Science & Society, Vol. 79, No.

1, January 2015, 11–37

Accumulation by Dispossession
and Anti-Capitalist Struggles:
A Long Historical Perspective

JEAN BATOU
ABSTRACT: David Harvey has suggested the term accumulation by
dispossession to capture the necessarily enduring role of primitive
accumulation in the development of mature capitalism, particu-
larly within “the new imperialism.” But this terminological change
should be clearly limited, which is not always the case, to an attempt
at better qualifying the functioning of primitive accumulation in
the history of capitalism as a dependent variable of expanded
capital accumulation. The dialectic between accumulation by dis-
possession and expanded accumulation, both being increasingly
deeply intertwined, follows cycles that are best understood histori-
cally using the Marxist theory of long waves. Last but not least,
in socio-political terms, there is a close relationship of strategic
importance between the relative weight of accumulation by dispos-
session in a given period, and the need for exploited wage earners
to build alliances with other dispossessed layers of the population.

D
AVID HARVEY HAS CONTRIBUTED to reopening the debate
on the role of primitive accumulation within the “accumula-
tion on the world scale” characteristic of the “new imperial-
ism,” which he proposes to rename “accumulation by dispossession”
(2003). This renewed attention naturally arises from the ever more
predatory role of contemporary capitalism, raising major theoretical
and strategic issues. In this sense, the new term is significant, emphasiz-
ing expropriation as the condition of accumulation, insisting on the
continuity of this process in the social formations dominated by capital-
ism, and not implying that accumulation by dispossession necessarily
leads to expanded capital accumulation. (Harvey correctly insists on
11

G4344-text.indd 11 11/18/2014 2:56:30 PM

 12 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

these distinctions). During the last ten years, an important literature

has been devoted to this discussion, focusing on specific theoreti-
cal issues or aiming at a better understanding of today’s imperialist
policies (see, e.g., Ashman, 2006; Negi and Auerbach, 2009; Moyo
and Yeros, 2011; Patnaik and Moyo, 2011). In this paper, however, I
elaborate the historical meaning of these concepts over the long term
in order to shed some light on their relevance.
Primitive accumulation does indeed continue to play a significant
role after the industrial revolution and the generalization of commodity
production, but it cannot be separated from expanded accumulation,
to whose requisites it is subordinated.1 There can be no doubt that the
dynamic of the capitalist system is now governed by the appropriation
of surplus-value at the expense of wage-labor, which makes expanded
capital accumulation possible within the production process itself. How-
ever, despite the inseparability of primitive accumulation and expanded
capital accumulation at the concrete level, it is necessary to distinguish
between them at the conceptual level, and to assess the role that the
former still plays today. Yet the fact that capitalism is now the dominant
mode of production poses a methodological problem: on the one hand,
it is not easy to disentangle primitive from capitalist accumulation; and
on the other hand, capitalist accumulation itself proceeds by way of a
double movement of valorization (exploitation of labor) and central-
ization (expropriation of capital).
Under mature capitalism, primitive accumulation can indeed pro-
ceed through non-economic mechanisms implemented by the state
(taxes and debt servicing, colonization, war, etc.), or with the help of
the state (privatization, property speculation, crony capitalism, etc.), or
even — at least partially — in the face of repression by the state (illegal
drug trade, human trafficking, organized crime, etc.). But it also involves
typical market mechanisms such as unequal exchange between petty
commodity and capitalist production. Of course, unequal exchange was
one of the first forms of primitive accumulation in precapitalist societ-
ies, largely due to the skills of experienced merchants and usurers, but
it was a secondary mechanism. Under capitalism, it is the rule because
of the trend toward full-scale operation of the law of value.2

1 This idea was put forward by Rosa Luxemburg (1913, chap. 27), before being taken up and
elaborated on, in particular by Ernest Mandel (1968).
2 Concerning the hypothetical operation of the law of value before capitalism, see Postone,
1993, 137.

G4344-text.indd 12 11/18/2014 2:56:30 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 13

An additional distinction must be made between the “concentra-

tion of capital” resulting from the accumulation of surplus value on
the basis of separate capitals, which increases the global weight and
power of the social capital, and the “centralization of capital” on the
back of small capitalists, which “can grow into powerful masses in a
single hand because . . . it has been withdrawn from many individual
hands.” Marx adds that in the war waged between distinct capitals, the
“new and terrible weapon” of credit represents “an enormous social
mechanism for the centralization of capitals” (Marx, 1887, 435–36).
There are thus striking analogies between primitive accumulation
and centralization of capital, and in this respect Prabhat Patnaik is
perfectly justified in classing both under the same general rubric of
“accumulation by encroachment” (2008).
Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish centralization of capi-
tal from primitive accumulation/accumulation by dispossession, a
difference that Harvey does not always present clearly. Centraliza-
tion of capital, which Marx also calls the “concentration of capitals
already formed,” actually results from the competition among capital-
ists, which drains off a portion of the surplus value resulting from the
exploitation of wage-labor (1971, III, 67).3 It cannot be equated with
the primitive accumulation/accumulation by dispossession that results
from the dispossession of independent small producers. If both can
produce similar social effects — the proletarianization of independent
producers and small capitalists — the former can also lead to the crys-
tallization of a stratum of small capitalists who make up for their low
relative productivity by maximizing the rate of exploitation of their
employees. We should note that this second typical case is encouraged
by the development of peripheral social formations, as well as by the
deregulation of the labor market in the center (subcontracting, black
economy, undeclared work, etc.), which provide favorable soil for it.
Therefore, it should not be lost sight of that the term “accumulation
by dispossession,” despite many advantages, is less satisfactory for defin-
ing the conceptual border between primitive accumulation and the
“annexation” of capitalist sectors defeated by competition.
That being so, is accumulation by dispossession indispensable for
the continuation of accumulation on a world scale, as Rosa Luxemburg

3 This formulation is to be found in the French edition of Le Capital, Volume I, chap. 25,
for which Marx claimed “a scientific value independent of the original,” even for “readers
familiar with the German language” (1971, I, 47, my translation).

G4344-text.indd 13 11/18/2014 2:56:30 PM

 14 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

maintained, and if so, why? Does its importance vary according to dif-
ferent periods, to what extent and for what reasons? Do its modalities
evolve in the course of time, and if so, how? Can one speak of a cyclical
development of the dialectic between expanded capital accumulation
and accumulation by dispossession in the history of capitalism? And
if so, does the Marxist theory of long waves, particularly argued by
Mandel (1975), offer at least a partial explanation? Finally, how to
correlate the relative importance of accumulation by dispossession in
a given time to the importance of alliances between exploited wage
earners and other dispossessed layers of the population?
In order to propose some elements of a response to these ques-
tions, I look at the birth of the capitalist mode of production, before
going on to examine the specific role played by primitive accumula-
tion/accumulation by dispossession in the various historical periods
of capitalism: free trade, imperialism, late capitalism and neoliberal
capitalism (or “new imperialism”). I shall try finally to show in what
way the modalities of articulation of these two forms of accumulation
raise the political problem of alliances between the exploited and
dispossessed, and the answers to this that have been given up to now.

