http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9096-9186
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ABSTRACT
The dawn of capitalism was marked by what Marx referred to as primitive accumulation. Nevertheless, similar processes of dispossession of the means of subsistence and production continue until today. Capitalism cannot be sustained if additional means of production and growing availability of labor-power are not integrated into its accumulation processes. If on one hand, we have recently seen an expansion of the processes of dispossession, on the other, there is growing evidence that the capitalist system is immersed in a structural crisis. Thus, it is plausible to imagine that the potential shift of emphasis from the generation to the redistribution of surpluses is a sign of the very limits of the system. This is because capitalism cannot be sustained by redistribution processes alone. These may be effective for individual capitalists, but the system requires expansion. This article discusses the hypothesis that the processes of dispossession of the means of subsistence and production that we see in late capitalism are signs of exhaustion of the system. These signs are revealed by both the limits of spaces and possibilities for expansion—as the system reaches full capitalization and full proletarianization—and by the resistance of the dispossessed.
Acknowledgements
This paper is a revised version of one delivered at the 112th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, August 2017. The author is grateful to Immanuel Wallerstein for his support at Yale, where this paper was written. All the usual disclaimers for errors of omission and commission apply.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Daniel Bin is an associate professor at the University of Brasilia. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Bin has published on economic policies and their implications for labor and class relations and, more recently, on dispossessions of means of subsistence and production. He is the author of A superestrutura da dívida [The Superstructure of Debt] (Alameda, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017).
ORCID
Daniel Bin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9096-9186
Notes
1. This section is a shortened version of a discussion I developed elsewhere (Bin Citation2018).
2. As we have seen, commodification and capitalization are treated as distinct processes. The first is the turning of an object that has use value into a commodity by attributing to it an exchange value. Capitalization is a process of turning a means of subsistence into a means of production of commodities.
3. It must be emphasized that Banaji does not agree with Frank’s ([Citation1969] Citation2009) attribution of a capitalist character to colonial Latin America. For Banaji, Frank ignores the fact that the laws of motion under which the hacienda estates operated derived not from the compulsion to accumulate—which is a capitalist feature—but from the compulsion to defend and improve the levels of social consumption—which is a feudal feature.
4. In a more recent publication, Wallerstein (Citation2013, 10) states that “production for exchange and/or profit” as the sine qua non characteristic of capitalism “holds [not] much water,” for “there has been some production for profit across the world for thousands of years,” thus long before capitalism came into existence.
5. For reasons of conceptual precision, I understand that primitive accumulation is restricted to the process of the establishment of the conditions for the rise of capitalism. The processes analogous to primitive accumulation that have continued since then until today for the reproduction and expansion of capitalist accumulation I define as expanding dispossession and its two variations—ECpD and ECmD—as we saw in the second section of this paper.
6. Paul Smith (Citation2007, 51) recalls that “for Marx … primitive accumulation is in essence the long history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.”
7. For the sake of precision, it must be emphasized that Wallerstein does not mean capitalism is a system in equilibrium. Quite the contrary, for as he affirms “there can be no real profit in a perfectly competitive system” (Wallerstein Citation2013, 11).
8. I am not sure whether this distinction—personnel costs, costs of inputs, and taxation—is convincing, since taxation can be a way of changing the magnitude of the other two costs, for instance, through state subsidy to capital or state-funded welfare, which works as a social wage.