Primitive accumulation of capital
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
In Marxist economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital, and therefore of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process. David Harvey summarizes Smith's description of the process in the following terms: "There were some people that were hard working and some people who were not. Some people who could be bothered, and some people who could not be bothered. And the result of that was that, bit by bit, those who were hard working, and could be bothered, accumulated some wealth. And eventually, those who could not be bothered, could not accumulate wealth, and in the end, in order to survive, preferred, actually, to give up their labor power as a commodity, in return for a living wage."
David Harvey summarized Karl Marx's description of it: primitive accumulation "entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation".
See also
- Accumulation by dispossession
- Enclosure
- Capital accumulation
- Common land
- History of capitalism
- Relations of production
- Socialist accumulation