I. The Birth of Capitalism According to Marx

Marx dealt at length with the “so-called original accumulation of

capital” (die sogennante ursprüngliche Akkumulation), to characterize the
conditions of possibility of capitalist accumulation.4 His explanations
were intended as a response to the theory of Adam Smith, according
to whom the division of labor, which Smith saw as the driving force
of increasing productivity and thus of capital accumulation (even
before the industrial revolution), would necessarily require a “previous
accumulation of stock.” Marx translated “previous” into German as
“ursprünglich,” which was rendered by his English and French transla-
tors as “primitive” (Perelman, 2000, 25).
Marx’s “so-called” refers to the scenario postulated by Adam
Smith, for whom the accumulation that preceded the division of
labor in manufacture had been the fruit of the savings of assiduous
and economic producers. As opposed to this, the “easy money” from

4 Capital, Volume I, chaps. 4 and 25, and especially 26–33; he returns to this in Volume III,
and he discussed it earlier in the Grundrisse of 1857–8.

G4344-text.indd 14 11/18/2014 2:56:30 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 15

colonization, the slave trade and commercial monopolies protected

by the state, etc. had been an obstacle to investing the capital thus
accumulated in order to raise the productivity of labor (accumula-
tion based on the division of productive labor). Smith was far from
denying the misdeeds of colonization, the slave trade, etc., in fact
denouncing these all the more readily as he saw them as an obstacle
to the development of the “wealth of nations.”
Marx turned this line of argument completely on its head. For
him, if original/preliminary/primitive accumulation was the condi-
tion of possibility for capitalist accumulation (or for the expanded
reproduction of capital in the sphere of production), it resulted from
a far more complex process, which I shall summarize in twelve points.
1. A certain primitive accumulation of capital was required for
expanded capital accumulation to get started (by exploitation of wage
labor). This logical condition was taken from Smith, despite some
hesitation over the translation of his original concept. In effect, Smith
saw a critical mass of capitals as an indispensable precondition for a
qualitative leap towards the division of labor and machinery, making
possible in turn an accelerated rise in the productivity of labor.
2. For Marx, this primitive accumulation was essentially realized
outside of the productive sphere, which was then still dominated by a
natural economy (very weakly monetarized) and/or a petty commod-
ity production sector that was rapidly expanding. So it was possible
only in the sphere of circulation, that of commodities (C—M—C)
or that of money (M—C—M'). It rested on the exchange of unequal
values, thus of swindling or usury, and definitely on various forms of
parasitism at the expense of the productive economy. It was not dis-
tinguished, in analytical terms, from pillage pure and simple, which
acquired growing importance, at least on the world scale, from the
late 15th century onward.
3. Marx did, however, distinguish two stages of primitive accumula-
tion, at least implicitly. The first could be seen in all precapitalist agri-
cultural societies with a certain development of the productive forces
— “the snail’s pace” method (Rühle, 1939). For Western Europe, it
was clearly at work uninterruptedly from the early Middle Ages (6th
century). The second began in the late 15th century, with the world
as its theater, and had far more powerful levers at its disposal, with
the rise of modern banking and the stock exchange, the farming of
taxes and the rise in public debt, and eventually the great chartered

G4344-text.indd 15 11/18/2014 2:56:30 PM

 16 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

companies, commercial monopolies, colonization, the treasure of the

Americas, the slave trade and bonded labor. The capital accumulated
on a global scale (particularly in the Atlantic) was then very much
greater than that required for the start of the industrial revolution.
We have already noted striking analogies between primitive accu-
mulation at the expense of non-capitalist sectors and the “concen-
tration of capitals already formed” (centralization of capital). It is
interesting, therefore, to note that Marx also mentions a second stage
of accumulation within the capitalist mode of production, marked by
an acceleration of the centralization of capital, thus of the draining
of small capitals, which makes it possible to boost “the very slow pro-
cedure” (“the spiral form”) of expanded reproduction.5 Although he
does not make clear its likely starting point, I believe that economic
history enables us to locate this around the mid-1820s, coinciding
with the exhaustion of the first long wave of capitalist development.
4. In the second stage of primitive accumulation, violence clearly
takes the upper hand: the colonization of the Americas, along with
the establishment of colonial enclaves and coastal trading posts in
Africa and Asia, the mass extermination of non-European popula-
tions on several continents, the expropriation of peasants and the
repression of the poor in the old world, the deportation of millions
of Africans and their reduction to slavery, the bloody mercantile wars
of the 17th and 18th centuries among Spain, Holland, England and
France, were certainly key pieces in this drama, which prefigured the
imperialism of the late 19th century, as Rudolf Hilferding (1910) and
Rosa Luxemburg (1913) showed, followed by Hannah Arendt (1951).
The analogy between the acceleration (second stage) of both primi-
tive accumulation and centralization of capital can be further specified
in this connection. These two spurts of accumulation are distinguished
in fact by their brutality. Marx then describes one of the two modalities
of the “centralization of capital” as a “violent method of annexation.”
5. The transition from the first stage of primitive accumulation to
the second raises complex historical problems that Marx did not tackle
directly. We should certainly see the Crusades (from the late 11th to
the late 13th century) and the rise of the Italian cities, particularly

5 “The world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got
a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway. Cen-
tralisation, on the contrary, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye . . .” (Marx, 1887,
436).

G4344-text.indd 16 11/18/2014 2:56:30 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 17

Venice, as a period of experimentation and transition in the late

medieval era. In any event, the second stage of primitive accumulation
was a necessary condition for the acceleration of its course and the
actualization of its economic and social potential. It is thus possible
to speak correctly of a qualitative leap and a change in the nature of
primitive accumulation, which Marx’s terminology does not really
bring to light.
6. That said, the accumulation of capitals over a long time scale
and outside of the productive sphere represents only one of the two
faces of the concept of primitive accumulation, and certainly the least
decisive. By emphasizing this aspect, many of its interpreters have
eased the task of their critics; certain writers, in fact, claimed that the
fixed capital required for the establishment of the first factories of
the English industrial revolution (before 1800) was not beyond the
reach of a well-to-do small producer (farmer or artisan) (Bairoch,
1963). Does economic history validate Smith’s thesis (of the virtuous
circle of saving) against that of Marx (of pillage on a large scale)? I
have shown elsewhere that this is not the case, even taking into con-
sideration only the initial start-up costs typical of the beginning of the
industrial revolution (Batou, 1990, 401–02). In any case, Marx’s thesis
cannot be assessed by the yardstick of such efforts of retrospective
quantification, no matter how interesting they may be.
7. The other side of the concept of primitive accumulation, in fact,
and certainly the most decisive, at the other pole of society, involves
the dispossession of the small producers from the commons (com-
mon land, forests, watercourses, game, fish, etc.) as well as from their
private means of production and subsistence (cultivable land, tools,
etc.), i.e., the formation of the proletariat. In Marx’s terms, “primitive
accumulation . . . means nothing but the separation of labor and the
worker from the conditions of labor, which confront him as indepen-
dent forces” (Marx, 1863, chap. 21). This phenomenon, however, is
very poorly indicated by the term accumulation, for which reason its
close link with the other aspect of primitive accumulation is often
not correctly grasped.
8. Primitive accumulation, envisaged as the necessary condition
for expanded capital accumulation to get started, thus combines the
two processes of accumulation and dispossession as two sides of the same
coin, the first of these being of an economic nature and the second of
a social nature. In this sense, accumulation by dispossession is undoubtedly

