbing services, Chinese restaurants, Mexican taco stands, Irish pubs) may be accessed by the workforce as a whole and other members of the society. The first three types of subsidy can be seen as direct, the last two as indirect.

5. Conclusion
To summarize: with the penetration of core capitalism into the periphery members of pre-capitalist social formations become differentiated into proletarians, semi-proletarians, and petty capitalist farmers; capital penetration disintegrates the subsistence economy and recomposes it. Peripheral capitalist formations arise in which the fully proletarianized permanent workers, the semi-proletarianized temporary and seasonally recurrent workers, and the petty capitalist farmer intermittent target earners are employed in core capitalist enterprises, established through capital export, in the periphery or as international migrants in the core capitalist countries themselves. En fin, there is a constant and ongoing primitive accumulation on which the expansion and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production depends. The continual expropriation of labor from non-capitalist social formations constitutes one of several aspects of this primitive accumulation. This includes the periodic transfer of labor from the informal economy to the formal and back again. Labor recruited from pre-capitalist and/or peripheral capitalist formations over at least the past 300 years has provided a subsidy to the core capitalist countries and to core capitalist enterprise (agro-export plantations, mining, export-processing plants) in the periphery. This subsidy emanates from the fact that workers are born and raised to working age outside of the core capitalist system, while the semi-proletarianized and intermittently proletarianized are maintained in times of disability, unemployment, and retirement outside the boundaries of the core capitalist system. Their families, and the future labor force these contain, are also reproduced outside of the core capitalist system. The subsidy takes on different forms according to the sector in which all types of this labor force are employed. In the most direct manner, it supplies low-waged labor to capitalist industry, manufacturing, and ancillary infrastructure. In a more indirect manner, it supplies consumer goods and services at low cost to the native (and immigrant) workforce, thus lowering pressures on the wage. Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References
Amin, S. 1974a. Accumulation on a world-scale: A critique of the theory of underdevelopment, vol. 2. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. 1974b. Modern migrations in West Africa. In Modern migrations in West Africa, ed. S. Amin, 65-124. London: Oxford University Press.

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Bio
Tamar Diana Wilson has published articles on the informal economy, immigration, and gender issues in Critique of Anthropology, Human Organization, Journal of Borderland Studies, Latin American Perspectives, Review of Radical Political Economics, Violence Against Women, and Urban Anthropology. Her book Subsidizing Capitalism: Brickmakers on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2005, SUNY Press) explores the subsidy to capitalism given by brickmakers deeply embedded in the informal economy. Her most recent book, Womens Migration Networks in Mexico and Beyond, shows the importance of women in migration networks both within Mexico and from Mexico to the United States.