G4344-text.indd 17 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 18 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

a more explicit terminology, synthesizing in a more evocative fashion

the double nature of this phenomenon. Marx could have given the
“so-called primitive accumulation” this new name, had he not explicitly
sought to discuss the genesis of capitalism by situating himself vis-à-vis
Smith in a perspective of both continuity and rupture.
9. Viewed historically, the second stage of primitive accumula-
tion also brings to light the key role of an essential connecting agent
between accumulation and dispossession: the politico-institutional fac-
tor (the functioning of the state, law, armed force, taxation, customs
protection). It is interesting to note how the latter came once more to
play a growing role in the 19th century, as a condition for the spread
of industrial capitalism on the European continent — particularly in
France, Germany and Russia — as well as in the United States, and
above all in Japan, not to speak of the later experiences of South
Korea, Taiwan and China. In the absence of such conditions, the dis-
possession of small producers could avoid leading to the formation
of a genuine industrial proletariat, a scenario that Marx envisaged for
Russia in the last quarter of the 19th century.
10. The use of the qualifying adjectives preliminary, original or
primitive can suggest that Marx situated primitive accumulation in an
earlier and bygone period when the capitalist mode of production
was still in the process of gestation. He thus notes in the Grundrisse
that the context in which the capitalist “must bring values into circula-
tion” (emphasis added) that did not arise from wage-labor, in order
to permit the creation of surplus value, “belongs among the antedilu-
vian conditions of capital . . . which, precisely . . . are past and gone,
and hence belong to the history of its formation, but in no way to its
contemporary history, i.e., not to the real system of the mode of pro-
duction ruled by it” (Marx, 1857–58, III). But, while capitalism brings
into circulation values that primarily originate in the exploitation
of wage-labor in the industrial countries, it never stops commoditiz-
ing products originating from precapitalist relations of production.
Furthermore, it is not necessary for it to be the dominant mode of
production everywhere. Therefore, in a letter to the Russian periodical
Otechestvenniye Zapisky, dated 1877, Marx noted that this process “has
not yet been radically accomplished except in England . . . but all the
countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement.”6

6 He explicitly quotes this from the French edition of Capital (Shanin, 1983, 135).

G4344-text.indd 18 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 19

11. In reality, Marx does not deny the continuing expropriation of

small producers within social formations dominated by the capitalist
mode of production, but he tends to combine this phenomenon with
the other forms of dispossession bound up with capitalist accumula-
tion. Thus in chapter 25 of Capital I, he notes that “accumulation of
capital is . . . increase of the proletariat” (1887, 429). He returns to
this a bit further on, classifying the pauperized independent small
producers among the “stagnant” part of the industrial reserve army,
which “recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of
modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying
branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manu-
facture to machinery” (ibid., 444, emphasis added). In chapter 27 of
Volume III, he explicitly makes the connection between the dispos-
session mechanisms of primitive accumulation and centralization of
capital, which equally tend towards an “expropriation on the most
enormous scale . . . from the direct producers to the smaller and the
medium-sized capitalists themselves,” before adding that expropria-
tion “is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production;
its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance,
it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all indi-
viduals” (1894, chap. 27).
12. In this way primitive accumulation continues to play a role in
the accumulation of capital within the capitalist mode of production,
particularly at the expense of petty commodity production, which still
dominates large swathes of the economy at least until the early 20th
century. In France, for example, until the First World War the major-
ity of those economically active did not yet work for a wage. On the
other hand, its effects partly merge with those of the centralization
of capital — a consequence of expanded capital accumulation, which
tends to deprive small capitalists of their means of production. This
is why Marx notes that “accumulation merely presents as a continuous
process what in primitive accumulation appears as a distinct historical
process, as the process of the emergence of capital and as a transi-
tion from one mode of production to another” (Marx, 1863, chap.
21). “The further extension of the capitalist mode of production,” he
concludes, “not only has as its consequence the progressive destruc-
tion of handicrafts, and of the small-scale landed property of the
cultivator himself, etc., but also the swallowing up of small capitalists
by large, and the deprivation of the former of their capital” (quoted

G4344-text.indd 19 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 20 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

in Rosdolsky, 1977, 280). That said, the relative importance of primi-

tive accumulation, in the strict sense, has continued to decline in the
more advanced countries. Besides, this dispossession now mainly rests
on the functioning of the market itself, even if political authorities
strive to facilitate it.

II. From Free-Trade Capitalism to Imperialism

Marx was a theorist of the birth of capitalism as a specific mode

of production, and he studied its maturity in one single country, Eng-
land. The question for him was to understand how this revolutionary
system imposed itself, and why it relied on an uninterrupted indus-
trial growth that provoked a permanent upheaval in social relations,
unprecedented since the generalization of agriculture. Because of
this, he was interested first of all in its manifestations in the country
where it was most precocious. He thus made his principal economic
discovery between November 1857 and June 1858, i.e., the elucida-
tion of the secret of the creation of surplus value, “a process thanks to
which the capitalist obtains without exchange and without equivalent,
free of charge, some of the labor time crystallized in value” (Mandel,
1971, 83).
However, during the period in which modern industry was chiefly
in competition with petty commodity production, which still held a
strong position and profited in particular from the relative protec-
tion that was afforded by high transport costs, it realized substantial
surplus profits, bound up with a considerable productivity differ-
ential. This competition between “an army furnished with breach-
loaders, and one armed with bows and arrows” (Marx, 1872–75, 295),
is inscribed in the continuity of accumulation by dispossession. It
was exercised first and foremost at the expense of small producers
in the earliest industrialized countries7 (until the end of the first
quarter of the 19th century), then increasingly of those in the least
advanced regions of Western Europe and North America (especially
after 1848, with the expansion of railways on both continents), at
the same time as it began to shake the most exposed sectors of the
international periphery (zones already colonized, port cities and
their immediate hinterlands).

7 Before the 1850s, factory machinery was still produced on a handicraft basis.

G4344-text.indd 20 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 21

This was undoubtedly the principal aspect of accumulation by

dispossession in the period of free-trade capitalism, since it made
possible a major transfer of value to the detriment of the precapitalist
sector (accumulation), driving it progressively to bankruptcy (dis-
possession) by way of the essentially “non-violent” means of unequal
exchange, with the benefit of a legal framework that gradually abol-
ished all forms of monopoly and protection. At the same time, the
privatization of the commons continued, particularly transforming
forest users into stealers of wood, hunters into poachers, etc. (Marx,
1842). Servicing the public debt was also a continuing burden on tax-
payers, the majority of whom were still small independent producers,
to the benefit of capital, and this in an ever growing number of states
and local communities.
Before the 1870s, the destruction of natural economy and petty
commodity production by the competition of cheap industrial prod-
ucts was thus already at work on a large scale in the less developed
(and protected) regions of Western Europe, as well as on the periph-
ery of the old continent (Ireland, the Mediterranean countries and
Eastern Europe), Latin America, the Middle East and certain parts of
sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Indonesian archipelago and Oceania.
In 1860, for example, England already exported between 8 and 11
square meters of cotton calico per inhabitant to Latin America, the
Middle East and North Africa (Batou, 1990, 386). This flourishing
trade led to a major transfer of value from the periphery to the center,
particularly effected by the increased production of raw materials by
small producers or businesses based on slavery or semi-slavery (peon-
age), but also arising from the coining of resources hoarded by tens
of millions of households (in particular, women’s jewels), as well as by
public and private debt. That said, the great rural masses of Asia and
Africa were only fully touched by this process in a second phase, after
the excavation of the Suez canal (1867) and the revival of colonization
along with the triumph of modern imperialism.
Contrary to Marx’s prediction, Western industry, still essentially
British, did not yet succeed in “batter[ing] down all Chinese walls,”
thanks to the “heavy artillery” of the “cheap prices of commodities”
(1848, chap. 1). But it certainly did begin to destroy natural economy
and petty commodity production in the most accessible periphery,
already separating a mass of small producers from their means of pro-
duction and thereby rendering conceivable their industrialization

G4344-text.indd 21 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 22 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

on a capitalist basis. In fact, despite the draining of major resources

towards the center, the accumulation of money capital in the hands
of local social elites and states was still largely adequate, in combina-
tion with appropriate policies — protectionist tariffs, development
of infrastructure, preferential credit, commercial monopolies, state
promotion of industry, etc. — to the need of promoting modern
industry. This is the rational kernel of Marx’s texts on the “progres-
sive” character of the British colonization of India, and his famous
prognosis — most clearly formulated in the preface to the First
German edition of Capital, that “the country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own
future” (Marx, 1887, 7).
At the same time, however, his study of the case of Ireland (1867)
and his reading of Georg Ludwig Maurer’s historical writings (1868)
led Marx to restrict this forecast to Western Europe, as he explained in
the French edition of Capital I, published in instalments between 1872
and 1875 (Anderson, 2010, 171–180). Despite not having systematized
their thinking on this subject, Marx, and to a lesser extent Engels, now
began to envisage the outlines of a periphery of the capitalist system
with social, economic and political dynamics that were distinct from
those of the center. It was in this sense that, in a letter to Engels of
November 20, 1867, Marx took a clear position in favor of Irish inde-
pendence, as well as an agrarian revolution and protective customs
tariffs to stand up to British industry. Engels explained a quarter of a
century later that, with “the repeal of the Corn Laws [1846] . . . Britain
was to become . . . the great manufacturing center of an agricultural
world, with an ever-increasing number of corn- and cotton-growing
Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun” (1892).
In his “Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the Commu-
nist Educational Association of German Workers in London,” Marx
also noted the direct connection between blocked industrialization
and dependence: “Every time Ireland was about to develop indus-
trially, she was crushed and reconverted into a purely agricultural
land” (1867). All the more true would this be for Latin America, the
Middle East, certain parts of India, the Indonesian archipelago and
Africa, which also underwent forms of early domination whether in
the mercantilist period, or in the early stage of the industrial revolu-
tion. This dependence, in fact, was able very early on to combine
external constraints with internal complicities, contributing to a lasting

G4344-text.indd 22 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 23

transformation of the social formations and political elites of these

countries. That is why comprador bourgeoisies most often praised the
accumulation by dispossession triggered by the influx of low-priced
manufactured British goods, and did not advocate the promotion of
local industry. For that reason, they readily subscribed to the theory
of comparative advantage and accepted a subordinate position in the
international division of labor. In their eyes, agricultural or mining
production — as well as trade bound up with well-established networks
of international exchange — was likely to be more profitable and less
risky than an industrial venture that would have to compete directly
with industry in the most advanced countries.
When local authorities did display resistance, the industrialized
countries resorted to organized contraband or diplomatic and political
pressure, applying the lever of external debt or even force of arms.
Before direct colonization, gunboat diplomacy and open warfare
already played a major role in opening up markets still protected
from Western commerce, as shown in particular by the examples of
China (the opium wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60), India (repression of
India’s First War of Independence — the Sepoy rebellion of 1857–8)
or Paraguay (war of the Triple Alliance, 1865–70). Similarly, the sub-
stantial modern industrial sector promoted by the Egyptian authori-
ties in the second quarter of the 19th century and shielded by state
trading monopolies would be swiftly destroyed by the liberalization
of trade imposed by a coalition of powers led by the British. This put
an end to the most impressive experiment in the industrialization of
the periphery until that of Japan (Batou, 1993).

III. The Classic Age of Imperialism (1873–1940/8)

The spread of the industrial revolution was complete by the start

of the European Great Depression (1873–94), which Marx saw as
coinciding with the end of the “progressive role” of capitalism. Two
years before his death, he would write that this mode of production
was “engaged in battle both with the working-class masses, with sci-
ence, and with the very productive forces which it engenders — in
a word, in a crisis which will end in its elimination” (Shanin, 1983,
106–7). Bill Warren’s thesis according to which classical imperialism
played a progressive role in spreading the capitalist mode of produc-
tion on a world scale (Warren, 1980) thus signaled (a hundred years

G4344-text.indd 23 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 24 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

later!) a regression in relation to the late Marx, not to speak of the

subsequent arguments of Lenin or Luxemburg.
Globally, imperialism defines a qualitatively new period of capital-
ism, in which capital accumulation — and not simply accumulation by
dispossession — must be envisaged on a world scale, in the context of
an ever more polarized uneven development. Beyond accumulation
by dispossession, whose field of operation is greatly expanded (par-
ticularly as a result of lower transport costs and colonial expansion),
the operation of the law of value itself now leads — at least partially
— to the draining of a significant fraction of the surplus value that
results from the “super-exploitation” (Marini, 1973) of wage workers
in the periphery, particularly in the production of raw materials, to
the central capital. Moyo and Yeros (2011) are thus right to remind
us of the important contribution of the Dependency School (or the
“underdevelopment school”), overlooked by Harvey (2003). In partic-
ular, they pointed to the systemic transfer of value from the periphery
to the center through such distinct mechanisms as “repatriation of
profits,” “interest payments, and dividends,” “imposition of monopoly
rents,” and “unequal exchange.” In any case, it would be simplistic,
and indeed erroneous, to understand accumulation on a world scale
as the combination of a central expanded capital accumulation and
a peripheral accumulation by dispossession. Globalized accumulation
has now to be seen as an articulated whole.
The opening of the Suez Canal (1867), which cut the journey
time between Europe and East Asia by almost half, the rise of steam
shipping, the development of railways and telegraph, certainly made
possible a new phase of accumulation by dispossession on an unprec-
edented scale at the expense of the great peasant masses of India,
China and the African continent. It also coincided with the brutal
acceleration of colonization in Asia and Africa, facilitated by impor-
tant breakthroughs in the field of armament — reach, precision,
reliability of rifles, dum-dum bullets, machine guns, gunboats, etc. At
the same time, capital accumulation in the peripheral countries was
now over-determined by massive European investment in transport
infrastructure and primary production (plantations, mines, etc.),
placing local bourgeoisies and elites in a position of subordination or
even requiring putting whole societies under direct guardianship so
as to guarantee the protection of metropolitan assets. Of course, this
new context does not rule out the possibility of major concentrations

G4344-text.indd 24 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 25

of money capital, or indeed technologically less advanced industrial

capital, in the hands of comprador bourgeoisies.
The effects of this new wave of accumulation by dispossession were
combined with the “super-exploitation” of peripheral wage labor to
stimulate expanded reproduction in the two most dynamic poles of
imperialist capital, Germany and the United States, thus contributing to
a new long wave of expansion in the years 1894–1913.8 A further point
arising here is that by remaining committed to free trade until 1914,
the United Kingdom had to cover a negative balance of payments with
the other industrialized countries, which it did thanks to a surplus trad-
ing balance with India and China (Latham, 1978; Arrighi, 1994). On
the other hand, the customs protection erected by Germany and the
United States enabled these countries to realize super-profits from the
monopoly of their domestic markets, while simultaneously stimulating
their exports. Engels thus viewed Germany’s return to protectionism,
in 1879, as the result of a convergence of interests between the big
landed proprietors (Junkers) who sought to protect their revenues
from the competition of the new large-scale agricultural exporters, and
industrialists in the iron and steel sector who wanted to ensure their
monopoly super-profits: the famous alliance of the barons of land and
of steel (1888, 521–35). Hilferding even argued that this temporary
“compromise” between the imperialist great powers undoubtedly made
it possible to push back the outbreak of the first global conflict (1910,
chap. 22). Mike Davis would return to this phenomenon to explain the
great Asian famines of the late Victorian age (2001, 296–302).
It is in no way surprising, then, that Rosa Luxemburg made the
focus of her analysis — which Harvey explicitly refers to — the indis-
pensable character of primitive accumulation in the countries where
natural economy and petty commodity production still played a lead-
ing role in permitting the pursuit of capitalist accumulation on the
world scale. To which she particularly added the rise of military expen-
diture that artificially created protected markets for heavy industry,
largely financed by deduction from the incomes of wage earners and
small independent producers (1913, chaps 26–32).
This global order remained operative worldwide until the inter-
war period, though deeply shaken by the October Revolution and

8 In the case of colonial Africa, Sam Moyo alludes to “primitive accumulation by dispossession”
(Patnaik and Moyo, 2011, 64–6).

G4344-text.indd 25 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 26 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

the two successive phases — 1917–1920 and 1934–1937 — of massive

international upsurge of class struggles from below. It was neverthe-
less marked by a long wave of economic stagnation in the context
of the fragmentation of the world market. In this period, the British
and French colonial surplus profits acquired at the price of an ever
more intense colonial exploitation, as well as the immense territorial
size of the United States, enabled these countries to better resist the
sirens of war than Germany or Japan. Eventually, the Second World
War represented a new exacerbation of inter-imperialist tensions in
a world marked by the economic self-isolation of the Soviet Union
(whatever its structural causes); the stubborn resistance to exploita-
tion of wage workers in the center; and the unprecedented rise of
national independence movements in the periphery, where certain
semi-colonial countries were already taking advantage of their partial
“disconnection” to promote policies of industrialization by import
substitution.
In this conjuncture, the new Nazi–Fascist order, which would
extend its rule over the greater part of the Old Continent for five to
six years, made possible the financing of the German capitalist war
economy by recourse to an accumulation by dispossession of extreme
brutality, especially in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: massive
pillage of the occupied countries, going far beyond Jewish property,
and the enslavement of some ten million foreign workers. Erich Koch,
Reichskommisar for the Ukraine, could thus declare: “I will pump
every last thing out of this country” (quoted in Mazower, 1999, 156).
After the defeat of the Axis powers, the lasting impact of such policies
would also contribute to keeping European wages in the immediate
postwar period relatively low, thus offering, with a quasi-unlimited
supply of labor (rural exodus, migration, women’s work, etc.) ideal
conditions for a revival of long-term expansion.
The period after the Second World War was marked by the gain-
ing of independence by the dominated countries of the globe and the
advent of neo-colonialism under U. S. hegemony, partly checked by the
emergence of the Soviet Union as a second Great Power, with strategic
nuclear warheads. As expanded capital accumulation was revived on an
unprecedented scale, underpinned by the third technological revolu-
tion, historians showed a renewed interest in “the imperialism of free
trade” of the first two-thirds of the 19th century, particularly in Latin
America (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). At the same time, heterodox

G4344-text.indd 26 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 27

currents in development economics, whose work was ­deepened — with

more radical conclusions — by the Dependency School and World
Systems Theory, sought to complete the understanding of imperialism
of the first two decades of the 20th century by returning to examine
the historical roots, social modalities and economic mechanisms of
informal dependence, particularly those of unequal exchange9 and
the transfer of surplus value from the periphery to the center.
At a time when the term “Third World” was coined by Alfred
Sauvy (1953) by analogy with the Third Estate of the French Revolu-
tion, while Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Lin Biao
evoked “the encirclement of the cities by the countryside” (1965),
the overthrow of capitalism thus seemed to depend increasingly on
the struggles of the poor peasantry and semi-proletariat of the South,
as opposed to a Western working class that was globally perceived as
a labor aristocracy by Third World revolutionaries.10 This particular
socio-political conjuncture certainly made it easier to understand the
sources of the anti-capitalist dynamic and the relative coherence of
social struggles in the periphery, which certain authors, in the wake
of Harvey, sometimes tend today to reduce to a juxtaposition of civic
protests. Yet despite such advances, this analysis rested on an errone-
ous perception of the overall dynamic of capitalist accumulation on
the world scale, which depended more than ever on the exploitation
of wage labor, including the “super-exploitation” of wage earners in
the dominated countries.

IV. The New Imperialism and Accumulation by Dispossession

For Harvey, the “new imperialism” coincides with a new long wave
of stagnation of capitalism from the mid-1970s. He defines a “regime
of accumulation” that can lead only to an aggravation of crises of
over-accumulation, all the more so in that it brings about a restric-
tion of solvent outlets (consumption and investment). He explains
how this contradiction may be partly resolved by a “spatio-temporal
fix” (re-colonization, privatization of natural resources on the world

9 They often equate under this term the draining of value at the expense of precapitalist sec-
tors or “closed-off” capitalist sectors that obstruct the free circulation of capitals (unequal
exchange in the Marxist sense) with the deduction of a major portion of periphery surplus
value by central capitalism (by the play of the law of value).
10 This view has been recently supported anew by Cope, 2012.

G4344-text.indd 27 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 28 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

scale, land grabbing, investment in urban property, etc.; a “freezing”

of assets in the form of infrastructure investments whose profitability
is expected only in the long run).
This “slowing down” of expanded accumulation leads to three
concomitant phenomena:
1. An increase in the rate of exploitation of wage earners (increase
of absolute and/or relative surplus value). In a context marked by
the forceful return of accumulation by dispossession (see below), the
“new imperialism” also strongly promotes the “super-exploitation” of
peripheral labor (which can also be located at the center — on-site
relocation), contributing to the re-emergence of forms of wage labor
close to slavery (sweatshops) or pauperized petty commodity produc-
tion (wage-earners disguised as “independent” producers). This is the
backdrop of some of the specifically gendered and racialized modali-
ties of today’s capitalist accumulation, on which I cannot expand here.
By mechanisms such as these, capitalism seems to recreate elements
of its precapitalist environment, whereas it is simply pressing further
back the limits to the exploitation of labor.
2. The harsher competition among capitalists, expressed in
increasingly acute conflicts bearing on the division of the total sur-
plus value produced among firms, branches and countries; between
industrial capital, rent of land and interest; between the center and
the periphery, etc. Within one and the same branch, or between dif-
ferent sectors (by way of the formation of prices of production), this
kind of confrontation is arbitrated by the law of value; it can also rest
on unequal exchange between countries with sharp differentials in
productivity that do not permit the free circulation of capitals.
3. An increase in accumulation by dispossession to the detriment
of the commons and of independent small proprietors. It is possible
to distinguish under this rubric a) the pursuit of forms of exploitation
at the expense of “traditional” commons and small-scale property; b)
privatization of socialized or nationalized companies, liberalization
of public services and the destruction of mechanisms for containing
the market, and of solidarity, that were achieved by social struggles.
We touch here on a central aspect of our argument: accumulation
by dispossession can in fact be conceived as the draining of resources
arising from still existing precapitalist sectors, but also as the reab-
sorption of economic territories and activities partly subtracted from
private investment as a result of the social and political conquests of

G4344-text.indd 28 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 29

the workers’ and anti-imperialist movements. In a more general sense,

accumulation by dispossession should therefore be conceived as a
double process, first of all at the expense of precapitalist social for-
mations, but also of the public institutions that arose within capitalist
social formations and that regulate the operation of certain domains
of activity (education, health, public transport, social housing, water,
energy, etc.) even when they do not control the capital involved (De
Angelis, 1999). Hence the term “new enclosures” proposed in the
early 1990s by a current of “autonomous Marxism” as a name for this
type of privatization (see, e.g., Midnight Notes, 1990; Caffentzis, 1992;
Federici, 2004).
Accumulation by dispossession today thus covers such varied phe-
nomena as:
1. The ruin and expropriation of small peasant property by placing
it in competition with globalized agribusiness, by a rising tax burden
on small producers, by the increase in real interest rates (particu-
larly in the 1980s), by the increased weight of health and education
expenses, etc. bound up with liberalization of services, by the priva-
tization of communal lands (Mexican law on the sale of ejidos, 1990)
and the more recent generalization of land grabbing, as well as the
exercise of direct violence, particularly bound up with narco-traffic
(Colombian paramilitaries).
2. The reduction of basic food consumption on the part of small
producers and capital’s reserve army, which makes possible today
an annual transfer of revenue in favor of the capitalist sector of the
order of U. S. $500 to $1,000 billion.11 Since the mid-1970s, in fact, the
stabilization of grain prices, despite growing demand, was obtained
by putting the poorest fraction of the world population on a starva-
tion diet. Rising prices were thus contained by a forced reduction in
per capita demand: between 1979–81 and 1999–2001, world cereal
consumption per capita fell by an average of 3.4%, certainly implying
a greater reduction on the part of the poorest (Patnaik, 2008).12

11 A reduction of some 5% in the food consumption of the 2.7 billion human beings living on
less than $2 per day represents a transfer of $750 billion per year to the profit of accumula-
tion by dispossession.
12 Patnaik (2008) estimates that the pursuit of income deflation has reached its physiological
limits (see the suicide epidemic of Indian farmers), which explains the present rise in the
prices of foodstuffs — on top of the rise in Chinese demand, the pressure exercised by
biofuel and the effects of speculation.

G4344-text.indd 29 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 30 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

3. The race for increasingly scarce natural resources (water, fossil

fuels, minerals, etc.), in which as in the late 19th century military power
plays a decisive role, today conferring dominant (if not potentially
monopoly) positions on the great powers, particularly the United
States. This explains the recent proliferation of Western armed inter-
ventions in the Middle East and most recently in Libya, as well as the
deployment of AFRICOM (since 2004) on the African continent, the
reactivation of the U. S. Fourth Fleet around Latin America (from
2008), the contested project of seven U. S. military bases in Colombia,
as well as the growing encirclement of Iran and China, etc.
4. The expropriation of small-scale urban property, in particular
highly mortgaged housing, by credit institutions (10 million homes
were repossessed between 2008 and 2011 in the United States alone).
This process was deliberately aggravated by “flipping” — the sale of an
apartment in bad condition and heavily mortgaged, but superficially
restored, leading to repossession when the new buyer proves unable to
finance both credit costs and upkeep (Harvey, 2003, 152–53). In the
field of social housing, the sale of apartments to their tenants, then
to financial institutions that repurchase them to speculate on their
price, steadily leads to a gentrification of former popular quarters.
5. The siphoning of public finance by debt service, leading to a
major deduction from both wage and non-wage income to the profit
of finance capital. This provides an excellent pretext for the priva-
tization of public assets and the reduction of mechanisms of fiscal
redistribution in favor of the most deprived. There is thus a clear
analogy between the public debt of the mercantilist age and that of
the Third World, which constantly rose in the 1980s and 1990s, as
well as that in Europe, the United States (federally and at state level)
and Japan today.
6. The increased contribution of family economy and domestic
labor for ensuring the reproduction of labor-power. We are in fact
seeing an increase in the tasks of reconstitution and reproduction of
labor-power performed without remuneration, particularly by women,
as the share of surplus value taken in tax declines and public services
and social provision are liberalized or privatized. The most extreme
forms of this development can be seen in the dominated countries,
particularly in the sweatshops of the South, where women sometimes
sleep beneath their machines and work while keeping an eye on
their children. This is reminiscent of the contribution of household

G4344-text.indd 30 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 31

economy to reducing the cost of wage labor in the early putting-out

system or the embryonic factories of the early industrial revolution.
7. The privatization of public services and social welfare, particu-
larly in Western Europe but also in the rest of the world, which makes
it possible to open up new fields for the production of surplus value, or
for draining it by land rent and credit. In states where these processes
are most advanced, not only are whole swathes of education, health,
public transport, water and energy distribution, social provision, etc.
privatized, but also parts of the prison system, police and armed forces.
By analogy, the continuing extension of the monopoly of intellectual
property (patents, licences, etc.),13 along with the rise in more or less
illegal trafficking (drugs, weapons, sex), likewise open up new fields
of particularly lucrative investment to rentier capital, enabling this
to participate in the redistribution of the surplus value produced on
a world scale, to the detriment of other capitalists, but also of wage
earners and small independent producers.
8. The privatization of public assets in the Soviet bloc and China,
as well as in Europe and the countries of the South — including sub-
soil resources — which can be compared, mutatis mutandis, with the
expropriation of church or crown property in the initial period of
primitive accumulation.
The conclusion to be drawn from this attempt at periodization
is that we need a history of the dialectical links between accumula-
tion by dispossession/centralization of capital and expanded capi-
tal accumulation over the longue durée, in parallel with the different
phases of development of capitalism: a) in the age of mercantilism and
primitive accumulation; b) during the spread of the industrial revolu-
tion, marked by the progress of free trade; c) in the age of classical
imperialism and colonization, as well as that of the second industrial
revolution; d) during the postwar boom, the revival of expanded
capital accumulation and the third technological revolution; e) in
the age of neoliberal capitalism and the “new imperialism.” I believe
it is possible to show a pattern of cyclical alternation between phases
of heightened accumulation by dispossession (and centralization of
capital) and phases of accumulation by expansion of wage labor. By
and large, the former coincides with the long waves of stagnation,

13 There is no need to share the conclusions of the theorists of cognitive capitalism on the
disappearance of the law of value to agree with them on the growing role of the knowledge
economy in the formation of rentier income from capital (Vercellone, 2003).

G4344-text.indd 31 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 32 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

whereas the second relates to the long waves of accelerated growth

in the capitalist economies. Each of these phases corresponds to a
particular imbrication of the different modalities of accumulation.
That is why their comparative study over the long run can contribute
to a better genetic understanding of the global development of capi-
talism. This is an impressive research agenda indeed.

V. What Alliances Between Exploited Wage Earners and

Dispossessed Small Proprietors?

As several theorists of proletarian emancipation have observed,

the need for an alliance between wage earners in the industrialized
countries and the broad peasant masses (in the process of pauperiza-
tion) of the periphery arises from the specific conditions of capitalist
accumulation on a world scale in the imperialist era. Marx was certainly
among the first to have seen the possibility of this, at the end of his
life, when he envisaged that the traditional Russian rural commune,
which had managed to survive the “progressive” phase of capitalism,
could have a communitarian future by linking its destiny to that of
future socialized European large-scale industry, thus avoiding the
inevitable alternative of primitive accumulation. He alludes to this
perspective in a famous letter to Vera Zasulich, dated March 8, 1881,
and published for the first time in 1924 (with its unsent drafts that
contain explosive additional arguments) (Shanin, 1983, 97–126). The
same insight was proposed by Marx and Engels in their 1882 preface
to the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: “If the
Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution
in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Rus-
sian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a
communist development” (quoted by Shanin, 1983, 139).14
It is thus inaccurate to claim, as Harvey does, that Marx placed
“little if any value on the social forms destroyed by primitive accu-
mulation” (2003, 163). Harvey does indeed admit that this is a com-
plex question, as he himself speaks of the possibilities of capitalism
instrumentalizing or co-opting earlier forms of social domination
in the service of accumulation by dispossession. In actual fact, these

14 These late developments in Marx’s thought have been recently revisited by Anderson, 2010,
224–236.

G4344-text.indd 32 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 33

composite social formations have been studied by many Marxist writ-

ers from the periphery, from the Ukrainian Constantin Dobrogeanu-
Gherea, alias Salomon Katz (1855–1920), who focused as early as 1910
on the ambiguity of the “new slavery” in Romania,15 to the Bolivian
René Zavalata Mercado (1935–84), who developed the concept of the
sociedad abigarrada (motley society) (Antezana, 1991). In the wake of
these reflections, the Dependency School observed that seemingly
obsolete economic structures, such as the Latin American latifundio
based on peonage, actually respond perfectly to the demands of capi-
talist accumulation on a world scale.
This is precisely the reason why the question of the alliance
between the industrial proletariat and the broad peasant masses of
the periphery lay at the heart of the Leninist strategy that aimed to
develop a hegemonic social bloc to promote the socialization of the
Soviet economy. It was taken into account in the programs of the
Communist movement in the early years of the Soviet Union, as well
as in the pioneering documents of the Communist International. It
was in this sense that Georgi Ivanovitch Safarov, who shared leading
responsibility for Asia in the Comintern, maintained in 1921: “The
large way of world history has seen the collision between capitalism and
its direct heirs, revolutionary proletarians, and its mongrels, oppressed
people. Capitalism has divided humanity into dominating nations
and oppressed nations. Revolution has made workers of dominating
nations and oppressed nations unite” (quoted by Broué, 1997, 290,
my translation). This strategic vision particularly gave rise to the policy
of an anti-imperialist united front, as adopted by the Fourth Congress
of the Communist International in 1922 (Riddell, 2012).
So when Harvey identifies primitive socialist accumulation, as
theorized in particular by Evgenii Preobrazhensky in the 1920s, with
Stalin’s forced collectivization (2003, 164–65), which can be consid-
ered as a form of brutal colonial dispossession of the countryside
(Viola, 1996, 29), he falls into a second confusion. On the contrary,
this Soviet economist, at this time a member of the Left Opposition,
proposed to exit from war communism but also to “steer” the NEP
so as to permit the draining of a part of the social surplus product
of the land to the towns, while still guaranteeing a steady rise in the

15 For Dobrogeanu-Gherea, the developed nations hold the proletarian nations “in economic
subjugation,” and “impose on the latter the former’s social forms” (quoted by Love, 1998, 87).

G4344-text.indd 33 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 34 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

peasants’ standard of living and preventing too serious a social dif-

ferentiation among them. Ignoring this fundamental debate is all
the more regrettable given that the key texts of this writer have been
translated into English (Preobrazhensky, 1964, 1973, 1979).
According to Harvey, we are presently witnessing “a shift in
emphasis from accumulation through expanded reproduction to
accumulation through dispossession . . . at the heart of imperialist
practices” (2003, 176–77).16 Nevertheless, this diagnosis, which he
did not repeat so bluntly in subsequent publications, is not compat-
ible with the formidable growth of employment on a world scale: in
the last 20 years, employment in advanced countries grew by 20%,
and by 80% in emergent economies. During the same period, in the
developing world, the growing number of landless rural workers,
often packed into slums and informal settlements, gives an idea of
the increasing inter-relationship between uprooted small farmers and
precarious wage laborers. They are the modern counterparts of the
“free” outlawed proletarians resulting from the expropriation of the
agricultural population from the 15th century onwards. But nowadays,
it means their immediate swelling the ranks of the global “reserve
army.” That is why, in the South, where accumulation by disposses-
sion is undoubtedly on the rise, the industrial workforce also grew
by 120%, resulting in a huge increase in the accumulation of surplus
value at the expense of wage earners, all the more pronounced since
globalization greatly reinforced competition among workers on a
world scale (Husson, 2013).
While accumulation by dispossession unquestionably plays a grow-
ing role in today’s accumulation on a world scale, one can dispute
the priority that Harvey assigns it over expanded capital accumu-
lation. In particular, this one-sided perception leads him to fail to
fully grasp the class content and potentialities of the new civil society
organizational forms (in the center and in the periphery alike) that
he describes. Should we not on the contrary return to the history of
center/periphery relations and the synergies it made possible between
resistance to accumulation by dispossession and resistance to the
“super-­exploitation” of labor (Moyo and Yeros, 2011)? And this all the
more so in that the apparent relativizing of struggles against expanded

16 This alleged consequence of the accumulation regime of the “new imperialism” has been
since then strongly contested: Ashman and Callinicos, 2006, 127; Brenner, 2006, 102; Fine,
2006, 144.

G4344-text.indd 34 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 35

capital accumulation also bears on a particular subjective context,

i.e. the very weak organization of the proletariat in the new poles of
accumulation of industrial capital (South Korea being an exception).
This situation may change, however, if the new wage-earning masses
of Southeast Asia prove capable, in the course of the coming years,
of increasing their levels of consciousness and organization.

Faculty of Social and Political Sciences

University of Lausanne
1015 Dorigny
Switzerland
jean.batou@unil.ch

REFERENCES

Anderson, Kevin B. 2010. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western
Societies. Chicago, Illinois/London: University of Chicago Press.
Antezana, Luis H. 1991. La diversidad social en Zavaleta Mercado. La Paz, Bolivia: Centro
Boliviano de Estudios Multidisciplinarios.
Arendt, Hannah. 2004 (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Revised edition. New
York: Schocken.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of
Our Times. London/New York: Verso.
Ashman, Sam, ed. 2006. “Symposium on David Harvey’s The New Imperialism.” Histori-
cal Materialism, 14:4.
Ashman, Sam, and Alex Callinicos. 2006. “Capital Accumulation and the State Sys-
tem.” Pp. 107–31 in Ashman, ed.
Bairoch, Paul. 1963. Révolution industrielle et sous-développement. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N.
Batou, Jean. 1990. Cent ans de résistance au sous-développement. L’industrialisation de
l’Amérique latine et du Moyen-Orient face au défi européen, 1770–1870. Genève:
Droz.
———. 1993. “Attempted Escapes From the Periphery in the Nineteenth Century,”
Review — A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, 16:3.
Brenner, Robert. 2006. “What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism?” Pp. 79–105 in
Ashman, ed.
Broué, Pierre. 1997. Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste, 1919–1943. Paris: Fayard.
Caffentzis, George. 1992. Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992. New York:
­Autonomedia.
Cope, Zak. 2012. Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour
Under Capitalism. Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb.
Davis, Mike. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts. El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World. London/New York: Verso.
De Angelis, Massimo. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation: A Suggested
Reinterpretation.” http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/ M.DeAngelis/PRIMACCA.htm

G4344-text.indd 35 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 36 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Engels, Frederick. 1888. “Preface to the 1888 Edition of ‘On the Question of Free
Trade’.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/index.
htm
———. 1892. “Preface” to the British edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in
England. http://www.egs.edu/library/friedrich-engels/articles/the-condition-
of-the-working-class-in-england-in-1844-with-a-preface-written-in-1892/preface/
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia.
Fine, Ben. 2006. “Debating the ‘New’ Imperialism.” Pp. 133–56 in Ashman, ed.
Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. 1953. “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” The
Economic History Review, Second Series, 6:1, 1–15. https:// www.mtholyoke. edu/
acad/intrel/ipe/gallagher.htm
Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford, England/New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Hilferding, Rudolf. 2007 (1910). Finance Capital. London: Routledge.
Husson, Michel. 2013. “La formation d’une classe ouvrière mondiale.” http://
­hussonet.free.fr/classow.pdf
Latham, Anthony. 1978. The International Economy and the Underdeveloped World, 1865–
1914. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Love, Joseph L. 1998. “Dependency Theories in Rumania before 1945.” Pp. 85–106
in Jean Batou and Thomas David, eds. Uneven Development in Europe. Genève,
Switzerland: Droz.
Luxemburg, Rosa. 1951 (1913). The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul. http://www.marxists.org/archive/ luxemburg/1913/accumulation-
capital/accumulation.pdf
Mandel, Ernest. 1968. “Accumulation primitive et industrialisation du tiers-monde.”
Pp. 143–68 in Victor Fay, ed., En partant du “Capital.” Paris: Anthropos.
———. 1971. The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
———. 1975. Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation. Revised
edition. London/New York: Verso.
Marini, Ruy Mauro. 1973. Dialéctica de la dependencia. Mexico: Nueva Era.
Marx, Karl. 1848. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. First English translation, 1888.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/ Manifesto.pdf
———. 1857–58. Grundrisse. Notebook III. http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/
works/1857/grundrisse/ch07.htm
———. 1863. Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers. http://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/
———. 1867. “Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the Communist Educa-
tional Association of German Workers in London.” http:// www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1867/12/16.htm
———. 1887. Capital, Volume I. First English Edition (4th German edition changes
included as indicated). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ down-
load/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf
———. 1894. Capital, Volume III. Institute of Marxism–Leninism, USSR. https://
archive.org/details/CapitalVolume3

G4344-text.indd 36 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

 accumulation by dispossession 37

———. 1971 (1872–75). Le Capital. Livre Premier, 3 vols. French translation of the
first German edition by Joseph Roy, entirely revised by Karl Marx. Paris: Edi-
tions sociales.
———. 1975 (1842). “Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood.” Pp. 224–263 in
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Mazower, Mark. 1999. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Penguin
Books.
Midnight Notes. 1990. “The New Enclosures.” Midnight Notes, 10.
Moyo, Sam, and Paris Yeros. 2011. “Rethinking the Theory of Primitive Accumulation:
Imperialism and the New Scramble for Land and Natural Resources.” Paper
presented to the 2nd IIPPE Conference, May 20–22, 2011, Istanbul, Turkey.
Negi, Rohit, and Marc Auerbach. 2009. The Contemporary Significance of Primitive Ac-
cumulation. Papers from a Session of the 2009 American Association of Geogra-
phers. Human Geography, 2:3, 89–107.
Patnaik, Prabhat. 2008. “The Accumulation Process in the Period of Globalization.”
D. D. Kosambi Memorial Lecture, delivered on May 8, 2008 at Pune. http://
ddkosambi.blogspot.ch
Patnaik, Utsa, and Sam Moyo. 2011. The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primi-
tive Accumulation and the Peasantry. Cape Town, South Africa: Panzabuka Press.
Perelman, Michael. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and
the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, North Carolina/London:
Duke University Press.
Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labour, and Social Domination. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Preobrazhensky, Evgenii A. 1979 (1920–26). The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization. New
York: M. E. Sharpe.
———. 1973 (1921). From the New Economic Policy to Socialism: A Glance into the Future
of Russia and Europe. London: New Park Publications.
———. 1964 (1926). The New Economics. London: Oxford University Press.
Riddell, John, ed. 2012. Toward the United Front. Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the
Communist International, 1922. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.
Rosdolsky, Roman. 1977. The Making of Marx’s “Capital.” London: Pluto Press.
Rühle, Otto. 1939. Karl Marx’s Capital. http://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/
capital.htm
Shanin, Teodor, ed. 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of
Capitalism.” New York: Monthly Review Press.
Vercellone, Carlo, ed. 2003. Sommes-nous sortis du capitalisme industriel? Paris: La Dis-
pute.
Viola, Lynne. 1996. Peasant Rebels under Stalin. Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant
Resistance. Oxford/London: Oxford University Press.
Warren, Bill. 1980. Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism. London: Verso.

G4344-text.indd 37 11/18/2014 2:56:31 PM

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.